Part 14

The fountains of Wang’s mirth were too much for him. His bleached and shrunken old body could hardly contain the elemental upwelling. The universe itself laughed at her in his old eyes as it had rained in Yuan’s. “Let us walk,” he gasped; “let us go home.” He wiped tears from his cheeks. Then once more the beauty of it overwhelmed him. “She can never love again!” He held his sides.

“Well,” she expostulated, “there is nobody. I could not love my father or my old friend Ambrose. The rest bore me. I do not want love. I have this queer new pleasure in me instead.”

They scrambled down the valleys, he subject to recurrent fits of amusement. She could not withstand him, and at last allowed herself to regard Yuan’s seriousness and her own bewilderment as a joke. “What has come to me?” she asked the old Sage.

“Death,” he answered.

Was this true? She felt as one who recognizes that a tide is about to seize and drown her.

“If not dead, you are dying,” he continued. “Did not Yuan give you the mystic peach that shrivels the soul and leaves a house for another inhabitant?”

“But you said I am to love,” she protested, displaying an agitation that came uppermost in spite of herself, an agitation that did not really seem to belong to her. “How can I love when I am dead and have no desire?”

“Cannot the immortal take pleasure in love—in compelling lips, in hands that awaken, in...?” In so-and-so and in so-and-so. The old man made her blush with his account of the delights of the senses.

“But you,” she interpolated—“you are a Sage ... you are above desire....”

“A Sage is not necessarily a drivelling idiot,” he replied. “I am very old. It is more than a hundred years since I was interested in what may interest a younger man, and the immortal in-dweller has other objects with me. But there was a time.... The unnameable, when he takes the place of the self, has no objection whatever to making use of the furniture. But he is master of desire.”

“But why did I not stay with Yuan and meditate with him for ever?”

“Because you are a woman and have more sense. Oh, the seriousness of these young men! He will get over it, as I did. But he has done his duty.”

“But why did he give me the peach?” She had so many questions to ask.

“The immediate occasion was your firmness of heart in following the strange beckonings of the imagination. In consequence you have lost your soul and gained the no-soul. This is immortality. Regard yourself as one of the lucky ones of the world, for infinity now lives in you. Joy and sorrow will be lost in transcending experience. None can withstand the silent and invisible force that possesses you, and nobody can take it away. Accept what has happened to you, young woman. Regard yourself as being dead to the world, and at the same time, when your lover kisses that coral mouth, bite his lip with your little teeth.”

They had come to the shore of the Lake, and he took her back to the island in his boat. She gave herself to the tide of immortality that was flowing into her throat, choking the life in her. She had become very serious now, but suddenly he looked up and said: “What fools we are to speak what cannot be spoken, imagining that what we say corresponds with reality!” His ironical laughter rang out over the Lake.

44

Once more Ambrose is sitting with Lychnis on the verandah. It is a warm autumn afternoon, and they are taking pleasure in the sunset glory of aster, dahlia and chrysanthemum that surrounds the Pavilion, and in the golden cloud-rack of leaves that now drifts on the lawn.

She came back, he tells us, so self-possessed, this once moody and relentless fairy. She had a certain calm dignity, unself-conscious and convincing—because, as Wang told her, she had lost her self in what is more authoritative than self; she had opened the way and permitted in herself the play of forces that brook no questioning, at once terrible and lovely.

She was perched on the rail of the verandah, clinging to a post, in a fit of meditation, and sometimes a leaf drifted against her cheek or shoulder.

“I realize now,” she said, “how completely I had forgotten you all. I do really think you had passed—all of you—utterly out of my mind. It is surprising. It would have been quite easy never to see you—any of you—again.”

“So loosely,” remarked Ambrose, “are people bound to one another! It is true—many men might be one’s father, or one’s husband. It is a habit formed accidentally.”

“I find it odd that my lot should have fallen with just you and the others.”

“You do not find it disturbing that human relationships should be so fluid, sentiment so flimsy, and the universe so heedless?”

