‘It’s after half past ten — aren’t you going to get up?’ she called.
She waited again. Two letters lay unopened on a small table. Suddenly she put down her pail and went into the bathroom. The pot of shaving-water stood untouched on the shelf, just as she had left it. She returned and knocked swiftly at her husband’s door, not speaking. She waited, then she knocked again, loudly, a long time. Something in the sound of her knocking made her afraid to try again. The noise was dull and thudding: it did not resound through the house with a natural ring, so she thought. She ran downstairs in terror, fled out into the front garden, and there looked up at his room. The window-door was open — everything seemed quiet.
Beatrice stood vacillating. She picked up a few tiny pebbles and flung them in a handful at his door. Some spattered on the panes sharply; some dropped dully in the room. One clinked on the wash-hand bowl. There was no response. Beatrice was terribly excited. She ran, with her black eyes blazing, and wisps of her black hair flying about her thin temples, out on to the road. By a mercy she saw the window-cleaner just pushing his ladder out of the passage of a house a little farther down the road. She hurried to him.
‘Will you come and see if there’s anything wrong with my husband?’ she asked wildly.
‘Why, mum?’ answered the window-cleaner, who knew her, and was humbly familiar. ‘Is he taken bad or something? Yes, I’ll come.’
He was a tall thin man with a brown beard. His clothes were all so loose, his trousers so baggy, that he gave one the impression his limbs must be bone, and his body a skeleton. He pushed at his ladders with a will.
‘Where is he, Mum?’ he asked officiously, as they slowed down at the side passage.
‘He’s in his bedroom, and I can’t get an answer from him.’
‘Then I s’ll want a ladder,’ said the window-cleaner, proceeding to lift one off his trolley. He was in a very great bustle. He knew which was Siegmund’s room: he had often seen Siegmund rise from some music he was studying and leave the drawing-room when the window-cleaning began, and afterwards he had found him in the small front bedroom. He also knew there were matrimonial troubles: Beatrice was not reserved.
‘Is it the least of the front rooms he’s in?’ asked the window-cleaner.
‘Yes, over the porch,’ replied Beatrice.
The man bustled with his ladder.
‘It’s easy enough,’ he said. ‘The door’s open, and we’re soon on the balcony.’
He set the ladder securely. Beatrice cursed him for a slow, officious fool. He tested the ladder, to see it was safe, then he cautiously clambered up. At the top he stood leaning sideways, bending over the ladder to peer into the room. He could see all sorts of things, for he was frightened.
‘I say there!’ he called loudly.
Beatrice stood below in horrible suspense.
‘Go in!’ she cried. ‘Go in! Is he there?’
The man stepped very cautiously with one foot on to the balcony, and peered forward. But the glass door reflected into his eyes. He followed slowly with the other foot, and crept forward, ready at any moment to take flight.
‘Hie, hie!’ he suddenly cried in terror, and he drew back.
Beatrice was opening her mouth to scream, when the window-cleaner exclaimed weakly, as if dubious:
‘I believe ‘e’s ‘anged ‘imself from the door-’ooks!’
‘No!’ cried Beatrice. ‘No, no, no!’
‘I believe ‘e ‘as!’ repeated the man.
‘Go in and see if he’s dead!’ cried Beatrice.
The man remained in the doorway, peering fixedly.
‘I believe he is,’ he said doubtfully.
‘No — go and see!’ screamed Beatrice.
The man went into the room, trembling, hesitating. He approached the body as if fascinated. Shivering, he took it round the loins and tried to lift it down. It was too heavy.
‘I know!’ he said to himself, once more bustling now he had something to do. He took his clasp-knife from his pocket, jammed the body between himself and the door so that it should not drop, and began to saw his way through the leathern strap. It gave. He started, and clutched the body, dropping his knife. Beatrice, below in the garden, hearing the scuffle and the clatter, began to scream in hysteria. The man hauled the body of Siegmund, with much difficulty, on to the bed, and with trembling fingers tried to unloose the buckle in which the strap ran. It was bedded in Siegmund’s neck. The window-cleaner tugged at it frantically, till he got it loose. Then he looked at Siegmund. The dead man lay on the bed with swollen, discoloured face, with his sleeping-jacket pushed up in a bunch under his armpits, leaving his side naked. Beatrice was screaming below. The window-cleaner, quite unnerved, ran from the room and scrambled down the ladder. Siegmund lay heaped on the bed, his sleeping-suit twisted and bunched up about him, his face hardly recognizable.
