The Trespasser by D.H. Lawrence
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D.H. Lawrence >> The Trespasser
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She became distressedly conscious that her feet, which lay on the wet
grass, were aching with cold. She said softly, gently, as if he was her
child whom she must correct and lead:
'I think we ought to go home, Siegmund.' He made a small sound, that
might mean anything, but did not stir or release her. His mouth,
however, remained motionless on her throat, and the caress went out
of it.
'It is cold and wet, dear; we ought to go,' she coaxed determinedly.
'Soon,' he said thickly.
She sighed, waited a moment, then said very gently, as if she were loath
to take him from his pleasure:
'Siegmund, I am cold.'
There was a reproach in this which angered him.
'Cold!' he exclaimed. 'But you are warm with me--'
'But my feet are out on the grass, dear, and they are like wet pebbles.'
'Oh dear!' he said. 'Why didn't you give them me to warm?' He leaned
forward, and put his hand on her shoes.
'They are very cold,' he said. 'We must hurry and make them warm.'
When they rose, her feet were so numbed she could hardly stand. She
clung to Siegmund, laughing.
'I wish you had told me before,' he said. 'I ought to have known....'
Vexed with himself, he put his arm round her, and they set off home.
_Chapter 5_
They found the fire burning brightly in their room. The only other
person in the pretty, stiffly-furnished cottage was their landlady, a
charming old lady, who let this sitting-room more for the change, for
the sake of having visitors, than for gain.
Helena introduced Siegmund as 'My friend'. The old lady smiled upon him.
He was big, and good-looking, and embarrassed. She had had a son years
back.... And the two were lovers. She hoped they would come to her house
for their honeymoon.
Siegmund sat in his great horse-hair chair by the fire, while Helena
attended to the lamp. Glancing at him over the glowing globe, she found
him watching her with a small, peculiar smile of irony, and anger, and
bewilderment. He was not quite himself. Her hand trembled so, she could
scarcely adjust the wicks.
Helena left the room to change her dress.
'I shall be back before Mrs Curtiss brings in the tray. There is the
Nietzsche I brought--'
He did not answer as he watched her go. Left alone, he sat with his arms
along his knees, perfectly still. His heart beat heavily, and all his
being felt sullen, watchful, aloof, like a balked animal. Thoughts came
up in his brain like bubbles--random, hissing out aimlessly. Once, in
the startling inflammability of his blood, his veins ran hot, and
he smiled.
When Helena entered the room his eyes sought hers swiftly, as sparks
lighting on the tinder. But her eyes were only moist with tenderness.
His look instantly changed. She wondered at his being so silent,
so strange.
Coming to him in her unhesitating, womanly way--she was only twenty-six
to his thirty-eight--she stood before him, holding both his hands and
looking down on him with almost gloomy tenderness. She wore a white
dress that showed her throat gathering like a fountain-jet of solid foam
to balance her head. He could see the full white arms passing clear
through the dripping spume of lace, towards the rise of her breasts. But
her eyes bent down upon him with such gloom of tenderness that he dared
not reveal the passion burning in him. He could not look at her. He
strove almost pitifully to be with her sad, tender, but he could not put
out his fire. She held both his hands firm, pressing them in appeal for
her dream love. He glanced at her wistfully, then turned away. She
waited for him. She wanted his caresses and tenderness. He would not
look at her.
'You would like supper now, dear?' she asked, looking where the dark
hair ended, and his neck ran smooth, under his collar, to the strong
setting of his shoulders.
'Just as you will,' he replied.
Still she waited, and still he would not look at her. Something troubled
him, she thought. He was foreign to her.
'I will spread the cloth, then,' she said, in deep tones of resignation.
She pressed his hands closely, and let them drop. He took no notice,
but, still with his arms on his knees, he stared into the fire.
In the golden glow of lamplight she set small bowls of white and
lavender sweet-peas, and mignonette, upon the round table. He watched
her moving, saw the stir of her white, sloping shoulders under the lace,
and the hollow of her shoulders firm as marble, and the slight rise and
fall of her loins as she walked. He felt as if his breast were scalded.
It was a physical pain to him.
Supper was very quiet. Helena was sad and gentle; he had a peculiar,
enigmatic look in his eyes, between suffering and mockery and love. He
was quite intractable; he would not soften to her, but remained there
aloof. He was tired, and the look of weariness and suffering was evident
to her through his strangeness. In her heart she wept.