“I find it beautiful. I should hate the world, now, if it were not all death and change. I have no use for anything that is not inexorable. I like the universe to stare pitilessly—with eyes resembling Yuan’s. It is only the cold and the passionless that I can admire. Ambrose, fancy a universe all mushy with love, like an over-ripe pear!”

“Excellent!” Ambrose remembers being conscious of enthusiasm in his voice, more surprisingly of a flush on the flower-texture of her face.

“Yuan helped me to enter the mind of tiger and eagle, to become the tiger and the eagle, and I found in them what I now find in myself, something I can’t describe—something immense. I have been a tree, too, you know, and a lotus, and a beetle. What I found in all of them Yuan has now become. He has given himself entirely to the contemplation of it in its nakedness, untransformed into bird, or mountain, or man. I did not want to follow his example, I suppose, because there are things I may find amusing in the world. Wang says that, having found the kingdom of the unnameable, the world has been given to me as well, and this is in order. But I think I have still just a little farther to go. The peach hasn’t quite done its work, and when I’m entirely dead perhaps I shall be like Yuan.”

Lord Sombrewater came along the verandah and sat down beside Ambrose. His eye was more pheasant-like than ever. He was glum. Lychnis had given him the outline of her story, and informed him of her willingness to go where he liked, but she had not given him certain information. He could have got it with a question, but he did not care at any time to get his information by direct questioning, and this was a question somewhat difficult to put.

Ambrose replied to her thoughts.

“There are people,” he observed, “so securely in alliance with our friend Yuan’s unnameable that they do not fear to step down into the world and drink deeply of its pleasures.”

“You, too, have tasted—” she began, and relapsed—refused, swiftly, to meet him in a common experience. “There are so many ways of approaching what it is I desire to say,” she continued, “and no words for it. But it really doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that nothing any longer matters, except the continual experience. One is so at peace.”

“The peace of God,” Ambrose interjected.

“I suppose one must say ‘God.’ But there is a great danger of being misunderstood.”

“This experience,” he observed, “is enjoyed in various forms by many people, yet it is one experience. The truth is one truth, expressed with modifications due to climatic or other circumstances. It is named after the system of Jesus, or Mithra, or Buddha. There is the Holy Ghost, or the intent contemplation; the paradise of Nirvana or the Holy City, with tastefully-jewelled gates—a hundred different expressions of the same thing. There is a form of the experience marketed by priests, another by wine-merchants at twelve and sixpence the bottle, and this has the advantage that it augments the national revenue. But whether the experience in itself has anything at all to do with reality, we are not in a position to decide.”

“I am glad you can laugh at it,” she said, with friendliness. “It is the mark of those elected to salvation that they can laugh at themselves. Those who have known truth laugh a lot—like Wang. I have learnt that.”

“You have learnt a great deal, Lychnis.” Lord Sombrewater entered the conversation. “Does there remain any region of experience which you have not understood?”

Ambrose perceived from her enigmatic smile that she understood her father’s question. She did not seem willing to give an unequivocal answer. Lord Sombrewater had no hesitation in questioning her intimately before him, and it would have been in accordance with her own relation with him to reply plainly. But she did not answer plainly. He noted that there had been some change, and wondered whether he should not seek an opportunity to withdraw.

“There is no region of experience that I have not understood,” she replied.

“Upon exploration, I presume?” queried Lord Sombrewater.

“It is a question whether a thing that has not been physically experienced can be understood,” she murmured.

He turned his head away in swift impatience.

“Hallo! hallo!” A stinging shout travelled to them across the lawn. It was Quentin coming back from an expedition with Fulke Arnott and Ruby. Seeing Lychnis on the verandah, he rushed over the lawn like a bear, leapt the rail, put his arm round her, where she clung to the post, and kissed her full on the lips. Then he drew back and gazed at her, saying reverently: “The Holy Spirit returns. The morning dew is once more seen on the flowers. The lamp of heaven shines, banishing for ever the dissensions of this little band and, as we hope, the bad temper of our host. If you require a husband, command me——” He paused for her reply, and Lord Sombrewater remained still, shading his face with a plump, capable hand. She shook her head, laughing. “Then I will be your virgin for ever,” he exclaimed.

