Part 10

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.

They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there. She had a curious sensation, she told Ambrose, as Yuan helped her down from the machine. It was strange, she said, to put her hand into his foreign hand. (No doubt the being so much with Ambrose, the perpetual comradeship that was between them, had trained her to note things.) Pleasant? Unpleasant? Not altogether unpleasant. Some slight antipathy, the diarist supposes. Certainly she forgot the sensation at once as they made their way into the darkness, the thrilling terror of the deep forest. She had no objection at all to the envelopment of her person by his cloak of understanding. If she had any sort of antipathy to his flesh, she had none whatever to his mind. He walked the forest like some shepherd of tigers. The snakes and insects let pass one of their kind, startled only by the shadow that followed him, bright-eyed and staring. They were mounting, and presently, when they had crossed the spine of the hill, the ground fell again slightly, only to mount beyond them in wave after wave of forest until the further waves had a white ridge, and far off, gleaming in outer space, were the snow-petals, the sacred lilies of ice.

Lychnis gasped. “I’m not sure—I think I’m afraid. They are so huge, so cold.” Fear of the mountains had entered her, and with it a host of other fears. She began to look round anxiously, to shrink. He was her only refuge from fear, and she shrank from him, too. Looking at her, she felt he divined the whole secret of her.

“You are afraid now?” he asked. “It’s natural. Fear must come in before it can be cast out. One must be conscious before one is unconscious. Sit down with your back to a tree.” He prevented, in some way, her impulse to look down in case a snake was coiled where she was to sit.

She obeyed him. He sat down opposite, with his back to a tree, and drew from his garment a small sort of flute and played. She found presently, as she listened to his slow, meditative theme, that she had forgotten her fear of the mountains. She began to gaze at them, seeking to become conscious of them, to shape the vague and profound emotion that they gave rise to, and express it. “Eternity,” she said. “They are eternal.”

“On the contrary,” he replied. “In a little while they will have gone, and an ocean perhaps will flow there.”

“Then it is I that am eternal, and the mountains made me remember.”

“Eternity is in you, but you are not eternal.”

Swiftly a thought of old Wang Li came to her mind.

“The truth that can be stated is not truth,” she shot at him.

He smiled. “The truth can be played with the flute, though. Listen.”

It was so, she thought, hearing something behind the notes he played that was like the mountains, but with no terror. And she saw without shrinking that the glittering eyes of fierce beasts were gazing steadfastly from the darkness, and tenderer creatures were near them. Then a python swayed down his head from the branch of a tree close by, and she put out her orchid-hand and touched the ivory skin. All that she remembered afterwards, for at the time she was not conscious of python, tiger, or deer; only of that which sounded from Yuan’s flute, that sang, as she put it, to itself in her and in the beasts, the intoxicating godhead that remains when ice vanishes, music is not listened to, and spirit itself has disappeared into nothing.

But afterwards, when the spell of the singing flute had lifted, she came to the conclusion that the experience of sublimity is unnecessarily serious. “I should prefer something suaver,” she told Ambrose, “more restrained—the god without the intoxication.”

30

Lychnis told Ambrose that the coldness of her reception, when she came back next morning, was a surprise to her. “I was only thinking and thinking of what I had seen and done in the night, of how I felt about Yuan,” she said, “and to find all that anger was horrible. There has been a change. Sir Richard frowns at me. Sprot is delighted, the little beast, because he can impute something to me. Fulke hates me. I prefer it. But our party is breaking up, and it is not like it used to be. I can’t help it. They have no business to interfere when I am going through with an experience.” Her anger rose. “They shall stay here until I have finished with it, or I will stay here alone, or with you. You will never be against me?”

He saw that her mind was in tumult, but by no means altogether because of the trouble she had got into with her father and the others. In any case she had an inextinguishable obstinacy. It appears that she had come back alone across the Lake in a boat, pre-occupied, lovely with the flush of her thoughts, only to find herself when she stepped on shore among grave and resentful faces. Her father was indoors. “Naturally,” she said, “he would never question me before all the others. He and I have always had our quarrels in private.” Ruby, too, was indoors.

