Page:The Trespasser, Lawrence, 1912.djvu/236

228 activity quite apart from his will or his consciousness, jogging and pulling him awake. At eight o’clock he sat up. A cramped pain in his thumbs made him wonder. He looked at them, and mechanically shut them again under his fingers into the position they sought after two hours of similar constraint. Siegmund opened his hands again, smiling.

“It is said to be the sign of a weak, deceitful character,” he said to himself.

His head was peculiarly numbed; at the back it felt heavy, as if weighted with lead. He could think only one detached sentence at intervals. Between whiles there was a blank, grey sleep or swoon.

“I have got to go and meet Helena at Wimbledon,” he said to himself, and instantly he felt a peculiar joy, as if he had laughed somewhere. “But I must be getting ready. I can’t disappoint her,” said Siegmund.

The idea of Helena woke a craving for rest in him. If he should say to her, “Do not go away from me; come with me somewhere,” then he might lie down somewhere beside her, and she might put her hands on his head. If she could hold his head in her hands—for she had fine, silken hands that adjusted themselves with a rare pressure, wrapping his weakness up in life—then his head would gradually grow healed, and he could rest. This was the one thing that remained for his restoration—that she should with long, unwearying gentleness put him to rest. He longed for it utterly—for the hands and the restfulness of Helena.

“But it is no good,” he said, starting like a drunken man from sleep. “What time is it?”