Chapter VII: Part 7

“Well,” she expostulated, “there is nobody. I could not love my father or my old friend Ambrose. The rest bore me. I do not want love. I have this queer new pleasure in me instead.”

They scrambled down the valleys, he subject to recurrent fits of amusement. She could not withstand him, and at last allowed herself to regard Yuan’s seriousness and her own bewilderment as a joke. “What has come to me?” she asked the old Sage.

“Death,” he answered.

Was this true? She felt as one who recognizes that a tide is about to seize and drown her.

“If not dead, you are dying,” he continued. “Did not Yuan give you the mystic peach that shrivels the soul and leaves a house for another inhabitant?”

“But you said I am to love,” she protested, displaying an agitation that came uppermost in spite of herself, an agitation that did not really seem to belong to her. “How can I love when I am dead and have no desire?”

“Cannot the immortal take pleasure in love—in compelling lips, in hands that awaken, in...?” In so-and-so and in so-and-so. The old man made her blush with his account of the delights of the senses.

“But you,” she interpolated—“you are a Sage ... you are above desire....”

“A Sage is not necessarily a drivelling idiot,” he replied. “I am very old. It is more than a hundred years since I was interested in what may interest a younger man, and the immortal in-dweller has other objects with me. But there was a time.... The unnameable, when he takes the place of the self, has no objection whatever to making use of the furniture. But he is master of desire.”

“But why did I not stay with Yuan and meditate with him for ever?”

“Because you are a woman and have more sense. Oh, the seriousness of these young men! He will get over it, as I did. But he has done his duty.”

“But why did he give me the peach?” She had so many questions to ask.

“The immediate occasion was your firmness of heart in following the strange beckonings of the imagination. In consequence you have lost your soul and gained the no-soul. This is immortality. Regard yourself as one of the lucky ones of the world, for infinity now lives in you. Joy and sorrow will be lost in transcending experience. None can withstand the silent and invisible force that possesses you, and nobody can take it away. Accept what has happened to you, young woman. Regard yourself as being dead to the world, and at the same time, when your lover kisses that coral mouth, bite his lip with your little teeth.”

They had come to the shore of the Lake, and he took her back to the island in his boat. She gave herself to the tide of immortality that was flowing into her throat, choking the life in her. She had become very serious now, but suddenly he looked up and said: “What fools we are to speak what cannot be spoken, imagining that what we say corresponds with reality!” His ironical laughter rang out over the Lake.

44

Once more Ambrose is sitting with Lychnis on the verandah. It is a warm autumn afternoon, and they are taking pleasure in the sunset glory of aster, dahlia and chrysanthemum that surrounds the Pavilion, and in the golden cloud-rack of leaves that now drifts on the lawn.

She came back, he tells us, so self-possessed, this once moody and relentless fairy. She had a certain calm dignity, unself-conscious and convincing—because, as Wang told her, she had lost her self in what is more authoritative than self; she had opened the way and permitted in herself the play of forces that brook no questioning, at once terrible and lovely.

She was perched on the rail of the verandah, clinging to a post, in a fit of meditation, and sometimes a leaf drifted against her cheek or shoulder.

“I realize now,” she said, “how completely I had forgotten you all. I do really think you had passed—all of you—utterly out of my mind. It is surprising. It would have been quite easy never to see you—any of you—again.”

“So loosely,” remarked Ambrose, “are people bound to one another! It is true—many men might be one’s father, or one’s husband. It is a habit formed accidentally.”

“I find it odd that my lot should have fallen with just you and the others.”

“You do not find it disturbing that human relationships should be so fluid, sentiment so flimsy, and the universe so heedless?”

“I find it beautiful. I should hate the world, now, if it were not all death and change. I have no use for anything that is not inexorable. I like the universe to stare pitilessly—with eyes resembling Yuan’s. It is only the cold and the passionless that I can admire. Ambrose, fancy a universe all mushy with love, like an over-ripe pear!”

“Excellent!” Ambrose remembers being conscious of enthusiasm in his voice, more surprisingly of a flush on the flower-texture of her face.

“Yuan helped me to enter the mind of tiger and eagle, to become the tiger and the eagle, and I found in them what I now find in myself, something I can’t describe—something immense. I have been a tree, too, you know, and a lotus, and a beetle. What I found in all of them Yuan has now become. He has given himself entirely to the contemplation of it in its nakedness, untransformed into bird, or mountain, or man. I did not want to follow his example, I suppose, because there are things I may find amusing in the world. Wang says that, having found the kingdom of the unnameable, the world has been given to me as well, and this is in order. But I think I have still just a little farther to go. The peach hasn’t quite done its work, and when I’m entirely dead perhaps I shall be like Yuan.”

