Landscape with figures

By Ronald Fraser

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Title: Landscape with figures

Author: Ronald Fraser

Release date: August 30, 2025 [eBook #76764]

Language: English

Original publication: New York City: Boni & Liveright, 1926

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Robert Tonsing, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES ***

LANDSCAPE
WITH FIGURES

_By_
RONALD FRASER

_NEW YORK_
BONI & LIVERIGHT
_MCMXXVI_

PREFACE

This book is only an attempt to reproduce, in words, experiences that
have come in contemplating the landscapes, flowers and figures in
Chinese pictures and on their porcelain. It is the story of a human
mind that follows the mysterious and half-wanton beckonings of such an
experience until it is seized and understood. The originals of my three
Chinese friends are to be seen in the print-room, the ceramic-room, and
the Asiatic galleries of the British Museum. I am not attempting to
convey any profound meaning, unless it be the meaning of that mystical
proverb, “Everything comes to him who waits.” The system of thought
that I attempt to reproduce is Chinese and very ancient. I have not
been able to make up my mind whether it contains something of general
value, or whether it is merely a thought-puzzle with which those who
find pleasure in such occupations may amuse themselves.

LANDSCAPE WITH
FIGURES

We take this flower-filled and graceful story of a summer visit to
a valley of the Far East from the diaries and minutes of Ambrose
Herbert. It grows from his leaves like an image of some choice,
cultivated flower, some Asiatic lake-lily; there is, indeed, a delicate
lily-smell, a faint water-smell, that teases the sense with a hint of
queer landscapes, alien, impenetrable faces, in an unreal world of
paradoxical dreams.

Yet they visited the real heart of that image, these seven men who
called themselves, in a vein of humour, the Seven Sages, and it appears
that they scarcely held their own, when it came to philosophy, with
the uncompromising practitioners of wisdom they found there. After
all, they were Europeans. Men of considerable sensibility, they yet
did not give the things of the spirit undue attention; still less did
they permit any vision of the universe they might have had to interfere
with their way of life. They lived by common-sense adjustment to the
more obvious in circumstances, occasionally, at sentimental moments,
following a chance gleam—but not following it too far. Five of them,
that is. The other two had gone wrong.

All seven were associated in business—Lord Sombrewater’s business—and
he was their president. They travelled in his steam-yacht. In England
it was their custom to dine once a week at Lord Sombrewater’s house
or in his bamboo garden, to hear a little music perhaps, drink wine
(except one of them), discuss life and the world. Now the industrial
world was seething at this time, and Lord Sombrewater had seemed to
retire his forces, leaving a picket here, an outpost there, a strong
point where necessary, well held. He had withdrawn into the quiet of
the ocean to mature plans, taking with him these friends and chief
lieutenants, who had each something to contribute. Much business was
done daily by wireless. He kept touch with reluctant Governments, and
controlled his generals in charge of the field, with relentless hand.
Ambrose remarks that a wise captain-general of industry will not omit
to remember that the good faith of a deputy may fail, and he is certain
that Lord Sombrewater, a silent man, harboured during his silences
considerations of that order even in regard to his six friends.

Ambrose Herbert was annalist and minute-writer to the Sages. He was
not himself a Sage. He recorded the sagacity of others, fitted for
this exercise by the passionless receptivity of his mind. Every
morning, every hour, he swept his mind clean, so that he might receive
unprejudiced the impressions of the day, and no doubt that is why the
lineaments of the people in his records, and the scenery, are so clear.
It came to his ears that this passivity was looked on doubtfully in a
man not yet senile, not yet even middle-aged, hardly mature; it was
complained that he had no character, except in his being characterless;
it was thought unfortunate. But Lord Sombrewater thought otherwise.

The first time we see them they are in far eastern seas. Lychnis, who
is Lord Sombrewater’s daughter, Ruby Frew-Gaff and her father (the
tall, polished Sir Richard, with pale blue eyes, Lord Sombrewater’s
chief physicist) are in the motor-launch with the light-bearded and
bard-like Terence Fitzgerald and Ambrose himself. Something had gone
wrong with the pelagic trawls that they used for capturing plants out
of the ocean. It seems to them a rather strange and other-worldly
ocean, like a sea in a picture, or on a vase. It is afternoon. There
is a magical warm scent in the wind, as if they were near some land of
delicate spring. Terence, the poet-painter-seer, is riding in the bows,
but his soul is afloat. Sir Richard is busy with the apparatus, and the
two girls, who have stolen a forbidden plunge in the sea, are clinging
to the sides of the launch like wet sea-snails. The ship, into which
the Sages have committed the weight of their philosophy, the _Floating
Leaf_, painted the colour of the bamboo, heaves gently a quarter of a
mile off on waves of a dark liquid green, which is compared with the
green of some claret glasses they used, and as the afternoon wears on
the sky becomes the same colour.

