Part 13

Lychnis closed her eyes, not caring to learn whether the slender young lady had also learnt at the same knee. Quentin, in his hateful irresponsibility, she savagely reflected, knew no restraints. But how would it be to spend the rest of her life among these twittering golden mice? The sad one, the intelligent one, perhaps she would not lightly permit herself what seemed to Lychnis to require the profound assent of reason and imagination. Yuan might take her away, of course. She suffered a wave of anger that he did not come.

39

Yuan was away in the mountains, and as day after day passed without him Lychnis sank deeper into doubt and misery. Then at last he came back, sought her out, spent all his time with her, and they began to weave their lives into one strand. They spent days and nights in the Flying Dragon, often at great distances from the valley; or sometimes they sought strange experiences among the neighbouring forests and crags; and the summer wore on to its full splendour. Afterwards she gave Ambrose some account of these various experiences, and he chose three or four to illustrate the progress of her relations with Yuan.

She began to be influenced increasingly, it appears, by the silent and deliberate guidance of his mind. He had means of conveying his thoughts to her without speech, and this means he used more and more effectively as their intimacy deepened. One afternoon of serene and golden beauty they were strolling, steeped in this conversation, through a birch-wood among the hills. They came upon three Rishi, or mountain wizards, contemplating the smoke of incense in a green circle under the trees. Behind the Rishi was a porcelain image, shrined among leaves, a thing of infinite stillness. The two friends silently joined the group; Yuan leaned against a birch trunk, chin in hand. Lychnis lay prone. But from time to time she looked round at Yuan, for he seemed to have withdrawn his mind from her, to have plunged himself, without thought for her, in the contemplation of the smoke of incense. And the three Rishi were of the most repulsive ugliness—the first huge and sensual, with a belly that burst through filthy rags, distended ears, and the face of a demon of wrath; the second small and thin, with the face of a froward newt; the third deformed in the spine, crab-armed, lascivious and cruel. They took no notice whatever of the newcomers, and sat for so long in a tremendous immobility, like that of the brooding porcelain figure, that the flap of a leaf overhead reverberated through the forest and seemed to echo down long passages in the mind. Their foul and repulsive appearance began to be more incongruous with so profound a stillness; their ugliness was so clearly not the sign of any present passion that they seemed to grow unreal. They might be about to vanish. She suddenly perceived in their faces the signs of immortal, worldforgetting youth. Then came a solitary message from Yuan, that these were men who had left behind them the passions of the world and given themselves to the experience of reality. “It is the presence of reality,” he said to her mind, “that displays the unreality of the outward world.” The wrathful one stirred faintly at the passage of thought from mind to mind; his wrinkled eyelids perceptibly twitched.

Yuan returned to the contemplation, and Lychnis found herself being drawn in—wandering, rather, in a world of fancies on the edge of what was too cold and uncongenial for her to enter. At first the sensations in her body intensified. There was an itch for movement in legs and fingers. She was acutely aware of the thrust of her chin in her hand, the strain of the muscles at waist and abdomen, a fly buzzing in her hair, a pebble under her knee. But a gentle wind played on her calves and head. Discomforts faded. She became aware of the beautiful lines and relations of her body. She relaxed, and the tree-roots on which she was lying seemed to embrace her, to gain contact with her; the life of the tree gained contact with her life. She turned on her back in the embrace of the birch-tree, and began pondering on the delicate tracery of leaves, swaying and glowing in the peaceful sky. She was in a world of trees—birch, poplar, chestnut and ash; tall silver trunks, brown twisted trunks, smooth boles, tender shoots, branches carrying a weight of ivy; green tranquil leaves, broad, flat leaves hanging on long stems, white fluttering leaves like clouds of butterflies; in a world of pale green and misty substance, and deep green with dark, lucid caves, splashes of golden yellow, blurs of red-brown. There was an imperceptible, infinite rustling, an unseen flitting of birds, sometimes a note; a tranquil diffused light, and beyond the tree-tops an immense pure well and medium of light, a warm sun-drenched region of inter-stellar space, longed for by the senses. The roots under her body stretched up to a silver trunk that lifted its weight of foliage into the world of foliage and light, lifting her spirit with it. She was among myriads of leaves, exulting, whispering choirs. It seemed to her that the spirits of those who have loved the light of the sky dwelt in them, tasting the sun and the warm winds, saturated with light, with air, with the unseen medium of life and being. A profound calm, a strength of reposed, victorious soul, pervaded the leaves, a dignity of that which fears neither life nor death, not subject to them. Sometimes a bevy of young leaves fluttered with a gust of angelic laughter, or there was a vast stir of passionless conversation, a communion of those who are beyond passion, reposing in the myriad forest leaves. She felt, certainly, a presence. It was what she had perceived in the hideous faces of the Rishi. A presence that was not a presence; a presence seen in the structure of beauty, but yet it was not beauty; she found it also in music, in a formula, in the valley, in the eyes of Yuan, but it was not any of these; not happiness or unhappiness, nor life or death, but pre-existent and yet non-existent—such phrases from Yuan’s conversation came to her mind. She turned her gaze to the serene and smiling face of the porcelain figure among the leaves. It was a thing of great stillness. It was inactive, but it seemed charged with activity. “It lives,” was her first thought; and pat came the silent answer from Yuan: “It more than lives. There is more than life.” A vista was opened to her. The presence in the life of the trees, in the not-life of the figure, in the unreal faces of the Rishi, was the same presence—the intangible, the unnameable. She perceived a reality outside thought, unhuman and without the warmth and pleasure of thought, a reality that she could not grasp with mind or senses; but the experience of it brought joy.

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.

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.”