NILAMBUJA
The Fantasy of a Poet’s Mood
The following contribution appeared in the “Indian Ladies’ Magazine” for Dec. 1902:
A woman was walking alone on the shores of a lake that shone like a great fire-opal in its ring of onyx-coloured hills; and her movements were full of a slumberous rhythm, as if they had caught the very cadence of the waters.
A strangely attractive figure, delicate as the stem of a lotus, with an indescribable languor pervading like a dim fragrance, the grace of her flower-like youth. Two unfathomably beautiful eyes flashed from the sensitive oval of a face, not in itself of an extraordinary beauty, but singularly expressive, a subtle revelation, as it were, of the lyric soul within. The heavy hair enfolding in its coils a faint odour of incense-fumes was wound about her head, and wreathed with sprays of newly-opened passion-flowers. The dusky fire of amethysts about her throat and arms, the sombre flame of her purpled draperies embroidered in threads of many-coloured silk and silver, brought out in their perfection, the golden tones, so luminously pale, of her warm, brown flesh. A clinging vapour of dreams hung about her like a veil, investing her with a glamour, as of something remote and mystic, and touched with immemorial passion.
Slowly the versatile splendour of the sunset melted into one fleeting moment of twilight that spread itself like a caress over the hills and valleys of acacia and ripening corn. Slowly she left the shore and threaded her way through a garden – herself, a shadowy fantasy among its winding shadows—and entered a courtyard of oleanders and pomegranate trees. On the steps of a long pillared hall dimly lighted by burning wicks steeped in copper vessels of sandal-oil, she paused, arrested by the vivid charm of the picture before her, and a smile of pure sensuous pleasure pierced through the rapt spirituality of her face.
An exquisite picture! A group of girls of her own age were lounging above the chamber like enormous birds or blossoms, in floating raiment of gold and scarlet and green. One, with daintily jewelled fingers, was embroidering with filmy threads, some fabric like auroral mist; another lay back among her pillows, in an attitude of seductive indolence, crushing an aromatic spice between her teeth, one foot audaciously crossed above her knee; a third leaned up against a pillar carved with antique legends, singing to herself vague snatches of a love-song. In a moment all three suspended their various idleness to welcome the intruder who loitered among one second to play with the pigeons that hovered about the ceiling.
Then she passed up a steep corridor that led her to her own chamber, followed by a murmur of love mingled with a sense of regret, of incomprehension. She was so inexplicably removed and separate from their brilliant, flower like life that asked for nothing more than the ephemeral dew and the amber sunshine, that was so naively content, so frankly enchanted with its own frail purposeless existence. * *
A wide, latticed chamber with windows that opened to the dawn. Its violet hangings worked with devices in gold and silver, the garlands of lilac-tinted lotus buds about the doorways, the subdued radiance of the torches on the walls, the cerulean smoke of incense from a brazen censer, the gleam of scattered ornaments of carved ivory and fretted silver, the very detachment of its situation from the rest of the dwelling lent to this room a peculiar significance and fascination, at once austere and sumptuous, as of a shrine dedicated to the goddess of mystery and dreams.
The dreamer stood alone in her temple of dreams, leaning out into the darkness. Her brows were bent as if with the burden of an unknown loneliness, her hands were stretched out as if with the weariness of a futile striving to pluck an unattainable desire. Her mouth was sorrowful as if with the silence of one who cannot render aright the music of inner voices, so importunate in their cry for expression. Memories of her far-off childhood came echoing through the gray desolation of her mood. A lyric child standing in the desert of her own lonely temperament, watching the stars, till she had caught from their inaccessible fires the soaring flame of a manifold enthusiasm, a myriad-hearted passion for humanity, for knowledge, for life, above all, for the eternal beauty of the universe. Thenceforth she had moved in the shadow of a perpetual mystery, consumed with a deep intellectual hunger, an unquenchable spiritual thirst, for ever seeking the ecstacy of Beauty in the voice of the winds and the waters, in the ethereal glory of dawn upon the mountains, in the uttered souls of poets and prophets, the dreamers and teachers of all ages and every race; but most of all, with a tremulous longing in the touching beauty of human faces and the secret poetry of every human life. Dwelling in the midst of those to whom the opulent loveliness of this earth is an ultimate end, all the sweeter for a knowledge of its perishable charm, and the delights of this material life with its dramatic experiences, a satisfying ideal all the dearer for a consciousness of its evanescent quality, she was for ever possessed by an intolerable desire to penetrate to the hidden eternity at the core of the most trivial accidents of human destiny, the most fleeting moment of this radiant and mutable world.
So the ardent years of her childhood had fled away in one swift flame of aspiration; and the lyric child had grown into the lyric woman. All the instincts of her awakening womanhood for the intoxication of love and the joy of life were deeply interfused with the more urgent and intimate need of the poet-soul for a perfect sympathy with its incommunicable vision, its subtle and inexpressible thought.
A flute-like laughter of delicate revels, a reed-like music of singing voices floated up through the starwrought silence. She paused in the heart of her reminiscence, and smiled a gradual smile that had in it the profound sadness of invisible tears. Ah! how she had lost count of the years, and missed the gracious birthright of her youth, so utterly had she seemed to pass away beyond the measurable shadow of time into the infinite loneliness of her soul’s ecstasy for Beauty. And the dreamer so insatiable for immortality, who was a woman full of tender mortal wants, wept bitterly for her unfulfilled inheritance of joy.