Lord Sombrewater came along the verandah and sat down beside Ambrose. His eye was more pheasant-like than ever. He was glum. Lychnis had given him the outline of her story, and informed him of her willingness to go where he liked, but she had not given him certain information. He could have got it with a question, but he did not care at any time to get his information by direct questioning, and this was a question somewhat difficult to put.

Ambrose replied to her thoughts.

“There are people,” he observed, “so securely in alliance with our friend Yuan’s unnameable that they do not fear to step down into the world and drink deeply of its pleasures.”

“You, too, have tasted—” she began, and relapsed—refused, swiftly, to meet him in a common experience. “There are so many ways of approaching what it is I desire to say,” she continued, “and no words for it. But it really doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that nothing any longer matters, except the continual experience. One is so at peace.”

“The peace of God,” Ambrose interjected.

“I suppose one must say ‘God.’ But there is a great danger of being misunderstood.”

“This experience,” he observed, “is enjoyed in various forms by many people, yet it is one experience. The truth is one truth, expressed with modifications due to climatic or other circumstances. It is named after the system of Jesus, or Mithra, or Buddha. There is the Holy Ghost, or the intent contemplation; the paradise of Nirvana or the Holy City, with tastefully-jewelled gates—a hundred different expressions of the same thing. There is a form of the experience marketed by priests, another by wine-merchants at twelve and sixpence the bottle, and this has the advantage that it augments the national revenue. But whether the experience in itself has anything at all to do with reality, we are not in a position to decide.”

“I am glad you can laugh at it,” she said, with friendliness. “It is the mark of those elected to salvation that they can laugh at themselves. Those who have known truth laugh a lot—like Wang. I have learnt that.”

“You have learnt a great deal, Lychnis.” Lord Sombrewater entered the conversation. “Does there remain any region of experience which you have not understood?”

Ambrose perceived from her enigmatic smile that she understood her father’s question. She did not seem willing to give an unequivocal answer. Lord Sombrewater had no hesitation in questioning her intimately before him, and it would have been in accordance with her own relation with him to reply plainly. But she did not answer plainly. He noted that there had been some change, and wondered whether he should not seek an opportunity to withdraw.

“There is no region of experience that I have not understood,” she replied.

“Upon exploration, I presume?” queried Lord Sombrewater.

“It is a question whether a thing that has not been physically experienced can be understood,” she murmured.

He turned his head away in swift impatience.

“Hallo! hallo!” A stinging shout travelled to them across the lawn. It was Quentin coming back from an expedition with Fulke Arnott and Ruby. Seeing Lychnis on the verandah, he rushed over the lawn like a bear, leapt the rail, put his arm round her, where she clung to the post, and kissed her full on the lips. Then he drew back and gazed at her, saying reverently: “The Holy Spirit returns. The morning dew is once more seen on the flowers. The lamp of heaven shines, banishing for ever the dissensions of this little band and, as we hope, the bad temper of our host. If you require a husband, command me——” He paused for her reply, and Lord Sombrewater remained still, shading his face with a plump, capable hand. She shook her head, laughing. “Then I will be your virgin for ever,” he exclaimed.

But she looked at him so that he began to laugh, and laughed until he shook the verandah.

“Tell me,” she desired him, “if I answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a plain question, would you believe that I told truth?”

“I should never listen to what you said,” he replied, “but to you speaking. There is no question of believing you. There is that in you, I perceive, that cannot disguise itself with lies. But permit me, once more, before I resign the world. We have not seen that autumn gold-brown hair for so many days, those shadows like mauve asters—or are they heliotrope?—those copper lights, those dahlia-red lips, that delicious cavern, those little white teeth....” He kissed her again. “And now,” prayerfully folding his hands, “to that All which is more than Nothing, that Nothing which is less than Everything.” He looked sideways at her.

“You are a restless man,” she said, smiling. “You have no peace in you.”

Ruby and Fulke Arnott followed on to the verandah, he sheep-faced, she with her radiance a little qualified.

“The wedded pair,” Quentin announced—“at least, not yet wedded in time. A marriage has been imagined, let us say, and will shortly be achieved in matter, between—and so forth. Rejecting Achilles, Venus prefers and elevates the chimpanzee. I am envious. I have no morsel.”

Fulke glowered, powerless to silence him. He would not look in the direction of Lychnis. Ruby, on the whole, tended to behave as if it did not matter what Lychnis had done, since it was Lychnis who had done it, and always provided that Lychnis made no attempt to recapture the affections of Fulke. But her impulses were checked by the somewhat cold behaviour of her father, who presently came out on the verandah.

“Good-afternoon, Lychnis,” he said. “Back again?”

She smiled at him and said nothing.

“To-morrow we depart, early in the morning.” Once more Lord Sombrewater entered the conversation, abruptly. He glanced at his daughter, Ambrose saw, for the effect of his words. She displayed nothing but an infrangible placidity.

