while to arrange the logic, the perspective, of my reply.”
“Oh, well; take time over it, if you must. But I’m not often in the
mood to ask you things.”
“In the meantime, I take it you have been disappointed?”
“I only hope Quentin was as disappointed as I was.”
“You won’t be ashamed with him? You don’t mind meeting him again?”
“But why? After all, I disappointed him. It’s for him to be ashamed if
he can’t do better than that. He got nothing from me but my will to
experiment, and I easily made it seem as if he was in fault. He went
off feeling ridiculous, I fancy. But look! they’re asking for bread.”
There was always bread in her pockets. The splendid birds were
clustered at the edge of the lawn, and she ran down and fed them, and
put her slender white hands among their plumage. The god-like leader
dug at her with his beak.
“How he stares! How insolent he is!” she exclaimed. “He pesters me—like
Quentin.”
She retired a little. The great bird followed, bridling and opening his
wings and frowning on her like a Jupiter. She stood still and taut,
fascinated. Suddenly he spread his huge wings about her and laid his
scarlet beak on her breast. She stood in his embrace for a moment,
with thrown-back head, and his beak moved on the slender stalk of her
throat. Then, swiftly and calmly, she disengaged herself and ran to
Ambrose. The swan seemed quite crestfallen. “Look! I’ve disappointed
him,” she said. “For my part, I prefer him to Quentin, but not very
much.”
“You are a great mystery, my water-lily,” Ambrose replied.
They made their way back along the sides of the hills.
19
Nothing happened for three days. A few of the party found that
eventlessness had a faint, queer effect on their nervous systems,
and the pervading scent of musk was enervating. The days were a warm
monochrome. The fiery procession of the sun across the diagonal of the
valley was slow, perceptible and unvaried. One might have been glad
to alter it. The profound peace and happiness of the valley became
even oppressive, even almost sinister for Sprot. The valley smiled
ceaselessly, and, as Quentin said, there is nothing more irritating.
At night, Lychnis told Ambrose, Ruby clung to her in some sort of
irrational fear. Only Lord Sombrewater remained entirely unaffected.
And Lychnis liked it. And Ambrose made observations in his diary.
Then, on the fourth day, there blew up a storm of wind, and the clouds
writhed like dragons, and the distant tiger-roar was heard as the wind
stroked the cracking forests on the fells.
“What music!” Lychnis listened to her emotions, her brows heavy.
“Mendelssohn only,” put in Quentin. “Everything in measure here. None
of your devastating German symphonies—not in these parts; even the
storms are civilized—still less your incoherent Irish harps.”
“I did really begin to feel,” said Terence, “that our environment was
unsympathetic. I haven’t had a dream, still less a vision, since we
came. And I find the Spirits of the Bamboo Forest, though they are
undoubtedly present in quivering myriads, more than a trifle hard
to elicit. But this is better; this is more hopeful. The wind may
bring things. I will therefore retire to my tower, and keep watch
for a messenger from one of those many worlds that are undoubtedly
interfolded with this. If you would like to share my vigil...?” He
turned his great misty eyes upon Lychnis. “I feel it coming upon me
that I am to begin a new portrait of you, in those elaborate clothes,
with your hair so, formally, but half-hidden in veils of bamboo leaves.”
Lychnis declined. She was going out to the forest to hear the great
branches cracking, she said. She and Ruby went to their bedroom to put
on clothes they could walk in—mediæval hunting-clothes.
“Half-hidden! You always have to keep your subject half-hidden,
Terence,” mocked Quentin. “Why don’t you paint her swimming naked in a
mystical bamboo-leaf sea? I should, by heaven! if I were a painter. She
wouldn’t be hidden! I should swoon, painting her.”
“You handle my daughter with your imagination a bit freely, Quentin,”
observed Lord Sombrewater.
“We are all Sages here, I think,” replied Quentin. “We can all embark
on the adventures of conversation, I think, for conversation’s sake,
without being horrified at what we are compelled to say in artistic
justice to our theme. It is true, certainly, that your daughter raises
in me exquisite lusts of the imagination. But if I want to marry her in
my imagination I may, I take it, without asking her parent’s imaginary
consent.”
“It is a pretty point,” said Lord Sombrewater tartly; for, where
Lychnis was concerned, even though a Sage, he would have put
restrictions on the art of conversation.
The girls came back, dressed for the excursion. “I shall accompany
you,” he said.
“And I,” said Sir Richard.
“And I,” said Quentin and Sprot.
“And I,” said Fulke, “if I may.”
