The clock downstairs struck two.
'I must get to sleep,' he said.
He dragged his portmanteau from beneath the bed and began to pack it.
When at last it was finished, he shut it with a snap. The click sounded
final. He stood up, stretched himself, and sighed.
'I am fearfully tired,' he said.
But that was persuasive. When he was undressed he sat in his pyjamas for
some time, rapidly beating his fingers on his knee.
'Thirty-eight years old,' he said to himself, 'and disconsolate as a
child!' He began to muse of the morrow.
When he seemed to be going to sleep, he woke up to find thoughts
labouring over his brain, like bees on a hive. Recollections, swift
thoughts, flew in and alighted upon him, as wild geese swing down and
take possession of a pond. Phrases from the opera tyrannized over him;
he played the rhythm with all his blood. As he turned over in this
torture, he sighed, and recognized a movement of the De Beriot concerto
which Helena had played for her last lesson. He found himself watching
her as he had watched then, felt again the wild impatience when she was
wrong, started again as, amid the dipping and sliding of her bow, he
realized where his thoughts were going. She was wrong, he was hasty; and
he felt her blue eyes looking intently at him.
Both started as his daughter Vera entered suddenly. She was a handsome
girl of nineteen. Crossing the room, brushing Helena as if she were a
piece of furniture in the way, Vera had asked her father a question, in
a hard, insulting tone, then had gone out again, just as if Helena had
not been in the room.
Helena stood fingering the score of _Pelléas_. When Vera had gone, she
asked, in the peculiar tone that made Siegmund shiver: 'Why do you consider the music of _Pelléas_ cold?' Siegmund had struggled to answer. So they passed everything off, without
mention, after Helena's fashion, ignoring all that might be humiliating;
and to her much was humiliating.
For years she had come as pupil to Siegmund, first as a friend of the
household. Then she and Louisa went occasionally to whatever hall or
theatre had Siegmund in the orchestra, so that shortly the three formed
the habit of coming home together. Then Helena had invited Siegmund to
her home; then the three friends went walks together; then the two went
walks together, whilst Louisa sheltered them.
Helena had come to read his loneliness and the humiliation of his lot.
He had felt her blue eyes, heavily, steadily gazing into his soul, and
he had lost himself to her.