Part 7

Now Ambrose gives an evening picture—an evening of emerald and fire. They have come back to the Pavilion, the wind has fallen, and Lychnis and Ruby are walking with him in the mazy paths of the bamboo-forest. The walls of bamboo curl over their heads like breakers under a flaring sky, and now and then, at some last fierce puff of the gale, there is a splutter of green foam. Ahead of them are the hills, like rollers darkening and lightening on a horizon of sea. And low down in the west rides the round sun, breaking in upon them through the leaves—inquisitive, unescapable, like the face of the goat-rider. It was Ruby (the red tinge of her hair and the peony colour of her robe making a sharp, exquisite chord with the bamboo green) who made that comparison. She was really restless under the sun’s stare. “I thought we should be safe here,” she said.

“Safe? Safe from what?” asked Lychnis (in purple and deep violet).

“From that face.”

“Oh, I thought you meant safe from ... from other things. Safe with old Ambrose. Safe, I mean, from the strain of people always pulling at you, attracting you, trying to get you.”

“I don’t mind that so much. But I didn’t like that man on the goat, who looked at us as if he saw some caterpillars on a bush.”

“He didn’t see us,” said Lychnis. “He only knew there was something or someone in the thicket. But you are afraid because if a man like that looked at you closely in the eyes he’d paralyse all your desire for resistance.”

Ruby was indignant. Ambrose describes with enjoyment the encounter between a resentful, sunset-headed Titania and a slim, bantering spirit in a purple thundercloud.

“He wouldn’t,” said Ruby.

“Well, search carefully in your mind and try and tell me exactly why his face frightens you. Reject your first thoughts and tell me precisely.”

Ruby sought, as desired. “Well,” she said, “his hands are too plump and womanish.”

“So, I believe, were Napoleon’s. But his hands are not his face. It may be your real reason, but I want to hear more of his face.”

“He had an absurd round hat, with fur on it, like Henry the Eighth.”

“A little lower and we shall come to his face.”

“He had a ridiculous coat on.”

“Too low. Mount him.”

“And I couldn’t see his legs.”

“They are important, certainly. But for God’s sake tell me about his face!”

“Oh well, then! I don’t like a man to have a yellow skin, and moth-eyebrows, and such a tiny mouth, and a jaw round instead of square, and eyes that look and look without moving.”

“I see. Delicate hands and a tiny mouth. Not European, it’s true. Not the sort of man who takes you in his grasp and sucks passionate kisses off your mouth, as if he were licking an oyster out of its gape.”

“Oh, Licky, you’re dreadful! You won’t understand. I can’t explain. I only mean there’s something about him that gives me the shivers.”

“Precisely—and deliciously. With a terrific, god-like power that comes of the very calm and delicateness of his face.”

“I shall dream of him in the night.”

“A calm, shining and awful figure, with a golden skin and slanting eyes, standing over you in a transfiguration; a visitor from some untroubled Nirvana; a being without thoughts, looking with wonder at your thought-troubled face. Not that thought troubles you much, my Juno.”

“Oh yes, it does,” protested Ruby. “I wonder and wonder—sometimes for hours. But not like you, Licky. You’re strange and say funny things.”

Lychnis suddenly changed her mood. “That’s for Ambrose to put down in his book. Dear Ambrose——” She took his arm and studied his face. He felt her eyes on him like the eyes of a violet. “Ambrose is a little Chinese,” she said. “He’s calm.” Then suddenly: “You can’t tell what thoughts are going on behind his serene, pink forehead. Does he ever give you the shivers, Ruby?”

“Oh, never!” cried Ruby.

Then they took him for a walk in the groves of the bamboo, one on each arm, and Lychnis whispered to him: “What terrific nonsense I’ve been talking!” They mounted Terence’s tower, and purple night stole over the Lotus Lake, and a myriad fireflies flickered over the forest.

21

Next morning there was a council of the Sages. It was very hot, and the Sages lay in chairs on a lawn before the Pavilion.

