“That is because he requires no aids to contemplation.”
“Then why does Hsiao take it?” asked Ruby.
“He is an artist, which is a weakness of the will, and he needs some
attachment to the illusions of sense.”
Lord Sombrewater had been deeply pondering. “It seems to me,” he said,
“that there is something to be argued for our western habit of life.
You here—I do not speak of the mass of your countrymen, who present, if
I may say so, the appearance of an immense swarm of toiling insects—you
in this valley have abandoned the world to its fate. You have
abandoned, so it seems to me, much that makes men specifically men, and
you have become the abodes of great impersonal forces. Sometimes when I
talk with you I feel I am talking with the nightwind, or the moonlight,
or the spraying waterfall. God-intoxicated, you have given up your
organisms to be the dwellingplace of the great unknown principle of the
universe, and any pleasure, any joy, that is in you, is its.”
“Precisely,” said Yuan. “Our bodies, to a more or less extent,
according to the measure of our renunciation, become temples of
godhead. Using your western phraseology, we have come strangely near to
Christian doctrine.”
“That is so; but my point is that in the West most of us hold that it
is the business of man to forget God, to immerse himself, while he is a
man, in his no doubt blind and temporary manhood, so that he may work
out whatever the purpose of creation was in creating him. It is the
duty of man to erect his ego into a god. He must be immensely conscious
of himself and the world, immensely unconscious of the universe. He
must be tremendously aware of man and his destiny. In Europe, in
America, we have formed the idea of Destiny and Progress.”
“And do you progress?” Wang Li suddenly spoke like a voice coming out
of the wind.
Lord Sombrewater began to search in his mind for the answer to that
question. But, except Frew-Gaff, the others did not await his reply,
and wandered off as their fancy directed. Hsiao disappeared. Quentin
attached a couple of admiring young girls and drove off Sprot, who
tried to accompany him, with lively pictures of his approaching fate.
Blackwood retired thoughtfully to a dark corner alone; Terence was
listlessly meditating on Yuan’s aura; Fulke and Ruby gloomily watched
to see what Lychnis would do. But Lychnis only sat with two Chinese
girls on the cliff-edge at the side of the torrent, and they were all
holding out crystal goblets in their orchid-hands to catch the spray
drops. They talked in their own languages and seemed well contented
with each other. Fifty feet below them the swaying moons of the barge
smote strange colours on the foam of the rapids, and the cluster of
small tethered boats streamed and leapt astern. Above them dreamed the
motionless Wang Li, with the moon on his scanty white beard.
An hour passed, and Sombrewater and Frew-Gaff were still in
conversation with Yuan. Ambrose surveyed the party, and there came
to his mind, as he watched Yuan, the description Lychnis had made to
him of eyes that were oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. He
sought, too, for an adequate description of the power that lurked in
the disposed beauty of that petal-mouth of dark enamel. He traced the
effect of power to the absence of muscular compression, of visible
will. It was unconscious and placid, like the dark, fathomless Lake,
where doubtless men had been drowned. Then suitably to his thoughts
came Sprot, with terror-stricken face, scrambling up the rocks, crying
out: “Hsiao! Hsiao the drunken painter! Hsiao is drowned!” Wang Li
dreamed on.
The visitors gathered together and discussed what Sprot called
the fatality in tones of horror or dismay. Sombrewater sadly but
efficiently put questions to the witness. “I saw the body bobbing about
in the wash under the bank,” Sprot averred. “A frightful-looking thing.”
“You are quite sure it was ... our friend Hsiao?”
“Absolutely. That fearful, black, waving top-knot. It was awful—awful!”
Presently they turned towards Yuan, who was studying a glistening fern.
“He does not seem to realize ...” said Lord Sombrewater. “He cannot
have understood ... I had perhaps better speak to him.” He approached
Yuan. “Yuan, my dear friend, I am afraid we have terrible news. Hsiao
has been drowned.” Yuan did not look up. “Hsiao is dead.”
“Quick and dead are relative terms,” responded Yuan. “Hsiao is Hsiao.”
“The blow has stunned him,” whispered Sprot, and suddenly found the
basilisk eye of Yuan upon him.
“You would desire, I gather, that the party should break up?” Yuan
inquired.
“But, my God——” began Sprot.
Sombrewater silenced him. “We would naturally not wish to go on
merrymaking,” he said to Yuan.
