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in this prison corridor of life. Siegmund looked round the room. He could get his razor, or he could hang himself. He had thought of the two ways before. Yet now he was unprovided. His portmanteau stood at the foot of the bed, its straps flung loose. A portmanteau strap would do. Then it should be a portmanteau strap!
‘Very well!’ said Siegmund, ‘it is finally settled. I had better write to Helena, and tell her, and say to her she must go on. I’d better tell her.’
He sat for a long time with his notebook and a pencil, but he wrote nothing. At last he gave up.
‘Perhaps it is just as well,’ he said to himself. ‘She said she would come with me — perhaps that is just as well. She will go to the sea. When she knows, the sea will take her. She must know.’
He took a card, bearing her name and her Cornwall address, from his pocket-book, and laid it on the dressing-table.
‘She will come with me,’ he said to himself, and his heart rose with elation.
‘That is a cowardice,’ he added, looking doubtfully at the card, as if wondering whether to destroy it.
‘It is in the hands of God. Beatrice may or may not send word to her at Tintagel. It is in the hands of God,’ he concluded.
Then he sat down again.
‘“But for that fear of something after-death,”’ he quoted to himself.
‘It is not fear,’ he said. ‘The act itself will be horrible and fearsome, but the after-death — it’s no more than struggling awake when you’re sick with a fright of dreams. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”’
Siegmund sat thinking of the after-death, which to him seemed so wonderfully comforting, full of rest, and reassurance, and renewal. He experienced no mystical ecstasies. He was sure of a wonderful kindness in death, a kindness which really reached right through life, though here he could not avail himself of it. Siegmund had always inwardly held faith that the heart of life beat kindly towards him. When he was cynical and sulky he knew that in reality it was only a waywardness of his.
The heart of life is implacable in its kindness. It may not be moved to fluttering of pity; it swings on uninterrupted by cries of anguish or of hate.
Siegmund was thankful for this unfaltering sternness of life. There was no futile hesitation between doom and pity. Therefore, he could submit and have faith. If each man by his crying could swerve the slow, sheer universe, what a doom of guilt he might gain. If Life could swerve from its orbit for pity, what terror of vacillation; and who would wish to bear the responsibility of the deflection?
Siegmund thanked God that life was pitiless, strong enough to take his treasures out of his hands, and to thrust him out of the room; otherwise, how could he go with any faith to death; otherwise, he would have felt the helpless disillusion of a youth who finds his infallible parents weaker than himself.
‘I know the heart of life is kind,’ said Siegmund, ‘because I feel it. Otherwise I would live in defiance. But Life is greater than me or anybody. We suffer, and we don’t know why, often. Life doesn’t explain. But I can keep faith in it, as a dog has faith in his master. After all, Life is as kind to me as I am to my dog. I have, proportionally, as much zest. And my purpose towards my dog is good. I need not despair of Life.’
It occurred to Siegmund that he was meriting the old gibe of the atheists. He was shirking the responsibility of himself, turning it over to an imaginary god.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t help it. I do not feel altogether self-responsible.’
The morning had waxed during these investigations. Siegmund had been vaguely aware of the rousing of the house. He was finally startled into a consciousness of the immediate present by the calling of Vera at his door.
‘There are two letters for you. Father.’
He looked about him in bewilderment; the hours had passed in a trance, and he had no idea of his time or place.
‘Oh, all right,’ he said, too much dazed to know what it meant. He heard his daughter going downstairs. Then swiftly returned over him the throbbing ache of his head and his arms, the discordant jarring of his body.
‘What made her bring me the letters?’ he asked himself. It was a very unusual attention. His heart replied, very sullen and shameful: ‘She wanted to know; she wanted to make sure I was all right.’
Siegmund forgot all his speculations on a divine benevolence. The discord of his immediate situation overcame every harmony. He did not fetch in the letters.
‘Is it so late?’ he said. ‘Is there no more time for me?’
He went to look at his watch. It was a quarter to nine. As he walked across the room he trembled, and a sickness made his bones feel rotten. He sat down on the bed.
‘What am I going to do?’ he asked himself.
By this time he was shuddering rapidly. A peculiar feeling, as if his belly were turned into nothingness, made him want to press his fists into his abdomen. He remained shuddering drunkenly, like a drunken man who is sick, incapable of thought or action.
A second knock came at the door. He started with a jolt.
‘Here is your shaving-water,’ said Beatrice in cold tones. ‘It’s half past nine.’
‘All right,’ said Siegmund, rising from the bed, bewildered.
‘And what time shall you expect dinner?’ asked Beatrice. She was still contemptuous.
‘Any time. I’m not going out,’ he answered.
He was surprised to hear the ordinary cool tone of his own voice, for he was shuddering uncontrollably, and was almost sobbing. In a shaking, bewildered, disordered condition he set about fulfilling his purpose. He was hardly conscious of anything he did; try as he would, he could not keep his hands steady in the violent spasms of shuddering, nor could he call his mind to think. He was one shuddering turmoil. Yet he performed his purpose methodically and exactly. In every particular he was thorough, as if he were the servant of some stern will. It was a mesmeric performance, in which the agent trembled with convulsive sickness.
Chapter 28
Siegmund’s lying late in bed made Beatrice very angry. The later it became, the more wrathful she grew. At half past nine she had taken up his shaving-water. Then she proceeded to tidy the dining-room, leaving the breakfast spread in the kitchen.
Vera and Frank were gone up to town; they would both be home for dinner at two o’clock. Marjory was despatched on an errand, taking Gwen with her. The children had no need to return home immediately, therefore it was highly probable they would play in the field or in the lane for an hour or two. Beatrice was alone downstairs. It was a hot, still morning, when everything outdoors shone brightly, and all indoors was dusked with coolness and colour. But Beatrice was angry. She moved rapidly and determinedly about the dining-room, thrusting old newspapers and magazines between the cupboard and the wall, throwing the litter in the grate, which was clear, Friday having been charwoman’s day, passing swiftly, lightly over the front of the furniture with the duster. It was Saturday, when she did not spend much time over the work. In the afternoon she was going out with Vera. That was not, however, what occupied her mind as she brushed aside her work. She had determined to have a settlement with Siegmund, as to how matters should continue. She was going to have no more of the past three years’ life; things had come to a crisis, and there must be an alteration. Beatrice was going to do battle, therefore she flew at her work, thus stirring herself up to a proper heat of blood. All the time, as she thrust things out of sight, or straightened a cover, she listened for Siegmund to come downstairs.
He did not come, so her anger waxed.
‘He can lie skulking in bed!’