At last she tinkled the bell for supper to be cleared. Meanwhile,
restlessly, she played fragments of Wagner on the piano.
'Will you want anything else?' asked the smiling old landlady.
'Nothing at all, thanks,' said Helena, with decision.
'Oh! then I think I will go to bed when I've washed the dishes. You will
put the lamp out, dear?'
'I am well used to a lamp,' smiled Helena. 'We use them always at home.'
She had had a day before Siegmund's coming, in which to win Mrs Curtiss'
heart, and she had been successful. The old lady took the tray.
'Good-night, dear--good-night, sir. I will leave you. You will not be
long, dear?'
'No, we shall not be long. Mr MacNair is very evidently tired out.'
'Yes--yes. It is very tiring, London.'
When the door was closed, Helena stood a moment undecided, looking at
Siegmund. He was lying in his arm-chair in a dispirited way, and looking
in the fire. As she gazed at him with troubled eyes, he happened to
glance to her, with the same dark, curiously searching,
disappointed eyes.
'Shall I read to you?' she asked bitterly.
'If you will,' he replied.
He sounded so indifferent, she could scarcely refrain from crying. She
went and stood in front of him, looking down on him heavily.
'What is it, dear?' she said.
'You,' he replied, smiling with a little grimace.
'Why me?'
He smiled at her ironically, then closed his eyes. She slid into his
arms with a little moan. He took her on his knee, where she curled up
like a heavy white cat. She let him caress her with his mouth, and did
not move, but lay there curled up and quiet and luxuriously warm.
He kissed her hair, which was beautifully fragrant of itself, and time
after time drew between his lips one long, keen thread, as if he would
ravel out with his mouth her vigorous confusion of hair. His tenderness
of love was like a soft flame lapping her voluptuously.
After a while they heard the old lady go upstairs. Helena went very
still, and seemed to contract. Siegmund himself hesitated in his
love-making. All was very quiet. They could hear the faint breathing of
the sea. Presently the cat, which had been sleeping in a chair, rose and
went to the door.
'Shall I let her out?' said Siegmund.
'Do!' said Helena, slipping from his knee. 'She goes out when the nights
are fine.'
Siegmund rose to set free the tabby. Hearing the front door open, Mrs
Curtiss called from upstairs: 'Is that you, dear?'
'I have just let Kitty out,' said Siegmund.
'Ah, thank you. Good night!' They heard the old lady lock her bedroom
door.
Helena was kneeling on the hearth. Siegmund softly closed the door, then
waited a moment. His heart was beating fast.
'Shall we sit by firelight?' he asked tentatively.
'Yes--If you wish,' she replied, very slowly, as if against her will. He
carefully turned down the lamp, then blew out the light. His whole body
was burning and surging with desire.
The room was black and red with firelight. Helena shone ruddily as she
knelt, a bright, bowed figure, full in the glow. Now and then red
stripes of firelight leapt across the walls. Siegmund, his face ruddy,
advanced out of the shadows.
He sat in the chair beside her, leaning forward, his hands hanging like
two scarlet flowers listless in the fire glow, near to her, as she knelt
on the hearth, with head bowed down. One of the flowers awoke and spread
towards her. It asked for her mutely. She was fascinated, scarcely
able to move.
'Come,' he pleaded softly.
She turned, lifted her hands to him. The lace fell back, and her arms,
bare to the shoulder, shone rosily. He saw her breasts raised towards
him. Her face was bent between her arms as she looked up at him afraid.
Lit by the firelight, in her white, clinging dress, cowering between her
uplifted arms, she seemed to be offering him herself to sacrifice.
In an instant he was kneeling, and she was lying on his shoulder,
abandoned to him. There was a good deal of sorrow in his joy.
* * * * *
It was eleven o'clock when Helena at last loosened Siegmund's arms, and
rose from the armchair where she lay beside him. She was very hot,
feverish, and restless. For the last half-hour he had lain absolutely
still, with his heavy arms about her, making her hot. If she had not
seen his eyes blue and dark, she would have thought him asleep. She
tossed in restlessness on his breast.
'Am I not uneasy?' she had said, to make him speak. He had smiled
gently.
