Part 6

“I do,” was the answer. “It’s the same valley by night as it was by day. Can’t you feel how warm and redolent it is?”

“But it’s so strange.”

“I love what’s strange.”

“I feel as if something, someone mysterious, might come and seize us.”

“I should like someone mysterious to come and seize me.”

“Oh, Lychnis, you are dreadful!”

There was no answer. Then, after a silence, Ruby spoke again in a breathless whisper: “Oh, look! There’s somebody under the trees.”

A pause.

“Silly! It’s only Quentin. How mad of him!”

Lord Sombrewater’s voice broke in from somewhere: “Go to bed at once, you two.”

Ambrose went out to the verandah in time to see the two silken forms vanish. But he was quite sure that Lychnis turned and waved to the dim figure under the trees. Her eyes shone.

18

Ambrose went down to the lake in the tremulous mists of daybreak. He pushed his way in waist-deep among reeds, noiselessly, to observe the habits of water-fowl.

Presently, without surprise, for she had the same early morning habits as himself, he saw the mist-white figure of Lychnis, with her skirt gathered in her hands, on one of the many little islets of rock scattered along the shore. She was bending forward, parting the water-lily leaves, gazing intently into the depths. He liked to see her once again in her own clothes, unswathed, a slender, air-loving Lychnis.

He whistled. She turned and waved—negatively, as it were—but after a minute she turned round again, and slowly began to make her way back, stepping and leaping and splashing from stone to stone, as if she walked on the water; and sometimes she swayed and balanced among the broad leaves, herself an unfolding white lily.

She came to him in the reeds and took his hand. “I didn’t want to see you at first. I thought it was Fulke or someone. But you looked so funny, waist-deep in the reeds and all thoughtful, and I thought I’d come. Let’s go, a long way—at once, in case any of the others come. I want to go miles this morning, exploring. Shall we?”

She was enchanting, in her slip of a dress and white stockings and delicate shoes. “How can you run and explore in shoes like those?” he asked.

“Fast-running things don’t have big hooves,” she replied.

“Quite true. Come on, then, Fawnsfeet.”

“My skirt’s not very wide,” she said, stepping out. It was a very slight affair, a mere shift, caught in on her right flank, so that the movement of side and hip was seen, to give the eye an unsatiable satisfaction. And one observed the moulding of shoulders and bust, and the young mounds that, as one supposed, a lover should one day cup with his hands and put his lips upon—a thought to make a man such as Quentin swoon. And the torso is incomparable, Ambrose observed to himself.

“I felt I couldn’t bear those other clothes any longer,” she explained—“except sometimes, to dress up. Ruby, on the other hand, likes them.”

“She’s asleep?”

“Fat with it, the pig. She woke up when I was having a bath out of a basin and thanked God that she was not a fool. The basin has a design of willow-trees done on it, and someone fishing. Do you fish?”

“Indeed, yes. Nothing I like better on a summer or autumn afternoon.”

“Well, I’ll fish with you. We’ll go right to the other end of the Lake by ourselves and fish all the afternoon. There’s some beauties in here. I saw them swimming past the rock I was standing on. It’s very deep, too—quite black with depth, and clear—like a black crystal. I sometimes think it looks more interesting under water, among water-plants, than above it. Don’t you?”

They made their way along the shore of the Lake, talking hard and laughing, smelling the water-smell and the early-morning smell. Sometimes they went on lawns, crossing the deep red or bright emerald bridges that spanned the rivulets; sometimes they trod among pebbles at the water’s edge; and sometimes, where the quaint hills came right down to the Lake, they had to scramble round sheer cliffs, jumping over the deep water from fragment to fragment of broken rock. At one place they had to creep under the bend of a slender, splashing cataract; at another they passed a man fishing. He took no notice of them.

Gently the air filled with the delicate splendours of the risen sun, and the steep island of rock out in the middle stood clearly to view. A breeze stirred the water.

