Part 15

“Do women have the experience of God unless they are in love?” She laughed a little, twisting her fingers among the reeds. “God? It is not a word that means anything. I only had an experience. I don’t know how to describe it, unless you have had it yourself. I had come to see the world, men and trees and mountains, as a varying manifestation of the same substance. I saw that everything was continuous, and the pine and pheasant on the branch were only another form of me. Me, did I say? There was no longer any me. Something else was there, and it gave me joy. It was more wonderful and satisfying than anything I had ever supposed could happen. I felt myself a piece of the universe, no longer in opposition to it, an unhappy little piece of separation. The infinite and inevitable had taken the place of my soul, and now it has left me, and however shall I get it back?”

“Calling this experience, for convenience, the experience of God,” he replied, “one can only reply that God is not to be thought of as a common seducer. Believe me, before long the satisfaction you speak of will again fill your heart. Why, there is no cause for despair. This reaction was to be foreseen!”

Her slender body was enshrined within the radiance of the rising sun in a frame of burning willows; her hair was an aureole of gossamer; but the heart in the midst of her was black. “I cannot feel hope!” she exclaimed. “I think God will forget me. He must have so many friends.”

“A thing not really worth saying,” he replied.

“You are angry with me.” She lifted her face to study him. “You are almost not impersonal.”

There was a silence. She would not sit down beside him. It seemed she must say something that desired to be said with the advantage that standing gave her. Or was she about to take flight before it could say itself? There is a disguised desire in her, was his thought—some powerful desire that she does not recognize, yet, for what it is.

“You cannot comfort me,” she told him. “My coldness of heart, that made me laugh, has left me, and I am weak enough to be crying for the Valley and the Pavilion, and all those summer days and the deep nights, and—and Yuan. Ambrose—Ambrose—” She seemed on the point of vanishing, but she spoke on: “You are a man of whom I can ask this—the only one. You are calm, passive. You will not mind. You see, your memory is so marvellous, you will never forget one hour of all the weeks we spent there or one thing that was ever said. And you have seen my soul stripped naked, so that it is wrong I should ever be the bride of another man. I desire you to marry me, so that I can always be near you and look in your mind and be reminded of the Valley, and always possess the days we spent there. Will you, Ambrose?”

She blushed very furiously.

Ambrose sat and looked steadily at his float passing him slowly on the stream. He smiled queerly to himself. Desire has marvellous ways of presenting itself to the mind, he reflected. Then, aloud: “In all this it seems to be assumed that I should be prepared to remain a flawless and in no way troublesome glass in which you could feast your heart on the scenes of the past. I ought to warn you—the assumption, which you perhaps make, that I should be a cold, convenient husband, is unjustified.”

She swayed on her feet, and her eyes stared at his unreadable face as if a spear from an unseen hand had smitten her side, and she was at grips with the reluctant secret of death. The delicious cavern of her mouth opened, but no words came. He gave her no help. He met her stare coldly, giving no shadow of a look that might carry the word of love.

“Think that over,” he added, and returned to his fishing.

48

Late in the afternoon, three days’ journey from the Gorge, they put up for the night at a mountain-village inn. The inn was high and isolated, the innkeeper attentive (obedient to the sign of the Dragon). But he warned them that a band of revolutionary troops was thought to be approaching the neighbourhood, with fire and sword.

“Are they, the festering blackheads?” Fulke’s revolutionary sympathies were a little alienated since his engagement to Ruby. “A lot of scrofulous thieves unworthy of the high name of revolutionary. By the giblets of St. Francis’s little dog——! I beg pardon, my darling.”

“You were going to remark,” put in Quentin, “that these do not carry bricks for the New Jerusalem.”

The Sages, the two girls, and Ambrose were gathered in the eating-room of the inn, talking, and watching the effect of sunset among the hills. Lychnis alone was silent, turning a matter over and over. Apparently she had recovered her firmness of heart, but not the transcendent experience. She had come to a point where she was indifferent to the past and future. The green tip of a budding flower of joy was fighting the winter snow and icy wind, the cold death in her mind.

The Sages and Ruby were apprehensive, at the same time somewhat boastful. Ambrose found a great deal to amuse him in their conversation, for, strangely enough, each considered that he alone among all the others had probed the experience of the summer to the bottom. Blackwood, perhaps, was the most jaunty. He did not really quite know where he stood in regard to life, but he fully trusted that he should soon find out, and in the meantime took an extra lump of sugar in coffee. Ambrose surmises that the words of Wang Li had given sanction for the release of impulses too long pent up and not dissipated or re-directed, and in the first capital they came to there would be an expenditure of energy.