'It is wonderful to be as still as this,' he said. She had lain tranquil
with him, then, for a few moments. To her there was something sacred in
his stillness and peace. She wondered at him; he was so different from
an hour ago. How could he be the same! Now he was like the sea, blue and
hazy in the morning, musing by itself. Before, he was burning, volcanic,
as if he would destroy her.
She had given him this new soft beauty. She was the earth in which his
strange flowers grew. But she herself wondered at the flowers produced
of her. He was so strange to her, so different from herself. What next
would he ask of her, what new blossom would she rear in him then. He
seemed to grow and flower involuntarily. She merely helped to
produce him.
Helena could not keep still; her body was full of strange sensations, of
involuntary recoil from shock. She was tired, but restless. All the time
Siegmund lay with his hot arms over her, himself so incomprehensible in
his base of blue, open-eyed slumber, she grew more breathless and
unbearable to herself.
At last she lifted his arm, and drew herself out of the chair. Siegmund
looked at her from his tranquillity. She put the damp hair from her
forehead, breathed deep, almost panting. Then she glanced hauntingly at
her flushed face in the mirror. With the same restlessness, she turned
to look at the night. The cool, dark, watery sea called to her. She
pushed back the curtain.
The moon was wading deliciously through shallows of white cloud. Beyond
the trees and the few houses was the great concave of darkness, the sea,
and the moonlight. The moon was there to put a cool hand of absolution
on her brow.
'Shall we go out a moment, Siegmund?' she asked fretfully.
'Ay, if you wish to,' he answered, altogether willing. He was filled
with an easiness that would comply with her every wish.
They went out softly, walked in silence to the bay. There they stood at
the head of the white, living moonpath, where the water whispered at the
casement of the land seductively.
'It's the finest night I have seen,' said Siegmund. Helena's eyes
suddenly filled with tears, at his simplicity of happiness.
'I like the moon on the water,' she said.
'I can hardly tell the one from the other,' he replied simply. 'The sea
seems to be poured out of the moon, and rocking in the hands of the
coast. They are all one, just as your eyes and hands and what you say,
are all you.'
'Yes,' she answered, thrilled. This was the Siegmund of her dream, and
she had created him. Yet there was a quiver of pain. He was beyond her
now, and did not need her.
'I feel at home here,' he said; 'as if I had come home where I was
bred.'
She pressed his hand hard, clinging to him.
'We go an awful long way round, Helena,' he said, 'just to find we're
all right.' He laughed pleasantly. 'I have thought myself such an
outcast! How can one be outcast in one's own night, and the moon always
naked to us, and the sky half her time in rags? What do we want?'
Helena did not know. Nor did she know what he meant. But she felt
something of the harmony.
'Whatever I have or haven't from now,' he continued, 'the darkness is a
sort of mother, and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and
sometimes the sea is a brother: and there's a family in one house,
you see.'
'And I, Siegmund?' she said softly, taking him in all seriousness. She
looked up at him piteously. He saw the silver of tears among the moonlit
ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed,
then bent to kiss her.
'The key of the castle,' he said. He put his face against hers, and felt
on his cheek the smart of her tears.
'It's all very grandiose,' he said comfortably, 'but it does for
tonight, all this that I say.'
'It is true for ever,' she declared.
'In so far as tonight is eternal,' he said.
He remained, with the wetness of her cheek smarting on his, looking from
under his brows at the white transport of the water beneath the moon.
They stood folded together, gazing into the white heart of the night.
_Chapter 6_
Siegmund woke with wonder in the morning. 'It is like the magic tales,'
he thought, as he realized where he was; 'and I am transported to a new
life, to realize my dream! Fairy-tales are true, after all.'
He had slept very deeply, so that he felt strangely new. He issued with
delight from the dark of sleep into the sunshine. Reaching out his hand,
he felt for his watch. It was seven o'clock. The dew of a sleep-drenched
night glittered before his eyes. Then he laughed and forgot the night.
The creeper was tapping at the window, as a little wind blew up the
sunshine. Siegmund put out his hands for the unfolding happiness of the
morning. Helena was in the next room, which she kept inviolate. Sparrows
in the creeper were shaking shadows of leaves among the sunshine;
milk-white shallop of cloud stemmed bravely across the bright sky; the
sea would be blossoming with a dewy shimmer of sunshine.
