The Trespasser by D.H. Lawrence
D >>
D.H. Lawrence >> The Trespasser
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16
Siegmund lay and clasped the sand, and tossed it in handfuls till over
him he was all hot and cloyed. Then he rose and looked at himself and
laughed. The water was swaying reproachfully against the steep pebbles
below, murmuring like a child that it was not fair--it was not fair he
should abandon his playmate. Siegmund laughed, and began to rub himself
free of the clogging sand. He found himself strangely dry and smooth. He
tossed more dry sand, and more, over himself, busy and intent like a
child playing some absorbing game with itself. Soon his body was dry and
warm and smooth as a camomile flower. He was, however, greyed and
smeared with sand-dust. Siegmund looked at himself with disapproval,
though his body was full of delight and his hands glad with the touch of
himself. He wanted himself clean. He felt the sand thick in his hair,
even in his moustache. He went painfully over the pebbles till he found
himself on the smooth rock bottom. Then he soused himself, and shook his
head in the water, and washed and splashed and rubbed himself with his
hands assiduously. He must feel perfectly clean and free--fresh, as if
he had washed away all the years of soilure in this morning's sea and
sun and sand. It was the purification. Siegmund became again a happy
priest of the sun. He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out
of him, as he might soak clean a soiled garment in the sea, and bleach
it white on the sunny shore. So white and sweet and tissue-clean he
felt--full of lightness and grace.
The garden in front of their house, where Helena was waiting for him,
was long and crooked, with a sunken flagstone pavement running up to the
door by the side of the lawn. On either hand the high fence of the
garden was heavy with wild clematis and honeysuckle. Helena sat
sideways, with a map spread out on her bench under the bushy little
laburnum tree, tracing the course of their wanderings. It was very
still. There was just a murmur of bees going in and out the brilliant
little porches of nasturtium flowers. The nasturtium leaf-coins stood
cool and grey; in their delicate shade, underneath in the green
twilight, a few flowers shone their submerged gold and scarlet. There
was a faint scent of mignonette. Helena, like a white butterfly in the
shade, her two white arms for antennae stretching firmly to the bench,
leaned over her map. She was busy, very busy, out of sheer happiness.
She traced word after word, and evoked scene after scene. As she
discovered a name, she conjured up the place. As she moved to the next
mark she imagined the long path lifting and falling happily.
She was waiting for Siegmund, yet his hand upon the latch startled her.
She rose suddenly, in agitation. Siegmund was standing in the sunshine
at the gate. They greeted each other across the tall roses.
When Siegmund was holding her hand, he said, softly laughing:
'You have come out of the water very beautiful this morning.'
She laughed. She was not beautiful, but she felt so at that moment. She
glanced up at him, full of love and gratefulness.
'And you,' she murmured, in a still tone, as if it were almost
sacrilegiously unnecessary to say it.
Siegmund was glad. He rejoiced to be told he was beautiful. After a few
moments of listening to the bees and breathing the mignonette, he said:
'I found a little white bay, just like you--a virgin bay. I had to swim
there.'
'Oh!' she said, very interested in him, not in the fact.
'It seemed just like you. Many things seem like you,' he said.
She laughed again in her joyous fashion, and the reed-like vibration
came into her voice.
'I saw the sun through the cliffs, and the sea, and you,' she said.
He did not understand. He looked at her searchingly. She was white and
still and inscrutable. Then she looked up at him; her earnest eyes, that
would not flinch, gazed straight into him. He trembled, and things all
swept into a blur. After she had taken away her eyes he found
himself saying:
'You know, I felt as if I were the first man to discover things: like
Adam when he opened the first eyes in the world.'
'I saw the sunshine in you,' repeated Helena quietly, looking at him
with her eyes heavy with meaning.
He laughed again, not understanding, but feeling she meant love.
'No, but you have altered everything,' he said.
The note of wonder, of joy, in his voice touched her almost beyond
self-control. She caught his hand and pressed it; then quickly kissed
it. He became suddenly grave.
'I feel as if it were right--you and me, Helena--so, even righteous. It
is so, isn't it? And the sea and everything, they all seem with us. Do
you think so?'
Looking at her, he found her eyes full of tears. He bent and kissed her,
and she pressed his head to her bosom. He was very glad.
