Very well, it was impossible! Then there remained only one door which he
could open 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?