“Thank God!” muttered Fulke. “Back to dear, dirty old Europe, with all there is to fight in it. By the tripes of St. Francis——”

“Fulke, dear!” It was Ruby who remonstrated.

“I forgot, darling.” He glanced at Lychnis, and went scarlet. “What I mean is, I long sometimes for the good old fight against the forces of capital....”

Lychnis laughed out—a laugh of pure, satisfying joyousness. “Fulke—my dear Fulke—you are coming to life too, like Quentin. You are all coming to life again. For I must confess,” she explained, “that you had all become a little faded before I went to stay on the Rock. You had lost personality, you know, beside Wang and Yuan.”

“By the foul liver of St. Eno ...” began Fulke. “I’m sorry, my dearest.”

“Well I’m blessed!” exclaimed Sir Richard. He looked uncertainly at Sombrewater, bit his lip, and gravely said his say. “It is reported, Arnold, that there are bandits in the countryside.”

“I am disinclined to remain,” Sombrewater replied. “We must trust to the name of the Dragon. He owes us that, I think. What do you say, Lychnis? I do not desire to force you to go or to stay.”

“Let us go.”

“We are at one, then, on this, at any rate.” He spoke testily. “You had all better begin to pack.”

They departed, except Sir Richard. Lychnis also made as if to go to her room.

“Your room has been changed,” Ambrose had to point out.

She turned, puzzled. “By whose orders?”

“At my request, Lychnis,” said Sir Richard gravely.

“What does this mean, Richard? I had not been told of this.” Lord Sombrewater was sharp.

“I had in mind to save her the inconvenience of the questioning to which Ruby would no doubt subject her.”

“This is not at all kindly done, Richard. You say in effect——” His lordship’s anger was rising, and then he seemed to realize the weakness of his position and turned on his daughter. “For God’s sake, Lychnis, tell us—are you my daughter still, or ... or another man’s wife ... or ... my God! this hurts me ... his mistress!”

Ambrose watched the scene with interest. The dusk was gathering. The questions seemed to flap and flutter against the luminous calm of her spirit like blundering bats. She stood among them smiling a little (though her breast did indeed heave somewhat), and replied: “You compel me to answer a question that seems impertinent. What is it to anyone here what has happened to me while I have been away? But if you place so much importance on the difference between one state and another, and if it hurts you to be kept in suspense, I will tell you—I am a virgin.”

There was silence. Then Sir Richard spoke: “I beg your pardon, Lychnis,” and went into the Pavilion.

When he was gone, her father hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks. “Thank God, my darling, you are still my daughter! You belong to no other man.” He drew back, and looked at her as if to reassure himself. “It is true—quite true—is it not?”

She suffered his kissing and his question, and answered: “Quite true.” Then he, too, went into the house; but whether he felt quite sure that he was secure of her love and sole possessor of her, Ambrose doubts.

Lychnis, on her part, looked at Ambrose with a somewhat dubious smile. “In his business affairs my father has much of the calm of Wang Li. He makes use of impersonal forces, and that is why he is pre-eminent. But in his relations with me he is destroyed by desire. It is odd, is it not? They do not realize, they do not mind, that morally I was Yuan’s mistress. I was prepared”—she spoke to him with a hesitation that was unusual in their talking together—“I was prepared to be his entirely. I did not shirk that, Ambrose. It was only accident that I was not. You understand that, don’t you?”

“In such cases it is so often accident.”

“In such cases.... Am I a case?”

Her eyes were the dusk looking at him, the brown autumn night, the velvety secret of interstellar space, the cold and heedless contemplation of God. He feasted on the beauty of it, when she had gone.

45

The last night in the valley was deep and secret and starry, deep blue with a streak of night-changed green where the bamboo grove was, mysterious with secret processes in grove and torrent, blue and starry like a still painting on a screen. Not far from the Pavilion a stream flowed slow and deep through a tunnel of trees and hanging creeper. Ambrose stood by a gleaming gilded bridge, listening to the rhythm of the water, feeling the close, secret life of the foliage. Over against the living wall of the grove he saw cigar-ends moving in irregular paths, fantastic planets in a dense æther. Over the bamboo flickered a myriad superb fire-insects, creation of Yuan’s. Beyond the grove burned a million gold stars.

The gurgle of the mysterious river in the darkness was flowing sound, hypnotic rhythm, music streaming out in streaks of some foreign colour through the thick and shifting blue substance of the dark night. After some time, he tells us, he became aware that his strange and peaceful meditation now held a different element—a queer thridding, an insect noise coming from within the grove of bamboo. Of a sudden it rose high and clear, and he remembered that it was Lychnis—Lychnis with her lute, playing the thoughts and motions of her spirit. “Lily-blossom of the world!” he murmured to the dim lilies that swayed at his feet. “Cold loveliness of being that buds for a moment of time out of the secrecy and darkness of unbeing!” He worshipped at this living monstrance of the body of God.

