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he said. ‘I was so gone on Beatrice when I married her. She had only just come back from Egypt. Her father was an army officer, a very handsome man, and, I believe, a bit of a rake. Beatrice is really well connected, you know. But old FitzHerbert ran through all his money, and through everything else. He was too hot for the rest of the family, so they dropped him altogether.
‘He came to live at Peckham when I was sixteen. I had just left school, and was to go into father’s business. Mrs FitzHerbert left cards, and very soon we were acquainted. Beatrice had been a good time in a French convent school. She had only knocked about with the army a little while, but it had brought her out. I remember I thought she was miles above me — which she was. She wasn’t bad-looking, either, and you know men all like her. I bet she’d marry again, in spite of the children.
‘At first I fluttered round her. I remember I’d got a little, silky moustache. They all said I looked older than sixteen. At that time I was mad on the violin, and she played rather well. Then FitzHerbert went off abroad somewhere, so Beatrice and her mother half lived at our house. The mother was an invalid.
‘I remember I nearly stood on my head one day. The conservatory opened off the smoking-room, so when I came in the room, I heard my two sisters and Beatrice talking about good-looking men.
‘“I consider Bertram will make a handsome man,” said my younger sister.
‘“He’s got beautiful eyes,” said my other sister.
‘“And a real darling nose and chin!” cried Beatrice. “If only he was more solide! He is like a windmill, all limbs.”
‘“He will fill out. Remember, he’s not quite seventeen,” said my elder sister.
‘“Ah, he is doux — he is câlin,” said Beatrice.
‘“I think he is rather too spoony for his age,” said my elder sister.
‘“But he’s a fine boy for all that. See how thick his knees are,” my younger sister chimed in.
‘“Ah, si, si!” cried Beatrice.
‘I made a row against the door, then walked across.
‘“Hello, is somebody in here?” I said, as I pushed into the little conservatory.
‘I looked straight at Beatrice, and she at me. We seemed to have formed an alliance in that look: she was the other half of my consciousness, I of hers. Ha! Ha! there were a lot of white narcissus, and little white hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, in the conservatory. I can see them now, great white stars, and tangles of little ones, among a bank of green; and I can recall the keen, fresh scent on the warm air; and the look of Beatrice . . . her great dark eyes.
‘It’s funny, but Beatrice is as dead — ay, far more dead — than Dante’s. And I am not that young fool, not a bit.
‘I was very romantic, fearfully emotional, and the soul of honour. Beatrice said nobody cared a thing about her. FitzHerbert was always jaunting off, the mother was a fretful invalid. So I was seventeen, earning half a guinea a week, and she was eighteen, with no money, when we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it awfully well, I have been a frightful drag on him, you know.
‘There’s the romance. I wonder how it will all end.’
Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit.
They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before Helena’s day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a thing in a man’s life as birth, or adolescence, or death, was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of disillusion.
‘Come to think of it,’ Siegmund continued, ‘I have always shirked. Whenever I’ve been in a tight corner I’ve gone to Pater.’
‘I think,’ she said, ‘marriage has been a tight corner you couldn’t get out of to go to anybody.’
‘Yet I’m here,’ he answered simply.
The blood suffused her face and neck.
‘And some men would have made a better job of it. When it’s come to sticking out against Beatrice, and sailing the domestic ship in spite of her, I’ve always funked. I tell you I’m something of a moral coward.’
He had her so much on edge she was inclined to answer, ‘So be it.’ Instead, she ran back over her own history: it consisted of petty discords in contemptible surroundings, then of her dreams and fancies, finally — Siegmund.
‘In my life,’ she said, with the fine, grating discord in her tones, ‘I might say always, the real life has seemed just outside — brownies running and fairies peeping — just beyond the common, ugly place where I am. I seem to have been hedged in by vulgar circumstances, able to glimpse outside now and then, and see the reality.’
‘You are so hard to get at,’ said Siegmund. ‘And so scornful of familiar things.’
She smiled, knowing he did not understand. The heat had jaded her, so that physically she was full of discord, of dreariness that set her teeth on edge. Body and soul, she was out of tune.
A warm, noiseless twilight was gathering over the downs and rising darkly from the sea. Fate, with wide wings, was hovering just over her. Fate, ashen grey and black, like a carrion crow, had her in its shadow. Yet Siegmund took no notice. He did not understand. He walked beside her whistling to himself, which only distressed her the more.
They were alone on the smooth hills to the east. Helena looked at the day melting out of the sky, leaving the permanent structure of the night. It was her turn to suffer the sickening detachment which comes after moments of intense living.
The rosiness died out of the sunset as embers fade into thick ash. In herself, too, the ruddy glow sank and went out. The earth was a cold dead heap, coloured drearily, the sky was dark with flocculent grey ash, and she herself an upright mass of soft ash.
She shuddered slightly with horror. The whole face of things was to her livid and ghastly. Being a moralist rather than an artist, coming of fervent Wesleyan stock, she began to scourge herself. She had done wrong again. Looking back, no one had she touched without hurting. She had a destructive force; anyone she embraced she injured. Faint voices echoed back from her conscience. The shadows were full of complaint against her. It was all true, she was a harmful force, dragging Fate to petty, mean conclusions.
Life and hope were ash in her mouth. She shuddered with discord. Despair grated between her teeth. This dreariness was worse than any her dreary, lonely life had known. She felt she could bear it no longer.
Siegmund was there. Surely he could help? He would rekindle her. But he was straying ahead, carelessly whistling the Spring Song from Die Walküre. She looked at him, and again shuddered with horror. Was that really Siegmund, that stooping, thick-shouldered, indifferent man? Was that the Siegmund who had seemed to radiate joy into his surroundings, the Siegmund whose coming had always changed the whole weather of her soul? Was that the Siegmund whose touch was keen with bliss for her, whose face was a panorama of passing God? She looked at him again. His radiance was gone, his aura had ceased. She saw him a stooping man, past the buoyancy of youth, walking and whistling rather stupidly — in short, something of the ‘clothed animal on end’, like the rest of men.
She suffered an agony of disillusion. Was this the real Siegmund, and her own only a projection of her soul? She took her breath sharply. Was he the real clay, and that other, her beloved, only the breathing of her soul upon this. There was an awful blank before her.
‘Siegmund!’ she said in despair.
He turned sharply at the sound of her voice. Seeing her face pale and distorted in the twilight, he was filled with dismay. She mutely lifted her arms to him, watching him in despair. Swiftly he took her in his arms, and asked in a troubled voice:
‘What is it, dear? Is something wrong?’