At last she drew back from him, held him her mouth to kiss. As he gently, sadly kissed her she pressed him to her bosom. She must get him back, whatever else she lost. She put her hand tenderly on his brow.
‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked.
‘I?’ he replied. ‘I really don’t know. I suppose I was hardly thinking anything.’
She waited a while, clinging to him, then, finding some difficulty in speech, she asked:
‘Was I very cruel, dear?’
It was so unusual to hear her grieved and filled with humility that he drew her close into him.
‘It was pretty bad, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘But I should think neither of us could help it.’
She gave a little sob, pressed her face into his chest, wishing she had helped it. Then, with Madonna love, she clasped his head upon her shoulder, covering her hands over his hair. Twice she kissed him softly in the nape of the neck, with fond, reassuring kisses. All the while, delicately, she fondled and soothed him, till he was child to her Madonna.
They remained standing with his head on her shoulder for some time, till at last he raised himself to lay his lips on hers in a long kiss of healing and renewal — long, pale kisses of after-suffering.
Someone was coming along the path. Helena let him go, shook herself free, turned sharply aside, and said:
‘Shall we go down to the water?’
‘If you like,’ he replied, putting out his hand to her. They went thus with clasped hands down the cliff path to the beach.
There they sat in the shadow of the uprising island, facing the restless water. Around them the sand and shingle were grey; there stretched a long pale line of surf, beyond which the sea was black and smeared with star-reflections. The deep, velvety sky shone with lustrous stars.
As yet the moon was not risen. Helena proposed that they should lie on a tuft of sand in a black cleft of the cliff to await its coming. They lay close together without speaking. Each was looking at a low, large star which hung straight in front of them, dripping its brilliance in a thin streamlet of light along the sea almost to their feet. It was a star-path fine and clear, trembling in its brilliance, but certain upon the water. Helena watched it with delight. As Siegmund looked at the star, it seemed to him a lantern hung at the gate to light someone home. He imagined himself following the thread of the star-track. What was behind the gate?
They heard the wash of a steamer crossing the bay. The water seemed populous in the night-time, with dark, uncanny comings and goings.
Siegmund was considering.
‘What was the matter with you?’ he asked.
She leaned over him, took his head in her lap, holding his face between her two hands as she answered in a low, grave voice, very wise and old in experience:
‘Why, you see, dear, you won’t understand. But there was such a greyish darkness, and through it — the crying of lives I have touched....’
His heart suddenly shrank and sank down. She acknowledged then that she also had helped to injure Beatrice and his children. He coiled with shame.
‘....A crying of lives against me, and I couldn’t silence them, nor escape out of the darkness. I wanted you — I saw you in front, whistling the Spring Song, but I couldn’t find you — it was not you — I couldn’t find you.’
She kissed his eyes and his brows.
‘No, I don’t see it,’ he said. ‘You would always be you. I could think of hating you, but you’d still be yourself.’
She made a moaning, loving sound. Full of passionate pity, she moved her mouth on his face, as a woman does on her child that has hurt itself.
‘Sometimes,’ she murmured, in a low, grieved confession, ‘you lose me.’
He gave a brief laugh.
‘I lose you!’ he repeated. ‘You mean I lose my attraction for you, or my hold over you, and then you — ?’
He did not finish. She made the same grievous murmuring noise over him.
‘It shall not be any more,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he replied, ‘since you decide it.’
She clasped him round the chest and fondled him, distracted with pity.
‘You mustn’t be bitter,’ she murmured.
‘Four days is enough,’ he said. ‘In a fortnight I should be intolerable to you. I am not masterful.’
‘It is not so, Siegmund,’ she said sharply.
‘I give way always,’ he repeated. ‘And then — tonight!’
‘Tonight, tonight!’ she cried in wrath. ‘Tonight I have been a fool!’
‘And I?’ he asked.
‘You — what of you?’ she cried. Then she became sad. ‘I have little perverse feelings,’ she lamented.
‘And I can’t bear to compel anything, for fear of hurting it. So I’m always pushed this way and that, like a fool.’
‘You don’t know how you hurt me, talking so,’ she said.
