Chapter V: Part 5

Slung behind him, sometimes touching him, Lychnis felt with her body that Yuan knew the air, knew all the roads, the precipices, the rapids of the air. He behaved as a far-travelling bird would behave, beating along the vast empty ways of the night with repeated crutch-strokes, or spreading out silver wings along the swift surface of a wind. Or, if he wearied, the tiny engine was switched on, and they traversed the sky with the speed of a meteor. Through him she knew the airways and lent him her movements, balancing and clinging with him on the huge precipice-face of the winds they were climbing, giving herself without shrinking to the fearful descent into a huge, opening nothingness. From time to time she caught a glimpse of his cheek. He threw her back an unsounded word, and she made noiseless answers with her small whispering mouth to his ear. He was intent and still, and his stillness held her, so that in spite of the dark void below she had no fear. Only the wind and the world moved, and they seemed intensely still in the midst of the sky, with their small heads so close.

Time had no meaning, and space twisted and wheeled around them. Soon, very far off, under a slanting beam of the moon, there came, as if the edge of space were advancing toward them, a glimmering of white petals, a flush of sacred lilies floating on the dark pool of the sky, lotuses waving about the feet of some Boddhisatva, for whom the Dragon was bearing on his back a beautiful captive to minister to his contempt of desire. But before the lilies came close, Yuan leant forward, and the dark pool of the world rushed up and engulfed them. The forest streamed up and out like black foam. Yuan hung over it, a silver moth, then brought the breast of the Dragon to the flood of a gleaming river. “The jungle,” he whispered.

There was a clamour of wild creatures. It suddenly faded to a far distance.

“They smell a flesh-eater,” he murmured.

Around them a circle of silence spread outwards till the distant circumference of howling died. But there was a movement. They seemed to Lychnis to be surrounded by looming shapes, by moving jewelled hands gesturing in darkness. There were movements in the unseen masses of foliage on the banks—swift movements of night hunters, slow movements of ancient creatures. There were long plungings and swirlings in the water. A vapour of heat drifted over them. The river flowed by unseen, and the Dragon held his breast to it like a soul in the flow of time. There were presences. Glancing at Yuan, half-visible, Lychnis found him, now, less than human, or perhaps more. Over the jungle there gleamed those lily petals, and a light from them seemed to illuminate his face. The eyes became oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. The small closed mouth was a carved symbol of eternal serenity. He became a god, and she found him almost intolerably strange.

“Forget your humanness,” murmured the mask. It was like a breath of the jungle speaking. “Forget it and know the creatures of the jungle.”

They were drifting a little down-stream towards the bank on their right. They were aware of a movement in the reeds, an arrival of concentrated silence. The darkness watched them. Then the reeds waved and parted, and there shone at them two savage emeralds. Lychnis, feeling the beautiful ferocity that crouched for her, glanced at Yuan, perhaps to see if she could share her experience with him. But he was in combat with the tiger, putting out the fierceness of the tiger, meeting, subduing the hunger that was about to spring. He entered through the deeps of being into the nature of tiger, and in some sort of wrestle in the realm of the tiger’s understanding dissipated the desire that sought to satisfy itself on Lychnis’s flesh.

They became aware that the knot of silence was resolved. Presently as if the tiger had spread some kind of intelligence, howling was heard again in the distance, and before long the rim of howling contracted. The forest had forgotten them. They were free in it.

“You are not afraid?” The pale gold mask uttered voice.

“Only a little.” But her fear was a fear of the being beside her. All other fear had vanished and survived only in that. “Are you never afraid?” she asked. “Here, or in the sky?”

“The personal I,” he answered, “the individual local Yuan, was a mass of fears. But the man I am becoming, the man whose I is vanishing, the god-saturated man, cannot experience fear. The wine-drunken man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the cart he breaks no bones. The god-intoxicated man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the sky all is well.”

“I am not god-intoxicated, as far as I know.”

“Nevertheless your perceptions are like those of one who is thus intoxicated. You perceive rhythms that only the heart of the infinite perceives.”

“I had not thought I was anything out of the way,” she said.

“Will you walk in the jungle under the cloak of my understanding?” he asked.

“Oh yes!” She was instant. How often, at night, one had heard some young man, or some older man, or even an aged man, say: Shall we walk in the wood a little? But this was to reenter the Garden by night, and walk in Eden with an archangel, or even with the Lord God. Possibly to see the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Looking at Yuan, to follow him, she asked herself: Are you the Serpent? He was leading her to knowledge, certainly, but not of good and evil, for he had said good and evil are local oppositions; in the unnameable they become one.

He was looking past her, boring into the reeds. She liked the dark, oblong eyes with their gimlet centres of blackness. She liked the imperious line of the cheek.

“We will not land here,” he said.

They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there. She had a curious sensation, she told Ambrose, as Yuan helped her down from the machine. It was strange, she said, to put her hand into his foreign hand. (No doubt the being so much with Ambrose, the perpetual comradeship that was between them, had trained her to note things.) Pleasant? Unpleasant? Not altogether unpleasant. Some slight antipathy, the diarist supposes. Certainly she forgot the sensation at once as they made their way into the darkness, the thrilling terror of the deep forest. She had no objection at all to the envelopment of her person by his cloak of understanding. If she had any sort of antipathy to his flesh, she had none whatever to his mind. He walked the forest like some shepherd of tigers. The snakes and insects let pass one of their kind, startled only by the shadow that followed him, bright-eyed and staring. They were mounting, and presently, when they had crossed the spine of the hill, the ground fell again slightly, only to mount beyond them in wave after wave of forest until the further waves had a white ridge, and far off, gleaming in outer space, were the snow-petals, the sacred lilies of ice.