Ambrose, naturally, joined himself to their party, as likely to provide
more material for description. They set off, leaving only Blackwood
and Terence Fitzgerald behind.
An hour’s march, mostly along the course of a stream that ran to
the Lake, brought them out of the jewel-like, smooth-surfaced and
quaint-conceited scenery, among which the Lotus Lake and the pavilions
lay, into scenery of a wilder description. Quentin was walking with
Lychnis, Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose.
“Terence should be here,” he remarked. “This is unfinished; this is
romantic.”
“But a bit wizardous,” said Lychnis. “You would scarcely expect to meet
one of his fair-haired Lohengrins—not among these oddly twisted pines
and misshapen rocks. Some strange, gnarled old man, perhaps, with a
staff—some very still old man, with a wrinkled, wicked smile, like a
bit of the scenery suddenly living and peering at you.”
“The mountain air is very bracing,” observed Lord Sombrewater, “and the
wind fortifies me exceedingly; but for a man who makes a regular habit
of six cigars a day the pace is beginning to tell. So much loose rock
about, isn’t there?”
“As for me,” said Quentin, “I am energy, I am vitality itself. I could
tread the mountains flat. When we get up there on the crags I shall
breathe in the streaming clouds and blow them out again in your faces.
I shall fill my chest with the atmosphere and leave you all gasping for
breath. You will entreat me for life, and I shall give it—on terms.”
“I don’t need air,” replied Lychnis. “I subsist on the æther.”
“You are the æther,” he answered, “or whatever medium there is on which
all things are founded. Without you....” At this point she deftly
skipped out of earshot—or, to be more exact, with Ambrose, nearly out
of earshot. “Without you,” he continued, to the wild, surrounding
forest—“without you we should not subsist at all. There would be
neither matter to desire cleavage with you, nor spirit to imagine the
immortality of love.”
“Your knowledge of the bawdy literature of the Middle Ages is more
profound than your physics,” interrupted Sir Richard.
“I create my physics, as per necessity, to conform with my imagined
world, like God,” he retorted.
Sir Richard smiled, in his courteous, grave way. “I confine my
observation to the world which has been created by the distinguished
colleague whom you mention. I find there traces of the existence of
consistency, order, law, and nothing beyond that, but those traces lead
me confidently to suppose that in due course we shall find the whole
mechanism to fall out pat.”
“I see the day coming,” said Quentin, “when some mechanico-scientific
bloke will pull the universe to pieces just to see if he can reassemble
it. I hate you people who are always poking in the works. Everyone
does it now. People buy cars. Do they drive them? No. They spread them
out on the lawn. Do people listen-in? Never. They muck about with the
valves. There is no art; there is only psycho-analysis. We pull up
all our flowers nowadays to examine the root-hairs and the system of
water-absorption. The wonders of the deep have vanished since we took
to dredging the Pacific. There’s no universe left; there’s only a
shedful of spare parts. I am the only child of Nature now living.”
“A child, yes,” said Sir Richard, “and ungoverned, save by whim.
Spontaneous as a jet of spring water, but every wind blows you towards
a new quarter. You are a man without self-direction. You cleave where
your desire leads you.”
“I was wrong,” said Quentin gaily, “when I said that I was the only
child of Nature living. Here are a dozen others.”
They had come down between overhanging rocks from a considerable height
of crag into a glen full of small pines and boulders, and before
them stood a great hump of mountain range and wind-tossed forest. On
their right hand was a little stony hill with small bushes on it and
an arbour, or summer-house. A stream—or, rather, a kind of flowing
moat—surrounded it. And in the arbour, or under the bushes, or by the
stream were men—men in mandarin robes—engaged, all of them (save two,
who were chatting mirthfully by the stream), in a meditation that
seemed characterized by an expression of hilarious vacuity. Some had
long black moustaches, others scanty white beards. All had their hands
folded in their sleeves, and all had a look—a look of youth, that, as
Lychnis said, was most unsuitable and monkey-like on their wizened
faces.
The party filed by the little mountain of meditation, glancing
sideways, but no one of its strange inhabitants took any notice of them
at all, even though Sprot went close up and peered at them across the
stream (without making any intelligent observation), as if they were
inhabitants of the Mappin Terraces.
“Wizards,” whispered Lychnis—“or Sages.”
“Wizards, Adepts, Rishi,” her father replied. “The sort of thing
Blackwood tries to be. Extreme cases of Blackwood.”
“I think not,” put in Quentin. “Taoists, I fancy, not Buddhists. There
are fundamental differences.”
