The Trespasser by D.H. Lawrence
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D.H. Lawrence >> The Trespasser
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Siegmund lay in the bright light, with his eyes closed, never moving.
His face was inflamed, but fixed like a mask.
Helena waited, until the terror of the passing of the hour was too
strong for her. She lifted his hand, which lay swollen with heat on the
sand, and she tried gently to draw him.
'We shall be too late,' she said in distress.
He sighed and sat up, looking out over the water.
Helena could not bear to see him look so vacant and expressionless. She
put her arm round his neck, and pressed his head against her skirt.
Siegmund knew he was making it unbearable for her. Pulling himself
together, he bent his head from the sea, and said:
'Why, what time is it?'
He took out his watch, holding it in his hand. Helena still held his
left hand, and had one arm round his neck.
'I can't see the figures,' he said. 'Everything is dimmed, as if it were
coming dark.'
'Yes,' replied Helena, in that reedy, painful tone of hers. 'My eyes
were the same. It is the strong sunlight.'
'I can't,' he repeated, and he was rather surprised--'I can't see the
time. Can you?'
She stooped down and looked.
'It is half past one,' she said.
Siegmund hated her voice as she spoke. There was still sufficient time
to catch the train. He stood up, moved inside his clothing, saying: 'I
feel almost stunned by the heat. I can hardly see, and all my feeling in
my body is dulled.'
'Yes,' answered Helena, 'I am afraid it will do you harm.'
'At any rate,' he smiled as if sleepily, 'I have had enough. If it's too
much--what _is_ too much?'
They went unevenly over the sand, their eyes sun-dimmed.
'We are going back--we are going back!' the heart of Helena seemed to
run hot, beating these words.
They climbed the cliff path toilsomely. Standing at the top, on the edge
of the grass, they looked down the cliffs at the beach and over the sea.
The strand was wide, forsaken by the sea, forlorn with rocks bleaching
in the sun, and sand and seaweed breathing off their painful scent upon
the heat. The sea crept smaller, farther away; the sky stood still.
Siegmund and Helena looked hopelessly out on their beautiful,
incandescent world. They looked hopelessly at each other, Siegmund's
mood was gentle and forbearing. He smiled faintly at Helena, then
turned, and, lifting his hand to his mouth in a kiss for the beauty he
had enjoyed, '_Addio_!' he said.
He turned away, and, looking from Helena landwards, he said, smiling
peculiarly:
'It reminds me of Traviata--an "_Addio_" at every verse-end.'
She smiled with her mouth in acknowledgement of his facetious irony; it
jarred on her. He was pricked again by her supercilious reserve.
'_Addi-i-i-i-o, Addi-i-i-o_!' he whistled between his teeth, hissing out
the Italian's passion-notes in a way that made Helena clench her fists.
'I suppose,' she said, swallowing, and recovering her voice to check
this discord--'I suppose we shall have a fairly easy journey--Thursday.'
'I don't know,' said Siegmund.
'There will not be very many people,' she insisted.
'I think,' he said, in a very quiet voice, 'you'd better let me go by
the South-Western from Portsmouth while you go on by the Brighton.'
'But why?' she exclaimed in astonishment.
'I don't want to sit looking at you all the way,' he said.
'But why should you?' she exclaimed.
He laughed.
'Indeed, no!' she said. 'We shall go together.'
'Very well,' he answered.
They walked on in silence towards the village. As they drew near the
little post office, he said:
'I suppose I may as well wire them that I shall be home tonight.'
'You haven't sent them any word?' she asked.
He laughed. They came to the open door of the little shop. He stood
still, not entering. Helena wondered what he was thinking.
'Shall I?' he asked, meaning, should he wire to Beatrice. His manner was
rather peculiar.
'Well, I should think so,' faltered Helena, turning away to look at the
postcards in the window. Siegmund entered the shop. It was dark and
cumbered with views, cheap china ornaments, and toys. He asked for a
telegraph form.
'My God!' he said to himself bitterly as he took the pencil. He could
not sign the abbreviated name his wife used towards him. He scribbled
his surname, as he would have done to a stranger. As he watched the
amiable, stout woman counting up his words carefully, pointing with her
finger, he felt sick with irony.
'That's right,' she said, picking up the sixpence and taking the form to
the instrument. 'What beautiful weather!' she continued. 'It will be
making you sorry to leave us.'
'There goes my warrant,' thought Siegmund, watching the flimsy bit of
paper under the post-mistress's heavy hand.
