They found themselves entering a roomy, inclined tunnel of some
substance so transparent that they seemed to be entering a partition
of the water. One by one they stepped down, taking a last glance, when
their eyes came to its level, across the many-leaved surface of the
Lake. In a few minutes they were walking in the depths of a forest
of stalks where strange creatures loomed. It was very silent, very
dim, very still, under that ceiling of flat leaves, or under an open
sky of lake-water. Sometimes a flight of small, ghostly fish darted
invisibly through the stalk-forest, or suddenly wheeling their sides in
a light-beam became a thousand rainbows. Sometimes a beetle-creature
struggled up skywards through the water, swimming as if faint for
heaven. Or swans swam overhead like June clouds, or thrust their
snaky necks down between lilies. A cormorant, breaking the limit
of the water into a shiver of crystal, passed them in silent white
pursuit of a hurrying fish. And in one region of the brownish-greenish
water-universe a solemn carp, opening and shutting his mouth like a
machine, took part with myriads of his kind in a mazy, rhythmical,
interminable, involuted and apparently purposeful dance.
“Just like human beings,” observed Quentin.
“Why do they do that?” asked Lychnis. She and Ruby were walking on
either side of Yuan; Fulke was following with despairful, scowling
face. “Are they happy?”
“They obey their nature,” said Yuan. “According to the doctrine of
Hsiao, they are Sages.”
“They cannot be Sages,” she put in, “because they have never been
conscious. To be a Sage means to have abandoned human consciousness and
to have adopted the demeanour of a fish or a vegetable.”
But he merely stood with bent head considering the glaucous lairs of
the water-world. He was not thinking. He was abandoned, unconscious of
self or of any process, to what his eyes saw. He was in relation with
the water, the fish, the beetles, through the reality which filled him
and them and superseded delimitation. He had ceased to exist. He was
no longer separate. But an onlooker would have been struck by his
self-possession.
Fulke went close to Lychnis and faint-heartedly touched her. His desire
to put his arms round her nearly achieved itself. Distracted by himself
and by his desire, he was now without inward resource. Entangled in the
inhibitions of self-consciousness, he blushed, stammered, and did not
know how to stand or where to put his hands.
Ambrose made notes on the behaviour of all concerned.
“Lychnis.” Fulke faltered a whisper.
She gave no sign of having heard.
“Lychnis. I.... Why won’t you talk to me? I could answer your
questions.... I....”
She made no answer.
“I know things, too. I am intelligent. Oh, slime and hell! I hardly
know what I’m saying!”
“Yes, yes. You are very intelligent—very nice.” She spoke as if
half-asleep.
He stumbled back over the damp sand to Ruby. “Look at her!” he
exclaimed. “She’s following him. He’s drawing her into his own mad
world. What can we do, Ruby?”
“I don’t know.” Ruby was dejected, alarmed. “She’s funny. I do wish she
wouldn’t be. You don’t think——” She stopped. “I don’t like it much
here. It’s not a place for people to be. Could I go back? Would they
mind?”
“My God!” he answered. “I think I’ll come with you. She’ll be all
right. Ambrose is here. You and I—we are of no use to her.” Their eyes
met in a perfect orgasm of wretchedness, and they glided off, the two
of them, along the tunnel and up out of the water-world into the air
and the sun.
Hsiao appeared to be disappointed. He had given himself up to the
contemplation of Ruby’s torch of red hair that glimmered through the
shadows of the stalk-forest. But, instantly dismissing anything so
painful as disappointment, he addressed himself to a contemplation of
Lychnis. “She has hands like the white opening water-lily,” he was
understood to say. “They would be cool and fragrant to the mouth, and
delicately scented.”
Wang Li tapped Ambrose on the shoulder, and pointed at his
great-grandson.
“A young man,” he said, “not free from the chains of desire.”
“Desire?” queried Ambrose.
“Desire. An itch of the mind; the mind still itching to experience,
to understand, to know. He still takes an interest in things. He
approaches the matter from the wrong angle. Seek first the kingdom of
non-being and the world of appearances will be yours at a later date.”
He notices a good deal for an old man who is permanently unconscious,
thought Ambrose. Peripherally, no doubt.
As for Lychnis and Yuan, they had gone on ahead. They looked as if
they were swimming in a gloom of stalks. One was going now deeper
into the Lake, into a pool of shadows, into a treeless, inter-stellar
space, lit only by the faint emanation of some distant, strange sun.
