Landscape with figures
And dimly, only dimly, she felt Yuan beside her in the sea of forest
thoughts, leaf thoughts, as if he guided her where she floated. In
the apprehension of him, in that realm of experience, there was no
distaste. She felt closer to him when her senses were submerged. She
was where there are no distinctions of this and that.
Her thoughts were broken into by spoken words. The Rishi were coming
to the end of their contemplation, and they returned to the world in a
state of unhuman gaiety. There still sounded in them the mirth of the
Paradise where they had been.
Their gaiety abruptly came to an end. “There are two imperfect beings
in contemplation with us,” said the demon of wrath.
“One,” added the newt, “is very imperfect, being full of half-thoughts,
and even whole thoughts, and long pauses of irrelevant dreaming. Those
who have thoughts in their minds should not gather round the smoke of
incense.”
“The other,” contributed the third, “is nearly thoughtless, nearly
unconscious; but he impedes the flow of reality into himself and among
us by some attachment to the passions and desires of men.”
“A brother!” piped the newt, with a gurgle of newt-like laughter, “an
immortal, has drowned the never-ending merriment of the immortals in a
draught of red and serious desire!”
Yuan did not change countenance, but he drew her away, and they were
followed as they went down the rocky path among the birches by sounds
of immense hilarity. This is the life he is destined for by family
tradition, reflected Lychnis, and he is to become like these, though
not so ugly.
His conversation on the way down was somewhat of that which is more
important than desire and life, beside which human pleasure is
insignificant. “Those,” he said, explaining the point of view of his
three acquaintances, “who have once found the satisfaction of non-being
desire it, and they shun the things that belong to existence, as, for
example, friendship and love.”
That might not be inconvenient, in some circumstances, was the thought
that presented itself to her attention. It came forcibly at first, then
faded in a myriad quivering forest thoughts, at the heart of which, in
a radiation of light and power, through a wisp of the smoke of incense,
the image of the porcelain saint eternally smiled. An unearthly smile,
it was, without scorn and without pity—a smile that made all human
experience seem irrelevant, and all human language conceited.
40
At the height of summer the rains came; the fiery flowers and the
fantastic hills were extinguished in a blur of rain, in a steam and
smell of rain throughout the valley, in clouds of rain drifting among
the crags, arrows of rain slanting across the Lake.
For a day or two Yuan and Lychnis stayed at home, amusing themselves
in the laboratories, talking in the library, studying paintings on
silk, handling bronzes and porcelain, looking out at the rain. They
had plenty to say and do, but the deluge had a voice for Lychnis, and
she desired to feel the drench on her body, to be enveloped in the
embrace of warm rain. The third day, therefore, they took a punt and
a cormorant, and went fishing, with only the protection of a flat
umbrella, she in her glass-green silk, he in his hunting costume of
russet-brown with a note of crimson. Forthwith they were gasping under
the minute insistent drive of the myriad rain arrows. They made their
way down the squelching path, among dripping laurels, to the shore.
She laughed. “We are in the power of the rain. It’s delicious.” And he
smiled back, knowing how softly and surely the rain prevails.
“See,” he called, “the subject for a picture—Rain on a Sheet of Water
and Ducks swimming under a Willow.”
They found their punt, and she remembers the touch of his wet hand as
he helped her on board. They pushed off, and the rain fell steadily and
softly all about them. The sky was full of grey, swirling veils; pale,
driving gusts swept the leaves and the white lilies. The shore receded,
there was a blur of willows in a slant of rain, a glimpse of rock like
a grey core of rain, and then they were together in a warm, misty
oblivion.
Lychnis put up her face to the soft downpour, taking warm caresses
on her eyes, in her mouth. The rain drenched her, soaked into her
hair, smoothed the silk robe to her body so that she seemed stripped,
blinded her, beat her, knew every part of her, and prevailed. She felt
shameless and searching caresses down back and limbs, between her
breasts and over her torso, on knees and feet. The rain was possessing
her, but the face of the rain that watched her was Yuan’s. She held up
her mouth to the down-drenching lover, saying, “I adore you.”
The voice of Yuan replied, “Water-lily.” He was regarding her,
she realized, with a keen gaze, more than ordinarily prolonged and
remorseless. He held her with his gaze, as if he admitted, now, a
special relation between them, and wished her to admit it, too.
Close to her, shut in by the changing wall of rain, he seemed big
and immediate, like a god, like the rain-god. His features, his
yellow skin, his piercing eyes, the slash of crimson on his brown
tunic—sole note of colour in a drifting, grey universe—had a terrifying
distinctness. He was very close and real and living, though his
life—the life behind his unreadable eyes—was not the life of men.
Perhaps because it was not Yuan who looked at her, but the swirling
rain, not Yuan, but the voice of the universe who spoke, distaste for
his flesh vanished. Yuan was dissolved and received into the body of
the rain, and she desired him. Past and future vanished; all else was
shut out; there was no earth or heaven—only herself in a space of warm,
saturating water, floating on water; herself, a cormorant with a fish,
and the god of the universe. In his eyes, deep and unreadable and
fascinating like the black lake-water, she was about to drown.
