LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 19

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      The air was warm and sweet in the little lane, remote from the sea, which led them along their last walk. On either side the white path was a grassy margin thickly woven with pink convolvuli. Some of the reckless little flowers, so gay and evanescent, had climbed the trunks of an old yew tree, and were looking up pertly at their rough host.

      Helena walked along, watching the flowers, and making fancies out of them.

      ‘Who called them “fairies’ telephones”?’ she said to herself. ‘They are tiny children in pinafores. How gay they are! They are children dawdling along the pavement of a morning. How fortunate they are! See how they take a wind-thrill! See how wide they are set to the sunshine! And when they are tired, they will curl daintily to sleep, and some fairies in the dark will gather them away. They won’t be here in the morning, shrivelled and dowdy . . . If only we could curl up and be gone, after our day. . . . ’

      She looked at Siegmund. He was walking moodily beside her.

      ‘It is good when life holds no anti-climax,’ she said.

      ‘Ay!’ he answered. Of course, he could not understand her meaning.

      She strayed into the thick grass, a sturdy white figure that walked with bent head, abstract, but happy.

      ‘What is she thinking?’ he asked himself. ‘She is sufficient to herself — she doesn’t want me. She has her own private way of communing with things, and is friends with them.’

      ‘The dew has been very heavy,’ she said, turning, and looking up at him from under her brows, like a smiling witch.

      ‘I see it has,’ he answered. Then to himself he said: ‘She can’t translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can’t render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will see I was not indispensable. . . . ’

      The lane led up to the eastern down. As they were emerging, they saw on the left hand an extraordinarily spick and span red bungalow. The low roof of dusky red sloped down towards the coolest green lawn, that was edged and ornamented with scarlet, and yellow, and white flowers brilliant with dew.

      A stout man in an alpaca jacket and panama hat was seated on the bare lawn, his back to the sun, reading a newspaper. He tried in vain to avoid the glare of the sun on his reading. At last he closed the paper and looked angrily at the house — not at anything in particular.

      He irritably read a few more lines, then jerked up his head in sudden decision, glared at the open door of the house, and called:

      ‘Amy! Amy!’

      No answer was forthcoming. He flung down the paper and strode off indoors, his mien one of wrathful resolution. His voice was heard calling curtly from the dining-room. There was a jingle of crockery as he bumped the table leg in sitting down.

      ‘He is in a bad temper,’ laughed Siegmund.

      ‘Breakfast is late,’ said Helena with contempt.

      ‘Look!’ said Siegmund.

      An elderly lady in black and white striped linen, a young lady in holland, both carrying some wild flowers, hastened towards the garden gate. Their faces were turned anxiously to the house. They were hot with hurrying, and had no breath for words. The girl pressed forward, opened the gate for the lady in striped linen, who hastened over the lawn. Then the daughter followed, and vanished also under the shady veranda.

      There was a quick sound of women’s low, apologetic voices, overridden by the resentful abuse of the man.

      The lovers moved out of hearing.

      ‘Imagine that breakfast-table!’ said Siegmund.

      ‘I feel,’ said Helena, with a keen twang of contempt in her voice, ‘as if a fussy cock and hens had just scuffled across my path.’

      ‘There are many such roosts,’ said Siegmund pertinently.

      Helena’s cold scorn was very disagreeable to him. She talked to him winsomely and very kindly as they crossed the open down to meet the next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of self-esteem tortured him to the end.

      Helena had rejected him. She gave herself to her fancies only. For some time she had confused Siegmund with her god. Yesterday she had cried to her ideal lover, and found only Siegmund. It was the spear in the side of his tortured self-respect.

      ‘At least,’ he said, in mortification of himself —‘at least, someone must recognize a strain of God in me — and who does? I don’t believe in it myself.’

      And, moreover, in the intense joy and suffering of his realized passion, the island, with its sea and sky, had fused till, like a brilliant bead, all their beauty ran together out of the common ore, and Siegmund saw it naked, saw the beauty of everything naked in the shifting magic of this bead. The island would be gone tomorrow: he would look for the beauty and find the dirt. What was he to do?

      ‘You know, Domine,’ said Helena — it was his old nickname she used —‘you look quite stern today.’

      ‘I feel anything but stern,’ he laughed. ‘Weaker than usual, in fact.’

      ‘Yes, perhaps so, when you talk. Then you are really surprisingly gentle. But when you are silent, I am even afraid of you — you seem so grave.’

      He laughed.

      ‘And shall I not be brave?’ he said. ‘Can’t you smell Fumum et opes strepitumque Romae?’ He turned quickly to Helena. ‘I wonder if that’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s years since I did a line of Latin, and I thought it had all gone.’

      ‘In the first place, what does it mean?’ said Helena calmly, ‘for I can only half translate. I have thrown overboard all my scrap-books of such stuff.’

      ‘Why,’ said Siegmund, rather abashed, ‘only “the row and the smoke of Rome”. But it is remarkable, Helena’— here the peculiar look of interest came on his face again —‘it is really remarkable that I should have said that.’

      ‘Yes, you look surprised,’ smiled she.

      ‘But it must be twenty’— he counted —‘twenty-two or three years since I learned that, and I forgot it — goodness knows how long ago. Like a drowning man, I have these memories before. . . . ’ He broke off, smiling mockingly, to tease her.

      ‘Before you go back to London,’ said she, in a matter-of-fact, almost ironical tone. She was inscrutable. This morning she could not bear to let any deep emotion come uppermost. She wanted rest. ‘No,’ she said, with calm distinctness, a few moments after, when they were climbing the rise to the cliff’s edge. ‘I can’t say that I smell the smoke of London. The mist-curtain is thick yet. There it is’— she pointed to the heavy, purple-grey haze that hung like arras on a wall, between the sloping sky and the sea. She thought of yesterday morning’s mist-curtain, thick and blazing gold, so heavy that no wind could sway its fringe.

      They lay down in the dry grass, upon the gold bits of bird’s-foot trefoil of the cliff’s edge, and looked out to sea. A warm, drowsy calm drooped over everything.

      ‘Six hours,’ thought Helena, ‘and we shall have passed the mist-curtain. Already it is thinning. I could break it open with waving my hand. I will not wave my hand.’

      She

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