The Trespasser

Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The

hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into

shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some

distance, very great, it seemed.

'I can't get hold of them,' he said distractedly to himself. He felt

detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things; as

if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and unsupported,

somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous space. He wanted to lie down

again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of supporting and

controlling his body. If he could lie down again perfectly still he need

not struggle to animate the cumbersome matter of his body, and then he

would not feel thus sick and outside himself.

But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the

moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly,

joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support.

Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked

with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious.

This pity for her drew him nearer to life.

He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the

hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in

his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not notice

it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally.

'What is it?' he asked himself in wonder.

His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke verbally

to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost

insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought

from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir

of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him.

They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so

uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he

stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot

securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became

conscious of it.

'Good Lord!' he said to himself. 'I wonder what it is.' He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his

body--his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing

wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself

into another detached phrase. 'There is nothing the matter with me,'

he said.