But she looked at him so that he began to laugh, and laughed until he shook the verandah.

“Tell me,” she desired him, “if I answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a plain question, would you believe that I told truth?”

“I should never listen to what you said,” he replied, “but to you speaking. There is no question of believing you. There is that in you, I perceive, that cannot disguise itself with lies. But permit me, once more, before I resign the world. We have not seen that autumn gold-brown hair for so many days, those shadows like mauve asters—or are they heliotrope?—those copper lights, those dahlia-red lips, that delicious cavern, those little white teeth....” He kissed her again. “And now,” prayerfully folding his hands, “to that All which is more than Nothing, that Nothing which is less than Everything.” He looked sideways at her.

“You are a restless man,” she said, smiling. “You have no peace in you.”

Ruby and Fulke Arnott followed on to the verandah, he sheep-faced, she with her radiance a little qualified.

“The wedded pair,” Quentin announced—“at least, not yet wedded in time. A marriage has been imagined, let us say, and will shortly be achieved in matter, between—and so forth. Rejecting Achilles, Venus prefers and elevates the chimpanzee. I am envious. I have no morsel.”

Fulke glowered, powerless to silence him. He would not look in the direction of Lychnis. Ruby, on the whole, tended to behave as if it did not matter what Lychnis had done, since it was Lychnis who had done it, and always provided that Lychnis made no attempt to recapture the affections of Fulke. But her impulses were checked by the somewhat cold behaviour of her father, who presently came out on the verandah.

“Good-afternoon, Lychnis,” he said. “Back again?”

She smiled at him and said nothing.

“To-morrow we depart, early in the morning.” Once more Lord Sombrewater entered the conversation, abruptly. He glanced at his daughter, Ambrose saw, for the effect of his words. She displayed nothing but an infrangible placidity.

“Thank God!” muttered Fulke. “Back to dear, dirty old Europe, with all there is to fight in it. By the tripes of St. Francis——”

“Fulke, dear!” It was Ruby who remonstrated.

“I forgot, darling.” He glanced at Lychnis, and went scarlet. “What I mean is, I long sometimes for the good old fight against the forces of capital....”

Lychnis laughed out—a laugh of pure, satisfying joyousness. “Fulke—my dear Fulke—you are coming to life too, like Quentin. You are all coming to life again. For I must confess,” she explained, “that you had all become a little faded before I went to stay on the Rock. You had lost personality, you know, beside Wang and Yuan.”

“By the foul liver of St. Eno ...” began Fulke. “I’m sorry, my dearest.”

“Well I’m blessed!” exclaimed Sir Richard. He looked uncertainly at Sombrewater, bit his lip, and gravely said his say. “It is reported, Arnold, that there are bandits in the countryside.”

“I am disinclined to remain,” Sombrewater replied. “We must trust to the name of the Dragon. He owes us that, I think. What do you say, Lychnis? I do not desire to force you to go or to stay.”

“Let us go.”

“We are at one, then, on this, at any rate.” He spoke testily. “You had all better begin to pack.”

They departed, except Sir Richard. Lychnis also made as if to go to her room.

“Your room has been changed,” Ambrose had to point out.

She turned, puzzled. “By whose orders?”

“At my request, Lychnis,” said Sir Richard gravely.

“What does this mean, Richard? I had not been told of this.” Lord Sombrewater was sharp.

“I had in mind to save her the inconvenience of the questioning to which Ruby would no doubt subject her.”

“This is not at all kindly done, Richard. You say in effect——” His lordship’s anger was rising, and then he seemed to realize the weakness of his position and turned on his daughter. “For God’s sake, Lychnis, tell us—are you my daughter still, or ... or another man’s wife ... or ... my God! this hurts me ... his mistress!”