_Chapter 9_
The day waxed hot. A few little silver tortoises of cloud had crawled
across the desert of sky, and hidden themselves. The chalk roads were
white, quivering with heat. Helena and Siegmund walked eastward
bareheaded under the sunshine. They felt like two insects in the niche
of a hot hearth as they toiled along the deep road. A few poppies here
and there among the wild rye floated scarlet in sunshine like
blood-drops on green water. Helena recalled Francis Thompson's poems,
which Siegmund had never read. She repeated what she knew, and laughed,
thinking what an ineffectual pale shadow of a person Thompson must have
been. She looked at Siegmund, walking in large easiness beside her.
'Artists are supremely unfortunate persons,' she announced.
'Think of Wagner,' said Siegmund, lifting his face to the hot bright
heaven, and drinking the heat with his blinded face. All states seemed
meagre, save his own. He recalled people who had loved, and he pitied
them--dimly, drowsily, without pain.
They came to a place where they might gain access to the shore by a path
down a landslip. As they descended through the rockery, yellow with
ragwort, they felt themselves dip into the inert, hot air of the bay.
The living atmosphere of the uplands was left overhead. Among the rocks
of the sand, white as if smelted, the heat glowed and quivered. Helena
sat down and took off her shoes. She walked on the hot, glistening sand
till her feet were delightfully, almost intoxicatingly scorched. Then
she ran into the water to cool them. Siegmund and she paddled in the
light water, pensively watching the haste of the ripples, like crystal
beetles, running over the white outline of their feet; looking out on
the sea that rose so near to them, dwarfing them by its far reach.
For a short time they flitted silently in the water's edge. Then there
settled down on them a twilight of sleep, the little hush that closes
the doors and draws the blinds of the house after a festival. They
wandered out across the beach above high-water mark, where they sat down
together on the sand, leaning back against a flat brown stone, Siegmund
with the sunshine on his forehead, Helena drooping close to him, in his
shadow. Then the hours ride by unnoticed, making no sound as they go.
The sea creeps nearer, nearer, like a snake which watches two birds
asleep. It may not disturb them, but sinks back, ceasing to look at them
with its bright eyes.
Meanwhile the flowers of their passion were softly shed, as poppies fall
at noon, and the seed of beauty ripened rapidly within them. Dreams came
like a wind through, their souls, drifting off with the seed-dust of
beautiful experience which they had ripened, to fertilize the souls of
others withal. In them the sea and the sky and ships had mingled and
bred new blossoms of the torrid heat of their love. And the seed of such
blossoms was shaken as they slept, into the hand of God, who held it in
His palm preciously; then scattered it again, to produce new splendid
blooms of beauty.
A little breeze came down the cliffs. Sleep lightened the lovers of
their experience; new buds were urged in their souls as they lay in a
shadowed twilight, at the porch of death. The breeze fanned the face of
Helena; a coolness wafted on her throat. As the afternoon wore on she
revived. Quick to flag, she was easy to revive, like a white pansy flung
into water. She shivered lightly and rose.
Strange, it seemed to her, to rise from the brown stone into life again.
She felt beautifully refreshed. All around was quick as a garden wet in
the early morning of June. She took her hair and loosened it, shook it
free from sand, spread, and laughed like a fringed poppy that opens
itself to the sun. She let the wind comb through its soft fingers the
tangles of her hair. Helena loved the wind. She turned to it, and took
its kisses on her face and throat.
Siegmund lay still, looking up at her. The changes in him were deeper,
like alteration in his tissue. His new buds came slowly, and were of a
fresh type. He lay smiling at her. At last he said:
'You look now as if you belonged to the sea.'
'I do; and some day I shall go back to it,' she replied.
For to her at that moment the sea was a great lover, like Siegmund, but
more impersonal, who would receive her when Siegmund could not. She
rejoiced momentarily in the fact. Siegmund looked at her and continued
smiling. His happiness was budded firm and secure.
'Come!' said Helena, holding out her hand.
He rose somewhat reluctantly from his large, fruitful inertia.
_Chapter 10_
Siegmund carried the boots and the shoes while they wandered over the
sand to the rocks. There was a delightful sense of risk in scrambling
with bare feet over the smooth irregular jumble of rocks. Helena laughed
suddenly from fear as she felt herself slipping. Siegmund's heart was
leaping like a child's with excitement as he stretched forward, himself
very insecure, to succour her. Thus they travelled slowly. Often she
called to him to come and look in the lovely little rock-pools, dusky
with blossoms of red anemones and brown anemones that seemed nothing but
shadows, and curtained with green of finest sea-silk. Siegmund loved to
poke the white pebbles, and startle the little ghosts of crabs in a
shadowy scuttle through the weed. He would tease the expectant anemones,
causing them to close suddenly over his finger. But Helena liked to
watch without touching things. Meanwhile the sun was slanting behind the
cross far away to the west, and the light was swimming in silver and
gold upon the lacquered water. At last Siegmund looked doubtfully at two
miles more of glistening, gilded boulders. Helena was seated on a stone,
dabbling her feet in a warm pool, delicately feeling the wet sea-velvet
of the weeds.
