Part 9

“Well, I have the idea that life may have some point, after all—that there may be a moment when you can say, Now one has really flowered into a moment of existence between nothing and nothing. I desire to exist, to be—not merely to remain a vague thing, an I, that cannot possess a single experience. One is only the beginning of a being, the material for one.”

“True. But you think you may be about to begin to exist. What are the symptoms?”

“I don’t quite know. How shall I put it?” She considered the question in silence. Then: “Would you say there was something unusually splendid and beautiful about the night?”

“Perhaps there is, now you mention it.”

“Do you happen to notice anything more than ordinarily intoxicating in the scent of the trees?”

He sniffed. “Perhaps, now you point it out.”

“Have you by any chance a sort of feeling that out there in the darkness, in a halo of extreme darkness, there might be some unseen experience that would complete you?”

“Um! I recognize the state of mind you describe as one which is familiar to human beings.”

She rose and stepped from the verandah down on to the lawn. Some jewel on her slipper shone in the grass like a glow-worm. He followed and walked beside her.

“Those are my impressions,” she said. The moon shone in her eyes through a hank of hair.

“The condition,” he lectured, “is the condition of one whose generalized passion, as I think you called it, is about to be attached to an object.”

“Oh!” She made a fox-face at him and led the way up a path in the bamboo grove. Presently they were hidden there, and the round moon hung in a deep sky behind a delicate pattern of leaves. “Sultry, is it not?” she continued, and loosened her wrap. She glimmered, in her frail gown, like a firefly or some sort of bamboo-fairy. “I would like ... it would be cool. One would bathe in night ... I might, almost, with only you here.” She stood looking at him, as if she really were considering it. Or was there even a mocking? Then “Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed, and shrouded her bosom in her wrap, “do you think Yuan might see us?”

“I fancy he would hardly be looking,” Ambrose replied.

“I really did think of doing it,” she asserted. “Has my reality-sense gone wrong? It seems quite odd that I should hesitate, with only you here, and in fairyland. Of course, with others about, reality is different. But you and I live in heaven, don’t we? I presume a person will be naked there? So you think the man on the island would not be looking. He does strike one as being a gentleman.”

“Does he please you?”

“I find him mysterious. What Ruby dislikes about him, I like—I mean the feeling that a cold and merciless god is looking at you. I wish I could be as unself-conscious as that. It’s like being looked at by something impersonal—the wind, the sky. Do you think he is a man? Or some human spirit of the mountains? You do not think him supercilious, do you? Those moth-eyebrows, I mean, and that slanting glance.”

“I think his mouth remarkable,” said Ambrose.

“Yes. It’s so small and innocent and unpitying, like a flower that can’t feel, or suffer, or know of its own destruction. A mouth that would look the same in torture. You can use that, Ambrose.” He smiled. “A mouth that he surely never uses to eat or kiss with. Will you use some of these words when you are writing in your diary?”

“Possibly. Do you understand all that he says?”

“What is the difficulty? I don’t find it a matter of understanding. I don’t have to say to myself, ‘What does he mean?’ I feel it in my bones.”

Ambrose pondered. “Perhaps you have the same means of consciousness as these Chinese.” He remembered her remarkable insights.

“Do you suppose I am a Sage?” she asked.

“At any rate,” he replied, “you resemble them in certain respects. You are at bottom only interested in what they would call the reality behind the flow of phenomena. You actually do live in constant touch with it, and find it exciting. Nothing else will ever quite give you satisfaction. It is a faculty which men of action lose. If they didn’t the flow of phenomena would cease.”

She stripped the dark leaves one by one from a bamboo.

“And what about men who record action and inaction with equal dispassion?”

“Oh,” he answered, “they also sometimes get in touch with reality, in a mild way. But about Yuan. What does he tell you?”