'Yes--it is too bad, isn't it,' he replied, bowing and laughing to the
woman.
'It is, sir,' she answered pleasantly. 'Good morning.'
He came out of the shop still smiling, and when Helena turned from the
postcards to look at him, the lines of laughter remained over his face
like a mask. She glanced at his eyes for a sign; his facial expression
told her nothing; his eyes were just as inscrutable, which made her
falter with dismay.
'What is he thinking of?' she asked herself. Her thoughts flashed back.
'And why did he ask me so peculiarly whether he should wire them
at home?'
'Well,' said Siegmund, 'are there any postcards?'
'None that I care to take,' she replied. 'Perhaps you would like one of
these?'
She pointed to some faded-looking cards which proved to be imaginary
views of Alum Bay done in variegated sand. Siegmund smiled.
'I wonder if they dribbled the sand on with a fine glass tube,' he said.
'Or a brush,' said Helena.
'She does not understand,' said Siegmund to himself. 'And whatever I do
I must not tell her. I should have thought she would understand.'
As he walked home beside her there mingled with his other feelings
resentment against her. Almost he hated her.
_Chapter 20_
At first they had a carriage to themselves. They sat opposite each other
with averted faces, looking out of the windows and watching the houses,
the downs dead asleep in the sun, the embankments of the railway with
exhausted hot flowers go slowly past out of their reach. They felt as if
they were being dragged away like criminals. Unable to speak or think,
they stared out of the windows, Helena struggling in vain to keep back
her tears, Siegmund labouring to breathe normally.
At Yarmouth the door was snatched open, and there was a confusion of
shouting and running; a swarm of humanity, clamouring, attached itself
at the carriage doorway, which was immediately blocked by a stout man
who heaved a leather bag in front of him as he cried in German that here
was room for all. Faces innumerable--hot, blue-eyed faces--strained to
look over his shoulders at the shocked girl and the amazed Siegmund.
There entered eight Germans into the second-class compartment, five men
and three ladies. When at last the luggage was stowed away they sank
into the seats. The last man on either side to be seated lowered himself
carefully, like a wedge, between his two neighbours. Siegmund watched
the stout man, the one who had led the charge, settling himself between
his large lady and the small Helena. The latter crushed herself against
the side of the carriage. The German's hips came down tight against her.
She strove to lessen herself against the window, to escape the pressure
of his flesh, whose heat was transmitted to her. The man squeezed in the
opposite direction.
'I am afraid I press you,' he said, smiling in his gentle, chivalric
German fashion. Helena glanced swiftly at him. She liked his grey eyes,
she liked the agreeable intonation, and the pleasant sound of his words.
'Oh no,' she answered. 'You do not crush me.'
Almost before she had finished the words she turned away to the window.
The man seemed to hesitate a moment, as if recovering himself from a
slight rebuff, before he could address his lady with the good-humoured
remark in German: 'Well, and have we not managed it very nicely, eh?'
The whole party began to talk in German with great animation. They told
each other of the quaint ways of this or the other; they joked loudly
over 'Billy'--this being a nickname discovered for the German
Emperor--and what he would be saying of the Czar's trip; they questioned
each other, and answered each other concerning the places they were
going to see, with great interest, displaying admirable knowledge. They
were pleased with everything; they extolled things English.
Helena's stout neighbour, who, it seemed, was from Dresden, began to
tell anecdotes. He was a _raconteur_ of the naive type: he talked with
face, hands, with his whole body. Now and again he would give little
spurts in his seat. After one of these he must have become aware of
Helena--who felt as if she were enveloped by a soft stove--struggling to
escape his compression. He stopped short, lifted his hat, and smiling
beseechingly, said in his persuasive way:
'I am sorry. I am sorry. I compress you!' He glanced round in
perplexity, seeking some escape or remedy. Finding none, he turned to
her again, after having squeezed hard against his lady to free
Helena, and said:
'Forgive me, I am sorry.'
'You are forgiven,' replied Helena, suddenly smiling into his face with
her rare winsomeness. The whole party, attentive, relaxed into a smile
at this. The good humour was complete.
'Thank you,' said the German gratefully.
Helena turned away. The talk began again like the popping of corn; the
_raconteur_ resumed his anecdote. Everybody was waiting to laugh. Helena
rapidly wearied of trying to follow the tale. Siegmund had made no
attempt. He had watched, with the others, the German's apologies, and
the sight of his lover's face had moved him more than he could tell.
