The Trespasser by D.H. Lawrence
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D.H. Lawrence >> The Trespasser
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She was fond of what scraps of German verse she knew. With French verse
she had no sympathy; but Goethe and Heine and Uhland seemed to speak
her language.
_Die Luft ist kuehl, und es dunkelt,
Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein._
She liked Heine best of all:
_Wie Traeume der Kindheit seh' ich es flimmern
Auf deinem wogenden Wellengebiet,
Und alte Erinnerung erzaehlt mir auf's Neue
Von all dem lieben herrlichen Spielzeug,
Von all den blinkenden Weihnachtsgaben...._
As she lay in Siegmund's arms again, and he was very still, dreaming she
knew not what, fragments such as these flickered and were gone, like the
gleam of a falling star over water. The night moved on imperceptibly
across the sky. Unlike the day, it made no sound and gave no sign, but
passed unseen, unfelt, over them. Till the moon was ready to step forth.
Then the eastern sky blenched, and there was a small gathering of clouds
round the opening gates:
_Aus alten Maerchen winket es
Hervor mit weisser Hand,
Da singt es und da klingt es
Von einem Zauberland._
Helena sang this to herself as the moon lifted herself slowly among the
clouds. She found herself repeating them aloud in in a forgetful
singsong, as children do.
'What is it?' said Siegmund. They were both of them sunk in their own
stillness, therefore it was a moment or two before she repeated her
singsong, in a little louder tone. He did not listen to her, having
forgotten that he had asked her a question.
'Turn your head,' she told him, when she had finished the verse, 'and
look at the moon.'
He pressed back his head, so that there was a gleaming pallor on his
chin and his forehead and deep black shadow over his eyes and his
nostrils. This thrilled Helena with a sense of mystery and magic.
'"_Die grossen Blumen schmachten_,"' she said to herself, curiously
awake and joyous. 'The big flowers open with black petals and silvery
ones, Siegmund. You are the big flowers, Siegmund; yours is the
bridegroom face, Siegmund, like a black and glistening flesh-petalled
flower, Siegmund, and it blooms in the _Zauberland_, Siegmund--this is
the magic land.'
Between the phrases of this whispered ecstasy she kissed him swiftly on
the throat, in the shadow, and on his faintly gleaming cheeks. He lay
still, his heart beating heavily; he was almost afraid of the strange
ecstasy she concentrated on him. Meanwhile she whispered over him sharp,
breathless phrases in German and English, touching him with her mouth
and her cheeks and her forehead.
'"_Und Liebesweisen toenen_"-not tonight, Siegmund. They are all
still-gorse and the stars and the sea and the trees, are all kissing,
Siegmund. The sea has its mouth on the earth, and the gorse and the
trees press together, and they all look up at the moon, they put up
their faces in a kiss, my darling. But they haven't you-and it all
centres in you, my dear, all the wonder-love is in you, more than in
them all Siegmund--Siegmund!'
He felt the tears falling on him as he lay with heart beating in slow
heavy drops under the ecstasy of her love. Then she sank down and lay
prone on him, spent, clinging to him, lifted up and down by the
beautiful strong motion of his breathing. Rocked thus on his strength,
she swooned lightly into unconsciousness.
When she came to herself she sighed deeply. She woke to the exquisite
heaving of his life beneath her.
'I have been beyond life. I have been a little way into death!' she said
to her soul, with wide-eyed delight. She lay dazed, wondering upon it.
That she should come back into a marvellous, peaceful happiness
astonished her.
Suddenly she became aware that she must be slowly weighing down the life
of Siegmund. There was a long space between the lift of one breath and
the next. Her heart melted with sorrowful pity. Resting herself on her
hands, she kissed him--a long, anguished kiss, as if she would fuse her
soul into his for ever. Then she rose, sighing, sighing again deeply.
She put up her hands to her head and looked at the moon. 'No more,' said
her heart, almost as if it sighed too-'no more!'
