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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