Sanchi

“ The art of Sānchī on the whole is wonderfully strong, fresh, and original. It shows no more trace of foreign tutelage than any of the Western schools—for artists of all countries borrow from each other and inherit ideas from the past. The sculptures of the gateways fall into two main categories—those which are structural or heraldic, and a series of pictures in stone illustrating the story of the Blessed One for the edification of pilgrims. ”

“ Though he says nothing about it in the Edicts which have been discovered, he erected numerous religious buildings including the Sanchi tope and the original temple at Bodh-Gaya. Their effect in turning men's attention to Buddhism must have been greatly enhanced by the fact that so far as we know no other sect had stone temples at this time. To such influences, we must add the human element. ”

“ Just as the Indian mosque is always Indian, so is the tomb of the great Pathān: it is the fifteenth-century development of the Indo-Aryan hero's tomb, the Buddhist stūpa. We have already seen how in the seventh century a.d., at Ajantā, the original idea of the stūpa as it was at Sānchī and Bharhut is altered. The dome, instead of being a solid mass enclosing a small relic chamber, has become a structural dome [8] of lotus-leaf form serving as the roof of an image shrine. The Lord Buddha has arisen from the dead and his tomb has become his throne-chamber. ”

“ Her great eyes loomed in her hot face like beacons. Her colour was high, her lips vivid. She looked as beautiful as an Indian flower. She was fighting for her own like a cat. An absent, shadowy, icily-pure Sanchia could never contend with this quivering reality of scarlet and burning brown; and the man stood disarmed before her, watching her every movement and sensible of every call of her body. ”

“ The great stūpa at Sānchī is one of a group situated in the Bhopāl State a few miles from Bhilsā, near which stood the famous city of Vidisha, [1] the capital of Eastern Mālwā. It is built upon a hill which in pre-Buddhist times may have been the site of Aryan Vedic rites, which gave to it the odour of sanctity, for it is not known to be in any way connected with the life of Buddha. Many stūpas of the Aryan princes of Mālwā may have preceded that which was dedicated to the memory of the royal Monk of Kapilavastu. ”

“ Their road lay now due west, keeping the ridge—a broad grass track belted rarely by woods on the north, but open on the south to hill and vale in diversity of sun and shade, a billowy sea of grass where no sign of man was to be seen. Sanchia's heart was so light she scarcely touched the ground. She swam the air, not flew. Chevenix pounded in her wake. ”

“ The real presence of Sanchia was always with him, to intensify, accentuate, and make reasonable the perceptions of his quickened senses. Sense blended with sense—as when the sharp fragrance of the thyme which his feet crushed gave him the vision of her immortal beauty, or when, in the rustle of the wind-swept grasses, he had a consciousness of her thrilled heart beating near by. ”

“ I've done that sort of thing—Sanchia knows. Now I must trouble you to advance. I'm sick of life on these terms: you could make life worth living. I must really trouble you: sorry to seem languid, but I am languid. You, with your fine sensibilities, ought to be the first to feel that; but no: you wait, looking exquisite, with eyes like blue-black water, and a mouth, a mouth like a flower. You soft gossamer beauty, I could crush you where you hover; but you won't come and be crushed. Certainly, you are cruel. ”

“ So she told him, Senhouse, her only friend; and he cried aloud in his agony, “God save her,” while his soul was saying, “Beatrice never shrank from hell, nor ever looked back. No more, God be thanked, does Sanchia.” When the thing was done, and she had gone with unbowed head into the deeps, he had known his hours of desolation; but from that hour she had stood for him “a thing enskied and sainted.” He felt that he was set apart for her worship, and only regretted that Beatrice had had a better poet for the business than Sanchia could ever hope for. ”

“ Again Sanchia bit her lips and sat back.
'Dear old pops,' said Helen, going to her father's side and slipping both arms about his neck, ruffling his scant hair and otherwise making free with his passive person, thereby achieving the dual result of coming between him and Sanchia and giving a joyous outlet to a new emotion. 'I am not going to leave you, after all. And the West is the nicest country in the world, too. ”

