A few of the inmates were moving here and there about the sidepaths. I especially noticed a very tall old lady, with silvery white hair, who walked with a stick, but extraordinarily upright.
“What beautiful hair that woman has!” I said to my poor friend.
“Yes, and she’s got a beautiful mind, too,” he answered in his slow, gentle voice. “I couldn’t possibly endure this if it weren’t for her.”
“Why is...”
“Why is she here? She wouldn’t mind your asking that, and I’m sure that I don’t. She is here because she is sane.”
“I see,” I said.
“What do you see?”
“A rather pretty young woman bringing our tea,” I answered, laughing; but suddenly arrested by the look in his eyes.
It gave me the impression of a pang.
“Pretty!” he groaned, “Oh, my God!”
He sat silent, with an appearance of intense stillness, as if he were frozen. He seemed to be staring at something that he saw in the air; but the expression in his eyes was so terrible that I could not look at them. In the meantime, the maid set down the tea-things glanced at him, and at me — rather peculiarly, I thought — and went her way.
“I’m awfully sorry, Evans,” I said as he seemed to be recovering. “I really don’t know what I said to... to distress you so much.”
“Of course you don’t,” he answered in a feeble, strained voice; “and I dare say this will resolve any doubts that may have come to you as to whether I really am insane. You don’t know my secret, and I cannot tell ii to you. I couldn’t tell it to anyone — except to that woman,” he added, pointing to the tall lady in the grounds.
He drank some tea, and continued moodily:
“Schopenhauer was wrong in ascribing reality to the will. It is futile to attribute reality to an aspect. Besides, if you must single out in that way, the completely enlightened will would cease to function. What you call the conscience would cease also.”
“You mean that there would no longer be any desire?”
“Desire would be swallowed up. There would be no more sea...”
He looked at me strangely, and continued:
“You have perception; but have you understanding? Are you... I wonder.”
The troubled look returned to his eyes, growing into an expression of settled pain. It is distressing to see suffering which one cannot by any means alleviate. In the faded light, the vast lawn and the shrubberies beyond appeared to extend in interminable gloom. The grounds seemed now deserted, and the peacock had ceased to give, at intervals, its peculiarly disagreeable and desolate cry. Only the tall woman continued to stalk in the side-path, looking queer and ghostly in the distance, with her silvery hair; and I had a fancy that she possessed the scene, in some way, like an embodiment of its mid-Victorian past. I felt wretchedly depressed, and eager, even anxious, to be gone.
But the diversion of talking with me was clearly of some service to my friend; so that I determined to prolong my visit, and also to repeat it very soon.
He was looking fixedly in the direction of the woman.
“She is going to come in,” he said presently. “If she turns across the lawn, I’ll tell you my story. It will be a signal.”
“Telepathy,” I said.
“Yes. More than that. Another man might have taken it that I was in love with her,” he added.
“Very likely he would,” I answered. “But why do you laugh like that?”
“Why? Oh, you’ll soon understand. She’s turning.”
Suddenly I felt terrified. I did not want to heat his story. I dreaded it. I had divined it, somehow. I do not mean specifically, but essentially and atmospherically.
“Are you... are you,” I asked, “quite sure that you want to tell me, Evans? Wouldn’t it... distress you too much?”
“I must tell you.”
“It was off Japan,” he went on in a rather disjointed way — “five days after leaving Osaka, where I had put in on a voyage to San Francisco. Ah, it’s a long time since I smoked...”
I had taken out my pipe and pouch.
“Why did you give it up?” I asked, grasping at the chance of a diversion.
“It gave me up, like other forms of illusion — all except.”
“‘The believing that we do something when we do nothing,’” I quoted hurriedly. “It’s not so simple as that, is it?”
“I had a steam-yacht,” he went on — he did not seem to have heard my question — “She was one of the fine Nineties yachts, built to sail as well as steam. It was near sunset; very calm — yes, very. Breathless — that is the very word. I remember thinking queerly, it’s holding its breath. Of course, I wasn’t clear what I meant; but I really did feel something. There really was some extraordinary tension — possession; and the sky! It was such an extraordinary such an indescribable colour. It was intense, intense dark, dark, dark blue! But this did not diminish the light — the light that was so brilliant for me to see Oh, God!”
