die. But there had been a change in Fulke, and he only glowered at
her. Quentin answered her appeal with a grin of somewhat resentful
amusement. She had therefore to speak for herself:
“Mr. Sprot, I am sorry to learn that you have to leave us.”
“What on earth do you mean?” he stammered. “I am not leaving. Your
father has not said so.”
“I have said so.”
“I won’t leave.” He squared up. “And what will you do about it?”
“If I see you anywhere about to-morrow morning I shall ask Yuan to
attend to you.” She went to the Pavilion, and they all watched her
walking with bent head across the lawn. Then they turned to consider
the case of Sprot, who was palely protesting that he would in no
circumstances go.
“Especially,” said Quentin pleasantly, “with the country in its present
state, when the traveller is more than likely to meet with robbery and
violent outrage.”
“I appeal to you.” Sprot clasped, as it were, the knees of Sir Richard
Frew-Gaff. But Sir Richard politely regretted that he could do nothing,
and walked away.
Sprot exploded. “It’s perfectly scandalous that hard-working,
reasonable-minded men should be at the beck and call of a piece of
goods like that! Why does everyone pay so much attention to her, I
should like to be told. She doesn’t work. She doesn’t produce anything.
What right has she to say what shall be? Walking off like a sprig of
lilac with a ‘You clear out!’ and all—her and her fat-faced Chink. It’s
my opinion....”
“We don’t want your opinion,” said Fulke morosely.
“Yes, we do. You run away and weep with your Ruby,” said Quentin, with
a wink to the rest.
Fulke flared. “You shut up, you stinking mud-pump! I’ve had just about
enough of your interference.”
“No naughty temper,” said Quentin, and being strong, though a sinner,
he immersed young righteousness in the Lake.
A native servant came down with a message that Lord Sombrewater would
be glad if Ambrose would step up to the Pavilion. Ambrose therefore
left the group on the shore of the Lake, thinking that the harmony of
the party was indeed sadly disturbed, and the serene lawns and fine
brooding trees disfigured by their quarrelling. Lord Sombrewater was
with Lychnis, she moody, he severe. But it was his custom to approach
a quarrel with his daughter in a business-like spirit, and he had not
allowed the matter to interrupt his eleven o’clock cigar. He motioned
Ambrose to a seat by a little lacquer table.
“Good-morning, Ambrose. I want you to know that there are now no
restrictions on my daughter’s liberty of movement. She may go where she
likes and with whom she likes, and I”—he spoke without bitterness—“I
wash my hands of it. I admit that it was foolish to make rules for
a daughter who takes as much notice of my wishes as the very solid
gate-post of this Pavilion. Facts are facts. She has argued with me,
and I think conclusively, that her life is her own. I have fully agreed
that her friendship with Yuan is not a matter with which I am closely
concerned. We must face the facts, and I see that it is useless to
attempt to control her. I want you to convey this to the others. Now,
Lychnis, I have done what you have asked. Will you kindly leave us?”
“I never said that you do not come closely into my life. You do. I want
you to.”
He waved her away. Ambrose knew that he would never hear in what
terms they had quarrelled. But this dismissal, he perceived, was a
retaliation on Lord Sombrewater’s part. If she had no place for her
father, if she desired to be independent, she would be independent,
very much so, and alone; she should feel the cold. Her eyes, Ambrose
saw, filled with tears as she went through to her green-and-gold
bedroom, and there was no turning on her hips at the door to make a
friendly gesture. No doubt she felt that another harbour was closing to
her.
“When I made a rule that she should not do this or that, I made a
mistake,” said his lordship, and his cigar had gone out. “Lychnis makes
her own rules as she goes along. She acts by an inner light, and cannot
see why others should have any views on the matter except the views
that are so clear to her. No doubt she is right, as maybe we all are,
in some deep sense; but it is hard, when she does these strange things,
for those who have merely to watch and trust. I find it difficult,
Ambrose. I love my daughter. I am jealous, and find it hard to be shut
out from her inner life. If I were in her heart, no doubt I should
agree that whatever she did was good. I should know what was going to
happen, and I should not now be afraid as to where the necessity under
which she doubtless acts might be going to lead her. I am honoured, as
one should be, for having created a thing that is useless and beautiful
... but not, very naturally, by the thing. What do you say?”
