LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 29

       Table of Contents

      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 place, 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

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