Ambrose, as usual, takes occasion to note some details. He mentions
the longitude, the latitude, the depth, and the temperature at various
levels as registered by the deep-sea thermometer. In addition, he
mentions some details with regard to the two girls; for instance, that
their arms and legs (bloodless, because of the cold) make changing
lights with their wet, plum-coloured bodies, and the patterns move
rhythmically. There is no doubt which of the two he prefers. At least,
whenever he describes them he gives Lychnis more space, possibly
because she is far more complex in her nature and difficult to
describe. He finds a key to the two girls in all their features. Ruby
is red-haired, well-developed and dimpled. Her mouth is described as
full and red, and (for those who have desires that way) of the kind
which, more than any other that he has seen, Ambrose supposes might
be thought kissable—that is to say, for an upstanding and not too
subtle lover. Lychnis is called, amongst other things, flower-like or
spritish. He speaks of a flower-like face, with some trace on it of
spritish and fairy passion. Her mouth seems to arouse thoughts of a
non-sensual order—in himself, that is, for he records a remark of the
Sage Quentin that to kiss Lychnis on the lips would be to find heaven
through the flames of sensation. But Ambrose asks, would a man want to
maul the body of a primrose with his mouth? In writing of the afternoon
under description, he takes opportunity to point out a relation
between their minds and their physique. Ruby, with reddish hair and
fine shining body, travels tirelessly in the sea like some fabulous,
ocean-going fish, and she is not variable in her moods; but Lychnis
slithers and plays in the fields of the sea fawn-like, and then she is
to be seen at rest considering the waters, or grimacing behind a wave.

Presently Sir Richard, discovering where they were, commanded them with
tones of displeasure into the boat. Ruby, who had only done what her
friend ordered, obeyed, and Lychnis, stopping first to nose under the
stern as if she were a whale, followed.

“This is really not very sensible,” he said, with an eye on their
vascular systems. “Down below at once and get dressed.”

Lychnis stood on the deck for a moment consulting her inward heart.
With her it was not a question of obeying or not obeying. In all
matters she followed some secret and rhythmic way that unfolded
itself to her at a suitable time. Ambrose transfers a sketch of her,
standing there in her plum-coloured bathing dress, to his white pages.
He discusses her head, shown against sky and sea, as a subtle and
beautiful relation of browns and ambers and pinks. Her eyes were a
surprising brown, greenish in face of the light, and her eyelashes
made a line of blackish purple when the eyelids were lowered. Her hair
seemed amber, light amber to brown, but often it held coppery lights
too, and a sort of deep heliotrope sheen and shadow, as now, against
sunset. The bloom of her skin, he says, was too delicate to injure
with human language—he only indicates a flush of health under the tan
of sun and voyage, and a vividness of colouring that came when her
feelings were high. He does tell us that her mouth utterly satisfied
the mind, with its pink deeper than coral, and a stain of some still
richer hue—he never can decide what it is, and vermilion-purple is the
nearest he can come to it. She had a way of turning up the corners of
her mouth at him. Ruby called it making a fox-face. Then he speaks,
geometrically, of certain curves which presented her to notice as a
young woman. He makes more than a score of attempts, one time and
another, to convey the movement and fine beauty of those curves, to
describe certain relations between one part of her and another.

She replied to Sir Richard, showing small, sharp teeth and umber
shadows in the delicious cavern of her mouth: “I couldn’t help it.
There’s something funny in the afternoon, or in the sea—something that
makes one feel dreamy.”

He smiled indulgently at her. “What does it make you dream of,
visionary, yet not unpractical Lychnis?”

She answered his smile. “Do you remember the seascape in some
dessert-plates of daddy’s at home? They came from Asia, I think—old,
buried Asia. I thought I had got melted into that picture.”

Ruby, willing and adoring slave of the finer girl, never venturing to
move without her except under orders, called from the companion-way:
“Do come, Licky darling.” And Licky, her inward heart at that moment
speaking, did not refuse. But she repeated to Sir Richard, as she went
off: “I believe we have got melted into a picture. We are going to have
an adventure in a dessert-plate.”

When the two young women came back again, clothed and glowing (we hear
that the tiny cabin was electrically warmed), evening was on the sea.
They drew off a little to watch their ship, a blotch of brown-green
floating on deep green water under a sky of dissolving lemon fire.
Terence Fitzgerald still rode in the bows, tall, rapt and motionless
(except that a sigh would now and then escape him, with a sentence
or two). For him such things as Ambrose notes, axes of reference and
other matters of exact detail, were not of moment. He had a fair
beard, and he was bard-like and communed with the lordly ones, riding
in the bows of the boat. And presently, when the _Floating Leaf_
drifted across the disc of the sun, he lifted his hands up, and his
brows furrowed in what Ambrose calls the pain of his vision. He spoke:

“I saw a cloud of them like peach-blossoms blown over the sea.”

“A cloud of what?” asked Sir Richard.

“The beautiful people.”

Sir Richard was tickled.

