She looked up at him suddenly, her face like a lifted light, wistful, tender, her eyes like many wet flowers. And he drew her to his breast with a passion of tenderness and consuming desire, and the last thought: ‘My hour is upon me, I am taken unawares–‘
So he knew her, and was one with her.
Afterwards, with a dim wonder, she touched the great scars in his sides with her finger-tips, and said:
“But they no longer hurt?”
“They are suns!” he said. “They shine from your torch. They are my atonement with you.”
And when they left the temple, it was the coldness before dawn. As he closed the door, he looked again at the goddess, and he said: “Lo, Isis is a kindly goddess; and full of tenderness. Great gods are warm-hearted, and have tender goddesses.”
The woman wrapped herself in her mantle and went home in silence, sightless, brooding like the lotus softly shutting again, with its gold core full of fresh life. She saw nothing, for her own petals were a sheath to her. Only she thought: ‘I am full of Osiris. I am full of the risen Osiris!
But the man looked at the vivid stars before dawn, as they rained down to the sea, and the dog-star green towards the sea’s rim. And he thought: ‘How plastic it is, how full of curves and folds like an invisible rose of dark-petalled openness that shows where the dew touches its darkness! How full it is, and great beyond all gods. How it leans around me, and I am part of it, the great rose of Space. I am like a grain of its perfume, and the woman is a grain of its beauty. Now the world is one flower of many petalled darknesses, and I am in its perfume as in a touch.’
So, in the absolute stillness and fullness of touch, he slept in his cave while the dawn came. And after the dawn, the wind rose and brought a storm, with cold rain. So he stayed in his cave in the peace and the delight of being in touch, delighting to hear the sea, and the rain on the earth, and to see one white-and-gold narcissus bowing wet, and still wet. And he said: “This is the great atonement, the being in touch. The grey sea and the rain, the wet narcissus and the woman I wait for, the invisible Isis and the unseen sun are all in touch, and at one.”
He waited at the temple for the woman, and she came in the rain. But she said to him:
“Let me sit awhile with Isis. And come to me, will you come to me, in the second hour of night?”
So he went back to the cave and lay in stillness and in the joy of being in touch, waiting for the woman who would come with the night, and consummate again the contact. Then when night came the woman came, and came gladly, for her great yearning, too, was upon her, to be in touch, to be in touch with him, nearer.
So the days came, and the nights came, and days came again, and the contact was perfected and fulfilled. And he said: “I will ask her nothing, not even her name, for a name would set her apart.”
And she said to herself: “He is Osiris. I wish to know no more.”
Plum blossom blew from the trees, the time of the narcissus was past, anemones lit up the ground and were gone, the perfume of bean-field was in the air. All changed, the blossom of the universe changed its petals and swung round to look another way. The spring was fulfilled, a contact was established, the man and the woman were fulfilled of one another, and departure was in the air.
One day he met her under the trees, when the morning sun was hot, and the pines smelled sweet, and on the hills the last pear blossom was scattering. She came slowly towards him, and in her gentle lingering, her tender hanging back from him, he knew a change in her.
Page 1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829
