Chapter III: Part 3

“It passes my comprehension,” said Sprot, “how anyone owning all this wealth can leave it absolutely unguarded. We may be murdered in our beds any night for the sake of the wealth that’s about us. These servants—can you trust them? They’re not white men, you know. I kicked one just now, to show who’s master here. I’ve always heard you ought to kick native servants. But, as I was saying, all this wealth and not a keeper, or a policeman, or even a ‘Trespassers-will-be-Prosecuted’ board.”

“It may be the custom of some Europeans to kick native servants,” said Lord Sombrewater testily, “but I shall be obliged if, in this case, you will use the extreme politeness they use with us.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly. But, if you will excuse me, all this gold and tortoiseshell, and the bric-à-brac—I suppose that’s valuable, too—who does it belong to? It must belong to somebody, I suppose. Or do you think we might—er—appropriate ... as a souvenir, I mean?”

“I don’t suppose they’d object to your pinching it,” said Fulke. “It’s clear there’s no capitalist system here.”

“Then you will be happy here?” asked Lychnis.

That brought him up short. “Yes, by the split kidneys of St. Sebastian!—thoroughly, frightfully happy!” He added to Ambrose in an undertone: “There’s always the Lake.”

“As for me,” put in Blackwood, “my summer-house down by the Lake is of marble and has a copper dome. So beautiful are my surroundings that I would readily stay here for ever, because of the exquisite and continuous temptation to the senses. But can these servants not be made to understand that I always have two lumps of sugar in my tea?”

“Sugar?” exclaimed Sprot. “What’s that got to do with meditation?”

“It’s a stimulant to the intestinal acrobatics,” said Quentin. “He rewards his performing vestiges with two lumps of sugar.”

“And you, Richard?” inquired the chairman.

“It seems to me we are committed. True, it is a nuisance to be without any facilities—no instruments, no materials, no laboratory—none to speak of, that is. Yet the place is very pleasant. Not that I am particularly susceptible to natural beauty——”

“It’s not natural,” broke in Terence unexpectedly. It was noticed for the first time that he seemed dissatisfied.

“But the air is stimulating, and, as you know, I am something of an optimist—in short, I particularly desire to find out what it is that gives these little grassy mountains that peculiar blue tinge, and the rocks simply shout for examination. Not that I am an expert geologist, of course. Still, one can record some observations. And I would add that I think we shall be at peace here. There is an air of happy serenity that lies on the valley.”

“And you, Terence?”

Terence, in the attitude of Rabindranath Tagore in meditation, raised his large, grey, poetic eyes. “I confess to a certain disappointment. Dragons are somewhat outside my habit of dreaming, and the Chinese gods are not, on the whole, attractive. I find something bland and pawnbroker-like in their faces——”

“That,” put in Blackwood, “is the everlasting calm of those who have learnt to despise the world.”

“I find it unheroic and fatuous. Moreover, I dislike the empty and unmeaning classicism of this Gentleman’s Park. And these rhododendrons and magnolias—they are so consciously ornamental and Chinese and matter-of-fact.”

“Still,” observed Sombrewater, “you would not wish to depart just yet?”

“So long as I am allowed to remain in my tower and commune with the myriad quivering spirits of the bamboo-forest.”

“By all means—if we may eat a few from time to time. I take it, then, that it’s settled. We remain.”

“I shall remain,” observed Lychnis, “till all’s blue. One need not starve, or stay out in the wet, for there are houses and servants and food everywhere. And I would like to say,” she added, with a certain diffidence, “that the matter-of-factness is only apparent. It seems to me, Terence, that it hides something—what shall I say?—almost unbearably passionate, all this classical restraint. Yes, the Pavilion and the little bridges and the landscape and everything else. These two paintings, for instance—the Flower-Spray. That empty, palpitating background. It is more than an evening sky. The flowers—don’t you think so, daddy?”—she appealed to her father to support her declaration of faith—“the flowers ... oh, they are more than lovely! There is something moves in them, behind them. Some great artist did that, with the calmness of a poet-painter who has feared beauty and conquered his fear. Then”—she looked round and gathered courage from their attentiveness—“the Geese. Not very romantic, Terence. But the soul of Geese is there, dear plump things! What is it Quentin would say in philosophy? Divested of all accident of appearance. They are whatever it is that is Goose at the perfect moment of evolution. The life of the universe is seen through the Geese in that picture. The painter has not hindered it with some sentimental pre-occupation of his own. Romanticism looks silly beside that sort of reality. I—I did not mean to have said so much. But it said itself. It was strange—those two pictures hypnotized me. Something that is not quite life—more than life; I can’t express it—moved in them, and words came to me.”

Quentin opened his eyes like a man waking from the illumination of prayer. “O exquisite penetration of unfolding virginity! These are the pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove, and we have heard a voice from the invisible but all-pervading reality of the universe. Now, I myself formed the same conclusion with regard to the art of China in the days of my purity—that is to say, when I was about thirteen. Some echo of those far-off days came to me as I studied my dessert-plate. This band of creamy pink enamel. This domestic scene in the centre of the plate. These two girls—what ivory-textured skins! what lily-petal hands holding the battledores. If the beauty, and by consequence the virtue, of the girls of this valley is anything like so fragile——”

“It is very fine ware,” put in Sir Richard. “I would like to understand their process more perfectly. Not that I am an expert in the manufacture of pottery. I wonder, by the way, if these cabinets are unlocked.”

“Obviously,” replied Quentin, “since there is no capitalist system here and no police. One must lock up things when there are police. There!” He opened a cabinet and brought out a piece of pottery. “By the Virgin Mary! it lives. The cellular organization of it lives and the integument is warm. It blushes under my fingers like a woman’s cheek. We have here all that’s most precious in the world, including three maidens.” He dug Fulke in the ribs. “Let us explore the mazy building.”

