The Golden Threshold | Page 5

in a low voice,
like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever she was, to be alone.
Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. And
first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one
who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of intellectual day" as this
child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles
and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East, maturity comes
early; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But
there was something else, something hardly personal, something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised,
wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before
which everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt
away in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart
without conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's
violence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there was
what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or pleasure
transported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held in a
flower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found in
those things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age of
twelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and
awoke to find herself famous throughout India. "Honestly," she said to
me, "I was not pleased; such things did not appeal to me." But here, in
a letter from Hyderabad, bidding one "share a March morning" with her,
there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: "Come and share
my exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold
and sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; the
voluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the
languid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold and
blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of life in
nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and
unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And,

do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from my
heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate
music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerial
essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the 'very me,' that part of me
that incessantly and in- solently, yes, and a little deliberately, triumphs
over that other part--a thing of nerves and tissues that suffers and cries
out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or twenty years hence."
Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom, and
was always awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in
exquisite English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement
sincerity of emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost
more directly, un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual,
critical sense of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as
frankly as that enthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour,
like the delicate reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. "I have
taught myself," she writes to me from India, "to be commonplace and
like everybody else superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and
cheerful, so 'brave,' all the banal things that are so comfortable to be.
My mother knows me only as 'such a tranquil child, but so
strong-willed.' A tranquil child!" And she writes again, with deeper
significance: "I too have learnt the subtle philosophy of living from
moment to moment. Yes, it is a subtle philosophy, though it appears
merely an epicurean doctrine: 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow
we die.' I have gone through so many yesterdays when I strove with
Death that I have realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it
is to me not merely a figure of speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow
I might die. It is scarcely two months since I came back from the grave:
is it worth while to be anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that
life or perhaps my temperament has given me I prize the gift of
laughter as beyond price."
Her desire, always, was to be "a wild free thing of the air like the birds,
with a song in my heart." A spirit of too much fire in too frail a body, it
was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy she found what
she could not find