Chapter II: Part 2

He had gone ashore with them, at the instance of Lychnis, and they had climbed to the top of a humped green hill so as to survey the country. There they stood, under a plum-tree in blossom, protected, as Lychnis observed, by cousins of Terence’s messengers from Paradise. Lychnis herself was in a fragile plum-colored frock, out of compliment to them, and her red-haired fellow was in willow-green.

Behind, between two contortions of cliff, lay the sea. Far away, across the wrinkled and fissured hills, there were mountains with the unmelted snows of winter lying on their tops like petals of narcissus. The afternoon was spring-like, and there seemed to Ambrose to be a fragrance of lilies; but whether it came from distant fields or whether the girls were scented with it, he could not quite decide. But he suddenly remembered that the Chinaman had spoken of a great lake of water-lilies beyond the mountains of the interior.

Lychnis stood on the hill with her hands clasped behind her, frowning at the snows.

“Is that where we are going?” she asked.

“The indications point that way, I believe. Does it amuse you to go?”

“Oh yes! And really, if we don’t find something new, something strange, there, I think I shall die. Shall we perhaps discover some secret of life there, do you suppose?”

“You mean?”

Ruby was wandering about, rather bored, and Lychnis, as often before, talked intimately to her confessor. “I am so tired of reading books and meeting people and thinking, just to fill up the time. I am so tired of being conscious and trying to be more conscious. It is a disease that a drink of genuine life would purge out of the system. I want to become so that I’m waiting to get up in the morning just because it is another day to live; then, when I lie down in bed at night, sleep would be a deep physical pleasure. I wish it was a young world, with only a few people in it, and spring meant that one would go out of doors and ride away on some quest.”

“Romantic,” he observed. “And is not that what you are to do now, with your squires?”

“But it will be only us, and we only fill up the time, without zest and unconsciousness. Would you call my father whole-hearted any more? He knows now that he makes what is not worth making, and he has lost touch with life. Sir Richard lives merely intellectually, and he only knows about the how of things and argues fantastically as to their why. He makes out God to be a symbol in mathematics. Then Terence. His visions are old, and I think they are pathological and mad. His auras and reincarnations and glittering spirits from other planes, and all his vibrations and rhythms and things—they are the cloud-rack of a decaying personality. They are illusions of visions; and who would follow them to the world’s end, except daddy, more in contempt than faith? And as for Blackwood, he is so disillusioned that he wants to come to an end, and maltreats his mind with some old lost discipline for making it think of nothing, which it was never meant to do. And Sprot does not even know that there are thoughts, or doubts, or despairs. He’s merely a cell, and he can only market goods, I am sure without zest. No, Fulke is the only one who has any vision of a sweet and joyous world. He has youth in him, and desire, and all that. But his shape displeases me.” She looked up at the plum-blossom burning on the branches above her.

“There is Quentin. He has zest,” Ambrose observed.

“But what for? Yet he pleases me, and if I find nothing at the end of this journey I think I may let him please me more—if he can. For one can have pleasure if one can have nothing else. Yet there are certain things about love that I don’t thoroughly understand—you could tell me, if I could ask you. I think I could.”

Her head was bent in thought. Then she raised up her passion-lidded eyes, and Ambrose took the opportunity to examine her state of mind.

“Perhaps it is not life that you desire,” he said thoughtfully. “There is something else—you will understand what I mean some day.”

“You mean love, I suppose?” she asked, indifferent.

“No, not that.”

“I find love a bore,” she observed. “It might not be, I can conceive. Several have loved me, and Fulke now I’m afraid, and Quentin, if we are to call that love. And I love myself undoubtedly. When I see myself in the mirror I wish, sometimes, that I were a young man, and I feel that if I were women would love me, and I would take one—perhaps Ruby, though she is rather stupid. I could love a god, if he wasn’t too curly-headed and milk-white. Mine would be dark-haired, not fair, like Terence’s clumsy Irish heroes. But there are no gods, unless there are some lost here in China. Mine would have an air of profound thoughtfulness. If there were gods, do you think I would have a chance?”

She looked so comically serious that Ambrose laughed at her.

She was petulant at his laughing. “You don’t love me, do you, Ambrose? You only think I’m funny.”

He says her sentence came at him like a flung blossom with a little dart in it. He records his answer:

“I can make no talk when it comes to ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Really, I’m not sure that I’m aware of feelings and desires and so forth.” He remarks that he scarcely knew how to put it.

“Oh, I know,” she replied scornfully. “You only make notes. We are all specimens. Still, that’s just as well, because if you were at all likely to love me”—she flushed, now, at the word spoken before in a rushing impulse—“there’d be nobody left to talk to. You know, Ambrose....” She hesitated, looking about in the grass as if words might spring up there. “It seems funny to say ... I mean, all those men are a nuisance in one way or another. When they look at me their eyes are seeing me as a young woman. Daddy, even ... you understand? Fulke displeasingly, because he’s like a chimpanzee and I find it insulting, and Sprot sentimentally and disgustingly, and Quentin—rather excitingly. And Sir Richard, too, Ambrose, though it sounds wicked of me to say it, but I can’t help knowing. Terence, of course, pretends I’m his inspiration. Do poets embrace their inspirations? I expect so. And with Arthur Blackwood it’s the way he sternly doesn’t look at me, and when I’ve been talking to him he always goes into four or five kinds of trances. It’s all a nuisance. But you, when you look at me and talk to me, though I know you perceive every inch and movement of me and very many of my thoughts, but not all by any means, I don’t mind. It is so, isn’t it?”

He bowed, and admired her standing up straight and frowning and flushed against the stem of the young plum-tree. A pink blossom fluttered down on her.