He kissed her. After a moment he said:
‘You are not like other folk. “Ihr Lascheks seid ein anderes Geschlecht.” I thought of you when we read it.’
‘Would you rather have me more like the rest, or more unlike, Siegmund? Which is it?’
‘Neither,’ he said. ‘You are you.’
They were quiet for a space. The only movement in the night was the faint gambolling of starlight on the water. The last person had passed in black silhouette between them and the sea.
He was thinking bitterly. She seemed to goad him deeper and deeper into life. He had a sense of despair, a preference of death. The German she read with him — she loved its loose and violent romance — came back to his mind: ‘Der Tod geht einem zur Seite, fast sichtbarlich, und jagt einem immer tiefer ins Leben.’
Well, the next place he would be hunted to, like a hare run down, was home. It seemed impossible the morrow would take him back to Beatrice.
‘This time tomorrow night,’ he said.
‘Siegmund!’ she implored.
‘Why not?’ he laughed.
‘Don’t, dear,’ she pleaded.
‘All right, I won’t.’
Some large steamer crossing the mouth of the bay made the water dash a little as it broke in accentuated waves. A warm puff of air wandered in on them now and again.
‘You won’t be tired when you go back?’ Helena asked.
‘Tired!’ he echoed.
‘You know how you were when you came,’ she reminded him, in tones full of pity. He laughed.
‘Oh, that is gone,’ he said.
With a slow, mechanical rhythm she stroked his cheek.
‘And will you be sad?’ she said, hesitating.
‘Sad!’ he repeated.
‘But will you be able to fake the old life up, happier, when you go back?’
‘The old life will take me up, I suppose,’ he said.
There was a pause.
‘I think, dear,’ she said, ‘I have done wrong.’
‘Good Lord — you have not!’ he replied sharply, pressing back his head to look at her, for the first time.
‘I shall have to send you back to Beatrice and the babies — tomorrow — as you are now....’
‘“Take no thought for the morrow.” Be quiet, Helena!’ he exclaimed as the reality bit him. He sat up suddenly.
‘Why?’ she asked, afraid.
‘Why!’ he repeated. He remained sitting, leaning forward on the sand, staring intently at Helena. She looked back in fear at him. The moment terrified her, and she lost courage.
With a fluttered motion she put her hand on his, which was pressed hard on the sand as he leaned forward. At once he relaxed his intensity, laughed, then became tender.
Helena yielded herself like a forlorn child to his arms, and there lay, half crying, while he smoothed her brow with his fingers, and grains of sand fell from his palm on her cheek. She shook with dry, withered sobs, as a child does when it snatches itself away from the lancet of the doctor and hides in the mother’s bosom, refusing to be touched.
But she knew the morrow
was coming, whether or not, and she cowered down on his breast. She was wild with fear of the parting and the subsequent days. They must drink, after tomorrow, separate cups. She was filled with vague terror of what it would be. The sense of the oneness and unity of their fates was gone.
Siegmund also was cowed by the threat of separation. He had more definite knowledge of the next move than had Helena. His heart was certain of calamity, which would overtake him directly. He shrank away. Wildly he beat about to find a means of escape from the next day and its consequences. He did not want to go. Anything rather than go back.
In the midst of their passion of fear the moon rose. Siegmund started to see the rim appear ruddily beyond the sea. His struggling suddenly ceased, and he watched, spellbound, the oval horn of fiery gold come up, resolve itself. Some golden liquor dripped and spilled upon the far waves, where it shook in ruddy splashes. The gold-red cup rose higher, looming before him very large, yet still not all discovered. By degrees the horn of gold detached itself from the darkness at back of the waves. It was immense and terrible. When would the tip be placed upon the table of the sea?
It stood at last, whole and calm, before him; then the night took up this drinking-cup of fiery gold, lifting it with majestic movement overhead, letting stream forth the wonderful unwasted liquor of gold over the sea — a libation.
Siegmund looked at the shaking flood of gold and paling gold spread wider as the night upraised the blanching crystal, poured out farther and farther the immense libation from the whitening cup, till at last the moon looked frail and empty.
