Part 3

What was she to say? With his hands on hers it was a union of strength which put the past before both like an open book. She remembered all the dreams now. Impossible to tell them here—they were so many, like and unlike, shaken shifting jewels in a kaleidoscope held in some unseen hand. But jewels. They sat a long time in this way, rapt in wordless memories, their eyes absorbing each other—the strangest reunion. When speech came it brought rapture which needed little explanation. They bathed in wonder as in clear water, they flung the sparkle of it over their heads and glittered to each other in its radiance. When had such a miracle been wrought for any two people in all the world? The dreams of the visionary were actual for them and heaven and earth instinct with miracle.

“When we are married—when we pass our lives utterly together the bond will be stronger,” he said, kissing her hand passionately two hours later. “We shall be awake with reason and intellect as well as vision to help our work, we shall do such things as the world has never dreamed, prove that miracle is the daily bread of those who know. Two halves of a perfect whole made one forever and ever. You see?”

He looked at her a moment with shining eyes and added, “The wise will come to us for wisdom, the poets for beauty, and we shall make our meeting-places the shrines of a new worship.”

Beatrice Veronica agreed with every pulse of her blood. The Great Adventure, and together!—what bliss could equal that marvel?

They were together perpetually, and surely human happiness was never greater than that of these two adventurers with the blue capes of Wonderland in sight at last over leagues of perilous seas. In another image, their caravan halted outside the gates of Paradise, and in a short few weeks those gates would swing open for them and, closing, shut out Fate.

But she did not dream of Martin Welland now, nor he of her. The discovery and all it involved was so thrilling that it brought every emotion to the surface as blood flushes the face when the heart beats violently. The inner centres were depleted.

They were married and Paradise was at hand, but for a while the happy business of settling their life engrossed them. It would be better to live in Canada and make long delightful visits to the Orient to refill the cisterns of marvel, they thought. A room for mutual work must be plotted in the bungalow; then there was the anxious question of a southern aspect. Then it was built, and it became a debatable decision whether some of the pines must fall to enlarge the vista to the sea. Friends rallied about her on the news of the marriage, and rejoiced to see the irradiation of Beatrice Veronica’s pale face. Then they must be entertained.

Then the endless joyful discussions as to whether the author should still be V. Lydiat or whether collaboration should be admitted. These things and many more filled the happy world they dwelt in.

Can the end be foreseen? They never foresaw it.

The hungry claim of human bliss fixed its roots in the inner soil where the Rosa Mystica had blossomed, and exhausted it for all else. That, at least, is the way in which one endeavours to state the mysterious enervation of the sub-conscious self which had built the stepping-stones between them to the meeting-point.

She went hopefully to her table when they had settled down, and he sat beside her doing his utmost to force the impulse across inches which had made nothing of oceans. It was dead. He could think of nothing but the sweet mist of brown tendrils in the nape of her neck, the pure line from ear to chin, the delights of the day to be. She sat with the poor remnant of his notes before her—for nearly all had been exhausted in the three books—and tried to shape them into V. Lydiat’s clear and sensitive beauty of words. It could not be done. Her eight thousand words marched and deployed heavy-footed as before. They were as unmanageable as mutineers or idiots. There was no life in them.

So it all descended to calmer levels. They slept in each other’s arms, but they never dreamed of each other now. They had really been nearer in their ghostly meeting by the Taj Mahal or in the evil splendours of Govindhar—far nearer, when she wrote and could not cease for joy, than when Martin Welland sat beside her and struggled to find what had flashed like light in the old days. They had to face it at last—V. Lydiat was dead.

It troubled them much for a while, but troubled the world more. The publishers were besieged with questions and entreaties. Finally those also slackened and died off.

V. Lydiat was buried.

They thought that perhaps if they returned to India the dead fire would re-kindle under that ardent sun. But no.

One day, at Benares, standing near the great Monkey Temple of Durga, Martin stopped suddenly, and a light came into his eyes.