She held on the way of her talk. “Now you are admiring me and making a mental note of my shape. You will record, later on, that the sky behind the blossom”—she turned to look—“is all tender apple-green, because it’s soon going to begin to be evening. Well, look at me.” She stood up on the toes of her slender shoes, and threw her arms out and her head back, so that he could study her breast and throat. He did so, and discusses the twin blossoms of her, and her whole shape, as a relation of subtle, slender curves that had a most stimulating effect on the mind and carried it beyond thoughts of physical beauty to profound thoughts of an informing creative spirit. He mentions that her throat was a springing flowerstalk.

“There,” she said at last. “You have looked, and it’s nothing to me. It would not be nothing if I were in love. I should be glad and happy at being studied. But I’m glad to be quite assured that I’m not, because now I know that one day, soon perhaps, I shall be able to ask you questions—questions I could put to no woman, last of all my mother, and no other man. You are the only soul in the world, Ambrose, who could receive from a woman such questions as I shall ask you—the only soul who could answer them without being silly. Soon—there are things I must ask you soon. Over there,” she pointed to the distant mountains, now cold and spiritual in the sinking sun—“over there, perhaps, we shall find someone, and there will no longer be something missing. There will be a note found to complete a music. And you,” she added with sudden malice—“you shall be marriage registrar.”

Then Ruby came wandering back—a lazy, redheaded Juno—and with her hands she clasped a mass of flowers to her bosom. “These are for the ship,” she observed. “Why didn’t you come and help me when I called? And what have you been jawing about? You’re always jawing, you two.”

“We’ve been talking most frightful stupid nonsense,” said Lychnis.

“I expect so,” replied Ruby with unconcern.

Then some of the others came from the ship, and they all gathered flowers until the silver moon rose out of the fissure of a hill into the tender, trembling sky. Mist began to form, and drove them back to the _Floating Leaf_, and it was not long before there was nothing to be seen but the mist and the moon, and here and there a plum-tree on a black knoll rising out of the mist, and a flight of wild geese crossing the sky.

10

Next morning, not unexpectedly, the Chinaman presented himself before Ambrose in his cabin like a scowling apparition, and proposed, in respectful and professorial language, that he should accompany the party. “For,” said he, “a guide to the country, its manners and customs, its flora and fauna; an interpreter of the language of the people, and more especially of their state of mind in regard to the several members of the party; a softener of passions; a holder forth of the timely coin; and, if need be, one who can remind men at the appropriate juncture of the unfortunate results that follow unthinking interference with the obvious will of Fate—such a one would perhaps be not without use to the party.”

“Are you such a one?” asked Ambrose.

“While striving constantly to imitate the tranquil humility of the narcissus upon which we gaze through the port-hole, I am one who has made not altogether unavailing efforts to acquire the technique of such a one as I describe.”

“Then such a one had better address his further inquiries to Lord Sombrewater.”

The other bowed and accompanied Ambrose to the owner’s room, where he repeated his proposal. Ambrose noted with admiration how swiftly his chief put on an impassivity that did not seem less than that of the Chinaman. The little expressionless, pheasant eyes met eyes of unreadable black lacquer, and Ambrose records that there seemed to be a sort of communication going on, as between animals or birds.

Lord Sombrewater at once confirmed an impression which Ambrose had himself long since received. “You are a man of considerable understanding,” he said. “You have, very markedly, the characteristic visage of a Sage.”

“I have gone but a very little way,” the Chinaman replied, “in imitation of those who have obtained wisdom, or, more correctly, of those who have learned to throw wisdom away.”

“You are a deft waiter as well.”

“That, noble viscount, comes of having perceived the inner nature of plates, glasses, table-napkins and the like. It is in such a purely menial capacity that I venture to offer my inexpert services.”

“In what capacity were you on the navigating bridge that night we were driven ashore?”

“I desired to meditate from that exposed place upon the state of mind of the master when he said, ‘The self-controlled man occupies himself with the unseen and not with what is visible,’ and when he said, ‘Purify the means of perception, so that by doing nothing all shall be accomplished.’”

“Oh, well, by the means you mention you have accomplished much—or someone has.” Lord Sombrewater thought for a few minutes. He told Ambrose, when later observations had told him a great deal, that he was convinced the ship had been steered by some sort of energy-beam from the shore. Then he decided. It seemed to be his method, at moments in his career when important decisions were before him, to adopt any plan that offered itself. It is probable that he decided on some instinctive summing up of facts, or indications, intuitively perceived. He unreservedly accepted the proposal that the Chinaman should act as guide. “What shall we call him?” he asked.

“Such-a-one,” Ambrose suggested.

“Good. I nearly made him minute-writer in your place, Ambrose. I rather fancy him. But we industrial princes can’t have people assassinated when they are in the way.”

Ambrose considered the point. “I suppose not,” he said thoughtfully—“not as a rule. But here nobody would ever know if you waited till we were some way inland. Quentin would do it for you.”

Sombrewater laughed loud and long. “You ignore the possibility of any affection a fellow might have for you.”

“No, no,” replied Ambrose. “I make due allowance for it in my estimation of the probable course of events.”

11

Just after sunrise the next day ten figures in the costume of ancient China (on the advice and with the assistance of Such-a-one) embarked in a cluster of odd craft that lay alongside the _Floating Leaf_. Each boat had a windowed cabin, like a gondola. On the sail of each was an emblem like a flying beast. The Dragon, Quentin pointed out.

