glances at the mysterious island. They passed many a reedy creek, where
carp, great and little, were swimming in hundreds, and green-headed
ducks; many a lawn coming down to the water’s edge, with willow-tree
or small, twisted pine; and at last they came to a mooring raft of
bamboo poles. There Such-a-one made fast, and led his party, in their
gay silks, by lawn and tall grove of bamboo toward the tributary
valleys. At well-spaced intervals he would indicate some pavilion,
designed and placed with regard to the surrounding contours, that was
at their disposal, and the party began to drop members at one or other
of these. Blackwood chose one by a stream not far from the lake for
himself alone. It had a copper-domed summer-house, where he could sit
and meditate by the water. Quentin, too, chose to be solitary, in a
gorgeous pavilion with a verandah and a pointed roof of yellow and
peacock-blue tiles. Next, farther away from the lake, Lord Sombrewater
chose an airy and complicated summer pavilion for Lychnis and Ruby,
Frew-Gaff, Ambrose and himself. Such-a-one bowed as they entered,
saying: “The Pavilion of the Yellow Emperor.” This Pavilion, situated
among lawns within the crescent of a forest of tall and splendid
bamboo, was a puzzle of open verandahs, screens, windows, interior
courtyards and little chambers and closets in threes. The massive roof,
weighted with curved rows of vermilion tiles, rose from a tangle of
upward-curling horns and grotesque monsters to a central and whirling
creature that was both dragon and spasm of forked lightning. The
furniture was exquisite, and in every room was a shrub or a flower—a
lily floating in a cistern or an oleander in a porcelain tub. A faint
scent of musk pervaded. The dwelling was provided with half a dozen
respectful menservants and three girls. There seemed more, because they
were all alike and always coming and going. The men were taller and
finer than those who had left in a hurry at the mouth of the Gorge of
Dragons. The girls, as Quentin remarked, were beautiful toys.
Lychnis and Ruby, with Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, vanished, and Ambrose
gathered from their voices, now near, now distant, that they
were exploring the mazes of the Pavilion. With Lord Sombrewater
he accompanied Terence, Fulke and Sprot on a search for further
accommodation. Behind the Pavilion, deep in the bamboo-forest, Terence
came on a graceful, tile-encased tower like a lighthouse among the
bamboo-leaf-spray, and elected to dwell in the topmost watch-chamber.
Finally, Sprot, entreating Fulke not to desert him, found a house of
lacquer and enamel, like a cabinet for a precious gem. There these two
ensconced themselves, neither very satisfied with the other.
Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose returned to the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion,
smiling and contented with the graceful fortune that seemed to have
befallen them. Lychnis stood at the door in a new robe of heliotrope.
A deep sash sheathed her hips, and her father, in his pleasure, put an
arm round the slender waist and kissed her. Then, “Where’s Such-a-one?”
he asked. “There are one or two things we ought to discuss.”
But Such-a-one had completely disappeared, so she told him.
“Indeed!” said he, turning his expressionless eyes, with a sharp,
bird-movement, on Ambrose.
15
Ambrose emerged from his chamber at the side of the house and
looked from the verandah across the quivering bamboo-forest. He was
composing his description of the morning’s adventure. Somewhere in the
neighbourhood he heard the girls chattering, and could not quite locate
the sound. Ruby’s voice came, calling him, and when he looked round in
bewilderment there was laughter. Then a lattice was pushed open at the
other end of the verandah, and Ruby put out her head and shoulders. She
had on a new jacket of geranium-red, and her copper hair was piled up
with combs of tortoise-shell. “Come in and see Licky and me,” she said.
“There’s a door on the verandah round the corner.”