Lychnis gasped. “I’m not sure—I think I’m afraid. They are so huge, so cold.” Fear of the mountains had entered her, and with it a host of other fears. She began to look round anxiously, to shrink. He was her only refuge from fear, and she shrank from him, too. Looking at her, she felt he divined the whole secret of her.

“You are afraid now?” he asked. “It’s natural. Fear must come in before it can be cast out. One must be conscious before one is unconscious. Sit down with your back to a tree.” He prevented, in some way, her impulse to look down in case a snake was coiled where she was to sit.

She obeyed him. He sat down opposite, with his back to a tree, and drew from his garment a small sort of flute and played. She found presently, as she listened to his slow, meditative theme, that she had forgotten her fear of the mountains. She began to gaze at them, seeking to become conscious of them, to shape the vague and profound emotion that they gave rise to, and express it. “Eternity,” she said. “They are eternal.”

“On the contrary,” he replied. “In a little while they will have gone, and an ocean perhaps will flow there.”

“Then it is I that am eternal, and the mountains made me remember.”

“Eternity is in you, but you are not eternal.”

Swiftly a thought of old Wang Li came to her mind.

“The truth that can be stated is not truth,” she shot at him.

He smiled. “The truth can be played with the flute, though. Listen.”

It was so, she thought, hearing something behind the notes he played that was like the mountains, but with no terror. And she saw without shrinking that the glittering eyes of fierce beasts were gazing steadfastly from the darkness, and tenderer creatures were near them. Then a python swayed down his head from the branch of a tree close by, and she put out her orchid-hand and touched the ivory skin. All that she remembered afterwards, for at the time she was not conscious of python, tiger, or deer; only of that which sounded from Yuan’s flute, that sang, as she put it, to itself in her and in the beasts, the intoxicating godhead that remains when ice vanishes, music is not listened to, and spirit itself has disappeared into nothing.

But afterwards, when the spell of the singing flute had lifted, she came to the conclusion that the experience of sublimity is unnecessarily serious. “I should prefer something suaver,” she told Ambrose, “more restrained—the god without the intoxication.”

30

Lychnis told Ambrose that the coldness of her reception, when she came back next morning, was a surprise to her. “I was only thinking and thinking of what I had seen and done in the night, of how I felt about Yuan,” she said, “and to find all that anger was horrible. There has been a change. Sir Richard frowns at me. Sprot is delighted, the little beast, because he can impute something to me. Fulke hates me. I prefer it. But our party is breaking up, and it is not like it used to be. I can’t help it. They have no business to interfere when I am going through with an experience.” Her anger rose. “They shall stay here until I have finished with it, or I will stay here alone, or with you. You will never be against me?”

He saw that her mind was in tumult, but by no means altogether because of the trouble she had got into with her father and the others. In any case she had an inextinguishable obstinacy. It appears that she had come back alone across the Lake in a boat, pre-occupied, lovely with the flush of her thoughts, only to find herself when she stepped on shore among grave and resentful faces. Her father was indoors. “Naturally,” she said, “he would never question me before all the others. He and I have always had our quarrels in private.” Ruby, too, was indoors.

It was the incredible Sprot, almost dancing with the pleasure of his accusing thoughts, who put the question: “Where have you been?”

She looked round at Fulke, in her eyes a command that Sprot should die. But there had been a change in Fulke, and he only glowered at her. Quentin answered her appeal with a grin of somewhat resentful amusement. She had therefore to speak for herself:

“Mr. Sprot, I am sorry to learn that you have to leave us.”

“What on earth do you mean?” he stammered. “I am not leaving. Your father has not said so.”

“I have said so.”

“I won’t leave.” He squared up. “And what will you do about it?”

“If I see you anywhere about to-morrow morning I shall ask Yuan to attend to you.” She went to the Pavilion, and they all watched her walking with bent head across the lawn. Then they turned to consider the case of Sprot, who was palely protesting that he would in no circumstances go.

“Especially,” said Quentin pleasantly, “with the country in its present state, when the traveller is more than likely to meet with robbery and violent outrage.”

“I appeal to you.” Sprot clasped, as it were, the knees of Sir Richard Frew-Gaff. But Sir Richard politely regretted that he could do nothing, and walked away.

Sprot exploded. “It’s perfectly scandalous that hard-working, reasonable-minded men should be at the beck and call of a piece of goods like that! Why does everyone pay so much attention to her, I should like to be told. She doesn’t work. She doesn’t produce anything. What right has she to say what shall be? Walking off like a sprig of lilac with a ‘You clear out!’ and all—her and her fat-faced Chink. It’s my opinion....”

“We don’t want your opinion,” said Fulke morosely.

“Yes, we do. You run away and weep with your Ruby,” said Quentin, with a wink to the rest.

Fulke flared. “You shut up, you stinking mud-pump! I’ve had just about enough of your interference.”

“No naughty temper,” said Quentin, and being strong, though a sinner, he immersed young righteousness in the Lake.

