'Is it a dream now, dear?' he whispered. Helena clasped him tightly,
shuddering because of the delicious suffusing of his warmth through her.
Almost immediately they heard the grinding of the brakes.
'Here we are, then!' exclaimed Helena, dropping into her conventional,
cheerful manner at once. She put straight her hat, while he gathered
his luggage.
Until tea-time there was a pause in their progress. Siegmund was
tingling with an exquisite vividness, as if he had taken some rare
stimulant. He wondered at himself. It seemed that every fibre in his
body was surprised with joy, as each tree in a forest at dawn utters
astonished cries of delight.
When Helena came back, she sat opposite to him to see him. His naïve
look of joy was very sweet to her. His eyes were dark blue, showing the
fibrils, like a purple-veined flower at twilight, and somehow,
mysteriously, joy seemed to quiver in the iris. Helena appreciated him,
feature by feature. She liked his clear forehead, with its thick black
hair, and his full mouth, and his chin. She loved his hands, that were
small, but strong and nervous, and very white. She liked his breast,
that breathed so strong and quietly, and his arms, and his thighs, and
his knees.
For him, Helena was a presence. She was ambushed, fused in an aura of
his love. He only saw she was white, and strong, and full fruited, he
only knew her blue eyes were rather awful to him.
Outside, the sea-mist was travelling thicker and thicker inland. Their
lodging was not far from the bay. As they sat together at tea,
Siegmund's eyes dilated, and he looked frowning at Helena.
'What is it?' he asked, listening uneasily.
Helena looked up at him, from pouring out the tea. His little anxious
look of distress amused her.
'The noise, you mean? Merely the fog-horn, dear--not Wotan's wrath, nor
Siegfried's dragon....' The fog was white at the window. They sat waiting. After a few seconds
the sound came low, swelling, like the mooing of some great sea animal,
alone, the last of the monsters. The whole fog gave off the sound for a
second or two, then it died down into an intense silence. Siegmund and
Helena looked at each other. His eyes were full of trouble. To see a
big, strong man anxious-eyed as a child because of a strange sound
amused her. But he was tired.
'I assure you, it _is_ only a fog-horn,' she laughed.
'Of course. But it is a depressing sort of sound.' 'Is it?' she said curiously. 'Why? Well--yes--I think I can understand
its being so to some people. It's something like the call of the horn
across the sea to Tristan.' She hummed softly, then three times she sang the horn-call. Siegmund,
with his face expressionless as a mask, sat staring out at the mist. The
boom of the siren broke in upon them. To him, the sound was full of
fatality. Helena waited till the noise died down, then she repeated her
horn-call.