The Complete Novels - D. H. Lawrence

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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

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      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

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