He came towards her. She felt her hands taken. The face, impending,
intent, was close to hers. The mouth, a calm flower in the rain, was
stretched out to her.
She offered herself to the terror of his mouth and the fierce and
shining infinity that looked out of his eyes. There was no person in
them, only a stupendous power. Yuan had vanished; what held her was
not Yuan. Her own body, her own person, seemed also to dissolve and
stream away in the rain. There was a sudden blinding drive, a hurricane
embrace of rain, and in the midst of it his small mouth was a spot of
fire.
41
Next day they climbed up among the crags in gusty weather, and as
evening drew on they were overtaken by a shower. There was a mountain
temple by a torrent in the shadow of a rock. They crossed the torrent
by a bridge and took shelter.
While Yuan contemplated a bronze image of Kwannon, Lychnis looked
out at the crags, the pines, the valley below where the torrent fell
booming. Far away was the Lake and the island in a mist of rain. Or
sometimes she watched Yuan. She had abandoned everything to him, and
waited for what he might be about to command. She was living in the
intoxication of what seemed an unending now, and made no conjectures as
to what might happen when now ended.
All day their talk had been of the regions where he had taken her with
the power of his mind (and where she had followed easily), of tree
life, of insect life (a weird region), of chill regions beyond, out of
which life takes origin. This seemed to her cold talk for lovers, and
she fancied she was ready that it should become warmer.
She called to him: “Yuan.”
His voice answered from within: “Lychnis.”
“We are like the gods up here. Down there I see the world, where Wang
Li is.” Her mind did not admit the thought of others on the far side of
the Lake.
“Do the gods live for ever, and are they eternally happy?” she asked.
Her thoughts were all of an immense duration of happiness in some
illimitable space of light, with dim shapes of mountains and pavilions.
But a shadow fell across her mind, an annihilating thought of a
cessation, of a space of nothing, of her lover wilfully dissolving in
emptiness, deliberately ceasing to be.
At her question, a swift, stony chill seemed to pass across his face.
“Your question has no relation to reality,” he coldly replied.
“I know you think it,” she answered. “I see quite well that it is
absurd. You have made me understand that life is relative and all that.
But it is a queer thought for a woman in love. My brains have all gone,
you see, because of it, and I—the I that is the living Lychnis, and
this body—clamour to be recognized.”
She had not spoken to him or to herself so boldly before, but the
thought of what he was always calling the eternal, non-existing
Lychnis, with no body for caresses, the Lychnis pre-existent in a
state precedent to matter and intelligence and life, was not congenial
to her. But was she ready for an alternative? At once her words
presented their own meaning clearly to her mind, and she experienced
a terror that she chose to find delicious. There he was, tall and
brooding, near her in the gloom of the evening. She was ready to
think of herself as having been seized, as captive to the masked,
expressionless god.
A gust of wind boomed in the roof of the hut.
“It is chilly here,” she said. “Are we going away to-night to the
forests in the south, where it is so warm?”
He stood close to her, and her orchid-petal hands lay in his. She
divined a formidable debate in his mind, and wished that she could have
read the eyes that gazed past her through the window. If he did not
take her to the forests.... If they stayed here.... This might become
her bridal chamber. She let the thought take her fully, and in the face
of reality looked through the window for an escape. There was only rain
and frowning crags and the valley, and perhaps the shadow of a picture
of someone far off who could have given her advice. The bridal chamber!
She was happy as she was, after all, in a now that might as well be
unending, and perhaps, if she was to be possessed by Yuan, it would
have to be in the glow of that moment of assent in the rain-world, now
somewhat past.
He made no reply to her thoughts. With him it was crisis. He chose the
flowering moment of desire to show his contempt for it. Most probably
the moments of silence were an eternity of the anguish of renunciation.
“Is anything the matter?” She caught some faint shadow of dismay on the
strong mask of his visage. “Are you displeased?”
There was no answer. There had been a change in Yuan, like the change
that comes over a man at the moment of death. Her breath troubled her,
and she beat in terror at the gates of his mind. “Oh, Yuan! Yuan!
Answer for pity’s sake!” But he had closed the gates of his mind
against her for ever. She stormed, now, to come in, to be his, to
accept the whole sequel of her actions, to accept the experience to
which she had given herself in its entirety. But the experience had
committed treason against her; she was forsaken of God.
“Oh what has happened? What is the matter?” she pleaded. “Why have
you gone cold to me?” But she pleaded with a porcelain idol in a dark
mountain temple. Her lands still lay in his like lilies in the hands
of an image. She tore them away, and took hold of the window-sill and
bowed her head into them and sobbed, until the fear of the universe
that had turned mercilessly against her silenced even her sobbing with
its formidable cold. Then there was a movement on the still face of
the image; the god put out a ray of protection against the terror that
threatened to overwhelm her, but he left her without refuge from her
grief and dismay. She was to face that, he seemed cruelly to determine,
unaided.