I remember Dr. Lavrier reminding me once, in a conversation about Lilith which I shall record presently, that the word “rapture” in the English of Shakespeare’s day meant “madness,” and adding, in the gently evocative manner which I came so greatly to admire, “I think all of us here are concerned with rapture in some way—I told you once that I liked to consider psychoanalysis as an art rather than a science—and when a man devotes himself to studying the nature of rapture he may find himself dispossessed, as it were. Categories dissolve, values and verities reverse themselves, things he reaches out to touch for comfort or guidance startle, and sometimes sicken, him with their unfamiliarity. It is a thing we are all aware of in this profession.”
I am always reminded of his statement when I think of Lilith’s face as, stepping out of the willow thicket through which we had followed the path toward the river, she stood on the granite bluffs above the water and looked out at the mighty tumult of the falls; for if ever I saw rapture in a human face, or felt in myself the beginnings of such troubled contemplation of it, it was at that moment. Her eyes widened with gathering joy and then fixed in a look of idle brilliance, as if she were held in some bitterly beautiful dream, while her features fell softly into an almost weary expression of ecstasy which seemed to me, remembering suddenly my mother’s face as she lay dead in the winter sunlight of her bedroom, to represent the total opposite of that look of consummate composure. There was a rough wind blowing off the falls; it flattened her skirt against her thighs and scattered her hair across her face, tangling strands of it about her lips and eyes. She raked it away with her finger tips and stood clutching the box of paints against her breast, staring out at the massive sheets of water thundering down from the great shelves of the falls and murmuring to herself in the strange sharp syllables of her own tongue. She turned toward me in a moment and said softly, her voice distorted by the roaring of the rapids, “Don’t you think that water is the most beautiful of all things, and demands a sacrifice?”
“It is beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t understand why it should demand a sacrifice.”
“Oh, I do,” said Warren, who stood beside me clutching Lilith’s paraphernalia in a comically conscientious way, his eyes shining with happiness at this opportunity to express a concord with the creature that he loved. “I think all beautiful things do. I remember going to the cathedral once at Eastertime with my sister when I was only twelve years old. They sang the ‘Mass in G Minor’ by Vaughan Williams, and it was so beautiful that I cried. I was wearing a new blazer with brass buttons on it; they had the arms of my school engraved on them, and I loved them very much. So I cut them off with my penknife and put them in the tray. I had a dollar in my pocket that my mother had given me for the offering; but that would not have been a sacrifice, you see. So I cut the buttons off my jacket. There were four down the front and three on each sleeve.” This was the longest and most fervent speech that I had ever heard him make.
Lilith listened, smiling, and said, “Mr. Evshevsky understands, you see. Haven’t you ever had such a feeling, Mr. Bruce?”
“No. I can’t remember it, if I have. The only thing that makes me feel as if I ought to make a sacrifice of some kind is misery.”
She dropped her eyes as I said this and fondled the latch of her paintbox for a moment, saying quietly, “How ugly, how brutal. I would not like to be served in that way. I would like people to love me and make sacrifices to me because I was beautiful, not as a tribute to my wretchedness.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean!” Warren said excitedly. “That’s what I felt in the cathedral. That God wants to be served in that way, too—not because of the miserable symbols of His power, but because He is beautiful.”
Lilith raised her eyes to his in a long thoughtful glance and turned back to the falls, lifting her head to breathe deeply the gusty air with its fresh smell of mist. The rest of the group had assembled to our left along the wide mound of rock on which we stood—an advantageous place for our picnic, as it was a large level area with a fine view of the falls, and yet lay back ten or fifteen yards from the steep and dangerous edge of the bank cliffs. I saw that Bob had reached the same conclusion, for he called to me, “I think this is a good place to eat, Vince. Let’s unpack the baskets.”
“All right.”
“I have Miss Arthur’s here, if you want to come for it.”
“Oh, let me get it,” Warren said. “I would be glad to.”