A native servant came down with a message that Lord Sombrewater would be glad if Ambrose would step up to the Pavilion. Ambrose therefore left the group on the shore of the Lake, thinking that the harmony of the party was indeed sadly disturbed, and the serene lawns and fine brooding trees disfigured by their quarrelling. Lord Sombrewater was with Lychnis, she moody, he severe. But it was his custom to approach a quarrel with his daughter in a business-like spirit, and he had not allowed the matter to interrupt his eleven o’clock cigar. He motioned Ambrose to a seat by a little lacquer table.

“Good-morning, Ambrose. I want you to know that there are now no restrictions on my daughter’s liberty of movement. She may go where she likes and with whom she likes, and I”—he spoke without bitterness—“I wash my hands of it. I admit that it was foolish to make rules for a daughter who takes as much notice of my wishes as the very solid gate-post of this Pavilion. Facts are facts. She has argued with me, and I think conclusively, that her life is her own. I have fully agreed that her friendship with Yuan is not a matter with which I am closely concerned. We must face the facts, and I see that it is useless to attempt to control her. I want you to convey this to the others. Now, Lychnis, I have done what you have asked. Will you kindly leave us?”

“I never said that you do not come closely into my life. You do. I want you to.”

He waved her away. Ambrose knew that he would never hear in what terms they had quarrelled. But this dismissal, he perceived, was a retaliation on Lord Sombrewater’s part. If she had no place for her father, if she desired to be independent, she would be independent, very much so, and alone; she should feel the cold. Her eyes, Ambrose saw, filled with tears as she went through to her green-and-gold bedroom, and there was no turning on her hips at the door to make a friendly gesture. No doubt she felt that another harbour was closing to her.

“When I made a rule that she should not do this or that, I made a mistake,” said his lordship, and his cigar had gone out. “Lychnis makes her own rules as she goes along. She acts by an inner light, and cannot see why others should have any views on the matter except the views that are so clear to her. No doubt she is right, as maybe we all are, in some deep sense; but it is hard, when she does these strange things, for those who have merely to watch and trust. I find it difficult, Ambrose. I love my daughter. I am jealous, and find it hard to be shut out from her inner life. If I were in her heart, no doubt I should agree that whatever she did was good. I should know what was going to happen, and I should not now be afraid as to where the necessity under which she doubtless acts might be going to lead her. I am honoured, as one should be, for having created a thing that is useless and beautiful ... but not, very naturally, by the thing. What do you say?”

“I say,” Ambrose replied, “that this is false sentiment. Love of a father is one thing; love of someone else is another. You should not be jealous of any kind of love that is not specifically yours to claim. Without jealousy, or, as our Chinese friends would say, without desire, or, as I may qualify it, without the addition of an inappropriate desire to the specific and proper desire of a father, or of a lover, as the case may be, there would exist no clash, or undue passion.”

Lord Sombrewater observed him. “You would not permit anything that might occur to alter whatever the relation between you and Lychnis may be?”

“There is a specific and possibly unique friendship between Lychnis and me which, if I do not allow it to be disturbed by irrelevant humours, can be left to take care of itself.”

“That tells me little.”

“Not having been choked by weeds, it has become a thing by itself, with life and a destiny. I have only to keep it pure of irrelevant desires.”

“You are an extraordinary man. If you would not mind my asking—if anything were to happen, and we left her here in China, would you miss her? Would you, let us say, be aware of a hiatus?”

“The mind,” Ambrose records himself as saying, “is its own place, as the poet so justly says, agreeing with our Chinese friends. Desire perishes, and that which is without desire is immortal.”

“I’m hanged if you don’t out-Wang old Wang!” Lord Sombrewater relit his cigar. Then he suddenly exploded: “And by God! Ambrose, I agree absolutely with Lychnis about Sprot! Out he shall go!”

It was lucky, Ambrose thought, that there should be someone handy to take off the full torrent of Lord Sombrewater’s emotion.

31

Lychnis, when she had given Ambrose an account of her doings, went swiftly in her short white dress under the heavy summer trees to the mooring-raft of red-painted bamboo, unfastened her coracle, and paddled through water lanes among lotuses to the island. She saw Hsiao in an arbour by the water’s edge, and waved in a friendly manner, but he was asleep. She brought her coracle to the marble quay, ascended the dragon-staircase, and sped along the ridge of the island, passing old Wang in meditation by a dung-heap. She climbed into the vermilion summer-house among the tree-tops, but Yuan was not there. She went out on to the verandah, and stood looking down over the scarlet rail into the Lake, where golden shapes of fish were passing like half-visible summer clouds. She saw the roof of Hsiao’s arbour and his two feet sticking out.

She went into the bare, sun-swept room again, and swung out an instrument from its cupboard. Not familiar with its use, but perceiving the principle of it and the method of adjustment by some scarcely conscious effort, she made the whole countryside disclose itself to her. First of all, there appeared in the field of view that dozen of queer philosophers on the rock over towards the mountains; next, through too wide an adjustment, a tract of country which she recognized—a little hill near the _Floating Leaf_, with a plum-tree, now in fruit, where she had talked with Ambrose, and Ruby had come back with her arms full of flowers. It was strange that she could hear the leaves rustling. She did not look for the ship. To see those three ladies knitting under the awning would have been to jolt the progress of a dream. She came back to the Peach-blossom Valley, and turned with a gesture of wrath from the spectacle of Sprot in altercation with her father. Then a few moments of growing impatience, until she found Yuan, waist-deep and busy in an enclosed pool at a distant point of the island. She heard the Lake rippling and the wash of water when he moved or plunged his hands in the pool. Breeding experiments, she thought. She had meant to go to him when she should have found him. It was so with her now that she demanded his presence constantly. But he was busy; he might prefer to be alone. She paused to inquire into her state of mind, realizing that she found it a necessity to be with him, and wondering what that might amount to.