'Don't you think we had better be mounting the cliffs?' he said.
She glanced up at him, smiling with irresponsible eyes. Then she lapped
the water with her feet, and surveyed her pink toes. She was absurdly,
childishly happy.
'Why should we?' she asked lightly.
He watched her. Her child-like indifference to consequences touched him
with a sense of the distance between them. He himself might play with
the delicious warm surface of life, but always he reeked of the
relentless mass of cold beneath--the mass of life which has no sympathy
with the individual, no cognizance of him.
She loved the trifles and the toys, the mystery and the magic of things.
She would not own life to be relentless. It was either beautiful,
fantastic, or weird, or inscrutable, or else mean and vulgar, below
consideration. He had to get a sense of the anemone and a sympathetic
knowledge of its experience, into his blood, before he was satisfied. To
Helena an anemone was one more fantastic pretty figure in her
kaleidoscope.
So she sat dabbling her pink feet in the water, quite unconscious of his
gravity. He waited on her, since he never could capture her.
'Come,' he said very gently. 'You are only six years old today.'
She laughed as she let him take her. Then she nestled up to him, smiling
in a brilliant, child-like fashion. He kissed her with all the father in
him sadly alive.
'Now put your stockings on,' he said.
'But my feet are wet.' She laughed.
He kneeled down and dried her feet on his handkerchief while she sat
tossing his hair with her finger-tips. The sunlight grew more and
more golden.
'I envy the savages their free feet,' she said.
'There is no broken glass in the wilderness--or there used not to be,'
he replied.
As they were crossing the sands, a whole family entered by the cliff
track. They descended in single file, unequally, like the theatre; two
boys, then a little girl, the father, another girl, then the mother.
Last of all trotted the dog, warily, suspicious of the descent. The boys
emerged into the bay with a shout; the dog rushed, barking, after them.
The little one waited for her father, calling shrilly:
'Tiss can't fall now, can she, dadda? Shall I put her down?'
'Ay, let her have a run,' said the father.
Very carefully she lowered the kitten which she had carried clasped to
her bosom. The mite was bewildered and scared. It turned round
pathetically.
'Go on, Tissie; you're all right,' said the child. 'Go on; have a run on
the sand.'
The kitten stood dubious and unhappy. Then, perceiving the dog some
distance ahead, it scampered after him, a fluffy, scurrying mite. But
the dog had already raced into the water. The kitten walked a few steps,
turning its small face this way and that, and mewing piteously. It
looked extraordinarily tiny as it stood, a fluffy handful, staring away
from the noisy water, its thin cry floating over the plash of waves.
Helena glanced at Siegmund, and her eyes were shining with pity. He was
watching the kitten and smiling.
'Crying because things are too big, and it can't take them in,' he said.
'But look how frightened it is,' she said.
'So am I.' He laughed. 'And if there are any gods looking on and
laughing at me, at least they won't be kind enough to put me in their
pinafores....'
She laughed very quickly.
'But why?' she exclaimed. 'Why should you want putting in a pinafore?'
'I don't,' he laughed.
On the top of the cliff they were between two bays, with darkening blue
water on the left, and on the right gold water smoothing to the sun.
Siegmund seemed to stand waist-deep in shadow, with his face bright and
glowing. He was watching earnestly.
'I want to absorb it all,' he said.
When at last they turned away:
'Yes,' said Helena slowly; 'one can recall the details, but never the
atmosphere.'
He pondered a moment.
'How strange!' he said. I can recall the atmosphere, but not the detail.
It is a moment to me, not a piece of scenery. I should say the picture
was in me, not out there.'
Without troubling to understand--she was inclined to think it
verbiage--she made a small sound of assent.
'That is why you want to go again to a place, and I don't care so much,
because I have it with me,' he concluded.