“Lunatics, if I may be allowed an opinion,” said Sprot—“from the local
asylum. Blackwood ought to be with them.” He grew warm. “I call it
preposterous that grown men should be allowed to sit all day on a rock,
grinning. They ought to have something better to do.”
“It is unpractical, isn’t it?” observed Ruby. “I despise men who don’t
do something.”
“And I simply can’t think,” said Lychnis, “why anybody ever does
anything at all. Because really there are so many reasons against doing
things—except, perhaps”—she pondered a little—“the things that bring
you new and strange experiences, and those, after all, involve you in
disappointment.”
Quentin winked at her. “Ætherial Lychnis,” he replied. “You will soon
be ready to join the gentlemen on the rock. As for me, I have been
a man of action—muscular action. I am a motor man. Yet, to have you
always near me, I will dissolve my fleshy substance, and consist of
a vacancy that meditates on nothing. I’ll be no more than a large,
empty shirt dreaming on a clothes-line. We’ll become sighing winds and
mingle our particles. We’ll be two doctrines of inaction, inert in one
another’s arms.”
“Always sensual, Quentin,” she replied.
By now they were at the edge of the deep forest that clothed the great
flanks of the mountain. Out of the forest rose craggy peaks that they
did not that day propose to climb. Lord Sombrewater, Sir Richard and
Sprot were already spreading the lunch. The wind had died, and they
sat in a thicket, listening to the last spasmodic sobs of the gale,
and looking out under the leaves that protected them away down the
mountain-side and across the glen they had traversed. Far down, one
among many fantastic outcroppings and erections of rock, was the little
mountain of meditation, and the dozen motionless figures could still
be descried. Here were no pavilions or eaves of temples. They had
come away, as it occurred to the mind of Ambrose to think, from the
civilized and composed harmony of the Peach-blossom Valley to outer
spaces undealt with by any ordering mind.
“This is undoubtedly for Terence,” said Sir Richard. “This is untidy.”
“And what do you think of it all, Fulke?” asked Lychnis.
These were the first words she had spoken to him that day, and he
brightened (unreasonably), as if he hoped she might love him, after
all. Yet he couldn’t agree with her opinions. “I am with Ruby,” he
said. “Men have no right to lie and dream about abstractions when there
is so much ugliness and misery in the world. They ought to be building
the New Jerusalem.”
“In China’s green and pleasant land,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Well,
let ’em. We don’t want it in England.”
“They’d have a better chance here,” retorted Fulke. “There’s no
capitalist system here that must be destroyed before you can build.
What lovely thing did the capitalist system ever produce, I ask?”
“My daughter,” suggested Lord Sombrewater. “Very definitely, I think,
it produced my daughter.”
Fulke ignored that. It was, as Ambrose notes, one of those unfair
arguments. “We could make England as lovely as this,” he said, “with a
little preliminary destruction and the aid of science.”
“Sheer, criminal balderdash!” exclaimed Sprot.
“What I can’t understand about you builders of superfluous Jerusalems,”
said Quentin, “is your utter dependence on your surroundings. Now I can
be happy in a Houndsditch slum. Where I am, the heavenly city is about
me. I am content with what I find. I do not ask to see the distant
scene—one step enough for me.”
“Don’t blaspheme,” said Sprot, who was a Christian.
“Ruby thinks it’s heaven where it’s comfortable and she can sleep,”
said Lychnis. “Personally, I can’t form the least idea what heaven may
consist in. It certainly isn’t in my heart. It isn’t round us here,
even—still less if Fulke turns it into a red-villa Jerusalem, or even a
marble one. Are those twelve on the little mountain in heaven? A little
too wizened for such a place, perhaps. One somehow expects heaven to
be full of beautiful Greeks. And I suppose one expects to be the only
woman there. Do you expect to be the only man there, Quentin?”
“I should hope so,” he answered, “since I expect to obtain heaven when
I....” She silenced him with a gesture, but his red lips smiled in his
frizzy beard.
“At any rate,” she went on, “one will not see western Europeans there,
unshaved Polish Jews, cross-looking, mingy English tradesmen. I would
like to see a man who didn’t look as if he was preoccupied with a corn.
Not that I wish to be rude to any of you. I love your sweet, lined,
thought-laden, nerve-ridden European faces. But when may I expect to
see a face that is all pure beauty? When, Ambrose?”
“I should think you very well might about here,” he answered. “The
Dragon perhaps. Someone who lives on that rock in the Lotus Lake.
