LITMIR.BIZ

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felt otherwise. She seemed to connect him with the beauty of things, as if she were the nerve through which he received intelligence of the sun, and wind, and sea, and of the moon and the darkness. Beauty she never felt herself came to him through her. It is that makes love. He could always sympathize with the wistful little flowers, and trees lonely in their crowds, and wild, sad seabirds. In these things he recognized the great yearning, the ache outwards towards something, with which he was ordinarily burdened. But with Helena, in this large sea-morning, he was whole and perfect as the day.

      ‘Will it be fine all day?’ he asked, when a cloud came over.

      ‘I don’t know,’ she replied in her gentle, inattentive manner, as if she did not care at all. ‘I think it will be a mixed day — cloud and sun — more sun than cloud.’

      She looked up gravely to see if he agreed. He turned from frowning at the cloud to smile at her. He seemed so bright, teeming with life.

      ‘I like a bare blue sky,’ he said; ‘sunshine that you seem to stir about as you walk.’

      ‘It is warm enough here, even for you,’ she smiled.

      ‘Ah, here!’ he answered, putting his face down to receive the radiation from the stone, letting his fingers creep towards Helena’s. She laughed, and captured his fingers, pressing them into her hand. For nearly an hour they remained thus in the still sunshine by the sea-wall, till Helena began to sigh, and to lift her face to the little breeze that wandered down from the west. She fled as soon from warmth as from cold. Physically, she was always so; she shrank from anything extreme. But psychically she was an extremist, and a dangerous one.

      They climbed the hill to the fresh-breathing west. On the highest point of land stood a tall cross, railed in by a red iron fence. They read the inscription.

      ‘That’s all right — but a vilely ugly railing!’ exclaimed Siegmund.

      ‘Oh, they’d have to fence in Lord Tennyson’s white marble,’ said Helena, rather indefinitely.

      He interpreted her according to his own idea.

      ‘Yes, he did belittle great things, didn’t he?’ said Siegmund.

      ‘Tennyson!’ she exclaimed.

      ‘Not peacocks and princesses, but the bigger things.’

      ‘I shouldn’t say so,’ she declared.

      He sounded indeterminate, but was not really so.

      They wandered over the downs westward, among the wind. As they followed the headland to the Needles, they felt the breeze from the wings of the sea brushing them, and heard restless, poignant voices screaming below the cliffs. Now and again a gull, like a piece of spume flung up, rose over the cliff’s edge, and sank again. Now and again, as the path dipped in a hollow, they could see the low, suspended intertwining of the birds passing in and out of the cliff shelter.

      These savage birds appealed to all the poetry and yearning in Helena. They fascinated her, they almost voiced her. She crept nearer and nearer the edge, feeling she must watch the gulls thread out in flakes of white above the weed-black rocks. Siegmund stood away back, anxiously. He would not dare to tempt Fate now, having too strong a sense of death to risk it.

      ‘Come back, dear. Don’t go so near,’ he pleaded, following as close as he might. She heard the pain and appeal in his voice. It thrilled her, and she went a little nearer. What was death to her but one of her symbols, the death of which the sagas talk — something grand, and sweeping, and dark.

      Leaning forward, she could see the line of grey sand and the line of foam broken by black rocks, and over all the gulls, stirring round like froth on a pot, screaming in chorus.

      She watched the beautiful birds, heard the pleading of Siegmund, and she thrilled with pleasure, toying with his keen anguish.

      Helena came smiling to Siegmund, saying:

      ‘They look so fine down there.’

      He fastened his hands upon her, as a relief from his pain. He was filled with a keen, strong anguish of dread, like a presentiment. She laughed as he gripped her.

      They went searching for a way of descent. At last Siegmund inquired of the coastguard the nearest way down the cliff. He was pointed to the ‘Path of the Hundred Steps’.

      ‘When is a hundred not a hundred?’ he said sceptically, as they descended the dazzling white chalk. There were sixty-eight steps. Helena laughed at his exactitude.

      ‘It must be a love of round numbers,’ he said.

      ‘No doubt,’ she laughed. He took the thing so seriously.

      ‘Or of exaggeration,’ he added.

      There was a shelving beach of warm white sand, bleached soft as velvet. A sounding of gulls filled the dark recesses of the headland; a low chatter of shingle came from where the easy water was breaking; the confused, shell-like murmur of the sea between the folded cliffs. Siegmund and Helena lay side by side upon the dry sand, small as two resting birds, while thousands of gulls whirled in a white-flaked storm above them, and the great cliffs towered beyond, and high up over the cliffs the multitudinous clouds were travelling, a vast caravan en route. Amidst the journeying of oceans and clouds and the circling flight of heavy spheres, lost to sight in the sky, Siegmund and Helena, two grains of life in the vast movement, were travelling a moment side by side.

      They lay on the beach like a grey and a white sea-bird together. The lazy ships that were idling down the Solent observed the cliffs and the boulders, but Siegmund and Helena were too little. They lay ignored and insignificant, watching through half-closed fingers the diverse caravan of Day go past. They lay with their latticed fingers over their eyes, looking out at the sailing of ships across their vision of blue water.

      ‘Now, that one with the greyish sails —’ Siegmund was saying.

      ‘Like a housewife of forty going placidly round with the duster — yes?’ interrupted Helena.

      ‘That is a schooner. You see her four sails, and —’

      He continued to classify the shipping, until he was interrupted by the wicked laughter of Helena.

      ‘That is right, I am sure,’ he protested.

      ‘I won’t contradict you,’ she laughed, in a tone which showed him he knew even less of the classifying of ships than she did.

      ‘So you have lain there amusing yourself at my expense all the time?’ he said, not knowing in the least why she laughed. They turned and looked at one another, blue eyes smiling and wavering as the beach wavers in the heat. Then they closed their eyes with sunshine.

      Drowsed by the sun, and the white sand, and the foam, their thoughts slept like butterflies on the flowers of delight. But cold shadows startled them up.

      ‘The clouds are coming,’ he said regretfully.

      ‘Yes; but the wind is quite strong enough for them,’ she answered,

      ‘Look at the shadows — like blots floating away. Don’t they devour the sunshine?’

      ‘It is quite warm enough here,’ she said, nestling in to him.

      ‘Yes; but the sting is missing. I like to feel the warmth biting in.’

      ‘No, I do not. To be cosy is enough.’

      ‘I like the sunshine on me, real, and manifest, and tangible. I feel like a seed that has been frozen for ages. I want to be bitten by the sunshine.’

      She leaned over and kissed him. The sun came bright-footed over the water, leaving a shining print on Siegmund’s face. He lay, with half-closed eyes, sprawled loosely on the sand. Looking at his limbs, she imagined he must be heavy, like the bounders. She sat over him, with her fingers stroking his eyebrows, that were broad and rather arched. He lay perfectly still, in a half-dream.

      Presently she laid her head on his breast, and remained

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