_Chapter 11_
They decided to find their way through the lanes to Alum Bay, and then,
keeping the cross in sight, to return over the downs, with the moon-path
broad on the water before them. For the moon was rising late. Twilight,
however, rose more rapidly than they had anticipated. The lane twisted
among meadows and wild lands and copses--a wilful little lane, quite
incomprehensible. So they lost their distant landmark, the white cross.
Darkness filtered through the daylight. When at last they came to a
signpost, it was almost too dark to read it. The fingers seemed to
withdraw into the dusk the more they looked.
'We must go to the left,' said Helena.
To the left rose the downs, smooth and grey near at hand, but higher
black with gorse, like a giant lying asleep with a bearskin over his
shoulders.
Several pale chalk-tracks ran side by side through the turf. Climbing,
they came to a disused chalk-pit, which they circumvented. Having passed
a lonely farmhouse, they mounted the side of the open down, where was a
sense of space and freedom.
'We can steer by the night,' said Siegmund, as they trod upwards
pathlessly. Helena did not mind whither they steered. All places in that
large fair night were home and welcome to her. They drew nearer to the
shaggy cloak of furze.
'There will be a path through it,' said Siegmund.
But when they arrived there was no path. They were confronted by a tall,
impenetrable growth of gorse, taller than Siegmund.
'Stay here,' said he, 'while I look for a way through. I am afraid you
will be tired.'
She stood alone by the walls of gorse. The lights that had flickered
into being during the dusk grew stronger, so that a little farmhouse
down the hill glowed with great importance on the night, while the
far-off in visible sea became like a roadway, large and mysterious, its
specks of light moving slowly, and its bigger lamps stationed out amid
the darkness. Helena wanted the day-wanness to be quite wiped off the
west. She asked for the full black night, that would obliterate
everything save Siegmund. Siegmund it was that the whole world meant.
The darkness, the gorse, the downs, the specks of light, seemed only to
bespeak him. She waited for him to come back. She could hardly endure
the condition of intense waiting.
He came, in his grey clothes almost invisible. But she felt him coming.
'No good,' he said, 'no vestige of a path. Not a rabbit-run.'
'Then we will sit down awhile,' said she calmly.
'"Here on this mole-hill,"' he quoted mockingly.
They sat down in a small gap in the gorse, where the turf was very soft,
and where the darkness seemed deeper. The night was all fragrance, cool
odour of darkness, keen, savoury scent of the downs, touched with
honeysuckle and gorse and bracken scent.
Helena turned to him, leaning her hand on his thigh.
'What day is it, Siegmund?' she asked, in a joyous, wondering tone. He
laughed, understanding, and kissed her.
'But really,' she insisted, 'I would not have believed the labels could
have fallen off everything like this.'
He laughed again. She still leaned towards him, her weight on her hand,
stopping the flow in the artery down his thigh.
'The days used to walk in procession like seven marionettes, each in
order and costume, going endlessly round.' She laughed, amused at
the idea.
'It is very strange,' she continued, 'to have the days and nights
smeared into one piece, as if the clock-hand only went round once in a
lifetime.'
'That is how it is,' he admitted, touched by her eloquence. 'You have
torn the labels off things, and they all are so different. This morning!
It does seem absurd to talk about this morning. Why should I be
parcelled up into mornings and evenings and nights? _I_ am not made up
of sections of time. Now, nights and days go racing over us like
cloud-shadows and sunshine over the sea, and all the time we take
no notice.'
She put her arms round his neck. He was reminded by a sudden pain in his
leg how much her hand had been pressing on him. He held his breath from
pain. She was kissing him softly over the eyes. They lay cheek to cheek,
looking at the stars. He felt a peculiar tingling sense of joy, a
keenness of perception, a fine, delicate tingling as of music.
'You know,' he said, repeating himself, 'it is true. You seem to have
knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate; they are all
in a symphony. They go moving on and on. You are the motive in
everything.'
Helena lay beside him, half upon him, sad with bliss.
'You must write a symphony of this--of us,' she said, prompted by a
disciple's vanity.
'Some time,' he answered. 'Later, when I have time.'
'Later,' she murmured--'later than what?'
'I don't know,' he replied. 'This is so bright we can't see beyond.' He
turned his face to hers and through the darkness smiled into her eyes
that were so close to his. Then he kissed her long and lovingly. He lay,
with her head on his shoulder looking through her hair at the stars.
'I wonder how it is you have such a fine natural perfume,' he said,
always in the same abstract, inquiring tone of happiness.
'Haven't all women?' she replied, and the peculiar penetrating twang of
a brass reed was again in her voice.
