Story, by
Clark Ashton SmithThe picture was more than five hundred years old; and time had not
changed its colors, unless to touch them with the mellow softness of
ancient hours, with the gathering morbidezza of bygone things. It had
been painted by a great artist of the Sung dynasty, on silk of the
finest weave, and mounted on rollers of ebony tipped with silver. For
twelve generations it had been one of the most cherished possessions of
the forefathers of Shih Liang. And it was equally cherished by Shih
Liang himself, who, like all his ancestors, was a scholar, a poet, and
a lover of both art and nature. Often, in his dreamiest or most
meditative moods, he would unroll the painting and gaze upon its
idyllic loveliness with the feeling of one who retires to the seclusion
and remoteness of a mountain-warded valley. It consoled him in a
measure for the bustle and blare and intrigue of the imperial court,
where he held an official post of no small honor; since he was not
altogether native to such things and would have preferred, like the
olden sages, the philosophic peace of a leaf-embowered hermitage.
The picture represented a pastoral scene of the most ideal and
visionary beauty. In the background arose lofty mountains rendered
vague by the slow withdrawal of morning mists; in the foreground there
ran a little stream, descending in mimic turbulence to a tranquil lake,
and crossed on its way by a rustic bridge of bamboo, more charming than
if it were made of royal lacquer. Beyond the stream and around the lake
were willows of vernal green more lovely and delicious than anything
that was ever beheld except in vision or memory. Incomparable was their
grace, ineffable their waving: they were like the willows of Shou Shan,
the Taoist Paradise; and they trailed their foliage as leaning women
trail their unbound hair. And partly hidden among them was a tiny hut;
and a maiden dressed in peony pink and white was crossing the little
bamboo bridge. But somehow the picture was more than a painting, was
more than a veritable scene: it possessed the enchantment of far-off
things for which the heart has longed in vain, of years and of places
that are lost beyond recall. Surely the artist had mingled with its
hues the diviner iris of dream or of retrospect, and the wine-sweet
tears of a nostalgia long denied.
Shih Liang felt that he knew the landscape more intimately than any
actual scene. Each time that he gazed upon it, his sensations were
those of a returning wanderer. It became to him the cool and
sequestered retreat in which he found a never-failing refuge from the
weariness of his days. And though he was of an ascetic turn and had
never married nor sought the company of women, the presence of the
peony maiden on the bridge was by no means exceptionable: in fact, her
tiny figure, with its more than mortal charm, was somehow an essential
part of the composition and was no less important to its perfection
than the stream, the willows, the lake, and the far-off mountains with
their riven veils of mist. And she seemed to companion him in the
visits and sojournings of reverie, when he would imagine himself
repairing to the little hut or roaming beneath the delicate foliage.
In truth, Shih Liang had need of such refuge and of such companionship,
illusory though they were. For, aside from his younger brother, Po
Lung, a boy of sixteen, he was alone and without living relatives or
comrades; and the fortunes of the family, declining through several
generations, had left him the heritor of many debts and little cash or
property, except a number of priceless art-treasures. His life was
increasingly sad, and oppressed by ill-health and poverty; for much of
the stipend from his secretarial post at the court was necessarily
devoted to the canceling of inherited obligations; and the remainder
was barely enough for his own sustenance and the education of his
brother.
Shih Liang was approaching middle-age; and his honorable heart was
rejoicing over the payment of the last family debt, when there came a
fresh stroke of misfortune. Through no fault or remissness of his own,
but the machinations of an envious fellow-scholar, Shih Liang was
suddenly deprived of his position and found himself without means of
support. No other position offered itself; for a certain amount of
unmerited disgrace was attached to the imperial dismissal. In order to
procure the necessities of life, and continue his brother's education,
Shih Liang was now forced to sell one by one many of the irreplaceable
heirlooms, the antique carvings of jade and ivory, the rare porcelains
and paintings of the ancestral collection. This he did with extreme
reluctance, with a sense of utter shame and profanation, such as could
be felt only by a true lover of such things, and by one whose very soul
was consecrated to the past and to the memory of his fathers.
The days and years went by, the collection dwindled piece by piece; and
the time drew near when the studies of Po Lung would be completed, when
he would be a scholar versed in all the classics and eligible for a
position of both honor and profit. But, alas! the porcelains and
lacquers, the jades and ivories had all been sold; and the paintings
were likewise gone, all except the willow landscape so dearly cherished
by Shih Liang.
A mortal and inassuageable sorrow, a dismay that was colder than the
chill of death itself, entered the heart of Shih Liang when he realized
the truth. It seemed to him that he could no longer live if he should
sell the picture. But if he did not sell it, how could he complete the
fraternal duty which he owed to Po Lung. There was but one possible
course; and he sent word at once to the Mandarin Mung Li, a connoisseur
who had purchased other pieces of the old collection, telling him that
the willow picture was now for sale.