“I say,” Ambrose replied, “that this is false sentiment. Love of a
father is one thing; love of someone else is another. You should not be
jealous of any kind of love that is not specifically yours to claim.
Without jealousy, or, as our Chinese friends would say, without desire,
or, as I may qualify it, without the addition of an inappropriate
desire to the specific and proper desire of a father, or of a lover, as
the case may be, there would exist no clash, or undue passion.”
Lord Sombrewater observed him. “You would not permit anything that
might occur to alter whatever the relation between you and Lychnis may
be?”
“There is a specific and possibly unique friendship between Lychnis and
me which, if I do not allow it to be disturbed by irrelevant humours,
can be left to take care of itself.”
“That tells me little.”
“Not having been choked by weeds, it has become a thing by itself, with
life and a destiny. I have only to keep it pure of irrelevant desires.”
“You are an extraordinary man. If you would not mind my asking—if
anything were to happen, and we left her here in China, would you miss
her? Would you, let us say, be aware of a hiatus?”
“The mind,” Ambrose records himself as saying, “is its own place, as
the poet so justly says, agreeing with our Chinese friends. Desire
perishes, and that which is without desire is immortal.”
“I’m hanged if you don’t out-Wang old Wang!” Lord Sombrewater relit
his cigar. Then he suddenly exploded: “And by God! Ambrose, I agree
absolutely with Lychnis about Sprot! Out he shall go!”
It was lucky, Ambrose thought, that there should be someone handy to
take off the full torrent of Lord Sombrewater’s emotion.
31
Lychnis, when she had given Ambrose an account of her doings, went
swiftly in her short white dress under the heavy summer trees to the
mooring-raft of red-painted bamboo, unfastened her coracle, and paddled
through water lanes among lotuses to the island. She saw Hsiao in an
arbour by the water’s edge, and waved in a friendly manner, but he
was asleep. She brought her coracle to the marble quay, ascended the
dragon-staircase, and sped along the ridge of the island, passing old
Wang in meditation by a dung-heap. She climbed into the vermilion
summer-house among the tree-tops, but Yuan was not there. She went out
on to the verandah, and stood looking down over the scarlet rail into
the Lake, where golden shapes of fish were passing like half-visible
summer clouds. She saw the roof of Hsiao’s arbour and his two feet
sticking out.
She went into the bare, sun-swept room again, and swung out an
instrument from its cupboard. Not familiar with its use, but perceiving
the principle of it and the method of adjustment by some scarcely
conscious effort, she made the whole countryside disclose itself
to her. First of all, there appeared in the field of view that
dozen of queer philosophers on the rock over towards the mountains;
next, through too wide an adjustment, a tract of country which she
recognized—a little hill near the _Floating Leaf_, with a plum-tree,
now in fruit, where she had talked with Ambrose, and Ruby had come
back with her arms full of flowers. It was strange that she could hear
the leaves rustling. She did not look for the ship. To see those three
ladies knitting under the awning would have been to jolt the progress
of a dream. She came back to the Peach-blossom Valley, and turned with
a gesture of wrath from the spectacle of Sprot in altercation with
her father. Then a few moments of growing impatience, until she found
Yuan, waist-deep and busy in an enclosed pool at a distant point of the
island. She heard the Lake rippling and the wash of water when he moved
or plunged his hands in the pool. Breeding experiments, she thought.
She had meant to go to him when she should have found him. It was so
with her now that she demanded his presence constantly. But he was
busy; he might prefer to be alone. She paused to inquire into her state
of mind, realizing that she found it a necessity to be with him, and
wondering what that might amount to.
Now that she had found him it did not seem right to watch him. She
paced the open rooms and balconies of that airy summer-house, like a
slim fly caught in a scarlet cage; going out to feast her heart on the
Lake, now a garden of lilies, white, rose, and golden; returning to the
instrument to see if Yuan was still at work. She opened a cabinet of
drawers, found it full of paintings on silk, and idly inspected them.