He went into their room, making a note of the words “refined elegance”
for subsequent use in describing its shape and furniture. There was
an effect of green, gold and black; for the walls were green, and
the furniture was ebony, with marquetry of brass, tortoise-shell and
mother-of-pearl. A clear sunlight, tempered by the lattices, showed
him all the exquisite appointments. The ebony cupboard, with half-open,
gold-enamelled doors, contained a hint of richly coloured clothes, like
petals within the sheath. A profusion of silken jackets was scattered
over an ebony and ivory commode, and hung on the handle of a lacquered
cabinet and over a screen painted with butterflies. The curtains of an
ebony bed, like a houseboat, were drawn, disclosing a heap of garments
on the swan-white coverlet. Lychnis was seated on a stool by a window,
having her hair brushed (but she had forbidden the use of resin) by
a Chinese girl with black-bead eyes and almost imperceptible mouth.
At her side was a lacquer table, laden with ivory brushes, jade and
tortoise-shell combs, pigment trays in rare porcelain. There was a box
with a brass mirror in the lid, and tiny drawers for lip-salve, rouge,
powder, and pencil for the eyebrows. She had in her slender hands a
gilt mirror. She was keeping her head very still, but she put, with her
eyebrows, an inquiry as to his state of mind. He indicated satisfaction.
“This is very untidy,” he remarked. “How can you be so untidy in this
perfectly proportioned chamber?”
“We’ve been trying on the clothes,” said geranium-red Ruby. “It took an
awful time to make up our minds. I chose this.” She opened her wide,
black-bordered sleeves like a red butterfly, and turned on her hips to
show him the great black wings of her sash. Her cheeks were flushed a
deep crimson with her enjoyment, and he wondered if, with that and the
advantage that her magnificent figure got from the half-revealing silk,
she did not almost eclipse her slenderer companion. He turned round,
with a view to the formation of a considered judgment.
Lychnis, the last golden comb stuck in her hair, stood up, and the
wrap that had swathed her shoulders fell to the ground. She, too, had
a faint flush, knowing, perhaps, that she was offered for judgment; or
had she used, he wondered, a little pigment from the porcelain tray?
She turned slowly for him to admire her. She wore a chrysanthemum
robe—dusky flowers on a ground of pale amber. Her neck—as Quentin
was wont to say, you could break it by clenching the hand—was a
chrysanthemum stalk. The big bow at the small of her back gathered
her robe in and disclosed the slim, womanish swell of her hips that
he had so often tried to describe. She raised her robe slightly, to
display trousers of some texture crisp and brown, like the petals of
the flower. “And these comic shoes.” She pointed to them, and walked
towards him, putting her feet one before the other in tiny steps.
“Must we walk like that? Ruby’s beautiful when she does it. Am I?”
They were lovely, and friendly, those two young women. He watched
them both imitate the swaying and delicate walk of the Chinese girls,
up and down the room, while the maid put away the clothes, paying no
attention. “You’ll turn into Chineses,” he warned them.
They both sprang at him with cries of “Never!” and pushed and pulled
him from the room and along a corridor just to show what they could do.
But Lychnis abruptly desisted. “Hark! What’s that?”
It was a carillon of silver bells pealing in a tower of porcelain,
calling the Sages from their several retreats to a meal in the Yellow
Emperor’s Pavilion. Lord Sombrewater and Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, clothed
respectively in sunset crimson and turquoise-blue, were already seated
in a chamber more sumptuous, but not less elegant, than the bedchamber.
It was furnished with rich tables, and flowers, and great jars of
finest blue-and-white porcelain. The other Sages arriving, changed
likewise into robes of the most brilliant hue, refreshment was served
in the shape of fragrant tea, with a dish of cooked bamboo shoots and
other more doubtful ingredients.
“I shan’t examine this,” said Quentin. “It smells good, and I’ll risk
the transformation of my lusts that may result from ingesting the
cellular composition of beetles and slugs.”
“An insubstantial diet will do you no harm,” said Sir Richard. “If I
were to drain you of blood and transfuse the sap of a vegetable, it
might render your temperament less—shall I say?—ardent.”
“Ah, no! You’d find me doting on a cabbage, or in dalliance with a
brussels sprout.”
“You approve of our surroundings, I take it?” observed Lord Sombrewater.
“We are in the garden of an emperor.”