“The position is as follows,” said the chairman. “I have received an invitation, very much resembling a command, to make a ceremonial call, along with the rest of you, upon the Mandarin who inhabits the rock-island in the Lotus Lake. The invitation, or command—one moment, please, Sprot—is written in English, and the Mandarin’s name appears to be Lung, or, as he kindly translates, Dragon. The question is, Shall we go? Now, my friend.”

“I say, Certainly not,” Sprot burst out. “Who is he, that we should obey his commands? I vote we don’t go, just to show him we’re free, independent Englishmen!”

Quentin whistled a few bars of the National Anthem.

“And in the alternative?” queried Lord Sombrewater.

“Stay here,” replied Sprot firmly.

“But that would hardly be courteous.”

“Why? They’re only Chinese. A lot of dirty, hugger-mugger, gibbering Orientals. But let’s go away altogether, if you like. I don’t want to stay. A place like this, where nothing ever happens, gets on my nerves. I want to go back to England and see a good old flaring advertisement of Beecham’s Pills. You know where you are, then.”

“And supposing,” asked Sir Richard, “they won’t let us go back?”

“What d’you mean?” Sprot went pale all at once.

Lord Sombrewater’s eyes were suddenly on Frew-Gaff. “Will you enlarge that a little, Richard?”

“What I mean is this: One has been sensible ever since we landed of the existence in these parts of somebody with very considerable power. Looking back, one may perhaps see that influence, or power, working even before we landed. And I myself am sensible of a deliberate, forming hand, not only in events, but in our material environment, even in the landscape. More than that—we are living at the generosity of someone who can afford to be very slow and ceremonious in discovering himself. I feel myself that underneath this prodigality of forethought for our comfort there lies an immense sureness, based on power. I feel that it is a kindly power, but it may be otherwise. In any case I am not afraid. I am profoundly interested; and for that reason, as well as for the sake of that high-breeding which I still hope distinguishes some Englishmen, I vote that we accept the invitation, in appropriate terms.”

“You express me exactly, Richard,” said the chairman, with an abrupt nod—“except that I shall have something to add.”

“I think it’s very unfair,” said Sprot, “to those of us who are uncomfortable in this valley. I do protest most earnestly against my surroundings. Who are our neighbours here? Twelve lunatics who drivel all day on a rock; a most suspicious-looking individual who rides about on a goat, which is contempt of civilization; a flock of gibbering servants; and a person who calls himself Dragon and lives on an island in the middle of a lake. I ask you, Can anybody feel confidence in people who behave like that?”

“What do you think, Quentin?” Sombrewater hoped to extinguish Sprot in the draught of Quentin’s eloquence; but Quentin was lazy in the heat, and Europe-sick, and only murmured of some scandalous adventure with a brocaded young lady on a summer’s afternoon in Spain (where he was engaged in the sale of electrical goods). She had consented, he remembered, because of a poetical feeling for the warm and indolent splendour of the afternoon, and there was a whole Spanish landscape in her torrid embrace.

“Interesting,” said the chairman, “but irrelevant. Terence, I think we can anticipate your views—and yours, Blackwood. Your vote is to remain, I am sure, Fulke?”

“My vote,” said Fulke sullenly, “is to stay here, if we must, but to send the girls immediately back to the ship.”

“Hear, hear,” said Sprot.

“Why?” asked Quentin, stirring.

“Because, in my opinion, as far as one of them is concerned, if she doesn’t go away from this valley now she never will. She’ll be bewitched, if she isn’t already, and go against Nature.”

“But how nice for her,” said Quentin, “to go against Nature! It will be an experience. That’s what we all desire, I presume, and find so difficult to get—experiences, strange experiences. People are so unwilling to lend themselves to experience.”

“Ambrose knows what I mean,” replied Fulke, still sullen and hang-dog with thwarted passion.

“May we this once invite you to contribute to the debate, Ambrose?” asked the chairman, folding his plump, capable hands and looking down at his papers.