“He told me that when he has once thoroughly investigated the nature of objects, and understood the identity of all things, he will do as his great-grandfather wishes—abandon all desire, and wholly give himself up to what he calls the unnameable. But he will go much farther than his great-grandfather, he says. Already he is convinced of the ultimate unreality of the world. He wishes one day to leave the world of relativity, to contemplate Nature in its absolute aspect, and finally to sleep a white and dreamless sleep of the mind, knowing only what is beyond mind. This is what he said, and in this state he won’t know his nose from his mouth, and his flesh and bones will be dissolved, and he will drift with the wind, not knowing whether he is the wind itself or a leaf riding on it.”

“In old age,” said Ambrose, “he will come down to the less picturesque and more human mysticism of his great-grandfather. But first he has, as you say, to put away desire.”

“He often does, already,” she answered eagerly. “He fasts in heart. It is quite simple, apparently. You only forget there is a you, and when there’s no you it can’t have desires.”

“Quite simple.”

“He says it is the more subtle desires, the desires of the intellect, that trouble him.”

“No doubt they do. And in other matters he is without passions?”

“As far as I can see. Well—he’s not a neuter.”

“He has the eye of a man?”

She hesitated. “Of more than a man.”

“It has expression in it—warmth, feeling, electricity?”

“I don’t know. I cannot say what there is in his eyes. I can only say that they are not dead. They have looked straight at mysterious things, and they are unreadable. All his face is unreadable. He is like rocks and forests. His eyes are the mysterious presences that are among trees. And they slant beautifully.”

“And what is your chief feeling about him?”

“If only I could always think of him as a figure on a vase....”

She smiled at Ambrose faintly, enigmatically, baffling further inquiry. Strange creature, she seemed to him, neither child nor woman—at any rate half-fairy. “I don’t dare look at him very close,” she concluded. “He’s so still, so different. If he came walking by now in a meditation I should shiver. Oh! listen, Ambrose. Someone really is coming!”

Ambrose stepped back into the bamboo thicket, and the shimmering, scented girl shrank in under his arm. There were voices, in English and Chinese—chiefly little exclamations and some laughter. Whoever it was passed on and the voices died out in the forest.

“Quentin,” whispered Ambrose, “and some young women we don’t know.”

They emerged on the white moonlit lawn, crossed the shadow of a great cedar, and entered the house.

27

One afternoon Lychnis, Ruby, Ambrose, Quentin and Fulke were on the island in company with Wang, Hsiao and Yuan. All were meditative, or sleepy, and they lay about on a little turfy place jutting out from the cliff a few feet above the water. They looked like a handful of orchids. Lychnis lay on her front with her head hanging over the Lake. She was gazing intently at the water, and her hair parted and fell down on either side of her face, leaving the slender neck bare, as if she had been laid on the plank of the guillotine. “How satisfying,” muttered Quentin, “to wring that neck!”

Yuan regarded the neck, but no shade or thought of emotion appeared on his countenance; nor did his fingers tighten.

“What a hateful thing to say!” said Ruby, who neither slept nor meditated, and only lay motionless.

Old Wang, after studying her for some time, had been heard to murmur: “The room has been made empty for the Master, but he does not enter it.”

Lychnis was fascinated by the water. She was thinking, if only she could wriggle out of her tunic and trousers, shoulders first, and slide over the cliff into the Lake and glide neatly among the stems of the water-lilies! To dip the chin first, and the mouth, tentatively, gingerly, in the cold element of a different universe; to bury the eyes, next, in its queer sights; to feel it slide over neck and back and legs; then suddenly to dart through it and surprise the inhabitants, like an unexpected meteor.

“I simply must know what it’s like to be a water-creature.” A sentence had emerged from the depths of her water-feelings.

“You can,” said Yuan, “by entering into subjective relationship with them.”

She looked at him as one who balances an infinity of considerations. “No doubt. But how does one enter into subjective relationship with, say, a water-beetle?”

“First,” began Yuan, “by forgetting self; then by emptying the mind....”

But old Wang interrupted, as if to give the young man instruction on an important matter. “Those who know, say nothing,” he observed; “those who say, know nothing.”

“But,” said Lychnis, “that makes conversation so difficult.”