And there, exhaustless in the night, the white light shook on the floor of the sea. He wondered how it would be gathered up. ‘I gather it up into myself,’ he said. And the stars and the cliffs and a few trees were watching, too. ‘If I have spilled my life,’ he thought, ‘the unfamiliar eyes of the land and sky will gather it up again.’
Turning to Helena, he found her face white and shining as the empty moon.
CHAPTER 17
Towards morning, Siegmund went to sleep. For four hours, until seven o’clock, the womb of sleep received him and nourished him again.
‘But it is finest of all to wake,’ he said, as the bright sunshine of the window, and the lumining green sunshine coming through the lifted hands of the leaves, challenged him into the open.
The morning was exceedingly fair, and it looked at him so gently that his blue eyes trembled with self-pity. A fragment of scarlet geranium glanced up at him as he passed, so that amid the vermilion tyranny of the uniform it wore he could see the eyes of the flower, wistful, offering him love, as one sometimes see the eyes of a man beneath the brass helmet of a soldier, and is startled. Everything looked at him with the same eyes of tenderness, offering him, timidly, a little love.
‘They are all extraordinarily sweet,’ said Siegmund to the full-mouthed scabious and the awkward, downcast ragwort. Three or four butterflies fluttered up and down in agitated little leaps, around him. Instinctively Siegmund put his hand forward to touch them.
‘The careless little beggars!’ he said.
When he came to the cliff tops there was the morning, very bravely dressed, rustling forward with a silken sound and much silken shining to meet him. The battleships had gone; the sea was blue with a panier of diamonds; the sky was full with a misty tenderness like love. Siegmund had never recognized before the affection that existed between him and everything. We do not realize how tremendously dear and indispensable to us are the hosts of common things, till we must leave them, and we break our hearts.
‘We have been very happy together,’ everything seemed to say.
Siegmund looked up into the eyes of the morning with a laugh.
‘It is very lovely,’ he said, ‘whatever happens.’
So he went down to the beach; his dark blue eyes, darker from last night’s experience, smiled always with the pride of love. He undressed by his usual altar-stone.
‘How closely familiar everything is,’ he thought. ‘It seems almost as if the curves of this stone were rounded to fit in my soul.’
He touched the smooth white slope of the stone gently with discovering fingers, in the same way as he touched the cheek of Helena, or of his own babies. He found great pleasure in this feeling of intimacy with things. A very soft wind, shy as a girl, put his arms round him, and seemed to lay its cheek against his chest. He placed his hands beneath his arms, where the wind was caressing him, and his eyes opened with wondering pleasure.
‘They find no fault with me,’ he said. ‘I suppose they are as fallible as I, and so don’t judge,’ he added, as he waded thigh-deep into the water, thrusting it to hear the mock-angry remonstrance.
‘Once more,’ he said, and he took the sea in his arms. He swam very quietly. The water buoyed him up, holding him closely clasped. He swam towards the white rocks of the headlands; they rose before him like beautiful buttressed gates, so glistening that he half expected to see fantail pigeons puffing like white irises in the niches, and white peacocks with dark green feet stepping down the terraces, trailing a sheen of silver.
‘Helena is right,’ he said to himself as he swam, scarcely swimming, but moving upon the bosom of the tide; ‘she is right, it is all enchanted. I have got into her magic at last. Let us see what it is like.’
He determined to visit again his little bay. He swam carefully round the terraces, whose pale shadows through the swift-spinning emerald facets of the water seemed merest fancy. Siegmund touched them with his foot; they were hard, cold, dangerous. He swam carefully. As he made for the archway, the shadows of the headland chilled the water. There under water, clamouring in a throng at the base of the submerged walls, were sea-women with dark locks, and young sea-girls, with soft hair, vividly green, striving to climb up out of the darkness into the morning, their hair swirling in abandon. Siegmund was half afraid of their frantic efforts.
But the tide carried him swiftly through the high gate into the porch. There was exultance in this sweeping entry. The skin-white, full-fleshed walls of the archway were dappled with green lights that danced in and out among themselves. Siegmund was carried along in an invisible chariot, beneath the jewel-stained walls. The tide swerved, threw him as he swam against the inward-curving white rock; his elbow met the rock, and he was sick with pain. He held his breath, trying to get back the joy and magic. He could not believe that the lovely, smooth side of the rock, fair as his own side with its ripple of muscles, could have hurt him thus. He let the water carry him till he might climb out on to the shingle. There he sat upon a warm boulder, and twisted to look at his arm. The skin was grazed, not very badly, merely a ragged scarlet patch no bigger than a carnation petal. The bruise, however, was painful, especially when, a minute or two later, he bent his arm.