Yuan seemed to fall in with their wishes. The party descended the rocks
in silence, and boarded the vessel with eyes turned from the bank. Wang
Li remained. He was in contemplation, and need not be disturbed, Yuan
said. They floated off on the current, Quentin and Terence at the oars.
“Will you not extinguish the lanterns?” asked Lord Sombrewater.
“As you wish,” Yuan politely replied.
Lychnis watched. The death of Hsiao did not greatly affect her, she
admitted. It was a pity, certainly. In any case death did not seem to
be reality to her, and her heart approved Yuan’s demeanour. Suddenly a
scream rang out, and Ruby pointed hysterically to the hideous floating
corpse. With a shudder Lord Sombrewater turned to Yuan. “We must
recover him.”
“Why?” Yuan asked. He did not seem to be able to understand this
preoccupation with a trivial event.
34
The following was compiled by Ambrose after listening to both the
girls. At two o’clock in the morning a lamp still burned in their
bedroom. Ruby, with a garment in her hand, was being addressed by
Lychnis, who still wore her white dress and had not even unbuttoned her
shoes.
“Can’t you see, little idiot, that death’s not important? It isn’t
real. Neither is life real. Life and death are not real. Something else
is, and that something else is in Yuan and Wang Li, and it goes on and
is everywhere, and death doesn’t make any difference. Yuan and Wang are
dead, too. I mean they are not alive in the way we understand life.”
But Ruby was not in an amiable mood. “At any rate,” she said savagely,
“there’s no doubt that we shall go away now from this horrible place.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I heard daddy say to your father that he couldn’t feel comfortable
here again. ‘With those cold-blooded freaks,’ he said.”
“Oh! And did my father agree?”
“I think so. He nodded.”
“Well——” Lychnis was aware of an unwonted nervous disturbance, a desire
to cry, at the secession and hostility of her obedient friend. She
concealed it. “It’s time we were in bed.” She stood up, unfastened her
dress, and let it slide to the floor, bending meanwhile on Ruby her
frowning brows. “We shall stay,” she added definitely.
Her anger had usually the effect of reducing Ruby to sulks or
submission. To-night she became defiant, and replied, looking at her
persecutor with shining, fascinated eyes. (And no wonder, thought
Ambrose, as he pictured the slim, contemptuous figure that had the
matter of subjugation in hand.)
“You think it’s for you to decide, Lychnis. It isn’t. We’ve made up our
minds to consider ourselves in future.”
“You’ve been plotting with Fulke, have you?”
Ruby’s eyes quivered. “Let me tell you daddy thinks so, too. If we want
to go now we shall.”
“Not without my permission—and Yuan’s.”
“Oh, Yuan! Why don’t you go to him altogether?”
The words had slipped out, and with the realization of what she had
said came the end of her courage.
The reply darted at her was, “Get into bed.”
She still had an ounce or two. “I won’t!”
“Do you remember last time you said that?”
Ruby remembered a night when a fury who exuded a sort of elemental
invincibleness had used a slipper on her until she howled for pain. She
did not care for pain.
Lychnis slid in beside her, and switched out all the lights in the room
except the one that hung in the ebony ceiling of their bed. “You hate
it when that light goes out, don’t you?” she asked in a cold voice.
“Every night you shake for fear of the strangeness of this house and
this valley and the tall, plum-cheeked Yuan with gimlet eyes. When the
queer moonlight creeps in through the lattices, as if Yuan were there,
flooding us with some cold emanation of his cold, unhuman spirit, you
lie and tremble. I am going to put the light out now.”
She switched it out with one hand and with the other gave Ruby a pinch.
Ruby sat up. “I hate you! Oh, you beast, I hate you!”
“You’d better ask Fulke to do something about it.” Lychnis spoke in a
ghostly voice.
But all at once Ruby collapsed into her pillow and began violently
crying. “Don’t—oh, please don’t tease me about Fulke!” she sobbed.
Lychnis had an intimation. “What’s the matter?”
For some time there was no answer; then a buried voice came from the
pillow: “I can’t bear you to speak of him.” A silence. Then: “I—I want
him. I love him.”
Lychnis peered into the dim moonlight, silent for a little. Then: “But,
my dear, I didn’t realize it was like that. I am surprised.” She put
her arms round Ruby. “Since when?”
There followed long confidences and comfortings. “And that’s why,”
concluded the afflicted one, “I said I hate you. I’ve been hating you a
long time—because you keep him from me!”