“Shall we stay here? What are the views of the Sages? It is pleasant,
certainly, beyond anything I have ever seen; but one or two
circumstances are a little mysterious.”
“It passes my comprehension,” said Sprot, “how anyone owning all
this wealth can leave it absolutely unguarded. We may be murdered in
our beds any night for the sake of the wealth that’s about us. These
servants—can you trust them? They’re not white men, you know. I kicked
one just now, to show who’s master here. I’ve always heard you ought to
kick native servants. But, as I was saying, all this wealth and not
a keeper, or a policeman, or even a ‘Trespassers-will-be-Prosecuted’
board.”
“It may be the custom of some Europeans to kick native servants,” said
Lord Sombrewater testily, “but I shall be obliged if, in this case, you
will use the extreme politeness they use with us.”
“Oh, certainly, certainly. But, if you will excuse me, all this gold
and tortoiseshell, and the bric-à-brac—I suppose that’s valuable,
too—who does it belong to? It must belong to somebody, I suppose. Or do
you think we might—er—appropriate ... as a souvenir, I mean?”
“I don’t suppose they’d object to your pinching it,” said Fulke. “It’s
clear there’s no capitalist system here.”
“Then you will be happy here?” asked Lychnis.
That brought him up short. “Yes, by the split kidneys of St.
Sebastian!—thoroughly, frightfully happy!” He added to Ambrose in an
undertone: “There’s always the Lake.”
“As for me,” put in Blackwood, “my summer-house down by the Lake is
of marble and has a copper dome. So beautiful are my surroundings
that I would readily stay here for ever, because of the exquisite and
continuous temptation to the senses. But can these servants not be
made to understand that I always have two lumps of sugar in my tea?”
“Sugar?” exclaimed Sprot. “What’s that got to do with meditation?”
“It’s a stimulant to the intestinal acrobatics,” said Quentin. “He
rewards his performing vestiges with two lumps of sugar.”
“And you, Richard?” inquired the chairman.
“It seems to me we are committed. True, it is a nuisance to be without
any facilities—no instruments, no materials, no laboratory—none to
speak of, that is. Yet the place is very pleasant. Not that I am
particularly susceptible to natural beauty——”
“It’s not natural,” broke in Terence unexpectedly. It was noticed for
the first time that he seemed dissatisfied.
“But the air is stimulating, and, as you know, I am something of an
optimist—in short, I particularly desire to find out what it is that
gives these little grassy mountains that peculiar blue tinge, and the
rocks simply shout for examination. Not that I am an expert geologist,
of course. Still, one can record some observations. And I would add
that I think we shall be at peace here. There is an air of happy
serenity that lies on the valley.”
“And you, Terence?”
Terence, in the attitude of Rabindranath Tagore in meditation, raised
his large, grey, poetic eyes. “I confess to a certain disappointment.
Dragons are somewhat outside my habit of dreaming, and the Chinese
gods are not, on the whole, attractive. I find something bland and
pawnbroker-like in their faces——”
“That,” put in Blackwood, “is the everlasting calm of those who have
learnt to despise the world.”
“I find it unheroic and fatuous. Moreover, I dislike the empty and
unmeaning classicism of this Gentleman’s Park. And these rhododendrons
and magnolias—they are so consciously ornamental and Chinese and
matter-of-fact.”
“Still,” observed Sombrewater, “you would not wish to depart just yet?”
“So long as I am allowed to remain in my tower and commune with the
myriad quivering spirits of the bamboo-forest.”
“By all means—if we may eat a few from time to time. I take it, then,
that it’s settled. We remain.”