“When the wind ruffles the Lake it looks like a meadow of snowdrops and violets,” said Lychnis. “I don’t see a sign of life on the island, do you?”

“Nothing but the foliage and the flowers.”

They had come now to a bay with a lawn shelving to the water. Lychnis stood with her hands behind her, looking seriously at the Rock. “Oh,” she exclaimed abruptly, “look at the swans!”

A noble flotilla, led by a god-like bird with frowning brows, swam royally towards them.

“How they stare!” She seemed fascinated. “Are they so different from us—in their lives, I mean, in their thoughts and feelings? Are we related to swans, Ambrose? I feel that I know them. I think I know them as well as I know people. Ambrose”—she bent her brows on him—“I think I shall ask you questions soon—to-day, perhaps. May I?”

“But yes, my silver birch.”

She considered. “Last night, Ambrose, Quentin kissed me!”

“Oh yes?”

She glanced at him, but her eyes were full of her thoughts. “Yes, he kissed me. I went back to him after you’d gone. The night was so strange and exciting. It was full of some promise. The night was full of some dark, passionate flower, waiting to open if I had the secret. I tried.”

“And you found it?”

“No; it was nothing to be kissed by Quentin—no more than my father’s kiss, or Ruby’s, or the peck of a bird—except that his beard was prickly and he smelt a good deal of wine. That’s why I must ask you questions. I don’t ask for facts. I know facts. I want to know how it can ever become so that they don’t obtrude rather unpleasantly on one’s consciousness. Do they ever stand out of the way of passion, Ambrose? Is there a desire that burns them all up into nothing?”

He was silent.

“It is possible that you do not know,” she said slowly.

“You must give me time, if I am to answer you fully. The subject is important, and wide.”

“Do you mean to write me an essay?”

“Not precisely.” He, too, considered. “It will take me some little while to arrange the logic, the perspective, of my reply.”

“Oh, well; take time over it, if you must. But I’m not often in the mood to ask you things.”

“In the meantime, I take it you have been disappointed?”

“I only hope Quentin was as disappointed as I was.”

“You won’t be ashamed with him? You don’t mind meeting him again?”

“But why? After all, I disappointed him. It’s for him to be ashamed if he can’t do better than that. He got nothing from me but my will to experiment, and I easily made it seem as if he was in fault. He went off feeling ridiculous, I fancy. But look! they’re asking for bread.”

There was always bread in her pockets. The splendid birds were clustered at the edge of the lawn, and she ran down and fed them, and put her slender white hands among their plumage. The god-like leader dug at her with his beak.

“How he stares! How insolent he is!” she exclaimed. “He pesters me—like Quentin.”

She retired a little. The great bird followed, bridling and opening his wings and frowning on her like a Jupiter. She stood still and taut, fascinated. Suddenly he spread his huge wings about her and laid his scarlet beak on her breast. She stood in his embrace for a moment, with thrown-back head, and his beak moved on the slender stalk of her throat. Then, swiftly and calmly, she disengaged herself and ran to Ambrose. The swan seemed quite crestfallen. “Look! I’ve disappointed him,” she said. “For my part, I prefer him to Quentin, but not very much.”

“You are a great mystery, my water-lily,” Ambrose replied.

They made their way back along the sides of the hills.

19

Nothing happened for three days. A few of the party found that eventlessness had a faint, queer effect on their nervous systems, and the pervading scent of musk was enervating. The days were a warm monochrome. The fiery procession of the sun across the diagonal of the valley was slow, perceptible and unvaried. One might have been glad to alter it. The profound peace and happiness of the valley became even oppressive, even almost sinister for Sprot. The valley smiled ceaselessly, and, as Quentin said, there is nothing more irritating. At night, Lychnis told Ambrose, Ruby clung to her in some sort of irrational fear. Only Lord Sombrewater remained entirely unaffected. And Lychnis liked it. And Ambrose made observations in his diary.

Then, on the fourth day, there blew up a storm of wind, and the clouds writhed like dragons, and the distant tiger-roar was heard as the wind stroked the cracking forests on the fells.

