PROSE PASTELS
by Clark Ashton Smith
I. _Chinoiserie_
Ling Yang, the poet, sits all day in his willow-hidden hut by the riverside, and dreams of the Lady Moy. Spring and the swallows have returnedfrom the timeless isles of amaranth, further than the flight of sailsin the unknown south; the silver buds of the willow are breaking intogold; and delicate jade-green reeds have begun to push their way amongthe brown and yellow rushes of yesteryear. But Ling Yang is heedlessof the brightening azure, the light that lengthens; and he has no eyefor the northward flight of the waterfowl, and the passing of the lastclouds, that melt and vanish in the flames of an amber sunset. For him,there is no season save that moon of waning summer in which he firstmet the Lady Moy. But a sorrow deeper than the sorrow of autumn abidesin his heart: for the heart of Moy is colder to him than high mountainsnows above a tropic valley; and all the songs he has made for her, thesongs of the flute and the songs of the lute, have found no favor inher hearing.
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Leagues away, in her pavilion of scarlet lacquer and ebony, the LadyMoy reclines on a couch piled with sapphire-coloured silks. All day,through the gathering gold of the willow-foliage, she watches theplacid lake, on whose surface the pale-green lily pads have begun towiden. Beside her, in a turquoise-studded binding, there lie theverses of the poet Ling Yung, who lived six centuries ago, and who sangin all his songs the praise of the Lady Loy, who disdained him. Moy hasno need to peruse them any longer, for they live in her memory even asupon the written page. And, sighing, she dreams ever of the great poetLing Yung, and of the melancholy romance that inspired his songs, andwonders enviously at the odd disdain that was shown toward him by theLady Loy.