She had a peculiar, childish wistfulness at times, and with this an
intangible aloofness that pierced his heart. It seemed to him he should
never know her. There was a remoteness about her, an estrangement
between her and all natural daily things, as if she were of an unknown
race that never can tell its own story. This feeling always moved
Siegmund's pity to its deepest, leaving him poignantly helpless. This
same foreignness, revealed in other ways, sometimes made him hate her.
It was as if she would sacrifice him rather than renounce her foreign
birth. There was something in her he could never understand, so that
never, never could he say he was master of her as she was of him
the mistress.
As she smiled and turned away from the German, mute, uncomplaining, like
a child wise in sorrow beyond its years, Siegmund's resentment against
her suddenly took fire, and blazed him with sheer pain of pity. She was
very small. Her quiet ways, and sometimes her impetuous clinging made
her seem small; for she was very strong. But Siegmund saw her now,
small, quiet, uncomplaining, living for him who sat and looked at her.
But what would become of her when he had left her, when she was alone,
little foreigner as she was, in this world, which apologizes when it has
done the hurt, too blind to see beforehand? Helena would be left behind;
death was no way for her. She could not escape thus with him from this
house of strangers which she called 'life'. She had to go on alone, like
a foreigner who cannot learn the strange language.
'What will she do?' Siegmund asked himself, 'when her loneliness comes
upon her like a horror, and she has no one to go to. She will come to
the memory of me for a while, and that will take her over till her
strength is established. But what then?'
Siegmund could find no answer. He tried to imagine her life. It would go
on, after his death, just in the same way, for a while, and then? He had
not the faintest knowledge of how she would develop. What would she do
when she was thirty-eight, and as old as himself? He could not conceive.
Yet she would not die, of that he was certain.
Siegmund suddenly realized that he knew nothing of her life, her real
inner life. She was a book written in characters unintelligible to him
and to everybody. He was tortured with the problem of her till it became
acute, and he felt as if his heart would burst inside him. As a boy he
had experienced the same sort of feeling after wrestling for an hour
with a problem in Euclid, for he was capable of great concentration.
He felt Helena looking at him. Turning, he found her steady, unswerving
eyes fixed on him, so that he shrank confused from them. She smiled: by
an instinctive movement she made him know that she wanted him to hold
her hand. He leaned forward and put his hand over hers. She had peculiar
hands, small, with a strange, delightful silkiness. Often they were cool
or cold; generally they lay unmoved within his clasp, but then they were
instinct with life, not inert. Sometimes he would feel a peculiar
jerking in his pulse, very much like electricity, when he held her hand.
Occasionally it was almost painful, and felt as if a little virtue were
passing out of his blood. But that he dismissed as nonsense.
The Germans were still rattling away, perspiring freely, wiping their
faces with their handkerchiefs as they laughed, moving inside their
clothing, which was sticking to their sides. Siegmund had not noticed
them for some time, he was so much absorbed. But Helena, though she
sympathized with her fellow-passengers, was tormented almost beyond
endurance by the noise, the heat of her neighbour's body, the atmosphere
of the crowded carriage, and her own emotion. The only thing that could
relieve her was the hand of Siegmund soothing her in its hold.
She looked at him with the same steadiness which made her eyes feel
heavy upon him, and made him shrink. She wanted his strength of nerve to
support her, and he submitted at once, his one aim being to give her out
of himself whatever she wanted.
_Chapter 21_
The tall white yachts in a throng were lounging off the roads of Ryde.
It was near the regatta time, so these proud creatures had flown loftily
together, and now flitted hither and thither among themselves, like a
concourse of tall women, footing the waves with superb touch. To
Siegmund they were very beautiful, but removed from him, as dancers
crossing the window-lights are removed from the man who looks up from
the street. He saw the Solent and the world of glamour flying gay as
snow outside, where inside was only Siegmund, tired, dispirited,
without any joy.
He and Helena had climbed among coils of rope on to the prow of their
steamer, so they could catch a little spray of speed on their faces to
stimulate them. The sea was very bright and crowded. White sails leaned
slightly and filed along the roads; two yachts with sails of amber
floated, it seemed, without motion, amid the eclipsed blue of the day;
small boats with red and yellow flags fluttered quickly, trailing the
sea with colour; a pleasure steamer coming from Cowes swung her soft
stout way among the fleeting ships; high in the background were
men-of-war, a long line, each one threading tiny triangles of flags
through a sky dim with distance.
