'That's according to my intensity,' laughed Hampson. 'I can open the
blue heaven with looking, and push back the doors of day a little, and
see--God knows what! One of these days I shall slip through. Oh, I am
perfectly sane; I only strive beyond myself!' 'Don't you think it's wrong to get like it?' asked Siegmund.
'Well, I do, and so does everybody; but the crowd profits by us in the
end. When they understand my music, it will be an education to them; and
the whole aim of mankind is to render life intelligible.' Siegmund pondered a little....
'You make me feel--as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,'
he said slowly.
The young man smiled, then looked down at the wall, where his own hands
lay white and fragile, showing the blue veins.
'I can scarcely believe they are me,' he said. 'If they rose up and
refused me, I should not be surprised. But aren't they beautiful?' He looked, with a faint smile, at Siegmund.
Siegmund glanced from the stranger's to his own hands, which lay curved
on the sea-wall as if asleep. They were small for a man of his stature,
but, lying warm in the sun, they looked particularly secure in life.
Instinctively, with a wave of self-love, he closed his fists over
his thumbs.
'I wonder,' said Hampson softly, with strange bitterness, 'that she
can't see it; I wonder she doesn't cherish you. You are full and
beautiful enough in the flesh--why will she help to destroy you, when
she loved you to such extremity?' Siegmund looked at him with awe-stricken eyes. The frail, swift man,
with his intensely living eyes, laughed suddenly.
'Fools--the fools, these women!' he said. 'Either they smash their own
crystal, or it revolts, turns opaque, and leaps out of their hands. Look
at me, I am whittled down to the quick; but your neck is thick with
compressed life; it is a stem so tense with life that it will hold up by
itself. I am very sorry.' All at once he stopped. The bitter despair in his tone was the voice of
a heavy feeling of which Siegmund had been vaguely aware for some weeks.
Siegmund felt a sense of doom. He laughed, trying to shake it off.
'I wish I didn't go on like this,' said Hampson piteously. 'I wish I
could be normal. How hot it is already! You should wear a hat. It is
really hot.' He pulled open his flannel shirt.
'I like the heat,' said Siegmund.