It was the incredible Sprot, almost dancing with the pleasure of his accusing thoughts, who put the question: “Where have you been?”

She looked round at Fulke, in her eyes a command that Sprot should die. But there had been a change in Fulke, and he only glowered at her. Quentin answered her appeal with a grin of somewhat resentful amusement. She had therefore to speak for herself:

“Mr. Sprot, I am sorry to learn that you have to leave us.”

“What on earth do you mean?” he stammered. “I am not leaving. Your father has not said so.”

“I have said so.”

“I won’t leave.” He squared up. “And what will you do about it?”

“If I see you anywhere about to-morrow morning I shall ask Yuan to attend to you.” She went to the Pavilion, and they all watched her walking with bent head across the lawn. Then they turned to consider the case of Sprot, who was palely protesting that he would in no circumstances go.

“Especially,” said Quentin pleasantly, “with the country in its present state, when the traveller is more than likely to meet with robbery and violent outrage.”

“I appeal to you.” Sprot clasped, as it were, the knees of Sir Richard Frew-Gaff. But Sir Richard politely regretted that he could do nothing, and walked away.

Sprot exploded. “It’s perfectly scandalous that hard-working, reasonable-minded men should be at the beck and call of a piece of goods like that! Why does everyone pay so much attention to her, I should like to be told. She doesn’t work. She doesn’t produce anything. What right has she to say what shall be? Walking off like a sprig of lilac with a ‘You clear out!’ and all—her and her fat-faced Chink. It’s my opinion....”

“We don’t want your opinion,” said Fulke morosely.

“Yes, we do. You run away and weep with your Ruby,” said Quentin, with a wink to the rest.

Fulke flared. “You shut up, you stinking mud-pump! I’ve had just about enough of your interference.”

“No naughty temper,” said Quentin, and being strong, though a sinner, he immersed young righteousness in the Lake.

A native servant came down with a message that Lord Sombrewater would be glad if Ambrose would step up to the Pavilion. Ambrose therefore left the group on the shore of the Lake, thinking that the harmony of the party was indeed sadly disturbed, and the serene lawns and fine brooding trees disfigured by their quarrelling. Lord Sombrewater was with Lychnis, she moody, he severe. But it was his custom to approach a quarrel with his daughter in a business-like spirit, and he had not allowed the matter to interrupt his eleven o’clock cigar. He motioned Ambrose to a seat by a little lacquer table.

“Good-morning, Ambrose. I want you to know that there are now no restrictions on my daughter’s liberty of movement. She may go where she likes and with whom she likes, and I”—he spoke without bitterness—“I wash my hands of it. I admit that it was foolish to make rules for a daughter who takes as much notice of my wishes as the very solid gate-post of this Pavilion. Facts are facts. She has argued with me, and I think conclusively, that her life is her own. I have fully agreed that her friendship with Yuan is not a matter with which I am closely concerned. We must face the facts, and I see that it is useless to attempt to control her. I want you to convey this to the others. Now, Lychnis, I have done what you have asked. Will you kindly leave us?”

“I never said that you do not come closely into my life. You do. I want you to.”

He waved her away. Ambrose knew that he would never hear in what terms they had quarrelled. But this dismissal, he perceived, was a retaliation on Lord Sombrewater’s part. If she had no place for her father, if she desired to be independent, she would be independent, very much so, and alone; she should feel the cold. Her eyes, Ambrose saw, filled with tears as she went through to her green-and-gold bedroom, and there was no turning on her hips at the door to make a friendly gesture. No doubt she felt that another harbour was closing to her.