Ambrose replied that as regards both the girls he could vouch that their instincts were infallible for whatever was in accordance with Nature, complex as the reactions of one of them might be and tortuous in working to a conclusion. As regards what might prove to be in accordance with Nature, it was inadvisable to dogmatize.

“Very well, then,” said Lord Sombrewater, shooting him a glance. “There is a majority for remaining. And in deciding, myself, to remain, let me say that I accept certain risks, as I may call them. All my life I have taken risks, when I felt within myself a certain compulsion, which was itself, perhaps, born of a hidden knowledge of what the result was bound to be. I have never been wrong. I may be wrong, possibly, this time. But do not the indications all point one way, and are we not really compelled to see this adventure out? We are a band of men who have come together because of a common interest. Business, yes—but as well as that we are seeking something in life. Like all Europeans, we are seekers after something vaguely defined. We find ourselves, suddenly, unexpectedly, in a more than merely other-than-European world. It is a world that so nearly resembles our own world that the subtle differences are the more surprising. It is our world in a slightly distorted mirror. Already some one or two of us find ourselves uncomfortable. There is something in the environment that is not agreeable to our conceptions of what ought to be, or indeed of what is. But I am convinced, with Quentin, that we must not desert this opportunity of experience, be the results what they may, until we have searched it to its last end. We must go on. I propose it.”

Ambrose wondered how far Lord Sombrewater, or any of them, would go. Lychnis, he fancied, would outstrip them in searching an experience to the bottom.

There being a majority, the chairman’s proposal was adopted, and the meeting broke up. Lord Sombrewater took Ambrose by the arm and walked with him to the red mooring-raft among the reeds of the Lake. “A somewhat obscure speech of yours, Ambrose,” he said. “I feel you know my daughter better than I do, and better than any other man ever will. I am her father, and my feelings are strong. One day, no doubt, she will have a lover, and his feelings will presumably be strong too.” (He seemed to think it unnecessary, though, that she should have a lover.) “But you are detached, and the more observant. What were you getting at? To what sort of eventuality did you refer?”

“I have not gone so far in my mind as to formulate an eventuality,” Ambrose replied.

“You are an old pike,” said Sombrewater. “You never bite and you will never be caught.”

22

Arrayed in harmonious splendours, they floated, next morning, in a crowd of fragile and fantastic boats of red, yellow and black, through lanes of flushed lotuses towards the Rock. Servants paddled them. Here and there an unknown white bird with crimson beak walked sedately on the carpet of leaves, or a green-headed duck dabbled with his bill among the stalks of the water-lilies. The Rock itself, at the distance of half a mile, covered with foliage and flowers, looked as if some lake-dragon, rising from the fathomless bottom, had thrust up the carpet of lilies with his back and fallen asleep on the water.

“It’s black and mysterious down there, among the stalks of the lilies,” whispered Lychnis. “One would like to be a fish and swim down among oozy roots. It must be wonderful to be a fish and nose about in a reed-world. But aren’t they pure, the lotuses? Like the flushing thoughts that sometimes come up from our black insides.”

“It is remarkable,” observed Quentin from under his canopy, “that a creature with so much in the way of tripes should throw off the dewy cobwebs of imaginations that one so often has.”

“Illusions,” said Blackwood.

“It’s lovely floating on water,” said Ruby. “I’m ready to live any number of lives like this, Mr. Blackwood.”

He firmly shut his ascetic lips, and his eyelids too (notes Ambrose), shutting them down on the bright summer-morning picture of Lychnis, full length and slender in her floating casket of coral.

“You’re not frightened, Ruby?” queried her friend across the separating leaf-carpet.

She shook her head.

But perhaps Lychnis herself was just a little dubious when they came within a hundred yards of the sun-beaten Rock and closely saw its dragon-spine ridge, its burden of pine and fig-tree, and its steep side, with little exquisite summer-houses pat to the colour and design of contour and foliage. And they were all a little silent when, rounding the head of the island, they entered its shadow and paddled under its towering wall. This was on the side of the Lake away from their Pavilion; they were cut off, so to speak, from what they knew.