“I shall remain,” observed Lychnis, “till all’s blue. One need not
starve, or stay out in the wet, for there are houses and servants and
food everywhere. And I would like to say,” she added, with a certain
diffidence, “that the matter-of-factness is only apparent. It seems
to me, Terence, that it hides something—what shall I say?—almost
unbearably passionate, all this classical restraint. Yes, the Pavilion
and the little bridges and the landscape and everything else. These
two paintings, for instance—the Flower-Spray. That empty, palpitating
background. It is more than an evening sky. The flowers—don’t you think
so, daddy?”—she appealed to her father to support her declaration
of faith—“the flowers ... oh, they are more than lovely! There is
something moves in them, behind them. Some great artist did that, with
the calmness of a poet-painter who has feared beauty and conquered
his fear. Then”—she looked round and gathered courage from their
attentiveness—“the Geese. Not very romantic, Terence. But the soul of
Geese is there, dear plump things! What is it Quentin would say in
philosophy? Divested of all accident of appearance. They are whatever
it is that is Goose at the perfect moment of evolution. The life of
the universe is seen through the Geese in that picture. The painter
has not hindered it with some sentimental pre-occupation of his own.
Romanticism looks silly beside that sort of reality. I—I did not mean
to have said so much. But it said itself. It was strange—those two
pictures hypnotized me. Something that is not quite life—more than
life; I can’t express it—moved in them, and words came to me.”
Quentin opened his eyes like a man waking from the illumination of
prayer. “O exquisite penetration of unfolding virginity! These are
the pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove, and we have
heard a voice from the invisible but all-pervading reality of the
universe. Now, I myself formed the same conclusion with regard to the
art of China in the days of my purity—that is to say, when I was about
thirteen. Some echo of those far-off days came to me as I studied my
dessert-plate. This band of creamy pink enamel. This domestic scene in
the centre of the plate. These two girls—what ivory-textured skins!
what lily-petal hands holding the battledores. If the beauty, and by
consequence the virtue, of the girls of this valley is anything like so
fragile——”
“It is very fine ware,” put in Sir Richard. “I would like to understand
their process more perfectly. Not that I am an expert in the
manufacture of pottery. I wonder, by the way, if these cabinets are
unlocked.”
“Obviously,” replied Quentin, “since there is no capitalist system here
and no police. One must lock up things when there are police. There!”
He opened a cabinet and brought out a piece of pottery. “By the
Virgin Mary! it lives. The cellular organization of it lives and the
integument is warm. It blushes under my fingers like a woman’s cheek.
We have here all that’s most precious in the world, including three
maidens.” He dug Fulke in the ribs. “Let us explore the mazy building.”
He led the party all over the Pavilion, discoursing in every room
with infinite learning on some precious object of Chinese art. Before
the ebony bed in the girls’ bedchamber he stood in an attitude of
respectful adoration. Lychnis tactfully withdrew, leading Ruby. He
spoke in a low voice: “And they lie there in each other’s arms, like
shepherdesses in a Boucher. That precious cabinet enshrines them. My
poor Fulke! To have seen, and to have no chance of possessing. But
come away from this holy place. It is not for the likes of us.” They
withdrew, Fulke suppressing a groan.
Finally, in a sort of study, they found a cabinet which contained what
appeared to resemble some kind of listening-in apparatus. “Now,” said
Frew-Gaff, “this is really remarkable.”
16
When evening fell, warm and flower-scented, they emerged, in their
summer-gorgeous robes, from the vermilion-tiled Pavilion, and filed
down towards the Lake. They stood on a lacquer bridge at the head of a
creek and looked silently across the sheen of water.
“Look!” whispered Lychnis, “the Rock!”
It seemed to float before them, in a vapour of evening. The middle and
upper reaches of the sky were clear and summer-foreboding, but clouds
loomed up from behind the mountains beyond the opposite shore, and
opened like large summer flowers.
The Sages went down and stood on a lawn by the water under a huge
flowering tree of unknown kind. Great petals, coloured deep rose,
floated down among them. Lychnis caught one in her hands and inhaled
its odour. Her petal-eyelids closed.
Fulke, roaming disconsolately at large, discovered a mooring-stage of
red painted bamboo among reeds, and there were two or three richly
coloured skiffs, with pointed bows and little masts, tied to it. He
leapt on the raft, and there was an outcry of waterfowl among the
reeds, loudly disturbing the silence. They listened.
“Shall we go out a little way on the water?” He invited Lychnis huskily.