Someone who broods on the stupendous forces of Nature out of the heart
of repose.”
“But Chinese can’t be handsome,” said Ruby. “They’re so fatuous, or
else so fierce—and in any case so foreign.”
But Lychnis suddenly held up her small orchid-hand enjoining silence. A
wind came rustling along the forest, and boomed out across the valley
like some fabulous dragonish bird. Sprot moved uneasily. “Someone
coming,” he muttered.
“Terence’s goat-rider!” Ruby clung to her father’s arm.
He came riding along the edge of the forest, seated on a goat of more
than natural size. He drove it with a branch of peach-blossom. His
dress was fantastically rich, and he had a little red button in his
hat. His face was plump and imperious; his tiny mouth ineffably calm.
He turned in his saddle as he rode past, and the dark, slant-slit
eyes in his face of dry gold bored into the thicket where they were
hidden—terrible eyes, attentive and fierce, like the eyes of the tiger
when they shine and are rapt with the mysterious and dreadful forces of
Nature.
20
Now Ambrose gives an evening picture—an evening of emerald and fire.
They have come back to the Pavilion, the wind has fallen, and Lychnis
and Ruby are walking with him in the mazy paths of the bamboo-forest.
The walls of bamboo curl over their heads like breakers under a
flaring sky, and now and then, at some last fierce puff of the gale,
there is a splutter of green foam. Ahead of them are the hills, like
rollers darkening and lightening on a horizon of sea. And low down
in the west rides the round sun, breaking in upon them through the
leaves—inquisitive, unescapable, like the face of the goat-rider. It
was Ruby (the red tinge of her hair and the peony colour of her robe
making a sharp, exquisite chord with the bamboo green) who made that
comparison. She was really restless under the sun’s stare. “I thought
we should be safe here,” she said.
“Safe? Safe from what?” asked Lychnis (in purple and deep violet).
“From that face.”
“Oh, I thought you meant safe from ... from other things. Safe with
old Ambrose. Safe, I mean, from the strain of people always pulling at
you, attracting you, trying to get you.”
“I don’t mind that so much. But I didn’t like that man on the goat, who
looked at us as if he saw some caterpillars on a bush.”
“He didn’t see us,” said Lychnis. “He only knew there was something or
someone in the thicket. But you are afraid because if a man like that
looked at you closely in the eyes he’d paralyse all your desire for
resistance.”
Ruby was indignant. Ambrose describes with enjoyment the encounter
between a resentful, sunset-headed Titania and a slim, bantering spirit
in a purple thundercloud.
“He wouldn’t,” said Ruby.
“Well, search carefully in your mind and try and tell me exactly
why his face frightens you. Reject your first thoughts and tell me
precisely.”
Ruby sought, as desired. “Well,” she said, “his hands are too plump and
womanish.”
“So, I believe, were Napoleon’s. But his hands are not his face. It may
be your real reason, but I want to hear more of his face.”
“He had an absurd round hat, with fur on it, like Henry the Eighth.”
“A little lower and we shall come to his face.”
“He had a ridiculous coat on.”
“Too low. Mount him.”
“And I couldn’t see his legs.”
“They are important, certainly. But for God’s sake tell me about his
face!”
“Oh well, then! I don’t like a man to have a yellow skin, and
moth-eyebrows, and such a tiny mouth, and a jaw round instead of
square, and eyes that look and look without moving.”
“I see. Delicate hands and a tiny mouth. Not European, it’s true. Not
the sort of man who takes you in his grasp and sucks passionate kisses
off your mouth, as if he were licking an oyster out of its gape.”
“Oh, Licky, you’re dreadful! You won’t understand. I can’t explain. I
only mean there’s something about him that gives me the shivers.”
“Precisely—and deliciously. With a terrific, god-like power that comes
of the very calm and delicateness of his face.”
“I shall dream of him in the night.”
“A calm, shining and awful figure, with a golden skin and slanting
eyes, standing over you in a transfiguration; a visitor from some
untroubled Nirvana; a being without thoughts, looking with wonder at
your thought-troubled face. Not that thought troubles you much, my
Juno.”
“Oh yes, it does,” protested Ruby. “I wonder and wonder—sometimes for
hours. But not like you, Licky. You’re strange and say funny things.”
Lychnis suddenly changed her mood. “That’s for Ambrose to put down in
his book. Dear Ambrose——” She took his arm and studied his face. He
felt her eyes on him like the eyes of a violet. “Ambrose is a little
Chinese,” she said. “He’s calm.” Then suddenly: “You can’t tell what
thoughts are going on behind his serene, pink forehead. Does he ever
give you the shivers, Ruby?”
