The Trespasser | Page 3

motionless.
'Will you make coffee, Louisa?' she asked. Louisa lifted herself, looked
at her friend, and stretched slightly.
'Oh!' she groaned voluptuously. 'This is so comfortable!'
'Don't trouble then, I'll go. No, don't get up,' said Helena, trying to
disengage herself. Louisa reached and put her hands on Helena's wrists.
'I will go,' she drawled, almost groaning with voluptuousness and
appealing love.
Then, as Helena still made movements to rise, the elder woman got up
slowly, leaning as she did so all her weight on her friend.
'Where is the coffee?' she asked, affecting the dullness of lethargy. She
was full of small affectations, being consumed with uneasy love.
'I think, my dear,' replied Helena, 'it is in its usual place.'
'Oh--o-o-oh!' yawned Louisa, and she dragged herself out.
The two had been intimate friends for years, had slept together, and
played together and lived together. Now the friendship was coming to
an end.
'After all,' said Byrne, when the door was closed, 'if you're alive you've
got to live.'

Helena burst into a titter of amusement at this sudden remark.
'Wherefore?' she asked indulgently.
'Because there's no such thing as passive existence,' he replied,
grinning.
She curled her lip in amused indulgence of this very young man.
'I don't see it at all,' she said.
'You can't, he protested, 'any more than a tree can help budding in
April--it can't help itself, if it's alive; same with you.'
'Well, then'--and again there was the touch of a sneer--'if I can't help
myself, why trouble, my friend?'
'Because--because I suppose I can't help myself--if it bothers me, it
does. You see, I'--he smiled brilliantly--'am April.'
She paid very little attention to him, but began in a peculiar reedy,
metallic tone, that set his nerves quivering:
'But I am not a bare tree. All my dead leaves, they hang to
me--and--and go through a kind of _danse macabre_--'
'But you bud underneath--like beech,' he said quickly.
'Really, my friend,' she said coldly, 'I am too tired to bud.'
'No,' he pleaded, 'no!' With his thick brows knitted, he surveyed her
anxiously. She had received a great blow in August, and she still was
stunned. Her face, white and heavy, was like a mask, almost sullen. She
looked in the fire, forgetting him.
'You want March,' he said--he worried endlessly over her--'to rip off
your old leaves. I s'll have to be March,' he laughed.
She ignored him again because of his presumption. He waited awhile,

then broke out once more.
'You must start again--you must. Always you rustle your red leaves of a
blasted summer. You are not dead. Even if you want to be, you're not.
Even if it's a bitter thing to say, you have to say it: you are not dead....'
Smiling a peculiar, painful smile, as if he hurt her, she turned to gaze at
a photograph that hung over the piano. It was the profile of a handsome
man in the prime of life. He was leaning slightly forward, as if yielding
beneath a burden of life, or to the pull of fate. He looked out musingly,
and there was no hint of rebellion in the contours of the regular features.
The hair was brushed back, soft and thick, straight from his fine brow.
His nose was small and shapely, his chin rounded, cleft, rather
beautifully moulded. Byrne gazed also at the photo. His look became
distressed and helpless.
'You cannot say you are dead with Siegmund,' he cried brutally. She
shuddered, clasped her burning arms on her breast, and looked into the
fire. 'You are not dead with Siegmund,' he persisted, 'so you can't say
you live with him. You may live with his memory. But Siegmund is
dead, and his memory is not he--himself,' He made a fierce gesture of
impatience. 'Siegmund now--he is not a memory--he is not your dead
red leaves--he is Siegmund Dead! And you do not know him, because
you are alive, like me, so Siegmund Dead is a stranger to you.'
With her head bowed down, cowering like a sulky animal, she looked
at him under her brows. He stared fiercely back at her, but beneath her
steady, glowering gaze he shrank, then turned aside.
'You stretch your hands blindly to the dead; you look backwards. No,
you never touch the thing,' he cried.
'I have the arms of Louisa always round my neck,' came her voice, like
the cry of a cat. She put her hands on her throat as if she must relieve
an ache. He saw her lip raised in a kind of disgust, a revulsion from life.
She was very sick after the tragedy.
He frowned, and his eyes dilated.

'Folk are good; they are good for one. You never have looked at them.
You would linger hours