He led the party all over the Pavilion, discoursing in every room with infinite learning on some precious object of Chinese art. Before the ebony bed in the girls’ bedchamber he stood in an attitude of respectful adoration. Lychnis tactfully withdrew, leading Ruby. He spoke in a low voice: “And they lie there in each other’s arms, like shepherdesses in a Boucher. That precious cabinet enshrines them. My poor Fulke! To have seen, and to have no chance of possessing. But come away from this holy place. It is not for the likes of us.” They withdrew, Fulke suppressing a groan.

Finally, in a sort of study, they found a cabinet which contained what appeared to resemble some kind of listening-in apparatus. “Now,” said Frew-Gaff, “this is really remarkable.”

16

When evening fell, warm and flower-scented, they emerged, in their summer-gorgeous robes, from the vermilion-tiled Pavilion, and filed down towards the Lake. They stood on a lacquer bridge at the head of a creek and looked silently across the sheen of water.

“Look!” whispered Lychnis, “the Rock!”

It seemed to float before them, in a vapour of evening. The middle and upper reaches of the sky were clear and summer-foreboding, but clouds loomed up from behind the mountains beyond the opposite shore, and opened like large summer flowers.

The Sages went down and stood on a lawn by the water under a huge flowering tree of unknown kind. Great petals, coloured deep rose, floated down among them. Lychnis caught one in her hands and inhaled its odour. Her petal-eyelids closed.

Fulke, roaming disconsolately at large, discovered a mooring-stage of red painted bamboo among reeds, and there were two or three richly coloured skiffs, with pointed bows and little masts, tied to it. He leapt on the raft, and there was an outcry of waterfowl among the reeds, loudly disturbing the silence. They listened.

“Shall we go out a little way on the water?” He invited Lychnis huskily.

But Lychnis stood quite still, looking at the Rock.

“You, Ruby?” To make Lychnis envious, perhaps.

“I’d rather stay here,” said Ruby, shuddering a little.

Nobody, not even Quentin, responded to his invitation. The evening was so still. Perhaps a faint awe was on their hearts.

The deep colour faded gradually out, and the light died off the lapping water. A fish leapt. Night stole over the valley and fell about the Rock. One by one their hearts misgave them at the experience of beauty. They quailed before the task of mastering it with their souls, and drew away. Lychnis only still gazed, and Ambrose studied her.

“Come, my dearest,” said Lord Sombrewater, turning, as he went, to draw her by the arm.

An ecstatic sigh escaped her. She seemed unable to move. Ambrose and her father, and one by one the others, turned to see what held her so fast.

The Rock was ablaze with orange-hued lanterns, as if in the middle of the water a rhododendron bush had suddenly put forth flowers.

“Almighty, and as we hope merciful, God!” Quentin was spontaneously upon his knees.

A rocket crept up the black sky, and twenty dying red suns were extinguished in the Lake. Another and another.

“An extremely ceremonious welcome,” muttered Lord Sombrewater. “Who is our host, I wonder?”

“Lavish, to say the least,” replied Frew-Gaff.

The display lasted an hour. The culminating device was a vermilion dragon that writhed and grinned high up above the Rock. With that the entertainment abruptly ceased, leaving the night darker.

“How shall we find the way?” asked Ruby, with a quiver in her voice. But two or three servants, with kindly-meant if ghostly foresight, appeared out of nowhere to guide them, and they went their several ways through the spectral groves of bamboo, looking back now and then towards the Lake.

17

Warm-hued lanterns decorated the Pavilion and filled the bedchambers with a dim, wavering and unreal light. Ambrose retired and composed his mind. But outside on the verandah he could hear Lychnis and Ruby whispering and the swish of their robes on the floor.

“I don’t like it, Licky darling,” said Ruby’s voice. “I’m frightened. I don’t like our room.”

“Well, daddy’s next door, and your father is somewhere close by.”

“I don’t like the place where we are, not by night.”

“I do,” was the answer. “It’s the same valley by night as it was by day. Can’t you feel how warm and redolent it is?”

“But it’s so strange.”

“I love what’s strange.”

“I feel as if something, someone mysterious, might come and seize us.”

“I should like someone mysterious to come and seize me.”

“Oh, Lychnis, you are dreadful!”

There was no answer. Then, after a silence, Ruby spoke again in a breathless whisper: “Oh, look! There’s somebody under the trees.”

A pause.

“Silly! It’s only Quentin. How mad of him!”

Lord Sombrewater’s voice broke in from somewhere: “Go to bed at once, you two.”

Ambrose went out to the verandah in time to see the two silken forms vanish. But he was quite sure that Lychnis turned and waved to the dim figure under the trees. Her eyes shone.

18

Ambrose went down to the lake in the tremulous mists of daybreak. He pushed his way in waist-deep among reeds, noiselessly, to observe the habits of water-fowl.

Presently, without surprise, for she had the same early morning habits as himself, he saw the mist-white figure of Lychnis, with her skirt gathered in her hands, on one of the many little islets of rock scattered along the shore. She was bending forward, parting the water-lily leaves, gazing intently into the depths. He liked to see her once again in her own clothes, unswathed, a slender, air-loving Lychnis.

He whistled. She turned and waved—negatively, as it were—but after a minute she turned round again, and slowly began to make her way back, stepping and leaping and splashing from stone to stone, as if she walked on the water; and sometimes she swayed and balanced among the broad leaves, herself an unfolding white lily.