Lychnis smiled in the dark. “But don’t you see? That’s nearly over. You
will have him from me altogether—very soon.”
“Do you really think so?” Consoled, glowing, and happily doubtful,
Ruby fell asleep. When she was asleep Lychnis turned over on her
face and sobbed her heart out. She saw clearly that Ruby would soon
have Fulke—the chimpanzee-like Fulke—away from her altogether. She
didn’t mind that. But it gave her a sense of desertion. It was strange
that soon Fulke should lie in her place, or take Ruby to his. She
would be alone. It was the case that she was losing her friends—even
her father. Her heart sank at the deep silence. The shadow of the
lattice lengthened out on the floor. Outside a spray of leaves brushed
monotonously against the roof of the verandah. Soon she would be alone,
quite alone—face to face with a queer reality—except for Ambrose. The
name floated to her in the silence. Ambrose. Perhaps he was on the
verandah composing. She crept from the bed, crept out on the verandah.
Outside there was nothing but the warm moonlight and the leaves
brushing on the roof. She came back, alone with the spectre of Yuan.
She shivered and lay deathly still, clutching the bedclothes, while the
ghostly moonlight peered in through the lattice, stole in and embraced
her like an emanation from his cold, unearthly mind. The spray of
leaves swished to and fro on the roof of the verandah.
35
Before making an important decision, which Ambrose presently records,
Lychnis suffered several changes of mood of a subtle kind, and she
was able under his expert questioning to describe them, to give an
account of the happenings in the mental, the emotional, the spiritual
sphere—the slight happenings that irresistibly fixed her course.
She woke heavy-eyed. After a long wandering in the hot mists of
early morning by the reedy shore of the Lake and among the creeks
and cliffs and waterfalls, she came clearly to see herself isolated.
Since the first morning when she had explored the valley with Ambrose
and encountered the swans, she alone (Ambrose not for the moment
considered) had made progress in experience. The others, she perceived,
had all abandoned the experience which they had begun, content to
remain on the fringe, to let it go ungrasped, uncomprehended. They
had stopped short on the threshold of the valley, on the threshold
of a dream. She had entered the dream. To her life was yielding up
secrets. She looked back from the dome of an emerald hill and saw the
vermilion roof, with its horns and glittering dragons, of the Yellow
Emperor’s Pavilion, in the crescent of the bamboo grove. They were
all sleeping there, except Ambrose, the recorder of other people’s
experiences, whose white-clad figure she saw in the far distance down
by the Lake. They were sleeping, while she woke and strove with what
life was offering to the mind. She would keep them there until she had
finished, until the valley and its denizens had no more to give, for
it is the privilege of those who wrestle with the stuff of experience
that they should sacrifice the others. Looking up, she saw that a great
mass of clouds in the east was thrusting its arms about the valley. An
encircling wall seemed to shut her off from the nearly forgotten world
of Europe. It made it easier not to go back.
Ambrose pictures her standing on the top of her hill like a fluttering
flag. Lonely she must have been. It is lonely, he remarks, to be in the
advanced posts in the matter of human experience.
36
In the afternoon, lying idle and alone on the verandah, she reflected
that she had not spoken to Terence Fitzgerald for a long time. She
could not remember that he had looked at her with hate or resentment.
He had been aloof, but that was his habit, and it might be that still
he was bound to her in spirit, not resenting her actions. So she went
to her bedroom, put on a twelfth-century robe of amber with a design
of black and red butterflies, sped across the lawn, and slid through
the bamboo-forest, that was heavy and dark with summer, to the tiled
watchtower.
She climbed the stairs, peering through little windows that she
passed, and came to his blue-tiled room. It was littered with painting
apparatus. He sat at the window, in his bard-like, painter’s gown, with
his hands clasped, looking sadly out over the quivering bamboo grove.
When she came in his great eyes filled with fire and his voice rang
with joy.
“At last the high gods have told you to come?” Then reproach shadowed
his face. “But in that alien dress. This is not Lychnis, not my divine
inspiration materialized.”
“I have abandoned the other dress,” she replied, “for ever.”
“For ever!”
“I must look the part I am going to play.”
“But we are going back. Lord Sombrewater has decided.” He spoke with
great earnestness.