The empty universe was inhabited by flights of fish, like angels going
on heavenly errands, and also by monstrous shapes of fiendish though
fish-like aspect.
“If these are the work of God,” said Ambrose, “I am hitherto
imperfectly acquainted with the full variety of His resources.”
“Of God,” replied Wang, “by the hand of my great-grandson, Yuan. Some
experiments of his.”
“I must bring my friend Sprot to see them,” said Ambrose, and received
a wink of consciousness from the Sage’s right eye. Old Wang and his two
descendants had a power of divination in the matter of character and
motive that was quite extraordinary. From Wang especially there was
nothing hidden.
“My great-grandson considers,” the old philosopher went on, “that,
while he is taking an interest in appearances, a man may as well
lend a hand in the temporary work of evolution, and add, by reason
of his conscious artistry, a certain distinction, either of ugliness
or beauty, to what sometimes appears to be the product of a bungler
working in the dark. It is the function of the artist to give point, to
relieve, to dramatize. For example——” He pointed abruptly to a glorious
creature that floated past like a sun, raying out veils of splendour,
and again to a slender torpedo-shape marvellously adapted for speed.
“No doubt also you have remarked the rarity of the birds in these
parts, and the perfect colour and shape of the flowers. Yuan’s. Nothing
but a certain indifference to the scientific point of view on the part
of his numerous relations has prevented him from experimenting with the
human species.”
“I am willing,” said Quentin, “to act as his agent, or vehicle, in any
experiments he may make with the human species, provided they are of a
creative, and not of a merely negative, order.”
“How,” asked Ambrose, “does he justify his pre-occupation with
objective existences?”
“He does not justify it,” said Wang, with what might have been taken
for a great-grandfatherly groan; “he boasts of it. It is a phase, of
course. It will pass. In time he will embrace his duty and become a
Sage.”
“In the meantime,” remarked Hsiao, “his activities greatly enhance the
amenities of the landscape and multiply the conveniences of life.”
Rounding a turn in the tunnel they came on Lychnis and Yuan, who were
both gazing upward. High overhead floated the red hull of a coracle,
and on either side of it a paddle, like a web foot, occasionally broke
the surface. “Fulke and Ruby, I have no doubt,” said Yuan. “Lazy, are
they not? Or else urgently discussing something.”
“Don’t let’s bother about them,” she replied. “Go on. Tell me more
about strange things.”
Willingly enough he returned to his subject, and the pair of them sped
on, absorbed in whatever theme they were discussing. Or perhaps it
was not the theme they enjoyed, but the experience—the experience of
sinking through the levels of consciousness and meeting in the deeps
where there is no opposition between this and that.
Presently there was a shaft in the tunnel with a spiral stair. This
the party ascended, and found themselves in the middle of the Lake. A
boat was moored there, and far away among the lotuses was the red craft
that had passed over their heads. Old Wang was smiling to himself with
abandon, and continued to smile until they landed on the island.
“And the joke?” asked Ambrose politely.
“I laughed to see how easily young trees bend to a breeze. It would not
be in accordance with wisdom to resist a main impulse of Nature. Here I
am in agreement with Hsiao. This is the doctrine of spontaneity.”
“Excellent,” replied Ambrose. “But, I take it, if there is any flaw in
the spontaneity the result will appear as indecision?”
“You are right,” said Wang, with a piercing look.
28
Soon enough there began to be a fuss about Lychnis and Yuan. It
appeared that Fulke and Ruby, on their ascent into the familiar world,
had taken a red cockle-shell skiff and spent the afternoon floating
about the Lake, tasting a certain joy in their common misery. No harm
in that. But on landing and returning home to the Pavilion, and on
finding it in the sole occupation of Sprot, they had communicated to
him their fears. These he received with the liveliest satisfaction,
spoke much of the accuracy of his forecasting, and spent the evening
stamping up and down in a resolved manner. When the party from the
island returned, he drew Quentin aside and significantly questioned
him, in the presence of Fulke and Terence, as to the proceedings of the
afternoon.
“What are you getting at, Sprotling?” asked Quentin.
“I am going to make representations to Lord Sombrewater. I am going to
convince him that it is desirable for us to leave the valley without
delay.”
