Landscape with Figures 27 – Fraser · Verses Across
Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 27Chapter 26
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Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 27
Chapter 26
FraserEnglish
Late at night, when the moon was up and Ruby and the rest of the household were asleep, Lychnis crept from the curtains of her black, roomy bed, and stole out on the verandah. Ambrose perceived her, standing in the moon like a pink crêpe-de-Chine ghost with a white core, her feet together and her hands behind her head, in a lovely, dart-like attitude, as if she were balancing for a flight into the scented, dark heart of the foliage. Waiting a moment to observe accurately the excellent shape of her head, with the hair drawn in to the neck, and to commit to memory certain curves of her bust, which slightly lifted the front of her glimmering shift and purified the soul like a vision of the Grail, he stirred. She turned, smiled, and vanished, returning again with a wrap like a mist about the moon. They sat side by side.
“It is hot, is it not?” she asked.
“I was composing my account of the day,” he answered. “I want your impressions.”
“Do you record impressions of all of us?” she inquired.
“Most of you, from time to time, tell me things that are of interest.”
“Of interest! You have interests, of course. One forgets that.”
“Oh yes, I have interests. To record with accuracy the essentials of an episode—that is one of them.”
“What an interest! Really, an interest is not very interesting—not so interesting as a passion. You have no passions?”
“They only cloud the vision of clear-eyed desire,” he answered—“in fact, they actually prevent attainment.”
“I’m afraid I’ve got a passion,” she observed—“a sort of general, unattached passion. If it suddenly fastened on someone the results might be frightful.”
“Abeyance it, and give me to-day’s impressions.”
“Oh, impressions! Well, in the first place, it’s hot. Then—I don’t quite know what impressions I have. I mean, they may come from inside me. Can one make impressions on oneself?”
“Let’s hear.”
“Well, I have the idea that life may have some point, after all—that there may be a moment when you can say, Now one has really flowered into a moment of existence between nothing and nothing. I desire to exist, to be—not merely to remain a vague thing, an I, that cannot possess a single experience. One is only the beginning of a being, the material for one.”
“True. But you think you may be about to begin to exist. What are the symptoms?”
“I don’t quite know. How shall I put it?” She considered the question in silence. Then: “Would you say there was something unusually splendid and beautiful about the night?”
“Perhaps there is, now you mention it.”
“Do you happen to notice anything more than ordinarily intoxicating in the scent of the trees?”
He sniffed. “Perhaps, now you point it out.”
“Have you by any chance a sort of feeling that out there in the darkness, in a halo of extreme darkness, there might be some unseen experience that would complete you?”
“Um! I recognize the state of mind you describe as one which is familiar to human beings.”
She rose and stepped from the verandah down on to the lawn. Some jewel on her slipper shone in the grass like a glow-worm. He followed and walked beside her.
“Those are my impressions,” she said. The moon shone in her eyes through a hank of hair.
“The condition,” he lectured, “is the condition of one whose generalized passion, as I think you called it, is about to be attached to an object.”
“Oh!” She made a fox-face at him and led the way up a path in the bamboo grove. Presently they were hidden there, and the round moon hung in a deep sky behind a delicate pattern of leaves. “Sultry, is it not?” she continued, and loosened her wrap. She glimmered, in her frail gown, like a firefly or some sort of bamboo-fairy. “I would like ... it would be cool. One would bathe in night ... I might, almost, with only you here.” She stood looking at him, as if she really were considering it. Or was there even a mocking? Then “Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed, and shrouded her bosom in her wrap, “do you think Yuan might see us?”
“I fancy he would hardly be looking,” Ambrose replied.
“I really did think of doing it,” she asserted. “Has my reality-sense gone wrong? It seems quite odd that I should hesitate, with only you here, and in fairyland. Of course, with others about, reality is different. But you and I live in heaven, don’t we? I presume a person will be naked there? So you think the man on the island would not be looking. He does strike one as being a gentleman.”
“Does he please you?”