She came to him in the reeds and took his hand. “I didn’t want to see you at first. I thought it was Fulke or someone. But you looked so funny, waist-deep in the reeds and all thoughtful, and I thought I’d come. Let’s go, a long way—at once, in case any of the others come. I want to go miles this morning, exploring. Shall we?”

She was enchanting, in her slip of a dress and white stockings and delicate shoes. “How can you run and explore in shoes like those?” he asked.

“Fast-running things don’t have big hooves,” she replied.

“Quite true. Come on, then, Fawnsfeet.”

“My skirt’s not very wide,” she said, stepping out. It was a very slight affair, a mere shift, caught in on her right flank, so that the movement of side and hip was seen, to give the eye an unsatiable satisfaction. And one observed the moulding of shoulders and bust, and the young mounds that, as one supposed, a lover should one day cup with his hands and put his lips upon—a thought to make a man such as Quentin swoon. And the torso is incomparable, Ambrose observed to himself.

“I felt I couldn’t bear those other clothes any longer,” she explained—“except sometimes, to dress up. Ruby, on the other hand, likes them.”

“She’s asleep?”

“Fat with it, the pig. She woke up when I was having a bath out of a basin and thanked God that she was not a fool. The basin has a design of willow-trees done on it, and someone fishing. Do you fish?”

“Indeed, yes. Nothing I like better on a summer or autumn afternoon.”

“Well, I’ll fish with you. We’ll go right to the other end of the Lake by ourselves and fish all the afternoon. There’s some beauties in here. I saw them swimming past the rock I was standing on. It’s very deep, too—quite black with depth, and clear—like a black crystal. I sometimes think it looks more interesting under water, among water-plants, than above it. Don’t you?”

They made their way along the shore of the Lake, talking hard and laughing, smelling the water-smell and the early-morning smell. Sometimes they went on lawns, crossing the deep red or bright emerald bridges that spanned the rivulets; sometimes they trod among pebbles at the water’s edge; and sometimes, where the quaint hills came right down to the Lake, they had to scramble round sheer cliffs, jumping over the deep water from fragment to fragment of broken rock. At one place they had to creep under the bend of a slender, splashing cataract; at another they passed a man fishing. He took no notice of them.

Gently the air filled with the delicate splendours of the risen sun, and the steep island of rock out in the middle stood clearly to view. A breeze stirred the water.

“When the wind ruffles the Lake it looks like a meadow of snowdrops and violets,” said Lychnis. “I don’t see a sign of life on the island, do you?”

“Nothing but the foliage and the flowers.”

They had come now to a bay with a lawn shelving to the water. Lychnis stood with her hands behind her, looking seriously at the Rock. “Oh,” she exclaimed abruptly, “look at the swans!”

A noble flotilla, led by a god-like bird with frowning brows, swam royally towards them.

“How they stare!” She seemed fascinated. “Are they so different from us—in their lives, I mean, in their thoughts and feelings? Are we related to swans, Ambrose? I feel that I know them. I think I know them as well as I know people. Ambrose”—she bent her brows on him—“I think I shall ask you questions soon—to-day, perhaps. May I?”

“But yes, my silver birch.”

She considered. “Last night, Ambrose, Quentin kissed me!”

“Oh yes?”

She glanced at him, but her eyes were full of her thoughts. “Yes, he kissed me. I went back to him after you’d gone. The night was so strange and exciting. It was full of some promise. The night was full of some dark, passionate flower, waiting to open if I had the secret. I tried.”

“And you found it?”

“No; it was nothing to be kissed by Quentin—no more than my father’s kiss, or Ruby’s, or the peck of a bird—except that his beard was prickly and he smelt a good deal of wine. That’s why I must ask you questions. I don’t ask for facts. I know facts. I want to know how it can ever become so that they don’t obtrude rather unpleasantly on one’s consciousness. Do they ever stand out of the way of passion, Ambrose? Is there a desire that burns them all up into nothing?”

He was silent.

“It is possible that you do not know,” she said slowly.

“You must give me time, if I am to answer you fully. The subject is important, and wide.”

“Do you mean to write me an essay?”

“Not precisely.” He, too, considered. “It will take me some little while to arrange the logic, the perspective, of my reply.”

“Oh, well; take time over it, if you must. But I’m not often in the mood to ask you things.”

“In the meantime, I take it you have been disappointed?”

“I only hope Quentin was as disappointed as I was.”

“You won’t be ashamed with him? You don’t mind meeting him again?”

“But why? After all, I disappointed him. It’s for him to be ashamed if he can’t do better than that. He got nothing from me but my will to experiment, and I easily made it seem as if he was in fault. He went off feeling ridiculous, I fancy. But look! they’re asking for bread.”

There was always bread in her pockets. The splendid birds were clustered at the edge of the lawn, and she ran down and fed them, and put her slender white hands among their plumage. The god-like leader dug at her with his beak.

“How he stares! How insolent he is!” she exclaimed. “He pesters me—like Quentin.”

She retired a little. The great bird followed, bridling and opening his wings and frowning on her like a Jupiter. She stood still and taut, fascinated. Suddenly he spread his huge wings about her and laid his scarlet beak on her breast. She stood in his embrace for a moment, with thrown-back head, and his beak moved on the slender stalk of her throat. Then, swiftly and calmly, she disengaged herself and ran to Ambrose. The swan seemed quite crestfallen. “Look! I’ve disappointed him,” she said. “For my part, I prefer him to Quentin, but not very much.”

“You are a great mystery, my water-lily,” Ambrose replied.

They made their way back along the sides of the hills.