“B. V. I’ve just remembered that one of the wisest of the pandits lives near here—a wonderful old fellow called Jadrup Gosein. Let’s go and state the case to him. The wisest man I know.”

They went, Beatrice Veronica ashamed to feel a little uprush of regret at the sacrifice of a part of the wonderful day. Martin knew so much. It was heavenly to go to these places with him, and have them illumined by his research. But they went to the pandit.

The holy man was seated under the shadow of a great image of Ganesha the Elephant-Headed One, the Giver of Counsel, and when they sat themselves before him at a measured distance the case was stated.

There was a long pause—a deep silence filled with hot sunshine smelling of marigolds, and the patter of bare feet on sun-baked floors, as curious quick eyes watched the conclave from afar.

Jadrup Gosein meditated deeply, then raised his serene dark face upon them with the dim look that peers from the very recesses of being. His words, incomprehensible to Beatrice Veronica, had the hollow resonance of a bell, near at hand but softened.

“There was a man long since,” he began, “to whom the high Gods offered in reward of merit, a rose-tree—very small and weak,—a suckling, as it were, among trees, with feeble fibrous root, accessible to all the dangers of drought and sun, and as he stretched his hand doubting, they offered him for choice a rose from the trees of Paradise, crimson and perfumed, its hidden bosom pearled with dew and wafting divine odours. And they said ‘Choose.’ So he said within his soul, ‘The tree may die—who knows the management of its frail roots? But the rose is here, sweeter than sweet, immortal since it grew in Paradise! I choose the rose.’

“And they put it in his hand. And the wise Elephant-Headed One said:

“‘O fool! What is a rose compared to a rose-tree that bears myriads of roses? Also the rose dies in the heat of human hands. The tree lives; a gathered rose is dead.’

“My children, you have chosen the rose. Be content. Yet in another life remember and cling to that which unsevered from the parent tree sends roots into the Now, the Then, and the Future, and blossoms immortally.”

So he dismissed them kindly.

“He means,” said Martin with troubled brow, “that ordinary household happiness shuts a man in from the stars. Do you remember the flute of Pan, B. V.? He tore the reed from the river and massacred it as a reed to make it a music-bearer for the Gods.

“The true Gods sigh for the cost and pain, For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds in the river.”

“But we are so happy!” she whispered, clinging against him to feel the warmth of his love. “The outer spaces are cold, cold. I don’t regret V. Lydiat. I have you. The reeds were happier in the river.”

Martin Welland sighed.

“You had both,” he said. “You have only me now.”

But that regret also slipped away. They forgot. It all faded into the light of common day and they were extremely happy.

The two could never account for the way in which they had come together in that dream-land of theirs. They had lost the clue of the mystery once and for all.

Jadrup Gosein could have told them, but it never occurred to them to ask him. There are however many lives and the Gods have a long patience.

THE SEA OF LILIES A STORY OF CHINA

THE SEA OF LILIES

A STORY OF CHINA

I had come down from the mountain fastnesses of my home in Kashmir on pilgrimage to a certain island off the coast of China. A long, long pilgrimage, but necessary; for, with a Buddhist monk attached to the monastery of Kan-lu-ssu in the hills of North China, I was to collect certain information from the libraries and scholars of two famous monasteries on the island of Puto. I, Lancelot Dunbar, am known to the monks of the northern monastery of Kan-lu-ssu by the friendly title of “Brother of the Pen,” and it is my delightful lot to labour abundantly among the strange and wonderful stores of ancient Buddhist and historic knowledge contained in some of the many monastic libraries scattered up and down India, China and Ceylon. It follows that my wife and I own two homes.

One is a little deserted monastery in the Western Hills, in China, known as “First Gate of Heaven,” and so beautiful that the name might have grown about it like the moss on its tiled roofs. Following the bigger monasteries, it has its quiet courtyard, its lotus-pool and the peaked roofs with their outward, upturned sweep. The pines crowd upon us, and the cloud-dragons of rain and wind play in their uncouth sport among the peaks and fill our streams with singing, glittering water.

