'What will she do?' Siegmund asked himself, 'when her loneliness comes
upon her like a horror, and she has no one to go to. She will come to
the memory of me for a while, and that will take her over till her
strength is established. But what then?' Siegmund could find no answer. He tried to imagine her life. It would go
on, after his death, just in the same way, for a while, and then? He had
not the faintest knowledge of how she would develop. What would she do
when she was thirty-eight, and as old as himself? He could not conceive.
Yet she would not die, of that he was certain.
Siegmund suddenly realized that he knew nothing of her life, her real
inner life. She was a book written in characters unintelligible to him
and to everybody. He was tortured with the problem of her till it became
acute, and he felt as if his heart would burst inside him. As a boy he
had experienced the same sort of feeling after wrestling for an hour
with a problem in Euclid, for he was capable of great concentration.
He felt Helena looking at him. Turning, he found her steady, unswerving
eyes fixed on him, so that he shrank confused from them. She smiled: by
an instinctive movement she made him know that she wanted him to hold
her hand. He leaned forward and put his hand over hers. She had peculiar
hands, small, with a strange, delightful silkiness. Often they were cool
or cold; generally they lay unmoved within his clasp, but then they were
instinct with life, not inert. Sometimes he would feel a peculiar
jerking in his pulse, very much like electricity, when he held her hand.
Occasionally it was almost painful, and felt as if a little virtue were
passing out of his blood. But that he dismissed as nonsense.
The Germans were still rattling away, perspiring freely, wiping their
faces with their handkerchiefs as they laughed, moving inside their
clothing, which was sticking to their sides. Siegmund had not noticed
them for some time, he was so much absorbed. But Helena, though she
sympathized with her fellow-passengers, was tormented almost beyond
endurance by the noise, the heat of her neighbour's body, the atmosphere
of the crowded carriage, and her own emotion. The only thing that could
relieve her was the hand of Siegmund soothing her in its hold.
She looked at him with the same steadiness which made her eyes feel
heavy upon him, and made him shrink. She wanted his strength of nerve to
support her, and he submitted at once, his one aim being to give her out
of himself whatever she wanted.