Part 9

She smiled at Ambrose faintly, enigmatically, baffling further inquiry. Strange creature, she seemed to him, neither child nor woman—at any rate half-fairy. “I don’t dare look at him very close,” she concluded. “He’s so still, so different. If he came walking by now in a meditation I should shiver. Oh! listen, Ambrose. Someone really is coming!”

Ambrose stepped back into the bamboo thicket, and the shimmering, scented girl shrank in under his arm. There were voices, in English and Chinese—chiefly little exclamations and some laughter. Whoever it was passed on and the voices died out in the forest.

“Quentin,” whispered Ambrose, “and some young women we don’t know.”

They emerged on the white moonlit lawn, crossed the shadow of a great cedar, and entered the house.

27

One afternoon Lychnis, Ruby, Ambrose, Quentin and Fulke were on the island in company with Wang, Hsiao and Yuan. All were meditative, or sleepy, and they lay about on a little turfy place jutting out from the cliff a few feet above the water. They looked like a handful of orchids. Lychnis lay on her front with her head hanging over the Lake. She was gazing intently at the water, and her hair parted and fell down on either side of her face, leaving the slender neck bare, as if she had been laid on the plank of the guillotine. “How satisfying,” muttered Quentin, “to wring that neck!”

Yuan regarded the neck, but no shade or thought of emotion appeared on his countenance; nor did his fingers tighten.

“What a hateful thing to say!” said Ruby, who neither slept nor meditated, and only lay motionless.

Old Wang, after studying her for some time, had been heard to murmur: “The room has been made empty for the Master, but he does not enter it.”

Lychnis was fascinated by the water. She was thinking, if only she could wriggle out of her tunic and trousers, shoulders first, and slide over the cliff into the Lake and glide neatly among the stems of the water-lilies! To dip the chin first, and the mouth, tentatively, gingerly, in the cold element of a different universe; to bury the eyes, next, in its queer sights; to feel it slide over neck and back and legs; then suddenly to dart through it and surprise the inhabitants, like an unexpected meteor.

“I simply must know what it’s like to be a water-creature.” A sentence had emerged from the depths of her water-feelings.

“You can,” said Yuan, “by entering into subjective relationship with them.”

She looked at him as one who balances an infinity of considerations. “No doubt. But how does one enter into subjective relationship with, say, a water-beetle?”

“First,” began Yuan, “by forgetting self; then by emptying the mind....”

But old Wang interrupted, as if to give the young man instruction on an important matter. “Those who know, say nothing,” he observed; “those who say, know nothing.”

“But,” said Lychnis, “that makes conversation so difficult.”

“Why converse?” Wang asked her, with a sardonic grin. “Speak only when compelled, and then reluctantly, and only in the words of the Sages.”

“In the meantime,” said Yuan, who, in relation to his great-grandfather, was only at the beginning of wisdom, “let us take a walk under the water.”

Lychnis lifted her head and glanced round at Ambrose. “Among all those plants? I’m not afraid, but isn’t it rather impossible?”

“I’ll dive in and save you,” said Quentin.

“I don’t like you under water,” she replied—“a spread-out monster with a dim, waving beard. Besides, I’ve no costume.”

“That is not a thing that matters—” began Yuan.

“Of course not,” put in Quentin, with immense approval.

The Chinese gentleman continued: “What I mean is, that we go as we are. It is not a miracle.”

The scattered orchids stood up, mystified, and undulated in a gay chain along the paths on the side of the cliffs. Presently Yuan halted at a place where glassy-green steps led down into deep waters between reed-clumps.

“A good place for pike, no doubt,” remarked Ambrose.

“You are a fisherman, then?” Yuan suddenly enveloped him, as it were, in an all-seeing gaze, which, while extremely polite, was also extremely inexorable.

“I fish, and meditate, and compose my thoughts.” Ambrose returned his gaze with a polite stare which, so Lychnis told him, was beautifully inflexible.

“Then we will fish and meditate together.”

“With the greatest pleasure.”

