is not quite ready.”
The night fell swiftly at last, faintly lit by a moon still low down
among the hills, like a lotus among great brown petals. Both felt the
weight of a fish when they went to put away rod and line. Soon all was
packed up, and Ambrose rowed the punt slowly away.
“You will put me on the island?” she asked.
“Certainly.”
“And tell my father?—explain to him?”
“I will.”
“And remain my friend when they all misunderstand and hate me?”
“Why, yes.”
“What a darling you are!”
He records that when he put her ashore on the Rock she kissed him and
wept. He rowed the punt slowly back through the lanes in the water-lily
leaves.
38
Lychnis made her way through its main gates into the walled collection
of courtyards and one-storied houses where the relatives of old Wang
and Yuan lived. During many days spent on the island she had made
acquaintance with numbers of them, and now they gave her an eager
welcome, overjoyed that the fair-haired and fairy-like stranger should
have accepted their invitation. But her first night, alone with two
Chinese girls in the lanterned chamber, was strange. They chattered
to her in a speech like the speech of birds; they rolled themselves
up fantastically on their queer beds; and, kind and affectionate with
her as they might be, she lay shaking by herself in the darkness,
unutterably alone.
With morning there were many things, apart from the pursuit of her
enterprise, to fill her mind. It was amusing to watch her companions
plastering their hair down with resin. Other young women came in to
assist at her toilet, some dressed, as was more usual among them,
in the ordinary costume of a Chinese girl; others, for the sake of
pleasing her, or because it was their custom, in robes copied from the
fashions of many centuries. An embarrassing interest was shown in her
affairs. They offered her a quantity of clothes to choose from, and
watched her with delighted and confusion-producing comment while she
managed the combination she effected of her own soft underclothes with
robe and trousers in heliotrope and green. They laughed over her. She
pleased them.
After breakfast, when she was introduced to some gentle elder women,
she was taken by four or five of her friends to a room with an effect,
in the clear morning heat, of pink and pale green and gold. There were
elaborate chairs, Chinese books, a chessboard in ebony and amber, a
stringed instrument (which later she learned to play), two or three
landscapes on silk, objects in ivory and jade and unknown precious
metals. An attempt was made at conversation of an explanatory kind.
The youngest of them—a demure, slender girl, who bent and twisted her
body with the grace of a willow in the wind—indicated names, such as
Golden Apricot, Blue Lotus, or Scarlet Moth. Then she put a question:
“Married?”
“Not married,” Lychnis replied.
“Those two married,” the child indicated, pointing to an elaborate,
indolent beauty, and a girl with a sad, intelligent face. “Hsiao’s
wives.”
Lychnis was shocked. They seemed so young for that hideous painter, and
it was tactless of the child to have introduced the subject. The beauty
smiled secretly, as if she had some fountain, and no mystical one, of
consolation, and the sad one wrung her hands. It was to be gathered
that the reactions of these two young widows were of the human kind,
not like those of their extraordinary relatives.
It occurred to Lychnis to ask whether Yuan was married. It came to
her that he might have a wife or two wives. There was an exasperating
titter. “Yuan!” Two or three shaped their mouths to his name,
producing an effect as if they were astonished, or scandalized, or
contemptuous—she could not tell what.
Then the beauty spoke—in English, surprisingly: “Yuan not a man—neither
is Wang Li.”
“You mean?”
But she would do no more than smile, and Lychnis leaned back on her
apple-green cushion, angrily wondering how to find out what she meant.
Was it meant that Yuan was a spirit, or ghost? A Yuan that was a ghost
might be more agreeable in the capacity of husband. She suddenly felt,
among these matter-of-fact and human young women, and there came with
it a dismaying sense of unreality, that she must have been dreaming
about some porcelain image in a museum or a figure on a scroll.
“Are you sad that Yuan is not a man?” asked the beauty, with quite
European cattishness.
“How well you speak English!” Lychnis graciously replied, desirous of
friendly relations.
At this also there was a titter, and the demure child explained with
readiness and a remarkable virtuosity in the method of allusion that
her lovely cousin had learnt this and more from Quentin.