“What music!” Lychnis listened to her emotions, her brows heavy.

“Mendelssohn only,” put in Quentin. “Everything in measure here. None of your devastating German symphonies—not in these parts; even the storms are civilized—still less your incoherent Irish harps.”

“I did really begin to feel,” said Terence, “that our environment was unsympathetic. I haven’t had a dream, still less a vision, since we came. And I find the Spirits of the Bamboo Forest, though they are undoubtedly present in quivering myriads, more than a trifle hard to elicit. But this is better; this is more hopeful. The wind may bring things. I will therefore retire to my tower, and keep watch for a messenger from one of those many worlds that are undoubtedly interfolded with this. If you would like to share my vigil...?” He turned his great misty eyes upon Lychnis. “I feel it coming upon me that I am to begin a new portrait of you, in those elaborate clothes, with your hair so, formally, but half-hidden in veils of bamboo leaves.”

Lychnis declined. She was going out to the forest to hear the great branches cracking, she said. She and Ruby went to their bedroom to put on clothes they could walk in—mediæval hunting-clothes.

“Half-hidden! You always have to keep your subject half-hidden, Terence,” mocked Quentin. “Why don’t you paint her swimming naked in a mystical bamboo-leaf sea? I should, by heaven! if I were a painter. She wouldn’t be hidden! I should swoon, painting her.”

“You handle my daughter with your imagination a bit freely, Quentin,” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are all Sages here, I think,” replied Quentin. “We can all embark on the adventures of conversation, I think, for conversation’s sake, without being horrified at what we are compelled to say in artistic justice to our theme. It is true, certainly, that your daughter raises in me exquisite lusts of the imagination. But if I want to marry her in my imagination I may, I take it, without asking her parent’s imaginary consent.”

“It is a pretty point,” said Lord Sombrewater tartly; for, where Lychnis was concerned, even though a Sage, he would have put restrictions on the art of conversation.

The girls came back, dressed for the excursion. “I shall accompany you,” he said.

“And I,” said Sir Richard.

“And I,” said Quentin and Sprot.

“And I,” said Fulke, “if I may.”

Ambrose, naturally, joined himself to their party, as likely to provide more material for description. They set off, leaving only Blackwood and Terence Fitzgerald behind.

An hour’s march, mostly along the course of a stream that ran to the Lake, brought them out of the jewel-like, smooth-surfaced and quaint-conceited scenery, among which the Lotus Lake and the pavilions lay, into scenery of a wilder description. Quentin was walking with Lychnis, Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose.

“Terence should be here,” he remarked. “This is unfinished; this is romantic.”

“But a bit wizardous,” said Lychnis. “You would scarcely expect to meet one of his fair-haired Lohengrins—not among these oddly twisted pines and misshapen rocks. Some strange, gnarled old man, perhaps, with a staff—some very still old man, with a wrinkled, wicked smile, like a bit of the scenery suddenly living and peering at you.”

“The mountain air is very bracing,” observed Lord Sombrewater, “and the wind fortifies me exceedingly; but for a man who makes a regular habit of six cigars a day the pace is beginning to tell. So much loose rock about, isn’t there?”

“As for me,” said Quentin, “I am energy, I am vitality itself. I could tread the mountains flat. When we get up there on the crags I shall breathe in the streaming clouds and blow them out again in your faces. I shall fill my chest with the atmosphere and leave you all gasping for breath. You will entreat me for life, and I shall give it—on terms.”

“I don’t need air,” replied Lychnis. “I subsist on the æther.”

“You are the æther,” he answered, “or whatever medium there is on which all things are founded. Without you....” At this point she deftly skipped out of earshot—or, to be more exact, with Ambrose, nearly out of earshot. “Without you,” he continued, to the wild, surrounding forest—“without you we should not subsist at all. There would be neither matter to desire cleavage with you, nor spirit to imagine the immortality of love.”

