Part 12

Her anger had usually the effect of reducing Ruby to sulks or submission. To-night she became defiant, and replied, looking at her persecutor with shining, fascinated eyes. (And no wonder, thought Ambrose, as he pictured the slim, contemptuous figure that had the matter of subjugation in hand.)

“You think it’s for you to decide, Lychnis. It isn’t. We’ve made up our minds to consider ourselves in future.”

“You’ve been plotting with Fulke, have you?”

Ruby’s eyes quivered. “Let me tell you daddy thinks so, too. If we want to go now we shall.”

“Not without my permission—and Yuan’s.”

“Oh, Yuan! Why don’t you go to him altogether?”

The words had slipped out, and with the realization of what she had said came the end of her courage.

The reply darted at her was, “Get into bed.”

She still had an ounce or two. “I won’t!”

“Do you remember last time you said that?”

Ruby remembered a night when a fury who exuded a sort of elemental invincibleness had used a slipper on her until she howled for pain. She did not care for pain.

Lychnis slid in beside her, and switched out all the lights in the room except the one that hung in the ebony ceiling of their bed. “You hate it when that light goes out, don’t you?” she asked in a cold voice. “Every night you shake for fear of the strangeness of this house and this valley and the tall, plum-cheeked Yuan with gimlet eyes. When the queer moonlight creeps in through the lattices, as if Yuan were there, flooding us with some cold emanation of his cold, unhuman spirit, you lie and tremble. I am going to put the light out now.”

She switched it out with one hand and with the other gave Ruby a pinch. Ruby sat up. “I hate you! Oh, you beast, I hate you!”

“You’d better ask Fulke to do something about it.” Lychnis spoke in a ghostly voice.

But all at once Ruby collapsed into her pillow and began violently crying. “Don’t—oh, please don’t tease me about Fulke!” she sobbed.

Lychnis had an intimation. “What’s the matter?”

For some time there was no answer; then a buried voice came from the pillow: “I can’t bear you to speak of him.” A silence. Then: “I—I want him. I love him.”

Lychnis peered into the dim moonlight, silent for a little. Then: “But, my dear, I didn’t realize it was like that. I am surprised.” She put her arms round Ruby. “Since when?”

There followed long confidences and comfortings. “And that’s why,” concluded the afflicted one, “I said I hate you. I’ve been hating you a long time—because you keep him from me!”

Lychnis smiled in the dark. “But don’t you see? That’s nearly over. You will have him from me altogether—very soon.”

“Do you really think so?” Consoled, glowing, and happily doubtful, Ruby fell asleep. When she was asleep Lychnis turned over on her face and sobbed her heart out. She saw clearly that Ruby would soon have Fulke—the chimpanzee-like Fulke—away from her altogether. She didn’t mind that. But it gave her a sense of desertion. It was strange that soon Fulke should lie in her place, or take Ruby to his. She would be alone. It was the case that she was losing her friends—even her father. Her heart sank at the deep silence. The shadow of the lattice lengthened out on the floor. Outside a spray of leaves brushed monotonously against the roof of the verandah. Soon she would be alone, quite alone—face to face with a queer reality—except for Ambrose. The name floated to her in the silence. Ambrose. Perhaps he was on the verandah composing. She crept from the bed, crept out on the verandah. Outside there was nothing but the warm moonlight and the leaves brushing on the roof. She came back, alone with the spectre of Yuan. She shivered and lay deathly still, clutching the bedclothes, while the ghostly moonlight peered in through the lattice, stole in and embraced her like an emanation from his cold, unearthly mind. The spray of leaves swished to and fro on the roof of the verandah.

35

Before making an important decision, which Ambrose presently records, Lychnis suffered several changes of mood of a subtle kind, and she was able under his expert questioning to describe them, to give an account of the happenings in the mental, the emotional, the spiritual sphere—the slight happenings that irresistibly fixed her course.

She woke heavy-eyed. After a long wandering in the hot mists of early morning by the reedy shore of the Lake and among the creeks and cliffs and waterfalls, she came clearly to see herself isolated. Since the first morning when she had explored the valley with Ambrose and encountered the swans, she alone (Ambrose not for the moment considered) had made progress in experience. The others, she perceived, had all abandoned the experience which they had begun, content to remain on the fringe, to let it go ungrasped, uncomprehended. They had stopped short on the threshold of the valley, on the threshold of a dream. She had entered the dream. To her life was yielding up secrets. She looked back from the dome of an emerald hill and saw the vermilion roof, with its horns and glittering dragons, of the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion, in the crescent of the bamboo grove. They were all sleeping there, except Ambrose, the recorder of other people’s experiences, whose white-clad figure she saw in the far distance down by the Lake. They were sleeping, while she woke and strove with what life was offering to the mind. She would keep them there until she had finished, until the valley and its denizens had no more to give, for it is the privilege of those who wrestle with the stuff of experience that they should sacrifice the others. Looking up, she saw that a great mass of clouds in the east was thrusting its arms about the valley. An encircling wall seemed to shut her off from the nearly forgotten world of Europe. It made it easier not to go back.