19

Nothing happened for three days. A few of the party found that eventlessness had a faint, queer effect on their nervous systems, and the pervading scent of musk was enervating. The days were a warm monochrome. The fiery procession of the sun across the diagonal of the valley was slow, perceptible and unvaried. One might have been glad to alter it. The profound peace and happiness of the valley became even oppressive, even almost sinister for Sprot. The valley smiled ceaselessly, and, as Quentin said, there is nothing more irritating. At night, Lychnis told Ambrose, Ruby clung to her in some sort of irrational fear. Only Lord Sombrewater remained entirely unaffected. And Lychnis liked it. And Ambrose made observations in his diary.

Then, on the fourth day, there blew up a storm of wind, and the clouds writhed like dragons, and the distant tiger-roar was heard as the wind stroked the cracking forests on the fells.

“What music!” Lychnis listened to her emotions, her brows heavy.

“Mendelssohn only,” put in Quentin. “Everything in measure here. None of your devastating German symphonies—not in these parts; even the storms are civilized—still less your incoherent Irish harps.”

“I did really begin to feel,” said Terence, “that our environment was unsympathetic. I haven’t had a dream, still less a vision, since we came. And I find the Spirits of the Bamboo Forest, though they are undoubtedly present in quivering myriads, more than a trifle hard to elicit. But this is better; this is more hopeful. The wind may bring things. I will therefore retire to my tower, and keep watch for a messenger from one of those many worlds that are undoubtedly interfolded with this. If you would like to share my vigil...?” He turned his great misty eyes upon Lychnis. “I feel it coming upon me that I am to begin a new portrait of you, in those elaborate clothes, with your hair so, formally, but half-hidden in veils of bamboo leaves.”

Lychnis declined. She was going out to the forest to hear the great branches cracking, she said. She and Ruby went to their bedroom to put on clothes they could walk in—mediæval hunting-clothes.

“Half-hidden! You always have to keep your subject half-hidden, Terence,” mocked Quentin. “Why don’t you paint her swimming naked in a mystical bamboo-leaf sea? I should, by heaven! if I were a painter. She wouldn’t be hidden! I should swoon, painting her.”

“You handle my daughter with your imagination a bit freely, Quentin,” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are all Sages here, I think,” replied Quentin. “We can all embark on the adventures of conversation, I think, for conversation’s sake, without being horrified at what we are compelled to say in artistic justice to our theme. It is true, certainly, that your daughter raises in me exquisite lusts of the imagination. But if I want to marry her in my imagination I may, I take it, without asking her parent’s imaginary consent.”

“It is a pretty point,” said Lord Sombrewater tartly; for, where Lychnis was concerned, even though a Sage, he would have put restrictions on the art of conversation.

The girls came back, dressed for the excursion. “I shall accompany you,” he said.

“And I,” said Sir Richard.

“And I,” said Quentin and Sprot.

“And I,” said Fulke, “if I may.”

Ambrose, naturally, joined himself to their party, as likely to provide more material for description. They set off, leaving only Blackwood and Terence Fitzgerald behind.

An hour’s march, mostly along the course of a stream that ran to the Lake, brought them out of the jewel-like, smooth-surfaced and quaint-conceited scenery, among which the Lotus Lake and the pavilions lay, into scenery of a wilder description. Quentin was walking with Lychnis, Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose.

“Terence should be here,” he remarked. “This is unfinished; this is romantic.”

“But a bit wizardous,” said Lychnis. “You would scarcely expect to meet one of his fair-haired Lohengrins—not among these oddly twisted pines and misshapen rocks. Some strange, gnarled old man, perhaps, with a staff—some very still old man, with a wrinkled, wicked smile, like a bit of the scenery suddenly living and peering at you.”

“The mountain air is very bracing,” observed Lord Sombrewater, “and the wind fortifies me exceedingly; but for a man who makes a regular habit of six cigars a day the pace is beginning to tell. So much loose rock about, isn’t there?”

“As for me,” said Quentin, “I am energy, I am vitality itself. I could tread the mountains flat. When we get up there on the crags I shall breathe in the streaming clouds and blow them out again in your faces. I shall fill my chest with the atmosphere and leave you all gasping for breath. You will entreat me for life, and I shall give it—on terms.”

“I don’t need air,” replied Lychnis. “I subsist on the æther.”

“You are the æther,” he answered, “or whatever medium there is on which all things are founded. Without you....” At this point she deftly skipped out of earshot—or, to be more exact, with Ambrose, nearly out of earshot. “Without you,” he continued, to the wild, surrounding forest—“without you we should not subsist at all. There would be neither matter to desire cleavage with you, nor spirit to imagine the immortality of love.”

“Your knowledge of the bawdy literature of the Middle Ages is more profound than your physics,” interrupted Sir Richard.

“I create my physics, as per necessity, to conform with my imagined world, like God,” he retorted.

Sir Richard smiled, in his courteous, grave way. “I confine my observation to the world which has been created by the distinguished colleague whom you mention. I find there traces of the existence of consistency, order, law, and nothing beyond that, but those traces lead me confidently to suppose that in due course we shall find the whole mechanism to fall out pat.”

“I see the day coming,” said Quentin, “when some mechanico-scientific bloke will pull the universe to pieces just to see if he can reassemble it. I hate you people who are always poking in the works. Everyone does it now. People buy cars. Do they drive them? No. They spread them out on the lawn. Do people listen-in? Never. They muck about with the valves. There is no art; there is only psycho-analysis. We pull up all our flowers nowadays to examine the root-hairs and the system of water-absorption. The wonders of the deep have vanished since we took to dredging the Pacific. There’s no universe left; there’s only a shedful of spare parts. I am the only child of Nature now living.”

“A child, yes,” said Sir Richard, “and ungoverned, save by whim. Spontaneous as a jet of spring water, but every wind blows you towards a new quarter. You are a man without self-direction. You cleave where your desire leads you.”

