The Trespasser

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?