Lychnis went first, swaying like an amber chrysanthemum on its stalk; Ruby followed, her plump, maiden curves voluptuously shown, as she balanced, in plum-coloured silk; Lord Sombrewater in marigold and green; Sir Richard in apricot, with a device in black like a system of coordinates; Sprot in mauve; Blackwood in lilac; Terence in flame-orange; Quentin in peacock-blue; Fulke in primrose with sleeves of green; Ambrose, lastly, in misty white. Clustered in their boats they seemed like flowers in fantastic baskets floating in the stream.

The resentment of the three ladies was soon forgotten in the excitement of the journey. Indeed, it was not long before the sea and the _Floating Leaf_ and the thought of their life in Europe seemed to fall under the horizon of the mind, and they saw only the new beauty and strangeness of the country where they found themselves. As Quentin remarked, nowhere else in the world were such refined harmonies of colour in landscape to be seen or such subtleties of tone. The river wound secretly and intimately deep among the emerald hills, with their dragon crags; now between lines of willows putting out a mist of silvery-grey leaves, a mist deepened here into a tender blue, there into a subtle rose; now through the delicate umber shadows of some flowery gorge among jade-hued rocks. Here a bridge spanned the river, springing from a group of trees and gracefully completing the rhythm of the valley; there a village nestled by some profound logic in the nook of a hill; once and again was some glimpse of the forest, or of the white, slender beam of a rushing cascade that plunged down from distant fells in harmonious passion. Over all floated white clouds like masses of blossoms, and it was as if the forces of Nature and the hand of man had united to suggest a landscape-dream of some profoundly meditating, non-human spirit, in which man had his place with the plum-blossom, the torrent and the black-bird on the branch.

They went slowly, by sail and pole, in three boats. Terence, as mystical leader of the expedition, sat in the first beside Such-a-one. Quentin took his morning exercise in the second, thrusting with the bamboo pole, and Frew-Gaff his in the third. They called to one another, startling coot, mallard and teal from the reeds. Ambrose was with Frew-Gaff and the two girls in the third boat. Lychnis and Ruby lay curled up on one side, looking out; Ambrose on the other.

A shout came over to them from Quentin: “How are the maiden skins?”

For answer Lychnis clapped the small hands that lay in her sleeves like petals, and Fulke, in another window, was observed trying in vain to catch her eye. Then, at another shout from Quentin, she asked to be put out on the bank, and met him. It was a rice-field, and half a dozen blue-clad labourers were at work there.

“I’m tired of standing still,” Quentin observed, strutting and striding in his magnificent robe, a blur of deep blue that gave emphasis to the whole riverside scene.

“So am I,” she answered; “my legs want to run.” She picked up her robe, and her green trousers flashed over the field like a pair of parrots. Ruby, who had scrambled ashore after her, followed, and her legs flashed like flamingoes.

“By the Virgin Mother, how beautiful!” Quentin sang out, and chased them down the rice-field like a great swaying peacock. He caught Lychnis first, as he came up with her among the bamboos, by her streaming hair and forced her head back, so that all her face and throat were exposed to him. She saw the red, smiling lips in the frizzy beard pouting a suggestion of kisses, and turned her face sharply aside. “The unburnt child dreads the fire!” He grinned his contempt at her and gave a vigorous tug at the handful of amber hair. “Rich, ungathered coral! Sweet, shadowy, unentered cavern of a mouth! Unfleshed teeth! Little tiger that has not yet tasted a man! Little fool!”

She stared soberly up at him. “Out of the strong cometh an excess of sweetness, too luscious pomegranate of a man!”

He grinned and led her back, still in captivity, to the boats, annexing the slow Ruby by the way, and as he drove his pair through the field the labourers began to follow and gather in round them, with a kind of singing chatter, like a chorus. Fulke, who was also on the bank, a little shamefaced because he lacked the spontaneity of Quentin and the two girls to run, started forward; but when the little crowd came near the boats, Such-a-one raised his voice to such effect that they sped across the field and vanished like rabbits among the bamboos.

“Odd, that,” said Quentin. “What is his secret charm? The authority lay not in the tone, but in the words. Or did he perform a miracle—The Manifestation and Evanishment of the Blue Men?”

“I believe anything, now,” Lychnis replied. “Every minute I hope to see that dragon flying across the hills.”

Then there was a cry from Terence and a gesture like the waving of a banner.

“He wants to go on,” said Quentin. “He’s losing sight of his Peach-blossom friends.”

So the boats began to move slowly ahead, those four, with Ambrose, following along the bank; and at everything Quentin said the girls laughed, encouraging the flow of his spontaneity. Presently they came to a village shadowed among huge rocks and trees. Variegated ducks surrounded them and a flock of geese steadily testified with outstretched necks to some difficult truth. The village was sombre, mysterious and deserted, but a girl was searching for some object among the pebbles at the water’s edge. She looked up, startled, at the approach of five gorgeous strangers like ghostly mandarins and their ladies, and began to make off with little tottering steps.

“Delicious object!” cried Quentin. “Totter, rather, to these arms and the refuge of this beard, which is indeed a better beard than any countryman of yours can produce. For the beard in these parts is scanty,” he explained, turning to Ambrose, “as you will undoubtedly record.” Then, seizing the girl by the skirt of her jacket, he turned her about and pinched her chin and her yellow cheeks. She screamed. At once from the shadowy houses there was a swift, silent arrival of yellow-skinned relations, and the rest of the party drew together while Quentin, with sparkling eyes and wide smile, faced the crowd. But immediately the voice of Such-a-one came from the leading boat, suavely rising and falling, and once more with mysterious effect, for the gathering dispersed, not, this time, without conveying, through their expressionless faces, some hint of a threat like the threat of geese.

Lord Sombrewater sprang out of his boat. “This is quite enough,” he said, with acid authority. “Lychnis! Ruby!” He pointed, and they returned to their window.

