The Greatest Works of D. H. Lawrence - D. H. Lawrence

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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 if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said:

      ‘Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next year, and stay for a whole month?’

      ‘If there be any next year,’ said she.

      Siegmund did not reply.

      She wondered if he had really spoken in sincerity, or if he, too, were mocking fate. They walked slowly through the broiling sun towards their lodging.

      ‘There will be an end to this,’ said Helena, communing with herself. ‘And when we come out of the mist-curtain, what will it be? No matter — let come what will. All along Fate has been resolving, from the very beginning, resolving obvious discords, gradually, by unfamiliar progression; and out of original combinations weaving wondrous harmonies with our lives. Really, the working out has been wondrous, is wondrous now. The Master-Fate is too great an artist to suffer an anti-climax. I am sure the Master-Musician is too great an artist to allow a bathetic anti-climax.’

      Chapter 15

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      The afternoon of the blazing day passed drowsily. Lying close together on the beach, Siegmund and Helena let the day exhale its hours like perfume, unperceived. Siegmund slept, a light evanescent sleep irised with dreams and with suffering: nothing definite, the colour of dreams without shape. Helena, as usual, retained her consciousness much more clearly. She watched the far-off floating of ships, and the near wading of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little waves, rippled forward and broke on the shore of her drowsiness. But each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed, spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was merely aware that the sun was wheeling down, tangling Siegmund and her in the traces, like overthrown charioteers. So the hours passed.

      After tea they went eastwards on the downs. Siegmund was animated, so that Helena caught his mood. It was very rare that they spoke of the time preceding their acquaintance, Helena knew little or nothing of Siegmund’s life up to the age of thirty, whilst he had never learned anything concerning her childhood. Somehow she did not encourage him to self-discovery. Today, however, the painful need of lovers for self-revelation took hold on him.

      ‘It is awfully funny,’ he said. ‘I was so gone on Beatrice when I married her. She had only just come back from Egypt. Her father was an army officer, a very handsome man, and, I believe, a bit of a rake. Beatrice is really well connected, you know. But old FitzHerbert ran through all his money, and through everything else. He was too hot for the rest of the family, so they dropped him altogether.

      ‘He came to live at Peckham when I was sixteen. I had just left school, and was to go into father’s business. Mrs FitzHerbert left cards, and very soon we were acquainted. Beatrice had been a good time in a French convent school. She had only knocked about with the army a little while, but it had brought her out. I remember I thought she was miles above me — which she was. She wasn’t bad-looking, either, and you know men all like her. I bet she’d marry again, in spite of the children.

      ‘At first I fluttered round her. I remember I’d got a little, silky moustache. They all said I looked older than sixteen. At that time I was mad on the violin, and she played rather well. Then FitzHerbert went off abroad somewhere, so Beatrice and her mother half lived at our house. The mother was an invalid.

      ‘I remember I nearly stood on my head one day. The conservatory opened off the smoking-room, so when I came in the room, I heard my two sisters and Beatrice talking about good-looking men.

      ‘“I consider Bertram will make a handsome man,” said my younger sister.

      ‘“He’s got beautiful eyes,” said my other sister.

      ‘“And a real darling nose and chin!” cried Beatrice. “If only he was more solide! He is like a windmill, all limbs.”

      ‘“He will fill out. Remember, he’s not quite seventeen,” said my elder sister.

      ‘“Ah, he is doux — he is câlin,” said Beatrice.

      ‘“I think he is rather too spoony for his age,” said my elder sister.

      ‘“But he’s a fine boy for all that. See how thick his knees are,” my younger sister chimed in.

      ‘“Ah, si, si!” cried Beatrice.

      ‘I made a row against the door, then walked across.

      ‘“Hello, is somebody in here?” I said, as I pushed into the little conservatory.

      ‘I looked straight at Beatrice, and she at me. We seemed to have formed an alliance in that look: she was the other half of my consciousness, I of hers. Ha! Ha! there were a lot of white narcissus, and little white hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, in the conservatory. I can see them now, great white stars, and tangles of little ones, among a bank of green; and I can recall the keen, fresh scent on the warm air; and the look of Beatrice . . . her great dark eyes.

      ‘It’s funny, but Beatrice is as dead — ay, far more dead — than Dante’s. And I am not that young fool, not a bit.

      ‘I was very romantic, fearfully emotional, and the soul of honour. Beatrice said nobody cared a thing about her. FitzHerbert was always jaunting off, the mother was a fretful invalid. So I was seventeen, earning half a guinea a week, and she was eighteen, with no money, when we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it awfully well, I have been a frightful drag on him, you know.

      ‘There’s the romance. I wonder how it will all end.’

      Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit.

      They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before Helena’s day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a

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