“I was wrong,” said Quentin gaily, “when I said that I was the only child of Nature living. Here are a dozen others.”

They had come down between overhanging rocks from a considerable height of crag into a glen full of small pines and boulders, and before them stood a great hump of mountain range and wind-tossed forest. On their right hand was a little stony hill with small bushes on it and an arbour, or summer-house. A stream—or, rather, a kind of flowing moat—surrounded it. And in the arbour, or under the bushes, or by the stream were men—men in mandarin robes—engaged, all of them (save two, who were chatting mirthfully by the stream), in a meditation that seemed characterized by an expression of hilarious vacuity. Some had long black moustaches, others scanty white beards. All had their hands folded in their sleeves, and all had a look—a look of youth, that, as Lychnis said, was most unsuitable and monkey-like on their wizened faces.

The party filed by the little mountain of meditation, glancing sideways, but no one of its strange inhabitants took any notice of them at all, even though Sprot went close up and peered at them across the stream (without making any intelligent observation), as if they were inhabitants of the Mappin Terraces.

“Wizards,” whispered Lychnis—“or Sages.”

“Wizards, Adepts, Rishi,” her father replied. “The sort of thing Blackwood tries to be. Extreme cases of Blackwood.”

“I think not,” put in Quentin. “Taoists, I fancy, not Buddhists. There are fundamental differences.”

“Lunatics, if I may be allowed an opinion,” said Sprot—“from the local asylum. Blackwood ought to be with them.” He grew warm. “I call it preposterous that grown men should be allowed to sit all day on a rock, grinning. They ought to have something better to do.”

“It is unpractical, isn’t it?” observed Ruby. “I despise men who don’t do something.”

“And I simply can’t think,” said Lychnis, “why anybody ever does anything at all. Because really there are so many reasons against doing things—except, perhaps”—she pondered a little—“the things that bring you new and strange experiences, and those, after all, involve you in disappointment.”

Quentin winked at her. “Ætherial Lychnis,” he replied. “You will soon be ready to join the gentlemen on the rock. As for me, I have been a man of action—muscular action. I am a motor man. Yet, to have you always near me, I will dissolve my fleshy substance, and consist of a vacancy that meditates on nothing. I’ll be no more than a large, empty shirt dreaming on a clothes-line. We’ll become sighing winds and mingle our particles. We’ll be two doctrines of inaction, inert in one another’s arms.”

“Always sensual, Quentin,” she replied.

By now they were at the edge of the deep forest that clothed the great flanks of the mountain. Out of the forest rose craggy peaks that they did not that day propose to climb. Lord Sombrewater, Sir Richard and Sprot were already spreading the lunch. The wind had died, and they sat in a thicket, listening to the last spasmodic sobs of the gale, and looking out under the leaves that protected them away down the mountain-side and across the glen they had traversed. Far down, one among many fantastic outcroppings and erections of rock, was the little mountain of meditation, and the dozen motionless figures could still be descried. Here were no pavilions or eaves of temples. They had come away, as it occurred to the mind of Ambrose to think, from the civilized and composed harmony of the Peach-blossom Valley to outer spaces undealt with by any ordering mind.

“This is undoubtedly for Terence,” said Sir Richard. “This is untidy.”

“And what do you think of it all, Fulke?” asked Lychnis.

These were the first words she had spoken to him that day, and he brightened (unreasonably), as if he hoped she might love him, after all. Yet he couldn’t agree with her opinions. “I am with Ruby,” he said. “Men have no right to lie and dream about abstractions when there is so much ugliness and misery in the world. They ought to be building the New Jerusalem.”

“In China’s green and pleasant land,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Well, let ’em. We don’t want it in England.”

“They’d have a better chance here,” retorted Fulke. “There’s no capitalist system here that must be destroyed before you can build. What lovely thing did the capitalist system ever produce, I ask?”

“My daughter,” suggested Lord Sombrewater. “Very definitely, I think, it produced my daughter.”

Fulke ignored that. It was, as Ambrose notes, one of those unfair arguments. “We could make England as lovely as this,” he said, “with a little preliminary destruction and the aid of science.”

“Sheer, criminal balderdash!” exclaimed Sprot.

“What I can’t understand about you builders of superfluous Jerusalems,” said Quentin, “is your utter dependence on your surroundings. Now I can be happy in a Houndsditch slum. Where I am, the heavenly city is about me. I am content with what I find. I do not ask to see the distant scene—one step enough for me.”

“Don’t blaspheme,” said Sprot, who was a Christian.

“Ruby thinks it’s heaven where it’s comfortable and she can sleep,” said Lychnis. “Personally, I can’t form the least idea what heaven may consist in. It certainly isn’t in my heart. It isn’t round us here, even—still less if Fulke turns it into a red-villa Jerusalem, or even a marble one. Are those twelve on the little mountain in heaven? A little too wizened for such a place, perhaps. One somehow expects heaven to be full of beautiful Greeks. And I suppose one expects to be the only woman there. Do you expect to be the only man there, Quentin?”

“I should hope so,” he answered, “since I expect to obtain heaven when I....” She silenced him with a gesture, but his red lips smiled in his frizzy beard.

“At any rate,” she went on, “one will not see western Europeans there, unshaved Polish Jews, cross-looking, mingy English tradesmen. I would like to see a man who didn’t look as if he was preoccupied with a corn. Not that I wish to be rude to any of you. I love your sweet, lined, thought-laden, nerve-ridden European faces. But when may I expect to see a face that is all pure beauty? When, Ambrose?”

“I should think you very well might about here,” he answered. “The Dragon perhaps. Someone who lives on that rock in the Lotus Lake. Someone who broods on the stupendous forces of Nature out of the heart of repose.”