“Oh, never!” cried Ruby.
Then they took him for a walk in the groves of the bamboo, one on each
arm, and Lychnis whispered to him: “What terrific nonsense I’ve been
talking!” They mounted Terence’s tower, and purple night stole over the
Lotus Lake, and a myriad fireflies flickered over the forest.
21
Next morning there was a council of the Sages. It was very hot, and the
Sages lay in chairs on a lawn before the Pavilion.
“The position is as follows,” said the chairman. “I have received
an invitation, very much resembling a command, to make a ceremonial
call, along with the rest of you, upon the Mandarin who inhabits the
rock-island in the Lotus Lake. The invitation, or command—one moment,
please, Sprot—is written in English, and the Mandarin’s name appears to
be Lung, or, as he kindly translates, Dragon. The question is, Shall we
go? Now, my friend.”
“I say, Certainly not,” Sprot burst out. “Who is he, that we should
obey his commands? I vote we don’t go, just to show him we’re free,
independent Englishmen!”
Quentin whistled a few bars of the National Anthem.
“And in the alternative?” queried Lord Sombrewater.
“Stay here,” replied Sprot firmly.
“But that would hardly be courteous.”
“Why? They’re only Chinese. A lot of dirty, hugger-mugger, gibbering
Orientals. But let’s go away altogether, if you like. I don’t want to
stay. A place like this, where nothing ever happens, gets on my nerves.
I want to go back to England and see a good old flaring advertisement
of Beecham’s Pills. You know where you are, then.”
“And supposing,” asked Sir Richard, “they won’t let us go back?”
“What d’you mean?” Sprot went pale all at once.
Lord Sombrewater’s eyes were suddenly on Frew-Gaff. “Will you enlarge
that a little, Richard?”
“What I mean is this: One has been sensible ever since we landed of
the existence in these parts of somebody with very considerable power.
Looking back, one may perhaps see that influence, or power, working
even before we landed. And I myself am sensible of a deliberate,
forming hand, not only in events, but in our material environment, even
in the landscape. More than that—we are living at the generosity of
someone who can afford to be very slow and ceremonious in discovering
himself. I feel myself that underneath this prodigality of forethought
for our comfort there lies an immense sureness, based on power. I feel
that it is a kindly power, but it may be otherwise. In any case I am
not afraid. I am profoundly interested; and for that reason, as well
as for the sake of that high-breeding which I still hope distinguishes
some Englishmen, I vote that we accept the invitation, in appropriate
terms.”
“You express me exactly, Richard,” said the chairman, with an abrupt
nod—“except that I shall have something to add.”
“I think it’s very unfair,” said Sprot, “to those of us who are
uncomfortable in this valley. I do protest most earnestly against my
surroundings. Who are our neighbours here? Twelve lunatics who drivel
all day on a rock; a most suspicious-looking individual who rides about
on a goat, which is contempt of civilization; a flock of gibbering
servants; and a person who calls himself Dragon and lives on an island
in the middle of a lake. I ask you, Can anybody feel confidence in
people who behave like that?”
“What do you think, Quentin?” Sombrewater hoped to extinguish Sprot
in the draught of Quentin’s eloquence; but Quentin was lazy in the
heat, and Europe-sick, and only murmured of some scandalous adventure
with a brocaded young lady on a summer’s afternoon in Spain (where he
was engaged in the sale of electrical goods). She had consented, he
remembered, because of a poetical feeling for the warm and indolent
splendour of the afternoon, and there was a whole Spanish landscape in
her torrid embrace.
“Interesting,” said the chairman, “but irrelevant. Terence, I think we
can anticipate your views—and yours, Blackwood. Your vote is to remain,
I am sure, Fulke?”
“My vote,” said Fulke sullenly, “is to stay here, if we must, but to
send the girls immediately back to the ship.”
“Hear, hear,” said Sprot.
“Why?” asked Quentin, stirring.
“Because, in my opinion, as far as one of them is concerned, if
she doesn’t go away from this valley now she never will. She’ll be
bewitched, if she isn’t already, and go against Nature.”
“But how nice for her,” said Quentin, “to go against Nature! It will
be an experience. That’s what we all desire, I presume, and find so
difficult to get—experiences, strange experiences. People are so
unwilling to lend themselves to experience.”
“Ambrose knows what I mean,” replied Fulke, still sullen and hang-dog
with thwarted passion.