“Funny,” remarked Quentin to Ambrose. “Your Chinaman has some talisman in his tongue. This will be useful should one of you go too far.”

12

Late in the afternoon they disembarked, and Such-a-one led them by a steep road through a village to a solitary inn halfway up the mountain. The moon came up behind the mountain, and soft hues and scents of the spring night stole into the sky.

A warm, stirring silence. The inn slept, and Ambrose kept watch in the road—before him a trembling emptiness of sky, and the fantastic roof of the inn, and a candle burning behind the paper blind. The blind moved, the candle was extinguished, and Lychnis and Ruby leaned out between the bamboo shoots. They threw him down flowers, whispering good-night. Then silence, breathing, scent-laden.

Ambrose was arranging the events of the day in his mind for purposes of record. While his mind worked his eyes were fixed on the moon sailing in a clump of bamboo beyond the inn, like a swan among reeds. His meditations were disturbed, suddenly, by an outbreak of imprecation in his near neighbourhood. It was Fulke. The language he used was like thunder and earthquake among those silent mountains, and seemed to Ambrose to give a distinctly reddish tinge to the sky.

He whistled, and Fulke paused like a nightingale disturbed in his song. Then with a “That you, Ambrose? My God!” he resumed his theme.

“What is it?” asked Ambrose.

“What is it! I’ll tell you, so that you put it down in the records, on parchment, with tender, fragrant little illustrations. What is it! Only this. I asked Lord Sombrewater this evening if I might propose to Lychnis. Lychnis!” He groaned at the name, at the stolen taste of a pleasure never to be his.

“Oh yes?”

“Oh yes! You slug-flesh! You snail-guts! Don’t you want to know what he answered?”

“As soon as you wish to tell me, revolutionary but propriety-observing Fulke. I don’t know if you wish to tell Lychnis as well. That’s her window, you know.”

Fulke looked up to her window, and Ambrose saw in the moonlight that his face was all furrowed with desire and despair. He clasped his hands together. “Exquisite—immaculate, goddess-minded,” he whispered, and suddenly tore at his hair.

Ambrose drew him off down the road, pondering on the word “immaculate.” The demand of the virgin and ineffective for immaculacy—he would have liked to dwell on that, but it did not seem the right moment. “And what did Lord Sombrewater say?” he asked.

“I asked him,” said Fulke, dwelling miserably on the scene, “if I might ask Lychnis to marry me, and he looked at me for about three seconds and said: ‘Why, certainly.’”

“I see.”

“He summed up my chances in exactly three seconds. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Walk straight in,’ as it were. Tell me, you duplicating jelly, is he right?”

“I think so.”

“My God! you don’t know how it hurts, Ambrose! You don’t feel pain or anything like that yourself, do you? But I tell you, I suffer. Make a note of it. Make a note that the infernal fluids that the spring disturbs in the blood are hurrying from end to end of me with messages of desire and love. But don’t make the mistake of supposing that I am possessed by mere lust. The sensations of my heart are like the sensations of the opening lilac. I am chaste, and I always have been, and I only desire to worship her, kneeling among spring flowers. She only thinks I am ungainly, I know. But my soul loves all that is pure and virgin and flame-like and verdant and too good and lovely in her for the world. She is just that. She is my Grail, and, in short, chastity is a bloody obsession with me.” Wringing Ambrose by the hand, he plunged away.

The moon, Ambrose noted, was now clear of the bamboos, swimming in the shimmering skylake. He continued his meditations. It was not long before the sound of a voice singing came to his ears, and presently Quentin arrived, well satisfied with wine and adventure. He greeted Ambrose mockingly, bowing and shaking himself by the hand.

“A custom I have learnt in the neighbourhood, O moon-souled one.”

“Can you tell me why it is,” Ambrose asked him, “that a remarkable filthiness of language often goes with an unusual purity of mind?”

“You mean Fulke? These revolutionary environment-altering, ideal-state-creating people always seem to suffer from a prolonged adolescence, just as your opposite, return-to-nothing, environment-rejecting Buddhist blokes, like Blackwood, seem to have never had any adolescence at all. Early excess, perhaps, in their case; late excess in the other. How terrible, Ambrose, are the results of a wrongly-timed excess!”

“The observation shall be recorded. Don’t wake everyone up when you go in.”

“I’m not going in. I shall breathe out the wine that’s in me and watch Fulke worshipping the narcissus in the early dawn. You can go in. I’ll relieve you.”

So Ambrose left him, with one last look at the bamboo grove and the floating swan-moon.

13

Days of such journeying followed; sometimes they went in the boats and sometimes wandered by dizzy paths along the sides of the zigzagging mountains among groves of spruce, fir, or high up among pines and slender cascades. The weather was very fair and warm, and the sun was only dimmed by the shadow of the lapis lazuli crags that towered threateningly over the path or by the jade-brown walls of a gorge. At every turn there was some new glimpse of a sun-bathed horizon, or a gleam of the sails of their boats on the shining, enamelled stream. White cranes stalked among the emerald rice-fields. The roofs of villages reposed under the hills, suitably to the contour, and sometimes there were to be seen the quaint eaves of a temple appositely jutting out. And sometimes the glistening cascade fell from their very feet to some green trough in the snowy bloom of cherry, peach and magnolia far below. The spring weather, the exhilarating air of the heights, and a special comradeship that, as Ambrose notes, is apt to accompany such an adventure—at any rate for the first few days—put them all in good spirits with themselves and one another, and the ravines and wrinkled, wizard-faced crags not infrequently echoed with human song. Lychnis usually glided ahead, like a spirit that seeks the consummation of life in some perfect gesture of the dance, and her attendant followed with a more deliberate and serene enjoyment. Terence came next, officially leading, often in colloquy with Such-a-one; and the rest streamed out behind in ever-changing order, gay in their coloured garments, like a marching troop of flowers.