There was a portrait of a young boy. It was so perfect a work of art,
a unity composed of an infinite number of rhythms, that its effect on
the mind was hypnotic. The tone was a variety of rich browns touched
with a lotus flush of almost unbelievable precision. The young boy was
kneeling on a lotus daïs with his hands joined in prayer. The eyebrows
were delicate as small painted moths. The tiny mouth was like a flower
that will never open and wither, beautiful and small and calm. The eyes
were purer than the deep and velvet pansy. Was it a boy, after all,
or a girl? She saw in the face a certain severity of saintliness, the
signs of a state of mind that she could remember, when she had been,
as it were, both boy and girl, with a desire for heaven. But what was
solemn and beautiful in the face was a shadow, a foreknowledge, of some
predestined renunciation, of some experience circled round with burning
flames, seen from afar off, before the thought of pain had meaning.
Pondering thus, she realized with a shock that the features were the
features of Yuan.
She looked at the image in the long-sight instrument, saw that Yuan was
still at work, and returned to the portrait.
Could Hsiao have painted it? Could he have received that sublime
inspiration in the stupor of wine? If he could paint a melon, when he
was drunk, in a way to disclose cosmical secrets, why not the portrait
of a saintly young boy? There was no signature. That was like Hsiao.
For him not the painting, but the contemplation in which he conceived
it. She understood that. The painting was a mere discharge, the symbol
of an experience fully grasped.
The face was not so much Yuan’s as the face of some perfect being,
predestined for the bliss of non-existence seen in the vision of an
artist. Not so much Yuan’s face. With the portrait in her hand she
returned to the instrument, and found after a little experimenting
that it was possible to deal with the field of view so as to fill it
with the image of a small object. She studied the image of Yuan with
the shame of Psyche studying the revealed face of the god. There had
been a change. The mild face of the boy had become severe, even fierce,
from the discipline of contemplation; in the place of innocence was
the calm, unvarying gaze of eyes that have rested on a reality that is
neither pure nor impure. She was afraid, as she had been afraid before
the mountains, and put the portrait away and swung the instrument back
into its cabinet. But first, with a swift mounting of her fear, she saw
that Yuan had left his pool, and was coming towards her with his eyes
fixed on hers.
He was coming to her. He would be there in a few minutes. He had only
been looking at the scarlet nest in the tree-tops, of course, and he
could not have descried her figure, where she was. But he would know,
and in a rush of passion she hated his insight and his domination; in
her mind she saw his face again, serene and alien. Her flesh shuddered.
Soon he stood between the scarlet posts of the doorway, yellow-brown
against a deep blue sky, attentive, impassive.
32
They were alone till the afternoon, when Sir Richard and his daughter,
both a trifle constrained, came over to the island with Fulke. The
sight of those three restored to Lychnis a sense of reality. In the
morning she had been drawn into the realms of Yuan’s vast interior
life, fascinated, hardly conscious that her identity was submerged.
Now in the afternoon, with her friends by, she could look on him as
an object, a man with whom she could enter on given relations, regard
being had to other considerations, as, for example, his race, her
father’s wishes, the pull of her home in England. She became happy,
contented that she should be in that frame of mind.
There was to be a water-party after sundown, and they spent the
afternoon making a promised inspection of some of Yuan’s laboratories
hidden in the rock. There they saw various matters in their several
stages of advancement.
“What funny old frights!” whispered Ruby, when she saw the artificers
at work. “I really believe they are the twelve men we saw looking so
idiotic on that rock.”
And certainly the twelve ancient or middle-aged gentlemen, who were
achieving machines of extreme delicacy out of an apparently vacant
stupor, did seem to be the same. For Sir Richard, when he saw the
artificers at work, the problem as to how Yuan procured his apparatus
was solved. “I wondered whether you sent plans to Europe,” he explained.
Yuan smiled. “I do not want to lay Europe in ruins. No. I indicate the
nature of my mechanical problems to these friends of mine, and they
work out the details in contemplation. They know the inner secrets of
platinum and ebonite and wood.”
“You are kind to Europe.” Sir Richard’s upper lip was firm. It is
inconvenient that the amateur should know more than the professor,
and it was only because of the paramount claims of science that he
endeavoured to draw Yuan into a discussion. The two gentlemen talked at
great length, while Lychnis listened entranced, and Ruby yawned. But
discussion was not easy, because Yuan was dealing in symbols that were
entirely strange and in realms of experience where his companion had
never been. Some formulæ that he wrote down were excessively pleasing;
to Sir Richard they meant as much as the experiences of a mystic, while
Lychnis recognized that they were indeed precisely that.