Lychnis closed her eyes, not caring to learn whether the slender
young lady had also learnt at the same knee. Quentin, in his hateful
irresponsibility, she savagely reflected, knew no restraints. But how
would it be to spend the rest of her life among these twittering golden
mice? The sad one, the intelligent one, perhaps she would not lightly
permit herself what seemed to Lychnis to require the profound assent
of reason and imagination. Yuan might take her away, of course. She
suffered a wave of anger that he did not come.
39
Yuan was away in the mountains, and as day after day passed without him
Lychnis sank deeper into doubt and misery. Then at last he came back,
sought her out, spent all his time with her, and they began to weave
their lives into one strand. They spent days and nights in the Flying
Dragon, often at great distances from the valley; or sometimes they
sought strange experiences among the neighbouring forests and crags;
and the summer wore on to its full splendour. Afterwards she gave
Ambrose some account of these various experiences, and he chose three
or four to illustrate the progress of her relations with Yuan.
She began to be influenced increasingly, it appears, by the silent and
deliberate guidance of his mind. He had means of conveying his thoughts
to her without speech, and this means he used more and more effectively
as their intimacy deepened. One afternoon of serene and golden beauty
they were strolling, steeped in this conversation, through a birch-wood
among the hills. They came upon three Rishi, or mountain wizards,
contemplating the smoke of incense in a green circle under the trees.
Behind the Rishi was a porcelain image, shrined among leaves, a thing
of infinite stillness. The two friends silently joined the group; Yuan
leaned against a birch trunk, chin in hand. Lychnis lay prone. But from
time to time she looked round at Yuan, for he seemed to have withdrawn
his mind from her, to have plunged himself, without thought for her, in
the contemplation of the smoke of incense. And the three Rishi were of
the most repulsive ugliness—the first huge and sensual, with a belly
that burst through filthy rags, distended ears, and the face of a demon
of wrath; the second small and thin, with the face of a froward newt;
the third deformed in the spine, crab-armed, lascivious and cruel.
They took no notice whatever of the newcomers, and sat for so long in
a tremendous immobility, like that of the brooding porcelain figure,
that the flap of a leaf overhead reverberated through the forest and
seemed to echo down long passages in the mind. Their foul and repulsive
appearance began to be more incongruous with so profound a stillness;
their ugliness was so clearly not the sign of any present passion that
they seemed to grow unreal. They might be about to vanish. She suddenly
perceived in their faces the signs of immortal, worldforgetting youth.
Then came a solitary message from Yuan, that these were men who had
left behind them the passions of the world and given themselves to the
experience of reality. “It is the presence of reality,” he said to her
mind, “that displays the unreality of the outward world.” The wrathful
one stirred faintly at the passage of thought from mind to mind; his
wrinkled eyelids perceptibly twitched.
Yuan returned to the contemplation, and Lychnis found herself being
drawn in—wandering, rather, in a world of fancies on the edge of what
was too cold and uncongenial for her to enter. At first the sensations
in her body intensified. There was an itch for movement in legs and
fingers. She was acutely aware of the thrust of her chin in her hand,
the strain of the muscles at waist and abdomen, a fly buzzing in her
hair, a pebble under her knee. But a gentle wind played on her calves
and head. Discomforts faded. She became aware of the beautiful lines
and relations of her body. She relaxed, and the tree-roots on which
she was lying seemed to embrace her, to gain contact with her; the
life of the tree gained contact with her life. She turned on her back
in the embrace of the birch-tree, and began pondering on the delicate
tracery of leaves, swaying and glowing in the peaceful sky. She was in
a world of trees—birch, poplar, chestnut and ash; tall silver trunks,
brown twisted trunks, smooth boles, tender shoots, branches carrying
a weight of ivy; green tranquil leaves, broad, flat leaves hanging on
long stems, white fluttering leaves like clouds of butterflies; in a
world of pale green and misty substance, and deep green with dark,
lucid caves, splashes of golden yellow, blurs of red-brown. There was
an imperceptible, infinite rustling, an unseen flitting of birds,
sometimes a note; a tranquil diffused light, and beyond the tree-tops
an immense pure well and medium of light, a warm sun-drenched region
of inter-stellar space, longed for by the senses. The roots under her
body stretched up to a silver trunk that lifted its weight of foliage
into the world of foliage and light, lifting her spirit with it. She
was among myriads of leaves, exulting, whispering choirs. It seemed to
her that the spirits of those who have loved the light of the sky dwelt
in them, tasting the sun and the warm winds, saturated with light,
with air, with the unseen medium of life and being. A profound calm, a
strength of reposed, victorious soul, pervaded the leaves, a dignity of
that which fears neither life nor death, not subject to them. Sometimes
a bevy of young leaves fluttered with a gust of angelic laughter, or
there was a vast stir of passionless conversation, a communion of
those who are beyond passion, reposing in the myriad forest leaves.