“They went sunwards, with an ecstasy on their faces, and we are to
follow them.”

“Ecstasy’s all very well in these tricky waters, Terence, but I should
prefer to see their navigation certificates.”

Terence smiled. “Believe me or not, my scientific Richard, we are to
find a heavenly country.”

Lychnis gazed at him round-eyed and more or less believing. She was
prepared to believe everything that sounded beautiful. “He’s in the
dessert-plate, too,” she murmured.

Sir Richard started the engine and they went back to the ship. Ambrose
notes how swiftly she loomed up out of the twilight, and adds that as
they went on board a fierce, foreign face scowled at them out of a
port-hole.

Ambrose had passed but a few minutes in his cabin, arranging his
impressions and making a few colour notes, when Lord Sombrewater’s man
knocked with a message. “His lordship’s compliments, Mr. Herbert, and
will you be good enough to step along to his lordship’s room?”

Ambrose stepped along, and describes the two men whom he found before a
decanter of sherry in the suffused light of the stateroom. There were
bamboos and clouds painted on the delicate walls, so that they might
have been sitting in the grove where the Sages held their sessions at
home. Lord Sombrewater and George Sprot had each a cigar and a glass
of sherry. The former always had a cigar and a glass of sherry at
seven o’clock, and Sprot would have a cigar and a glass of sherry with
anybody at any time of day. The two were in consultation, if that can
be called a consultation where the one party is merely testing the
reactions of the other party to his announcements.

Ambrose was greeted affably, but with swiftness and decision. “Come in,
Ambrose. Sit down.” And Ambrose was in a chair. “A council to-morrow
morning.” And Ambrose had made a note on his tablet. “A glass of
sherry.” And the golden liquid was poured out. But Ambrose did not
touch it.

Lord Sombrewater was economical in thought, in word, in movement. He
wasted no man’s time, and no woman’s. He achieved his desires with the
maximum of deliberation and the minimum of means, and he did not regard
the achievement as an occasion for the wasteful output of sentiment. He
had produced three things of importance—a world-business in electrical
goods, a bamboo garden, and Lychnis. He had created the business by
the remorseless application of drastic and ever-renewed principles of
economy as regards both production and disposal. He had created his
bamboo garden by an economy of mental effort, working to time-schedule,
concentrated utterly during the appointed hour upon the subject in
hand. And he had created Lychnis with an economy in the matter of
demonstrative affection that his wife secretly thought distressing.

As to appearance, he was short—six inches shorter, except for Sprot,
than the shortest of his six companions. He was bald longitudinally
from the crown. Yet he dominated. He had little plump, masterful hands.
He had a swift, birdlike glance that dwelt shrewdly for a moment and
divined motives. And in the name Sombrewater there was for Ambrose
(who observes that such impressions came vaguely at sea) some reminder
of the deep lakes and the torrents tumbling among the crags where he
had built those murmuring factories—some reminder of the scenes that
from boyhood must have entered into his lordship’s being, to flower in
Lychnis, perhaps to dream in her, vicariously and uneconomically.

As for George Sprot, he was a plain, ordinary man, with nondescript
hair and unbeautiful form and structureless, unintelligent face. He
was a “practical” man, and he had been attached in some subordinate
capacity to Lord Sombrewater’s enterprise, and invited to join the
Sages (but he did not know it), as representing that great body of
uninstructed, biased and congenitally foolish opinion by which human
affairs are so largely ruled. His motto was, that one man is as good
as another, but towards men who had achieved distinction in the fields
of painting, literature and music he adopted an attitude of convinced
disrespect. Towards an industrial viscount he adopted an attitude of
careful familiarity which scarcely concealed his adulation.

Just at present he seemed to be in a state of distressing nervous
excitement. One would have said that the restraint of his employer’s
manner was irksome to him, that with some other man he might have been
impatient. He was impatient with Ambrose, indeed, because Ambrose was
in no hurry to ask questions, and with Ambrose he had no hesitation in
showing it. His manner towards Ambrose, we learn, was the manner of
a man towards a paid servant, though Ambrose was not, as a matter of
fact, a paid servant.

Ambrose did at last put one necessary question: “Is there anything
special for the agenda?”

Lord Sombrewater shot him a glance. “Mutiny of the crew.”

Ambrose wrote on his tablet, “Mutiny of the crew.” Then he asked, as
usual: “Anything else?”

A sound like the collapse of a heart escaped from Sprot. “Mutiny!” he
exclaimed, interrupting under compulsion of his feelings—“Mutiny! Don’t
you understand? The crew have threatened mutiny. There is—you said so,
I think, Lord Sombrewater—there is actual danger.”

“Mutiny is likely to be accompanied by violence,” remarked Ambrose.