Then again he listened intently to the queer realities of spirit that she was creating with form and movement in the night. The plectrum that had made a thridding of crickets now made a whispering of the leaves of the bamboo. Next, solid and clear out of her vision, a sound like the patter of pearls raining on a temple of porcelain. With composure and quiet deliberation she made her lute sing the secret of life of the valley, strength of giant pine, depth and stillness of the lake, high wind among crags; in it dreamed the exaggerated shapes of Yuan, Hsiao and Wang Li. It was there in the grove she sang. Ambrose gazed, as one gazes with the mind into an experience striving to see what is there, as if he should see her at the heart of the grove in a transfiguration. But there obtruded upon his gaze, now used to the darkness, the figures of the seven Sages, listening in their chairs. Had Richard Frew-Gaff ears, he wondered, to hear her turn the stars and all physical reality into voices of ghosts? Did Blackwood receive some whisper of the truth Wang aimed at him? Quentin listened with limbs stretched out in a rigor of emotion. Terence he dimly perceived with hands wrung between his knees, frowning perhaps on some new, queer beauty. Sombrewater had bowed his head in his hand—understanding too fully that he had a strange lost girl for a daughter. Fulke and Ruby, no doubt, were making love among the trees, perhaps out on the starry Lake; perhaps they heard and were afraid.

His mind returned to the lute-player in the grove. Now she was making a music that was icy and terrible. Image of pine, lake, and crag became faint and vanishing. There was nothing human in it, but only a loneliness of Himalayan peaks and a coldness of outer space. It was the vision of Yuan. The coldness descended even on the heart of Ambrose as he was floated near upon the edge of extinction. The starry sky, the lawn, the grove, the bright gilded bridge, swam, and there was nothing solid. Suddenly her plectrum tore the strings with a sound like the rending of silk. There was silence, and out of it there grew a divine laughter.

46

Ambrose gave a pull with his paddle and drove his canoe head-on into the grey and misty margin of an islet. He shivered, for the cold of daybreak was still on the water. He had meant to stop here, at the bend of the Lake, and look finally at the valley and the island, to reflect on the march of time, taste for a due moment an emotion nobler than sadness, as the beloved valley and the rich experience of the summer faded from bright now into dim past. But valley and rock had vanished in morning vapour. There was nothing but an islet glimpsed in a sepia mist, a blur of willow, a crag high overhead in the vapour, a dejected heron brooding on one leg in the shallows.

Idle for a moment, he let his craft drift out from the reeds. Even the Lake itself, he reflected, some current in it, was bearing him away towards the river, towards the hidden Dragon Gorge. He dipped a blade, and paddled slowly across the water, past islets of reed and bamboo that stood out of the mist, looking for some place where a lane in the mist might give him a glimpse of the Valley. Once, indeed, there was a rift, a view of what seemed some part of the Rock. He was like a man seeking in his memory for something familiar and forgotten.

Silently over the water came Lychnis in her white dress, paddling alone, looking steadfastly in front of her. Their boats rasped.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I did not mean to intercept you.”

“It seems to be fated that our paths in life should drift together.” She spoke very coldly, and he admitted to himself that something was gone from their relationship. He cleared his mind—opened it to the possible implications of that change. They came to him.

“The mist is lifting,” he said, and they both looked back over the islet-studded water. The distant Rock, the shore of the Lake with their own mooring-raft of bamboo, a deep grey blur, came into sight like a dream remembered at morning when sleep cannot be regained.

She turned her head steadily away, and the mists closed again, blotting out lake and islet and crag. A voice came from her. “One had pleasant days there.” The blade of her paddle hung, and the voice came from her again: “It is not the same, only remembering.”

She sped her canoe, and he watched her become a blot of white and pale brown, vanishing in grey vapour.

47

Under the leadership, once more, of Such-a-one, the homeward journey began. Sprot had been released from imprisonment on the mountain of meditation. The mists lifted soon after they had entered the Gorge of Dragons; the autumn sunshine was warm; violets were to be seen where lawn or grove came down to the water’s edge, and a memory of early summer lingered among the sombre brown shadows under and about the cliffs. Lychnis would not let them camp in the creek where they had spent a night when they were journeying the other way. The violets were ghosts, and the autumn song of birds was an echo, for it seems that her firmness of heart had left her when they entered the Gorge.

So they went swiftly on, helped by the seaward current. Lord Sombrewater watched Lychnis with anxiety, and Quentin lay in wait, hoping to catch some advantage out of her reaction. But she shunned everyone, and was a fiend to Ruby, who lay in her boat.

