Part 12

At that moment, indeed, if Terence wanted Ireland, Lychnis wanted England. Hypnotized by the wheeling of the swifts over the elms, she had seen her home, and the pull at her was agonizing. The elm-clump beyond the sea of bamboo was an island of the familiar in a sea of strangeness. She suffered an intolerable desire for England, for the Georgian house, for the tennis-lawns, the stables, the cornfields. Her nerves stormed for the satisfaction that those old habits could give, and her more complex desire for the undefined satisfaction that she was pursuing in the Peach-blossom Valley all but suffered shipwreck. But she gave no hint of this to the poet. He was friendly to her, but because he loved her she must put him far away, increasing her isolation. They sat in stillness and silence while the blazing summer sun sank down the afternoon sky and the swifts mounted and swerved and flickered high up over the elms.

37

At evening, when the sky was a flaming garden in the glass of the Lake, Ambrose and Lychnis sat side by side in a punt at a distant part of the shore, quietly fishing. Their punt was moored by two poles. Behind them a wall of reeds; before them the green reflection; a step beyond it the sky mirrored in an abyss. They were fishing for pike, perch and the like.

“Yes, it had been decided to return,” he replied to a question, “until Sprot disappeared. It is not known whether he went back to the _Floating Leaf_ or whether—— Do you, perhaps, know what has become of him?”

“I haven’t a notion.” She hooked a gudgeon of suitable size through the appropriate membrane and cast her line. “Until it is known, I suppose, my father will stay on. I mean, he wouldn’t desert even Sprot. In any case I do not think he will go back just yet.”

Ambrose lifted his eyes for a moment from his float to glance at her—a reed-fairy with amber robe and amber hair, steadily holding her rod with slender hands, frowning at the float that bobbed in the ripples. She was a novice at fishing. It was certainly accurate to describe her as a most lovely young woman. The meaning of her words would no doubt be given presently. She had clearly brought him here to deliver it.

“They can’t bear it any more because Hsiao’s death doesn’t make any difference to Yuan and Wang. Why, Ambrose?”

“You know why. You have grasped the principle. They cherish the personality, and cannot endure the indifference to personality that Yuan and Wang display.”

“Yes,” she responded; “I do know. They cannot bear to think that they are of no more importance than a grain of dust, or a slug, or a tomato. What do you think about personality?”

“The strange thing about it is,” he pointed out, “that Wang and Yuan, who ignore it, have more of it. It is a strange truth. But we understand—do we not?—that the personality is not their own. They merely contain, as it were, something cosmical, something that streams and emanates from them.”

“It has the effect, merely, of personality,” she observed. “But it is very fascinating.”

“You find it so?”

“My float has gone.” It had disappeared in the clouds that seemed to drift under it.

“Don’t strike for a few seconds,” he put in. “It’s pike. They run off with the bait and begin to swallow it afterwards. Now!”

She struck.

“Don’t pull,” he continued. “Hold gently when you can.”

“I feel it,” she gasped. “I’m in communication. It’s wonderful to feel the weight of something in a world you can’t see.”

By a method of her own the fish was got into the boat. “It’s a pike,” said Ambrose, “but with improvements of Yuan’s.”

“Yes, I find Yuan fascinating,” she continued, when she had cast her line again.

“You are in love with him?”

“Must you put it in the diary? If he were a figure on a vase ... if he would behave as such after marriage ... I don’t know if I am in love. That’s what I have to find out. I couldn’t go away without finding out, could I? I must find out. Nothing else matters, and that is the sole reason why I am making so much trouble—not intellectual curiosity, or friendship, or anything like that, but simply an unanswerable desire to understand what is happening to me. At present it’s like this—I can’t do without him. I feel I must always be in his presence, watching him, hearing him. Is that love?”

“It is foolish,” said Ambrose, “to ask ourselves ‘Is she in love?’ We have no definition of love. We do not know what it is. This is the only question we need put, in the case before us: ‘Is your desire towards him strong enough, and more especially single enough, to decide you to make an experiment with him that would create a situation complex enough to be awkward from the point of view of some of the parties less intimately, but to an important extent, concerned?’”

“Yes, that is the question we ought to put,” she agreed. “The answer is——”

But he was momentarily engaged in pulling a fine red perch of about six pounds out of the water. He landed it, and they bent over the tank, to watch it swimming about in company with her improved pike.

“The answer,” she resumed, gazing at his image in the tank, “is that she doesn’t know, but she has made up her mind that the only way to find out is to live in conditions similar to those which would obtain if the whole experiment were in hand, and with this object she proposes to accept an invitation extended to her some time back and live on the island for a little while in close company with Wang and Yuan, sharing quarters with two or three of the Chinese girls. Is that the kind of answer you like? The kind of sentence, I should say.” They left the tank and went back to their rods. Brown shadows of night were now lurking in the luxuriant summer foliage of the valley.

“At any rate it leaves me clear as to your meaning.” He fitted out his hook with a fresh gudgeon. “You intend to pursue your experience, if necessary to the last conclusion?”

“Well—nobody could blame me if I did.”

“Nobody could, but plenty would. It is the custom to blame people who put things to the test for themselves.”

“You would not blame me?”

“Praise and blame do seem so profoundly irrelevant. Was that a bite? No. It is getting too dark to see. The chief point is that at present you are not sure. You will go near the terrible fruit of knowledge, but will you pluck it?”

“You see inside of me, Ambrose. I like it. Yes, there is perhaps something I cannot get over. I don’t know if I loathe that, or whether I like it. Perhaps you can tell me which. Or ... or what it would be like ... if something would make it ... easy.”

Her speech did not often falter. This little hard grain of knowledge in regard to physical facts she still hesitated to put to the test of experience. The unilluminated fact discomposed her.

“That statement you were to prepare for me...?”

He smiled to himself in the gathering brown darkness. “I am afraid it 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.”