Helena watched with poignant sorrow all the agitation of colour on the blue afternoon.
"We must leave it; we must pa.s.s out of it," she lamented, over and over again. Each new charm she caught eagerly.
"I like the steady purpose of that brown-sailed tramp," she said to herself, watching a laden coaster making for Portsmouth.
They were still among the small shipping of Ryde. Siegmund and Helena, as they looked out, became aware of a small motor-launch heading across their course towards a yacht whose tall masts were drawn clean on the sky. The eager launch, its nose up as if to breathe, was racing over the swell like a coursing dog. A lady, in white, and a lad with dark head and white jersey were leaning in the bows; a gentleman was bending over some machinery in the middle of the boat, while the sailor in the low stern was also stooping forward attending to something. The steamer was sweeping onwards, huge above the water; the dog of a boat was coursing straight across her track. The lady saw the danger first. Stretching forward, she seized the arm of the lad and held him firm, making no sound, but watching the forward menace of the looming steamer.
"Look!" cried Helena, catching hold of Siegmund. He was already watching. Suddenly the steamer bell clanged. The gentleman looked up, with startled, sunburned face; then he leaped to the stern. The launch veered. It and the steamer closed together like a pair of scissors. The lady, still holding the boy, looked up with an expressionless face at the high sweeping chisel of the steamer"s bows; the husband stood rigid, staring ahead. No sound was to be heard save the rustling of water under the bows. The scissors closed, the launch skelped forward like a dog from in front of the traffic. It escaped by a yard or two. Then, like a dog, it seemed to look round. The gentleman in the stern glanced back quickly. He was a handsome, dark-haired man with dark eyes. His face was as if carven out of oak, set and grey-brown. Then he looked to the steering of his boat. No one had uttered a sound. From the tiny boat coursing low on the water, not a sound, only tense waiting. The launch raced out of danger towards the yacht. The gentleman, with a brief gesture, put his man in charge again, whilst he himself went forward to the lady. He was a handsome man, very proud in his movements; and she, in her bearing, was prouder still. She received him almost with indifference.
Helena turned to Siegmund. He took both her hands and pressed them, whilst she looked at him with eyes blind with emotion. She was white to the lips, and heaving like the buoy in the wake of the steamer. The noise of life had suddenly been hushed, and each heart had heard for a moment the noiselessness of death. How everyone was white and gasping!
They strove, on every hand, to fill the day with noise and the colour of life again.
"By Jove, that was a near thing!"
"Ah, that has made me feel bad!" said a woman.
"A French yacht," said somebody.
Helena was waiting for the voice of Siegmund. But he did not know what to say. Confused, he repeated:
"That was a close shave."
Helena clung to him, searching his face. She felt his difference from herself. There was something in his experience that made him different, quiet, with a peculiar expression as if he were pained.
"Ah, dear Lord!" he was saying to himself. "How bright and whole the day is for them! If G.o.d had suddenly put His hand over the sun, and swallowed us up in a shadow, they could not have been more startled.
That man, with his fine, white-flannelled limbs and his dark head, has no suspicion of the shadow that supports it all. Between the blueness of the sea and the sky he pa.s.ses easy as a gull, close to the fine white seamew of his mate, amid red flowers of flags, and soft birds of ships, and slow-moving monsters of steamboats.
"For me the day is transparent and shrivelling. I can see the darkness through its petals. But for him it is a fresh bell-flower, in which he fumbles with delights like a bee.
"For me, quivering in the inters.p.a.ces of the atmosphere, is the darkness the same that fills in my soul. I can see death urging itself into life, the shadow supporting the substance. For my life is burning an invisible flame. The glare of the light of myself, as I burn on the fuel of death, is not enough to hide from me the source and the issue. For what is a life but a flame that bursts off the surface of darkness, and tapers into the darkness again? But the death that issues differs from the death that was the source. At least, I shall enrich death with a potent shadow, if I do not enrich life."
"Wasn"t that woman fine!" said Helena.
"So perfectly still," he answered.
"The child realized nothing," she said.
Siegmund laughed, then leaned forward impulsively to her.
"I am always so sorry," he said, "that the human race is urged inevitably into a deeper and deeper realization of life."
She looked at him, wondering what provoked such a remark.
"I guess," she said slowly, after a while, "that the man, the sailor, will have a bad time. He was abominably careless."
"He was careful of something else just then," said Siegmund, who hated to hear her speak in cold condemnation. "He was attending to the machinery or something."
"That was scarcely his first business," said she, rather sarcastic.
Siegmund looked at her. She seemed very hard in judgement--very blind.
Sometimes his soul surged against her in hatred.
"Do you think the man _wanted_ to drown the boat?" he asked.
"He nearly succeeded," she replied.
There was antagonism between them. Siegmund recognized in Helena the world sitting in judgement, and he hated it. "But, after all," he thought, I suppose it is the only way to get along, to judge the event and not the person. I have a disease of sympathy, a vice of exoneration."
Nevertheless, he did not love Helena as a judge. He thought rather of the woman in the boat. She was evidently one who watched the sources of life, saw it great and impersonal.
"Would the woman cry, or hug and kiss the boy when she got on board?" he asked.
"I rather think not. Why?" she replied.
"I hope she didn"t," he said.
Helena sat watching the water spurt back from the bows. She was very much in love with Siegmund. He was suggestive; he stimulated her. But to her mind he had not her own dark eyes of hesitation; he was swift and proud as the wind. She never realized his helplessness.
Siegmund was gathering strength from the thought of that other woman"s courage. If she had so much restraint as not to cry out, or alarm the boy, if she had so much grace not to complain to her husband, surely he himself might refrain from revealing his own fear of Helena, and from lamenting his hard fate.
They sailed on past the chequered round towers. The sea opened, and they looked out to eastward into the sea-s.p.a.ce. Siegmund wanted to flee. He yearned to escape down the open ways before him. Yet he knew he would be carried on to London. He watched the sea-ways closing up. The sh.o.r.e came round. The high old houses stood flat on the right hand. The sh.o.r.e swept round in a sickle, reaping them into the harbour. There the old _Victory_, gay with myriad pointed pennons, was harvested, saved for a trophy.
"It is a dreadful thing," thought Siegmund, "to remain as a trophy when there is nothing more to do." He watched the landing-stages swooping nearer. There were the trains drawn up in readiness. At the other end of the train was London.
He could scarcely bear to have Helena before him for another two hours.
The suspense of that protracted farewell, while he sat opposite her in the beating train, would cost too much. He longed to be released from her.
They had got their luggage, and were standing at the foot of the ladder, in the heat of the engines and the smell of hot oil, waiting for the crowd to pa.s.s on, so that they might ascend and step off the ship on to the mainland.
"Won"t you let me go by the South-Western, and you by the Brighton?"
asked Siegmund, hesitating, repeating the morning"s question.
Helena looked at him, knitting her brows with misgiving and perplexity.
"No," she replied. "Let us go together."
Siegmund followed her up the iron ladder to the quay.
There was no great crowd on the train. They easily found a second-cla.s.s compartment without occupants. He swung the luggage on the rack and sat down, facing Helena.
"Now," said he to himself, "I wish I were alone."
He wanted to think and prepare himself.
Helena, who was thinking actively, leaned forward to him to say:
"Shall I not go down to Cornwall?"