But the thought of his own expunging from the picture was very bitter.
“Like the puff from the steamer’s funnel, I should be gone.”
He looked at himself, at his limbs and his body in the pride of his maturity. He was very beautiful to himself.
“Nothing, in the place where I am,” he said. “Gone, like a puff of steam that melts on the sunshine.”
Again Siegmund looked at the sea. It was glittering with laughter as at a joke.
“And I,” he said, lying down in the warm sand, “I am nothing. I do not count; I am inconsiderable.”
He set his teeth with pain. There were no tears, there was no relief. A convulsive gasping shook him as he lay on the sands. All the while he was arguing with himself.
“Well,” he said, “if I am nothing dead I am nothing alive.”
But the vulgar proverb arose—“Better a live dog than a dead lion,” to answer him. It seemed an ignominy to be dead. It meant, to be overlooked, even by the smallest creature of God’s earth. Surely that was a great ignominy.
Helena, meanwhile, was bathing, for the last time, by the same sea-shore with him. She was no swimmer. Her endless delight was to explore, to discover small treasures. For her the world was still a great wonder-box which hid innumerable sweet toys for surprises in all its crevices. She had bathed in many rock-pools’ tepid baths, trying first one, then another. She had lain on the sand where the cold arms of the ocean lifted her and smothered her impetuously, like an awful lover.