CHAPTER 29
Helena was dozing down in the cove at Tintagel. She and Louisa and Olive lay on the cool sands in the shadow, and steeped themselves in rest, in a cool, sea-fragrant tranquillity.
The journey down had been very tedious. After waiting for half an hour in the midnight turmoil of an August Friday in Waterloo station, they had seized an empty carriage, only to be followed by five north-countrymen, all of whom were affected by whisky. Olive, Helena, Louisa, occupied three corners of the carriage. The men were distributed between them. The three women were not alarmed. Their tipsy travelling companions promised to be tiresome, but they had a frank honesty of manner that placed them beyond suspicion. The train drew out westward. Helena began to count the miles that separated her from Siegmund. The north-countrymen began to be jolly: they talked loudly in their uncouth English; they sang the music-hall songs of the day; they furtively drank whisky. Through all this they were polite to the girls. As much could hardly be said in return of Olive and Louisa. They leaned forward whispering one to another. They sat back in their seats laughing, hiding their laughter by turning their backs on the men, who were a trifle disconcerted by this amusement.
The train spun on and on. Little homely clusters of lamps, suggesting the quiet of country life, turned slowly round through the darkness. The men dropped into a doze. Olive put a handkerchief over her face and went to sleep. Louisa gradually nodded and jerked into slumber. Helena sat weariedly and watched the rolling of the sleeping travellers and the dull blank of the night sheering off outside. Neither the men nor the women looked well asleep. They lurched and nodded stupidly. She thought of Bazarof in Fathers and Sons, endorsing his opinion on the appearance of sleepers: all but Siegmund. Was Siegmund asleep? She imagined him breathing regularly on the pillows; she could see the under arch of his eyebrows, the fine shape of his nostrils, the curve of his lips, as she bent in fancy over his face.
The dawn came slowly. It was rather cold. Olive wrapped herself in rugs and went to sleep again. Helena shivered, and stared out of the window. There appeared a wanness in the night, and Helena felt inexpressibly dreary. A rosiness spread out far away. It was like a flock of flamingoes hovering over a dark lake. The world vibrated as the sun came up.
Helena waked the tipsy men at Exeter, having heard them say that there they must change. Then she walked the platform, very jaded. The train rushed on again. It was a most, most wearisome journey. The fields were very flowery, the morning was very bright, but what were these to her? She wanted dimness, sleep, forgetfulness. At eight o’clock, breakfast-time, the ‘dauntless three’ were driving in a waggonette amid blazing, breathless sunshine, over country naked of shelter, ungracious and harsh.
‘Why am I doing this?’ Helena asked herself.
The three friends, washed, dressed, and breakfasted. It was too hot to rest in the house, so they trudged to the coast, silently, each feeling in an ill humour.
When Helena was really rested, she took great pleasure in Tintagel. In the first place, she found that the cove was exactly, almost identically the same as the Walhalla scene in Walküre; in the second pl
ace, Tristan was here, in the tragic country filled with the flowers of a late Cornish summer, an everlasting reality; in the third place, it was a sea of marvellous, portentous sunsets, of sweet morning baths, of pools blossomed with life, of terrible suave swishing of foam which suggested the Anadyomene. In sun it was the enchanted land of divided lovers. Helena for ever hummed fragments of Tristan. As she stood on the rocks she sang, in her little, half-articulate way, bits of Isolde’s love, bits of Tristan’s anguish, to Siegmund.
She had not received her letter on Sunday. That had not very much disquieted her, though she was disappointed. On Monday she was miserable because of Siegmund’s silence, but there was so much of enchantment in Tintagel, and Olive and Louisa were in such high spirits, that she forgot most whiles.