She felt, certainly, a presence. It was what she had perceived in the
hideous faces of the Rishi. A presence that was not a presence; a
presence seen in the structure of beauty, but yet it was not beauty;
she found it also in music, in a formula, in the valley, in the eyes
of Yuan, but it was not any of these; not happiness or unhappiness,
nor life or death, but pre-existent and yet non-existent—such phrases
from Yuan’s conversation came to her mind. She turned her gaze to the
serene and smiling face of the porcelain figure among the leaves. It
was a thing of great stillness. It was inactive, but it seemed charged
with activity. “It lives,” was her first thought; and pat came the
silent answer from Yuan: “It more than lives. There is more than life.”
A vista was opened to her. The presence in the life of the trees, in
the not-life of the figure, in the unreal faces of the Rishi, was the
same presence—the intangible, the unnameable. She perceived a reality
outside thought, unhuman and without the warmth and pleasure of
thought, a reality that she could not grasp with mind or senses; but
the experience of it brought joy.
And dimly, only dimly, she felt Yuan beside her in the sea of forest
thoughts, leaf thoughts, as if he guided her where she floated. In
the apprehension of him, in that realm of experience, there was no
distaste. She felt closer to him when her senses were submerged. She
was where there are no distinctions of this and that.
Her thoughts were broken into by spoken words. The Rishi were coming
to the end of their contemplation, and they returned to the world in a
state of unhuman gaiety. There still sounded in them the mirth of the
Paradise where they had been.
Their gaiety abruptly came to an end. “There are two imperfect beings
in contemplation with us,” said the demon of wrath.
“One,” added the newt, “is very imperfect, being full of half-thoughts,
and even whole thoughts, and long pauses of irrelevant dreaming. Those
who have thoughts in their minds should not gather round the smoke of
incense.”
“The other,” contributed the third, “is nearly thoughtless, nearly
unconscious; but he impedes the flow of reality into himself and among
us by some attachment to the passions and desires of men.”
“A brother!” piped the newt, with a gurgle of newt-like laughter, “an
immortal, has drowned the never-ending merriment of the immortals in a
draught of red and serious desire!”
Yuan did not change countenance, but he drew her away, and they were
followed as they went down the rocky path among the birches by sounds
of immense hilarity. This is the life he is destined for by family
tradition, reflected Lychnis, and he is to become like these, though
not so ugly.
His conversation on the way down was somewhat of that which is more
important than desire and life, beside which human pleasure is
insignificant. “Those,” he said, explaining the point of view of his
three acquaintances, “who have once found the satisfaction of non-being
desire it, and they shun the things that belong to existence, as, for
example, friendship and love.”
That might not be inconvenient, in some circumstances, was the thought
that presented itself to her attention. It came forcibly at first, then
faded in a myriad quivering forest thoughts, at the heart of which, in
a radiation of light and power, through a wisp of the smoke of incense,
the image of the porcelain saint eternally smiled. An unearthly smile,
it was, without scorn and without pity—a smile that made all human
experience seem irrelevant, and all human language conceited.
40
At the height of summer the rains came; the fiery flowers and the
fantastic hills were extinguished in a blur of rain, in a steam and
smell of rain throughout the valley, in clouds of rain drifting among
the crags, arrows of rain slanting across the Lake.