They camped one warm night, there being no village and no inn, at the mouth of an unusually gloomy ravine, where the mountains, towering above them, seemed almost to meet. The moon was in her third quarter. Three of the Sages—Terence, Frew-Gaff and Sprot—with Ambrose, were standing among the reeds by the water’s edge, peering into the mysterious, moon-dappled mouth of the gorge. Terence, profoundly stirred in spirit, had received illumination, and his eyes were deep pools troubled by shining moon-angels. He raised his hands up before the mountains and exclaimed: “The Last Wall!”

“Meaning,” said Frew-Gaff, “that on the other side of this barrier, which is to be pierced by means of this gorge, we shall find a sort of Fairyland of Pantomime Peaches?”

“The land of the Peach-blossom People, undoubtedly, matter-dividing Richard.”

“Dancing about in pink and purple tights, I suppose.”

“And as real as æther waves, fanatic particle-worshipper.”

“Well, after all,” said Sprot surprisingly, “there may be something in what Terence says. There are more things in heaven and earth, as Wordsworth reminds us. There is much that we cannot comprehend, and I was never one to scoff at what is beyond our understanding.” It was clear, Ambrose saw, that he had something up his sleeve.

“Let me feel your pulse,” said Sir Richard. “Ah! I thought so. The spring and the excellent wine we drank at dinner, and something that is no doubt aphrodisiacal in the night itself, have disturbed your blood. I detect overtones of moonshine in the vibrations of your nervous system. The sap is stirring in you; you are beginning to Sprot.”

“Clever—very clever,” replied the little man, with a certain resentment. He would have shown it more positively, but he knew it was better not to engage with these men in a contest of words.

“He has had a vision, perhaps,” fluted Terence from the gorge-mouth in deep tones. “Illumination comes oftenest to those who are simple in mind.”

“True,” observed Sir Richard.

“Not entirely a vision,” said Sprot, with a sudden falter. Then he made up his mind. “Look here, you chaps, you mustn’t laugh at me for once....”

“Go on,” said Frew-Gaff.

“How beautiful is the humility of those who have experienced the Experience!” exclaimed Terence.

Sprot pointed a finger. “You see Blackwood up there?”

Following his finger, they dimly saw the motionless form of Blackwood seated cross-legged on a ledge of the mountain. He was in discipline. “Yes,” they breathed.

“Well, I was up there talking to him, because I thought he might do me a bit of good, and as we were chatting, about self-control and” (he coughed) “purity and that sort of thing, and it was getting dark, we both distinctly saw a man pass riding on a goat, like the one you saw, Terence, beside the ship. He went down that narrow path very silent and swift, ghost-like; but what got us both a bit startled was his eyes, which were what you might call fierce and majestic, if I might put it so.”

Terence took him by the hand, exclaiming, “Brother!” Then once more addressing the mountain as “The Last Wall,” he stepped towards the river and said, to some hypothetical listener, “I come.”

“Stop!” cried Sprot. Terence, knee-deep in the reedy water, turned with an expression of inquiry.

“There’s more than ghosts in these mountains,” said the man of business. “Gentlemen, I am not an artist, or a dreamer, or a scientist; I am a practical man, and as such I keep my eyes and ears pretty wide open, and perhaps I see things that escape some others. Now this fellow Such-a-one, and his talisman, and all the tales we’ve heard about this part of the world—what do you make of it?” He paused, a conjuror about to produce an idea out of an apparently empty mind.

“Absolutely nothing,” said Sir Richard, looking down at him with tolerance in his moonlit, distinguished face.

“Nothing, naturally, it being a matter plain to be seen without a microscope, and hence not interesting to a scientific man. Well, Mr. Poet Fitzgerald, wade into the river by all means, though I might warn you against catching cold. As I said, I am a practical man. But there’s something more than a feverish cold hidden in the blackness of that split in the mountains, in my opinion.”

He stopped, and the others stared expectantly into the gorge.

“There’s dragons,” he exclaimed, like an explosion.

“Credo quia absurdum.” The voice of Quentin unexpectedly broke the silence, and Sprot jumped round as if his fancies had taken on a fearful reality.

“These mountains are certainly full of dragons,” continued Quentin. “Listen!” They listened, and a murmur of rippling water came down the gorge. “Do you not hear them drinking and swimming? Do you not realize that all these past days, as we walked among contorted crags, we were among dragons, twisting and grinning in their sleep? Look above you at those gruesome, moonlit shapes among the mountains, and their light, white breath drifting about the peaks. Look——” He stopped abruptly, and resumed in a queer tone. “Look, in fact, at that one hanging in the air.”

They looked and saw a great, beaked bird floating overhead with wide, motionless wings. Their mouths hung open, and Ambrose ascertained afterwards that their sensations were rather of astonishment than alarm. Frew-Gaff was the first to bring his mind to bear on it.

“An aeroplane, by all that’s holy!” he exclaimed.

The bird wheeled round a great circle and vanished over the mountains.

“Then what silent engines!” replied Quentin. “I fear it is the Dragon. Remember the emblem on our boats. It is clear that we have come here, by the hand of Such-a-one, in the capacity of sacrifice for some annual feast. Hence the respectful attitude of the surrounding population. Sprot will undoubtedly suffer first.”

Sprot was pale, trembling. “The camp!” he muttered. “The girls!”