Late at night they came to the mouth of the Gorge and pitched their tents (but not where they had pitched them before) and slept. Ambrose, however, preferred to keep watch for any portent that might appear, and at dawn, when he was fishing among the reeds at the deep-flowing mouth of the Gorge, Lychnis came to him, sweet with the morning, flushed with despair.

“It has gone,” she said flatly. “Gone! What shall I do if I am seduced and deserted by my experience that I loved, Ambrose?”

“Do you consider,” he asked, “that you have had the experience of God?”

“Do women have the experience of God unless they are in love?” She laughed a little, twisting her fingers among the reeds. “God? It is not a word that means anything. I only had an experience. I don’t know how to describe it, unless you have had it yourself. I had come to see the world, men and trees and mountains, as a varying manifestation of the same substance. I saw that everything was continuous, and the pine and pheasant on the branch were only another form of me. Me, did I say? There was no longer any me. Something else was there, and it gave me joy. It was more wonderful and satisfying than anything I had ever supposed could happen. I felt myself a piece of the universe, no longer in opposition to it, an unhappy little piece of separation. The infinite and inevitable had taken the place of my soul, and now it has left me, and however shall I get it back?”

“Calling this experience, for convenience, the experience of God,” he replied, “one can only reply that God is not to be thought of as a common seducer. Believe me, before long the satisfaction you speak of will again fill your heart. Why, there is no cause for despair. This reaction was to be foreseen!”

Her slender body was enshrined within the radiance of the rising sun in a frame of burning willows; her hair was an aureole of gossamer; but the heart in the midst of her was black. “I cannot feel hope!” she exclaimed. “I think God will forget me. He must have so many friends.”

“A thing not really worth saying,” he replied.

“You are angry with me.” She lifted her face to study him. “You are almost not impersonal.”

There was a silence. She would not sit down beside him. It seemed she must say something that desired to be said with the advantage that standing gave her. Or was she about to take flight before it could say itself? There is a disguised desire in her, was his thought—some powerful desire that she does not recognize, yet, for what it is.

“You cannot comfort me,” she told him. “My coldness of heart, that made me laugh, has left me, and I am weak enough to be crying for the Valley and the Pavilion, and all those summer days and the deep nights, and—and Yuan. Ambrose—Ambrose—” She seemed on the point of vanishing, but she spoke on: “You are a man of whom I can ask this—the only one. You are calm, passive. You will not mind. You see, your memory is so marvellous, you will never forget one hour of all the weeks we spent there or one thing that was ever said. And you have seen my soul stripped naked, so that it is wrong I should ever be the bride of another man. I desire you to marry me, so that I can always be near you and look in your mind and be reminded of the Valley, and always possess the days we spent there. Will you, Ambrose?”

She blushed very furiously.

Ambrose sat and looked steadily at his float passing him slowly on the stream. He smiled queerly to himself. Desire has marvellous ways of presenting itself to the mind, he reflected. Then, aloud: “In all this it seems to be assumed that I should be prepared to remain a flawless and in no way troublesome glass in which you could feast your heart on the scenes of the past. I ought to warn you—the assumption, which you perhaps make, that I should be a cold, convenient husband, is unjustified.”

She swayed on her feet, and her eyes stared at his unreadable face as if a spear from an unseen hand had smitten her side, and she was at grips with the reluctant secret of death. The delicious cavern of her mouth opened, but no words came. He gave her no help. He met her stare coldly, giving no shadow of a look that might carry the word of love.

“Think that over,” he added, and returned to his fishing.

48

Late in the afternoon, three days’ journey from the Gorge, they put up for the night at a mountain-village inn. The inn was high and isolated, the innkeeper attentive (obedient to the sign of the Dragon). But he warned them that a band of revolutionary troops was thought to be approaching the neighbourhood, with fire and sword.

“Are they, the festering blackheads?” Fulke’s revolutionary sympathies were a little alienated since his engagement to Ruby. “A lot of scrofulous thieves unworthy of the high name of revolutionary. By the giblets of St. Francis’s little dog——! I beg pardon, my darling.”

“You were going to remark,” put in Quentin, “that these do not carry bricks for the New Jerusalem.”

The Sages, the two girls, and Ambrose were gathered in the eating-room of the inn, talking, and watching the effect of sunset among the hills. Lychnis alone was silent, turning a matter over and over. Apparently she had recovered her firmness of heart, but not the transcendent experience. She had come to a point where she was indifferent to the past and future. The green tip of a budding flower of joy was fighting the winter snow and icy wind, the cold death in her mind.

The Sages and Ruby were apprehensive, at the same time somewhat boastful. Ambrose found a great deal to amuse him in their conversation, for, strangely enough, each considered that he alone among all the others had probed the experience of the summer to the bottom. Blackwood, perhaps, was the most jaunty. He did not really quite know where he stood in regard to life, but he fully trusted that he should soon find out, and in the meantime took an extra lump of sugar in coffee. Ambrose surmises that the words of Wang Li had given sanction for the release of impulses too long pent up and not dissipated or re-directed, and in the first capital they came to there would be an expenditure of energy.