“ Sanchia, new to courtship, was quietly elated, and her amusement did nothing to diminish her elation. She had never been wooed before: there had been nothing of the kind in those shuddering days when she and Ingram, trembling in each other's sight, had mutely cried across the waste of London for balm upon their wounds. The flattery of attentions had never been hers, nor the high credit of admiration so respectful as the good merchant's. He esteemed her the fairest and holiest of women, was as timid as a boy in her company, gasped like a fish and grew unmannerly hot ”

“ Ingram might rage for her in vain, Chevenix agonise, or quarrel with his host and friend, Mrs. Devereux disapprove to the point of keeping her room; but Sanchia, with front serene, moved from office-table to kitchen, to the garden, to the home-farm, interviewed Mrs. Benson, consulted with the stockman, pored—her head close to Clyde's—over seed-pans and melon borders, was keenly interested, judicial, reflective, pleading, coaxing by turns—seemed, in fact, not to have a perplexity in her fair head. Her health was superb, she never had an ache nor failed of an appetite. ”

“ All nature, in fact, was vocal of Sanchia by day; and at night, presently, she stole white-footed down the slant rays of the moon and fed his soul upon exhalations of her own. Idle as he might have appeared to one who did not know the man—for beyond the routine of his handiwork he did nothing visible—he was really intensely busy. Out of the stores reaped and garnered in those meditative years was to come the substance of his after-life.
But no man in England may live three years in a grass valley unreported; his fame will spread abroad, scattered as birds sow seeds. ”

“ This mysterious, shrouded Sanchia figured in it as the goddess of a shrine—omnipresent, a felt influence, yet never a woman. He spoke her name with a drop of the voice; every act of hers, as he related it, was coloured by sanction to seem the dealing of a divine person with creeping mankind. To Mrs. Germain it was all preposterous; if she had owned the humorous sense it would have been tragically absurd. For what did it amount to, pray, but this, that Jack Senhouse had been in love with a girl who had loved somebody else, had married her choice, and was now repenting it? ”

“ He came to picture the mating of these two—Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long-enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you—into you, and beyond you. ”

“ Morosine seemed to her so extraordinarily reasonable, so ready, with well-known laws, to account for unheard of vagaries, that it would have been real luxury to her to find herself and her escapade the mere creatures of some such law. To be discovered normal: what a relief from strain!
Lady Maria, it seems, charged him with Oriental aptitudes. Sanchia gave that judgment careful attention, studied her friend in the light of it, weighed every word of his to her, watched him closely in company when he could not be aware of it. She decided against the opinion. ”

“ The little Sanchica knew him by his yellow beard, and his resemblance to his portrait, which she had often seen in the picture-gallery of the Generalife. She gazed in wonder and admiration at this royal pageant, as it passed glistening among the trees; but though she knew these monarchs and courtiers and warriors, so pale and silent, were out of the common course of nature, and things of magic and enchantment, yet she looked on with a bold heart, such courage did she derive from the mystic talisman of the hand, which was suspended about her neck. ”

“ Lady Maria twinkled; but her scrutiny was keen. “I don't think you have explained the gardener,” she told her. Sanchia blushed.
“He's a boy,” was her suggestion: but Lady Maria's comment on that was, “And a bruiser it seems.”
Sanchia smiled gently. “Poor Struan! He was very difficult. He made me furiously angry. What he did was outrageous. But I am sure he is a genius.”
“What!” cried her ladyship. “A genius at gardening? or at thrashing gentlemen?”
Sanchia said simply, “It's extraordinary what he can do with plants. He's certainly a genius there. He's like a plant himself. ”

“ You noble creature, you have made Sanchia Murray love you! Generous man, you have come to mean everything to a poor little woman who is lonely!'
It is much to be said in a glance, but Sanchia had never travelled so far on her chosen road of life if she had not learned, long ago, how to put into a look all that she did not feel. And she did not stop with the one look; again she appeared to stumble, again her eyelids fluttered upward, her glance melted into his; again she flashed sufficient message to redden Longstreet's cheeks and make his own eyes burn with embarrassment. ”