Taken by his infectious alarm, they rushed back to the camp. All was well. The blue-clad stewards, under the assiduous tutelage of Such-a-one, were prostrating themselves forehead to ground. The others were looking up at the mountains with mingled amusement and apprehension, as if they preferred to believe that someone had played a rather uncanny joke. The girls, by their dishevelled hair, had come from their pillows. This drew Quentin. “A girl fresh from her bed is among the most intoxicating sights of earth,” he murmured to Ambrose.

Then Blackwood came flitting through the night with a not altogether well-disciplined haste, asking: “What is it in the sky?”

The matter was pretty thoroughly discussed, without satisfactory conclusion. “Anyway,” said Lord Sombrewater at last, “dragon or aeroplane, the incident adds piquancy to the adventure. What do you say, Lychnis? Would you rather go back?”

She shook her head. “On the contrary.”

“And you, Ruby?”

But Ruby had fallen asleep. “What a lovely morsel for sacrifice!” said Quentin, looking down at her.

14

Ambrose’s narrative proceeds with the same observant calm; and it is from the heightened colour of the things he has to describe, and the heightened emotion of the conversation he has to set down, rather than from any deliberately enhanced passion of his language, that we derive our impression of the beauty of the Peach-blossom Valley. He shows us the lagoons, the valleys, the oyster-shaped rocks and the distant mountains, and he describes the reactions of his companions, without intervention of sentimental comment.

It seems that in the misty, serene and summer-promising loveliness of the next daybreak they embarked and entered the gorge almost without waiting for breakfast, undeterred, confirmed even in their resolution, by the disappearance of all the servants, except Such-a-one, who explained that they regarded the manifestation of the Dragon as a warning, and would undoubtedly spread the news, as they returned to their villages, that the whole party had been carried away.

The mists had scarcely lifted from the quivering reeds, and the sky was still all blue and rose, when they poled across the clear black water and entered the gorge. There proved to be nothing formidable or gloomy in the gorge. It was wide and, when mists lifted, warm sunlight poured down among rock shapes of a dream, throwing queer shadows on the water. Their passage along these fantastic corridors was slow. The sails were useless, and the water was too deep for the pole, so that progress could only be made by the use of paddles and by pushing on the fissures and protuberances of the rock. But it was not easy, for the boats were heavy, and either they were continually bumping on a buttress or coming neatly to rest in an angle, or else one had to paddle against the stream over an open sheet of water, for here and there the gorge widened into a mountain-locked lake, and there were arms of the lake running into green mountain-valleys, and wide bays and beaches bordered with majestic groves of the tall, springing bamboo. There were also dragon-hiding pools under contorted cliffs, black waters and shadowy flights of fish.

They all worked silently with pole and paddle. At last Quentin wiped the sweat off his face and asked: “Who’ll swim with me in the Gorge of Dragons?”

“I will.” The voices of Lychnis and Ruby chimed high among the rocks, echoed by Fulke Arnott.

“Wait a minute,” put in Lord Sombrewater. “Is it safe, swimming here?” He addressed Such-a-one.

The Chinaman smiled gravely. “The river is warm and sweet and clear, Excellence. There are few reeds in the channel, and there is nothing more formidable, by day, than pike. These, however, are voracious.”

“I’m not frightened of fish,” said Lychnis. “I’ll kick them.” Anticipating her father’s consent, she vanished into the interior of her boat, followed by Ruby; and Ambrose remarks that, after the silk robes in which they had for so many days suffered obliteration, the manifestation of their naked limbs and plum-coloured bodies was quite surprising. Soon four of the party were in the river—the two young women, Quentin (whom Ambrose likens to a piece of live rock), and Fulke (who was dragonish). They sported and splashed round the leading boat like water-gods, or swam far ahead, dark little heads and shining arms driving showers of water-drops. Then Lychnis and Ruby, when they were tired of it, played at being hippopotamuses, like children. That was on the suggestion of Lychnis; and Ambrose, leaning out of his window when she plunged, saw her shortened body down under the water, and her pale pretending face, her still eyes, when she floated up through the water to breathe. She was followed by the dim mass of Quentin, who had suddenly appeared beside her from under the boat.

“I nearly had you,” he said, spouting water from his mouth. “Drown with me, and let us be drifted into some underwater cave, locked together in a never-ending river-dream.” She made a fox-face at him.

The others swam in their turn. After the bathe they had a meal, and some strolled in the groves and some slept in the warmth, and later in the day they went on again, singing, and satisfied with the still splendour of evening. They spent the night in a creek, among clumps of bamboo.

It was during the following morning that the gorge began to open out, as the mountain range through which they had passed declined into a broken litter of jade-green hills, and they saw ahead of them the first glimpses of the Peach-blossom Valley. They called it the Peach-blossom Valley then because the journey came to an end there, Terence having received the necessary intimation; but Ambrose tries over some other names, as Willow Valley, and Valley of Emerald Hills, and Valley of Blue Pines. They were so moved, it seems, by the composed beauty of the scene that met their eyes as they left the mild opening of the ravine that for a time they forgot each other’s existence and lived alone in the delicate solitude of that dreamy landscape. The stream, deep and slow, wound between willows, and through the willow-screen they saw verdant lawns with a fleeting glimpse of deer. Beyond, there were orchards of cherry, peach and plum, so that the valley seemed full of low-drifting clouds, white and pink; above the clouds gleamed the smooth emerald of the hills, the blue pines and quaint outcroppings of jade-hued rock. Birds sang. The stream was fed by little tributaries that murmured among the lawns. Tributaries and stream were spanned by bridges of lacquer and here, among groves of bamboo, was the yellow-tiled roof of a pavilion, and there, sticking up out of the peach-blossom foam, a sunlit pagoda or a porcelain tower; and once, on the verandah of a pavilion by the water, they saw a figure seated in meditation, and once an angler under the willows.