Sprot was assertive. “I always said,” he pointed out to them, “that you would come round to my point of view. You admit that I was right about....” He did not venture to name names.

“A fool,” observed Lord Sombrewater, who had no longer any regard to Sprot’s feelings—“a fool is a man who knows from birth what it takes others seventy years to find out.”

But Sprot was not put out. “I do hope,” he continued, “that we are not in real danger here.”

“If we are not,” observed Frew-Gaff, “it will probably be due to your friends in the Valley.”

“I would like to feel certain that we shall see Europe again,” put in Blackwood anxiously.

“I trust,” said Frew-Gaff, “that the Dragon will fulfil his obligations. I fear, from what the villagers say, that we are in for trouble.”

“It would always be possible to go back,” said Fulke. “We had a wonderful time there, after all. I for one should be contented to stay there for the rest of my life—now.” He looked fondly at his wench, who leaned against his shoulder.

“No,” said Blackwood promptly, “do not let us go back—not unless the danger is really considerable.”

“Great things are awaiting us in Europe,” said Terence. “I feel it. I have seen Europe in a vision, and we are to arrive there safely after this time of exile and cleansing purgatory.”

“The Valley would be a very nice place with a decent up-to-date hotel and a golf-course,” said Sprot. “I should like to see a little enterprise and capital put into that Valley. Men were made to work, not to think. I shall never forget....” He shuddered as he thought of that frightful period of imprisonment with twelve lunatics on the mountain of meditation.

“I have not yet understood,” remarked Lord Sombrewater, “what there was to prevent your coming away.”

“What there was...! Well, if you were put on a rock surrounded by water, and every time you put your foot in the water to wade across you were sort of shrivelled all up your legs and spine with a frightful tingling pain, you’d soon know what there was to prevent you coming away.”

“Couldn’t you jump?”

“Jump? I tried once! Those devils always seemed to know what you were thinking about, night and day, and when I jumped one of them gave me a twitch that sent me in head first. Not till my dying day shall I forget it. I couldn’t remember where I was for a week. My God! if I had my way with them!” He went purple at the thought of the indignities to which he had been subjected. “Go back you may,” he added, “but you go without George Sprot.”

“There are some experiments that I greatly desire to make,” added Frew-Gaff. “I believe I can reproduce some things we have seen lately, if I can only grasp one or two principles that baffle me.” He kindled his brows.

“That you never will,” thought Lychnis. She despised them for having hopes and fears. It was all one to her, she told herself, if she were slain there that night. She was looking out through the window of the inn. Opposite, a toppling jade crag flamed with a faint fire of sunset from beyond the Valley. The scene did not move her greatly, she found. She was calm in face of the once heart-hurting beauty of sunsets. She turned once more to examine her thoughts, all upside down as Ambrose had put them. He sat there with his back to her, but the current of all her moods was toward him.

As the last rays of light departed from the Chinese landscape, stranger here to them than in the Valley, they heard sounds of considerable excitement in the village. They all went out into the street, and presently little crowds of chattering peasants began to pass the inn. The innkeeper came out at Lord Sombrewater’s request. Such-a-one had vanished.

“Ask what the trouble is, Lychnis,” commanded Lord Sombrewater.

“Refugees,” the innkeeper conveyed, standing impassively with his hands hidden in his sleeves.

“What is happening, then?” she asked.

He directed their gaze across the Valley. A young moon had risen over the zigzagging mountain, and there on the precipitous side of it, not half a mile from the inn, were a hundred lights—the camp-fires of the revolutionaries—and on other hills there were other lights.

Even as the Sages were looking at one another, and Ruby and Fulke, in each other’s arms, were making appointments for eternity, a flash came from the hillside. The revolutionaries had discharged their field-piece. The shell burst very short. They tried again, with the same effect, and this seemed to put them in a frenzy, for they began a furious cannonade and opened fire with their rifles. But not a shot came over the village, and they slew nothing but the breeze. The villagers, perceiving that the strangers were miraculously protected, sought to share in the working of the charm, and soon the party was surrounded by a dense crowd of bead-eyed Orientals, chattering in the dark. The flash of guns and a flare in the sky told that the attack was proceeding over a wide front.

Lychnis watched the proceedings with unconcern.

Very soon, perceiving the uselessness of his artillery, the enemy commander changed tactics, and seemed, from the noise that his troops made, about to deliver a hand assault.

“There are perhaps five thousand of them,” muttered Sombrewater. “Richard—if we could get the girls away? If you could steal down to the river and get off in the boats?”