“But, good God!” Sprot burst out, “don’t you see—I——” He met Lord
Sombrewater’s eye (he was appealing, of course, to him through
the protective ears of Ambrose). “Has it quite been realized
that—er—that—er—we have women on board—girls? That——”

There was a knock at one of the doors, and he performed what must have
given him the sensation of a considerable saltatory feat. He jumped, in
brief. But it was Lychnis, in a flowered dressing-gown, with her hair
shaken loose to dry. She shrank back a little at sight of Sprot, as a
primrose might shrink from a boot.

She ran her comb through the waves of hair, making them crackle. “Did I
hear you say there’s going to be mutiny?”

“That is so,” answered her father. He turned to Sprot. “Thank you
for your advice, and, of course, not a word to the women.” Sprot was
dismissed, in a condition of uncontrol that Ambrose thought pitiable.
Ambrose was asked, by a motion of the hand, to remain.

It was the half-hour before dinner that Lord Sombrewater liked to
spend with Lychnis. Regularly at seven-thirty o’clock he waited for
her to come in from her adjoining room, and very often she did.
Within limits his affection for his daughter might be said to be
unconsidered. In regard to his daughter there was an abeyance of his
deliberate personality. He loved her, in fact. Ambrose tells us that
the enjoyment of his wealth and his rank had been first and foremost
in the activity of acquiring them, as an end in itself; that it was
a new and exquisite gratification to him when he got Lychnis to dower
with them. He liked Ambrose to be there during those half-hours, partly
because Ambrose gave Lychnis pleasure by his conversation and advice.
Ambrose is aware that Lord Sombrewater thought him to be a harmless
kind of man. He knows that by a method of his own Lord Sombrewater had
formed the opinion, on consideration of his written work, that Ambrose
was the man to transmit his daughter’s beauty, in the written word,
to posterity. Terence Fitzgerald, who painted for the business those
wonderful and inspiring posters of god-like men radiating auras of
golden brilliance, was expected, likewise, to transmit her beauty on
canvas and in verse; but Terence was not asked in for the half-hour
before dinner. Lord Sombrewater had formed the opinion that Terence
also was an innocent man, but he was a poet, and the behaviour of
a poet was less certainly predictable than that of a white-minded
recorder of things done. And, indeed, the innocence of poets, in
juxtaposition with the innocence of maidens, is apt to work out
unhappily, sometimes.

So Lychnis might go on brushing her hair, and Ambrose might, since
somebody must if her beauty was to be recorded, describe what the
rhythmic movement of her arms should reveal; and if, when her body
twisted in the flowered dressing-gown as she flung her hair out, the
line of breast or back or thigh should please him, he might be allowed
to write it accurately down.

When dinner was finished, Ambrose and Fulke Arnott sat a long time over
their coffee: in attendance, the fierce, foreign face that had scowled
from a port-hole.

“There’s a council to-morrow morning, Fulke,” said Ambrose.

“Is there?” rejoined Fulke. “What about?”

“Mutiny of the crew.”

“Mutiny of the—— You mean——”

“I mean they are going on strike.”

Fulke Arnott, Ambrose says, was a young man with the soul of a
Greek athlete in the body of a chimpanzee, the thoughts of a saint
and the means of expression of a fish-porter. He describes him
as the cleanest-hearted man who ever set himself to the task of
self-expression in foul language. He allowed the fountain of his genius
to play in a preliminary manner. “You mean to tell me that those
stinking Chinks, those crawling, paste-coloured liver-flukes, those
doped nightmare beetles, have had the bowels to go on strike?”

“Precisely that.”

Fulke’s face was greasy with excitement. “Then, Ambrose, we may
solemnly thank God. We meet in the eastern hemisphere what we ran
away from in the west. We learn this hour, comrade Ambrose, that the
blinking revolution is world-wide, and the New World is about to be.”

“With a population of Chinks, as described?” Ambrose asked. It appears
that Fulke Arnott was a sidereal chemist whom Lord Sombrewater, on
discovering that he knew about the interiors of stars and had a
touch of quaint, constructive genius, had attached to his works with
instructions to reflect upon the interiors of furnaces. It amused Lord
Sombrewater to employ a revolutionary with advantage to his business,
and he was fond of his conversation. Fulke on his part admired his
employer as an artist, while attacking him as the world’s greatest
grinder of the faces of the poor.

“What do the others make of it?” he asked.

“Sombrewater discloses nothing.”

“He has the personality of a dynamo.”

“Sprot is alarmed.”

“Naturally, the snail-gutted bourgeois.”

“Frew-Gaff says they can’t get the better of our trained intelligence.”

“He believes in science, Frew-Gaff does.”

“Terence thinks it’s very wonderful. He says the high gods are leading
us.”

“It’s my belief the high gods are leading us up the garden. What about
Blackwood and Quentin?”

“I haven’t told them yet.”

“It’s no good looking for Blackwood now. He’s in a trance in his cabin.”

