Landscape with figures
After a time he touched her on the shoulder and beckoned her to follow
him. She went after him into the twilight garden behind the temple, and
there he plucked a peach from a little tree and bade her eat it. “This
fruit,” he said, “is only for the favoured of God when they have become
fitted to endure deep experiences.”
Saying this he walked away, and she followed him across the torrent,
homeward through rain that beat her now and loved her no more. He held
his face from her. Once, indeed, he turned to her suddenly, and she
seemed, almost against credence, to see an expression of suffering.
But before it had gained a hold even on her memory it was gone, and he
strode on again.
42
The oppressive heat of summer was over, and during the still nights
when the lotus fades Lychnis heard of the wild geese flying southward.
She saw nothing of Yuan for nine days. But entering the summer
pavilion among the tree-tops one brilliant night of autumn she found
him seated cross-legged on the floor, in a haze of moonlight, ragged,
bare-chested, in a rapt meditation. He made no sign of having perceived
her. She sat herself down in his neighbourhood and waited, recognizing
in the moonlight—ghostly remembrance of summer sunshine she was used to
there—details of the bleached, airswept room. Her eyes were drawn to
the space of vast, shimmering sky in the door. A branch of pine thrust
across that space, she remembers, and she watched the delicate shadow
of the pine-branch swaying slightly on the bare floor, travelling
remorselessly like time towards the idol seated by the doorway. He was
so still that soon she believed herself to be dreaming.
When at last a voice issued from his profound immobility she felt the
assault of terror, as if a phantom had spoken. “There is an imperfect
being in contemplation with me,” the figure said.
“It is I, Lychnis,” she answered meekly.
He seemed scarcely aware of her. He was indeed dead in the body. “An
echo reaches me. A voice that spoke once in the world of unreality.”
His tones were the high, uncertain tones of a spirit. He turned his
face, and it was illuminated by an unearthly brilliance. It was like
talking with a god enthroned in a ghostly radiance of the night sky,
and the floor between them seemed a gulf of interstellar space.
“Here on this lonely earth,” she answered, “speaks a mouth you have
kissed.”
“What do you desire of me?”
“I desire to talk about ourselves and about love.” She was suddenly
sharp and insistent. One sees her seated on a cushion, her head bent
attentively towards him, or hanging somewhat like a child’s, and when
her head was hanging like that, one learns, it was because she had
become aware of a new, surprising element—an element of disrespect.
“Ourselves? Love? Self and love are renounced and forgotten, or if
remembered they are the remembered pain of some past life.” He spoke
like a dreamer in paradise, unwilling to wake.
“That is taking things very seriously,” she said, speaking thoughts
that astonished her as they came into her mind. “Perhaps, after all,
love is not a thing to be taken so seriously.” A quiver of pain
troubled her as she said it, remembering what delights she had thought
to obtain from life and love.
Did he stir in his cave of radiance? “The moment of love is past. It
was perfect, and needs no addition. In any sense that is not tedious it
lives forever, and may be continually enjoyed by those who live in the
blissful regions of non-being. The personal in love is nothing.”
“All the same,” she put in, “it is delicious.”
“In love,” he repeated, “there is one moment that is eternal. As in
art there is a moment of perfect balance, which cannot be added to or
diminished without ruin, so in love.”
“Then,” she said, mocking, “I am for promiscuity. The more moments the
better.”
“But the delights of the lover and the artist,” he replied, “if they
could be prolonged for ever, would not be worth even a hint of the
experience of non-being.”
Alongside this verbal exchange, alongside the mockery that had come so
unexpectedly to life in her mind, she was hurt with images of days they
had spent together. She resumed: “I will not talk mockery. Let us be
plain about the issue. We loved. We experienced the beginnings of a
perfect life together. You have broken it. You have made a renunciation
in accordance with the tradition of your family. You have sacrificed
me to attain your queer paradise. I want you to satisfy me that it was
right to do so.”
He said nothing for a long time. She thought that he might reply with
questions: whether they had indeed loved; whether their life together
would have remained perfect; whether, indeed, there had not been
already a hesitation on her part. Then he spoke:
“The supreme experience of the senses is the renunciation of love.”
This did not seem to her an answer. She still waited, and soon he
spoke again, looking steadily out through the doorway into the space
of moonlight. His face was frozen and pure. “Do you still trouble my
peace?”
“I grieve for our beautiful ruined love. I cannot, cannot forget it.”
His tones fell now with strange modulations, and there came to her
cadences of the flute he played to her in the forest. “The shadow of
the pine-branch travels across the floor, reaches my foot, passes over
my body, but does not enter me. It is thus with the memory of love.
