“You woke it,” she said, “you, a poet. Say that you will bring me to the Lord Buddha.”
“That you may marry a flower! This thought is strange.”
“You conceived it,” she answered, “you, a poet.”
He was reluctant, but she was not to be prevented.
“You intend it, then?” He surrendered at last.
“I intend it.”
“And I am no more to you than a means to enjoyment I shall not share in, a pandar?” He was white and sarcastic.
“Since it is my marriage night,” she rejoined, “you may kiss me,” and gave him her arms and her mouth. She knew well of the shudder that convulsed this elegant and meditative being as he obeyed her; she saw how he regained his pale, ironical self-control.
“Bravo, sovereign reason,” she whispered, when he had himself in hand.
“Desire is transient,” he said with a wry smile. “And in any case illusory.”
“That may be,” she replied, “but I will prove it for myself.”
Presently there was a gondola, paddled by men whose bodies shone like dark bronze under the moon. They had eyes of night with a memory of sunset, and their foreheads were marked with the sign of a god. There began a journey, but she only heeded the end of it and had but an impression of scenes and episodes following one another swiftly and with queer caprice as in a dream. The gondola sped over the lagoon, propelled by the bronze men; they sang in the rhythm of their movements; their strength seemed to stream like a never-ending music. The lagoon was wide sometimes, and full of glinting palm-islands; sometimes it narrowed to a channel in a mysterious darkness of ferns. Everywhere lilies; ever the bronze figures sang an incomprehensible song; ever the deep eyes of her lover gazed into hers. But, “Faster! Faster!” she replied to his silent entreaty.
They were no longer in a gondola, but driving interminably along mounting roads, she in the disguise of a youth; and she had impressions of white houses, dim temples, offerings of roses. Then many changes passing in the dark of one night. “Are we not there yet?” she constantly asked. “Shall we not come soon to the Lord Buddha?” But her breath came faster at the thought of the fearful excursion into vacuity that she must make.
At last the road lay through temperate forests, and for the first time, when they descended from the ox-cart, and the young man led her by the hand, she took sharp note of her surroundings – an inn in a garden, a temple bright with jasmine, an image dreaming in interior gloom, and far off the shine of Himalayan snows. But how quiet the forest! How sweet the air! Her heart beat less wildly in that peace; her lover’s passion abated; they entered the forest as those who are received into the fringes of a contemplation, walking carefully, as if their movements were thoughts that might trouble the Lord Buddha’s calm. Soon they came within sight of a place, a little way off, where golden moonbeams among the trees were shafts of a temple containing some brighter radiance. There was profound silence. Beast lay quiet on the grass, bird was still on the branch, dreaming each his part within the dream of the Holy One. Her lover held back on the threshold of that silence, gazing somewhat wistfully as one who sees what he can never understand or obtain, but cannot scoff.
“You still intend it?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, emptied of all fear save the fear of that splendor.
“Alas! then farewell.”
She gave him her cheek, pitiful with the Lord Buddha’s pity, yet looking sideways toward the temple of moonbeams and starlight. She was intent on her will and scarcely felt his kisses; yet when she found herself alone, and heard his footsteps dwindling away in the thicket, and his involuntary sobbing, she wept a little for his despair and for the sadness of the world. This the Enlightened knew and fixed his thoughts on her so that she advanced further among the trees into the circle of silence, and at last was face to face with the savior of worlds, more terrible in his serenity than wrathful deities, a heavenly Being seated in contemplation too cold for the passionate human heart. He seemed not to move, not to breathe, except as she had seen an image do when she stared at it a long time; he was more than man, more than god; but the compassion of his smile, the celestial peace of his face, took away fear. She saw in his rapt gaze darkness deeper than moonless night; because the wheel of life scarcely turned she felt a silence deeper than the silence of space; she was ready to cease, and yield herself to the hidden, omnipresent and indescribable Power whose secret she had for a moment guessed at in the Lord Buddha’s eyes.
A long time passed, and she had many calm thoughts. At last a voice came from him. “What is it that you desire, thoughtful child?”
