“I believe we are lost!” Helena interrupted him.
“Lost! What matter!” he answered indifferently, and Helena pressed him tighter, hearer to her in a kind of triumph. “But did we not come this way?” he added.
“No. See”—her voice was reeded with restrained emotion—“we have certainly not been along this bare path which dips up and down.”
“Well, then, we must merely keep due eastward, towards the moon pretty well, as much as we can,” said Siegmund, looking forward over the down, where the moon was wrestling heroically to win free of the pack of clouds which hung on her like wolves on a white deer. As he looked at the moon he felt a sense of companionship. Helena, not understanding, left him so much alone; the moon was nearer.
Siegmund continued to review the last hours. He had been so wondrously happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had been wandering in another—a glamorous, primordial world.
“I suppose,” he said to himself, “I have lived too intensely, I seem to have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now they’ve gone my house is weak.”
So he struggled to diagnose his case of splendour and sickness. He reviewed his hour of passion with Helena.
“Surely,” he told himself, “I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt my cup. My soul seems to leak out—I am half here, half gone away. That’s why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.”
Then he came to the hour of Helena’s strange ecstasy over him. That, somehow, had filled him with passionate grief. It was happiness concentrated one drop too keen, so that what should have been vivid wine was like a pure poison scathing him. But his consciousness, which had been unnaturally active, now was dulling. He felt the blood flowing vigorously along the limbs again, and stilling has brain, sweeping away his sickness, soothing him.
“I suppose,” he said to himself for the last time, “I suppose living too intensely kills you, more or less.”