“I find him mysterious. What Ruby dislikes about him, I like—I mean the feeling that a cold and merciless god is looking at you. I wish I could be as unself-conscious as that. It’s like being looked at by something impersonal—the wind, the sky. Do you think he is a man? Or some human spirit of the mountains? You do not think him supercilious, do you? Those moth-eyebrows, I mean, and that slanting glance.”
“I think his mouth remarkable,” said Ambrose.
“Yes. It’s so small and innocent and unpitying, like a flower that can’t feel, or suffer, or know of its own destruction. A mouth that would look the same in torture. You can use that, Ambrose.” He smiled. “A mouth that he surely never uses to eat or kiss with. Will you use some of these words when you are writing in your diary?”
“Possibly. Do you understand all that he says?”
“What is the difficulty? I don’t find it a matter of understanding. I don’t have to say to myself, ‘What does he mean?’ I feel it in my bones.”
Ambrose pondered. “Perhaps you have the same means of consciousness as these Chinese.” He remembered her remarkable insights.
“Do you suppose I am a Sage?” she asked.
“At any rate,” he replied, “you resemble them in certain respects. You are at bottom only interested in what they would call the reality behind the flow of phenomena. You actually do live in constant touch with it, and find it exciting. Nothing else will ever quite give you satisfaction. It is a faculty which men of action lose. If they didn’t the flow of phenomena would cease.”
She stripped the dark leaves one by one from a bamboo.
“And what about men who record action and inaction with equal dispassion?”
“Oh,” he answered, “they also sometimes get in touch with reality, in a mild way. But about Yuan. What does he tell you?”
“He told me that when he has once thoroughly investigated the nature of objects, and understood the identity of all things, he will do as his great-grandfather wishes—abandon all desire, and wholly give himself up to what he calls the unnameable. But he will go much farther than his great-grandfather, he says. Already he is convinced of the ultimate unreality of the world. He wishes one day to leave the world of relativity, to contemplate Nature in its absolute aspect, and finally to sleep a white and dreamless sleep of the mind, knowing only what is beyond mind. This is what he said, and in this state he won’t know his nose from his mouth, and his flesh and bones will be dissolved, and he will drift with the wind, not knowing whether he is the wind itself or a leaf riding on it.”
“In old age,” said Ambrose, “he will come down to the less picturesque and more human mysticism of his great-grandfather. But first he has, as you say, to put away desire.”
“He often does, already,” she answered eagerly. “He fasts in heart. It is quite simple, apparently. You only forget there is a you, and when there’s no you it can’t have desires.”
“Quite simple.”
“He says it is the more subtle desires, the desires of the intellect, that trouble him.”
“No doubt they do. And in other matters he is without passions?”
“As far as I can see. Well—he’s not a neuter.”
“He has the eye of a man?”
She hesitated. “Of more than a man.”
“It has expression in it—warmth, feeling, electricity?”
“I don’t know. I cannot say what there is in his eyes. I can only say that they are not dead. They have looked straight at mysterious things, and they are unreadable. All his face is unreadable. He is like rocks and forests. His eyes are the mysterious presences that are among trees. And they slant beautifully.”
“And what is your chief feeling about him?”
“If only I could always think of him as a figure on a vase....”
She smiled at Ambrose faintly, enigmatically, baffling further inquiry. Strange creature, she seemed to him, neither child nor woman—at any rate half-fairy. “I don’t dare look at him very close,” she concluded. “He’s so still, so different. If he came walking by now in a meditation I should shiver. Oh! listen, Ambrose. Someone really is coming!”
Ambrose stepped back into the bamboo thicket, and the shimmering, scented girl shrank in under his arm. There were voices, in English and Chinese—chiefly little exclamations and some laughter. Whoever it was passed on and the voices died out in the forest.
“Quentin,” whispered Ambrose, “and some young women we don’t know.”
They emerged on the white moonlit lawn, crossed the shadow of a great cedar, and entered the house.