Ambrose smiled as he thought of Blackwood in his cabin, striving to
hide from life and desire. Blackwood, a too sensitive man, found the
strain of life in an industrial society more than he could bear. Also,
he was not successful in achieving his somewhat exquisite desires.
He failed, for example, with women. Unlike Fulke Arnott, he took no
consolation from dreaming of a perfect world. Fulke was for changing
his surroundings; Blackwood, on the other hand, had convinced himself
that there never can be happiness for anyone, and he found this belief
sustaining. He had therefore embraced what he understood to be the pure
doctrine of Indian Buddhism, and spent his time dodging existence by
a method of protective mimicry, in which he imitated the appearance
of Nothing. He had resigned the position of physiological adviser in
Lord Sombrewater’s therapeutic apparatus department, and now lived in a
cottage and occupied himself with the technique of self-destruction.
But, as he was soon miserably to learn, he had the processes without
the reality; the form quite without the inspiration.

“Quentin, I imagine, is not in a trance?” Ambrose queried.

“Quentin!” Fulke’s brow blackened. “With Lychnis and Ruby for certain.
Showing off his bushy beard and his princely figure in the light of the
moon. The libertine! The outsize, libidinous, bearded rat!”

“One would not describe him as a rat. There is something too royal and
magnanimous about him.”

“Oh, no doubt. He has a royal air. And ruddy cheeks. And fine red lips.
And a chest like a beechtree. And the legs of Ulysses. And arms that
hug. The sort of man that young girls dream of.”

“It cannot be denied that he is a refined scholar.”

“You don’t grudge him his successes. Nor do I, you fish! In that realm
of endeavour you only have to try and you are successful. But they
don’t know, poor innocents, how deceptive size is. It’s the promise
that attracts them. The performance is apt to be disappointing.”

“You are warm. And—may I say?—there is a certain odd discrepancy
between your declared views on sex purity and the somewhat promiscuous
and even sordid habits of your imagination in that regard.”

“Pink-cheeked Ambrose, rosy-fingered Ambrose, continent Ambrose, I
don’t reconcile anything. I am the only man in this ship who doesn’t
reconcile his ideas with one another, the only one who isn’t a blasted
walking logic, the only one——” He stopped and patted Ambrose on the
shoulder. “Come on; let’s go up on deck. I forgot I’m a Sage. The
trouble is, you know, Ambrose, that, I mean to say—I shouldn’t mind
if it wasn’t Lychnis. He can do what he likes about Ruby, but when
it’s Lychnis—— She’s too good to be seduced by anybody but a winged,
frowning Eros, and there aren’t such things. What time is it? She
and Frew-Gaff and I are going to begin a new series of calculations
to-night. The wonder that girl is, Ambrose! She feels about mathematics
the way some people feel about flowers. She told me once that formulæ
bud and blossom for her like roses. She’s all rhythm, that girl. She
has the most astonishing perceptions about physical reality, and all
unknowingly. It’s my belief that with just a little more she’ll find
herself accidentally in possession of some extraordinary secret.
She has something in her that no one else in this ship understands,
something mysterious, insight—I don’t know what to call it—and she
is unconscious of it. The wonder! The darling! Put that down in your
notebooks and ponder it. I can see in your eye that you are composing
sentences as I go along, you soulless, metal-minded register.”

Ambrose remarks that he couldn’t do better than record the conversation
as it fell.

Presently they were on deck. They found Quentin with Lychnis and Ruby
(in cloaks of emerald and rose respectively, with glimmering shoes),
showing off his bushy beard and his heroic figure in the light of a
yellow rose-leaf moon. The ship was moving gently in the foam-flowering
fields of the sea. Above them, against a swaying almond-tree of stars,
could be seen the head of a seaman looking over the canvas of the
navigating bridge. There was no sound but the sound of the sea and
Quentin’s rich voice and the girls’ laughter.

“Five-and-twenty past nine, Lychnis,” said Fulke.

“Oh, bother!” She frowned. But the thought of the calculations, once
planted in her consciousness, began to attract her. “I’ll come,” she
said; and chose to descend to the lower deck by an iron ladder that the
sailors used in passage from foc’s’le to bridge. She vanished into the
darkness like some faint emerald emanation.

“And your mother wants you, Ruby,” said Ambrose.

The rose emanation went slowly and sulkily after the emerald, and
Ambrose delivered his message on the subject of mutiny with a gesture
towards a light that outlined a door in the swaying foc’s’le.

“Well, I’ll take ’em on single-handed, in defence of virginity,” said
Quentin, “though chastity requires no defence, for, as Judas Thomas
tells us, chastity is an athlete who is not overcome. How beautiful
is the story of Perpetua, the virgin martyred at Carthage, and of
Thekla, for whom the lioness fought with other beasts in the arena! No,
Ambrose. Purity is absolute. The pure virgin cannot be defiled, for
her heart is not in the work. And that is why we need have no scruples
regarding her.”

“Thekla?” asked Ambrose. “I am not acquainted with that story. I must
look it up.”

