17
THE IRISH CHAPTER
There was a row of us preparing for sleep out under the stars—the Dakotan at one side, then two small boys, the little girl and the old man.... It was one of those nights in which we older ones decided to tell stories instead of writing them. We had talked long, like true Arabs around a fire on the beach. A South Wind came in and the Lake received and loved it. I asked the Dakotan what the Lake was saying.
"It isn't—it's listening."
It made me think at once of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata, called Appassionata. There is one here who plays that, and because it tells him a story, he plays it sometimes rather well and makes the others see.... The slow movement is deeply rich; the inspiration seems to go out of the sonata after that, but of the first movement we never tire, and the drama is always keen. It tells the story (to us) of a woman—of love and life and death. She wants the earth in her love—but her lover is strange and hears persistently a call that is not of earth. The woman tries to hold him. All earth beauty is about her—her love a perfume, a torrent. The voice of destiny speaks to her that it must not be. She rebels. The story rushes on, many voices coming to her re-stating the inexorable truth that he must go.
The same story is told in Coventry Patmore's Departure—to us the most magic of all the great little poems. But in Departure it is the woman who is called.
... Again and again in the Appassionata, the word comes to the woman, saying that she will be greater if she speeds him on his way. She will not hear. We sense her splendid tenure of beauty—all the wonder that Mother Earth has given her.... One after another the lesser voices have told her that it must be, but she does not obey—and then the Master comes down.
It is one of the most glowing passages in all the literature of tone. The chelas have spoken and have not availed. Now the Guru speaks. Out of vastness and leisure, out of spaciousness of soul and wisdom, out of the deeps and heights of compassion, the Guru speaks—and suddenly the woman's soul turns to him listening. That miracle of listening is expressed in the treble—a low light rippling receptivity. It is like a cup held forth—or palms held upward. The Guru speaks. His will is done.
And that is what I thought of, when the Dakotan said that the Lake was listening. It was listening to the South Wind.... That night we talked of Ireland. It may have been the fairies that the little girl always brings; or it may have been that a regiment of Irish troops had just been slaughtered in a cause that had far less significance to Ireland than our child talk by the fire; or it may have been the South Wind that brought us closer to the fairy Isle, for it is the Irish peasants who say to a loved guest at parting:
"May you meet the South Wind."