'I don't know,' he said, quite untouched. 'But you are scented like
nuts, new kernels of hazel-nuts, and a touch of opium....' He remained
abstractedly breathing her with his open mouth, quite absorbed in her.
'You are so strange,' she murmured tenderly, hardly able to control her
voice to speak.
'I believe,' he said slowly, 'I can see the stars moving through your
hair. No, keep still, _you_ can't see them.' Helena lay obediently very
still. 'I thought I could watch them travelling, crawling like gold
flies on the ceiling,' he continued in a slow sing-song. 'But now you
make your hair tremble, and the stars rush about.' Then, as a new
thought struck him: 'Have you noticed that you can't recognize the
constellations lying back like this. I can't see one. Where is the
north, even?'
She laughed at the idea of his questioning her concerning these things.
She refused to learn the names of the stars or of the constellations, as
of the wayside plants. 'Why should I want to label them?' she would say.
'I prefer to look at them, not to hide them under a name.' So she
laughed when he asked her to find Vega or Arcturus.
'How full the sky is!' Siegmund dreamed on--'like a crowded street. Down
here it is vastly lonely in comparison. We've found a place far quieter
and more private than the stars, Helena. Isn't it fine to be up here,
with the sky for nearest neighbour?'
'I did well to ask you to come?' she inquired wistfully. He turned to
her.
'As wise as God for the minute,' he replied softly. 'I think a few
furtive angels brought us here--smuggled us in.'
'And you are glad?' she asked. He laughed.
'_Carpe diem_,' he said. 'We have plucked a beauty, my dear. With this
rose in my coat I dare go to hell or anywhere.'
'Why hell, Siegmund?' she asked in displeasure.
'I suppose it is the _postero_. In everything else I'm a failure,
Helena. But,' he laughed, 'this day of ours is a rose not many men
have plucked.'
She kissed him passionately, beginning to cry in a quick, noiseless
fashion.
'What does it matter, Helena?' he murmured. 'What does it matter? We are
here yet.'
The quiet tone of Siegmund moved her with a vivid passion of grief. She
felt she should lose him. Clasping him very closely, she burst into
uncontrollable sobbing. He did not understand, but he did not interrupt
her. He merely held her very close, while he looked through her shaking
hair at the motionless stars. He bent his head to hers, he sought her
face with his lips, heavy with pity. She grew a little quieter. He felt
his cheek all wet with her tears, and, between his cheek and hers, the
ravelled roughness of her wet hair that chafed and made his face burn.
'What is it, Helena?' he asked at last. 'Why should you cry?'
She pressed her face in his breast, and said in a muffled,
unrecognizable voice:
'You won't leave me, will you, Siegmund?'
'How could I? How should I?' he murmured soothingly. She lifted her face
suddenly and pressed on him a fierce kiss.
'How could I leave you?' he repeated, and she heard his voice waking,
the grip coming into his arms, and she was glad.
An intense silence came over everything. Helena almost expected to hear
the stars moving, everything below was so still. She had no idea what
Siegmund was thinking. He lay with his arms strong around her. Then she
heard the beating of his heart, like the muffled sound of salutes, she
thought. It gave her the same thrill of dread and excitement, mingled
with a sense of triumph. Siegmund had changed again, his mood was gone,
so that he was no longer wandering in a night of thoughts, but had
become different, incomprehensible to her. She had no idea what she
thought or felt. All she knew was that he was strong, and was knocking
urgently with his heart on her breast, like a man who wanted something
and who dreaded to be sent away. How he came to be so concentratedly
urgent she could not understand. It seemed an unreasonable an
incomprehensible obsession to her. Yet she was glad, and she smiled in
her heart, feeling triumphant and restored. Yet again, dimly, she
wondered where was the Siegmund of ten minutes ago, and her heart lifted
slightly with yearning, to sink with a dismay. This Siegmund was so
incomprehensible. Then again, when he raised his head and found her
mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming
flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a
soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she
decided, was supreme, transcendental.
The lights of the little farmhouse below had vanished, the yellow specks
of ships were gone. Only the pier-light, far away, shone in the black
sea like the broken piece of a star. Overhead was a silver-greyness of
stars; below was the velvet blackness of the night and the sea. Helena
found herself glimmering with fragments of poetry, as she saw the sea,
when she looked very closely, glimmered dustily with a reflection
of stars.
_Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser
Ohne Regung ruht das Meer ..._
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16