“Why converse?” Wang asked her, with a sardonic grin. “Speak only when compelled, and then reluctantly, and only in the words of the Sages.”

“In the meantime,” said Yuan, who, in relation to his great-grandfather, was only at the beginning of wisdom, “let us take a walk under the water.”

Lychnis lifted her head and glanced round at Ambrose. “Among all those plants? I’m not afraid, but isn’t it rather impossible?”

“I’ll dive in and save you,” said Quentin.

“I don’t like you under water,” she replied—“a spread-out monster with a dim, waving beard. Besides, I’ve no costume.”

“That is not a thing that matters—” began Yuan.

“Of course not,” put in Quentin, with immense approval.

The Chinese gentleman continued: “What I mean is, that we go as we are. It is not a miracle.”

The scattered orchids stood up, mystified, and undulated in a gay chain along the paths on the side of the cliffs. Presently Yuan halted at a place where glassy-green steps led down into deep waters between reed-clumps.

“A good place for pike, no doubt,” remarked Ambrose.

“You are a fisherman, then?” Yuan suddenly enveloped him, as it were, in an all-seeing gaze, which, while extremely polite, was also extremely inexorable.

“I fish, and meditate, and compose my thoughts.” Ambrose returned his gaze with a polite stare which, so Lychnis told him, was beautifully inflexible.

“Then we will fish and meditate together.”

“With the greatest pleasure.”

The two men bowed, and Yuan led the way down the glassy-green steps. They found themselves entering a roomy, inclined tunnel of some substance so transparent that they seemed to be entering a partition of the water. One by one they stepped down, taking a last glance, when their eyes came to its level, across the many-leaved surface of the Lake. In a few minutes they were walking in the depths of a forest of stalks where strange creatures loomed. It was very silent, very dim, very still, under that ceiling of flat leaves, or under an open sky of lake-water. Sometimes a flight of small, ghostly fish darted invisibly through the stalk-forest, or suddenly wheeling their sides in a light-beam became a thousand rainbows. Sometimes a beetle-creature struggled up skywards through the water, swimming as if faint for heaven. Or swans swam overhead like June clouds, or thrust their snaky necks down between lilies. A cormorant, breaking the limit of the water into a shiver of crystal, passed them in silent white pursuit of a hurrying fish. And in one region of the brownish-greenish water-universe a solemn carp, opening and shutting his mouth like a machine, took part with myriads of his kind in a mazy, rhythmical, interminable, involuted and apparently purposeful dance.

“Just like human beings,” observed Quentin.

“Why do they do that?” asked Lychnis. She and Ruby were walking on either side of Yuan; Fulke was following with despairful, scowling face. “Are they happy?”

“They obey their nature,” said Yuan. “According to the doctrine of Hsiao, they are Sages.”

“They cannot be Sages,” she put in, “because they have never been conscious. To be a Sage means to have abandoned human consciousness and to have adopted the demeanour of a fish or a vegetable.”

But he merely stood with bent head considering the glaucous lairs of the water-world. He was not thinking. He was abandoned, unconscious of self or of any process, to what his eyes saw. He was in relation with the water, the fish, the beetles, through the reality which filled him and them and superseded delimitation. He had ceased to exist. He was no longer separate. But an onlooker would have been struck by his self-possession.

Fulke went close to Lychnis and faint-heartedly touched her. His desire to put his arms round her nearly achieved itself. Distracted by himself and by his desire, he was now without inward resource. Entangled in the inhibitions of self-consciousness, he blushed, stammered, and did not know how to stand or where to put his hands.

Ambrose made notes on the behaviour of all concerned.

“Lychnis.” Fulke faltered a whisper.

She gave no sign of having heard.

“Lychnis. I.... Why won’t you talk to me? I could answer your questions.... I....”

She made no answer.

“I know things, too. I am intelligent. Oh, slime and hell! I hardly know what I’m saying!”

“Yes, yes. You are very intelligent—very nice.” She spoke as if half-asleep.

He stumbled back over the damp sand to Ruby. “Look at her!” he exclaimed. “She’s following him. He’s drawing her into his own mad world. What can we do, Ruby?”