The two men bowed, and Yuan led the way down the glassy-green steps. They found themselves entering a roomy, inclined tunnel of some substance so transparent that they seemed to be entering a partition of the water. One by one they stepped down, taking a last glance, when their eyes came to its level, across the many-leaved surface of the Lake. In a few minutes they were walking in the depths of a forest of stalks where strange creatures loomed. It was very silent, very dim, very still, under that ceiling of flat leaves, or under an open sky of lake-water. Sometimes a flight of small, ghostly fish darted invisibly through the stalk-forest, or suddenly wheeling their sides in a light-beam became a thousand rainbows. Sometimes a beetle-creature struggled up skywards through the water, swimming as if faint for heaven. Or swans swam overhead like June clouds, or thrust their snaky necks down between lilies. A cormorant, breaking the limit of the water into a shiver of crystal, passed them in silent white pursuit of a hurrying fish. And in one region of the brownish-greenish water-universe a solemn carp, opening and shutting his mouth like a machine, took part with myriads of his kind in a mazy, rhythmical, interminable, involuted and apparently purposeful dance.

“Just like human beings,” observed Quentin.

“Why do they do that?” asked Lychnis. She and Ruby were walking on either side of Yuan; Fulke was following with despairful, scowling face. “Are they happy?”

“They obey their nature,” said Yuan. “According to the doctrine of Hsiao, they are Sages.”

“They cannot be Sages,” she put in, “because they have never been conscious. To be a Sage means to have abandoned human consciousness and to have adopted the demeanour of a fish or a vegetable.”

But he merely stood with bent head considering the glaucous lairs of the water-world. He was not thinking. He was abandoned, unconscious of self or of any process, to what his eyes saw. He was in relation with the water, the fish, the beetles, through the reality which filled him and them and superseded delimitation. He had ceased to exist. He was no longer separate. But an onlooker would have been struck by his self-possession.

Fulke went close to Lychnis and faint-heartedly touched her. His desire to put his arms round her nearly achieved itself. Distracted by himself and by his desire, he was now without inward resource. Entangled in the inhibitions of self-consciousness, he blushed, stammered, and did not know how to stand or where to put his hands.

Ambrose made notes on the behaviour of all concerned.

“Lychnis.” Fulke faltered a whisper.

She gave no sign of having heard.

“Lychnis. I.... Why won’t you talk to me? I could answer your questions.... I....”

She made no answer.

“I know things, too. I am intelligent. Oh, slime and hell! I hardly know what I’m saying!”

“Yes, yes. You are very intelligent—very nice.” She spoke as if half-asleep.

He stumbled back over the damp sand to Ruby. “Look at her!” he exclaimed. “She’s following him. He’s drawing her into his own mad world. What can we do, Ruby?”

“I don’t know.” Ruby was dejected, alarmed. “She’s funny. I do wish she wouldn’t be. You don’t think——” She stopped. “I don’t like it much here. It’s not a place for people to be. Could I go back? Would they mind?”

“My God!” he answered. “I think I’ll come with you. She’ll be all right. Ambrose is here. You and I—we are of no use to her.” Their eyes met in a perfect orgasm of wretchedness, and they glided off, the two of them, along the tunnel and up out of the water-world into the air and the sun.

Hsiao appeared to be disappointed. He had given himself up to the contemplation of Ruby’s torch of red hair that glimmered through the shadows of the stalk-forest. But, instantly dismissing anything so painful as disappointment, he addressed himself to a contemplation of Lychnis. “She has hands like the white opening water-lily,” he was understood to say. “They would be cool and fragrant to the mouth, and delicately scented.”

Wang Li tapped Ambrose on the shoulder, and pointed at his great-grandson.

“A young man,” he said, “not free from the chains of desire.”

“Desire?” queried Ambrose.

“Desire. An itch of the mind; the mind still itching to experience, to understand, to know. He still takes an interest in things. He approaches the matter from the wrong angle. Seek first the kingdom of non-being and the world of appearances will be yours at a later date.”

He notices a good deal for an old man who is permanently unconscious, thought Ambrose. Peripherally, no doubt.

As for Lychnis and Yuan, they had gone on ahead. They looked as if they were swimming in a gloom of stalks. One was going now deeper into the Lake, into a pool of shadows, into a treeless, inter-stellar space, lit only by the faint emanation of some distant, strange sun. The empty universe was inhabited by flights of fish, like angels going on heavenly errands, and also by monstrous shapes of fiendish though fish-like aspect.