“Your knowledge of the bawdy literature of the Middle Ages is more profound than your physics,” interrupted Sir Richard.

“I create my physics, as per necessity, to conform with my imagined world, like God,” he retorted.

Sir Richard smiled, in his courteous, grave way. “I confine my observation to the world which has been created by the distinguished colleague whom you mention. I find there traces of the existence of consistency, order, law, and nothing beyond that, but those traces lead me confidently to suppose that in due course we shall find the whole mechanism to fall out pat.”

“I see the day coming,” said Quentin, “when some mechanico-scientific bloke will pull the universe to pieces just to see if he can reassemble it. I hate you people who are always poking in the works. Everyone does it now. People buy cars. Do they drive them? No. They spread them out on the lawn. Do people listen-in? Never. They muck about with the valves. There is no art; there is only psycho-analysis. We pull up all our flowers nowadays to examine the root-hairs and the system of water-absorption. The wonders of the deep have vanished since we took to dredging the Pacific. There’s no universe left; there’s only a shedful of spare parts. I am the only child of Nature now living.”

“A child, yes,” said Sir Richard, “and ungoverned, save by whim. Spontaneous as a jet of spring water, but every wind blows you towards a new quarter. You are a man without self-direction. You cleave where your desire leads you.”

“I was wrong,” said Quentin gaily, “when I said that I was the only child of Nature living. Here are a dozen others.”

They had come down between overhanging rocks from a considerable height of crag into a glen full of small pines and boulders, and before them stood a great hump of mountain range and wind-tossed forest. On their right hand was a little stony hill with small bushes on it and an arbour, or summer-house. A stream—or, rather, a kind of flowing moat—surrounded it. And in the arbour, or under the bushes, or by the stream were men—men in mandarin robes—engaged, all of them (save two, who were chatting mirthfully by the stream), in a meditation that seemed characterized by an expression of hilarious vacuity. Some had long black moustaches, others scanty white beards. All had their hands folded in their sleeves, and all had a look—a look of youth, that, as Lychnis said, was most unsuitable and monkey-like on their wizened faces.

The party filed by the little mountain of meditation, glancing sideways, but no one of its strange inhabitants took any notice of them at all, even though Sprot went close up and peered at them across the stream (without making any intelligent observation), as if they were inhabitants of the Mappin Terraces.

“Wizards,” whispered Lychnis—“or Sages.”

“Wizards, Adepts, Rishi,” her father replied. “The sort of thing Blackwood tries to be. Extreme cases of Blackwood.”

“I think not,” put in Quentin. “Taoists, I fancy, not Buddhists. There are fundamental differences.”

“Lunatics, if I may be allowed an opinion,” said Sprot—“from the local asylum. Blackwood ought to be with them.” He grew warm. “I call it preposterous that grown men should be allowed to sit all day on a rock, grinning. They ought to have something better to do.”

“It is unpractical, isn’t it?” observed Ruby. “I despise men who don’t do something.”

“And I simply can’t think,” said Lychnis, “why anybody ever does anything at all. Because really there are so many reasons against doing things—except, perhaps”—she pondered a little—“the things that bring you new and strange experiences, and those, after all, involve you in disappointment.”

Quentin winked at her. “Ætherial Lychnis,” he replied. “You will soon be ready to join the gentlemen on the rock. As for me, I have been a man of action—muscular action. I am a motor man. Yet, to have you always near me, I will dissolve my fleshy substance, and consist of a vacancy that meditates on nothing. I’ll be no more than a large, empty shirt dreaming on a clothes-line. We’ll become sighing winds and mingle our particles. We’ll be two doctrines of inaction, inert in one another’s arms.”

“Always sensual, Quentin,” she replied.