“ Your seemingly passive martyr is really in an ecstasy. He aims at outraging Nature; begins by despising and ends by dreading it. Nature, however, has ways of revenging herself.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Sanchia soberly.
They walked on together, she by this time very much absorbed. She was not conscious of the shifting crowd, the lifting of hats, the chatter, the yapping dogs that ran in and out of women's skirts. ”

“ He had far rather deal mentally with the lovely image of Sanchia, as he saw it, than actually with the breathing, palpitating flesh. To picture her longing, straining, trembling—to keep her always so, always holding out her arms, never obtaining what she sought: his bliss lay in that. He knew himself, after much experience of the sort; he had missed so often by blundering in, that now he dared not risk a wreck. Here at last, he told himself, was perfection: let him look to it that he kept it at its perfect poise. He must poise himself to do that, balance himself upon a knife-edge. ”

“ To his simple soul a fine day, a fine-fettled river demanded, as of right, a happy mood in man, for whom all things were made. And a fine girl by his side, a good, a brave, a splendid girl—down on her luck—on such a day! What could one do? If, when you began, she choked you off! Wouldn't meet you half-way—bottled it up! And here he was, geared for fishing, and without the heart to wet a line, because of all this misery. Sanchia, sharply in profile to him, from cheek to chin, from shoulder to low breast, all one sinuous, lax, beautiful line, broke in on his rueful meditations. ”

“ Perhaps too much reliance should not be placed on these very early traditions, as no material evidence of them exists, nor in the often-repeated assertion that Asoka built 84,000 dagobas, [59] to receive relics. That he built several is quite certain. The fact of the relics of two of the favourite disciples of Buddha—Mogalana and Sariputra—and of ten of the principal dignitaries of the Buddhist Church in the time of Asoka having been found at Sanchi in topes certainly anterior to the Christian era, [60] is quite sufficient for our present purpose. ”

“ Here are sufficient elements of danger to draw any woman; so Sanchia found herself presently drawn.
He came to Charles Street one evening late in November, to what Lady Maria called a little party. There was an autumn session that year, and London full. To her little party, then, came a solid wedge of three hundred people into rooms capable of holding with comfort fifty.
Chevenix was by Sanchia's side at the top of the stair, chatting pleasantly about every new-comer, when he suddenly stopped. “Hulloa,” he said, “here's Morosine, as smooth as a glass stiletto. He'll amuse you. ”

“ He saw all things flowing towards heaven, which to him was Harmony, Rest, what he called Appeasement. And all this straining and yearning in infinite variety was figured to him in Sanchia, as he discerned, but could not perceive, her presence. He made her out in elemental images, into the contours of the hills read her bountiful shape, into the onslaught of the wind her dauntless ardour. In fire leaped her pride, in the mantling snow her chastity was proclaimed. The rain was her largess, her treasure poured to enrich mankind. All flowers were sacred to her—frail beauty salient from the earth. ”

“ She particularly liked his company in galleries, because, though he never allowed himself raptures—of which she, too, was incapable—he was always seeking the roots of rapture. Sanchia had a fund of enthusiasm for art all the richer, perhaps, for being denied expression. It was comfortable to have that securely based.
“Do you ever consider,” he asked her once, when they stood before the great group of the Pediment, “why it is that these things are so beautiful; why, although they are bare of colour and all that stands for life to us in art, they are more than life? ”

“ You know me just as I know you. There's a confidence, a certainty about you. That's what's so splendid. There can't be a girl in the world like you.” He clasped her in triumph. “My Sancie! Back I come at the end of my time, and everything's in apple-pie order. And to crown all, there's you at the door, to welcome me—and wait your turn—and wait your turn. Always the same—my wise, fine Sanchia!” He leaned forward, picked up and held her hand. “My dear, I love you,” he said, and jumped up and kissed her. ”

“ Glyde, who had turned very white, compressed his lips and went back to his work—like a machine. Presently a light step made him start, look guardedly up, watch and wait. Sanchia, bare-headed, fresh and debonnaire, came in, like a stream of west wind. Her eyes beamed her health and pleasure. “Oh, Struan,” she said, “do come and see the Susianas. They are on the very point of opening. Do come. There's nobody about. ”