Now that she had found him it did not seem right to watch him. She paced the open rooms and balconies of that airy summer-house, like a slim fly caught in a scarlet cage; going out to feast her heart on the Lake, now a garden of lilies, white, rose, and golden; returning to the instrument to see if Yuan was still at work. She opened a cabinet of drawers, found it full of paintings on silk, and idly inspected them. There was a portrait of a young boy. It was so perfect a work of art, a unity composed of an infinite number of rhythms, that its effect on the mind was hypnotic. The tone was a variety of rich browns touched with a lotus flush of almost unbelievable precision. The young boy was kneeling on a lotus daïs with his hands joined in prayer. The eyebrows were delicate as small painted moths. The tiny mouth was like a flower that will never open and wither, beautiful and small and calm. The eyes were purer than the deep and velvet pansy. Was it a boy, after all, or a girl? She saw in the face a certain severity of saintliness, the signs of a state of mind that she could remember, when she had been, as it were, both boy and girl, with a desire for heaven. But what was solemn and beautiful in the face was a shadow, a foreknowledge, of some predestined renunciation, of some experience circled round with burning flames, seen from afar off, before the thought of pain had meaning. Pondering thus, she realized with a shock that the features were the features of Yuan.

She looked at the image in the long-sight instrument, saw that Yuan was still at work, and returned to the portrait.

Could Hsiao have painted it? Could he have received that sublime inspiration in the stupor of wine? If he could paint a melon, when he was drunk, in a way to disclose cosmical secrets, why not the portrait of a saintly young boy? There was no signature. That was like Hsiao. For him not the painting, but the contemplation in which he conceived it. She understood that. The painting was a mere discharge, the symbol of an experience fully grasped.

The face was not so much Yuan’s as the face of some perfect being, predestined for the bliss of non-existence seen in the vision of an artist. Not so much Yuan’s face. With the portrait in her hand she returned to the instrument, and found after a little experimenting that it was possible to deal with the field of view so as to fill it with the image of a small object. She studied the image of Yuan with the shame of Psyche studying the revealed face of the god. There had been a change. The mild face of the boy had become severe, even fierce, from the discipline of contemplation; in the place of innocence was the calm, unvarying gaze of eyes that have rested on a reality that is neither pure nor impure. She was afraid, as she had been afraid before the mountains, and put the portrait away and swung the instrument back into its cabinet. But first, with a swift mounting of her fear, she saw that Yuan had left his pool, and was coming towards her with his eyes fixed on hers.

He was coming to her. He would be there in a few minutes. He had only been looking at the scarlet nest in the tree-tops, of course, and he could not have descried her figure, where she was. But he would know, and in a rush of passion she hated his insight and his domination; in her mind she saw his face again, serene and alien. Her flesh shuddered.

Soon he stood between the scarlet posts of the doorway, yellow-brown against a deep blue sky, attentive, impassive.

32

They were alone till the afternoon, when Sir Richard and his daughter, both a trifle constrained, came over to the island with Fulke. The sight of those three restored to Lychnis a sense of reality. In the morning she had been drawn into the realms of Yuan’s vast interior life, fascinated, hardly conscious that her identity was submerged. Now in the afternoon, with her friends by, she could look on him as an object, a man with whom she could enter on given relations, regard being had to other considerations, as, for example, his race, her father’s wishes, the pull of her home in England. She became happy, contented that she should be in that frame of mind.

There was to be a water-party after sundown, and they spent the afternoon making a promised inspection of some of Yuan’s laboratories hidden in the rock. There they saw various matters in their several stages of advancement.

“What funny old frights!” whispered Ruby, when she saw the artificers at work. “I really believe they are the twelve men we saw looking so idiotic on that rock.”

And certainly the twelve ancient or middle-aged gentlemen, who were achieving machines of extreme delicacy out of an apparently vacant stupor, did seem to be the same. For Sir Richard, when he saw the artificers at work, the problem as to how Yuan procured his apparatus was solved. “I wondered whether you sent plans to Europe,” he explained.

Yuan smiled. “I do not want to lay Europe in ruins. No. I indicate the nature of my mechanical problems to these friends of mine, and they work out the details in contemplation. They know the inner secrets of platinum and ebonite and wood.”

“You are kind to Europe.” Sir Richard’s upper lip was firm. It is inconvenient that the amateur should know more than the professor, and it was only because of the paramount claims of science that he endeavoured to draw Yuan into a discussion. The two gentlemen talked at great length, while Lychnis listened entranced, and Ruby yawned. But discussion was not easy, because Yuan was dealing in symbols that were entirely strange and in realms of experience where his companion had never been. Some formulæ that he wrote down were excessively pleasing; to Sir Richard they meant as much as the experiences of a mystic, while Lychnis recognized that they were indeed precisely that.