“Are we? Not quite yet perhaps.” She concealed her meaning, giving
him great distress. They sat together in the wide window, on a ledge
of pale yellow tiles. The poet eyed her long and dreamily; sometimes
(through dreaming) his knee touched hers, or his hand, if he spoke,
found it necessary to pat her fingers or her shoulder. The innocence of
the poet permitted itself some intimacies. But they woke no thrill in
her. She only leaned out and caressed the close ivy, or gazed up at the
swifts circling over a group of elms in the midst of the bamboo.
“The dress is alien, but it is enchanting,” he said, after a pause. “It
falls about you like an amber spell.”
“Paint me,” she replied. “I came to be painted, as promised.”
He obeyed. “I believe it is a spell,” he went on. “You are under a
spell, woven on you by your Chinese. The robe has definitely altered
your aura.”
“Is that the case? Tell me, has Yuan got an aura?”
“As far as I can discover,” said Terence, with the air of making a
mysterious confidence, “he has got practically nothing else.”
“You mean—no body?”
“No corporeal habitation at all—not to speak of. Does that interest
you? Is it a point of any importance?”
But she was watching the swifts, and only threw out an aside: “You must
write an article, ‘The Influence of Environment on the Aura.’”
“But it is profound, I can tell you—in fact, it is disconcerting.
I cannot understand these people. It is all part and parcel of the
mysterious, sinister unresponsiveness of the place. I am unhappy here.”
His grey eyes were mournful. “I sit all day without any illumination,
unvisited by any messenger from those mysterious worlds that touch so
closely on ours. The astral plane is quite closed to me.”
“Something has gone wrong with the trapdoor,” she ventured,
unsympathetically.
“Unvisited by anyone,” he added, with meaning. But she was absorbed in
the gliding swifts.
“I believe some evil spirit on the Other Side has done this by way
of a joke. Those three friends of yours, Lychnis, are elementals,
vampires.”
“It was you brought us here,” she threw out, with her eyes on the sky.
“The Peach-blossom People—pink feet, I remember.”
“It was to punish me for some error. They have brought me here and
blown out the candle of my vision. I cannot contemplate. My harp and my
tongue are silent; my hand is paralysed. And now the word descends on
me in the mists of morning that I must arise and go back to Ireland.
Everything is so designed and so finished, so dead; and I find your
friends so on top of life, so beyond the capacity to feel the world’s
sorrow, so smug.”
She spoke to the bamboo grove. “And so clean. And everyone is so happy.
And inspiration only comes to you when you are in an untidy, poverty
stricken, romantic country where the people are superstitious and
incompetent. In your Paradise everyone must be Celtic and ridiculous.
To be poetical, to have beautiful fancies and run to press with them
is diseased. You dress up the cold substance of experience with
starry crowns and gauze wings to make it look like fairies. A country
should produce either men who can think straight or men who can live
hard—especially the first. That is what compels me in a man.”
The wild anger that flashed in his eyes died down when she suddenly
turned her face.
“There is distress in your eyes, not scorn.” His concern became
apparent in a disposition to offer her the protection of his bosom.
At that moment, indeed, if Terence wanted Ireland, Lychnis wanted
England. Hypnotized by the wheeling of the swifts over the elms, she
had seen her home, and the pull at her was agonizing. The elm-clump
beyond the sea of bamboo was an island of the familiar in a sea of
strangeness. She suffered an intolerable desire for England, for the
Georgian house, for the tennis-lawns, the stables, the cornfields. Her
nerves stormed for the satisfaction that those old habits could give,
and her more complex desire for the undefined satisfaction that she
was pursuing in the Peach-blossom Valley all but suffered shipwreck.
But she gave no hint of this to the poet. He was friendly to her,
but because he loved her she must put him far away, increasing her
isolation. They sat in stillness and silence while the blazing summer
sun sank down the afternoon sky and the swifts mounted and swerved and
flickered high up over the elms.
37
At evening, when the sky was a flaming garden in the glass of the Lake,
Ambrose and Lychnis sat side by side in a punt at a distant part of the
shore, quietly fishing. Their punt was moored by two poles. Behind them
a wall of reeds; before them the green reflection; a step beyond it the
sky mirrored in an abyss. They were fishing for pike, perch and the
like.
“Yes, it had been decided to return,” he replied to a question,
“until Sprot disappeared. It is not known whether he went back to the
_Floating Leaf_ or whether—— Do you, perhaps, know what has become of
him?”
“I haven’t a notion.” She hooked a gudgeon of suitable size through the
appropriate membrane and cast her line. “Until it is known, I suppose,
my father will stay on. I mean, he wouldn’t desert even Sprot. In any
case I do not think he will go back just yet.”