Our other home is a red-pine hut near the Liderwat in Kashmir. The beauty of it, the warm homeliness set amid the cold magnificence of the hills and immeasurable forests, no tongue can tell. The hut is very large and low, divided into our own rooms and the guest-rooms, with hospitable fireplaces for fragrant pine-logs and floors strewn with rugs brought by yak and pony down the wild tracks from Yarkand and Leh. Beautiful rooms, as I think—the windows looking out into the pines and the endless ways that lead to romance and vision.

Which home is the more beautiful I cannot say. We have never known, and our friends give no help; for some choose one and some the other. One day I shall write of our life in Kashmir, the clean, beautiful enchantment of it, the journeyings into the mountains—but to-day I must recall myself to the pilgrimage to Puto.

It is an island off the coast of China, as I said before, most holy to the Buddhists of the Far East, dear to all who know it in its beauty and religious peace and the lovely legends that cling about it, a place of purification of the heart and of a serenity that the true pilgrim may hope to carry away with him as the crowning of his toil and prayer. It is one of the Chusan Archipelago and is separated from the large island of Chusan by a stretch of water known as the “Sea of Lilies.” And it is not very far distant from the hybrid dissipations of Shanghai and the swarming streets of Ningpo and can be reached from either. Yet it is as far removed from their hard realities as if it were built on floating clouds and lit by other dawns than ours.

Shanghai concerns itself, I am told, with that ancient and universally respected Trinity of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I know little of it myself and accept the testimony of friends, and especially of one who knew it well. “I just think,” he said with conviction, “that if nothing happens to Shanghai, Sodom and Gomorrah were very unfairly dealt with.”

So I met my friend Shan Tao in Ningpo, and we set sail together. The island of Puto, at all events, concerns itself with a very different Trinity from that of Shanghai. For the deity of Puto is the Supreme, enthroned in eternal light, and on his right hand stands Wisdom and on his left, Love. The patron saint of this island is Kwan-yin (the Kwannon of Japan), the incarnation of divine love and pity, she who has refused to enter paradise, so that, remaining on this sad earth, she may be attentive to the tears and prayers of humanity and depart from it only when the Starry Gates have closed behind the last sinner and sorrow and sighing have fled away like clouds melting into the golden calms of sunset. Yet when I say “she,” I limit the power of this mighty _Bodhisattva_, or _Pusa_, as Buddhas-to-be are called in India and China. For that pure essence is far above all limitations of sex and, uniting in itself the perfection of both, may be manifested as either, according to need and opportunity. Be that as it may, Puto is the holiest, most immediate home of Kwan-yin, and her influence spreads far beyond its shores and makes the very sea that surrounds it sacred. Therefore it is to this day the Sea of Lilies.

For when the Dwarf-men, the Japanese, came storming down on the island from Hangchow long ago and carried off a part of the sacred relics, they woke in the dawn to find their ship moving slower and slower and finally rocking like a ship asleep in what seemed a vast meadow of lilies. Thick as snow about them lay the ivory chalices with golden stamens; thick as the coiling of snakes innumerable were the long piped and knotted stems, with the great prone leaves. Neither oar nor sail could move the ship; for the mysterious lilies, white and silent, that had sprung up from the depths in a night held it as if with chains. And then comprehension entered the hearts of the Dwarfs, and, taking hurried counsel, they put the ship about and headed for the sacred island once more. As they did so, a soft wind like the waft of a passing garment breathed on the surface of the sea, the ivory chalices closed and the crystal lymph flowed over them, and, where the leagues of blossom had spread, were now only the foam-flowers of the waste ocean. So the treasures were restored to Puto, and, when the story was told to the monks, they adored the Heavenly Lady who guards her own.