From the laboratories they went to the gardens and hot-houses, full of unfamiliar plants and insects; from the gardens and hot-houses to the breeding-grounds; and it was here that even Sir Richard’s scientific mind shrank a little at sight of some of the monsters Yuan had created, in what seemed an irresponsible way. In particular a frightful cross between an ape and a tiger shocked his moral sense. But Yuan took no pains to justify himself, and only replied that all those who help in the great work of creation will have their jokes from time to time.

Towards evening Yuan left them to make his preparations for the water-party, and Sir Richard sat by the Lake with the two girls pondering deeply on the afternoon’s talk. He evidently desired to unburden himself, and found a certain difficulty in speaking to Lychnis, the only possible listener. But in the end, if he was displeased with her, the contents of his mind were too much for him.

“That man could alter the world,” he said, turning to her somewhat constrainedly at last. “I do not pretend to be an expert in more than one or two of the sciences we touched on, but I know enough to recognize that what he says is of first-class importance. Do you understand, my dear girl, that he has discovered all we know in physiology by pure contemplation? I would go farther and guess that physiology is no problem to him at all; he simply perceives the nature of the body, and it is my opinion that he will live for ever. There seems practically no nervous expenditure. He avails himself of some sort of cosmical energy and forgets about his own organization, which has become merely the sphere, so to speak, in which the energy I speak of is present. And I don’t mind confessing that I am completely baffled in my own branch. He talks, Lychnis, as if he had experienced everything he knows, as if he actually saw, felt, even heard, physical reality. He proceeds, as it were, from insight; and, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything hidden. Odd, if reality should, after all, be something more than a state of affairs in a field of electrical stresses. It is profoundly disconcerting. It is as if the most refined discoveries of science should prove to be familiar to an ape or to an idiot. They are ape-like, these friends of yours, and a trifle idiotic. I am not an anthropologist—not an expert—but I perceive something orangoid in your friends, in the disposition, for example, of the lower limbs horizontally, in the posture of the hands.”

Sir Richard, forgetting his constraint, seemed to ask for sympathy; but she was angry with him for his frame of mind towards her, and made only some brief reply.

33

The mood which they all fell into, staring out over the Lake at the warm shadows of evening, was broken by the dip of paddles and the simultaneous arrival, with the party from the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion, of Yuan, Hsiao and Wang, with several slight and exquisite girls. They had a remarkable faculty, those three, of waking from reverie on the tick of an appointment. Lychnis sat and watched as each one, in gorgeous robe of mediæval China, stepped from the dusk of the water, like some mystery of the summer night breaking into flower. Darkness fell swiftly, and an ochre moon rose over the sombre side of the valley. She sat on in silence, white and wraith-like among those shapes of splendour, and they gathered around her, waiting on her will, and there was a consciousness that for all of them for that moment the universe turned about her. Ambrose records that it occurred to Yuan and himself at the same time to announce to her that all was ready, and they stood, the two of them (Yuan in a magnificent robe of deep green, himself in dark amber), looking at one another across her moon-golden head. Ambrose immediately gave place, and stood, so Lychnis afterwards told him, smiling complaisantly at the glimmer of stars that was breaking over the trees.

Soon they were all out on the Lake in a ceremonial barge, towing a cluster of painted boats, and the island became a dark complex in the moonlight, illuminated by the dying reflection of a farewell rocket that shot up from the point. In answer Yuan lit a score of lanterns—orange, violet, and brown—swaying moons that cast unearthly reflections in the Lake. But there was silence among the visitors, a certain uneasiness, because of the relation that had arisen as between Lychnis and Yuan and as between those two and the rest.

But Lord Sombrewater would not permit any breach of etiquette, and presently there was a murmur of talk under the ochre moon as the barge swished slowly through dark red lilies towards the distant sources of the Lake, where they were to picnic by the waterfalls. Two or three of the Chinese girls perched like finches on their favourite, their amusing Quentin, and soon enough there was plenty of laughter at his incomprehensible jokes. Ambrose, sitting beside Frew-Gaff, took opportunity to observe that there was no cause for any reasonable anxiety.

“I suppose Sombrewater is right,” replied Sir Richard. “It is not that I suspect Lychnis for a moment of folly, as you know; but in this world we must be ready to hear of strange things. I know it; but really, if we were told, one day, of a marriage with this Oriental (who exerts an extraordinary fascination, I admit), I should have the creeps. I somehow cannot tolerate the thought of a union between an English girl—a girl like Lychnis—and him.”

The thoughts that arise in the brain, Ambrose observed to himself, are governed, like economic men, by a master of whom they are not aware.

“I have been compelled to give Ruby the same freedom of movement,” added Sir Richard. “She is quite capable, I am sure, of looking after herself. A very sensible girl. We shall have no surprises from her.”

“And as to Sprot?” queried Ambrose.

“He refuses to go.”

“Lychnis has spoken to Yuan.”

“I wonder what Yuan will do.”

Ambrose looked at Sprot, who was showing a certain defiant and stupid courage in face of the danger of staying, which he preferred to the danger of going away. Appositely they passed three white pelicans on an islet. They had monstrous beaks, those pelicans, the creation of Yuan. And Ambrose wondered, with Sir Richard, what Yuan would do.