Terence lifted up his face and spoke inspired words: “I have a most
convincing reason for that. This afternoon, in a dream, I saw the
mountains of my native country, and a picture of the whole party of
us eating honey in Innisfree. And there came on me a great impulse
to arise and go there, which I would have obeyed at once had not the
vision clearly said that the rest of you are to go, too.” He stood for
a moment looking into the distance, and his grey eyes were undoubtedly
alight with the apprehension of something not immediately attainable.
“I starve here,” he added, “for the sights and the sounds of Europe.
I am out of touch with the Other Side. There is no veil of misery to
pierce; no heaven to reach, because no hell to reach from.”
“The dirt and the poverty,” said Quentin, “the factories and the
brothels, the advertisements, the bankruptcy courts, the demure women
who know the game of love—I agree. I hate this calm, this perfection.
What you say is true. There are no arcs here, consequently no perfect
rounds to long for.”
“Oh, for some work to do!” cried Fulke. “A world to redeem from the
clutches of industrialism—a State to build—a race to create!”
“I am with you in the last item only,” said Quentin, putting out his
crisp, curly beard.
“At all events,” summed up Sprot with enthusiasm, “we hate this
neighbourhood. We are all for returning to the ship. But first, how to
get rid of this Chink, this Yuan?”
“I could knife him, if necessary,” said Quentin, with a certain genuine
earnestness.
“Why not?” asked Sprot. “Nobody would know. It’s often done in these
Asiatic countries. There are no police here. But first—evidence.
Lychnis must be watched.”
Fulke swung round. “You damned, newt-livered, beetle-tongued,
slug-sticky, crawling miasma! Use Lychnis, will you? Besmirch her
reputation because you’re unhappy away from your kennel? My God! if I
hear her name on your slime-coated tongue one single time again, I’ll
drag your entrails out through your eye-sockets!”
“He’s in a temper,” explained Quentin. “He’s in love—but hopelessly, I
fear.”
Fulke looked at him with a light in his eyes like a sullen sunset
drowning in a tide of misery. “Oh!” he cried, “you’re not capable of
love. You’re not clean men. And I that am clean am of all of you the
most miserable. I hate life!” He broke off, and made for the house. He
met Ruby coming out, and once more a circuit of emotion was established
between them.
“Where’s Lychnis?” she asked, with some anxiety.
The others listened.
“Heaven knows,” he answered. “Can’t you find her?”
On investigation it turned out that Lychnis had disappeared. There was
no sign of her anywhere. “Where can she be?” asked Ruby, with tears in
her voice.
They all stood on the lawn staring over the Lake like men who have lost
a vision. Sombrewater and Frew-Gaff, returning late from a geological
expedition in the mountains, were met with the intelligence by an
almost elated Sprot.
“I knew it,” said the little man. “I have warned you, Lord Sombrewater.”
Lord Sombrewater turned and stared at him so that he began fumbling
with his collar. “You have warned me of what?”
He had nothing to say.
“Be so good as to keep your thoughts to yourself.”
Lord Sombrewater went abruptly into the Pavilion.
29
Lychnis, in the meanwhile, was off to the south-west with Yuan in the
Dragon. The stars were on fire in heaven; there was a space of white
light about the moon; far below slid the perfumed forest. She sat
behind Yuan in the hollow body of the creature, and he, slung between
the wings, bent this way and that, wheeling and dipping his fantastic
chariot; and sometimes, when he had climbed the peak of the wind, he
would fling himself forward, and she would see the dark, rushing world
beyond the streak of moon on his shoulders as they swooped on a hundred
miles through the night. Then, after a few moments of rest on some hill
that loomed up out of the void, a soft purr of his mysterious engine or
a beat of the wings and the chariot sprang up and forward like an eagle.
Slung behind him, sometimes touching him, Lychnis felt with her body
that Yuan knew the air, knew all the roads, the precipices, the rapids
of the air. He behaved as a far-travelling bird would behave, beating
along the vast empty ways of the night with repeated crutch-strokes,
or spreading out silver wings along the swift surface of a wind. Or,
if he wearied, the tiny engine was switched on, and they traversed the
sky with the speed of a meteor. Through him she knew the airways and
lent him her movements, balancing and clinging with him on the huge
precipice-face of the winds they were climbing, giving herself without
shrinking to the fearful descent into a huge, opening nothingness.