He set down his burdens and went quickly in his awkward shambling stride across the rocks to fetch it for her, returning in a moment with the waxed-paper parcel of sandwiches held carefully in his fine hands, grinning with satisfaction. Lilith took it from him silently. While Warren and I unpacked the hamper I had carried from the limousine, she sat down on the smooth warm face of the boulder, clasping her knees and bowing her neck in the sunlight. It was a most perfunctory luncheon; Warren bolted his food with abstracted voracity, watching Lilith constantly in his innocent and ardent way and speaking, at every opportunity, with a nervous elation and at a length I had never known in him. Lilith ate idly, her eyes almost constantly upon the falls, breaking her sandwiches into pieces with her finger tips and then nibbling and abandoning them one by one. She half turned toward him once, keeping her eyes upon the blown foam of the rapids, and asked, “Do you think power is beautiful, Mr. Evshevsky?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” he answered eagerly. “And it is made beautiful by the things on which it is inscribed. I think that when there is a power abroad we must submit to it; it is a kind of natural obedience. How would we know that lightning is magnificent if we didn’t see it split the rocks and blast the trees? It is the rock’s destiny to be split, and the tree’s destiny to be blasted, because that is the only way the magnificence of the lightning can be revealed. We must submit to God’s power, too, because it’s the only way that He can be revealed. Don’t you feel that? That it’s our destiny to reveal His nature by yielding to it with our own?” He lifted and clasped his long hands excitedly as he spoke, bending his head forward in a yearning and zealous way, as if borne toward her by the torrent of his thought. “Surely you felt that when you said the river was beautiful.”
“No.”
“You didn’t? But then why does it seem beautiful to you?”
“I didn’t say that. I said the water was beautiful, not the river. The water is beautiful because it makes rainbows in the mist above the falls, the way my prisms do. And because it is all broken into crystal spray above the boulders, like chandeliers. And because there are drowned queens floating in it with their lungs full of silver.” She stood up impatiently, shaking her head like a dog emerging from water, and spread her fingers in the sunlight. “I want to paint,” she said. “May I, Mr. Bruce?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll set up the easel for you.”
“Not here. It will blow over in the wind, and I can’t see where the cascade breaks, down there. Can you bring it a little closer for me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see what Mr. Clayfield says.”
I walked across the boulder to where Bob, Mandel and Wren sat with the other patients amid a litter of waxed paper, sandwiches and Thermos bottles.
“Miss Arthur wants to go down a little further, to paint,” I said. “She says it’s too windy here, and she can’t see well. Is it all right?”
“I guess so,” Bob said. “There are only eight of them; and if we’re responsible for two each it ought to work out. How are they getting along?”
“Very well, I think. Warren is full of very frank admiration, but he seems to be well behaved, and I think she’s rather enjoying him.”
“Good. As long as he doesn’t get on her nerves I’d let them stay together.”
I think it was partly Lilith’s pleasure—how warm, artless and genuine it always seemed on such occasions!—at Bob’s agreement that made me less cautious than I should have been; for this, together with the staff’s eagerness to encourage her participation in more such outings, made me particularly anxious to insure her enjoyment of the trip, and more liberal than I should have been, perhaps, in judging the suitability of the site she chose to paint from. This was on a high flat shelf of rock in the lee of a great boulder which shielded her easel from the wind, and selected, apparently, out of her passion for privacy and originality, as it stood far back from any of the footpaths that wound among the bracken. We had to forge our way to it through a thicket of chokecherry which scratched our wrists and ankles and ripped a large triangular tear in Lilith’s skirt, through which the white flesh of her thigh flashed rhythmically as she walked. She stopped sometimes to break clusters of purple pokeweed berries from the tall, soft-stemmed bushes that grew among the thicket, or to pluck up handfuls of young grass, or strip the bright scarlet berries from another flowering plant, which I did not know.
“What are they for?” Warren asked.
“To paint with.”
“Really? You really paint with them?”
“Oh, yes. They make lovely colors.”
She stuffed them into the pocket of her skirt and climbed with swift, lithe movements up the shelf of rock that she had led us to. When she had gained the top of it she lifted her bent arm to her forehead, staring across the chasm into the sun.
“Oh, this is a lovely spot!” she said. “Can we stay here?”