‘No,’ said he pitiably to himself, ‘it is impossible it should have hurt me. I suppose I was careless.’
Nevertheless, the aspect of the morning changed. He sat on the boulder looking out on the sea. The azure sky and the sea laughed on, holding a bright conversation one with another. The two headlands of the tiny bay gossiped across the street of water. All the boulders and pebbles of the sea-shore played together.
‘Surely,’ said Siegmund, ‘they take no notice of me; they do not care a jot or a tittle for me. I am a fool to think myself one with them.’
He contrasted this with the kindness of the morning as he had stood on the cliffs.
‘I was mistaken,’ he said. ‘It was an illusion.’
He looked wistfully out again. Like neighbours leaning from opposite windows of an overhanging street, the headlands were occupied one with another. White rocks strayed out to sea, followed closely by other white rocks. Everything was busy, interested, occupied with its own pursuit and with its own comrades. Siegmund alone was without pursuit or comrade.
‘They will all go on the same; they will be just as gay. Even Helena, after a while, will laugh and take interest in others. What do I matter?’
S
iegmund thought of the futility of death:
We are not long for music and laughter, Love and desire and hate; I think we have no portion in them after We pass the gate.
‘Why should I be turned out of the game?’ he asked himself, rebelling. He frowned, and answered: ‘Oh, Lord! — the old argument!’
But the thought of his own expunging from the picture was very bitter.
‘Like the puff from the steamer’s funnel, I should be gone.’
He looked at himself, at his limbs and his body in the pride of his maturity. He was very beautiful to himself.
‘Nothing, in the place where I am,’ he said. ‘Gone, like a puff of steam that melts on the sunshine.’
Again Siegmund looked at the sea. It was glittering with laughter as at a joke.
‘And I,’ he said, lying down in the warm sand, ‘I am nothing. I do not count; I am inconsiderable.’
He set his teeth with pain. There were no tears, there was no relief. A convulsive gasping shook him as he lay on the sands. All the while he was arguing with himself.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if I am nothing dead I am nothing alive.’
But the vulgar proverb arose — ’Better a live dog than a dead lion,’ to answer him. It seemed an ignominy to be dead. It meant, to be overlooked, even by the smallest creature of God’s earth. Surely that was a great ignominy.
Helena, meanwhile, was bathing, for the last time, by the same sea-shore with him. She was no swimmer. Her endless delight was to explore, to discover small treasures. For her the world was still a great wonder-box which hid innumerable sweet toys for surprises in all its crevices. She had bathed in many rock-pools’ tepid baths, trying first one, then another. She had lain on the sand where the cold arms of the ocean lifted her and smothered her impetuously, like an awful lover.
‘The sea is a great deal like Siegmund,’ she said, as she rose panting, trying to dash her nostrils free from water. It was true; the sea as it flung over her filled her with the same uncontrollable terror as did Siegmund when he sometimes grew silent and strange in a tide of passion.
She wandered back to her rock-pools; they were bright and docile; they did not fling her about in a game of terror. She bent over watching the anemone’s fleshy petals shrink from the touch of her shadow, and she laughed to think they should be so needlessly fearful. The flowing tide trickled noiselessly among the rocks, widening and deepening insidiously her little pools. Helena retreated towards a large cave round the bend. There the water gurgled under the bladder-wrack of the large stones; the air was cool and clammy. She pursued her way into the gloom, bending, though there was no need, shivering at the coarse feel of the seaweed beneath her naked feet. The water came rustling up beneath the fucus as she crept along on the big stones; it returned with a quiet gurgle which made her shudder, though even that was not disagreeable. It needed, for all that, more courage than was easy to summon before she could step off her stone into the black pool that confronted her. It was festooned thick with weeds that slid under her feet like snakes. She scrambled hastily upwards towards the outlet.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 50