On Monday night, towards two o’clock, there came a violent storm of thunder and lightning. Louisa started up in bed at the first clap, waking Helena. The room palpitated with white light for two seconds; the mirror on the dressing-table glared supernaturally. Louisa clutched her friend. All was dark again, the thunder clapping directly.
‘There, wasn’t that lovely!’ cried Louisa, speaking of the lightning. ‘Oo, wasn’t it magnificent! — glorious!’
The door clicked and opened: Olive entered in her long white nightgown. She hurried to the bed.
‘I say, dear!’ she exclaimed, ‘may I come into the fold? I prefer the shelter of your company, dear, during this little lot.’
‘Don’t you like it?’ cried Louisa. ‘I think it’s lovely — lovely!’
There came another slash of lightning. The night seemed to open and shut. It was a pallid vision of a ghost-world between the clanging shutters of darkness. Louisa and Olive clung to each other spasmodically.
‘There!’ exclaimed the former, breathless. ‘That was fine! Helena, did you see that?’
She clasped ecstatically the hand of her friend, who was lying down. Helena’s answer was extinguished by the burst of thunder.
‘There’s no accounting for tastes,’ said Olive, taking a place in the bed. ‘I can’t say I’m struck on lightning. What about you, Helena?’
‘I’m not struck yet,’ replied Helena, with a sarcastic attempt at a jest.
‘Thank you, dear,’ said Olive; ‘you do me the honour of catching hold.’
Helena laughed ironically.
‘Catching what?’ asked Louisa, mystified.
‘Why, dear,’ answered Olive, heavily condescending to explain, ‘I offered Helena the handle of a pun, and she took it. What a flash! You know, it’s not that I’m afraid....’
The rest of her speech was overwhelmed in thunder.
Helena lay on the edge of the bed, listening to the ecstatics of one friend and to the impertinences of the other. In spite of her ironical feeling, the thunder impressed her with a sense of fatality. The night opened, revealing a ghostly landscape, instantly to shut again with blackness. Then the thunder crashed. Helena felt as if some secret were being disclosed too swiftly and violently for her to understand. The thunder exclaimed horribly on the matter. She was sure something had happened.
Gradually the storm, drew away. The rain came down with a rush, persisted with a bruising sound upon the earth and the leaves.
‘What a deluge!’ exclaimed Louisa.
No one answered her. Olive was falling asleep, and Helena was in no mood to reply. Louisa, disconsolate, lay looking at the black window, nursing a grievance, until she, too, drifted into sleep. Helena was awake; the storm had left her with a settled sense of calamity. She felt bruised. The sound of the heavy rain bruising the ground outside represented her feeling; she could not get rid of the bruised sense of disaster.
She lay wondering what it was, why Siegmund had not written, what could have happened to him. She imagined all of them terrible, and endued with grandeur, for she had kinship with Hedda Gabler.
‘But no,’ she said to herself, ‘it is impossible anything should have happened to him — I should have known. I should have known the moment his spirit left his body; he would have come to me. But I slept without dreams last night, and today I am sure there has been no crisis. It is impossible it should have happened to him: I should have known.’
She was very certain that in event of Siegmund’s death, she would have received intelligence. She began to consider all the causes which might arise to prevent his writing immediately to her.
‘Nevertheless,’ she said at last, ‘if I don’t hear tomorrow I will go and see.’
She had written to him on Monday. If she should receive no answer by Wednesday morning she would return to London. As she was deciding this she went to sleep.
The next day passed without news. Helena was in a state of distress. Her wistfulness touched the other two women very keenly. Louisa waited upon her, was very tender and solicitous. Olive, who was becoming painful by reason of her unsatisfied curiosity, had to be told in part of the state of affairs.
Helena looked up a train. She was quite sure by this time that something fatal awaited her.