“I don’t know.” Ruby was dejected, alarmed. “She’s funny. I do wish she wouldn’t be. You don’t think——” She stopped. “I don’t like it much here. It’s not a place for people to be. Could I go back? Would they mind?”

“My God!” he answered. “I think I’ll come with you. She’ll be all right. Ambrose is here. You and I—we are of no use to her.” Their eyes met in a perfect orgasm of wretchedness, and they glided off, the two of them, along the tunnel and up out of the water-world into the air and the sun.

Hsiao appeared to be disappointed. He had given himself up to the contemplation of Ruby’s torch of red hair that glimmered through the shadows of the stalk-forest. But, instantly dismissing anything so painful as disappointment, he addressed himself to a contemplation of Lychnis. “She has hands like the white opening water-lily,” he was understood to say. “They would be cool and fragrant to the mouth, and delicately scented.”

Wang Li tapped Ambrose on the shoulder, and pointed at his great-grandson.

“A young man,” he said, “not free from the chains of desire.”

“Desire?” queried Ambrose.

“Desire. An itch of the mind; the mind still itching to experience, to understand, to know. He still takes an interest in things. He approaches the matter from the wrong angle. Seek first the kingdom of non-being and the world of appearances will be yours at a later date.”

He notices a good deal for an old man who is permanently unconscious, thought Ambrose. Peripherally, no doubt.

As for Lychnis and Yuan, they had gone on ahead. They looked as if they were swimming in a gloom of stalks. One was going now deeper into the Lake, into a pool of shadows, into a treeless, inter-stellar space, lit only by the faint emanation of some distant, strange sun. The empty universe was inhabited by flights of fish, like angels going on heavenly errands, and also by monstrous shapes of fiendish though fish-like aspect.

“If these are the work of God,” said Ambrose, “I am hitherto imperfectly acquainted with the full variety of His resources.”

“Of God,” replied Wang, “by the hand of my great-grandson, Yuan. Some experiments of his.”

“I must bring my friend Sprot to see them,” said Ambrose, and received a wink of consciousness from the Sage’s right eye. Old Wang and his two descendants had a power of divination in the matter of character and motive that was quite extraordinary. From Wang especially there was nothing hidden.

“My great-grandson considers,” the old philosopher went on, “that, while he is taking an interest in appearances, a man may as well lend a hand in the temporary work of evolution, and add, by reason of his conscious artistry, a certain distinction, either of ugliness or beauty, to what sometimes appears to be the product of a bungler working in the dark. It is the function of the artist to give point, to relieve, to dramatize. For example——” He pointed abruptly to a glorious creature that floated past like a sun, raying out veils of splendour, and again to a slender torpedo-shape marvellously adapted for speed. “No doubt also you have remarked the rarity of the birds in these parts, and the perfect colour and shape of the flowers. Yuan’s. Nothing but a certain indifference to the scientific point of view on the part of his numerous relations has prevented him from experimenting with the human species.”

“I am willing,” said Quentin, “to act as his agent, or vehicle, in any experiments he may make with the human species, provided they are of a creative, and not of a merely negative, order.”

“How,” asked Ambrose, “does he justify his pre-occupation with objective existences?”

“He does not justify it,” said Wang, with what might have been taken for a great-grandfatherly groan; “he boasts of it. It is a phase, of course. It will pass. In time he will embrace his duty and become a Sage.”

“In the meantime,” remarked Hsiao, “his activities greatly enhance the amenities of the landscape and multiply the conveniences of life.”

Rounding a turn in the tunnel they came on Lychnis and Yuan, who were both gazing upward. High overhead floated the red hull of a coracle, and on either side of it a paddle, like a web foot, occasionally broke the surface. “Fulke and Ruby, I have no doubt,” said Yuan. “Lazy, are they not? Or else urgently discussing something.”

“Don’t let’s bother about them,” she replied. “Go on. Tell me more about strange things.”