Mung Li had long coveted this picture. He came in person, his eyes
gleaming in his fat face with the avidity of a collector who scents a
bargain; and the transaction was soon concluded. The money was paid
immediately; but Shih Liang begged leave to retain the picture for
another day before delivering it to the mandarin. And knowing that Shih
Liang was a man of honor, Mung Li assented readily to this request.
When the mandarin had gone, Shih Liang unrolled the landscape and hung
it on the wall. His stipulation to Mung Li bad been prompted by the
irresistible feeling that he must have one more hour of communion with
the beloved scene, must repair once more in reverie to its inviolate
retreat. After that, he would be as one without a home or a sanctuary;
for he knew that in all the world there was nothing that could take the
place of the willow picture or afford a like asylum for his dreams.
The mellowing rays of earliest eventide were sifted upon the silk
volumen where it hung on the bare wall; but for Shih Liang, the
painting was steeped in a light of supernal enchantment, was touched by
more than the muted splendor of the falling sun. And it seemed to him
that never before had the foliage been so tender with immortal spring,
or the mist about the mountain so glamorous with eternally dissolving
opal, or the maiden upon the rustic bridge so lovely with unfading
youth. And somehow, by an unaccountable sorcery of perspective, the
painting itself was larger and deeper than of yore, and had
mysteriously assumed even more of reality, or the illusion of an actual
place.
With unshed tears in his heart, like an exile who bids farewell to his
natal valley, Shih Liang enjoyed the sorrowful luxury of looking upon
the willow picture for the last time. Even as on a thousand former
occasions. his fancy strayed beneath the branches and beside the mere,
it inhabited the tiny hut whose roof was so tantalizingly revealed and
concealed, it peered at the mountain-tops from behind the trailing
foliage, or paused upon the bridge to converse with the peony maiden.
And now there happened a strange and inexplicable thing. Though the sun
had gone down while Shih Liang continued to gaze and dream, and a
twilight had gathered in the room, the picture itself was no less plain
and luminous than before, as if it were ]it by another sun than that of
contemporary time and space. And the landscape had grown even larger,
till it seemed to Shih Liang that he was looking through an open door
on the veritable scene itself.
Then, as bewilderment assailed him, he heard a whisper that was not an
actual voice, but which seemed to emanate from the landscape and become
audible as a thought in his inmost mind. And the whisper said:
"Because you have loved me so long and so dearly, and because your
heart is native here but alien to all the world beside, it is now
permitted that I should become for you the inviolable refuge of which
you have dreamed, and a place wherein you can wander and abide forever."
So, with the surpassing joy of one whose fondest vision has been
verified, the rapture of one who inherits the heaven of his reverie.,
Shih Liang passed from the twilight room into the morning picture. And
the ground was soft with a flower-embroidered grass beneath his heel;
and the leaves of the willows murmured in an April wind that blew from
long ago; and he saw the door of the half-hidden hut as he had never
seen it before except in fancy; and the peony maiden smiled and
answered his greeting when he approached her; and her voice was like
the speech of the willows and the blossoms.
The disappearance of Shih Liang was a matter of brief and passing
concern to those who had known him. It was readily believed that his
financial sorrows had driven him to suicide, probably by drowning in
the great river that ran athwart the capital.
Po Lung, having received the money left by his brother from the sale of
the last painting, was enabled to finish his education; and the willow
landscape, which had been found hanging on the wall of Shih Liang's
abode, was duly claimed by the Mandarin Mung Li, its purchaser.
Nlung Li was delighted with his acquisition; but there was one detail
which puzzled him considerably when he unrolled the volumen and
examined it. He could remember only one figure, a maiden in pink and
white, on the little bamboo bridge; and now there were two figures!
Mung Li inspected the second figure with much curiosity, and was more
than surprised when he noted that it had a singular resemblance to Shih
Liang. But it was very tiny, like that of the maiden; and his eyes were
dim from peering at so many porcelains and lacquers and paintings; so
he could not be entirely sure. At any rate, the picture was very old;
and he must have been mistaken about the number of the figures.
However, it was undeniably peculiar.
Mung Li might have thought the matter still stranger, if he had looked
more often at the painting. He might have found that the peony maiden
and the person who resembled Shih Liang were sometimes engaged in other
diversions than that of merely passing the time of day on the bamboo
bridge!
Possibly
the spoken-word masterpiece of the late
Brother Theodore, it ranks with
Boris Karloff's reading of "
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!". Here the trademark accent fades with the drive to simply
express, how he makes the two adversaries alive in his telling, that you can hardly think of him as having "an accent" at all. Somehow, in my strange fannish way, I wish he'd gotten together with
Maurice Sendak to produce the ultimate
Grimm's Fairy Tales...or is this
Strewel Pieter?
I see the video...the huge hands on her tiny swaddled body, the tiny hand reaching for his rough square jaw...their bright eyes meeting, as he lays her in the cradle...
"Undt now, I vill tell the tale...Vunce upon a dtime..."