VI
CAMELLIAS
Blue bay below as far as eye can reach. Blue sky above, blue to the edge of the horizon. And in between a steep cliff of green: dark fir, pale bamboo, and that impenetrable undergrowth for which alone a botanist has a name—or names.
The time of the plum blossom has been, is gone, and the world is drowsing in the dream of summer. Up here in the green the quick sappy life is stirring, I can hear it plainly; for in all the world there is no other sound.
The trodden green path runs up, from blue to blue. Midway between the two I stop. And the green world closes in around me, shutting out the blue I came from and the blue to which I go.
The tall dark firs sway slowly. The pale bamboos wave slim fingers, green as March lime leaves in the sun, their golden stems are elusive and bewitching, sunned dryads of the East.
The green world has me in its hold. I forget the steep path to the blue above. It is warm and still, and the bamboos beckon as they sway.
How green it is! All the greens a painter ever dreamt of ... and the graceful bamboos beckon Eastern Vivians to bewitch.
I stay to look and look—never trees so graceful nor the green world so fair. A step. I have left the pathway,—and then—I stop. Beyond the pale bamboos and above them, its dark green branches rising upwards to the blue, is a camellia tree. Each glossy handful of leaves holds a single blood-red flower. And the tree stands there beyond, above the swaying, beckoning bamboos, stern, severe.
“And the Wages of Sin is Death.”
I turn back to the path. The blue below spreads out as far as eye can reach, the blue above lies shining at the end of the pathway. The green world between is still.
But the path is very steep.