But the island seemed civilized and friendly enough. The wall of rock, coming up sheer out of the depths of the Lake (one could see great carp and wondrous fish nosing in crannies many feet below), was alive, a wrinkled meditation in stone. Reeds fringed it here and there, foliage hung in cascades from the summit, an arbour or a garden seat stood by some perilous path, under pine, rhododendron or orange-tree. Then, coming to a sheltered bight between two flying and fantastic buttresses of rock, they saw a flight of steps, gleaming and twisting up the cliff like a devil in anguish, and at the foot of the steps, by the water’s edge, the Dragon itself waited courteously on a marble quay to receive them.

The Dragon, a brilliant coloured bird, resolved itself into three Chinese gentlemen. The first, in pale heliotrope, was very old and bright and clean, with blind eyes, scanty white beard, and a hilarious appearance. The second was a shapeless little dump of a man in mauve, darkly pigmented, with black top-knot, little wisp of black chin-tuft, long slits for eyes, and a general appearance of inspired ugliness. The third, in a richly embroidered robe the colour of a peony stalk, was the goat-rider. He was younger and taller than the others, and now, at close quarters, one saw that the clear, penetrating eyes in the face of dry gold were candid, mild and grave—or so, usually, they seemed; but at moments they were more difficult to read than the eyes of the hawk or the leopard.

All three received the visitors with smiles and many assurances of welcome, yet also with a certain well-bred air of aloofness—an air that refused to presume on the willingness of the visitors to know them and at the same time esteemed itself at a pretty high price, modestly, as a fine jewel might. A highly civilized trio.

The tall youth stepped forward. Entreating them to mount the stairs (which they did), making also from time to time, in concert with his two companions, gestures expressive of his desire to assist them in the intolerably steep ascent, he explained that the laughing old gentleman with the scanty white beard was his great-grandfather, Wang Li; and the ugly, poetical gentleman, named Hsiao Chai, his grandfather. His own name was Yuan Ch’ien. His father was making a pilgrimage.

Arriving at the top of the stairs, he indicated a direction. “Not to weary you,” he said, “with the florid and excessive courtesy which is the custom among ourselves, this path leads to my great-grandfather’s summer pavilion, where, begging you to excuse the omission of a number of preliminary calls and other formalities, he would desire you to take luncheon.”

Adopting the same high-mannered air as their hosts, the party moved forward without remarking to one another on the strangeness of this or that—except Sprot, who loudly whispered to Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose, “Speaks English!”

Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose, who had noticed it for themselves, made no sign of having heard him, and it was disconcerting when Yuan, ten yards away, spoke as if he were answering the thought. “Anticipating,” he said, “the surprise which you are bound to feel, I may speak of myself so far as to explain that I have been acquainted with London and many of your European capitals, not to mention the cities of the United States of America. And we have had visitors from England before.”

Sprot paled. Where were those visitors now? In dungeons, perhaps, under the island, or mouldering on the oozy bed of the Lake. One hoped not to see white skeletons, ominously marred, their parts disposed after some plan other than the usual.

“My knowledge of your customs,” continued Yuan, “enables me to be certain that you will pardon what my countrymen and many of my relations might regard as an immoral absence of ceremony. We run our affairs here on lines which are not precisely national, in any sense.”

Wang Li and Hsiao signified approval of this last sentiment. Lord Sombrewater observed to the very old man that he considered the surroundings most elegant.

“We are now,” replied Wang Li, “almost at that invisible centre on which the unity of the whole depends”; and he smiled in a way that Ambrose at first tentatively describes as imbecile.

The surroundings were indeed elegant. The party had come to the house of the Dragon—not so much a house as a walled village of tasteful, if startling, elegance. It was full, as they afterwards found, of relations; but now, instead of entering the stout red gates, they proceeded, by a harmonious approach, amid scenery with the character of a contrived design on a dessert-plate, to the summer pavilion of Wang Li.

