Landscape with Figures 37 – Fraser · Verses Across
Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 37Chapter 36
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Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 37
Chapter 36
FraserEnglish
In the afternoon, lying idle and alone on the verandah, she reflected that she had not spoken to Terence Fitzgerald for a long time. She could not remember that he had looked at her with hate or resentment. He had been aloof, but that was his habit, and it might be that still he was bound to her in spirit, not resenting her actions. So she went to her bedroom, put on a twelfth-century robe of amber with a design of black and red butterflies, sped across the lawn, and slid through the bamboo-forest, that was heavy and dark with summer, to the tiled watchtower.
She climbed the stairs, peering through little windows that she passed, and came to his blue-tiled room. It was littered with painting apparatus. He sat at the window, in his bard-like, painter’s gown, with his hands clasped, looking sadly out over the quivering bamboo grove. When she came in his great eyes filled with fire and his voice rang with joy.
“At last the high gods have told you to come?” Then reproach shadowed his face. “But in that alien dress. This is not Lychnis, not my divine inspiration materialized.”
“I have abandoned the other dress,” she replied, “for ever.”
“For ever!”
“I must look the part I am going to play.”
“But we are going back. Lord Sombrewater has decided.” He spoke with great earnestness.
“Are we? Not quite yet perhaps.” She concealed her meaning, giving him great distress. They sat together in the wide window, on a ledge of pale yellow tiles. The poet eyed her long and dreamily; sometimes (through dreaming) his knee touched hers, or his hand, if he spoke, found it necessary to pat her fingers or her shoulder. The innocence of the poet permitted itself some intimacies. But they woke no thrill in her. She only leaned out and caressed the close ivy, or gazed up at the swifts circling over a group of elms in the midst of the bamboo.
“The dress is alien, but it is enchanting,” he said, after a pause. “It falls about you like an amber spell.”
“Paint me,” she replied. “I came to be painted, as promised.”
He obeyed. “I believe it is a spell,” he went on. “You are under a spell, woven on you by your Chinese. The robe has definitely altered your aura.”
“Is that the case? Tell me, has Yuan got an aura?”
“As far as I can discover,” said Terence, with the air of making a mysterious confidence, “he has got practically nothing else.”
“You mean—no body?”
“No corporeal habitation at all—not to speak of. Does that interest you? Is it a point of any importance?”
But she was watching the swifts, and only threw out an aside: “You must write an article, ‘The Influence of Environment on the Aura.’”
“But it is profound, I can tell you—in fact, it is disconcerting. I cannot understand these people. It is all part and parcel of the mysterious, sinister unresponsiveness of the place. I am unhappy here.” His grey eyes were mournful. “I sit all day without any illumination, unvisited by any messenger from those mysterious worlds that touch so closely on ours. The astral plane is quite closed to me.”
“Something has gone wrong with the trapdoor,” she ventured, unsympathetically.
“Unvisited by anyone,” he added, with meaning. But she was absorbed in the gliding swifts.
“I believe some evil spirit on the Other Side has done this by way of a joke. Those three friends of yours, Lychnis, are elementals, vampires.”
“It was you brought us here,” she threw out, with her eyes on the sky. “The Peach-blossom People—pink feet, I remember.”
“It was to punish me for some error. They have brought me here and blown out the candle of my vision. I cannot contemplate. My harp and my tongue are silent; my hand is paralysed. And now the word descends on me in the mists of morning that I must arise and go back to Ireland. Everything is so designed and so finished, so dead; and I find your friends so on top of life, so beyond the capacity to feel the world’s sorrow, so smug.”
She spoke to the bamboo grove. “And so clean. And everyone is so happy. And inspiration only comes to you when you are in an untidy, poverty stricken, romantic country where the people are superstitious and incompetent. In your Paradise everyone must be Celtic and ridiculous. To be poetical, to have beautiful fancies and run to press with them is diseased. You dress up the cold substance of experience with starry crowns and gauze wings to make it look like fairies. A country should produce either men who can think straight or men who can live hard—especially the first. That is what compels me in a man.”
The wild anger that flashed in his eyes died down when she suddenly turned her face.
“There is distress in your eyes, not scorn.” His concern became apparent in a disposition to offer her the protection of his bosom.
At that moment, indeed, if Terence wanted Ireland, Lychnis wanted England. Hypnotized by the wheeling of the swifts over the elms, she had seen her home, and the pull at her was agonizing. The elm-clump beyond the sea of bamboo was an island of the familiar in a sea of strangeness. She suffered an intolerable desire for England, for the Georgian house, for the tennis-lawns, the stables, the cornfields. Her nerves stormed for the satisfaction that those old habits could give, and her more complex desire for the undefined satisfaction that she was pursuing in the Peach-blossom Valley all but suffered shipwreck. But she gave no hint of this to the poet. He was friendly to her, but because he loved her she must put him far away, increasing her isolation. They sat in stillness and silence while the blazing summer sun sank down the afternoon sky and the swifts mounted and swerved and flickered high up over the elms.