I saw with some misgiving that less than ten yards in front of us the bank dropped steeply to the river in an almost vertical slope, strewn with shattered boulders, slate and the rotting trunks of fallen pines; but as a concession to her enthusiasm I did not protest. Warren set up her easel with many ostentatious manipulations of its bolts and braces and, while she began to sketch, stretched out on the rock a little behind her to watch, beaming with obvious delight at the privilege. I sat beside him and smoked a cigarette, falling into a state of luxurious somnolence from the sunlight, the droning of bees in the wildflowers, the rumble of the falls and the occasional casual murmur of their conversation.
It was astonishing to watch with what skill Lilith used the natural colors of the berries and herbs that she had gathered. She crushed the grass blades on the stone and rubbed the moist, frayed fibers on her paper to make cloudy masses of vegetation in many different tones. The stamens of the wild flags she used like pencils, touching their tufts of pollen to her painting and then brushing it with her finger tip to produce points of scattered yellow, brilliant as buttercups.
“It’s wonderful!” Warren said. “I had no idea you could paint like that—simply with grasses and things of that kind.”
“Yes. They fade, of course; but there are no such colors while they last.”
“But don’t you need many more? How can you paint with so few?”
“I have others here, in my box, that I’ve made—permanent colors. This red is cochineal, the black is simply charcoal, the ocher is clay from the garden at Crowfields. And here’s a white I made out of limestone; I slaked it myself and pulverized it in a mortar.” He murmured with admiration while she burst one of the pokeberries with her finger tips and drew a streak of vivid violet across the paper.
“I should like to be able to paint,” he said, “or to do anything of that kind. I have always had a great love of the arts; when I look at a painting or listen to music, I’m very moved. I understand them, but I can’t do them myself.”
He watched, frowning with fascination, while Lilith’s fingers flashed about the easel. “How do you begin?” he asked. “I can never understand how you begin. When I pick up a violin or a paintbrush I suddenly feel exhausted and embarrassed. What is it that you do?”
“I do nothing,” Lilith said. “My hand moves, and I follow it.”
“Ah, that’s it!” Warren said. “The hand moves! Mine doesn’t move, of course. Or if it does, it moves only in the direction of the salted almonds. I always have a bowl of them beside me when I work; it is a great mistake. I sat all one afternoon last week, trying to write a poem, and could do nothing but nibble salted nuts. The more I tried to concentrate the more of them I ate. It’s what always happens. I can’t trust my hands, you see.”
“I think that is where you fail,” Lilith said. “You must learn to trust them, if you want them to lead you to things you love.”
“Do you think they will? Perhaps it is only that I love salted almonds. What a terrible thought—to be a gourmet by nature! A taster and sampler of things. Still, it may be true, I’m afraid. I have a scholar’s mind, you know, not an artist’s. It’s a very different faculty.”
“But you have the gift of tongues. That’s a great gift.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, compared to yours. I’ve studied them, yes; I know their grammar. But you’ve invented one of your own. That is the greatest gift.”
“I did not invent it,” Lilith said, turning toward him with a fiercely solemn look. “It was taught to me. I learned it, just as you do.”
“How?” Warren said. “Who have you learned it from? Do you mean it’s a spoken language?”
“Yes. It is spoken by my people.”
“Really? And you actually hear them, then? You hear them speaking it? I would love to hear it, too. I’m fascinated by languages. Do you think they would speak to me?”
She watched him studiously for a moment, seeming to search his face for signs of mockery; but there was nothing to be seen in it but guileless eagerness.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But it’s very difficult to learn to hear them. It was many years before they would reveal themselves to me.”
“I’m sure I could learn it,” Warren said. “I learn very quickly, you know. I learned to speak Hungarian in less than a month. Perhaps you would teach me.” He clasped his knees in his hands, leaning forward with excitement.
“No, I wouldn’t be allowed to teach you, unless it was approved. It’s a language that very few are permitted to speak.”
“But what would I have to do?” he asked. “I’m sure I could persuade them.”
She lifted her brush and clenched the tip of it lightly between her teeth, staring softly at the ground. “You would have to demonstrate great courage,” she said. “And a great capacity—for joy.”