From time to time she caught a glimpse of his cheek. He threw her
back an unsounded word, and she made noiseless answers with her small
whispering mouth to his ear. He was intent and still, and his stillness
held her, so that in spite of the dark void below she had no fear. Only
the wind and the world moved, and they seemed intensely still in the
midst of the sky, with their small heads so close.
Time had no meaning, and space twisted and wheeled around them. Soon,
very far off, under a slanting beam of the moon, there came, as if the
edge of space were advancing toward them, a glimmering of white petals,
a flush of sacred lilies floating on the dark pool of the sky, lotuses
waving about the feet of some Boddhisatva, for whom the Dragon was
bearing on his back a beautiful captive to minister to his contempt of
desire. But before the lilies came close, Yuan leant forward, and the
dark pool of the world rushed up and engulfed them. The forest streamed
up and out like black foam. Yuan hung over it, a silver moth, then
brought the breast of the Dragon to the flood of a gleaming river. “The
jungle,” he whispered.
There was a clamour of wild creatures. It suddenly faded to a far
distance.
“They smell a flesh-eater,” he murmured.
Around them a circle of silence spread outwards till the distant
circumference of howling died. But there was a movement. They seemed to
Lychnis to be surrounded by looming shapes, by moving jewelled hands
gesturing in darkness. There were movements in the unseen masses of
foliage on the banks—swift movements of night hunters, slow movements
of ancient creatures. There were long plungings and swirlings in the
water. A vapour of heat drifted over them. The river flowed by unseen,
and the Dragon held his breast to it like a soul in the flow of time.
There were presences. Glancing at Yuan, half-visible, Lychnis found
him, now, less than human, or perhaps more. Over the jungle there
gleamed those lily petals, and a light from them seemed to illuminate
his face. The eyes became oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold.
The small closed mouth was a carved symbol of eternal serenity. He
became a god, and she found him almost intolerably strange.
“Forget your humanness,” murmured the mask. It was like a breath of the
jungle speaking. “Forget it and know the creatures of the jungle.”
They were drifting a little down-stream towards the bank on their
right. They were aware of a movement in the reeds, an arrival of
concentrated silence. The darkness watched them. Then the reeds waved
and parted, and there shone at them two savage emeralds. Lychnis,
feeling the beautiful ferocity that crouched for her, glanced at Yuan,
perhaps to see if she could share her experience with him. But he was
in combat with the tiger, putting out the fierceness of the tiger,
meeting, subduing the hunger that was about to spring. He entered
through the deeps of being into the nature of tiger, and in some sort
of wrestle in the realm of the tiger’s understanding dissipated the
desire that sought to satisfy itself on Lychnis’s flesh.
They became aware that the knot of silence was resolved. Presently as
if the tiger had spread some kind of intelligence, howling was heard
again in the distance, and before long the rim of howling contracted.
The forest had forgotten them. They were free in it.
“You are not afraid?” The pale gold mask uttered voice.
“Only a little.” But her fear was a fear of the being beside her. All
other fear had vanished and survived only in that. “Are you never
afraid?” she asked. “Here, or in the sky?”
“The personal I,” he answered, “the individual local Yuan, was a mass
of fears. But the man I am becoming, the man whose I is vanishing, the
god-saturated man, cannot experience fear. The wine-drunken man is
not afraid, and if he falls out of the cart he breaks no bones. The
god-intoxicated man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the sky all
is well.”
“I am not god-intoxicated, as far as I know.”
“Nevertheless your perceptions are like those of one who is thus
intoxicated. You perceive rhythms that only the heart of the infinite
perceives.”
“I had not thought I was anything out of the way,” she said.
“Will you walk in the jungle under the cloak of my understanding?” he
asked.
“Oh yes!” She was instant. How often, at night, one had heard some
young man, or some older man, or even an aged man, say: Shall we walk
in the wood a little? But this was to reenter the Garden by night, and
walk in Eden with an archangel, or even with the Lord God. Possibly to
see the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Looking at Yuan, to follow
him, she asked herself: Are you the Serpent? He was leading her to
knowledge, certainly, but not of good and evil, for he had said good
and evil are local oppositions; in the unnameable they become one.
He was looking past her, boring into the reeds. She liked the dark,
oblong eyes with their gimlet centres of blackness. She liked the
imperious line of the cheek.
“We will not land here,” he said.
They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came
down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there.
