Landscape with figures
the cold hand of death. It was the dread that he would paralyse her
life and make her sit there for ever in a cold and spiritual trance.
There was some unknown and compelling reason why she should escape;
there was some urgent and unrecognized desire. The satisfaction of her
being, she now knew, was elsewhere. With a cry she fled from that bare,
moon-swept pavilion, and left the symbol of her experience staring into
the moonlight.
43
Ambrose finds it difficult to decide from the recital that Lychnis
gave him what was her dominant mood during the following days. There
was an element she did not dwell on, but it was important—an element
of incredulity, perhaps, at finding her grief supportable. We see her
flitting about the woods, driven, in company with the leaves; the
wind was her own bewilderment. Mostly she went with her eyes on the
ground. Sometimes, no doubt, she would stamp her foot in anger for the
pleasant days Yuan had ruined, and wring her hands out of helplessness.
But it seems there were also days of which she tells little—days when
she surprisingly lost her trouble in adoration of their splendid
heedlessness. That heedlessness was a character of the universe with
which she now discovered in herself a surprising affinity.
Of one critical day she told nothing at all until long after, and for
some time Ambrose left blank pages in the diary. But one day he was
able to fill them in.
All was turning brown in the woods. Not a green leaf of summer.
Nothing but early twilight falling over the mountain hut, and sad
autumn rain. Yet, oddly, she did not feel a commensurate gloom. The
clouds drove across the sky, now lowering and resentful, now swift
and angry, now melting in vapour of tears, now piling onward high and
contemptuous. But her spirit did not answer these changes; it remained
calm; it derived a satisfaction from the magnificence of the moving
cloudscape; it exulted, even, in the deep and steady passion of the
waterfall pouring from the wooded shoulder of a mountain, in the vast
tranquillity of the high crags that floated above seas of rain. She
stood in the shelter of an overhung rock—a tiny, green-robed figure in
the majesty of the mountains—and examined her state of mind. Where was
her grief? Washed away on the rain that swept in gusts over the distant
Lake. Where was the bundle of moods that made up her troublesome self?
Blown away on the winds that tore through the pines, shattered and
obliterated like the leaves of summer. Had she any regret for her
loneliness? She was incredulous to find that she desired no companion,
that she had need of no human being. Had she any fear of the solitude
of the mountains? She looked round at the wizard shapes of pine-tree
and rock to see if she could frighten herself, and there was nothing in
her mind but a strange, sweet, and growing exultation. All alone under
the huge overhung crag she laughed her tiny insect laugh—and checked
herself, for surely it was absurd that she felt no grief. But there it
was, a sensation as if waves out of heaven had flowed into the body
that her self, Lychnis, had vacated. Such a thing was preposterous, she
decided; and pursued her way homeward, resolvedly denying the almost
intolerable pleasure that invaded her. She walked with the heavy gait
of one who suffers.
Then, fronting her, in a thicket by a glade, she perceived the merry,
blanched face of Wang Li, peeping among brown leaves that fluttered
and danced on his aged bald head. A wild fawn nuzzled in his hand. He
called her, and she approached him with the demure gait of one who is
sorrow-stricken, but underneath this dissembling her heart beat like a
bird’s, for she seemed to be standing within the play of forces that
flowed from him. Out of the corner of her eye she stole a glance at
the smiling, scant-bearded visage. He was unguessably old, yet younger
than the flowers that had been in the glade that April. He was full of
a frightening, unhuman wisdom; on his face there played the wrinkles
of a vast laughter. And unmistakably she found in herself something
corresponding.
“So Yuan has abandoned you,” he said, “and you do not know where to
find some relief from your temporary sorrow.”
She caught his eye. There were lightnings in it before which her
dissembling vanished like silk on hot coals. She broke into peal
after peal of laughter, and Wang beat his old head in an ecstasy of
merriment. The fawn cropped the grass in complete indifference.
But swiftly she became grave again. “I do not understand myself,” she
told him.
“It is simple enough.”
“All the same, I don’t understand why, when I was so dearly in love
with Yuan....”
“In love with your left knee!”
“What do you mean then? Was I not in love?” She reflected, almost
prepared, now, to believe it. “It is true, there was always a
hesitation. But I can explain that.”
He doubled up with laughter.
“I really can. There was a difference of flesh between us. He was a
foreigner, you see.”
The echoes of his laughter drifted to the mountains.
She was a little mortified. “It is insulting of you not to believe
me. I only know that I shall never love any man again.” Now the deep
pleasures of the summer came back to her heart, giving it a twist.
The fountains of Wang’s mirth were too much for him. His bleached and
shrunken old body could hardly contain the elemental upwelling. The
universe itself laughed at her in his old eyes as it had rained in
Yuan’s. “Let us walk,” he gasped; “let us go home.” He wiped tears from
his cheeks. Then once more the beauty of it overwhelmed him. “She can
never love again!” He held his sides.
“Well,” she expostulated, “there is nobody. I could not love my father
or my old friend Ambrose. The rest bore me. I do not want love. I have
this queer new pleasure in me instead.”