She looked down at Siegmund. He was drawing in great heavy breaths. He
lay still on his back, gazing up at her, and she stood motionless at his
side, looking down at him. He felt stunned, half-conscious. Yet as he
lay helplessly looking up at her some other consciousness inside him
murmured; 'Hawwa--Eve--Mother!' She stood compassionate over him.
Without touching him she seemed to be yearning over him like a mother.
Her compassion, her benignity, seemed so different from his little
Helena. This woman, tall and pale, drooping with the strength of her
compassion, seemed stable, immortal, not a fragile human being, but a
personification of the great motherhood of women.
'I am her child, too,' he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in
sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when
he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and
gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture.
'Come,' she said gently, when she knew he was restored. 'Shall we go?'
He rose, with difficulty gathering his strength.
_Chapter 12_
Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The
hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into
shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some
distance, very great, it seemed.
'I can't get hold of them,' he said distractedly to himself. He felt
detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things; as
if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and unsupported,
somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous space. He wanted to lie down
again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of supporting and
controlling his body. If he could lie down again perfectly still he need
not struggle to animate the cumbersome matter of his body, and then he
would not feel thus sick and outside himself.
But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the
moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly,
joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support.
Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked
with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious.
This pity for her drew him nearer to life.
He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the
hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in
his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not notice
it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally.
'What is it?' he asked himself in wonder.
His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke verbally
to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost
insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought
from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir
of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him.
They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so
uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he
stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot
securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became
conscious of it.
'Good Lord!' he said to himself. 'I wonder what it is.'
He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his
body--his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing
wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself
into another detached phrase. 'There is nothing the matter with me,'
he said.
Then he continued vaguely wondering, recalling the sensation of wretched
sickness which sometimes follows drunkenness, thinking of the times when
he had fallen ill.
'But I am not like that,' he said, 'because I don't feel tremulous. I am
sure my hand is steady.'
Helena stood still to consider the road. He held out his hand before
him. It was motionless as a dead flower on this silent night.
'Yes, I think this is the right way,' said Helena, and they set off
again, as if gaily.
'It certainly feels rather deathly,' said Siegmund to himself. He
remembered distinctly, when he was a child and had diphtheria, he had
stretched himself in the horrible sickness, which he felt was--and here
he chose the French word--'_l'agonie_'. But his mother had seen and had
cried aloud, which suddenly caused him to struggle with all his soul to
spare her her suffering.
'Certainly it is like that,' he said. 'Certainly it is rather deathly. I
wonder how it is.'
Then he reviewed the last hour.
'I believe we are lost!' Helena interrupted him.
'Lost! What matter!' he answered indifferently, and Helena pressed him
tighter, hearer to her in a kind of triumph. 'But did we not come this
way?' he added.
'No. See'--her voice was reeded with restrained emotion--'we have
certainly not been along this bare path which dips up and down.'
'Well, then, we must merely keep due eastward, towards the moon pretty
well, as much as we can,' said Siegmund, looking forward over the down,
where the moon was wrestling heroically to win free of the pack of
clouds which hung on her like wolves on a white deer. As he looked at
the moon he felt a sense of companionship. Helena, not understanding,
left him so much alone; the moon was nearer.
Siegmund continued to review the last hours. He had been so wondrously
happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately
beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had
been wandering in another--a glamorous, primordial world.
'I suppose,' he said to himself, 'I have lived too intensely, I seem to
have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now
they've gone my house is weak.'
So he struggled to diagnose his case of splendour and sickness. He
reviewed his hour of passion with Helena.
'Surely,' he told himself, 'I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt
my cup. My soul seems to leak out--I am half here, half gone away.
That's why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.'
Then he came to the hour of Helena's strange ecstasy over him. That,
somehow, had filled him with passionate grief. It was happiness
concentrated one drop too keen, so that what should have been vivid wine
was like a pure poison scathing him. But his consciousness, which had
been unnaturally active, now was dulling. He felt the blood flowing
vigorously along the limbs again, and stilling has brain, sweeping away
his sickness, soothing him.