“It could be tried,” said Sir Richard tentatively. “But it is for you to go, Arnold....”

“Leg it with me,” suggested Quentin, prepared to die if his last hours might be amorous.

“I will not leave this spot in any circumstances whatever,” Lychnis answered, low and decisively.

Lord Sombrewater was about to speak, but the words perished in his mouth, for at that moment the colossal apparition of a dragon, with eyes like burning topaz, writhed in fearful silence through the Valley and vanished among the hills. The clamour of the attack ceased, and the people of the village prostrated themselves.

“We were rewarded by heaven,” said Quentin devoutly, “for the purity of our lives!”

But the attack was forward again. The enemy came on, yelling like pandemonium, and one after another the flame-beasts came galloping out of the mountains, and where they passed through the attacking forces their trail was blazed with paralysed men.

“This helps,” exclaimed Sombrewater, “but they’re still swarming up every valley. Do you see them where the flame goes? They’re not being held.” He sought for his daughter’s hand, and she gave it him. She wore the smile of a holy one. It had come to her that there was nothing but a quietness akin to the quietness of space in her heart. The world might crack and she would be calm, for there was now nothing in her subject to death.

It was true that the enemy were not being held, but the mind that was defending the Sages had reserves in hand; indeed, he disposed of the attack in a way that was cynically humorous. In the days when Yuan had taken interest in appearances his interest had been keen and productive. As he had told them, he was able to reproduce appearances and conjure up phenomena. The secret of the toys he had devised for the defence of the Valley had been communicated, in accordance with family tradition, to the engineers, and they, doubtless, were handling the matter at the present time. With great subtlety the fiery dragons were managed so as to force the attack into certain defined areas. They did not kill, except inadvertently, and, once he was used to them, they served to provoke the enemy to defiance, so that he was gradually drawn on. Yet for a long time it seemed to the Sages as if the defence must fail. But now the dragons were followed by monsters in human form, with blue, scowling faces and tongues of red fire, who floated over the forest. Their robes seemed to blow and flap in the breeze, disclosing the limbs of demons; shadows of hate lurked on their brows, and their green eyeballs glowed balefully. Each carried a scimitar under his arm, and one of them, by way of preparatory gesture, cynically shaved a forest from the mountain. The revolutionaries were checked, but amid scenes of compulsion and terror their commander forced his way to the village—a big, hideous man—hewing and slaughtering with an immense curved blade.

He was on them, with a dozen followers, before the Sages realized what had happened, and Fulke and Ruby were already in their hands. The commander himself, smiling like a death’s head, fixed his eyes on Lychnis and swung his blade. She found herself looking darkness in the face, and there was only one thought in her mind—Ambrose would die too. His existence and hers would disappear in the non-existing. Already from the cold threshold she looked back at the world, and saw it as a bright place where those who had learnt to stare in the face of darkness might command and enjoy desire. Then she saw Ambrose. His eyes were very far away. He, too, was looking in the face of darkness. Or did he not love her then? For her, now, he suddenly became the darkness, the heedless, the unnameable. It was in him, in him, that her existence was to disappear.

The bandit lifted his curved blade. It swung once, twice, hissing, and she still brooded on her revelation. But Such-a-one appeared at an upper window in the inn with a device in his hand, and at the third death-bringing swing of the blade he dealt with the chemical composition of the bandit in such a way that the characteristics which distinguish the living from the dead suddenly ceased to be present. Thus also with his followers.

The din and yelling were now terrific. Lychnis ran to help Ruby, who had fainted, and tended her while the conflict raged. The angel of annunciation had visited her and her eyes shone, and Ruby, coming to herself, perceived that something had happened to her friend. “Oh, Licky,” she exclaimed, “are we dead? For you look like a spirit in heaven.”

“Yes,” answered Lychnis. “I have died, and I am looking back at the world. I see that I never knew till I died what it was that I wanted.”

But Ruby, seeing the battle and hearing the din, was puzzled. “I do not know what you mean,” she murmured. “I only feel that you have become different from the living.”

“It is true, my dearest—really true.” Lychnis smiled at her friend.

A vast blaze of light thrust the reeling hills out into blackness, and they saw a mass of the enemy pallid and paralysed in the ghastly glare. Then Ruby shrieked, for a monstrous flame-demon swung a scythe through a huge circle of the night, and the men who had been standing huddled before him stood no more. The rest of the attacking horde turned to save themselves while they could. Then, with a hiss and a roar that seemed to blast the forests, fire sprang from every hillside and streamed over the flying forces. The sky became full of burning villages, and the ears were stifled with the streaming of unearthly flames. Stricken phantom hosts scattered in panic terror along the spines of the mountains; crags of burning sulphur toppled down upon them in obliterating thunder; the mountains themselves seemed to collapse upon flying armies of spectres; and of the actual and substantial fugitives who sought among the rocks for some cover from this spectacle there was none whose heart was not squeezed and ruptured by the cold hand of fear.