Ambrose watched the scene with interest. The dusk was gathering. The questions seemed to flap and flutter against the luminous calm of her spirit like blundering bats. She stood among them smiling a little (though her breast did indeed heave somewhat), and replied: “You compel me to answer a question that seems impertinent. What is it to anyone here what has happened to me while I have been away? But if you place so much importance on the difference between one state and another, and if it hurts you to be kept in suspense, I will tell you—I am a virgin.”

There was silence. Then Sir Richard spoke: “I beg your pardon, Lychnis,” and went into the Pavilion.

When he was gone, her father hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks. “Thank God, my darling, you are still my daughter! You belong to no other man.” He drew back, and looked at her as if to reassure himself. “It is true—quite true—is it not?”

She suffered his kissing and his question, and answered: “Quite true.” Then he, too, went into the house; but whether he felt quite sure that he was secure of her love and sole possessor of her, Ambrose doubts.

Lychnis, on her part, looked at Ambrose with a somewhat dubious smile. “In his business affairs my father has much of the calm of Wang Li. He makes use of impersonal forces, and that is why he is pre-eminent. But in his relations with me he is destroyed by desire. It is odd, is it not? They do not realize, they do not mind, that morally I was Yuan’s mistress. I was prepared”—she spoke to him with a hesitation that was unusual in their talking together—“I was prepared to be his entirely. I did not shirk that, Ambrose. It was only accident that I was not. You understand that, don’t you?”

“In such cases it is so often accident.”

“In such cases.... Am I a case?”

Her eyes were the dusk looking at him, the brown autumn night, the velvety secret of interstellar space, the cold and heedless contemplation of God. He feasted on the beauty of it, when she had gone.

45

The last night in the valley was deep and secret and starry, deep blue with a streak of night-changed green where the bamboo grove was, mysterious with secret processes in grove and torrent, blue and starry like a still painting on a screen. Not far from the Pavilion a stream flowed slow and deep through a tunnel of trees and hanging creeper. Ambrose stood by a gleaming gilded bridge, listening to the rhythm of the water, feeling the close, secret life of the foliage. Over against the living wall of the grove he saw cigar-ends moving in irregular paths, fantastic planets in a dense æther. Over the bamboo flickered a myriad superb fire-insects, creation of Yuan’s. Beyond the grove burned a million gold stars.

The gurgle of the mysterious river in the darkness was flowing sound, hypnotic rhythm, music streaming out in streaks of some foreign colour through the thick and shifting blue substance of the dark night. After some time, he tells us, he became aware that his strange and peaceful meditation now held a different element—a queer thridding, an insect noise coming from within the grove of bamboo. Of a sudden it rose high and clear, and he remembered that it was Lychnis—Lychnis with her lute, playing the thoughts and motions of her spirit. “Lily-blossom of the world!” he murmured to the dim lilies that swayed at his feet. “Cold loveliness of being that buds for a moment of time out of the secrecy and darkness of unbeing!” He worshipped at this living monstrance of the body of God.

Then again he listened intently to the queer realities of spirit that she was creating with form and movement in the night. The plectrum that had made a thridding of crickets now made a whispering of the leaves of the bamboo. Next, solid and clear out of her vision, a sound like the patter of pearls raining on a temple of porcelain. With composure and quiet deliberation she made her lute sing the secret of life of the valley, strength of giant pine, depth and stillness of the lake, high wind among crags; in it dreamed the exaggerated shapes of Yuan, Hsiao and Wang Li. It was there in the grove she sang. Ambrose gazed, as one gazes with the mind into an experience striving to see what is there, as if he should see her at the heart of the grove in a transfiguration. But there obtruded upon his gaze, now used to the darkness, the figures of the seven Sages, listening in their chairs. Had Richard Frew-Gaff ears, he wondered, to hear her turn the stars and all physical reality into voices of ghosts? Did Blackwood receive some whisper of the truth Wang aimed at him? Quentin listened with limbs stretched out in a rigor of emotion. Terence he dimly perceived with hands wrung between his knees, frowning perhaps on some new, queer beauty. Sombrewater had bowed his head in his hand—understanding too fully that he had a strange lost girl for a daughter. Fulke and Ruby, no doubt, were making love among the trees, perhaps out on the starry Lake; perhaps they heard and were afraid.