“When I made a rule that she should not do this or that, I made a mistake,” said his lordship, and his cigar had gone out. “Lychnis makes her own rules as she goes along. She acts by an inner light, and cannot see why others should have any views on the matter except the views that are so clear to her. No doubt she is right, as maybe we all are, in some deep sense; but it is hard, when she does these strange things, for those who have merely to watch and trust. I find it difficult, Ambrose. I love my daughter. I am jealous, and find it hard to be shut out from her inner life. If I were in her heart, no doubt I should agree that whatever she did was good. I should know what was going to happen, and I should not now be afraid as to where the necessity under which she doubtless acts might be going to lead her. I am honoured, as one should be, for having created a thing that is useless and beautiful ... but not, very naturally, by the thing. What do you say?”

“I say,” Ambrose replied, “that this is false sentiment. Love of a father is one thing; love of someone else is another. You should not be jealous of any kind of love that is not specifically yours to claim. Without jealousy, or, as our Chinese friends would say, without desire, or, as I may qualify it, without the addition of an inappropriate desire to the specific and proper desire of a father, or of a lover, as the case may be, there would exist no clash, or undue passion.”

Lord Sombrewater observed him. “You would not permit anything that might occur to alter whatever the relation between you and Lychnis may be?”

“There is a specific and possibly unique friendship between Lychnis and me which, if I do not allow it to be disturbed by irrelevant humours, can be left to take care of itself.”

“That tells me little.”

“Not having been choked by weeds, it has become a thing by itself, with life and a destiny. I have only to keep it pure of irrelevant desires.”

“You are an extraordinary man. If you would not mind my asking—if anything were to happen, and we left her here in China, would you miss her? Would you, let us say, be aware of a hiatus?”

“The mind,” Ambrose records himself as saying, “is its own place, as the poet so justly says, agreeing with our Chinese friends. Desire perishes, and that which is without desire is immortal.”

“I’m hanged if you don’t out-Wang old Wang!” Lord Sombrewater relit his cigar. Then he suddenly exploded: “And by God! Ambrose, I agree absolutely with Lychnis about Sprot! Out he shall go!”

It was lucky, Ambrose thought, that there should be someone handy to take off the full torrent of Lord Sombrewater’s emotion.

31

Lychnis, when she had given Ambrose an account of her doings, went swiftly in her short white dress under the heavy summer trees to the mooring-raft of red-painted bamboo, unfastened her coracle, and paddled through water lanes among lotuses to the island. She saw Hsiao in an arbour by the water’s edge, and waved in a friendly manner, but he was asleep. She brought her coracle to the marble quay, ascended the dragon-staircase, and sped along the ridge of the island, passing old Wang in meditation by a dung-heap. She climbed into the vermilion summer-house among the tree-tops, but Yuan was not there. She went out on to the verandah, and stood looking down over the scarlet rail into the Lake, where golden shapes of fish were passing like half-visible summer clouds. She saw the roof of Hsiao’s arbour and his two feet sticking out.

She went into the bare, sun-swept room again, and swung out an instrument from its cupboard. Not familiar with its use, but perceiving the principle of it and the method of adjustment by some scarcely conscious effort, she made the whole countryside disclose itself to her. First of all, there appeared in the field of view that dozen of queer philosophers on the rock over towards the mountains; next, through too wide an adjustment, a tract of country which she recognized—a little hill near the _Floating Leaf_, with a plum-tree, now in fruit, where she had talked with Ambrose, and Ruby had come back with her arms full of flowers. It was strange that she could hear the leaves rustling. She did not look for the ship. To see those three ladies knitting under the awning would have been to jolt the progress of a dream. She came back to the Peach-blossom Valley, and turned with a gesture of wrath from the spectacle of Sprot in altercation with her father. Then a few moments of growing impatience, until she found Yuan, waist-deep and busy in an enclosed pool at a distant point of the island. She heard the Lake rippling and the wash of water when he moved or plunged his hands in the pool. Breeding experiments, she thought. She had meant to go to him when she should have found him. It was so with her now that she demanded his presence constantly. But he was busy; he might prefer to be alone. She paused to inquire into her state of mind, realizing that she found it a necessity to be with him, and wondering what that might amount to.