'I suppose,' he said to himself for the last time, 'I suppose living too
intensely kills you, more or less.'
Then Siegmund forgot. He opened his eyes and saw the night about him.
The moon had escaped from the cloud-pack, and was radiant behind a fine
veil which glistened to her rays, and which was broidered with a
lustrous halo, very large indeed, the largest halo Siegmund had ever
seen. When the little lane turned full towards the moon, it seemed as if
Siegmund and Helena would walk through a large Moorish arch of
horse-shoe shape, the enormous white halo opening in front of them. They
walked on, keeping their faces to the moon, smiling with wonder and a
little rapture, until once mote the little lane curved wilfully, and
they were walking north. Helena observed three cottages crouching under
the hill and under trees to cover themselves from the magic of the
moonlight.
'We certainly did not come this way before,' she said triumphantly. The
idea of being lost delighted her.
Siegmund looked round at the grey hills smeared over with a low, dim
glisten of moon-mist. He could not yet fully realize that he was walking
along a lane in the Isle of Wight. His surroundings seemed to belong to
some state beyond ordinary experience--some place in romance, perhaps,
or among the hills where Bruenhild lay sleeping in her large bright halo
of fire. How could it be that he and Helena were two children of London
wandering to find their lodging in Freshwater? He sighed, and looked
again over the hills where the moonlight was condensing in mist
ethereal, frail, and yet substantial, reminding him of the way the manna
must have condensed out of the white moonlit mists of Arabian deserts.
'We may be on the road to Newport,' said Helena presently, 'and the
distance is ten miles.'
She laughed, not caring in the least whither they wandered, exulting in
this wonderful excursion! She and Siegmund alone in a glistening
wilderness of night at the back of habited days and nights! Siegmund
looked at her. He by no means shared her exultation, though he
sympathized with it. He walked on alone in his deep seriousness, of
which she was not aware. Yet when he noticed her abandon, he drew her
nearer, and his heart softened with protecting tenderness towards her,
and grew heavy with responsibility.
The fields breathed off a scent as if they were come to life with the
night, and were talking with fragrant eagerness. The farms huddled
together in sleep, and pulled the dark shadow over them to hide from the
supernatural white night; the cottages were locked and darkened. Helena
walked on in triumph through this wondrous hinterland of night, actively
searching for the spirits, watching the cottages they approached,
listening, looking for the dreams of those sleeping inside, in the
darkened rooms. She imagined she could see the frail dream-faces at the
windows; she fancied they stole out timidly into the gardens, and went
running away among the rabbits on the gleamy hill-side. Helena laughed
to herself, pleased with her fancy of wayward little dreams playing with
weak hands and feet among the large, solemn-sleeping cattle. This was
the first time, she told herself, that she had ever been out among the
grey-frocked dreams and white-armed fairies. She imagined herself lying
asleep in her room, while her own dreams slid out down the moonbeams.
She imagined Siegmund sleeping in his room, while his dreams, dark-eyed,
their blue eyes very dark and yearning at night-time, came wandering
over the grey grass seeking her dreams.
So she wove her fancies as she walked, until for very weariness she was
fain to remember that it was a long way--a long way. Siegmund's arm was
about her to support her; she rested herself upon it. They crossed a
stile and recognized, on the right of the path, the graveyard of the
Catholic chapel. The moon, which the days were paring smaller with
envious keen knife, shone upon the white stones in the burial-ground.
The carved Christ upon His cross hung against a silver-grey sky. Helena
looked up wearily, bowing to the tragedy. Siegmund also looked, and
bowed his head.
'Thirty years of earnest love; three years' life like a passionate
ecstasy-and it was finished. He was very great and very wonderful. I am
very insignificant, and shall go out ignobly. But we are the same; love,
the brief ecstasy, and the end. But mine is one rose, and His all the
white beauty in the world.'