“If these are the work of God,” said Ambrose, “I am hitherto imperfectly acquainted with the full variety of His resources.”

“Of God,” replied Wang, “by the hand of my great-grandson, Yuan. Some experiments of his.”

“I must bring my friend Sprot to see them,” said Ambrose, and received a wink of consciousness from the Sage’s right eye. Old Wang and his two descendants had a power of divination in the matter of character and motive that was quite extraordinary. From Wang especially there was nothing hidden.

“My great-grandson considers,” the old philosopher went on, “that, while he is taking an interest in appearances, a man may as well lend a hand in the temporary work of evolution, and add, by reason of his conscious artistry, a certain distinction, either of ugliness or beauty, to what sometimes appears to be the product of a bungler working in the dark. It is the function of the artist to give point, to relieve, to dramatize. For example——” He pointed abruptly to a glorious creature that floated past like a sun, raying out veils of splendour, and again to a slender torpedo-shape marvellously adapted for speed. “No doubt also you have remarked the rarity of the birds in these parts, and the perfect colour and shape of the flowers. Yuan’s. Nothing but a certain indifference to the scientific point of view on the part of his numerous relations has prevented him from experimenting with the human species.”

“I am willing,” said Quentin, “to act as his agent, or vehicle, in any experiments he may make with the human species, provided they are of a creative, and not of a merely negative, order.”

“How,” asked Ambrose, “does he justify his pre-occupation with objective existences?”

“He does not justify it,” said Wang, with what might have been taken for a great-grandfatherly groan; “he boasts of it. It is a phase, of course. It will pass. In time he will embrace his duty and become a Sage.”

“In the meantime,” remarked Hsiao, “his activities greatly enhance the amenities of the landscape and multiply the conveniences of life.”

Rounding a turn in the tunnel they came on Lychnis and Yuan, who were both gazing upward. High overhead floated the red hull of a coracle, and on either side of it a paddle, like a web foot, occasionally broke the surface. “Fulke and Ruby, I have no doubt,” said Yuan. “Lazy, are they not? Or else urgently discussing something.”

“Don’t let’s bother about them,” she replied. “Go on. Tell me more about strange things.”

Willingly enough he returned to his subject, and the pair of them sped on, absorbed in whatever theme they were discussing. Or perhaps it was not the theme they enjoyed, but the experience—the experience of sinking through the levels of consciousness and meeting in the deeps where there is no opposition between this and that.

Presently there was a shaft in the tunnel with a spiral stair. This the party ascended, and found themselves in the middle of the Lake. A boat was moored there, and far away among the lotuses was the red craft that had passed over their heads. Old Wang was smiling to himself with abandon, and continued to smile until they landed on the island.

“And the joke?” asked Ambrose politely.

“I laughed to see how easily young trees bend to a breeze. It would not be in accordance with wisdom to resist a main impulse of Nature. Here I am in agreement with Hsiao. This is the doctrine of spontaneity.”

“Excellent,” replied Ambrose. “But, I take it, if there is any flaw in the spontaneity the result will appear as indecision?”

“You are right,” said Wang, with a piercing look.

28

Soon enough there began to be a fuss about Lychnis and Yuan. It appeared that Fulke and Ruby, on their ascent into the familiar world, had taken a red cockle-shell skiff and spent the afternoon floating about the Lake, tasting a certain joy in their common misery. No harm in that. But on landing and returning home to the Pavilion, and on finding it in the sole occupation of Sprot, they had communicated to him their fears. These he received with the liveliest satisfaction, spoke much of the accuracy of his forecasting, and spent the evening stamping up and down in a resolved manner. When the party from the island returned, he drew Quentin aside and significantly questioned him, in the presence of Fulke and Terence, as to the proceedings of the afternoon.

“What are you getting at, Sprotling?” asked Quentin.

“I am going to make representations to Lord Sombrewater. I am going to convince him that it is desirable for us to leave the valley without delay.”