When they came to the waterfalls among the high rocks at the Lake’s source the moon was shining into the night-sombre valley, and they disembarked and climbed and spread supper in face of the golden and shadowy scene, and the murmur of their talk was subdued to the steady diapason of the main torrent that poured from the crags, not dissonant with the peace and ordered serenity of the landscape. Nothing moved. Far off the island slept, small and brooding. A spirit of peace fell on them all.

“You are philosophic in great comfort here,” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are civilized,” Yuan mildly replied. “It is not philosophy to evolve noble and consolatory systems, or systems of despair, among misery and ruin. Those who require to perform their meditations among desolations or desert wastes are merely unable to cope with the claims of a domestic environment. Contemplation is an activity that can only be pursued by people who have mastered Nature. It is only then that pure reality can be seen. In all other circumstances thought is conditioned by the actualities of being, and is directed towards the problem of evil or some antithetic good. Here we have so wrought that we are free to take part in the experience of a reality that is, as it were, behind. Our environment does not hinder us; our bodies claim no attention; we forget ourselves; we cease to be, and what is everlasting rushes in to fill the place of what was.”

“You seek annihilation,” murmured Blackwood.

“Seek your big toe!” replied Wang, going to the foot of the matter with characteristic efficiency. Indeed, as he lifted his right eyelid, he seemed to emit a trickle of some elemental force that could have dried up the cataract. “In seeking death, you seek what does not exist.”

“Perhaps I have been wrong,” sadly admitted Blackwood. “I must seek, I see now, for some deeper life.”

“Seek your eyebrows!” retorted Wang. “In seeking life, you seek also what does not exist.”

“Then what on earth is a man who is all wrong with the world to do?”

Wang opened him with the blade of insight. “You do not get rid of desire by sitting on it. That is what your thoughts of annihilation are—desire gone to mildew. Only they think in terms of annihilation who are extremely conscious of self. Abandon your methods. Desire neither life nor death, and eat red meat.”

“I fear I have sadly misinterpreted the wisdom of the Sages,” Blackwood faltered, and actually the moon glowed in a tear on his cheek.

“This is the beginning, and only the beginning, of wisdom,” replied Wang. “Retrace your steps, give rein to the passions of a man, and in ten years’ time you may take some gentle exercise in self-forgetfulness.” With this somewhat paradoxical statement he seemed to close himself to all outside influence, and the spray of the moonlit cascade gradually wetted his old bald head.

“It seems likely,” remarked Sir Richard, “that Hsiao will presently be altogether forgetful of his body, since the goblet in his hand contains about a pint and a half of your really very powerful and delicious wine, and that is the third I have seen him consume.”

“In the days when Hsiao thought in terms of good and evil, of restraint and excess, he used to be very sick,” Yuan replied. “Rid the mind of purely relative distinctions between drunk and sober, and you will not be troubled with the gout.”

“Thank you for that recipe,” said Quentin.

“Wang Li does not take wine, I notice,” said Lord Sombrewater.

“That is because he requires no aids to contemplation.”

“Then why does Hsiao take it?” asked Ruby.

“He is an artist, which is a weakness of the will, and he needs some attachment to the illusions of sense.”

Lord Sombrewater had been deeply pondering. “It seems to me,” he said, “that there is something to be argued for our western habit of life. You here—I do not speak of the mass of your countrymen, who present, if I may say so, the appearance of an immense swarm of toiling insects—you in this valley have abandoned the world to its fate. You have abandoned, so it seems to me, much that makes men specifically men, and you have become the abodes of great impersonal forces. Sometimes when I talk with you I feel I am talking with the nightwind, or the moonlight, or the spraying waterfall. God-intoxicated, you have given up your organisms to be the dwellingplace of the great unknown principle of the universe, and any pleasure, any joy, that is in you, is its.”

“Precisely,” said Yuan. “Our bodies, to a more or less extent, according to the measure of our renunciation, become temples of godhead. Using your western phraseology, we have come strangely near to Christian doctrine.”

“That is so; but my point is that in the West most of us hold that it is the business of man to forget God, to immerse himself, while he is a man, in his no doubt blind and temporary manhood, so that he may work out whatever the purpose of creation was in creating him. It is the duty of man to erect his ego into a god. He must be immensely conscious of himself and the world, immensely unconscious of the universe. He must be tremendously aware of man and his destiny. In Europe, in America, we have formed the idea of Destiny and Progress.”

“And do you progress?” Wang Li suddenly spoke like a voice coming out of the wind.

Lord Sombrewater began to search in his mind for the answer to that question. But, except Frew-Gaff, the others did not await his reply, and wandered off as their fancy directed. Hsiao disappeared. Quentin attached a couple of admiring young girls and drove off Sprot, who tried to accompany him, with lively pictures of his approaching fate. Blackwood retired thoughtfully to a dark corner alone; Terence was listlessly meditating on Yuan’s aura; Fulke and Ruby gloomily watched to see what Lychnis would do. But Lychnis only sat with two Chinese girls on the cliff-edge at the side of the torrent, and they were all holding out crystal goblets in their orchid-hands to catch the spray drops. They talked in their own languages and seemed well contented with each other. Fifty feet below them the swaying moons of the barge smote strange colours on the foam of the rapids, and the cluster of small tethered boats streamed and leapt astern. Above them dreamed the motionless Wang Li, with the moon on his scanty white beard.