It seemed a little thing, but she told it. “I had wished to be a flower for a little while, so that I might know them, as surely you know them.”
He made no answer, there was no alteration of his countenance. She forgot her wish in the contemplation of his splendor, and after a time it seemed good to her to lie down on the soft floor and share in his dream. She seemed to be once more on a journey, a ghost inquiringly roaming a night-bound region, a spirit still imprinted with human memories, flower-ghost and maiden-ghost, able, if she desired, to enter the seed of some flower and emerge with it into the experience of light and life. She wandered in a new, spacious time of her own wherever the darkness seemed fragrant with summer, putting off her choice and always saying, “In some other country the sun when he rises will be more gentle, the wind sweeter.” But often she was at point to surrender her freedom because she felt intimately the sensation and experience of flowers: it might be some great beauty of dusky peonies growing in black mold, azaleas dancing on a moonlit terrace, or ivy on a wall hiding a nest of birds. Marigolds in an old garden drew her; poppies in starlit cornfields, fuchsias in a shadowy porch and crimson roses; cyclamens and magnolias on temperate and scented hillsides; starry flowers shining in the darkness of tropical forests; and blue lotuses dreaming on a night-bound water. But not only great beauties. Noisome growths drew her by contrary, and she was tempted to steep herself in the experience of poisonous plants; streaked, snaky plants; plants of an evil green with white and startling venation; ill-smelling carrion flowers; insect eaters, sticky sundews and sinister nepenthes; agaves and cactuses, fleshy, succulent and obscene; tangled and disgusting dodders, broom-rapes, rusts, smuts and sickly mildews; fevers, agues and flesh-destroying poxes; parasites that prey on the living, and saprophytes that feed on the putrid dead.
“Shall I at last be the foul visitor that burrows in the substance of beauty?” she asked herself, and fled shuddering from the vision of what she might easily become.
At last the fairness and experience of a plant, one only among myriads, spoke convincingly to her; she was contented to cease wandering and give herself up to stillness and obscure dreaming.
She was on a mountain side, looking over forests to snow-peaks gleaming in starlight. It was cold, vast and beautiful as the contemplation of one who shall soon cease to be. By a little rock grew a starry flower. “Be my body, seed of this flower,” she prayed, and the world faded. She was lost in a darkness, and strange and dark was the beginning of this experience: far snow-peaks fading into black forest, a lightless region of plant-forms, darkness and silence and cell blindly communicating with cell. Then all movement, all sensation, all knowledge ceasing. Then for a long time nothing.
At last, sunrise. A young flower waking to life. Dim senses, desires, satisfactions. A little stirring of the dawn-wind, and what pleasure in the compliance of the stalk! A faint tingling that increased and filled the senses with pleasure, a suffusing of all the body with golden vision, as the radiant flower of light blossomed in heaven. Hunger, thirst: a sharp, desirable moisture at hand for refreshment. Heat, weariness: a shadow softly stealing over when the glow of the light-flower became too ardent; scented wind-waves bathing the longing body. Great spaces of delicious and untr
anslatable sense-dreaming, while the sweetness of light and dark alternately provoked and assuaged desires. Sometimes a threat of invisible evils, and a shrinking of the body: sometimes a wound, and the body swiftly renewing itself. But ever foremost, in sensation that seemed like vision, the influence of the radiant light-flower. At first, for many spaces, between the cool spaces of dawn when a wind carried news from a distance, and the dark spaces of night when delicate senses mirrored only the remote tingling of far-off and tiny light-flowers, a shrinking from that near and dominant splendor. But soon, under insistent usage, the awakening of a new and most sweet necessity. What delight, then, to offer the body in its moment of perfection to the searching heat of a blue-golden morning; to endure all day on the mountain side that tenderness and that cruelty; and at last to suffer the entry of a messenger, and resign all dreaming to the will of a remorseless particle!