Sprot was assertive. “I always said,” he pointed out to them, “that you would come round to my point of view. You admit that I was right about....” He did not venture to name names.

“A fool,” observed Lord Sombrewater, who had no longer any regard to Sprot’s feelings—“a fool is a man who knows from birth what it takes others seventy years to find out.”

But Sprot was not put out. “I do hope,” he continued, “that we are not in real danger here.”

“If we are not,” observed Frew-Gaff, “it will probably be due to your friends in the Valley.”

“I would like to feel certain that we shall see Europe again,” put in Blackwood anxiously.

“I trust,” said Frew-Gaff, “that the Dragon will fulfil his obligations. I fear, from what the villagers say, that we are in for trouble.”

“It would always be possible to go back,” said Fulke. “We had a wonderful time there, after all. I for one should be contented to stay there for the rest of my life—now.” He looked fondly at his wench, who leaned against his shoulder.

“No,” said Blackwood promptly, “do not let us go back—not unless the danger is really considerable.”

“Great things are awaiting us in Europe,” said Terence. “I feel it. I have seen Europe in a vision, and we are to arrive there safely after this time of exile and cleansing purgatory.”

“The Valley would be a very nice place with a decent up-to-date hotel and a golf-course,” said Sprot. “I should like to see a little enterprise and capital put into that Valley. Men were made to work, not to think. I shall never forget....” He shuddered as he thought of that frightful period of imprisonment with twelve lunatics on the mountain of meditation.

“I have not yet understood,” remarked Lord Sombrewater, “what there was to prevent your coming away.”

“What there was...! Well, if you were put on a rock surrounded by water, and every time you put your foot in the water to wade across you were sort of shrivelled all up your legs and spine with a frightful tingling pain, you’d soon know what there was to prevent you coming away.”

“Couldn’t you jump?”

“Jump? I tried once! Those devils always seemed to know what you were thinking about, night and day, and when I jumped one of them gave me a twitch that sent me in head first. Not till my dying day shall I forget it. I couldn’t remember where I was for a week. My God! if I had my way with them!” He went purple at the thought of the indignities to which he had been subjected. “Go back you may,” he added, “but you go without George Sprot.”

“There are some experiments that I greatly desire to make,” added Frew-Gaff. “I believe I can reproduce some things we have seen lately, if I can only grasp one or two principles that baffle me.” He kindled his brows.

“That you never will,” thought Lychnis. She despised them for having hopes and fears. It was all one to her, she told herself, if she were slain there that night. She was looking out through the window of the inn. Opposite, a toppling jade crag flamed with a faint fire of sunset from beyond the Valley. The scene did not move her greatly, she found. She was calm in face of the once heart-hurting beauty of sunsets. She turned once more to examine her thoughts, all upside down as Ambrose had put them. He sat there with his back to her, but the current of all her moods was toward him.

As the last rays of light departed from the Chinese landscape, stranger here to them than in the Valley, they heard sounds of considerable excitement in the village. They all went out into the street, and presently little crowds of chattering peasants began to pass the inn. The innkeeper came out at Lord Sombrewater’s request. Such-a-one had vanished.

“Ask what the trouble is, Lychnis,” commanded Lord Sombrewater.

“Refugees,” the innkeeper conveyed, standing impassively with his hands hidden in his sleeves.

“What is happening, then?” she asked.

He directed their gaze across the Valley. A young moon had risen over the zigzagging mountain, and there on the precipitous side of it, not half a mile from the inn, were a hundred lights—the camp-fires of the revolutionaries—and on other hills there were other lights.

Even as the Sages were looking at one another, and Ruby and Fulke, in each other’s arms, were making appointments for eternity, a flash came from the hillside. The revolutionaries had discharged their field-piece. The shell burst very short. They tried again, with the same effect, and this seemed to put them in a frenzy, for they began a furious cannonade and opened fire with their rifles. But not a shot came over the village, and they slew nothing but the breeze. The villagers, perceiving that the strangers were miraculously protected, sought to share in the working of the charm, and soon the party was surrounded by a dense crowd of bead-eyed Orientals, chattering in the dark. The flash of guns and a flare in the sky told that the attack was proceeding over a wide front.

Lychnis watched the proceedings with unconcern.

Very soon, perceiving the uselessness of his artillery, the enemy commander changed tactics, and seemed, from the noise that his troops made, about to deliver a hand assault.

“There are perhaps five thousand of them,” muttered Sombrewater. “Richard—if we could get the girls away? If you could steal down to the river and get off in the boats?”

“It could be tried,” said Sir Richard tentatively. “But it is for you to go, Arnold....”

“Leg it with me,” suggested Quentin, prepared to die if his last hours might be amorous.

