Part 14

“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.

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.

“There are people,” he observed, “so securely in alliance with our friend Yuan’s unnameable that they do not fear to step down into the world and drink deeply of its pleasures.”

“You, too, have tasted—” she began, and relapsed—refused, swiftly, to meet him in a common experience. “There are so many ways of approaching what it is I desire to say,” she continued, “and no words for it. But it really doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that nothing any longer matters, except the continual experience. One is so at peace.”

“The peace of God,” Ambrose interjected.

“I suppose one must say ‘God.’ But there is a great danger of being misunderstood.”

“This experience,” he observed, “is enjoyed in various forms by many people, yet it is one experience. The truth is one truth, expressed with modifications due to climatic or other circumstances. It is named after the system of Jesus, or Mithra, or Buddha. There is the Holy Ghost, or the intent contemplation; the paradise of Nirvana or the Holy City, with tastefully-jewelled gates—a hundred different expressions of the same thing. There is a form of the experience marketed by priests, another by wine-merchants at twelve and sixpence the bottle, and this has the advantage that it augments the national revenue. But whether the experience in itself has anything at all to do with reality, we are not in a position to decide.”

“I am glad you can laugh at it,” she said, with friendliness. “It is the mark of those elected to salvation that they can laugh at themselves. Those who have known truth laugh a lot—like Wang. I have learnt that.”

“You have learnt a great deal, Lychnis.” Lord Sombrewater entered the conversation. “Does there remain any region of experience which you have not understood?”

Ambrose perceived from her enigmatic smile that she understood her father’s question. She did not seem willing to give an unequivocal answer. Lord Sombrewater had no hesitation in questioning her intimately before him, and it would have been in accordance with her own relation with him to reply plainly. But she did not answer plainly. He noted that there had been some change, and wondered whether he should not seek an opportunity to withdraw.

“There is no region of experience that I have not understood,” she replied.

“Upon exploration, I presume?” queried Lord Sombrewater.

“It is a question whether a thing that has not been physically experienced can be understood,” she murmured.

He turned his head away in swift impatience.