“We are in water-colour land,” said Quentin. “This valley is done on silk. I fear you others are too gross-minded to subsist here for long.”

It was a landscape of unrivalled delicacy and refined distinction, a tone-subtlety of pale pink and blue, amber and apple-green, with harmonious notes of red and, in the hazy sky, of yellow. A soft wind fanned them up-stream. The valley widened continually, and the channel of the stream became lost in the first shimmering stretches of a lagoon. Now on either side they saw other valleys opening out, and beyond them glimpses of frowning pine-wood under azure and jade-brown crags. Azalea flamed on the hillsides. Ahead of them the arm of the lagoon on which they were sailing was studded with emerald islets, and the oyster-shell rocks rose out of seas of lilies. The hills toppled curiously, and in the strange perspective the distant mountains seemed to zigzag and stagger a little—not, indeed, out of harmony with the general effect of something artificial, composed and deliberately fantastic in a scene which might have proceeded from the mind of a classic artist.

Now they approached a part where the hills came right down to the water, and the lagoon took a right-angled turn between gate-posts of rock, the valley turning with it in its general design. Rounding the rocks on their left-hand, they saw before them a reach of water stretching away two or three miles, and perhaps a mile wide. This lake also, softly lapping in the all-pervading sunlight, was studded with islets of tender green; but in the middle of it—as near as they could judge the middle—there stood a greater island of rock, lifted high out of the water, crowned with pine-trees, flower-bearing, afloat, as it seemed, in a water-meadow sewn with a million opening buds of the lotus. The boats drifted unheeded while they all gazed at the tremulous, tender beauty of the scene—lapping water; island rock in lotus-meadow; reedy shores; blossom on emerald hills; beyond, a hint of snow-capped mountains; and all poised before them, clear-cut and delicate in a dream-medium of quivering, sun-saturated air.

With one accord they turned to Lychnis, as if to inquire what her thoughts were. Her face had a flush like the tip of the opening lotus. “The Dragon Altar on the Dragon Island,” she whispered to Such-a-one, who was observed to be in the doubled-up position of one who makes obeisance.

Nor would he lead them in the boats any nearer the rock.

“I’ll swim there,” said Quentin. “There’ll be lanes through the lotus-meadow.”

“I desire you to be good enough to refrain on this occasion.” Lord Sombrewater spoke peremptorily.

“Very well,” Quentin replied. “I obey. My heart is chastened, for the moment, by the supreme and subtle distinction of the water-colourist who composed this classic landscape, and there will be opportunities for enterprise at a later date.”

“But where are we going to live?” complained Ruby. “We can’t live for ever in these boats.”

“What does it matter?” asked Lychnis. “I’d like to go on floating for ever among the lotuses, dabbling my hands in the lake, until the world vanished and there was only a single lotus and my contemplation.” There was profound passion in her voice, and Blackwood turned to controvert the element of heresy in her point of view. But she woke from reverie and made some inquiries. “This is perhaps the earthly paradise. Can we stay here?” She addressed the Chinaman. “Is this valley for us? May we live in those pavilions and contemplate in those porcelain towers? Oh, Ruby! did you see the verandahs? What a summer we shall have—water-parties and lantern-feasts!”

The black eyes of their guide, unreadable as boot-buttons, regarded her child-like excitement. He bowed. “Nobody will prevent you, in these valleys, from the enjoyment of whatever you may find at your disposal. Let us explore the accommodative facilities.”

So they skirted the margin of the water for more than a mile, stealing glances at the mysterious island. They passed many a reedy creek, where carp, great and little, were swimming in hundreds, and green-headed ducks; many a lawn coming down to the water’s edge, with willow-tree or small, twisted pine; and at last they came to a mooring raft of bamboo poles. There Such-a-one made fast, and led his party, in their gay silks, by lawn and tall grove of bamboo toward the tributary valleys. At well-spaced intervals he would indicate some pavilion, designed and placed with regard to the surrounding contours, that was at their disposal, and the party began to drop members at one or other of these. Blackwood chose one by a stream not far from the lake for himself alone. It had a copper-domed summer-house, where he could sit and meditate by the water. Quentin, too, chose to be solitary, in a gorgeous pavilion with a verandah and a pointed roof of yellow and peacock-blue tiles. Next, farther away from the lake, Lord Sombrewater chose an airy and complicated summer pavilion for Lychnis and Ruby, Frew-Gaff, Ambrose and himself. Such-a-one bowed as they entered, saying: “The Pavilion of the Yellow Emperor.” This Pavilion, situated among lawns within the crescent of a forest of tall and splendid bamboo, was a puzzle of open verandahs, screens, windows, interior courtyards and little chambers and closets in threes. The massive roof, weighted with curved rows of vermilion tiles, rose from a tangle of upward-curling horns and grotesque monsters to a central and whirling creature that was both dragon and spasm of forked lightning. The furniture was exquisite, and in every room was a shrub or a flower—a lily floating in a cistern or an oleander in a porcelain tub. A faint scent of musk pervaded. The dwelling was provided with half a dozen respectful menservants and three girls. There seemed more, because they were all alike and always coming and going. The men were taller and finer than those who had left in a hurry at the mouth of the Gorge of Dragons. The girls, as Quentin remarked, were beautiful toys.