An hour passed, and Sombrewater and Frew-Gaff were still in conversation with Yuan. Ambrose surveyed the party, and there came to his mind, as he watched Yuan, the description Lychnis had made to him of eyes that were oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. He sought, too, for an adequate description of the power that lurked in the disposed beauty of that petal-mouth of dark enamel. He traced the effect of power to the absence of muscular compression, of visible will. It was unconscious and placid, like the dark, fathomless Lake, where doubtless men had been drowned. Then suitably to his thoughts came Sprot, with terror-stricken face, scrambling up the rocks, crying out: “Hsiao! Hsiao the drunken painter! Hsiao is drowned!” Wang Li dreamed on.

The visitors gathered together and discussed what Sprot called the fatality in tones of horror or dismay. Sombrewater sadly but efficiently put questions to the witness. “I saw the body bobbing about in the wash under the bank,” Sprot averred. “A frightful-looking thing.”

“You are quite sure it was ... our friend Hsiao?”

“Absolutely. That fearful, black, waving top-knot. It was awful—awful!”

Presently they turned towards Yuan, who was studying a glistening fern.

“He does not seem to realize ...” said Lord Sombrewater. “He cannot have understood ... I had perhaps better speak to him.” He approached Yuan. “Yuan, my dear friend, I am afraid we have terrible news. Hsiao has been drowned.” Yuan did not look up. “Hsiao is dead.”

“Quick and dead are relative terms,” responded Yuan. “Hsiao is Hsiao.”

“The blow has stunned him,” whispered Sprot, and suddenly found the basilisk eye of Yuan upon him.

“You would desire, I gather, that the party should break up?” Yuan inquired.

“But, my God——” began Sprot.

Sombrewater silenced him. “We would naturally not wish to go on merrymaking,” he said to Yuan.

Yuan seemed to fall in with their wishes. The party descended the rocks in silence, and boarded the vessel with eyes turned from the bank. Wang Li remained. He was in contemplation, and need not be disturbed, Yuan said. They floated off on the current, Quentin and Terence at the oars.

“Will you not extinguish the lanterns?” asked Lord Sombrewater.

“As you wish,” Yuan politely replied.

Lychnis watched. The death of Hsiao did not greatly affect her, she admitted. It was a pity, certainly. In any case death did not seem to be reality to her, and her heart approved Yuan’s demeanour. Suddenly a scream rang out, and Ruby pointed hysterically to the hideous floating corpse. With a shudder Lord Sombrewater turned to Yuan. “We must recover him.”

“Why?” Yuan asked. He did not seem to be able to understand this preoccupation with a trivial event.

34

The following was compiled by Ambrose after listening to both the girls. At two o’clock in the morning a lamp still burned in their bedroom. Ruby, with a garment in her hand, was being addressed by Lychnis, who still wore her white dress and had not even unbuttoned her shoes.

“Can’t you see, little idiot, that death’s not important? It isn’t real. Neither is life real. Life and death are not real. Something else is, and that something else is in Yuan and Wang Li, and it goes on and is everywhere, and death doesn’t make any difference. Yuan and Wang are dead, too. I mean they are not alive in the way we understand life.”

But Ruby was not in an amiable mood. “At any rate,” she said savagely, “there’s no doubt that we shall go away now from this horrible place.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I heard daddy say to your father that he couldn’t feel comfortable here again. ‘With those cold-blooded freaks,’ he said.”

“Oh! And did my father agree?”

“I think so. He nodded.”

“Well——” Lychnis was aware of an unwonted nervous disturbance, a desire to cry, at the secession and hostility of her obedient friend. She concealed it. “It’s time we were in bed.” She stood up, unfastened her dress, and let it slide to the floor, bending meanwhile on Ruby her frowning brows. “We shall stay,” she added definitely.

Her anger had usually the effect of reducing Ruby to sulks or submission. To-night she became defiant, and replied, looking at her persecutor with shining, fascinated eyes. (And no wonder, thought Ambrose, as he pictured the slim, contemptuous figure that had the matter of subjugation in hand.)

“You think it’s for you to decide, Lychnis. It isn’t. We’ve made up our minds to consider ourselves in future.”

“You’ve been plotting with Fulke, have you?”

Ruby’s eyes quivered. “Let me tell you daddy thinks so, too. If we want to go now we shall.”

“Not without my permission—and Yuan’s.”

“Oh, Yuan! Why don’t you go to him altogether?”

The words had slipped out, and with the realization of what she had said came the end of her courage.

The reply darted at her was, “Get into bed.”

She still had an ounce or two. “I won’t!”

“Do you remember last time you said that?”

Ruby remembered a night when a fury who exuded a sort of elemental invincibleness had used a slipper on her until she howled for pain. She did not care for pain.

Lychnis slid in beside her, and switched out all the lights in the room except the one that hung in the ebony ceiling of their bed. “You hate it when that light goes out, don’t you?” she asked in a cold voice. “Every night you shake for fear of the strangeness of this house and this valley and the tall, plum-cheeked Yuan with gimlet eyes. When the queer moonlight creeps in through the lattices, as if Yuan were there, flooding us with some cold emanation of his cold, unhuman spirit, you lie and tremble. I am going to put the light out now.”

She switched it out with one hand and with the other gave Ruby a pinch. Ruby sat up. “I hate you! Oh, you beast, I hate you!”

“You’d better ask Fulke to do something about it.” Lychnis spoke in a ghostly voice.