Siegmund felt his heart very heavy, sad, and at fault, in presence of
the Christ. Yet he derived comfort from the knowledge that life was
treating him in the same manner as it had treated the Master, though his
compared small and despicable with the Christ-tragedy. Siegmund stepped
softly into the shadow of the pine copse.
'Let me get under cover,' he thought. 'Let me hide in it; it is good,
the sudden intense darkness. I am small and futile: my small,
futile tragedy!'
Helena shrank in the darkness. It was almost terrible to her, and the
silence was like a deep pit. She shrank to Siegmund. He drew her closer,
leaning over her as they walked, trying to assure her. His heart was
heavy, and heavy with a tenderness approaching grief, for his small,
brave Helena.
'Are you sure this is the right way?' he whispered to her.
'Quite, quite sure,' she whispered confidently in reply. And presently
they came out into the hazy moonlight, and began stumbling down the
steep hill. They were both very tired, both found it difficult to go
with ease or surety this sudden way down. Soon they were creeping
cautiously across the pasture and the poultry farm. Helena's heart was
beating, as she imagined what a merry noise there would be should they
wake all the fowls. She dreaded any commotion, any questioning, this
night, so she stole carefully along till they issued on the high-road
not far from home.
_Chapter 13_
In the morning, after bathing, Siegmund leaned upon the seawall in a
kind of reverie. It was late, towards nine o'clock, yet he lounged,
dreamily looking out on the turquoise blue water, and the white haze of
morning, and the small, fair shadows of ships slowly realizing before
him. In the bay were two battleships, uncouth monsters, lying as naive
and curious as sea-lions strayed afar.
Siegmund was gazing oversea in a half-stupid way, when he heard a voice
beside him say:
'Where have they come from; do you know, sir?'
He turned, saw a fair, slender man of some thirty-five years standing
beside him and smiling faintly at the battleships.
'The men-of-war? There are a good many at Spithead,' said Siegmund.
The other glanced negligently into his face.
'They look rather incongruous, don't you think? We left the sea empty
and shining, and when we come again, behold, these objects keeping their
eye on us!'
Siegmund laughed.
'You are not an Anarchist, I hope?' he said jestingly.
'A Nihilist, perhaps,' laughed the other. 'But I am quite fond of the
Czar, if pity is akin to love. No; but you can't turn round without
finding some policeman or other at your elbow--look at them, abominable
ironmongery!--ready to put his hand on your shoulder.'
The speaker's grey-blue eyes, always laughing with mockery, glanced from
the battleships and lit on the dark blue eyes of Siegmund. The latter
felt his heart lift in a convulsive movement. This stranger ran so
quickly to a perturbing intimacy.
'I suppose we are in the hands of--God,' something moved Siegmund to
say. The stranger contracted his eyes slightly as he gazed deep at
the speaker.
'Ah!' he drawled curiously. Then his eyes wandered over the wet hair,
the white brow, and the bare throat of Siegmund, after which they
returned again to the eyes of his interlocutor. 'Does the Czar sail this
way?' he asked at last.
'I do not know,' replied Siegmund, who, troubled by the other's
penetrating gaze, had not expected so trivial a question.
'I suppose the newspaper will tell us?' said the man.
Sure to,' said Siegmund.
'You haven't seen it this morning?'
'Not since Saturday.'
The swift blue eyes of the man dilated. He looked curiously at Siegmund.
'You are not alone on your holiday?'
'No.' Siegmund did not like this--he gazed over the sea in displeasure.
'I live here--at least for the present--name, Hampson--'
'Why, weren't you one of the first violins at the Savoy fifteen years
back?' asked Siegmund.
They chatted awhile about music. They had known each other, had been
fairly intimate, and had since become strangers. Hampson excused himself
for having addressed Siegmund:
'I saw you with your nose flattened against the window,' he said, 'and
as I had mine in the same position too, I thought we were fit to be
re-acquainted.'
Siegmund looked at the man in astonishment.
'I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It's a pity to try
and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don't you think?'
'Stare beyond it, you mean?' asked Siegmund.