'It is all very glad,' said Siegmund to himself, 'but it seems to be
fanciful.'
He was out of it. Already he felt detached from life. He belonged to his
destination. It is always so: we have no share in the beauty that lies
between us and our goal.
Helena watched with poignant sorrow all the agitation of colour on the
blue afternoon.
'We must leave it; we must pass out of it,' she lamented, over and over
again. Each new charm she caught eagerly.
'I like the steady purpose of that brown-sailed tramp,' she said to
herself, watching a laden coaster making for Portsmouth.
They were still among the small shipping of Ryde. Siegmund and Helena,
as they looked out, became aware of a small motor-launch heading across
their course towards a yacht whose tall masts were drawn clean on the
sky. The eager launch, its nose up as if to breathe, was racing over the
swell like a coursing dog. A lady, in white, and a lad with dark head
and white jersey were leaning in the bows; a gentleman was bending over
some machinery in the middle of the boat, while the sailor in the low
stern was also stooping forward attending to something. The steamer was
sweeping onwards, huge above the water; the dog of a boat was coursing
straight across her track. The lady saw the danger first. Stretching
forward, she seized the arm of the lad and held him firm, making no
sound, but watching the forward menace of the looming steamer.
'Look!' cried Helena, catching hold of Siegmund. He was already
watching. Suddenly the steamer bell clanged. The gentleman looked up,
with startled, sunburned face; then he leaped to the stern. The launch
veered. It and the steamer closed together like a pair of scissors. The
lady, still holding the boy, looked up with an expressionless face at
the high sweeping chisel of the steamer's bows; the husband stood rigid,
staring ahead. No sound was to be heard save the rustling of water under
the bows. The scissors closed, the launch skelped forward like a dog
from in front of the traffic. It escaped by a yard or two. Then, like a
dog, it seemed to look round. The gentleman in the stern glanced back
quickly. He was a handsome, dark-haired man with dark eyes. His face was
as if carven out of oak, set and grey-brown. Then he looked to the
steering of his boat. No one had uttered a sound. From the tiny boat
coursing low on the water, not a sound, only tense waiting. The launch
raced out of danger towards the yacht. The gentleman, with a brief
gesture, put his man in charge again, whilst he himself went forward to
the lady. He was a handsome man, very proud in his movements; and she,
in her bearing, was prouder still. She received him almost with
indifference.
Helena turned to Siegmund. He took both her hands and pressed them,
whilst she looked at him with eyes blind with emotion. She was white to
the lips, and heaving like the buoy in the wake of the steamer. The
noise of life had suddenly been hushed, and each heart had heard for a
moment the noiselessness of death. How everyone was white and gasping!
They strove, on every hand, to fill the day with noise and the colour of
life again.
'By Jove, that was a near thing!'
'Ah, that has made me feel bad!' said a woman.
'A French yacht,' said somebody.
Helena was waiting for the voice of Siegmund. But he did not know what
to say. Confused, he repeated:
'That was a close shave.'
Helena clung to him, searching his face. She felt his difference from
herself. There was something in his experience that made him different,
quiet, with a peculiar expression as if he were pained.
'Ah, dear Lord!' he was saying to himself. 'How bright and whole the day
is for them! If God had suddenly put His hand over the sun, and
swallowed us up in a shadow, they could not have been more startled.
That man, with his fine, white-flannelled limbs and his dark head, has
no suspicion of the shadow that supports it all. Between the blueness of
the sea and the sky he passes easy as a gull, close to the fine white
seamew of his mate, amid red flowers of flags, and soft birds of ships,
and slow-moving monsters of steamboats.
'For me the day is transparent and shrivelling. I can see the darkness
through its petals. But for him it is a fresh bell-flower, in which he
fumbles with delights like a bee.
'For me, quivering in the interspaces of the atmosphere, is the darkness
the same that fills in my soul. I can see death urging itself into life,
the shadow supporting the substance. For my life is burning an invisible
flame. The glare of the light of myself, as I burn on the fuel of death,
is not enough to hide from me the source and the issue. For what is a
life but a flame that bursts off the surface of darkness, and tapers
into the darkness again? But the death that issues differs from the
death that was the source. At least, I shall enrich death with a potent
shadow, if I do not enrich life.'
'Wasn't that woman fine!' said Helena.
'So perfectly still,' he answered.
'The child realized nothing,' she said.