Lychnis and Ruby, with Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, vanished, and Ambrose gathered from their voices, now near, now distant, that they were exploring the mazes of the Pavilion. With Lord Sombrewater he accompanied Terence, Fulke and Sprot on a search for further accommodation. Behind the Pavilion, deep in the bamboo-forest, Terence came on a graceful, tile-encased tower like a lighthouse among the bamboo-leaf-spray, and elected to dwell in the topmost watch-chamber. Finally, Sprot, entreating Fulke not to desert him, found a house of lacquer and enamel, like a cabinet for a precious gem. There these two ensconced themselves, neither very satisfied with the other.

Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose returned to the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion, smiling and contented with the graceful fortune that seemed to have befallen them. Lychnis stood at the door in a new robe of heliotrope. A deep sash sheathed her hips, and her father, in his pleasure, put an arm round the slender waist and kissed her. Then, “Where’s Such-a-one?” he asked. “There are one or two things we ought to discuss.”

But Such-a-one had completely disappeared, so she told him.

“Indeed!” said he, turning his expressionless eyes, with a sharp, bird-movement, on Ambrose.

15

Ambrose emerged from his chamber at the side of the house and looked from the verandah across the quivering bamboo-forest. He was composing his description of the morning’s adventure. Somewhere in the neighbourhood he heard the girls chattering, and could not quite locate the sound. Ruby’s voice came, calling him, and when he looked round in bewilderment there was laughter. Then a lattice was pushed open at the other end of the verandah, and Ruby put out her head and shoulders. She had on a new jacket of geranium-red, and her copper hair was piled up with combs of tortoise-shell. “Come in and see Licky and me,” she said. “There’s a door on the verandah round the corner.”

He went into their room, making a note of the words “refined elegance” for subsequent use in describing its shape and furniture. There was an effect of green, gold and black; for the walls were green, and the furniture was ebony, with marquetry of brass, tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl. A clear sunlight, tempered by the lattices, showed him all the exquisite appointments. The ebony cupboard, with half-open, gold-enamelled doors, contained a hint of richly coloured clothes, like petals within the sheath. A profusion of silken jackets was scattered over an ebony and ivory commode, and hung on the handle of a lacquered cabinet and over a screen painted with butterflies. The curtains of an ebony bed, like a houseboat, were drawn, disclosing a heap of garments on the swan-white coverlet. Lychnis was seated on a stool by a window, having her hair brushed (but she had forbidden the use of resin) by a Chinese girl with black-bead eyes and almost imperceptible mouth. At her side was a lacquer table, laden with ivory brushes, jade and tortoise-shell combs, pigment trays in rare porcelain. There was a box with a brass mirror in the lid, and tiny drawers for lip-salve, rouge, powder, and pencil for the eyebrows. She had in her slender hands a gilt mirror. She was keeping her head very still, but she put, with her eyebrows, an inquiry as to his state of mind. He indicated satisfaction.

“This is very untidy,” he remarked. “How can you be so untidy in this perfectly proportioned chamber?”

“We’ve been trying on the clothes,” said geranium-red Ruby. “It took an awful time to make up our minds. I chose this.” She opened her wide, black-bordered sleeves like a red butterfly, and turned on her hips to show him the great black wings of her sash. Her cheeks were flushed a deep crimson with her enjoyment, and he wondered if, with that and the advantage that her magnificent figure got from the half-revealing silk, she did not almost eclipse her slenderer companion. He turned round, with a view to the formation of a considered judgment.

Lychnis, the last golden comb stuck in her hair, stood up, and the wrap that had swathed her shoulders fell to the ground. She, too, had a faint flush, knowing, perhaps, that she was offered for judgment; or had she used, he wondered, a little pigment from the porcelain tray? She turned slowly for him to admire her. She wore a chrysanthemum robe—dusky flowers on a ground of pale amber. Her neck—as Quentin was wont to say, you could break it by clenching the hand—was a chrysanthemum stalk. The big bow at the small of her back gathered her robe in and disclosed the slim, womanish swell of her hips that he had so often tried to describe. She raised her robe slightly, to display trousers of some texture crisp and brown, like the petals of the flower. “And these comic shoes.” She pointed to them, and walked towards him, putting her feet one before the other in tiny steps. “Must we walk like that? Ruby’s beautiful when she does it. Am I?”

They were lovely, and friendly, those two young women. He watched them both imitate the swaying and delicate walk of the Chinese girls, up and down the room, while the maid put away the clothes, paying no attention. “You’ll turn into Chineses,” he warned them.

They both sprang at him with cries of “Never!” and pushed and pulled him from the room and along a corridor just to show what they could do.

But Lychnis abruptly desisted. “Hark! What’s that?”

It was a carillon of silver bells pealing in a tower of porcelain, calling the Sages from their several retreats to a meal in the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion. Lord Sombrewater and Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, clothed respectively in sunset crimson and turquoise-blue, were already seated in a chamber more sumptuous, but not less elegant, than the bedchamber. It was furnished with rich tables, and flowers, and great jars of finest blue-and-white porcelain. The other Sages arriving, changed likewise into robes of the most brilliant hue, refreshment was served in the shape of fragrant tea, with a dish of cooked bamboo shoots and other more doubtful ingredients.

“I shan’t examine this,” said Quentin. “It smells good, and I’ll risk the transformation of my lusts that may result from ingesting the cellular composition of beetles and slugs.”

“An insubstantial diet will do you no harm,” said Sir Richard. “If I were to drain you of blood and transfuse the sap of a vegetable, it might render your temperament less—shall I say?—ardent.”

“Ah, no! You’d find me doting on a cabbage, or in dalliance with a brussels sprout.”

“You approve of our surroundings, I take it?” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are in the garden of an emperor.”

“Shall we stay here? What are the views of the Sages? It is pleasant, certainly, beyond anything I have ever seen; but one or two circumstances are a little mysterious.”