Willingly enough he returned to his subject, and the pair of them sped on, absorbed in whatever theme they were discussing. Or perhaps it was not the theme they enjoyed, but the experience—the experience of sinking through the levels of consciousness and meeting in the deeps where there is no opposition between this and that.

Presently there was a shaft in the tunnel with a spiral stair. This the party ascended, and found themselves in the middle of the Lake. A boat was moored there, and far away among the lotuses was the red craft that had passed over their heads. Old Wang was smiling to himself with abandon, and continued to smile until they landed on the island.

“And the joke?” asked Ambrose politely.

“I laughed to see how easily young trees bend to a breeze. It would not be in accordance with wisdom to resist a main impulse of Nature. Here I am in agreement with Hsiao. This is the doctrine of spontaneity.”

“Excellent,” replied Ambrose. “But, I take it, if there is any flaw in the spontaneity the result will appear as indecision?”

“You are right,” said Wang, with a piercing look.

28

Soon enough there began to be a fuss about Lychnis and Yuan. It appeared that Fulke and Ruby, on their ascent into the familiar world, had taken a red cockle-shell skiff and spent the afternoon floating about the Lake, tasting a certain joy in their common misery. No harm in that. But on landing and returning home to the Pavilion, and on finding it in the sole occupation of Sprot, they had communicated to him their fears. These he received with the liveliest satisfaction, spoke much of the accuracy of his forecasting, and spent the evening stamping up and down in a resolved manner. When the party from the island returned, he drew Quentin aside and significantly questioned him, in the presence of Fulke and Terence, as to the proceedings of the afternoon.

“What are you getting at, Sprotling?” asked Quentin.

“I am going to make representations to Lord Sombrewater. I am going to convince him that it is desirable for us to leave the valley without delay.”

Terence lifted up his face and spoke inspired words: “I have a most convincing reason for that. This afternoon, in a dream, I saw the mountains of my native country, and a picture of the whole party of us eating honey in Innisfree. And there came on me a great impulse to arise and go there, which I would have obeyed at once had not the vision clearly said that the rest of you are to go, too.” He stood for a moment looking into the distance, and his grey eyes were undoubtedly alight with the apprehension of something not immediately attainable. “I starve here,” he added, “for the sights and the sounds of Europe. I am out of touch with the Other Side. There is no veil of misery to pierce; no heaven to reach, because no hell to reach from.”

“The dirt and the poverty,” said Quentin, “the factories and the brothels, the advertisements, the bankruptcy courts, the demure women who know the game of love—I agree. I hate this calm, this perfection. What you say is true. There are no arcs here, consequently no perfect rounds to long for.”

“Oh, for some work to do!” cried Fulke. “A world to redeem from the clutches of industrialism—a State to build—a race to create!”

“I am with you in the last item only,” said Quentin, putting out his crisp, curly beard.

“At all events,” summed up Sprot with enthusiasm, “we hate this neighbourhood. We are all for returning to the ship. But first, how to get rid of this Chink, this Yuan?”

“I could knife him, if necessary,” said Quentin, with a certain genuine earnestness.

“Why not?” asked Sprot. “Nobody would know. It’s often done in these Asiatic countries. There are no police here. But first—evidence. Lychnis must be watched.”

Fulke swung round. “You damned, newt-livered, beetle-tongued, slug-sticky, crawling miasma! Use Lychnis, will you? Besmirch her reputation because you’re unhappy away from your kennel? My God! if I hear her name on your slime-coated tongue one single time again, I’ll drag your entrails out through your eye-sockets!”

“He’s in a temper,” explained Quentin. “He’s in love—but hopelessly, I fear.”

Fulke looked at him with a light in his eyes like a sullen sunset drowning in a tide of misery. “Oh!” he cried, “you’re not capable of love. You’re not clean men. And I that am clean am of all of you the most miserable. I hate life!” He broke off, and made for the house. He met Ruby coming out, and once more a circuit of emotion was established between them.

“Where’s Lychnis?” she asked, with some anxiety.

The others listened.

“Heaven knows,” he answered. “Can’t you find her?”