Part 13

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.

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 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.