Siegmund laughed, then leaned forward impulsively to her.
'I am always so sorry,' he said, 'that the human race is urged
inevitably into a deeper and deeper realization of life.'
She looked at him, wondering what provoked such a remark.
'I guess,' she said slowly, after a while, 'that the man, the sailor,
will have a bad time. He was abominably careless.'
'He was careful of something else just then,' said Siegmund, who hated
to hear her speak in cold condemnation. 'He was attending to the
machinery or something.'
'That was scarcely his first business,' said she, rather sarcastic.
Siegmund looked at her. She seemed very hard in judgement--very blind.
Sometimes his soul surged against her in hatred.
'Do you think the man _wanted_ to drown the boat?' he asked.
'He nearly succeeded,' she replied.
There was antagonism between them. Siegmund recognized in Helena the
world sitting in judgement, and he hated it. 'But, after all,' he
thought, I suppose it is the only way to get along, to judge the event
and not the person. I have a disease of sympathy, a vice of
exoneration.'
Nevertheless, he did not love Helena as a judge. He thought rather of
the woman in the boat. She was evidently one who watched the sources of
life, saw it great and impersonal.
'Would the woman cry, or hug and kiss the boy when she got on board?' he
asked.
'I rather think not. Why?' she replied.
'I hope she didn't,' he said.
Helena sat watching the water spurt back from the bows. She was very
much in love with Siegmund. He was suggestive; he stimulated her. But to
her mind he had not her own dark eyes of hesitation; he was swift and
proud as the wind. She never realized his helplessness.
Siegmund was gathering strength from the thought of that other woman's
courage. If she had so much restraint as not to cry out, or alarm the
boy, if she had so much grace not to complain to her husband, surely he
himself might refrain from revealing his own fear of Helena, and from
lamenting his hard fate.
They sailed on past the chequered round towers. The sea opened, and they
looked out to eastward into the sea-space. Siegmund wanted to flee. He
yearned to escape down the open ways before him. Yet he knew he would be
carried on to London. He watched the sea-ways closing up. The shore came
round. The high old houses stood flat on the right hand. The shore swept
round in a sickle, reaping them into the harbour. There the old
_Victory_, gay with myriad pointed pennons, was harvested, saved for
a trophy.
'It is a dreadful thing,' thought Siegmund, 'to remain as a trophy when
there is nothing more to do.' He watched the landing-stages swooping
nearer. There were the trains drawn up in readiness. At the other end of
the train was London.
He could scarcely bear to have Helena before him for another two hours.
The suspense of that protracted farewell, while he sat opposite her in
the beating train, would cost too much. He longed to be released
from her.
They had got their luggage, and were standing at the foot of the ladder,
in the heat of the engines and the smell of hot oil, waiting for the
crowd to pass on, so that they might ascend and step off the ship on to
the mainland.
'Won't you let me go by the South-Western, and you by the Brighton?'
asked Siegmund, hesitating, repeating the morning's question.
Helena looked at him, knitting her brows with misgiving and perplexity.
'No,' she replied. 'Let us go together.'
Siegmund followed her up the iron ladder to the quay.
There was no great crowd on the train. They easily found a second-class
compartment without occupants. He swung the luggage on the rack and sat
down, facing Helena.
'Now,' said he to himself, 'I wish I were alone.'
He wanted to think and prepare himself.
Helena, who was thinking actively, leaned forward to him to say:
'Shall I not go down to Cornwall?'
By her soothing willingness to do anything for him, Siegmund knew that
she was dogging him closely. He could not bear to have his anxiety
protracted.
'But you have promised Louisa, have you not?' he replied.
'Oh, well!' she said, in the peculiar slighting tone she had when she
wished to convey the unimportance of affairs not touching him.
'Then you must go,' he said.
'But,' she began, with harsh petulance, 'I do not want to go down to
Cornwall with _Louisa and Olive_'--she accentuated the two names--'after
_this_,' she added.
'Then Louisa will have no holiday--and you have promised,' he said
gravely.
Helena looked at him. She saw he had decided that she should go.
'Is my promise so _very_ important?' she asked. She glanced angrily at
the three ladies who were hesitating in the doorway. Nevertheless, the
ladies entered, and seated themselves at the opposite end of the
carriage. Siegmund did not know whether he were displeased or relieved
by their intrusion. If they had stayed out, he might have held Helena in
his arms for still another hour. As it was, she could not harass him
with words. He tried not to look at her, but to think.
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