The Trespasser

The day waxed hot. A few little silver tortoises of cloud had crawled

across the desert of sky, and hidden themselves. The chalk roads were

white, quivering with heat. Helena and Siegmund walked eastward

bareheaded under the sunshine. They felt like two insects in the niche

of a hot hearth as they toiled along the deep road. A few poppies here

and there among the wild rye floated scarlet in sunshine like

blood-drops on green water. Helena recalled Francis Thompson's poems,

which Siegmund had never read. She repeated what she knew, and laughed,

thinking what an ineffectual pale shadow of a person Thompson must have

been. She looked at Siegmund, walking in large easiness beside her.

'Artists are supremely unfortunate persons,' she announced.

'Think of Wagner,' said Siegmund, lifting his face to the hot bright

heaven, and drinking the heat with his blinded face. All states seemed

meagre, save his own. He recalled people who had loved, and he pitied

them--dimly, drowsily, without pain.

They came to a place where they might gain access to the shore by a path

down a landslip. As they descended through the rockery, yellow with

ragwort, they felt themselves dip into the inert, hot air of the bay.

The living atmosphere of the uplands was left overhead. Among the rocks

of the sand, white as if smelted, the heat glowed and quivered. Helena

sat down and took off her shoes. She walked on the hot, glistening sand

till her feet were delightfully, almost intoxicatingly scorched. Then

she ran into the water to cool them. Siegmund and she paddled in the

light water, pensively watching the haste of the ripples, like crystal

beetles, running over the white outline of their feet; looking out on

the sea that rose so near to them, dwarfing them by its far reach.

For a short time they flitted silently in the water's edge. Then there

settled down on them a twilight of sleep, the little hush that closes

the doors and draws the blinds of the house after a festival. They

wandered out across the beach above high-water mark, where they sat down

together on the sand, leaning back against a flat brown stone, Siegmund

with the sunshine on his forehead, Helena drooping close to him, in his

shadow. Then the hours ride by unnoticed, making no sound as they go.

The sea creeps nearer, nearer, like a snake which watches two birds

asleep. It may not disturb them, but sinks back, ceasing to look at them

with its bright eyes.

Meanwhile the flowers of their passion were softly shed, as poppies fall

at noon, and the seed of beauty ripened rapidly within them. Dreams came

like a wind through, their souls, drifting off with the seed-dust of

beautiful experience which they had ripened, to fertilize the souls of

others withal. In them the sea and the sky and ships had mingled and

bred new blossoms of the torrid heat of their love. And the seed of such

blossoms was shaken as they slept, into the hand of God, who held it in

His palm preciously; then scattered it again, to produce new splendid

blooms of beauty.