Siegmund rose to look, and it was so. Also the houses, like white, and
red, and black cattle, were wandering down the bay, with a mist of
sunshine between him and them. He leaned with his hands on the
window-ledge looking out of the casement. The breeze ruffled his hair,
blew down the neck of his sleeping-jacket upon his chest. He laughed,
hastily threw on his clothes, and went out.
There was no sign of Helena. He strode along, singing to himself, and
spinning his towel rhythmically. A small path led him across a field and
down a zigzag in front of the cliffs. Some nooks, sheltered from the
wind, were warm with sunshine, scented of honeysuckle and of thyme. He
took a sprig of woodbine that was coloured of cream and butter. The
grass wetted his brown shoes and his flannel trousers. Again, a fresh
breeze put the scent of the sea in his uncovered hair. The cliff was a
tangle of flowers above and below, with poppies at the lip being blown
out like red flame, and scabious leaning inquisitively to look down, and
pink and white rest-harrow everywhere, very pretty.
Siegmund stood at a bend where heath blossomed in shaggy lilac, where
the sunshine but no wind came. He saw the blue bay curl away to the
far-off headland. A few birds, white and small, circled, dipped by the
thin foam-edge of the water; a few ships dimmed the sea with silent
travelling; a few small people, dark or naked-white, moved below the
swinging birds.
He chose his bathing-place where the incoming tide had half covered a
stretch of fair, bright sand that was studded with rocks resembling
square altars, hollowed on top. He threw his clothes on a high rock. It
delighted him to feel the fresh, soft fingers of the wind touching him
and wandering timidly over his nakedness. He ran laughing over the sand
to the sea, where he waded in, thrusting his legs noisily through the
heavy green water.
It was cold, and he shrank. For a moment he found himself thigh-deep,
watching the horizontal stealing of a ship through the intolerable
glitter, afraid to plunge. Laughing, he went under the clear
green water.
He was a poor swimmer. Sometimes a choppy wave swamped him, and he rose
gasping, wringing the water from his eyes and nostrils, while he heaved
and sank with the rocking of the waves that clasped his breast. Then he
stooped again to resume his game with the sea. It is splendid to play,
even at middle age, and the sea is a fine partner.
With his eyes at the shining level of the water, he liked to peer
across, taking a seal's view of the cliffs as they confronted the
morning. He liked to see the ships standing up on a bright floor; he
liked to see the birds come down.
But in his playing he drifted towards the spur of rock, where, as he
swam, he caught his thigh on a sharp, submerged point. He frowned at the
pain, at the sudden cruelty of the sea; then he thought no more of it,
but ruffled his way back to the clear water, busily continuing his play.
When he ran out on to the fair sand his heart, and brain, and body were
in a turmoil. He panted, filling his breast with the air that was
sparkled and tasted of the sea. As he shuddered a little, the wilful
palpitations of his flesh pleased him, as if birds had fluttered against
him. He offered his body to the morning, glowing with the sea's passion.
The wind nestled in to him, the sunshine came on his shoulders like warm
breath. He delighted in himself.
The rock before him was white and wet, like himself; it had a pool of
clear water, with shells and one rose anemone.
'She would make so much of this little pool,' he thought. And as he
smiled, he saw, very faintly, his own shadow in the water. It made him
conscious of himself, seeming to look at him. He glanced at himself, at
his handsome, white maturity. As he looked he felt the insidious
creeping of blood down his thigh, which was marked with a long red
slash. Siegmund watched the blood travel over the bright skin. It wound
itself redly round the rise of his knee.
'That is I, that creeping red, and this whiteness I pride myself on is
I, and my black hair, and my blue eyes are I. It is a weird thing to be
a person. What makes me myself, among all these?'
Feeling chill, he wiped himself quickly.
'I am at my best, at my strongest,' he said proudly to himself. 'She
ought to be rejoiced at me, but she is not; she rejects me as if I were
a baboon under my clothing.'
He glanced at his whole handsome maturity, the firm plating of his
breasts, the full thighs, creatures proud in themselves. Only he was
marred by the long raw scratch, which he regretted deeply.
'If I was giving her myself, I wouldn't want that blemish on me,' he
thought.
He wiped the blood from the wound. It was nothing.