“But Chinese can’t be handsome,” said Ruby. “They’re so fatuous, or else so fierce—and in any case so foreign.”

But Lychnis suddenly held up her small orchid-hand enjoining silence. A wind came rustling along the forest, and boomed out across the valley like some fabulous dragonish bird. Sprot moved uneasily. “Someone coming,” he muttered.

“Terence’s goat-rider!” Ruby clung to her father’s arm.

He came riding along the edge of the forest, seated on a goat of more than natural size. He drove it with a branch of peach-blossom. His dress was fantastically rich, and he had a little red button in his hat. His face was plump and imperious; his tiny mouth ineffably calm. He turned in his saddle as he rode past, and the dark, slant-slit eyes in his face of dry gold bored into the thicket where they were hidden—terrible eyes, attentive and fierce, like the eyes of the tiger when they shine and are rapt with the mysterious and dreadful forces of Nature.

20

Now Ambrose gives an evening picture—an evening of emerald and fire. They have come back to the Pavilion, the wind has fallen, and Lychnis and Ruby are walking with him in the mazy paths of the bamboo-forest. The walls of bamboo curl over their heads like breakers under a flaring sky, and now and then, at some last fierce puff of the gale, there is a splutter of green foam. Ahead of them are the hills, like rollers darkening and lightening on a horizon of sea. And low down in the west rides the round sun, breaking in upon them through the leaves—inquisitive, unescapable, like the face of the goat-rider. It was Ruby (the red tinge of her hair and the peony colour of her robe making a sharp, exquisite chord with the bamboo green) who made that comparison. She was really restless under the sun’s stare. “I thought we should be safe here,” she said.

“Safe? Safe from what?” asked Lychnis (in purple and deep violet).

“From that face.”

“Oh, I thought you meant safe from ... from other things. Safe with old Ambrose. Safe, I mean, from the strain of people always pulling at you, attracting you, trying to get you.”

“I don’t mind that so much. But I didn’t like that man on the goat, who looked at us as if he saw some caterpillars on a bush.”

“He didn’t see us,” said Lychnis. “He only knew there was something or someone in the thicket. But you are afraid because if a man like that looked at you closely in the eyes he’d paralyse all your desire for resistance.”

Ruby was indignant. Ambrose describes with enjoyment the encounter between a resentful, sunset-headed Titania and a slim, bantering spirit in a purple thundercloud.

“He wouldn’t,” said Ruby.

“Well, search carefully in your mind and try and tell me exactly why his face frightens you. Reject your first thoughts and tell me precisely.”

Ruby sought, as desired. “Well,” she said, “his hands are too plump and womanish.”

“So, I believe, were Napoleon’s. But his hands are not his face. It may be your real reason, but I want to hear more of his face.”

“He had an absurd round hat, with fur on it, like Henry the Eighth.”

“A little lower and we shall come to his face.”

“He had a ridiculous coat on.”

“Too low. Mount him.”

“And I couldn’t see his legs.”

“They are important, certainly. But for God’s sake tell me about his face!”

“Oh well, then! I don’t like a man to have a yellow skin, and moth-eyebrows, and such a tiny mouth, and a jaw round instead of square, and eyes that look and look without moving.”

“I see. Delicate hands and a tiny mouth. Not European, it’s true. Not the sort of man who takes you in his grasp and sucks passionate kisses off your mouth, as if he were licking an oyster out of its gape.”

“Oh, Licky, you’re dreadful! You won’t understand. I can’t explain. I only mean there’s something about him that gives me the shivers.”

“Precisely—and deliciously. With a terrific, god-like power that comes of the very calm and delicateness of his face.”

“I shall dream of him in the night.”

“A calm, shining and awful figure, with a golden skin and slanting eyes, standing over you in a transfiguration; a visitor from some untroubled Nirvana; a being without thoughts, looking with wonder at your thought-troubled face. Not that thought troubles you much, my Juno.”

“Oh yes, it does,” protested Ruby. “I wonder and wonder—sometimes for hours. But not like you, Licky. You’re strange and say funny things.”

Lychnis suddenly changed her mood. “That’s for Ambrose to put down in his book. Dear Ambrose——” She took his arm and studied his face. He felt her eyes on him like the eyes of a violet. “Ambrose is a little Chinese,” she said. “He’s calm.” Then suddenly: “You can’t tell what thoughts are going on behind his serene, pink forehead. Does he ever give you the shivers, Ruby?”

“Oh, never!” cried Ruby.

Then they took him for a walk in the groves of the bamboo, one on each arm, and Lychnis whispered to him: “What terrific nonsense I’ve been talking!” They mounted Terence’s tower, and purple night stole over the Lotus Lake, and a myriad fireflies flickered over the forest.

21

Next morning there was a council of the Sages. It was very hot, and the Sages lay in chairs on a lawn before the Pavilion.

“The position is as follows,” said the chairman. “I have received an invitation, very much resembling a command, to make a ceremonial call, along with the rest of you, upon the Mandarin who inhabits the rock-island in the Lotus Lake. The invitation, or command—one moment, please, Sprot—is written in English, and the Mandarin’s name appears to be Lung, or, as he kindly translates, Dragon. The question is, Shall we go? Now, my friend.”

“I say, Certainly not,” Sprot burst out. “Who is he, that we should obey his commands? I vote we don’t go, just to show him we’re free, independent Englishmen!”

Quentin whistled a few bars of the National Anthem.

“And in the alternative?” queried Lord Sombrewater.

“Stay here,” replied Sprot firmly.

“But that would hardly be courteous.”