But all at once Ruby collapsed into her pillow and began violently crying. “Don’t—oh, please don’t tease me about Fulke!” she sobbed.

Lychnis had an intimation. “What’s the matter?”

For some time there was no answer; then a buried voice came from the pillow: “I can’t bear you to speak of him.” A silence. Then: “I—I want him. I love him.”

Lychnis peered into the dim moonlight, silent for a little. Then: “But, my dear, I didn’t realize it was like that. I am surprised.” She put her arms round Ruby. “Since when?”

There followed long confidences and comfortings. “And that’s why,” concluded the afflicted one, “I said I hate you. I’ve been hating you a long time—because you keep him from me!”

Lychnis smiled in the dark. “But don’t you see? That’s nearly over. You will have him from me altogether—very soon.”

“Do you really think so?” Consoled, glowing, and happily doubtful, Ruby fell asleep. When she was asleep Lychnis turned over on her face and sobbed her heart out. She saw clearly that Ruby would soon have Fulke—the chimpanzee-like Fulke—away from her altogether. She didn’t mind that. But it gave her a sense of desertion. It was strange that soon Fulke should lie in her place, or take Ruby to his. She would be alone. It was the case that she was losing her friends—even her father. Her heart sank at the deep silence. The shadow of the lattice lengthened out on the floor. Outside a spray of leaves brushed monotonously against the roof of the verandah. Soon she would be alone, quite alone—face to face with a queer reality—except for Ambrose. The name floated to her in the silence. Ambrose. Perhaps he was on the verandah composing. She crept from the bed, crept out on the verandah. Outside there was nothing but the warm moonlight and the leaves brushing on the roof. She came back, alone with the spectre of Yuan. She shivered and lay deathly still, clutching the bedclothes, while the ghostly moonlight peered in through the lattice, stole in and embraced her like an emanation from his cold, unearthly mind. The spray of leaves swished to and fro on the roof of the verandah.

35

Before making an important decision, which Ambrose presently records, Lychnis suffered several changes of mood of a subtle kind, and she was able under his expert questioning to describe them, to give an account of the happenings in the mental, the emotional, the spiritual sphere—the slight happenings that irresistibly fixed her course.

She woke heavy-eyed. After a long wandering in the hot mists of early morning by the reedy shore of the Lake and among the creeks and cliffs and waterfalls, she came clearly to see herself isolated. Since the first morning when she had explored the valley with Ambrose and encountered the swans, she alone (Ambrose not for the moment considered) had made progress in experience. The others, she perceived, had all abandoned the experience which they had begun, content to remain on the fringe, to let it go ungrasped, uncomprehended. They had stopped short on the threshold of the valley, on the threshold of a dream. She had entered the dream. To her life was yielding up secrets. She looked back from the dome of an emerald hill and saw the vermilion roof, with its horns and glittering dragons, of the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion, in the crescent of the bamboo grove. They were all sleeping there, except Ambrose, the recorder of other people’s experiences, whose white-clad figure she saw in the far distance down by the Lake. They were sleeping, while she woke and strove with what life was offering to the mind. She would keep them there until she had finished, until the valley and its denizens had no more to give, for it is the privilege of those who wrestle with the stuff of experience that they should sacrifice the others. Looking up, she saw that a great mass of clouds in the east was thrusting its arms about the valley. An encircling wall seemed to shut her off from the nearly forgotten world of Europe. It made it easier not to go back.

Ambrose pictures her standing on the top of her hill like a fluttering flag. Lonely she must have been. It is lonely, he remarks, to be in the advanced posts in the matter of human experience.

36

In the afternoon, lying idle and alone on the verandah, she reflected that she had not spoken to Terence Fitzgerald for a long time. She could not remember that he had looked at her with hate or resentment. He had been aloof, but that was his habit, and it might be that still he was bound to her in spirit, not resenting her actions. So she went to her bedroom, put on a twelfth-century robe of amber with a design of black and red butterflies, sped across the lawn, and slid through the bamboo-forest, that was heavy and dark with summer, to the tiled watchtower.

She climbed the stairs, peering through little windows that she passed, and came to his blue-tiled room. It was littered with painting apparatus. He sat at the window, in his bard-like, painter’s gown, with his hands clasped, looking sadly out over the quivering bamboo grove. When she came in his great eyes filled with fire and his voice rang with joy.

“At last the high gods have told you to come?” Then reproach shadowed his face. “But in that alien dress. This is not Lychnis, not my divine inspiration materialized.”

“I have abandoned the other dress,” she replied, “for ever.”

“For ever!”

“I must look the part I am going to play.”

“But we are going back. Lord Sombrewater has decided.” He spoke with great earnestness.

“Are we? Not quite yet perhaps.” She concealed her meaning, giving him great distress. They sat together in the wide window, on a ledge of pale yellow tiles. The poet eyed her long and dreamily; sometimes (through dreaming) his knee touched hers, or his hand, if he spoke, found it necessary to pat her fingers or her shoulder. The innocence of the poet permitted itself some intimacies. But they woke no thrill in her. She only leaned out and caressed the close ivy, or gazed up at the swifts circling over a group of elms in the midst of the bamboo.

“The dress is alien, but it is enchanting,” he said, after a pause. “It falls about you like an amber spell.”

“Paint me,” she replied. “I came to be painted, as promised.”