For a day or two Yuan and Lychnis stayed at home, amusing themselves
in the laboratories, talking in the library, studying paintings on
silk, handling bronzes and porcelain, looking out at the rain. They
had plenty to say and do, but the deluge had a voice for Lychnis, and
she desired to feel the drench on her body, to be enveloped in the
embrace of warm rain. The third day, therefore, they took a punt and
a cormorant, and went fishing, with only the protection of a flat
umbrella, she in her glass-green silk, he in his hunting costume of
russet-brown with a note of crimson. Forthwith they were gasping under
the minute insistent drive of the myriad rain arrows. They made their
way down the squelching path, among dripping laurels, to the shore.
She laughed. “We are in the power of the rain. It’s delicious.” And he
smiled back, knowing how softly and surely the rain prevails.
“See,” he called, “the subject for a picture—Rain on a Sheet of Water
and Ducks swimming under a Willow.”
They found their punt, and she remembers the touch of his wet hand as
he helped her on board. They pushed off, and the rain fell steadily and
softly all about them. The sky was full of grey, swirling veils; pale,
driving gusts swept the leaves and the white lilies. The shore receded,
there was a blur of willows in a slant of rain, a glimpse of rock like
a grey core of rain, and then they were together in a warm, misty
oblivion.
Lychnis put up her face to the soft downpour, taking warm caresses
on her eyes, in her mouth. The rain drenched her, soaked into her
hair, smoothed the silk robe to her body so that she seemed stripped,
blinded her, beat her, knew every part of her, and prevailed. She felt
shameless and searching caresses down back and limbs, between her
breasts and over her torso, on knees and feet. The rain was possessing
her, but the face of the rain that watched her was Yuan’s. She held up
her mouth to the down-drenching lover, saying, “I adore you.”
The voice of Yuan replied, “Water-lily.” He was regarding her,
she realized, with a keen gaze, more than ordinarily prolonged and
remorseless. He held her with his gaze, as if he admitted, now, a
special relation between them, and wished her to admit it, too.
Close to her, shut in by the changing wall of rain, he seemed big
and immediate, like a god, like the rain-god. His features, his
yellow skin, his piercing eyes, the slash of crimson on his brown
tunic—sole note of colour in a drifting, grey universe—had a terrifying
distinctness. He was very close and real and living, though his
life—the life behind his unreadable eyes—was not the life of men.
Perhaps because it was not Yuan who looked at her, but the swirling
rain, not Yuan, but the voice of the universe who spoke, distaste for
his flesh vanished. Yuan was dissolved and received into the body of
the rain, and she desired him. Past and future vanished; all else was
shut out; there was no earth or heaven—only herself in a space of warm,
saturating water, floating on water; herself, a cormorant with a fish,
and the god of the universe. In his eyes, deep and unreadable and
fascinating like the black lake-water, she was about to drown.
He came towards her. She felt her hands taken. The face, impending,
intent, was close to hers. The mouth, a calm flower in the rain, was
stretched out to her.
She offered herself to the terror of his mouth and the fierce and
shining infinity that looked out of his eyes. There was no person in
them, only a stupendous power. Yuan had vanished; what held her was
not Yuan. Her own body, her own person, seemed also to dissolve and
stream away in the rain. There was a sudden blinding drive, a hurricane
embrace of rain, and in the midst of it his small mouth was a spot of
fire.
41
Next day they climbed up among the crags in gusty weather, and as
evening drew on they were overtaken by a shower. There was a mountain
temple by a torrent in the shadow of a rock. They crossed the torrent
by a bridge and took shelter.
While Yuan contemplated a bronze image of Kwannon, Lychnis looked
out at the crags, the pines, the valley below where the torrent fell
booming. Far away was the Lake and the island in a mist of rain. Or
sometimes she watched Yuan. She had abandoned everything to him, and
waited for what he might be about to command. She was living in the
intoxication of what seemed an unending now, and made no conjectures as
to what might happen when now ended.
All day their talk had been of the regions where he had taken her with
the power of his mind (and where she had followed easily), of tree
life, of insect life (a weird region), of chill regions beyond, out of
which life takes origin. This seemed to her cold talk for lovers, and
she fancied she was ready that it should become warmer.