“I will not leave this spot in any circumstances whatever,” Lychnis answered, low and decisively.

Lord Sombrewater was about to speak, but the words perished in his mouth, for at that moment the colossal apparition of a dragon, with eyes like burning topaz, writhed in fearful silence through the Valley and vanished among the hills. The clamour of the attack ceased, and the people of the village prostrated themselves.

“We were rewarded by heaven,” said Quentin devoutly, “for the purity of our lives!”

But the attack was forward again. The enemy came on, yelling like pandemonium, and one after another the flame-beasts came galloping out of the mountains, and where they passed through the attacking forces their trail was blazed with paralysed men.

“This helps,” exclaimed Sombrewater, “but they’re still swarming up every valley. Do you see them where the flame goes? They’re not being held.” He sought for his daughter’s hand, and she gave it him. She wore the smile of a holy one. It had come to her that there was nothing but a quietness akin to the quietness of space in her heart. The world might crack and she would be calm, for there was now nothing in her subject to death.

It was true that the enemy were not being held, but the mind that was defending the Sages had reserves in hand; indeed, he disposed of the attack in a way that was cynically humorous. In the days when Yuan had taken interest in appearances his interest had been keen and productive. As he had told them, he was able to reproduce appearances and conjure up phenomena. The secret of the toys he had devised for the defence of the Valley had been communicated, in accordance with family tradition, to the engineers, and they, doubtless, were handling the matter at the present time. With great subtlety the fiery dragons were managed so as to force the attack into certain defined areas. They did not kill, except inadvertently, and, once he was used to them, they served to provoke the enemy to defiance, so that he was gradually drawn on. Yet for a long time it seemed to the Sages as if the defence must fail. But now the dragons were followed by monsters in human form, with blue, scowling faces and tongues of red fire, who floated over the forest. Their robes seemed to blow and flap in the breeze, disclosing the limbs of demons; shadows of hate lurked on their brows, and their green eyeballs glowed balefully. Each carried a scimitar under his arm, and one of them, by way of preparatory gesture, cynically shaved a forest from the mountain. The revolutionaries were checked, but amid scenes of compulsion and terror their commander forced his way to the village—a big, hideous man—hewing and slaughtering with an immense curved blade.

He was on them, with a dozen followers, before the Sages realized what had happened, and Fulke and Ruby were already in their hands. The commander himself, smiling like a death’s head, fixed his eyes on Lychnis and swung his blade. She found herself looking darkness in the face, and there was only one thought in her mind—Ambrose would die too. His existence and hers would disappear in the non-existing. Already from the cold threshold she looked back at the world, and saw it as a bright place where those who had learnt to stare in the face of darkness might command and enjoy desire. Then she saw Ambrose. His eyes were very far away. He, too, was looking in the face of darkness. Or did he not love her then? For her, now, he suddenly became the darkness, the heedless, the unnameable. It was in him, in him, that her existence was to disappear.

The bandit lifted his curved blade. It swung once, twice, hissing, and she still brooded on her revelation. But Such-a-one appeared at an upper window in the inn with a device in his hand, and at the third death-bringing swing of the blade he dealt with the chemical composition of the bandit in such a way that the characteristics which distinguish the living from the dead suddenly ceased to be present. Thus also with his followers.

The din and yelling were now terrific. Lychnis ran to help Ruby, who had fainted, and tended her while the conflict raged. The angel of annunciation had visited her and her eyes shone, and Ruby, coming to herself, perceived that something had happened to her friend. “Oh, Licky,” she exclaimed, “are we dead? For you look like a spirit in heaven.”

“Yes,” answered Lychnis. “I have died, and I am looking back at the world. I see that I never knew till I died what it was that I wanted.”

But Ruby, seeing the battle and hearing the din, was puzzled. “I do not know what you mean,” she murmured. “I only feel that you have become different from the living.”

“It is true, my dearest—really true.” Lychnis smiled at her friend.

A vast blaze of light thrust the reeling hills out into blackness, and they saw a mass of the enemy pallid and paralysed in the ghastly glare. Then Ruby shrieked, for a monstrous flame-demon swung a scythe through a huge circle of the night, and the men who had been standing huddled before him stood no more. The rest of the attacking horde turned to save themselves while they could. Then, with a hiss and a roar that seemed to blast the forests, fire sprang from every hillside and streamed over the flying forces. The sky became full of burning villages, and the ears were stifled with the streaming of unearthly flames. Stricken phantom hosts scattered in panic terror along the spines of the mountains; crags of burning sulphur toppled down upon them in obliterating thunder; the mountains themselves seemed to collapse upon flying armies of spectres; and of the actual and substantial fugitives who sought among the rocks for some cover from this spectacle there was none whose heart was not squeezed and ruptured by the cold hand of fear.