'Exactly!' replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. 'I call a
day like this "the blue room". It's the least draughty apartment in all
the confoundedly draughty House of Life.'
Siegmund looked at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express
something in his own soul.
'I mean,' the man explained, 'that after all, the great mass of life
that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the
blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can't
stop it, once we've begun to leak.'
'What do you mean by "leak"?' asked Siegmund.
'Goodness knows--I talk through my hat. But once you've got a bit tired
of the house, you glue your nose to the windowpane, and stare for the
dark--as you were doing.'
'But, to use your metaphor, I'm not tired of the House--if you mean
Life,' said Siegmund.
'Praise God! I've met a poet who's not afraid of having his pocket
picked--or his soul, or his brain!' said the stranger, throwing his head
back in a brilliant smile, his eyes dilated.
'I don't know what you mean, sir,' said Siegmund, very quietly, with a
strong fear and a fascination opposing each other in his heart.
'You're not tired of the House, but of your own particular room-say,
suite of rooms--'
'Tomorrow I am turned out of this "blue room",' said Siegmund with a wry
smile. The other looked at him seriously.
'Dear Lord!' exclaimed Hampson; then: 'Do you remember Flaubert's saint,
who laid naked against a leper? I could _not_ do it.'
'Nor I,' shuddered Siegmund.
'But you've got to-or something near it!'
Siegmund looked at the other with frightened, horrified eyes.
'What of yourself?' he said, resentfully.
'I've funked-ran away from my leper, and now am eating my heart out, and
staring from the window at the dark.'
'But can't you _do_ something?' said Siegmund.
The other man laughed with amusement, throwing his head back and showing
his teeth.
'I won't ask you what _your_ intentions are,' he said, with delicate
irony in his tone. 'You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five
hundred a year by hard work; but it's no good. If you have acquired a
liking for intensity in life, you can't do without it. I mean vivid soul
experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and
physical excitement.'
Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes.
'Well, and what then?' he said.
'What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other
craving. You become a _concentre_, you feed your normal flame with
oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are
always semi-transparent.'
Siegmund laughed.
'At least, I am quite opaque,' he said.
The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat.
'Not altogether,' said Hampson. 'And you, I should think, are one whose
flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.'
Siegmund glanced again at him, startled.
'You haven't much reserve. You're like a tree that'll flower till it
kills itself,' the man continued. 'You'll run till you drop, and then
you won't get up again. You've no dispassionate intellect to control you
and economize.'
'You're telling me very plainly what I am and am not,' said Siegmund,
laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it.
'Oh, it's only what I think,' replied Hampson. 'We're a good deal alike,
you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn't; but women
have always done as they liked with me.'
'That's hardly so in my case,' said Siegmund.
Hampson eyed him critically.
'Say one woman; it's enough,' he replied.
Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea.
'The best sort of women--the most interesting--are the worst for us,'
Hampson resumed. 'By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and
animal in us. Then they are supersensitive--refined a bit beyond
humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their
instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth;
and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or
warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great
potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of
life. In us her force becomes evident.
'She can't live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting
women don't want _us_; they want the flowers of the spirit they can
gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and
to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us--that
is, us altogether.'
'You're a bit downright are you not?' asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He
did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such statements
were arbitrary.
'That's according to my intensity,' laughed Hampson. 'I can open the
blue heaven with looking, and push back the doors of day a little, and
see--God knows what! One of these days I shall slip through. Oh, I am
perfectly sane; I only strive beyond myself!'
'Don't you think it's wrong to get like it?' asked Siegmund.
'Well, I do, and so does everybody; but the crowd profits by us in the
end. When they understand my music, it will be an education to them; and
the whole aim of mankind is to render life intelligible.'
Siegmund pondered a little....
'You make me feel--as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,'
he said slowly.
The young man smiled, then looked down at the wall, where his own hands
lay white and fragile, showing the blue veins.
'I can scarcely believe they are me,' he said. 'If they rose up and
refused me, I should not be surprised. But aren't they beautiful?'
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