Lest it be said that the burdened consciences of the Dwarfs misled them into a dream, let the story be told of Wang Kuei, a haughty official who was sent on his Emperor’s behalf to do reverence at the shrines of Puto and did it grudgingly and with a pride that ill became him. So, when his ship set sail from the island and he sat in glory on deck, glad at heart that his service was over, suddenly her swift course was stayed. Behold, in the moonlight, the meadows of ocean had bloomed into innumerable lilies, and there was no sea-track between them, no glimmer of water in the interstices of the paving-leaves, and the ship was a prisoner of beauty! Then the story of the Dwarfs rushed into his soul. In haste he prostrated himself on the deck with his face toward the island and prayed for pardon as he had never yet prayed, and the Heavenly Lady heard him and the lilies were resumed into her pure being. The man of pride returned to Puto and, doing homage of the humblest, went back in security to his Emperor.

But who can tell the beauty of Puto, looking forth on its little sisters of the archipelago with the serenity of an elder who has attained? We put up in one of the cells allotted to pilgrims in a monastery among the hills overlooking the Sea of Lilies. Surely, I think, a lovelier place could not be. The little ways wind about the island, past great rocks sculptured with holy figures and groves of trees that climb the hills to the tiled roofs of the many temples and monasteries. And wild and sweet on the hills grows the gardenia, whence the island has its name of “White Flower.” The sunny sweetness of its perfume recalled to me the far-away, wild daphne bushes of Mount Abu in Rajputana, near the marvellous white temples of Dilwara, temples of another, yet not unallied, faith. It is easy to tell when the gods go by—it can never be common air again, but sweet, sweet unutterably.

All day I trod the bays on sand fine as powdered gold or wandered among the flowers, taking notes for my book at the various temples and talking with the monks and such hermits as are not under the vow of silence. When they found I was at work for Kan-lu-ssu in the hills, they opened their hearts and told me many things.

I suppose it is difficult for the western mind to comprehend the impulses that send a man to dwell in the solitudes of Puto, girdled with its miraculous sea, there to let the years slip from him like a vesture, unheeded, unregretted—but to me it is easy. Let me tell the story of one of these monks, gathered from his own lips and told where a ravine breaks down to the sands of a little bay; where the small waves fall in a lulling monotone, a fitting burden to quiet words softly spoken as the shadows lengthened to the hour of rest. He was named in religion “High Illumination.” His name in the world I cannot tell.

His father had been a farmer in Anhui, a well-to-do man for his class. There were two sons, and my friend was the younger. His father, of whom he spoke with deep reverence, had the utmost confidence in the elder brother. In dying, he expressed only the desire that the elder brother would make a just division with the younger of all the possessions he was leaving, and so departed.

“And I was content,” said High Illumination, “knowing my father’s wisdom and believing that his wish, uttered in the presence of us both, would be as binding upon my honoured brother as an imperial command. Therefore, when all observances of departure had been completed and the proper time came, I expected my share in peace, and the more so since my good father had provided for my marriage with a beautiful maiden, the daughter of a lifelong friend. But that was not to be.

“And still my brother said nothing; all the duties of the seasons proceeded and I worked and helped him, expecting daily that he would speak.

“Then at last in great astonishment I ventured this: ‘Honoured Elder Brother, the will of our just father is still unfulfilled. Should we not proceed in this matter?’

“And he, with anger and a reddened face: ‘What is this discontent? Do you not share the land where you labour upon it? What more would you have?’

“So, very temperately and courteously, I said: ‘Honoured Elder Brother, I work but as a hired man who has no hire. I have not so much as a _cash_ in my pocket to buy me the least of pleasures or needs. I have but my food, and that, as I think, my elder sister [the brother’s wife] grudges me. Such certainly was not the intention of our just father.’

“Then, his face distorted with rage, he replied, ‘Have your way, and if it bring bitterness and disturbance of spirit, then thank yourself for your greed!’”

High Illumination paused a moment as if in memory.

“Greed!” I said indignantly. “My friend, you were wronged and cruelly. You could in a court of law have compelled him to do you justice.”