'She thinks ten thousand times more of that little pool, with a bit of
pink anemone and some yellow weed, than of me. But, by Jove! I'd rather
see her shoulders and breast than all heaven and earth put together
could show.... Why doesn't she like me?' he thought as he dressed. It
was his physical self thinking.
After dabbling his feet in a warm pool, he returned home. Helena was in
the dining-room arranging a bowl of purple pansies. She looked up at him
rather heavily as he stood radiant on the threshold. He put her at her
ease. It was a gay, handsome boy she had to meet, not a man, strange and
insistent. She smiled on him with tender dignity.
'You have bathed?' she said, smiling, and looking at his damp, ruffled
black hair. She shrank from his eyes, but he was quite unconscious.
'You have not bathed!' he said; then bent to kiss her. She smelt the
brine in his hair.
'No; I bathe later,' she replied. 'But what--'
Hesitating, she touched the towel, then looked up at him anxiously.
'It _is_ blood?' she said.
'I grazed my thigh--nothing at all,' he replied.
'Are you sure?'
He laughed.
'The towel looks bad enough,' she said.
'It's an alarmist,' he laughed.
She looked in concern at him, then turned aside.
'Breakfast is quite ready,' she said.
'And I for breakfast--but shall I do?'
She glanced at him. He was without a collar, so his throat was bare
above the neck-band of his flannel shirt. Altogether she disapproved of
his slovenly appearance. He was usually so smart in his dress.
'I would not trouble,' she said almost sarcastically.
Whistling, he threw the towel on a chair.
'How did you sleep?' she asked gravely, as she watched him beginning to
eat.
'Like the dead--solid,' he replied'. 'And you?'
'Oh, pretty well, thanks,' she said, rather piqued that he had slept so
deeply, whilst she had tossed, and had called his name in a torture of
sleeplessness.
'I haven't slept like that for years,' he said enthusiastically. Helena
smiled gently on him. The charm of his handsome, healthy zest came over
her. She liked his naked throat and his shirt-breast, which suggested
the breast of the man beneath it. She was extraordinarily happy, with
him so bright. The dark-faced pansies, in a little crowd, seemed gaily
winking a golden eye at her.
After breakfast, while Siegmund dressed, she went down to the sea. She
dwelled, as she passed, on all tiny, pretty things--on the barbaric
yellow ragwort, and pink convolvuli; on all the twinkling of flowers,
and dew, and snail-tracks drying in the sun. Her walk was one long
lingering. More than the spaces, she loved the nooks, and fancy more
than imagination.
She wanted to see just as she pleased, without any of humanity's
previous vision for spectacles. So she knew hardly any flower's name,
nor perceived any of the relationships, nor cared a jot about an
adaptation or a modification. It pleased her that the lowest browny
florets of the clover hung down; she cared no more. She clothed
everything in fancy.
'That yellow flower hadn't time to be brushed and combed by the fairies
before dawn came. It is tousled ...' so she thought to herself. The pink
convolvuli were fairy horns or telephones from the day fairies to the
night fairies. The rippling sunlight on the sea was the Rhine maidens
spreading their bright hair to the sun. That was her favourite form of
thinking. The value of all things was in the fancy they evoked. She did
not care for people; they were vulgar, ugly, and stupid, as a rule.
Her sense of satisfaction was complete as she leaned on the low
sea-wall, spreading her fingers to warm on the stones, concocting magic
out of the simple morning. She watched the indolent chasing of wavelets
round the small rocks, the curling of the deep blue water round the
water-shadowed reefs.
'This is very good,' she said to herself. 'This is eternally cool, and
clean and fresh. It could never be spoiled by satiety.'
She tried to wash herself with the white and blue morning, to clear away
the soiling of the last night's passion.
The sea played by itself, intent on its own game. Its aloofness, its
self-sufficiency, are its great charm. The sea does not give and take,
like the land and the sky. It has no traffic with the world. It spends
its passion upon itself. Helena was something like the sea,
self-sufficient and careless of the rest.
Siegmund came bareheaded, his black hair ruffling to the wind, his eyes
shining warmer than the sea-like cornflowers rather, his limbs swinging
backward and forward like the water. Together they leaned on the wall,
warming the four white hands upon the grey bleached stone as they
watched the water playing.
When Siegmund had Helena near, he lost the ache, the yearning towards
something, which he always 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.
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