From the laboratories they went to the gardens and hot-houses, full of
unfamiliar plants and insects; from the gardens and hot-houses to the
breeding-grounds; and it was here that even Sir Richard’s scientific
mind shrank a little at sight of some of the monsters Yuan had created,
in what seemed an irresponsible way. In particular a frightful cross
between an ape and a tiger shocked his moral sense. But Yuan took no
pains to justify himself, and only replied that all those who help in
the great work of creation will have their jokes from time to time.
Towards evening Yuan left them to make his preparations for the
water-party, and Sir Richard sat by the Lake with the two girls
pondering deeply on the afternoon’s talk. He evidently desired to
unburden himself, and found a certain difficulty in speaking to
Lychnis, the only possible listener. But in the end, if he was
displeased with her, the contents of his mind were too much for him.
“That man could alter the world,” he said, turning to her somewhat
constrainedly at last. “I do not pretend to be an expert in more
than one or two of the sciences we touched on, but I know enough to
recognize that what he says is of first-class importance. Do you
understand, my dear girl, that he has discovered all we know in
physiology by pure contemplation? I would go farther and guess that
physiology is no problem to him at all; he simply perceives the
nature of the body, and it is my opinion that he will live for ever.
There seems practically no nervous expenditure. He avails himself of
some sort of cosmical energy and forgets about his own organization,
which has become merely the sphere, so to speak, in which the energy I
speak of is present. And I don’t mind confessing that I am completely
baffled in my own branch. He talks, Lychnis, as if he had experienced
everything he knows, as if he actually saw, felt, even heard, physical
reality. He proceeds, as it were, from insight; and, really, there
doesn’t seem to be anything hidden. Odd, if reality should, after all,
be something more than a state of affairs in a field of electrical
stresses. It is profoundly disconcerting. It is as if the most refined
discoveries of science should prove to be familiar to an ape or to an
idiot. They are ape-like, these friends of yours, and a trifle idiotic.
I am not an anthropologist—not an expert—but I perceive something
orangoid in your friends, in the disposition, for example, of the lower
limbs horizontally, in the posture of the hands.”
Sir Richard, forgetting his constraint, seemed to ask for sympathy; but
she was angry with him for his frame of mind towards her, and made only
some brief reply.
33
The mood which they all fell into, staring out over the Lake at
the warm shadows of evening, was broken by the dip of paddles and
the simultaneous arrival, with the party from the Yellow Emperor’s
Pavilion, of Yuan, Hsiao and Wang, with several slight and exquisite
girls. They had a remarkable faculty, those three, of waking from
reverie on the tick of an appointment. Lychnis sat and watched as each
one, in gorgeous robe of mediæval China, stepped from the dusk of the
water, like some mystery of the summer night breaking into flower.
Darkness fell swiftly, and an ochre moon rose over the sombre side of
the valley. She sat on in silence, white and wraith-like among those
shapes of splendour, and they gathered around her, waiting on her will,
and there was a consciousness that for all of them for that moment the
universe turned about her. Ambrose records that it occurred to Yuan and
himself at the same time to announce to her that all was ready, and
they stood, the two of them (Yuan in a magnificent robe of deep green,
himself in dark amber), looking at one another across her moon-golden
head. Ambrose immediately gave place, and stood, so Lychnis afterwards
told him, smiling complaisantly at the glimmer of stars that was
breaking over the trees.
Soon they were all out on the Lake in a ceremonial barge, towing a
cluster of painted boats, and the island became a dark complex in
the moonlight, illuminated by the dying reflection of a farewell
rocket that shot up from the point. In answer Yuan lit a score of
lanterns—orange, violet, and brown—swaying moons that cast unearthly
reflections in the Lake. But there was silence among the visitors, a
certain uneasiness, because of the relation that had arisen as between
Lychnis and Yuan and as between those two and the rest.
But Lord Sombrewater would not permit any breach of etiquette, and
presently there was a murmur of talk under the ochre moon as the barge
swished slowly through dark red lilies towards the distant sources of
the Lake, where they were to picnic by the waterfalls. Two or three
of the Chinese girls perched like finches on their favourite, their
amusing Quentin, and soon enough there was plenty of laughter at
his incomprehensible jokes. Ambrose, sitting beside Frew-Gaff, took
opportunity to observe that there was no cause for any reasonable
anxiety.