She had a curious sensation, she told Ambrose, as Yuan helped her down
from the machine. It was strange, she said, to put her hand into his
foreign hand. (No doubt the being so much with Ambrose, the perpetual
comradeship that was between them, had trained her to note things.)
Pleasant? Unpleasant? Not altogether unpleasant. Some slight antipathy,
the diarist supposes. Certainly she forgot the sensation at once as
they made their way into the darkness, the thrilling terror of the deep
forest. She had no objection at all to the envelopment of her person by
his cloak of understanding. If she had any sort of antipathy to his
flesh, she had none whatever to his mind. He walked the forest like
some shepherd of tigers. The snakes and insects let pass one of their
kind, startled only by the shadow that followed him, bright-eyed and
staring. They were mounting, and presently, when they had crossed the
spine of the hill, the ground fell again slightly, only to mount beyond
them in wave after wave of forest until the further waves had a white
ridge, and far off, gleaming in outer space, were the snow-petals, the
sacred lilies of ice.
Lychnis gasped. “I’m not sure—I think I’m afraid. They are so huge, so
cold.” Fear of the mountains had entered her, and with it a host of
other fears. She began to look round anxiously, to shrink. He was her
only refuge from fear, and she shrank from him, too. Looking at her,
she felt he divined the whole secret of her.
“You are afraid now?” he asked. “It’s natural. Fear must come in before
it can be cast out. One must be conscious before one is unconscious.
Sit down with your back to a tree.” He prevented, in some way, her
impulse to look down in case a snake was coiled where she was to sit.
She obeyed him. He sat down opposite, with his back to a tree, and drew
from his garment a small sort of flute and played. She found presently,
as she listened to his slow, meditative theme, that she had forgotten
her fear of the mountains. She began to gaze at them, seeking to become
conscious of them, to shape the vague and profound emotion that they
gave rise to, and express it. “Eternity,” she said. “They are eternal.”
“On the contrary,” he replied. “In a little while they will have gone,
and an ocean perhaps will flow there.”
“Then it is I that am eternal, and the mountains made me remember.”
“Eternity is in you, but you are not eternal.”
Swiftly a thought of old Wang Li came to her mind.
“The truth that can be stated is not truth,” she shot at him.
He smiled. “The truth can be played with the flute, though. Listen.”
It was so, she thought, hearing something behind the notes he played
that was like the mountains, but with no terror. And she saw without
shrinking that the glittering eyes of fierce beasts were gazing
steadfastly from the darkness, and tenderer creatures were near them.
Then a python swayed down his head from the branch of a tree close
by, and she put out her orchid-hand and touched the ivory skin. All
that she remembered afterwards, for at the time she was not conscious
of python, tiger, or deer; only of that which sounded from Yuan’s
flute, that sang, as she put it, to itself in her and in the beasts,
the intoxicating godhead that remains when ice vanishes, music is not
listened to, and spirit itself has disappeared into nothing.
But afterwards, when the spell of the singing flute had lifted,
she came to the conclusion that the experience of sublimity is
unnecessarily serious. “I should prefer something suaver,” she told
Ambrose, “more restrained—the god without the intoxication.”
30
Lychnis told Ambrose that the coldness of her reception, when she came
back next morning, was a surprise to her. “I was only thinking and
thinking of what I had seen and done in the night, of how I felt about
Yuan,” she said, “and to find all that anger was horrible. There has
been a change. Sir Richard frowns at me. Sprot is delighted, the little
beast, because he can impute something to me. Fulke hates me. I prefer
it. But our party is breaking up, and it is not like it used to be.
I can’t help it. They have no business to interfere when I am going
through with an experience.” Her anger rose. “They shall stay here
until I have finished with it, or I will stay here alone, or with you.
You will never be against me?”
He saw that her mind was in tumult, but by no means altogether because
of the trouble she had got into with her father and the others. In
any case she had an inextinguishable obstinacy. It appears that she
had come back alone across the Lake in a boat, pre-occupied, lovely
with the flush of her thoughts, only to find herself when she stepped
on shore among grave and resentful faces. Her father was indoors.
“Naturally,” she said, “he would never question me before all the
others. He and I have always had our quarrels in private.” Ruby, too,
was indoors.
It was the incredible Sprot, almost dancing with the pleasure of his
accusing thoughts, who put the question: “Where have you been?”