Ambrose lifted his eyes for a moment from his float to glance at her—a
reed-fairy with amber robe and amber hair, steadily holding her rod
with slender hands, frowning at the float that bobbed in the ripples.
She was a novice at fishing. It was certainly accurate to describe her
as a most lovely young woman. The meaning of her words would no doubt
be given presently. She had clearly brought him here to deliver it.
“They can’t bear it any more because Hsiao’s death doesn’t make any
difference to Yuan and Wang. Why, Ambrose?”
“You know why. You have grasped the principle. They cherish the
personality, and cannot endure the indifference to personality that
Yuan and Wang display.”
“Yes,” she responded; “I do know. They cannot bear to think that they
are of no more importance than a grain of dust, or a slug, or a tomato.
What do you think about personality?”
“The strange thing about it is,” he pointed out, “that Wang and
Yuan, who ignore it, have more of it. It is a strange truth. But we
understand—do we not?—that the personality is not their own. They
merely contain, as it were, something cosmical, something that streams
and emanates from them.”
“It has the effect, merely, of personality,” she observed. “But it is
very fascinating.”
“You find it so?”
“My float has gone.” It had disappeared in the clouds that seemed to
drift under it.
“Don’t strike for a few seconds,” he put in. “It’s pike. They run off
with the bait and begin to swallow it afterwards. Now!”
She struck.
“Don’t pull,” he continued. “Hold gently when you can.”
“I feel it,” she gasped. “I’m in communication. It’s wonderful to feel
the weight of something in a world you can’t see.”
By a method of her own the fish was got into the boat. “It’s a pike,”
said Ambrose, “but with improvements of Yuan’s.”
“Yes, I find Yuan fascinating,” she continued, when she had cast her
line again.
“You are in love with him?”
“Must you put it in the diary? If he were a figure on a vase ... if he
would behave as such after marriage ... I don’t know if I am in love.
That’s what I have to find out. I couldn’t go away without finding out,
could I? I must find out. Nothing else matters, and that is the sole
reason why I am making so much trouble—not intellectual curiosity, or
friendship, or anything like that, but simply an unanswerable desire to
understand what is happening to me. At present it’s like this—I can’t
do without him. I feel I must always be in his presence, watching him,
hearing him. Is that love?”
“It is foolish,” said Ambrose, “to ask ourselves ‘Is she in love?’ We
have no definition of love. We do not know what it is. This is the only
question we need put, in the case before us: ‘Is your desire towards
him strong enough, and more especially single enough, to decide you
to make an experiment with him that would create a situation complex
enough to be awkward from the point of view of some of the parties less
intimately, but to an important extent, concerned?’”
“Yes, that is the question we ought to put,” she agreed. “The answer
is——”
But he was momentarily engaged in pulling a fine red perch of about six
pounds out of the water. He landed it, and they bent over the tank, to
watch it swimming about in company with her improved pike.
“The answer,” she resumed, gazing at his image in the tank, “is that
she doesn’t know, but she has made up her mind that the only way to
find out is to live in conditions similar to those which would obtain
if the whole experiment were in hand, and with this object she proposes
to accept an invitation extended to her some time back and live on the
island for a little while in close company with Wang and Yuan, sharing
quarters with two or three of the Chinese girls. Is that the kind
of answer you like? The kind of sentence, I should say.” They left
the tank and went back to their rods. Brown shadows of night were now
lurking in the luxuriant summer foliage of the valley.
“At any rate it leaves me clear as to your meaning.” He fitted out his
hook with a fresh gudgeon. “You intend to pursue your experience, if
necessary to the last conclusion?”
“Well—nobody could blame me if I did.”
“Nobody could, but plenty would. It is the custom to blame people who
put things to the test for themselves.”
“You would not blame me?”
“Praise and blame do seem so profoundly irrelevant. Was that a bite?
No. It is getting too dark to see. The chief point is that at present
you are not sure. You will go near the terrible fruit of knowledge, but
will you pluck it?”
“You see inside of me, Ambrose. I like it. Yes, there is perhaps
something I cannot get over. I don’t know if I loathe that, or whether
I like it. Perhaps you can tell me which. Or ... or what it would be
like ... if something would make it ... easy.”
Her speech did not often falter. This little hard grain of knowledge
in regard to physical facts she still hesitated to put to the test of
experience. The unilluminated fact discomposed her.
“That statement you were to prepare for me...?”