§ XXV
She woke lazily, the slug, with a dream that she was in some weedy cave in the depths of a sun-irradiated sea. Then, as the day brightened and the image of downward-sweeping leaves of the weeping beech sharpened, she saw her golden frock, and wondered why she was lying there with the sun drawing a pattern on her hip. She raised her bright head and looked round. The memory of her dream was dim in the sunshine.
She rose, and moved about inside her leaf-tent for a little while, smelling the sweetness of the foliage that was now softly stirring, bathing her face in the warm sun, nuzzling and peeping, a white and gold fawn among burning leaves.
What time of day was it? Early morning, by the taste of the air. Four o’clock? Five? It would be safe to travel in the Gardens just now; and there was no need for the golden dress. One could run and run, as one’s limbs desired to do, in wind-light silk. Obeying her desire for swift movement, she left her bower of beech-leaves, crossed the rhododendron walk looking from side to side of her, and sped through the trees. The breeze smoothed her cobweb garments against her.
She darted into the Sion vista, noted the Tropical Plant House, now less unearthly, glistening like dew in the sunlight, and made straight for the Lake. She desired the rush of wind, the embrace of cold water. A breeze ruffled the surface of the Lake, and drifted her discarded garments into a bush, where they hung like spider webs. The water flowed coldly in her mouth and eyes, slipped along her sides and her thighs as she struck out from the shore, scattering a thousand diamond-drops sunward. She swam, and ran on the grass, until it was scarcely discreet; but after her mystical experience earthly considerations seemed to have little relevance.
Yet it was necessary to leave the Gardens, or else to hide. She would go home, and carry the day with boldness.
Awaiting a suitable occasion, she declared herself, a couple of hours later, to the young gardener who had looked at her so sulkily one morning earlier in the year. If anything disentangled itself clearly from the complex of reactions that he displayed on being confronted by this golden fragility, it was complete disbelief in her story – a rough and ready story, for she had very rightly determined to rely, in the case of the young gardener, on her appearance. He was consumed, obviously, between a cynical interpretation of her escapade, hope for himself, and a fiery belief in the good and the beautiful inspired by the wispish delicacy of her loveliness. But he was ready, he was eager, to lend her a mackintosh; he fell over a barrow in his anxiety to comply with her request; and he assisted her to put it on with an ineptitude that was highly indicative. Still triumphant with the splendor of her experience, she would have liked everybody to be happy. She put her hand in his, therefore, and lightly kissed his cheek. In a year, poor man, he had pined and died, and she regretted what she had done. But the mackintosh was most useful to her. It enabled her to leave the Gardens with her splendor hidden, except for the golden shoes and the glinting hair.
She walked into the morning-room, convinced of her power. They were all sitting there – her mother, Hubert, Roland – like those who wait while the coffin is being carried downstairs. Hubert, at ease in the window with his elegantly trousered legs crossed, distributing a faint aroma of pomade and expensive soap, was clearly in command. She dropped her mackintosh on the sofa.
Her mother raised her hands and gasped “Judy!” There was a trace of asthma in her gasp.
“Yes, mother?”
Her mother was pointing at her frock.
“It looks so much worse in the morning!” she exclaimed. She displayed an increasing distress. “That it should have come to this!”
Judy picked up her dress and displayed her silken legs. “Is this the token of sin?” she asked. “Is this what all the fuss is about? How odd people are, that stuffs should cause such violent and such different reactions. A man shudders at flannel; cotton stirs his imagination; and silk finally destroys his self-control. What difference is there in the chemical changes when the silk is artificial? Some one should measure it. But really, really, I don’t understand.”
She caught Roland’s eye and felt an unexpected confusion, an odd disturbance of her nerves. He was calm, she noticed, but his calm was achieved with difficulty. She glanced at Hubert. Hubert, she felt at once, had something up his sleeve. He had ready some means with which to destroy her freedom and checkmate her plans.
“Whose is the mackintosh?” asked her brother, cool and observant.
“A friend’s.”
“How did you get those earth-stains on your stockings?”
“From contact with the earth.”