“I suppose Sombrewater is right,” replied Sir Richard. “It is not that
I suspect Lychnis for a moment of folly, as you know; but in this world
we must be ready to hear of strange things. I know it; but really, if
we were told, one day, of a marriage with this Oriental (who exerts
an extraordinary fascination, I admit), I should have the creeps. I
somehow cannot tolerate the thought of a union between an English
girl—a girl like Lychnis—and him.”
The thoughts that arise in the brain, Ambrose observed to himself, are
governed, like economic men, by a master of whom they are not aware.
“I have been compelled to give Ruby the same freedom of movement,”
added Sir Richard. “She is quite capable, I am sure, of looking after
herself. A very sensible girl. We shall have no surprises from her.”
“And as to Sprot?” queried Ambrose.
“He refuses to go.”
“Lychnis has spoken to Yuan.”
“I wonder what Yuan will do.”
Ambrose looked at Sprot, who was showing a certain defiant and stupid
courage in face of the danger of staying, which he preferred to the
danger of going away. Appositely they passed three white pelicans on an
islet. They had monstrous beaks, those pelicans, the creation of Yuan.
And Ambrose wondered, with Sir Richard, what Yuan would do.
When they came to the waterfalls among the high rocks at the Lake’s
source the moon was shining into the night-sombre valley, and they
disembarked and climbed and spread supper in face of the golden and
shadowy scene, and the murmur of their talk was subdued to the steady
diapason of the main torrent that poured from the crags, not dissonant
with the peace and ordered serenity of the landscape. Nothing moved.
Far off the island slept, small and brooding. A spirit of peace fell on
them all.
“You are philosophic in great comfort here,” observed Lord Sombrewater.
“We are civilized,” Yuan mildly replied. “It is not philosophy to
evolve noble and consolatory systems, or systems of despair, among
misery and ruin. Those who require to perform their meditations among
desolations or desert wastes are merely unable to cope with the claims
of a domestic environment. Contemplation is an activity that can
only be pursued by people who have mastered Nature. It is only then
that pure reality can be seen. In all other circumstances thought is
conditioned by the actualities of being, and is directed towards the
problem of evil or some antithetic good. Here we have so wrought that
we are free to take part in the experience of a reality that is, as it
were, behind. Our environment does not hinder us; our bodies claim no
attention; we forget ourselves; we cease to be, and what is everlasting
rushes in to fill the place of what was.”
“You seek annihilation,” murmured Blackwood.
“Seek your big toe!” replied Wang, going to the foot of the matter with
characteristic efficiency. Indeed, as he lifted his right eyelid, he
seemed to emit a trickle of some elemental force that could have dried
up the cataract. “In seeking death, you seek what does not exist.”
“Perhaps I have been wrong,” sadly admitted Blackwood. “I must seek, I
see now, for some deeper life.”
“Seek your eyebrows!” retorted Wang. “In seeking life, you seek also
what does not exist.”
“Then what on earth is a man who is all wrong with the world to do?”
Wang opened him with the blade of insight. “You do not get rid of
desire by sitting on it. That is what your thoughts of annihilation
are—desire gone to mildew. Only they think in terms of annihilation who
are extremely conscious of self. Abandon your methods. Desire neither
life nor death, and eat red meat.”
“I fear I have sadly misinterpreted the wisdom of the Sages,”
Blackwood faltered, and actually the moon glowed in a tear on his cheek.
“This is the beginning, and only the beginning, of wisdom,”
replied Wang. “Retrace your steps, give rein to the passions of a
man, and in ten years’ time you may take some gentle exercise in
self-forgetfulness.” With this somewhat paradoxical statement he seemed
to close himself to all outside influence, and the spray of the moonlit
cascade gradually wetted his old bald head.
“It seems likely,” remarked Sir Richard, “that Hsiao will presently be
altogether forgetful of his body, since the goblet in his hand contains
about a pint and a half of your really very powerful and delicious
wine, and that is the third I have seen him consume.”
“In the days when Hsiao thought in terms of good and evil, of restraint
and excess, he used to be very sick,” Yuan replied. “Rid the mind of
purely relative distinctions between drunk and sober, and you will not
be troubled with the gout.”
“Thank you for that recipe,” said Quentin.