The Trespasser | Page 9

passenger was waiting. Suddenly Siegmund's
heart leaped up, wrenching wildly. He burst open the door, and caught
hold of Helena. She dilated, gave a palpitating cry as he dragged her
into the carriage.
'You here!' he exclaimed, in a strange tone. She was shivering with
cold. Her almost naked arms were blue. She could not answer
Siegmund's question, but lay clasped against him, shivering away her
last chill as his warmth invaded her. He laughed in his heart as she
nestled in to him.
'Is it a dream now, dear?' he whispered. Helena clasped him tightly,
shuddering because of the delicious suffusing of his warmth through
her.
Almost immediately they heard the grinding of the brakes.
'Here we are, then!' exclaimed Helena, dropping into her conventional,
cheerful manner at once. She put straight her hat, while he gathered his
luggage.
Until tea-time there was a pause in their progress. Siegmund was
tingling with an exquisite vividness, as if he had taken some rare
stimulant. He wondered at himself. It seemed that every fibre in his
body was surprised with joy, as each tree in a forest at dawn utters

astonished cries of delight.
When Helena came back, she sat opposite to him to see him. His naïve
look of joy was very sweet to her. His eyes were dark blue, showing the
fibrils, like a purple-veined flower at twilight, and somehow,
mysteriously, joy seemed to quiver in the iris. Helena appreciated him,
feature by feature. She liked his clear forehead, with its thick black hair,
and his full mouth, and his chin. She loved his hands, that were small,
but strong and nervous, and very white. She liked his breast, that
breathed so strong and quietly, and his arms, and his thighs, and his
knees.
For him, Helena was a presence. She was ambushed, fused in an aura
of his love. He only saw she was white, and strong, and full fruited, he
only knew her blue eyes were rather awful to him.
Outside, the sea-mist was travelling thicker and thicker inland. Their
lodging was not far from the bay. As they sat together at tea,
Siegmund's eyes dilated, and he looked frowning at Helena.
'What is it?' he asked, listening uneasily.
Helena looked up at him, from pouring out the tea. His little anxious
look of distress amused her.
'The noise, you mean? Merely the fog-horn, dear--not Wotan's wrath,
nor Siegfried's dragon....'
The fog was white at the window. They sat waiting. After a few
seconds the sound came low, swelling, like the mooing of some great
sea animal, alone, the last of the monsters. The whole fog gave off the
sound for a second or two, then it died down into an intense silence.
Siegmund and Helena looked at each other. His eyes were full of
trouble. To see a big, strong man anxious-eyed as a child because of a
strange sound amused her. But he was tired.
'I assure you, it is only a fog-horn,' she laughed.

'Of course. But it is a depressing sort of sound.'
'Is it?' she said curiously. 'Why? Well--yes--I think I can understand its
being so to some people. It's something like the call of the horn across
the sea to Tristan.'
She hummed softly, then three times she sang the horn-call. Siegmund,
with his face expressionless as a mask, sat staring out at the mist. The
boom of the siren broke in upon them. To him, the sound was full of
fatality. Helena waited till the noise died down, then she repeated her
horn-call.
'Yet it is very much like the fog-horn,' she said, curiously interested.
'This time next week, Helena!' he said.
She suddenly went heavy, and stretched across to clasp his hand as it
lay upon the table.
'I shall be calling to you from Cornwall,' she said.
He did not reply. So often she did not take his meaning, but left him
alone with his sense of tragedy. She had no idea how his life was
wrenched from its roots, and when he tried to tell her, she balked him,
leaving him inwardly quite lonely.
'There is no next week,' she declared, with great cheerfulness. 'There is
only the present.'
At the same moment she rose and slipped across to him. Putting her
arms round his neck, she stood holding his head to her bosom, pressing
it close, with her hand among his hair. His nostrils and mouth were
crushed against her breast. He smelled the silk of her dress and the faint,
intoxicating odour of her person. With shut eyes he owned heavily to
himself again that she was blind to him. But some other self urged with
gladness, no matter how blind she was, so that she pressed his face
upon her.

She stroked and caressed his hair, tremblingly