“Why? They’re only Chinese. A lot of dirty, hugger-mugger, gibbering Orientals. But let’s go away altogether, if you like. I don’t want to stay. A place like this, where nothing ever happens, gets on my nerves. I want to go back to England and see a good old flaring advertisement of Beecham’s Pills. You know where you are, then.”

“And supposing,” asked Sir Richard, “they won’t let us go back?”

“What d’you mean?” Sprot went pale all at once.

Lord Sombrewater’s eyes were suddenly on Frew-Gaff. “Will you enlarge that a little, Richard?”

“What I mean is this: One has been sensible ever since we landed of the existence in these parts of somebody with very considerable power. Looking back, one may perhaps see that influence, or power, working even before we landed. And I myself am sensible of a deliberate, forming hand, not only in events, but in our material environment, even in the landscape. More than that—we are living at the generosity of someone who can afford to be very slow and ceremonious in discovering himself. I feel myself that underneath this prodigality of forethought for our comfort there lies an immense sureness, based on power. I feel that it is a kindly power, but it may be otherwise. In any case I am not afraid. I am profoundly interested; and for that reason, as well as for the sake of that high-breeding which I still hope distinguishes some Englishmen, I vote that we accept the invitation, in appropriate terms.”

“You express me exactly, Richard,” said the chairman, with an abrupt nod—“except that I shall have something to add.”

“I think it’s very unfair,” said Sprot, “to those of us who are uncomfortable in this valley. I do protest most earnestly against my surroundings. Who are our neighbours here? Twelve lunatics who drivel all day on a rock; a most suspicious-looking individual who rides about on a goat, which is contempt of civilization; a flock of gibbering servants; and a person who calls himself Dragon and lives on an island in the middle of a lake. I ask you, Can anybody feel confidence in people who behave like that?”

“What do you think, Quentin?” Sombrewater hoped to extinguish Sprot in the draught of Quentin’s eloquence; but Quentin was lazy in the heat, and Europe-sick, and only murmured of some scandalous adventure with a brocaded young lady on a summer’s afternoon in Spain (where he was engaged in the sale of electrical goods). She had consented, he remembered, because of a poetical feeling for the warm and indolent splendour of the afternoon, and there was a whole Spanish landscape in her torrid embrace.

“Interesting,” said the chairman, “but irrelevant. Terence, I think we can anticipate your views—and yours, Blackwood. Your vote is to remain, I am sure, Fulke?”

“My vote,” said Fulke sullenly, “is to stay here, if we must, but to send the girls immediately back to the ship.”

“Hear, hear,” said Sprot.

“Why?” asked Quentin, stirring.

“Because, in my opinion, as far as one of them is concerned, if she doesn’t go away from this valley now she never will. She’ll be bewitched, if she isn’t already, and go against Nature.”

“But how nice for her,” said Quentin, “to go against Nature! It will be an experience. That’s what we all desire, I presume, and find so difficult to get—experiences, strange experiences. People are so unwilling to lend themselves to experience.”

“Ambrose knows what I mean,” replied Fulke, still sullen and hang-dog with thwarted passion.

“May we this once invite you to contribute to the debate, Ambrose?” asked the chairman, folding his plump, capable hands and looking down at his papers.

Ambrose replied that as regards both the girls he could vouch that their instincts were infallible for whatever was in accordance with Nature, complex as the reactions of one of them might be and tortuous in working to a conclusion. As regards what might prove to be in accordance with Nature, it was inadvisable to dogmatize.

“Very well, then,” said Lord Sombrewater, shooting him a glance. “There is a majority for remaining. And in deciding, myself, to remain, let me say that I accept certain risks, as I may call them. All my life I have taken risks, when I felt within myself a certain compulsion, which was itself, perhaps, born of a hidden knowledge of what the result was bound to be. I have never been wrong. I may be wrong, possibly, this time. But do not the indications all point one way, and are we not really compelled to see this adventure out? We are a band of men who have come together because of a common interest. Business, yes—but as well as that we are seeking something in life. Like all Europeans, we are seekers after something vaguely defined. We find ourselves, suddenly, unexpectedly, in a more than merely other-than-European world. It is a world that so nearly resembles our own world that the subtle differences are the more surprising. It is our world in a slightly distorted mirror. Already some one or two of us find ourselves uncomfortable. There is something in the environment that is not agreeable to our conceptions of what ought to be, or indeed of what is. But I am convinced, with Quentin, that we must not desert this opportunity of experience, be the results what they may, until we have searched it to its last end. We must go on. I propose it.”

Ambrose wondered how far Lord Sombrewater, or any of them, would go. Lychnis, he fancied, would outstrip them in searching an experience to the bottom.

There being a majority, the chairman’s proposal was adopted, and the meeting broke up. Lord Sombrewater took Ambrose by the arm and walked with him to the red mooring-raft among the reeds of the Lake. “A somewhat obscure speech of yours, Ambrose,” he said. “I feel you know my daughter better than I do, and better than any other man ever will. I am her father, and my feelings are strong. One day, no doubt, she will have a lover, and his feelings will presumably be strong too.” (He seemed to think it unnecessary, though, that she should have a lover.) “But you are detached, and the more observant. What were you getting at? To what sort of eventuality did you refer?”

“I have not gone so far in my mind as to formulate an eventuality,” Ambrose replied.

“You are an old pike,” said Sombrewater. “You never bite and you will never be caught.”

22

Arrayed in harmonious splendours, they floated, next morning, in a crowd of fragile and fantastic boats of red, yellow and black, through lanes of flushed lotuses towards the Rock. Servants paddled them. Here and there an unknown white bird with crimson beak walked sedately on the carpet of leaves, or a green-headed duck dabbled with his bill among the stalks of the water-lilies. The Rock itself, at the distance of half a mile, covered with foliage and flowers, looked as if some lake-dragon, rising from the fathomless bottom, had thrust up the carpet of lilies with his back and fallen asleep on the water.