At ten o’clock precisely Ambrose reported to Lord Sombrewater, who
was playing bridge with his captain and two of the three ladies—Lady
Frew-Gaff and Mrs. Sprot. Ruby’s red head was bent over a book and Lady
Sombrewater knitted. The three ladies did not differ in appearance
more noticeably than sparrows. Indeed, they closely resembled
sparrows, among the painted bamboos. They had all three been very
pretty girls, and that was why their husbands had married them. They
had married them before they knew exactly what kind of prettiness and
what accomplishments they required women to have. As regards Lady
Sombrewater, the very negative of her husband, Ambrose wondered how
Lychnis had been gotten out of that nonentity.

“And where is Lychnis?” she asked, as he came in.

“She’s with Sir Richard Frew-Gaff and Fulke Arnott, doing sums.”

“Queer girl. I missed her after dinner. I thought she was with you.”

“She and Ruby were with Quentin after dinner,” the captain innocently
said.

Lord Sombrewater’s eye was expressionless, like a pheasant’s. The three
ladies exchanged glances, glanced at Ruby, and when she glanced up from
her book simultaneously glanced back again.

There was silence for an hour.

“Game and rubber,” said Mrs. Sprot at last.

“And bedtime,” added Lady Frew-Gaff. And there was a great pushing back
of chairs and shaking of handbags and jingling of coins and picking
up of dropped odds and ends. The choleric Chink came in with Bovril
and whisky-and-soda, and as he went out again, with a last furious
good-night, the ship gave a distinct heave.

Then Lychnis came in. “Yes,” she replied to a question, “there’s a
wind blowing. Terence is outside sniffing it. He says it’s full of the
Peach-blossom People. He says they keep on flicking the tops of the
little waves with their pink feet.”

“And what did you say to that?” asked her father.

“I said no doubt it was true. He looks at the waves a lot, so he ought
to know. I told him about my waves.”

“Your waves?”

“Light waves and that. Calculations about them, in rhyme and blank
verse. We had wonderful ones to-night—long flat ones like trains and
some like falling rockets, and a series like the rhizome of a bamboo
that keeps on putting out a new shoot. Fulke nearly cried because a
demonstration of Sir Richard’s was so beautiful.”

By an understanding convenient to everybody, Lady Sombrewater retained
the right to use a tone of authority with her daughter, and now she
ordered her daughter to bed. Swiftly she went to bed herself, thus
putting disobedience out of sight. The other two ladies followed,
shepherding Ruby.

It very often happened that Ambrose spent the last half-hour before
bedtime in conversation with those two. It was Lord Sombrewater’s
custom to drink a whisky-and-soda and to smoke a cigar, and Lychnis
would chatter or gloom or behave idiotically, as her mood might be.
To-night she gloomed.

“Cross to-night, Licky?” asked her father.

“Dissatisfied.” She pulled a lock of hair over her eyes and bit it—a
trick of childhood when people looked at her and she was sulking.

“What beautiful hands Sir Richard Frew-Gaff has got!” she said. “They
move like beings, with minds, contriving things. Mine are merely
something to finish the shape of the arm.”

Ambrose looked at her arms and hands—orchids waving on stalks. Fit
to express passion, they might be considered. He looked at her feet.
She had pale green stockings to go with her emerald dress, and dark
green snake-skin shoes. Her dress was a sheath to the flower of her
body. Underneath, as Lady Sombrewater had told him, thinking him a most
suitable recipient for the confidence—underneath she wore tenderest
stalk-green silk. She liked to feel that her clothes were petals, a
living integument of nature.

“Been working too hard?” said Lord Sombrewater.

“No,” she answered emphatically. “I don’t think I work at all. What I
do comes to me, and it’s not tiring.”

“Well,” he observed, “it makes you scratch your head a good deal,
judging by your hair.”

Her hair was erratic in disposition. Loosed from control, it grew and
flowed from her head in fan-like streams. There was evidence that her
hand had been plunged recently in its depths, for the tonic effect of
irritation on the sap of her genius. She took out the pins, and her
hair spread and rippled down her emerald dress, so that to the queer,
associative mind of Ambrose she seemed to gloom from a torrent of some
cascading tropic fern. The high forehead, heavy with thought, the
considering eyes, with the lids and the shadows that spoke of what he
chooses to call her plant-like passions, were seen in a wavy, ferny
fountain. Nor does he stop at that in his curious description. He
often describes her as plant-like, but here he talks of her as having
affinities with the insect. He says that she produced an effect on him
as if she were an insect, with a remote, non-human mind, regarding him
from among the fronds of a fern.

“Still, I’m not tired,” she said, enigmatically smiling.

“Nevertheless, you had better go to bed,” put in Ambrose.

She walked towards the door (painted cloudy between two painted clumps
of bamboo) of her bedroom. She walked with small steps in a line. It
was in her walk that she became a woman. One saw that her knees and
back were a woman’s. In the open door she twisted round on sinuous
hips and thrust out a hand through a torrent of hair in a gesture of
good-night.