But Lychnis stood quite still, looking at the Rock.
“You, Ruby?” To make Lychnis envious, perhaps.
“I’d rather stay here,” said Ruby, shuddering a little.
Nobody, not even Quentin, responded to his invitation. The evening was
so still. Perhaps a faint awe was on their hearts.
The deep colour faded gradually out, and the light died off the lapping
water. A fish leapt. Night stole over the valley and fell about the
Rock. One by one their hearts misgave them at the experience of beauty.
They quailed before the task of mastering it with their souls, and drew
away. Lychnis only still gazed, and Ambrose studied her.
“Come, my dearest,” said Lord Sombrewater, turning, as he went, to draw
her by the arm.
An ecstatic sigh escaped her. She seemed unable to move. Ambrose and
her father, and one by one the others, turned to see what held her so
fast.
The Rock was ablaze with orange-hued lanterns, as if in the middle of
the water a rhododendron bush had suddenly put forth flowers.
“Almighty, and as we hope merciful, God!” Quentin was spontaneously
upon his knees.
A rocket crept up the black sky, and twenty dying red suns were
extinguished in the Lake. Another and another.
“An extremely ceremonious welcome,” muttered Lord Sombrewater. “Who is
our host, I wonder?”
“Lavish, to say the least,” replied Frew-Gaff.
The display lasted an hour. The culminating device was a vermilion
dragon that writhed and grinned high up above the Rock. With that the
entertainment abruptly ceased, leaving the night darker.
“How shall we find the way?” asked Ruby, with a quiver in her voice.
But two or three servants, with kindly-meant if ghostly foresight,
appeared out of nowhere to guide them, and they went their several
ways through the spectral groves of bamboo, looking back now and then
towards the Lake.
17
Warm-hued lanterns decorated the Pavilion and filled the bedchambers
with a dim, wavering and unreal light. Ambrose retired and composed
his mind. But outside on the verandah he could hear Lychnis and Ruby
whispering and the swish of their robes on the floor.
“I don’t like it, Licky darling,” said Ruby’s voice. “I’m frightened. I
don’t like our room.”
“Well, daddy’s next door, and your father is somewhere close by.”
“I don’t like the place where we are, not by night.”
“I do,” was the answer. “It’s the same valley by night as it was by
day. Can’t you feel how warm and redolent it is?”
“But it’s so strange.”
“I love what’s strange.”
“I feel as if something, someone mysterious, might come and seize us.”
“I should like someone mysterious to come and seize me.”
“Oh, Lychnis, you are dreadful!”
There was no answer. Then, after a silence, Ruby spoke again in a
breathless whisper: “Oh, look! There’s somebody under the trees.”
A pause.
“Silly! It’s only Quentin. How mad of him!”
Lord Sombrewater’s voice broke in from somewhere: “Go to bed at once,
you two.”
Ambrose went out to the verandah in time to see the two silken forms
vanish. But he was quite sure that Lychnis turned and waved to the dim
figure under the trees. Her eyes shone.
18
Ambrose went down to the lake in the tremulous mists of daybreak. He
pushed his way in waist-deep among reeds, noiselessly, to observe the
habits of water-fowl.
Presently, without surprise, for she had the same early morning
habits as himself, he saw the mist-white figure of Lychnis, with her
skirt gathered in her hands, on one of the many little islets of
rock scattered along the shore. She was bending forward, parting the
water-lily leaves, gazing intently into the depths. He liked to see her
once again in her own clothes, unswathed, a slender, air-loving Lychnis.
He whistled. She turned and waved—negatively, as it were—but after a
minute she turned round again, and slowly began to make her way back,
stepping and leaping and splashing from stone to stone, as if she
walked on the water; and sometimes she swayed and balanced among the
broad leaves, herself an unfolding white lily.
She came to him in the reeds and took his hand. “I didn’t want to see
you at first. I thought it was Fulke or someone. But you looked so
funny, waist-deep in the reeds and all thoughtful, and I thought I’d
come. Let’s go, a long way—at once, in case any of the others come. I
want to go miles this morning, exploring. Shall we?”