“It’s black and mysterious down there, among the stalks of the lilies,” whispered Lychnis. “One would like to be a fish and swim down among oozy roots. It must be wonderful to be a fish and nose about in a reed-world. But aren’t they pure, the lotuses? Like the flushing thoughts that sometimes come up from our black insides.”

“It is remarkable,” observed Quentin from under his canopy, “that a creature with so much in the way of tripes should throw off the dewy cobwebs of imaginations that one so often has.”

“Illusions,” said Blackwood.

“It’s lovely floating on water,” said Ruby. “I’m ready to live any number of lives like this, Mr. Blackwood.”

He firmly shut his ascetic lips, and his eyelids too (notes Ambrose), shutting them down on the bright summer-morning picture of Lychnis, full length and slender in her floating casket of coral.

“You’re not frightened, Ruby?” queried her friend across the separating leaf-carpet.

She shook her head.

But perhaps Lychnis herself was just a little dubious when they came within a hundred yards of the sun-beaten Rock and closely saw its dragon-spine ridge, its burden of pine and fig-tree, and its steep side, with little exquisite summer-houses pat to the colour and design of contour and foliage. And they were all a little silent when, rounding the head of the island, they entered its shadow and paddled under its towering wall. This was on the side of the Lake away from their Pavilion; they were cut off, so to speak, from what they knew.

But the island seemed civilized and friendly enough. The wall of rock, coming up sheer out of the depths of the Lake (one could see great carp and wondrous fish nosing in crannies many feet below), was alive, a wrinkled meditation in stone. Reeds fringed it here and there, foliage hung in cascades from the summit, an arbour or a garden seat stood by some perilous path, under pine, rhododendron or orange-tree. Then, coming to a sheltered bight between two flying and fantastic buttresses of rock, they saw a flight of steps, gleaming and twisting up the cliff like a devil in anguish, and at the foot of the steps, by the water’s edge, the Dragon itself waited courteously on a marble quay to receive them.

The Dragon, a brilliant coloured bird, resolved itself into three Chinese gentlemen. The first, in pale heliotrope, was very old and bright and clean, with blind eyes, scanty white beard, and a hilarious appearance. The second was a shapeless little dump of a man in mauve, darkly pigmented, with black top-knot, little wisp of black chin-tuft, long slits for eyes, and a general appearance of inspired ugliness. The third, in a richly embroidered robe the colour of a peony stalk, was the goat-rider. He was younger and taller than the others, and now, at close quarters, one saw that the clear, penetrating eyes in the face of dry gold were candid, mild and grave—or so, usually, they seemed; but at moments they were more difficult to read than the eyes of the hawk or the leopard.

All three received the visitors with smiles and many assurances of welcome, yet also with a certain well-bred air of aloofness—an air that refused to presume on the willingness of the visitors to know them and at the same time esteemed itself at a pretty high price, modestly, as a fine jewel might. A highly civilized trio.

The tall youth stepped forward. Entreating them to mount the stairs (which they did), making also from time to time, in concert with his two companions, gestures expressive of his desire to assist them in the intolerably steep ascent, he explained that the laughing old gentleman with the scanty white beard was his great-grandfather, Wang Li; and the ugly, poetical gentleman, named Hsiao Chai, his grandfather. His own name was Yuan Ch’ien. His father was making a pilgrimage.

Arriving at the top of the stairs, he indicated a direction. “Not to weary you,” he said, “with the florid and excessive courtesy which is the custom among ourselves, this path leads to my great-grandfather’s summer pavilion, where, begging you to excuse the omission of a number of preliminary calls and other formalities, he would desire you to take luncheon.”

Adopting the same high-mannered air as their hosts, the party moved forward without remarking to one another on the strangeness of this or that—except Sprot, who loudly whispered to Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose, “Speaks English!”

Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose, who had noticed it for themselves, made no sign of having heard him, and it was disconcerting when Yuan, ten yards away, spoke as if he were answering the thought. “Anticipating,” he said, “the surprise which you are bound to feel, I may speak of myself so far as to explain that I have been acquainted with London and many of your European capitals, not to mention the cities of the United States of America. And we have had visitors from England before.”

Sprot paled. Where were those visitors now? In dungeons, perhaps, under the island, or mouldering on the oozy bed of the Lake. One hoped not to see white skeletons, ominously marred, their parts disposed after some plan other than the usual.

“My knowledge of your customs,” continued Yuan, “enables me to be certain that you will pardon what my countrymen and many of my relations might regard as an immoral absence of ceremony. We run our affairs here on lines which are not precisely national, in any sense.”

Wang Li and Hsiao signified approval of this last sentiment. Lord Sombrewater observed to the very old man that he considered the surroundings most elegant.

“We are now,” replied Wang Li, “almost at that invisible centre on which the unity of the whole depends”; and he smiled in a way that Ambrose at first tentatively describes as imbecile.

The surroundings were indeed elegant. The party had come to the house of the Dragon—not so much a house as a walled village of tasteful, if startling, elegance. It was full, as they afterwards found, of relations; but now, instead of entering the stout red gates, they proceeded, by a harmonious approach, amid scenery with the character of a contrived design on a dessert-plate, to the summer pavilion of Wang Li.

“This way,” said Wang, indicating a complicated geometrical harmony of vermilion lines and arcs, perched among trees, a symphony of red balconies and lemon-yellow roof; and they went up into an airy pavilion like a nest of red straws in the pines, sunny, but mysteriously cool. It was on the side of the island where they had landed, and a red balcony hung out over the water. Lychnis seated herself there, on the floor.