“Why is she so often moody, do you suppose?” asked Lord Sombrewater
when the door was shut.

“She is twenty-two. She is likely to be dissatisfied until she is
mated,” Ambrose observed.

Lord Sombrewater accepted this with considerable reluctance. “No doubt
there is something in what you say. The observations of a spectator are
certainly very illuminating. I hardly seem to be putting her in the way
of getting a mate, though, at present.” He smiled, passing it off.

“It would be difficult, no doubt, for her to find one among those on
board.” He wondered whether, in fact, Lord Sombrewater was not even
consciously hiding her away.

“How does she react towards Quentin?” he was asked.

“It is to be presumed that it is a matter of indifference to a flower
what wind carries the pollen, or whence.”

“You are doubtless right.”

“Without pursuing a misleading analogy too far, it is to be remarked
that a certain type of flower-minded and flower-passionate young woman
is often strangely careless in selecting a lover.”

“That is so,” said her father slowly.

Early next morning Ambrose came on deck in a monkish dressing-gown with
a fleecy towel round his neck. The wind had fallen. The morning was
fresh and tender and delicate as a morning in a Chinese silk, and the
sea was rippling and black like a lake. It was time for the matutinal
exercises. Lord Sombrewater’s valet and the fierce Chink were in
attendance with sponges and other matters; fresh and sea-water showers
were fixed conveniently; but it seemed to Ambrose that there began to
be something queer about these English habits in those far eastern seas.

Five of the Sages were already exercising, or standing under the
showers with expressions of enjoyment or endurance. Lord Sombrewater
was thorough but silent, and occupied himself with the punch-ball.
Fulke Arnott, deep-chested, long-armed, bow-legged and hairy as an
ape, felt his limbs with closed eyes and imagined himself a piece of
Pheidias. Sprot, the pot-bellied and knock-kneed, produced in his
throat a noise which he called singing, and Ambrose presumes that he
felt in the remnant of his soul some echo of what in an ancestor may
have been a free impulse. Terence stood under the fresh-water shower
like a Druid. His exercises were those prescribed for occultists, and
his mind, as the element drenched him, was concentrated on the purity
of the element. Then he moved to the sea-water shower, and concentrated
on salt health. When he had finished he moved over and stood by the
rail, tall and stately, shading his eyes and gazing into the rising
sun. Far and wide the little dark waves broke idly in tiny jets and
sprays of white foam. “We float, not on water,” he was heard to say,
“but on meadows of snowdrops and deep-leaved violets.”

Sir Richard Frew-Gaff was most amiable of the Sages at that time of
the day. With his higher centres a little relaxed from the preceding
day’s contemplation of physical reality, and warm with anticipation of
another day’s work, he appeared benevolently, as it were, in the world
of living phenomena, and cracked a couple of jokes. At the moment he
was hanging by the knees on the horizontal bar and hailed Ambrose,
passing in his white towel from the shower.

“Hallo, Ambrose!”

“Hallo!” The pale blue eyes of the scientist were looking at him upside
down. “You’re pinker than ever—like a pink cherub in a white cloud.”
Sir Richard swung and landed erect on the mat. “What’s the secret of
your morning freshness, Ambrose? You must sleep like the sainted dead
in paradise. Do you dream at all?”

“Not unless I want to.”

“Well, I envy you. I do not sleep too well nowadays.”

Ambrose would not expect to sleep, he tells us, if his brains were full
of imaginations that chained him to the world of physical appearance.

Then Arthur Ravenhill came gravely from his cabin. He did not use
the gymnastic apparatus. The functions of his body, assimilative and
excretory, were regulated by the operations of his mind. He digested
consciously, and his exercises took place in his inside. He was able
to perform gymnastic feats with his liver and kidneys, and had in mind
to achieve the supreme accomplishment and reverse the processes of the
alimentary canal. He was very thin. He had the air, in fact, of one who
has attained a considerable degree of self-mortification, and he was
able at any time of the day or night to discipline himself into one of
the four trances.

“Morning,” said Lord Sombrewater. “Didn’t see you yesterday.”

He stood with folded hands. “Having been led into sensual thoughts
by the beauty of the afternoon, it seemed to me necessary that I
should undertake the four intent contemplations. Thus, abandoning the
idea that there is an ego, realizing that beauty is a glamour in the
mind of that which has no ego, having rid myself of desire for any
but spiritual forms of existence and then convinced myself that all
existence, however abstract, is evil, the sensual images melted away.”

He passed through the group of gymnasts and stood under the shower like
an ascetic at the door of his forest cave, who by chance receives cold
water on the back of his neck.

“There’s a council this morning at nine,” Ambrose told him.

