LITMIR.BIZ

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she replied.

      ‘To have a simple, slow-moving mind and an active life is the desideratum.’

      ‘Is it?’ she asked ironically.

      ‘I would give anything to be like that,’ he said.

      ‘That is, not to be yourself,’ she said pointedly.

      He laughed without much heartiness.

      ‘Don’t they seem a long way off?’ he said, staring at the bucolic scene. ‘They are farther than Theocritus — down there is farther than Sicily, and more than twenty centuries from us. I wish it weren’t.’

      ‘Why do you?’ she cried, with curious impatience.

      He laughed.

      Crossing the down, scattered with dark bushes, they came directly opposite the path through the furze.

      ‘There it is!’ she cried, ‘How could we miss it?’

      ‘Ascribe it to the fairies,’ he replied, whistling the bird music out of Siegfried, then pieces of Tristan. They talked very little.

      She was tired. When they arrived at a green, naked hollow near the cliff’s edge, she said:

      ‘This shall be our house today.’

      ‘Welcome home!’ said Siegmund.

      He flung himself down on the high, breezy slope of the dip, looking out to sea. Helena sat beside him. It was absolutely still, and the wind was slackening more and more. Though they listened attentively, they could hear only an indistinct breathing sound, quite small, from the water below: no clapping nor hoarse conversation of waves. Siegmund lay with his hands beneath his head, looking over the sparkling sea. To put her page in the shadow, Helena propped her book against him and began to read.

      Presently the breeze, and Siegmund, dropped asleep. The sun was pouring with dreadful persistence. It beat and beat on Helena, gradually drawing her from her book in a confusion of thought. She closed her eyes wearily, longing for shade. Vaguely she felt a sympathy with Adam in ‘Adam Cast Forth’. Her mind traced again the tumultuous, obscure strugglings of the two, forth from Eden through the primitive wildernesses, and she felt sorrowful. Thinking of Adam blackened with struggle, she looked down at Siegmund. The sun was beating him upon the face and upon his glistening brow. His two hands, which lay out on the grass, were full of blood, the veins of his wrists purple and swollen with heat. Yet he slept on, breathing with a slight, panting motion. Helena felt deeply moved. She wanted to kiss him as he lay helpless, abandoned to the charge of the earth and the sky. She wanted to kiss him, and shed a few tears. She did neither, but instead, moved her position so that she shaded his head. Cautiously putting her hand on his hair, she found it warm, quite hot, as when you put your hand under a sitting hen, and feel the hot-feathered bosom.

      ‘It will make him ill,’ she whispered to herself, and she bent over to smell the hot hair. She noticed where the sun was scalding his forehead. She felt very pitiful and helpless when she saw his brow becoming inflamed with the sun-scalding.

      Turning weariedly away, she sought relief in the landscape. But the sea was glittering unbearably, like a scaled dragon wreathing. The houses of Freshwater slept, as cattle sleep motionless in the hollow valley. Green Farringford on the slope, was drawn over with a shadow of heat and sleep. In the bay below the hill the sea was hot and restless. Helena was sick with sunshine and the restless glitter of water.

      ‘“And there shall be no more sea,”’ she quoted to herself, she knew not wherefrom.

      ‘No more sea, no more anything,’ she thought dazedly, as she sat in the midst of this fierce welter of sunshine. It seemed to her as if all the lightness of her fancy and her hope were being burned away in this tremendous furnace, leaving her, Helena, like a heavy piece of slag seamed with metal. She tried to imagine herself resuming the old activities, the old manner of living.

      ‘It is impossible,’ she said; ‘it is impossible! What shall I be when I come out of this? I shall not come out, except as metal to be cast in another shape. No more the same Siegmund, no more the same life. What will become of us — what will happen?’

      She was roused from these semi-delirious speculations in the sun furnace by Siegmund’s waking. He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked smiling at Helena.

      ‘It is worth while to sleep,’ said he, ‘for the sake of waking like this. I was dreaming of huge ice-crystals.’

      She smiled at him. He seemed unconscious of fate, happy and strong. She smiled upon him almost in condescension.

      ‘I should like to realize your dream,’ she said. ‘This is terrible!’

      They went to the cliff’s edge, to receive the cool up-flow of air from the water. She drank the travelling freshness eagerly with her face, and put forward her sunburnt arms to be refreshed.

      ‘It is really a very fine sun,’ said Siegmund lightly. ‘I feel as if I were almost satisfied with heat.’

      Helena felt the chagrin of one whose wretchedness must go unperceived, while she affects a light interest in another’s pleasure. This time, when Siegmund ‘failed to follow her’, as she put it, she felt she must follow him.

      ‘You are having your satisfaction complete this journey,’ she said, smiling; ‘even a sufficiency of me.’

      ‘Ay!’ said Siegmund drowsily. ‘I think I am. I think this is about perfect, don’t you?’

      She laughed.

      ‘I want nothing more and nothing different,’ he continued; ‘and that’s the extreme of a decent time, I should think.’

      ‘The extreme of a decent time!’ she repeated.

      But he drawled on lazily:

      ‘I’ve only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I’ve got all the cheese — which is you, my dear.’

      ‘I certainly feel eaten up,’ she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him lying in a royal ease, his eyes naïve as a boy’s, his whole being careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she felt very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a sense of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy, his fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or spoil one minute of his consummate hour.

      From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them. Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid’s chair, wheeling silently over the short dry grass. The invalid, a young man, was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide —‘the life tide,’ she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her own distress. She was fretted to her soul.

      ‘Come!’ she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him.

      ‘We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow — so quiet,’ she said to herself.

      They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her own state, after her own fashion.

      ‘The Mist Spirit,’ she said to herself. ‘The Mist Spirit draws a curtain round us — it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a thin, torn curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the curtain again, I do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of the outside, and I am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I want to be in our own fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain.’

      As

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