His mind returned to the lute-player in the grove. Now she was making a music that was icy and terrible. Image of pine, lake, and crag became faint and vanishing. There was nothing human in it, but only a loneliness of Himalayan peaks and a coldness of outer space. It was the vision of Yuan. The coldness descended even on the heart of Ambrose as he was floated near upon the edge of extinction. The starry sky, the lawn, the grove, the bright gilded bridge, swam, and there was nothing solid. Suddenly her plectrum tore the strings with a sound like the rending of silk. There was silence, and out of it there grew a divine laughter.

46

Ambrose gave a pull with his paddle and drove his canoe head-on into the grey and misty margin of an islet. He shivered, for the cold of daybreak was still on the water. He had meant to stop here, at the bend of the Lake, and look finally at the valley and the island, to reflect on the march of time, taste for a due moment an emotion nobler than sadness, as the beloved valley and the rich experience of the summer faded from bright now into dim past. But valley and rock had vanished in morning vapour. There was nothing but an islet glimpsed in a sepia mist, a blur of willow, a crag high overhead in the vapour, a dejected heron brooding on one leg in the shallows.

Idle for a moment, he let his craft drift out from the reeds. Even the Lake itself, he reflected, some current in it, was bearing him away towards the river, towards the hidden Dragon Gorge. He dipped a blade, and paddled slowly across the water, past islets of reed and bamboo that stood out of the mist, looking for some place where a lane in the mist might give him a glimpse of the Valley. Once, indeed, there was a rift, a view of what seemed some part of the Rock. He was like a man seeking in his memory for something familiar and forgotten.

Silently over the water came Lychnis in her white dress, paddling alone, looking steadfastly in front of her. Their boats rasped.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I did not mean to intercept you.”

“It seems to be fated that our paths in life should drift together.” She spoke very coldly, and he admitted to himself that something was gone from their relationship. He cleared his mind—opened it to the possible implications of that change. They came to him.

“The mist is lifting,” he said, and they both looked back over the islet-studded water. The distant Rock, the shore of the Lake with their own mooring-raft of bamboo, a deep grey blur, came into sight like a dream remembered at morning when sleep cannot be regained.

She turned her head steadily away, and the mists closed again, blotting out lake and islet and crag. A voice came from her. “One had pleasant days there.” The blade of her paddle hung, and the voice came from her again: “It is not the same, only remembering.”

She sped her canoe, and he watched her become a blot of white and pale brown, vanishing in grey vapour.

47

Under the leadership, once more, of Such-a-one, the homeward journey began. Sprot had been released from imprisonment on the mountain of meditation. The mists lifted soon after they had entered the Gorge of Dragons; the autumn sunshine was warm; violets were to be seen where lawn or grove came down to the water’s edge, and a memory of early summer lingered among the sombre brown shadows under and about the cliffs. Lychnis would not let them camp in the creek where they had spent a night when they were journeying the other way. The violets were ghosts, and the autumn song of birds was an echo, for it seems that her firmness of heart had left her when they entered the Gorge.

So they went swiftly on, helped by the seaward current. Lord Sombrewater watched Lychnis with anxiety, and Quentin lay in wait, hoping to catch some advantage out of her reaction. But she shunned everyone, and was a fiend to Ruby, who lay in her boat.

Late at night they came to the mouth of the Gorge and pitched their tents (but not where they had pitched them before) and slept. Ambrose, however, preferred to keep watch for any portent that might appear, and at dawn, when he was fishing among the reeds at the deep-flowing mouth of the Gorge, Lychnis came to him, sweet with the morning, flushed with despair.

“It has gone,” she said flatly. “Gone! What shall I do if I am seduced and deserted by my experience that I loved, Ambrose?”

“Do you consider,” he asked, “that you have had the experience of God?”