They scrambled down the valleys, he subject to recurrent fits of
amusement. She could not withstand him, and at last allowed herself to
regard Yuan’s seriousness and her own bewilderment as a joke. “What has
come to me?” she asked the old Sage.
“Death,” he answered.
Was this true? She felt as one who recognizes that a tide is about to
seize and drown her.
“If not dead, you are dying,” he continued. “Did not Yuan give you the
mystic peach that shrivels the soul and leaves a house for another
inhabitant?”
“But you said I am to love,” she protested, displaying an agitation
that came uppermost in spite of herself, an agitation that did not
really seem to belong to her. “How can I love when I am dead and have
no desire?”
“Cannot the immortal take pleasure in love—in compelling lips, in hands
that awaken, in...?” In so-and-so and in so-and-so. The old man made
her blush with his account of the delights of the senses.
“But you,” she interpolated—“you are a Sage ... you are above
desire....”
“A Sage is not necessarily a drivelling idiot,” he replied. “I am very
old. It is more than a hundred years since I was interested in what may
interest a younger man, and the immortal in-dweller has other objects
with me. But there was a time.... The unnameable, when he takes the
place of the self, has no objection whatever to making use of the
furniture. But he is master of desire.”
“But why did I not stay with Yuan and meditate with him for ever?”
“Because you are a woman and have more sense. Oh, the seriousness of
these young men! He will get over it, as I did. But he has done his
duty.”
“But why did he give me the peach?” She had so many questions to ask.
“The immediate occasion was your firmness of heart in following the
strange beckonings of the imagination. In consequence you have lost
your soul and gained the no-soul. This is immortality. Regard yourself
as one of the lucky ones of the world, for infinity now lives in you.
Joy and sorrow will be lost in transcending experience. None can
withstand the silent and invisible force that possesses you, and nobody
can take it away. Accept what has happened to you, young woman. Regard
yourself as being dead to the world, and at the same time, when your
lover kisses that coral mouth, bite his lip with your little teeth.”
They had come to the shore of the Lake, and he took her back to the
island in his boat. She gave herself to the tide of immortality that
was flowing into her throat, choking the life in her. She had become
very serious now, but suddenly he looked up and said: “What fools
we are to speak what cannot be spoken, imagining that what we say
corresponds with reality!” His ironical laughter rang out over the Lake.
44
Once more Ambrose is sitting with Lychnis on the verandah. It is a warm
autumn afternoon, and they are taking pleasure in the sunset glory of
aster, dahlia and chrysanthemum that surrounds the Pavilion, and in the
golden cloud-rack of leaves that now drifts on the lawn.
She came back, he tells us, so self-possessed, this once moody and
relentless fairy. She had a certain calm dignity, unself-conscious and
convincing—because, as Wang told her, she had lost her self in what is
more authoritative than self; she had opened the way and permitted in
herself the play of forces that brook no questioning, at once terrible
and lovely.
She was perched on the rail of the verandah, clinging to a post, in a
fit of meditation, and sometimes a leaf drifted against her cheek or
shoulder.
“I realize now,” she said, “how completely I had forgotten you all. I
do really think you had passed—all of you—utterly out of my mind. It
is surprising. It would have been quite easy never to see you—any of
you—again.”
“So loosely,” remarked Ambrose, “are people bound to one another! It is
true—many men might be one’s father, or one’s husband. It is a habit
formed accidentally.”
“I find it odd that my lot should have fallen with just you and the
others.”
“You do not find it disturbing that human relationships should be so
fluid, sentiment so flimsy, and the universe so heedless?”
“I find it beautiful. I should hate the world, now, if it were not all
death and change. I have no use for anything that is not inexorable. I
like the universe to stare pitilessly—with eyes resembling Yuan’s. It
is only the cold and the passionless that I can admire. Ambrose, fancy
a universe all mushy with love, like an over-ripe pear!”
“Excellent!” Ambrose remembers being conscious of enthusiasm in his
voice, more surprisingly of a flush on the flower-texture of her face.
“Yuan helped me to enter the mind of tiger and eagle, to become the
tiger and the eagle, and I found in them what I now find in myself,
something I can’t describe—something immense. I have been a tree, too,
you know, and a lotus, and a beetle. What I found in all of them Yuan
has now become. He has given himself entirely to the contemplation of
it in its nakedness, untransformed into bird, or mountain, or man.
I did not want to follow his example, I suppose, because there are
things I may find amusing in the world. Wang says that, having found
the kingdom of the unnameable, the world has been given to me as well,
and this is in order. But I think I have still just a little farther to
go. The peach hasn’t quite done its work, and when I’m entirely dead
perhaps I shall be like Yuan.”
Lord Sombrewater came along the verandah and sat down beside Ambrose.
His eye was more pheasant-like than ever. He was glum. Lychnis had
given him the outline of her story, and informed him of her willingness
to go where he liked, but she had not given him certain information.
He could have got it with a question, but he did not care at any time
to get his information by direct questioning, and this was a question
somewhat difficult to put.
Ambrose replied to her thoughts.