No More Learning

To
those who knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure
seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards
beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and
wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.

She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk, and
as she was so small, and her long black hair hung straight down
her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and 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 insolently,
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.