Tears glistened on the weak, dignified and pathetic face of her mother. “Oh, Judith,” she said, striving to control her emotions. “Oh, Judith. We ought never to have given you such a wicked name.”
“Be quiet, mother,” said Hubert, “and leave her to me.”
It was hard, though salutary, for the poor lady, that she should be not only disobeyed but managed by her children.
Roland spoke. “I take it we are not going to demand explanations? Her movements are her own business.”
She flashed a look of gratitude at him. This big and brown man was a friend. But she saw that all his strength was at work holding down a tempest.
“Still,” he continued, “as those who are, or will be, intimately related to you, we cannot but be affected by your conduct. If you will not tell us what is going on in your mind – and we do not demand it, I beg you to remember – could you not to some extent model your behavior on what is judged reasonable, adapt yourself to what is liked?”
She desired to retain this friend, this link with a world in which for the moment she was not living; but this was an attempt to restrict her liberty. “The literary man to the life,” she mocked.
“That may be.” He breathed more quickly. “But I should like you to note that patience, and a desire to understand, on my side demand something more than a little smart repartee on yours.”
She saw the justice of this, but she was impatient with these unnecessary discussions and only wanted to be left to her thoughts. “The repartee,” she said, “will certainly be on my side.”
“Then I shall have to resort to other weapons.” His voice shook.
“You will fling some verbal thunderbolts, I presume?”
His calm exterior vanished. He had been too long self-controlled. “You silky, pale-eyed leopard. You slip of sarcasm. You sleek-headed torture. You luxurious tigress with your little biting teeth. Adorable beast. Darling spite. Golden tongue of hell fire!”
“Three more sentences,” she cried, staring at him under a queer fascination, “and you’ll win me.”
“Stop it!” he cried, his muscles all instinctive to strike her. “Oh, stop it, for God’s sake!”
She slipped between his arms and tempted him, remembering the arms of a lost lover, flesh of fire-containing marble. Forgetful of everything but an imagined mouth, a scented breath, she kissed Roland, sighing, swoo
ning, and transfixed with a sharp spear of remembered pleasure.
He tore himself away, and the door closed on him. Her heart misgave her. She had only been innocently giving herself to an experience, and why were people so concerned, so angry? Her heart certainly misgave her, for in the arms of Roland she had seemed to be supplied with something material and comforting that she lacked. Now he had flung out, with unexpected decision, and there was Hubert grinning at her from his armchair.
“I perceive,” he said, “that you have an unreasonable desire for that professor. And now for the settlement of your little affair.”
She braced her nerves for a contest.
The mother of these two was in tears. “You wicked, wicked girl! Oh, Hubert, what are we to do with her?” She hung on him as on hope itself.
Hubert played his card.
“We are to let her do exactly what she likes.”
Judy herself was startled.
“Yes,” continued Hubert, with his hands in his pockets. “She’s so mad that there’s money in it. That’s a thing that professors don’t understand, and few men of business. We must face the facts. The girl’s mad, but she has something up her sleeve, and when she consents to produce it I’ll put it on the market for her, at a suitable commission. I can understand people who have something to put on the market. And the first rule is – to leave them alone. You have complete liberty of movement, Judy: and if you want any help, call on me.”
She would have kissed her brother, but pride forbade. She gave him one look, and dashed upstairs.
§ XXVI
On an afternoon, late in the summer, she was walking, somewhat melancholy-minded, in the Gardens with Roland. For long now she had been moody, by turns sad and elated; but her sadness and her elation were not extreme; she lived in a summery serenity, and felt no desire for activity of any kind. While the leaves of the great trees turned a darker green, and some began to shrivel, she found in herself a tendency to reflect on the passage of time; to gaze protractedly at the deep spaces of the sky; to withdraw, at length, from the life of sensation and meditate on the nature of things through long stretches of the afternoon. This state had been easy to bring about. Day by day the composition of her mind had seemed to change, and gradually she had come to feel as if the beautiful image that walked in the name of Judith was in the possession of a stranger. What an ethereal and lovely slip she had become Roland did not fail to inform her.
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