Our friends watched in silence until the cynical and jocular fireworks came to an end in fitful lightning and muttering thunder. The terror of the Dragon was in their minds. But there were two in whom terror had no place.

49

They did not at once enter the paradise that was now theirs. They did not even speak of it to each other. They pondered the golden future in secret, and only sometimes, by a glance more subtly effective than kisses, acknowledged that their blood ran to the same rhythm. For those who feed their hearts on the substance of eternity there is no haste.

At last, on a spring morning, the _Floating Leaf_ lay in Southampton Water. They stood at the rail, the two of them, looking at the bed of smokestacks, masts and cranes that flourished in the Hampshire foreshore. It was necessary that something should be said, now that this daily companionship was to end.

He regarded her steadfastly. The corners of her mouth were turned up, and she smiled faintly at the water.

“You are making a fox-face,” he observed.

“I was thinking of the Valley.”

“Pleasantly?”

“Oh, very pleasantly! But how far away it seems, and how strange the things we all talked about, even the words we used! They would sound comic in this atmosphere. Was it real, or did we dream it? Or is this unreal, England and these liners and railways?”

“All life is unreal, as you and I know,” he answered her. “We accept it, because we must; but sometimes reality is felt. It sticks through, and the world seems queer beside it. You and I have it for always in our hearts.”

“That is true,” she said, “even if we dreamt, even if we did really for a time live in a landscape on a vase or a silk. But how did it come to you, this experience of unbreakable, calm joy that has come to me?”

“I came by it years back, in war and disaster.”

“Why do you and I have it, and not the others?”

“I cannot answer that. It is predestination. There are some that cannot help but be saved.”

She touched his hand. “We are in love with one another, are we not, Ambrose?”

He answered, “Yes.”

“It took me so long to find out. One could not recognize a happiness that was so wonderful and so close. Why did you not tell me?”

“I did not want to plant love in you. I wanted it to come of necessity, from the centre of your being.”

“Did it hurt, when you saw me in love with Yuan?”

He smiled.

“Oh!” she cried, “I love you because you are cold and unmoved and unescapable, like Fate! I love you because you do not desire me and my beauty is nothing to you. I die and am forgotten in the night of your being. You are death and change itself, the beautiful, pitiless universe in which we are all swallowed and become nothing.”

“You also,” he answered. “We have eaten the peaches of immortality, you and I, and we are no longer you and I. We have tasted the fruit, the substance of the universe, that is eaten in the endless fields of Nirvana. We are dead, and we can descend into the world like gods, to command and enjoy desire.”

“You do desire me?”

“Yes, my flower, my insect.”

She was in his arms, face to face with his unswerving regard. What she found in his eyes must have contented her.

“You understand—everything?” He asked to hear her say “Yes.”

“Everything.”

“And this time there is nothing to get over?—no repugnance?”

Once more she drew up the corners of her mouth, and, “On the contrary,” he heard.

He kissed her, and there was that in his embrace to catch away her breath with surprise and joy.

When Lord Sombrewater came along the deck and saw them sitting together he was struck by something new in their attitude. An immense and unexpected possibility presented itself to his mind.

“What’s this?” he asked, with his swift, birdlike regard.

Lychnis told him, and he made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction. “Well, really, this is most gratifying! As you must marry—I suppose you must—some day——”

“To-day,” she interpolated.

He was somewhat taken aback. “We’ll see—we’ll see. Time enough. But if it must happen, I’d rather a thousand times it was Ambrose than anyone else in the world. Really, very gratifying—very gratifying—and surprising. You old pike! I shall feel that her husband has not taken her away from me—has not——” He coughed. “A half-share, perhaps—really, not more than a half-share. Why, with Ambrose you’ll hardly be married at all.” He beamed, and they exchanged a tingling glance. Then, formally, they received his blessing. “God bless you both—a thousand times. You old pike!” Lord Sombrewater blew his nose and, as a second thought, went off to announce the news to the Sages, and, in due course, to his wife.

They sat side by side, and looked at the smooth water and the spring sky, and wondered at the instant and almost intolerable reality of the happiness that was in them.

* * * * *

Ambrose did not forsake his notebooks upon his marriage, but he does not write much about himself or intimately about Lychnis. One sees them, though, with that infinite serenity in their souls, contemplating the world with instructed affection and containedly giving themselves to the surprises and exquisite pleasures of love.

* * * * *

Lord Sombrewater seems to have regarded the birth of a grandson with mixed feelings. Apparently it was not somehow what he had expected.

+The End+

Transcriber’s Notes:

• Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
• Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+).
• Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
• Redundant title pages removed.