Part 15

“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?”

“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?”