“This way,” said Wang, indicating a complicated geometrical harmony of vermilion lines and arcs, perched among trees, a symphony of red balconies and lemon-yellow roof; and they went up into an airy pavilion like a nest of red straws in the pines, sunny, but mysteriously cool. It was on the side of the island where they had landed, and a red balcony hung out over the water. Lychnis seated herself there, on the floor.

“The invisible centre of Unity,” observed Wang. And here they noticed, looking down avenues of tree-tops, that the landscape surrounding the island and the Lake had changed, in the sense that the secret of its design, hidden from every other view-point, was strikingly revealed. From everywhere else it baffled, and perhaps a little chafed, the mind. From here it ever variously satisfied and rested one. And the more one looked at the Rock itself, the more one was convinced by a volume or surface, a space of yellow or blue tiling, a green and grinning monster, a bending cypress or sophora.

There was no furniture in the room, except a few stools, an affair of ebony and enamel that looked like a smoking table, a musical instrument, or an unknown parlour game, and some jars which Quentin at once recognized as products of the Tang and Ming dynasties—in fact, he identified the signatures, with the applause of old Wang Li. “Though,” the old man strangely observed, “the name which can be written down is not the everlasting name.”

“That is, of course, true,” replied Quentin. But he replied absently, for there came in two exquisite and fragile girls, who, after ceremoniously saluting the company, ran like mice, the one to Lychnis, the other to Ruby, and, squatting beside them, began to chatter softly in a shy and welcoming, if incomprehensible, way.

Then, when the visitors had been allowed time to feast their imaginations on the rhythmic wonders of pavilion and arch, marble pathway and bronze dragon, sweeping terrace and dreaming cedar, that sought their attention at every window (or else, according to their natures, wondered what freak could have made himself responsible for this freakish fantasia of unexpected colour and disconcerting line), a light but sumptuous luncheon of pigeons’ eggs floating in soup, braised bamboo-shoots and other things was served, under the direction of a sort of major-domo whose choleric features they at once recognized. Sprot plucked at Lord Sombrewater’s gay sleeve and whispered, but Lord Sombrewater shook him off.

“It would scarcely be polite,” said Yuan at this point, “to leave you in a state of doubt at what must have appeared to be a remarkable series of coincidences. With the permission of my great-grandfather, I will enter upon some details.”

Old Wang Li nodded and assumed an expression of almost idiotic vacancy, murmuring: “That which can be told is not to be compared for excellence with that which cannot be told.” The hideous and poetical Hsiao, who had exchanged with Quentin a number of cups of wine, had fallen into an inspired contemplation of half a melon. Yuan, impassive (and was he humble or imperious, smiling or fierce?—Lychnis and Ambrose could not make up their minds), entered upon details.

“The founder of our line, himself a descendant of the Wu-Lung, or Five Dragons, first lived on this Rock in the time of Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor. It was about the year 2630 +B.C.+, as you reckon dates in Europe. There are, it is true, discrepancies between the dates given in the Bamboo Books and those given by the majority of Chinese historians. In any case the event was not very recent, and in consequence we are a highly civilized family. At times our influence has been very wide, especially in days when the philosophy of Lao-tzu, which was embraced by my family not long after 600 +B.C.+, has been in the ascendant. At other times our influence has been less, but at no time have we lost possession of this island, owing to a faculty long cherished in the family for devising instruments of considerable ingenuity and precision.”

Lychnis laughed almost aloud at the look on Sprot’s face—a look of depressed triumph at the justification of a dismal prophecy.

“It was a member of the Dragon family,” continued Yuan, “who invented the south-pointing needle, gun-powder, anæsthetics, and the flying chariot. It would be idle to pretend that we have not even now at our disposal matters of still greater ingenuity, so that it has for a long time past been the custom to regard this neighbourhood as one where it is not unreasonable to flatter our quite unexpressed desire to enjoy the pleasures of unmolested contemplation. There have, of course, been those who were rash enough to ignore the tradition. Thus, generation by generation, we have built our pavilions, set our hands to these valleys and turned them into our pleasure garden, with summer-houses for the use of the visitors who have honoured our possessions by sharing them. And the desires of our visitors are, of course, flattered equally with our own.”