Part 10

They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there. She had a curious sensation, she told Ambrose, as Yuan helped her down from the machine. It was strange, she said, to put her hand into his foreign hand. (No doubt the being so much with Ambrose, the perpetual comradeship that was between them, had trained her to note things.) Pleasant? Unpleasant? Not altogether unpleasant. Some slight antipathy, the diarist supposes. Certainly she forgot the sensation at once as they made their way into the darkness, the thrilling terror of the deep forest. She had no objection at all to the envelopment of her person by his cloak of understanding. If she had any sort of antipathy to his flesh, she had none whatever to his mind. He walked the forest like some shepherd of tigers. The snakes and insects let pass one of their kind, startled only by the shadow that followed him, bright-eyed and staring. They were mounting, and presently, when they had crossed the spine of the hill, the ground fell again slightly, only to mount beyond them in wave after wave of forest until the further waves had a white ridge, and far off, gleaming in outer space, were the snow-petals, the sacred lilies of ice.

Lychnis gasped. “I’m not sure—I think I’m afraid. They are so huge, so cold.” Fear of the mountains had entered her, and with it a host of other fears. She began to look round anxiously, to shrink. He was her only refuge from fear, and she shrank from him, too. Looking at her, she felt he divined the whole secret of her.

“You are afraid now?” he asked. “It’s natural. Fear must come in before it can be cast out. One must be conscious before one is unconscious. Sit down with your back to a tree.” He prevented, in some way, her impulse to look down in case a snake was coiled where she was to sit.

She obeyed him. He sat down opposite, with his back to a tree, and drew from his garment a small sort of flute and played. She found presently, as she listened to his slow, meditative theme, that she had forgotten her fear of the mountains. She began to gaze at them, seeking to become conscious of them, to shape the vague and profound emotion that they gave rise to, and express it. “Eternity,” she said. “They are eternal.”

“On the contrary,” he replied. “In a little while they will have gone, and an ocean perhaps will flow there.”

“Then it is I that am eternal, and the mountains made me remember.”

“Eternity is in you, but you are not eternal.”

Swiftly a thought of old Wang Li came to her mind.

“The truth that can be stated is not truth,” she shot at him.

He smiled. “The truth can be played with the flute, though. Listen.”

It was so, she thought, hearing something behind the notes he played that was like the mountains, but with no terror. And she saw without shrinking that the glittering eyes of fierce beasts were gazing steadfastly from the darkness, and tenderer creatures were near them. Then a python swayed down his head from the branch of a tree close by, and she put out her orchid-hand and touched the ivory skin. All that she remembered afterwards, for at the time she was not conscious of python, tiger, or deer; only of that which sounded from Yuan’s flute, that sang, as she put it, to itself in her and in the beasts, the intoxicating godhead that remains when ice vanishes, music is not listened to, and spirit itself has disappeared into nothing.

But afterwards, when the spell of the singing flute had lifted, she came to the conclusion that the experience of sublimity is unnecessarily serious. “I should prefer something suaver,” she told Ambrose, “more restrained—the god without the intoxication.”

30

Lychnis told Ambrose that the coldness of her reception, when she came back next morning, was a surprise to her. “I was only thinking and thinking of what I had seen and done in the night, of how I felt about Yuan,” she said, “and to find all that anger was horrible. There has been a change. Sir Richard frowns at me. Sprot is delighted, the little beast, because he can impute something to me. Fulke hates me. I prefer it. But our party is breaking up, and it is not like it used to be. I can’t help it. They have no business to interfere when I am going through with an experience.” Her anger rose. “They shall stay here until I have finished with it, or I will stay here alone, or with you. You will never be against me?”

He saw that her mind was in tumult, but by no means altogether because of the trouble she had got into with her father and the others. In any case she had an inextinguishable obstinacy. It appears that she had come back alone across the Lake in a boat, pre-occupied, lovely with the flush of her thoughts, only to find herself when she stepped on shore among grave and resentful faces. Her father was indoors. “Naturally,” she said, “he would never question me before all the others. He and I have always had our quarrels in private.” Ruby, too, was indoors.

It was the incredible Sprot, almost dancing with the pleasure of his accusing thoughts, who put the question: “Where have you been?”

She looked round at Fulke, in her eyes a command that Sprot should 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.