Ambrose pictures her standing on the top of her hill like a fluttering flag. Lonely she must have been. It is lonely, he remarks, to be in the advanced posts in the matter of human experience.

36

In the afternoon, lying idle and alone on the verandah, she reflected that she had not spoken to Terence Fitzgerald for a long time. She could not remember that he had looked at her with hate or resentment. He had been aloof, but that was his habit, and it might be that still he was bound to her in spirit, not resenting her actions. So she went to her bedroom, put on a twelfth-century robe of amber with a design of black and red butterflies, sped across the lawn, and slid through the bamboo-forest, that was heavy and dark with summer, to the tiled watchtower.

She climbed the stairs, peering through little windows that she passed, and came to his blue-tiled room. It was littered with painting apparatus. He sat at the window, in his bard-like, painter’s gown, with his hands clasped, looking sadly out over the quivering bamboo grove. When she came in his great eyes filled with fire and his voice rang with joy.

“At last the high gods have told you to come?” Then reproach shadowed his face. “But in that alien dress. This is not Lychnis, not my divine inspiration materialized.”

“I have abandoned the other dress,” she replied, “for ever.”

“For ever!”

“I must look the part I am going to play.”

“But we are going back. Lord Sombrewater has decided.” He spoke with great earnestness.

“Are we? Not quite yet perhaps.” She concealed her meaning, giving him great distress. They sat together in the wide window, on a ledge of pale yellow tiles. The poet eyed her long and dreamily; sometimes (through dreaming) his knee touched hers, or his hand, if he spoke, found it necessary to pat her fingers or her shoulder. The innocence of the poet permitted itself some intimacies. But they woke no thrill in her. She only leaned out and caressed the close ivy, or gazed up at the swifts circling over a group of elms in the midst of the bamboo.

“The dress is alien, but it is enchanting,” he said, after a pause. “It falls about you like an amber spell.”

“Paint me,” she replied. “I came to be painted, as promised.”

He obeyed. “I believe it is a spell,” he went on. “You are under a spell, woven on you by your Chinese. The robe has definitely altered your aura.”

“Is that the case? Tell me, has Yuan got an aura?”

“As far as I can discover,” said Terence, with the air of making a mysterious confidence, “he has got practically nothing else.”

“You mean—no body?”

“No corporeal habitation at all—not to speak of. Does that interest you? Is it a point of any importance?”

But she was watching the swifts, and only threw out an aside: “You must write an article, ‘The Influence of Environment on the Aura.’”

“But it is profound, I can tell you—in fact, it is disconcerting. I cannot understand these people. It is all part and parcel of the mysterious, sinister unresponsiveness of the place. I am unhappy here.” His grey eyes were mournful. “I sit all day without any illumination, unvisited by any messenger from those mysterious worlds that touch so closely on ours. The astral plane is quite closed to me.”

“Something has gone wrong with the trapdoor,” she ventured, unsympathetically.

“Unvisited by anyone,” he added, with meaning. But she was absorbed in the gliding swifts.

“I believe some evil spirit on the Other Side has done this by way of a joke. Those three friends of yours, Lychnis, are elementals, vampires.”

“It was you brought us here,” she threw out, with her eyes on the sky. “The Peach-blossom People—pink feet, I remember.”

“It was to punish me for some error. They have brought me here and blown out the candle of my vision. I cannot contemplate. My harp and my tongue are silent; my hand is paralysed. And now the word descends on me in the mists of morning that I must arise and go back to Ireland. Everything is so designed and so finished, so dead; and I find your friends so on top of life, so beyond the capacity to feel the world’s sorrow, so smug.”

She spoke to the bamboo grove. “And so clean. And everyone is so happy. And inspiration only comes to you when you are in an untidy, poverty stricken, romantic country where the people are superstitious and incompetent. In your Paradise everyone must be Celtic and ridiculous. To be poetical, to have beautiful fancies and run to press with them is diseased. You dress up the cold substance of experience with starry crowns and gauze wings to make it look like fairies. A country should produce either men who can think straight or men who can live hard—especially the first. That is what compels me in a man.”

The wild anger that flashed in his eyes died down when she suddenly turned her face.

“There is distress in your eyes, not scorn.” His concern became apparent in a disposition to offer her the protection of his bosom.

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.