Terence lifted up his face and spoke inspired words: “I have a most convincing reason for that. This afternoon, in a dream, I saw the mountains of my native country, and a picture of the whole party of us eating honey in Innisfree. And there came on me a great impulse to arise and go there, which I would have obeyed at once had not the vision clearly said that the rest of you are to go, too.” He stood for a moment looking into the distance, and his grey eyes were undoubtedly alight with the apprehension of something not immediately attainable. “I starve here,” he added, “for the sights and the sounds of Europe. I am out of touch with the Other Side. There is no veil of misery to pierce; no heaven to reach, because no hell to reach from.”

“The dirt and the poverty,” said Quentin, “the factories and the brothels, the advertisements, the bankruptcy courts, the demure women who know the game of love—I agree. I hate this calm, this perfection. What you say is true. There are no arcs here, consequently no perfect rounds to long for.”

“Oh, for some work to do!” cried Fulke. “A world to redeem from the clutches of industrialism—a State to build—a race to create!”

“I am with you in the last item only,” said Quentin, putting out his crisp, curly beard.

“At all events,” summed up Sprot with enthusiasm, “we hate this neighbourhood. We are all for returning to the ship. But first, how to get rid of this Chink, this Yuan?”

“I could knife him, if necessary,” said Quentin, with a certain genuine earnestness.

“Why not?” asked Sprot. “Nobody would know. It’s often done in these Asiatic countries. There are no police here. But first—evidence. Lychnis must be watched.”

Fulke swung round. “You damned, newt-livered, beetle-tongued, slug-sticky, crawling miasma! Use Lychnis, will you? Besmirch her reputation because you’re unhappy away from your kennel? My God! if I hear her name on your slime-coated tongue one single time again, I’ll drag your entrails out through your eye-sockets!”

“He’s in a temper,” explained Quentin. “He’s in love—but hopelessly, I fear.”

Fulke looked at him with a light in his eyes like a sullen sunset drowning in a tide of misery. “Oh!” he cried, “you’re not capable of love. You’re not clean men. And I that am clean am of all of you the most miserable. I hate life!” He broke off, and made for the house. He met Ruby coming out, and once more a circuit of emotion was established between them.

“Where’s Lychnis?” she asked, with some anxiety.

The others listened.

“Heaven knows,” he answered. “Can’t you find her?”

On investigation it turned out that Lychnis had disappeared. There was no sign of her anywhere. “Where can she be?” asked Ruby, with tears in her voice.

They all stood on the lawn staring over the Lake like men who have lost a vision. Sombrewater and Frew-Gaff, returning late from a geological expedition in the mountains, were met with the intelligence by an almost elated Sprot.

“I knew it,” said the little man. “I have warned you, Lord Sombrewater.”

Lord Sombrewater turned and stared at him so that he began fumbling with his collar. “You have warned me of what?”

He had nothing to say.

“Be so good as to keep your thoughts to yourself.”

Lord Sombrewater went abruptly into the Pavilion.

29

Lychnis, in the meanwhile, was off to the south-west with Yuan in the Dragon. The stars were on fire in heaven; there was a space of white light about the moon; far below slid the perfumed forest. She sat behind Yuan in the hollow body of the creature, and he, slung between the wings, bent this way and that, wheeling and dipping his fantastic chariot; and sometimes, when he had climbed the peak of the wind, he would fling himself forward, and she would see the dark, rushing world beyond the streak of moon on his shoulders as they swooped on a hundred miles through the night. Then, after a few moments of rest on some hill that loomed up out of the void, a soft purr of his mysterious engine or a beat of the wings and the chariot sprang up and forward like an eagle.

Slung behind him, sometimes touching him, Lychnis felt with her body that Yuan knew the air, knew all the roads, the precipices, the rapids of the air. He behaved as a far-travelling bird would behave, beating along the vast empty ways of the night with repeated crutch-strokes, or spreading out silver wings along the swift surface of a wind. Or, if he wearied, the tiny engine was switched on, and they traversed the sky with the speed of a meteor. Through him she knew the airways and lent him her movements, balancing and clinging with him on the huge precipice-face of the winds they were climbing, giving herself without shrinking to the fearful descent into a huge, opening nothingness. From time to time she caught a glimpse of his cheek. He threw her back an unsounded word, and she made noiseless answers with her small whispering mouth to his ear. He was intent and still, and his stillness held her, so that in spite of the dark void below she had no fear. Only the wind and the world moved, and they seemed intensely still in the midst of the sky, with their small heads so close.