The next morning she bade her friends a temporary good-bye, saying she would return in the evening. Immediately the train had gone, Louisa rushed into the little waiting-room of the station and wept. Olive shed tears for sympathy and self-pity. She pitied herself that she should be let in for so dismal a holiday. Louisa suddenly stopped crying and sat up:
‘Oh, I know I’m a pig, dear, am I not?’ she exclaimed. ‘Spoiling your holiday. But I couldn’t help it, dear, indeed I could not.’
‘My dear Lou!’ cried Olive in tragic contralto. ‘Don’t refrain for my sake. The bargain’s made; we can’t help what’s in the bundle.’
The two unhappy women trudged the long miles back from the station to their lodging. Helena sat in the swinging express revolving the same thought like a prayer-wheel. It would be difficult to think of anything more trying than thus sitting motionless in the train, which itself is throbbing and bursting its heart with anxiety, while one waits hour after hour for the blow which falls nearer as the distance lessens. All the time Helena’s heart and her consciousness were with Siegmund in London, for she believed he was ill and needed her.
‘Promise me,’ she had said, ‘if ever I were sick and wanted you, you would come to me.’
‘I would come to you from hell!’ Siegmund had replied.
‘And if you were ill — you would let me come to you?’ she had added.
‘I promise,’ he answered.
Now Helena believed he was ill, perhaps very ill, perhaps she only could be of any avail. The miles of distance were like hot bars of iron across her breast, and against them it was impossible to strive. The train did what it could.
That day remains as a smear in the record of Helena’s life. In it there is no spacing of hours, no lettering of experience, merely a smear of suspense.
Towards six o’clock she alighted, at Surbiton station, deciding that this would be the quickest way of getting to Wimbledon. She paced the platform slowly, as if resigned, but her heart was crying out at the great injustice of delay. Presently the local train came in. She had planned to buy a local paper at Wimbledon, and if from that source she could learn nothing, she would go on to his house and inquire. She had prearranged everything minutely.
After turning the newspaper several times she found what she sought.
‘The funeral took place, at two o’clock today at Kingston Cemetery, of — — . Deceased was a professor of music, and had just returned from a holiday on the South Coast....’
The paragraph, in a bald twelve lines, told her everything.
‘Jury returned a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity. Sympathy was expressed for the widow and children.’
Helena stood still on the station for some time, looking at the print. Then she dropped the paper and wandered into the town, not knowing where she was going.
‘That was what I got,’ she said, months afterwards; ‘and it was like a brick, it was like a brick.’
S
he wandered on and on, until suddenly she found herself in the grassy lane with only a wire fence bounding her from the open fields on either side, beyond which fields, on the left, she could see Siegmund’s house standing florid by the road, catching the western sunlight. Then she stopped, realizing where she had come. For some time she stood looking at the house. It was no use her going there; it was of no use her going anywhere; the whole wide world was opened, but in it she had no destination, and there was no direction for her to take. As if marooned in the world, she stood desolate, looking from the house of Siegmund over the fields and the hills. Siegmund was gone; why had he not taken her with him?
The evening was drawing on; it was nearly half past seven when Helena looked at her watch, remembering Louisa, who would be waiting for her to return to Cornwall.
‘I must either go to her, or wire to her. She will be in a fever of suspense,’ said Helena to herself, and straightway she hurried to catch a tramcar to return to the station. She arrived there at a quarter to eight; there was no train down to Tintagel that night. Therefore she wired the news:
‘Siegmund dead. No train tonight. Am going home.’
* * * * *
This done, she took her ticket and sat down to wait. By the strength of her will everything she did was reasonable and accurate. But her mind was chaotic.
‘It was like a brick,’ she reiterated, and that brutal simile was the only one she could find, months afterwards, to describe her condition. She felt as if something had crashed into her brain, stunning and maiming her.
As she knocked at the door of home she was apparently quite calm. Her mother opened to her.
‘What, are you alone?’ cried Mrs. Verden.
‘Yes. Louisa did not come up,’ replied Helena, passing into the dining-room. As if by instinct she glanced on the mantelpiece to see if there was a letter. There was a newspaper cutting. She went forward and took it. It was from one of the London papers.
‘Inquest was held today upon the body of — — .’
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 59