It is thus also with the memory of the world. Around me, when I was
a boy, I saw a world of rock and grass and blue sky. Then, when I had
meditated on these, and perceived the secret life of water-meadow,
torrent and flower, the seen world dissolved. Rock and grass became
vaporous like the sky. I saw trees like apparitions, landscapes of
shifting smoke, mountains of mist beyond mountains of mist melting
endlessly away into an infinite horizon of æther. The world became a
contemplation in the smoke of incense. It has gone, and now I meditate
on what has taken its place. I am possessed of what is greater than
joy. I have come into the calm of nothingness, into the lightless and
ineffable regions of non-being, where there is neither splendour nor
darkness. It is an ecstasy. There is no ripple from the created world;
no tremor of the pain or passion of men; nothing that appertains to the
mind of men; nothing in terms of thought and feeling, of aspiration or
regret. The pure lily is no more than the filthy fungus; the loftiness
of mountains and depth of waters are as the flatness and mud of the
river-bed. I believe in the unnameable, without shape or substance,
infinite and inexpressible; one in man, plant and inanimate matter;
spirit of spirit, origin of origin, form of form. I believe in the way
that cannot be followed, the truth that cannot be taught, the life
which is more than life. It does nothing, yet there is nothing which
it does not achieve; creates all things, yet in itself is not; all
worlds and systems of worlds are born in it, yet it cannot be seen or
heard; in its nothingness life and death and all modes of conceivable
being reside; it does not exist, yet it is home to the soul of man. It
is ineffable. I therefore renounce the world. I renounce joy and pain;
the vision of spring and the solemn reaping of autumn; the delight in
mountain and tree, in cloudscape, in the fierce tiger, in the flight of
wild geese. I renounce the pride of life and the pleasure of the body,
and I renounce for ever the memory and taste of love.”
The cadences that came like waves out of the moonlit silence ceased.
His visage was white and numb. One could not tell if the deep, oblong
eyes were seeing or if they were blind. Did he breathe? Did the bare
porcelain chest move? He might have been some hypnotic image, drowning
her resentment in sleep.
But the rim of the moon came suddenly into the doorway, making a
change, releasing her from a spell. It was intolerable that he should
despise the memory of their intimacy, and reject all she had given him
of her mind and senses. “Why, why did you kiss me that time?” she
asked, in a storm of protest.
“I do not remember,” said the calm voice.
Now he seemed immensely foreign and impenetrable, as if she had been
in love with a creature. Fiercely she remembered the Jupiter swan that
had made love to her that first morning, in a fit of inexplicable
desire. Had it been like that with Yuan? No communion of spirit at
all? Her ideas about him had been fictions of the mind. The angry
desire to be kissed once again by that fiction whose mouth was a spot
of fire at once consumed her. She longed in a storm of resentment to
wake his senses again, to see those flower-lips crumpled with the
fire of passion, to see them grey with the ashes of it. But what art
had she to tempt him with? Or, indeed, what art could have equalled
the natural beauty of her shape, the fragile and intoxicating bloom
and mystery of her person, the troubled loveliness of her mouth, of
her eyes? Troubled, certainly, they were, but in them was a gleam of
that unstriving and creative energy on which her lover meditated. In
those subtle and moving relations between shoulder and breast, in the
ineffable curves of her body, shone openly his uncreated principle from
which all order and beauty proceeds.
These, maybe, were his thoughts, and evidently he perceived hers. “That
which is accidental in your loveliness has no force with me. Only the
eternal has force. The eternal shines in you.”
Once again, amazingly, there streamed up in her a fountain of mockery,
but the icy reality of his renunciation froze her mockery at her lips.
“I believe,” she said, hesitatingly—“I believe that I am more of an
adept than Yuan, for I could laugh. I could laugh like old Wang and
the Rishi. I am less bound to the world and to passion than Yuan if I
can laugh. To renounce is to be bound by the tie of renunciation.” But
no sign of emotion or any response appeared on his face, and swiftly
once more she fell under the hypnotic spell of his stillness. He could
not be mocked into life. She had to meet him in the reality in which
he rested. “I am a woman,” she said. “I see no opposition between your
unnameable and my now. Time may surely be made delicious, for the
unnameable must be in time, too, and in the usage of love. It certainly
is for a woman.”
“The supreme experience of the senses,” he repeated, “is the
renunciation of love. The renunciation is imperfect if it is only made
by the one. You have apprehended the bliss that I now experience. I
brought it to your spirit, but your own nature made you capable of
receiving it. Your thoughts and desires are not altogether of earth.
The earth in you is earth, not of human flesh, but of the narcissus.
You have eaten the mystic peach. Why cannot you therefore go all the
way with me and renounce your share of what we had in the world?”
She felt a vague terror. She faltered. “Even the narcissus needs the
usage of love.”
“Why do you not learn to attain the full ecstasy of contemplation in
the heart of the unnameable?”
“I do not desire to sit here motionless, like a dreaming flower,
without texture or colour, and receive in my dream a seed from your
dream to beget a dream.”
“It is life that is a dream,” he corrected. “To dread the unnameable is
to be a lost child that dreads to find home.”
“Home! You have found home ... through me!” She received illumination.
“You brought me here as an excuse for renunciation, as an exercise; you
used me to make your renunciation as difficult, as exquisite, and as
notable as you could. And now, perhaps, some shadow of earthly passion
makes you urge me to accompany you. I will not. I have a home for my
spirit as well....” She broke off, for now terror snatched at her like