“Yet he was right: for me it was greed,” said High Illumination, with a smile of quiet humour. “I had thought of it night and day, till it had soured my soul. But the next day at dawn my brother called to me with anger in his voice and said: ‘The division is now made. Come and see.’

“So we passed along through the dewy dawn-gold in silence, past his fields of budding rice and millet prosperously green, and at last we came to a great stretch of pebbles and water-springs where nothing would grow, no, not even a blade of grass. The place had come to my father from many ancestors, and none could either use or sell its barrenness.

“And there it lay, grey and hard in the morning gold, and my brother, pointing, said: ‘Take it; the division is made. And when you store your plentiful rice, thank my generosity.’ And, turning, he left me and went back to his prosperity, laughing.”

“It was a devil’s deed,” I said. “Surely he laid up for himself a black _karma_ in so doing.”

High Illumination shook his head slowly. “Who can judge the karma of another? Daily did I pray that my brother’s feet might be set in the way of peace, and I had assurance that thus and no otherwise it should be. But hear the story and its loveliness.

“So I sat nearly all day, staring at the pebbles. There was not even a yard of the ground that spade and hoe could conquer, and I knew myself vanquished. Then in the evening I rose and went to a neighbour and said, ‘I beseech you to find me work; for I must eat or die.’ He gave me work and the wage was my food only; for he was bone-poor. So I lived for two years, and, if I passed my brother, he would jeer at my rags and leanness.

“Now, as I went by my desolate heritage one day, I saw that between the pebbles were pushing little bright green shoots, strong and hardy, thrusting the small stones aside to make room for their impatience. The tender greenness pleased me. It was like warmth and sunshine to see the life of it, and I wondered what manner of growth could find food among the stones. For a while I could not go that way, but, when I went again, behold a thing most beautiful, for all the plants were covered with buds like pearls!

“My brother, hear a marvel. One day, before ever I came in sight of it, a sweet perfume, warm with the sun, exhaling the very breath of paradise, surrounded me. When I approached, the desert had blossomed abundantly. I could not see the stones; they were covered with lilies, white lilies, each with a gold cup, set in ivory, to hold the incense-offering to the sun. What could I say, what think in beholding this miracle of loveliness? I sat beside them to watch what they would do, and a light breeze moved the flowers like bells upon the stems, and there was a going in the leaves of them as though the hem of an unseen garment trailed among them. And they were mine.”

“They had never grown there before?” I asked.

“No man of those parts had seen the like; nor I myself. Every day, when my work was done, I went to look at them and sat to see their beauty of ivory and gold. And once, as I sat, the rich official, Chung Ching-yu, rode by. Pausing in astonishment, he bought a handful of the flowers, giving me the first money I had seen for a year, and he told me to gather the bulbs in due season and receive from him in return their weight in silver. And what he said ran on to other rich men and to men not rich, in the city of Ningpo, and they came bidding against one another for the bulbs to sell to the great and to send in ships to strange countries, until I who had been poor scarce knew how to store my riches. And I saw what my lilies loved and put for them more stones and water, and the next year they were a wilderness of sweets, where all the bees of the world came to gather nectar.

“But I knew indeed whence they came, since such beauty could not be of earth, and I withdrew myself to a lonely place and addressed my prayer to Kwan-yin, who had thus blessed my poverty, and I said: ‘O Adorable, whose ears are open ever to the cry of the oppressed, whose beautiful eyes are pitiful to sorrow, I bless thee for this compassion. And because I dread the love of riches, and the flowers and not money, are to me my soul, give me grace so to receive the mercy of thy gift that it may befit thy greatness and my littleness.’ Even as I said the words, a thought came to me, and I went to find my brother, whom I had not seen for long days.

“Now, when he saw me come, his face darkened with rage, and he said: ‘Are you come to taunt me because of my folly, in that I gave the best of all the land to your idleness, or to thank me for the gold it has heaped upon you? Speak out; for the lucky man may speak.’