She called to him: “Yuan.”
His voice answered from within: “Lychnis.”
“We are like the gods up here. Down there I see the world, where Wang
Li is.” Her mind did not admit the thought of others on the far side of
the Lake.
“Do the gods live for ever, and are they eternally happy?” she asked.
Her thoughts were all of an immense duration of happiness in some
illimitable space of light, with dim shapes of mountains and pavilions.
But a shadow fell across her mind, an annihilating thought of a
cessation, of a space of nothing, of her lover wilfully dissolving in
emptiness, deliberately ceasing to be.
At her question, a swift, stony chill seemed to pass across his face.
“Your question has no relation to reality,” he coldly replied.
“I know you think it,” she answered. “I see quite well that it is
absurd. You have made me understand that life is relative and all that.
But it is a queer thought for a woman in love. My brains have all gone,
you see, because of it, and I—the I that is the living Lychnis, and
this body—clamour to be recognized.”
She had not spoken to him or to herself so boldly before, but the
thought of what he was always calling the eternal, non-existing
Lychnis, with no body for caresses, the Lychnis pre-existent in a
state precedent to matter and intelligence and life, was not congenial
to her. But was she ready for an alternative? At once her words
presented their own meaning clearly to her mind, and she experienced
a terror that she chose to find delicious. There he was, tall and
brooding, near her in the gloom of the evening. She was ready to
think of herself as having been seized, as captive to the masked,
expressionless god.
A gust of wind boomed in the roof of the hut.
“It is chilly here,” she said. “Are we going away to-night to the
forests in the south, where it is so warm?”
He stood close to her, and her orchid-petal hands lay in his. She
divined a formidable debate in his mind, and wished that she could have
read the eyes that gazed past her through the window. If he did not
take her to the forests.... If they stayed here.... This might become
her bridal chamber. She let the thought take her fully, and in the face
of reality looked through the window for an escape. There was only rain
and frowning crags and the valley, and perhaps the shadow of a picture
of someone far off who could have given her advice. The bridal chamber!
She was happy as she was, after all, in a now that might as well be
unending, and perhaps, if she was to be possessed by Yuan, it would
have to be in the glow of that moment of assent in the rain-world, now
somewhat past.
He made no reply to her thoughts. With him it was crisis. He chose the
flowering moment of desire to show his contempt for it. Most probably
the moments of silence were an eternity of the anguish of renunciation.
“Is anything the matter?” She caught some faint shadow of dismay on the
strong mask of his visage. “Are you displeased?”
There was no answer. There had been a change in Yuan, like the change
that comes over a man at the moment of death. Her breath troubled her,
and she beat in terror at the gates of his mind. “Oh, Yuan! Yuan!
Answer for pity’s sake!” But he had closed the gates of his mind
against her for ever. She stormed, now, to come in, to be his, to
accept the whole sequel of her actions, to accept the experience to
which she had given herself in its entirety. But the experience had
committed treason against her; she was forsaken of God.
“Oh what has happened? What is the matter?” she pleaded. “Why have
you gone cold to me?” But she pleaded with a porcelain idol in a dark
mountain temple. Her lands still lay in his like lilies in the hands
of an image. She tore them away, and took hold of the window-sill and
bowed her head into them and sobbed, until the fear of the universe
that had turned mercilessly against her silenced even her sobbing with
its formidable cold. Then there was a movement on the still face of
the image; the god put out a ray of protection against the terror that
threatened to overwhelm her, but he left her without refuge from her
grief and dismay. She was to face that, he seemed cruelly to determine,
unaided.
After a time he touched her on the shoulder and beckoned her to follow
him. She went after him into the twilight garden behind the temple, and
there he plucked a peach from a little tree and bade her eat it. “This
fruit,” he said, “is only for the favoured of God when they have become
fitted to endure deep experiences.”
Saying this he walked away, and she followed him across the torrent,
homeward through rain that beat her now and loved her no more. He held
his face from her. Once, indeed, he turned to her suddenly, and she
seemed, almost against credence, to see an expression of suffering.
But before it had gained a hold even on her memory it was gone, and he
strode on again.
42