She was enchanting, in her slip of a dress and white stockings and
delicate shoes. “How can you run and explore in shoes like those?” he
asked.
“Fast-running things don’t have big hooves,” she replied.
“Quite true. Come on, then, Fawnsfeet.”
“My skirt’s not very wide,” she said, stepping out. It was a very
slight affair, a mere shift, caught in on her right flank, so that
the movement of side and hip was seen, to give the eye an unsatiable
satisfaction. And one observed the moulding of shoulders and bust, and
the young mounds that, as one supposed, a lover should one day cup with
his hands and put his lips upon—a thought to make a man such as Quentin
swoon. And the torso is incomparable, Ambrose observed to himself.
“I felt I couldn’t bear those other clothes any longer,” she
explained—“except sometimes, to dress up. Ruby, on the other hand,
likes them.”
“She’s asleep?”
“Fat with it, the pig. She woke up when I was having a bath out of a
basin and thanked God that she was not a fool. The basin has a design
of willow-trees done on it, and someone fishing. Do you fish?”
“Indeed, yes. Nothing I like better on a summer or autumn afternoon.”
“Well, I’ll fish with you. We’ll go right to the other end of the Lake
by ourselves and fish all the afternoon. There’s some beauties in here.
I saw them swimming past the rock I was standing on. It’s very deep,
too—quite black with depth, and clear—like a black crystal. I sometimes
think it looks more interesting under water, among water-plants, than
above it. Don’t you?”
They made their way along the shore of the Lake, talking hard and
laughing, smelling the water-smell and the early-morning smell.
Sometimes they went on lawns, crossing the deep red or bright emerald
bridges that spanned the rivulets; sometimes they trod among pebbles
at the water’s edge; and sometimes, where the quaint hills came right
down to the Lake, they had to scramble round sheer cliffs, jumping over
the deep water from fragment to fragment of broken rock. At one place
they had to creep under the bend of a slender, splashing cataract; at
another they passed a man fishing. He took no notice of them.
Gently the air filled with the delicate splendours of the risen sun,
and the steep island of rock out in the middle stood clearly to view. A
breeze stirred the water.
“When the wind ruffles the Lake it looks like a meadow of snowdrops and
violets,” said Lychnis. “I don’t see a sign of life on the island, do
you?”
“Nothing but the foliage and the flowers.”
They had come now to a bay with a lawn shelving to the water. Lychnis
stood with her hands behind her, looking seriously at the Rock. “Oh,”
she exclaimed abruptly, “look at the swans!”
A noble flotilla, led by a god-like bird with frowning brows, swam
royally towards them.
“How they stare!” She seemed fascinated. “Are they so different from
us—in their lives, I mean, in their thoughts and feelings? Are we
related to swans, Ambrose? I feel that I know them. I think I know them
as well as I know people. Ambrose”—she bent her brows on him—“I think I
shall ask you questions soon—to-day, perhaps. May I?”
“But yes, my silver birch.”
She considered. “Last night, Ambrose, Quentin kissed me!”
“Oh yes?”
She glanced at him, but her eyes were full of her thoughts. “Yes,
he kissed me. I went back to him after you’d gone. The night was so
strange and exciting. It was full of some promise. The night was full
of some dark, passionate flower, waiting to open if I had the secret. I
tried.”
“And you found it?”
“No; it was nothing to be kissed by Quentin—no more than my father’s
kiss, or Ruby’s, or the peck of a bird—except that his beard was
prickly and he smelt a good deal of wine. That’s why I must ask you
questions. I don’t ask for facts. I know facts. I want to know how it
can ever become so that they don’t obtrude rather unpleasantly on one’s
consciousness. Do they ever stand out of the way of passion, Ambrose?
Is there a desire that burns them all up into nothing?”
He was silent.
“It is possible that you do not know,” she said slowly.
“You must give me time, if I am to answer you fully. The subject is
important, and wide.”
“Do you mean to write me an essay?”