Time had no meaning, and space twisted and wheeled around them. Soon, very far off, under a slanting beam of the moon, there came, as if the edge of space were advancing toward them, a glimmering of white petals, a flush of sacred lilies floating on the dark pool of the sky, lotuses waving about the feet of some Boddhisatva, for whom the Dragon was bearing on his back a beautiful captive to minister to his contempt of desire. But before the lilies came close, Yuan leant forward, and the dark pool of the world rushed up and engulfed them. The forest streamed up and out like black foam. Yuan hung over it, a silver moth, then brought the breast of the Dragon to the flood of a gleaming river. “The jungle,” he whispered.

There was a clamour of wild creatures. It suddenly faded to a far distance.

“They smell a flesh-eater,” he murmured.

Around them a circle of silence spread outwards till the distant circumference of howling died. But there was a movement. They seemed to Lychnis to be surrounded by looming shapes, by moving jewelled hands gesturing in darkness. There were movements in the unseen masses of foliage on the banks—swift movements of night hunters, slow movements of ancient creatures. There were long plungings and swirlings in the water. A vapour of heat drifted over them. The river flowed by unseen, and the Dragon held his breast to it like a soul in the flow of time. There were presences. Glancing at Yuan, half-visible, Lychnis found him, now, less than human, or perhaps more. Over the jungle there gleamed those lily petals, and a light from them seemed to illuminate his face. The eyes became oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. The small closed mouth was a carved symbol of eternal serenity. He became a god, and she found him almost intolerably strange.

“Forget your humanness,” murmured the mask. It was like a breath of the jungle speaking. “Forget it and know the creatures of the jungle.”

They were drifting a little down-stream towards the bank on their right. They were aware of a movement in the reeds, an arrival of concentrated silence. The darkness watched them. Then the reeds waved and parted, and there shone at them two savage emeralds. Lychnis, feeling the beautiful ferocity that crouched for her, glanced at Yuan, perhaps to see if she could share her experience with him. But he was in combat with the tiger, putting out the fierceness of the tiger, meeting, subduing the hunger that was about to spring. He entered through the deeps of being into the nature of tiger, and in some sort of wrestle in the realm of the tiger’s understanding dissipated the desire that sought to satisfy itself on Lychnis’s flesh.

They became aware that the knot of silence was resolved. Presently as if the tiger had spread some kind of intelligence, howling was heard again in the distance, and before long the rim of howling contracted. The forest had forgotten them. They were free in it.

“You are not afraid?” The pale gold mask uttered voice.

“Only a little.” But her fear was a fear of the being beside her. All other fear had vanished and survived only in that. “Are you never afraid?” she asked. “Here, or in the sky?”

“The personal I,” he answered, “the individual local Yuan, was a mass of fears. But the man I am becoming, the man whose I is vanishing, the god-saturated man, cannot experience fear. The wine-drunken man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the cart he breaks no bones. The god-intoxicated man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the sky all is well.”

“I am not god-intoxicated, as far as I know.”

“Nevertheless your perceptions are like those of one who is thus intoxicated. You perceive rhythms that only the heart of the infinite perceives.”

“I had not thought I was anything out of the way,” she said.

“Will you walk in the jungle under the cloak of my understanding?” he asked.

“Oh yes!” She was instant. How often, at night, one had heard some young man, or some older man, or even an aged man, say: Shall we walk in the wood a little? But this was to reenter the Garden by night, and walk in Eden with an archangel, or even with the Lord God. Possibly to see the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Looking at Yuan, to follow him, she asked herself: Are you the Serpent? He was leading her to knowledge, certainly, but not of good and evil, for he had said good and evil are local oppositions; in the unnameable they become one.

He was looking past her, boring into the reeds. She liked the dark, oblong eyes with their gimlet centres of blackness. She liked the imperious line of the cheek.

“We will not land here,” he said.