Part 11

Soon they were all out on the Lake in a ceremonial barge, towing a cluster of painted boats, and the island became a dark complex in the moonlight, illuminated by the dying reflection of a farewell rocket that shot up from the point. In answer Yuan lit a score of lanterns—orange, violet, and brown—swaying moons that cast unearthly reflections in the Lake. But there was silence among the visitors, a certain uneasiness, because of the relation that had arisen as between Lychnis and Yuan and as between those two and the rest.

But Lord Sombrewater would not permit any breach of etiquette, and presently there was a murmur of talk under the ochre moon as the barge swished slowly through dark red lilies towards the distant sources of the Lake, where they were to picnic by the waterfalls. Two or three of the Chinese girls perched like finches on their favourite, their amusing Quentin, and soon enough there was plenty of laughter at his incomprehensible jokes. Ambrose, sitting beside Frew-Gaff, took opportunity to observe that there was no cause for any reasonable anxiety.

“I suppose Sombrewater is right,” replied Sir Richard. “It is not that I suspect Lychnis for a moment of folly, as you know; but in this world we must be ready to hear of strange things. I know it; but really, if we were told, one day, of a marriage with this Oriental (who exerts an extraordinary fascination, I admit), I should have the creeps. I somehow cannot tolerate the thought of a union between an English girl—a girl like Lychnis—and him.”

The thoughts that arise in the brain, Ambrose observed to himself, are governed, like economic men, by a master of whom they are not aware.

“I have been compelled to give Ruby the same freedom of movement,” added Sir Richard. “She is quite capable, I am sure, of looking after herself. A very sensible girl. We shall have no surprises from her.”

“And as to Sprot?” queried Ambrose.

“He refuses to go.”

“Lychnis has spoken to Yuan.”

“I wonder what Yuan will do.”

Ambrose looked at Sprot, who was showing a certain defiant and stupid courage in face of the danger of staying, which he preferred to the danger of going away. Appositely they passed three white pelicans on an islet. They had monstrous beaks, those pelicans, the creation of Yuan. And Ambrose wondered, with Sir Richard, what Yuan would do.

When they came to the waterfalls among the high rocks at the Lake’s source the moon was shining into the night-sombre valley, and they disembarked and climbed and spread supper in face of the golden and shadowy scene, and the murmur of their talk was subdued to the steady diapason of the main torrent that poured from the crags, not dissonant with the peace and ordered serenity of the landscape. Nothing moved. Far off the island slept, small and brooding. A spirit of peace fell on them all.

“You are philosophic in great comfort here,” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are civilized,” Yuan mildly replied. “It is not philosophy to evolve noble and consolatory systems, or systems of despair, among misery and ruin. Those who require to perform their meditations among desolations or desert wastes are merely unable to cope with the claims of a domestic environment. Contemplation is an activity that can only be pursued by people who have mastered Nature. It is only then that pure reality can be seen. In all other circumstances thought is conditioned by the actualities of being, and is directed towards the problem of evil or some antithetic good. Here we have so wrought that we are free to take part in the experience of a reality that is, as it were, behind. Our environment does not hinder us; our bodies claim no attention; we forget ourselves; we cease to be, and what is everlasting rushes in to fill the place of what was.”

“You seek annihilation,” murmured Blackwood.

“Seek your big toe!” replied Wang, going to the foot of the matter with characteristic efficiency. Indeed, as he lifted his right eyelid, he seemed to emit a trickle of some elemental force that could have dried up the cataract. “In seeking death, you seek what does not exist.”

“Perhaps I have been wrong,” sadly admitted Blackwood. “I must seek, I see now, for some deeper life.”

“Seek your eyebrows!” retorted Wang. “In seeking life, you seek also what does not exist.”

“Then what on earth is a man who is all wrong with the world to do?”

Wang opened him with the blade of insight. “You do not get rid of desire by sitting on it. That is what your thoughts of annihilation are—desire gone to mildew. Only they think in terms of annihilation who are extremely conscious of self. Abandon your methods. Desire neither life nor death, and eat red meat.”

“I fear I have sadly misinterpreted the wisdom of the Sages,” Blackwood faltered, and actually the moon glowed in a tear on his cheek.

“This is the beginning, and only the beginning, of wisdom,” replied Wang. “Retrace your steps, give rein to the passions of a man, and in ten years’ time you may take some gentle exercise in self-forgetfulness.” With this somewhat paradoxical statement he seemed to close himself to all outside influence, and the spray of the moonlit cascade gradually wetted his old bald head.

“It seems likely,” remarked Sir Richard, “that Hsiao will presently be altogether forgetful of his body, since the goblet in his hand contains about a pint and a half of your really very powerful and delicious wine, and that is the third I have seen him consume.”

“In the days when Hsiao thought in terms of good and evil, of restraint and excess, he used to be very sick,” Yuan replied. “Rid the mind of purely relative distinctions between drunk and sober, and you will not be troubled with the gout.”

“Thank you for that recipe,” said Quentin.

“Wang Li does not take wine, I notice,” said Lord Sombrewater.

“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.