Our friends watched in silence until the cynical and jocular fireworks came to an end in fitful lightning and muttering thunder. The terror of the Dragon was in their minds. But there were two in whom terror had no place.

49

They did not at once enter the paradise that was now theirs. They did not even speak of it to each other. They pondered the golden future in secret, and only sometimes, by a glance more subtly effective than kisses, acknowledged that their blood ran to the same rhythm. For those who feed their hearts on the substance of eternity there is no haste.

At last, on a spring morning, the _Floating Leaf_ lay in Southampton Water. They stood at the rail, the two of them, looking at the bed of smokestacks, masts and cranes that flourished in the Hampshire foreshore. It was necessary that something should be said, now that this daily companionship was to end.

He regarded her steadfastly. The corners of her mouth were turned up, and she smiled faintly at the water.

“You are making a fox-face,” he observed.

“I was thinking of the Valley.”

“Pleasantly?”

“Oh, very pleasantly! But how far away it seems, and how strange the things we all talked about, even the words we used! They would sound comic in this atmosphere. Was it real, or did we dream it? Or is this unreal, England and these liners and railways?”

“All life is unreal, as you and I know,” he answered her. “We accept it, because we must; but sometimes reality is felt. It sticks through, and the world seems queer beside it. You and I have it for always in our hearts.”

“That is true,” she said, “even if we dreamt, even if we did really for a time live in a landscape on a vase or a silk. But how did it come to you, this experience of unbreakable, calm joy that has come to me?”

“I came by it years back, in war and disaster.”

“Why do you and I have it, and not the others?”

“I cannot answer that. It is predestination. There are some that cannot help but be saved.”

She touched his hand. “We are in love with one another, are we not, Ambrose?”

He answered, “Yes.”

“It took me so long to find out. One could not recognize a happiness that was so wonderful and so close. Why did you not tell me?”

“I did not want to plant love in you. I wanted it to come of necessity, from the centre of your being.”

“Did it hurt, when you saw me in love with Yuan?”

He smiled.

“Oh!” she cried, “I love you because you are cold and unmoved and unescapable, like Fate! I love you because you do not desire me and my beauty is nothing to you. I die and am forgotten in the night of your being. You are death and change itself, the beautiful, pitiless universe in which we are all swallowed and become nothing.”

“You also,” he answered. “We have eaten the peaches of immortality, you and I, and we are no longer you and I. We have tasted the fruit, the substance of the universe, that is eaten in the endless fields of Nirvana. We are dead, and we can descend into the world like gods, to command and enjoy desire.”

“You do desire me?”

“Yes, my flower, my insect.”

She was in his arms, face to face with his unswerving regard. What she found in his eyes must have contented her.

“You understand—everything?” He asked to hear her say “Yes.”

“Everything.”

“And this time there is nothing to get over?—no repugnance?”

Once more she drew up the corners of her mouth, and, “On the contrary,” he heard.

He kissed her, and there was that in his embrace to catch away her breath with surprise and joy.

When Lord Sombrewater came along the deck and saw them sitting together he was struck by something new in their attitude. An immense and unexpected possibility presented itself to his mind.

“What’s this?” he asked, with his swift, birdlike regard.

Lychnis told him, and he made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction. “Well, really, this is most gratifying! As you must marry—I suppose you must—some day——”

“To-day,” she interpolated.

He was somewhat taken aback. “We’ll see—we’ll see. Time enough. But if it must happen, I’d rather a thousand times it was Ambrose than anyone else in the world. Really, very gratifying—very gratifying—and surprising. You old pike! I shall feel that her husband has not taken her away from me—has not——” He coughed. “A half-share, perhaps—really, not more than a half-share. Why, with Ambrose you’ll hardly be married at all.” He beamed, and they exchanged a tingling glance. Then, formally, they received his blessing. “God bless you both—a thousand times. You old pike!” Lord Sombrewater blew his nose and, as a second thought, went off to announce the news to the Sages, and, in due course, to his wife.

They sat side by side, and looked at the smooth water and the spring sky, and wondered at the instant and almost intolerable reality of the happiness that was in them.

* * * * *

Ambrose did not forsake his notebooks upon his marriage, but he does not write much about himself or intimately about Lychnis. One sees them, though, with that infinite serenity in their souls, contemplating the world with instructed affection and containedly giving themselves to the surprises and exquisite pleasures of love.

* * * * *

Lord Sombrewater seems to have regarded the birth of a grandson with mixed feelings. Apparently it was not somehow what he had expected.

+The End+

Transcriber’s Notes:

• Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). • Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+). • Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. • Redundant title pages removed.