By now they were at the edge of the deep forest that clothed the great flanks of the mountain. Out of the forest rose craggy peaks that they did not that day propose to climb. Lord Sombrewater, Sir Richard and Sprot were already spreading the lunch. The wind had died, and they sat in a thicket, listening to the last spasmodic sobs of the gale, and looking out under the leaves that protected them away down the mountain-side and across the glen they had traversed. Far down, one among many fantastic outcroppings and erections of rock, was the little mountain of meditation, and the dozen motionless figures could still be descried. Here were no pavilions or eaves of temples. They had come away, as it occurred to the mind of Ambrose to think, from the civilized and composed harmony of the Peach-blossom Valley to outer spaces undealt with by any ordering mind.

“This is undoubtedly for Terence,” said Sir Richard. “This is untidy.”

“And what do you think of it all, Fulke?” asked Lychnis.

These were the first words she had spoken to him that day, and he brightened (unreasonably), as if he hoped she might love him, after all. Yet he couldn’t agree with her opinions. “I am with Ruby,” he said. “Men have no right to lie and dream about abstractions when there is so much ugliness and misery in the world. They ought to be building the New Jerusalem.”

“In China’s green and pleasant land,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Well, let ’em. We don’t want it in England.”

“They’d have a better chance here,” retorted Fulke. “There’s no capitalist system here that must be destroyed before you can build. What lovely thing did the capitalist system ever produce, I ask?”

“My daughter,” suggested Lord Sombrewater. “Very definitely, I think, it produced my daughter.”

Fulke ignored that. It was, as Ambrose notes, one of those unfair arguments. “We could make England as lovely as this,” he said, “with a little preliminary destruction and the aid of science.”

“Sheer, criminal balderdash!” exclaimed Sprot.

“What I can’t understand about you builders of superfluous Jerusalems,” said Quentin, “is your utter dependence on your surroundings. Now I can be happy in a Houndsditch slum. Where I am, the heavenly city is about me. I am content with what I find. I do not ask to see the distant scene—one step enough for me.”

“Don’t blaspheme,” said Sprot, who was a Christian.

“Ruby thinks it’s heaven where it’s comfortable and she can sleep,” said Lychnis. “Personally, I can’t form the least idea what heaven may consist in. It certainly isn’t in my heart. It isn’t round us here, even—still less if Fulke turns it into a red-villa Jerusalem, or even a marble one. Are those twelve on the little mountain in heaven? A little too wizened for such a place, perhaps. One somehow expects heaven to be full of beautiful Greeks. And I suppose one expects to be the only woman there. Do you expect to be the only man there, Quentin?”

“I should hope so,” he answered, “since I expect to obtain heaven when I....” She silenced him with a gesture, but his red lips smiled in his frizzy beard.

“At any rate,” she went on, “one will not see western Europeans there, unshaved Polish Jews, cross-looking, mingy English tradesmen. I would like to see a man who didn’t look as if he was preoccupied with a corn. Not that I wish to be rude to any of you. I love your sweet, lined, thought-laden, nerve-ridden European faces. But when may I expect to see a face that is all pure beauty? When, Ambrose?”

“I should think you very well might about here,” he answered. “The Dragon perhaps. Someone who lives on that rock in the Lotus Lake. Someone who broods on the stupendous forces of Nature out of the heart of repose.”

“But Chinese can’t be handsome,” said Ruby. “They’re so fatuous, or else so fierce—and in any case so foreign.”

But Lychnis suddenly held up her small orchid-hand enjoining silence. A wind came rustling along the forest, and boomed out across the valley like some fabulous dragonish bird. Sprot moved uneasily. “Someone coming,” he muttered.

“Terence’s goat-rider!” Ruby clung to her father’s arm.

He came riding along the edge of the forest, seated on a goat of more than natural size. He drove it with a branch of peach-blossom. His dress was fantastically rich, and he had a little red button in his hat. His face was plump and imperious; his tiny mouth ineffably calm. He turned in his saddle as he rode past, and the dark, slant-slit eyes in his face of dry gold bored into the thicket where they were hidden—terrible eyes, attentive and fierce, like the eyes of the tiger when they shine and are rapt with the mysterious and dreadful forces of Nature.

20