“Evans,” I cried as I evaded his look, “do not go on! You’re in agony. You can’t stand it, Evans!”
“No. I shall be better. She is coming.” He pointed to the tall woman, who was approaching the foot of the terrace across the lawn.
“Diomedea,” he shouted suddenly, “what is the word?” She answered with a strange gesture, letting fall her stick, clasping her hands, slowly unfolding them, spreading them out with the palms falling away downward. It was a gesture that expressed absolute emptiness, absolute abandonment. It perfectly expressed this, with the rhythmic beauty of unanswerable, irresistible eloquence.
She reversed the movement. I can only describe the effect as magical. I felt that, into an immeasurable vacuity, there was pouring a welling, solvent tide.
“You can go on now,” I said, feeling the words flow from me like a sigh.
I had not observed the woman particularly. She impressed me as being impersonal in some way. I could see her, of course, despite the dim light; and my impression is that she had a strangely classical Greek cast of face and extraordinarily bright, light blue eyes. But it is quite impossible to explain why, or how, I am unable to describe her at all clearly. She seemed interior to us; though that is too crudely definite a word to convey my meaning.
As to that amazing, wonderful language of her hands, it cannot be described as ceremonial, or symbolic — a ritual sign-language, in any way. It was too immediate, too essential in fact, to be styled language. The expression was identical with the idea; the form which was also the substance — with the rhythm. Perhaps, in effecting this inner — and also outer — visualization, she became, or gave the effect of becoming, impersonal, and accordingly obscure.
She was gone. I did not see her go. my consciousness, as far as I can express the experience, was submerged in a kind of vast ocean. I think Evans was proceeding with his story, emphasizing insistently the peculiar dark blue, or blue dark, colour of the sky all above and around his yacht. But, for me, there was only the vague, neutral element of what, I suppose, was a subconscious, or partially subconscious, state.
Presently, however, I saw what he had seen — the skies duskily glowing in their deep, dark blueness, the sea almost black. The whole scene was overpoweringly impressive, sultry, intimidating. The virtually flat immobility of the waters seemed an impossible phenomenon.
Doubtless, it was impossible to normal visualization. It is conceivable, however, that the normal pitch of the senses can be altered. Supposing, as Plato imagined, that the atmosphere in which we breathe and move might appear to an inhabitant of the upper, or ethereal element to have the comparative density of water: then, the sea would appear to such an observer, analogously, as solid. Scientifically, in fact, the ground is not so stable as it appears. It has its waves, which, like the colours above and below our range of vision, we are not able to perceive.
Now, I had emerged out of the subconscious state, as I have told — but how, or where?
There was something upon that sea. A figure was appearing. I was seized with indescribable sensations; emotions: fear, wonder, amazement, expectancy, strangeness — all-uniting, all-modifying strangeness! Evans continued, telling his story, divulging his secret; which henceforth was also to be my secret — incommunicably so: even though in trying to describe what I saw and felt, I strain the ineptitude of words into nonsense.
But while I vainly tug at the sense and superficial letter of expression, I cannot but wonder whether, if power were given me I could transmute, transfuse, the pining torment by the force of some liberating symbol. What superlative, irresistible genius might not be operated by the sting and flame of such cratered condensation! A thin steam of vague, insignificant analogies is, at least, some alleviation.
The appearance was monstrously beautiful — the figure, or creature, that suddenly became visible on that sea — so concretely visible — against those dark, violet dark, glowing deep skies. It was as the incarnate bloom of which they were the umbrageous foil. It sweetly, faintly, delicately embodied the moon-like magic which is reflected in the soft splendour of the pearl. It was the essential, stark-naked, overpowering manifestation in form and voluptuous, smooth feminine feature of the grace that falls away continually in the brimmed contours of the waves.
Thus I saw it — and thus might see it still, unharmed, unhaunted in this horror of desolation, in this yearning, irremediable torment of desire; this racking hell! But it stirred; it moved; it turned upon me its penetrative, dream-like glance.
I did not leave this house. Diomedea helps us. She is coming now.