Last of all Quentin came striding from his luxurious bed. He certainly
outshone the rest as a conception in muscle. The deck trembled and
the apparatus shook with the weight of his leaps and his swinging
limbs. From the great pectoral slab to the Achilles tendon he was a
wonder—a muscular temple, a cathedral of bone and sinew, florid and
huge. When he was holding a long arm balance on the parallel bars his
torso resembled the junction of two branches of a beech. Within him,
too, there was no mean nervous system and brain. He knew the classic
poets, Greek and Latin, by heart, and was an expert in the art of
post-mediæval, early Renaissance periods in all countries of the
world. Ambrose describes him finally as a princely ruffian.

The exercises finished, they took coffee and met in council. At nine
o’clock precisely Lord Sombrewater rapped on the table before him, and
the Sages stopped talking. He was an expert in the chair. He had done a
great deal of business in chairs, and from behind them. They afforded
excellent opportunities for controlling large blocks of business by
means of majorities, for giving harmless vent to the opinions of
cranks, and for obtaining the consent of shareholders to reasonable
proposals.

He began: “The situation we have to consider is the following: our
intention was to visit Japan. The crew we took on at Sydney, after
that strange trouble we had there, seem to be under the influence of
some mysterious fear. That fierce-faced Chink chose them for us, you
remember. Well, they have intimated that they will sink the ship unless
we land them forthwith at a Chinese port.”

“Why?” asked Sprot.

It was a question the chairman expected. Shareholders were apt to ask
“Why?” His technique was to unfold just such a minimum of a situation
as sufficed to answer questions.

“They allege, as a matter of fact, that they have wireless orders from
their union.”

“Are all those Chinks and dagos and things in a union?”

“It’s international now,” put in Fulke Arnott. “I would like to point
out to you the interesting features of this situation. We’re a quarry.
The arch-capitalist escapes from Europe with his accomplices in search
of a year’s quiet to mature his plans, and labour brings him to book in
the middle of the China Seas. It’s good. It’s pretty. It’s encouraging.”

“It’s all that,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “It’s also pure nonsense.
In any case I do not consider myself a fugitive.”

“I don’t want to imply that you ran away,” Fulke replied. “The fact is
that your position is one in which you can afford to take a year off,
so long as you watch the intrigues of the henchmen you’ve elevated and
see that they don’t manœuvre you out of the position of control.”

“You begin to see the point. The central fact is my position. It is
true that I own the mines, the railways, the crops, the whole activity
of large pieces of several continents. If I cannot escape them, neither
can they escape me. I am their light and air. Without my activity,
races perish. Unless I continue to produce business enterprises, as
Terence produces pictures and Richard Frew-Gaff his hypotheses, nations
will starve.”

“My answer,” said Fulke, “is: Let them.” His green-brown eyes glowed.
He had a vision, as Ambrose presently ascertained, of a few young men
and women, few and free, living on nuts in a wood.

“We wander from the point,” said the chairman. “I do not believe for
a moment that there are any orders from any union. The trouble is
something quite different. But we have to consider what action we shall
take. Let us have views round the table. What is your view of our
action, Fulke?”

“In theory——”

“Never mind that. Let’s hear what another business man has to say.
George Sprot, your views, please.”

Sprot, who had been agitatedly twisting his fingers, was flattered.
“Defy them! If they won’t work, let them starve. If they mutiny, shoot
them.”

“So useful, George,” said Quentin. “So practical.”

Lord Sombrewater tapped with his hammer. “Terence.”

“I saw a cloud of beings, the colour of peach-blossom, drifting over
the sea. They swayed and bent like one branch blown by the same wind.
They were going towards China.”

“Attach them, Terence,” exclaimed the irrepressible Quentin. “They’ll
do instead of steam when the boilers go out.”

Once more the hammer. “Richard.”

“I suggest that we run the ship ourselves. Fulke and Lychnis and I can
easily work out a theory of navigation. We can complete it in a few
days. Some of us must be crew. Quentin’s a whole crew of stokers in
himself.”

Quentin passed a remark which Ambrose faithfully records, but we need
not trouble ourselves with it.

“That’s all very well, Richard,” said the chairman; “but in a tempest I
should hesitate to trust entirely in your very harmonious calculations.
And in any case, the officers have not deserted.”

“Well, let us be the crew.”

“I don’t know that Barnes would care to run the ship with a crew
consisting chiefly of professors. Still, it might be practicable, after
we had disposed of the mutineers. Blackwood?”

“I have nothing to suggest. It is a matter of indifference to me where
I am or what I am asked to do.”

“Quentin?”

“I intend,” said Quentin, “to avail myself of the opportunities for
experience in both countries, and I don’t mind which comes first. There
are customs in both that I desire to experience. There are things
that I want to see. And there are, I fancy, in Tokyo, examples of the
miraculous flowering of Sung art, in which we meet with an idealism, a
spirituality, that cannot but be ennobling. What moral grandeur! What
ecstatic visions! And my Buddhist friend on my left should not fail to
consider the Ukiyoyé, those pictures of the frail, vanishing world,
those exquisite reproaches to our transitory desires, those——”

“Precisely. When we reach Tokyo the matter shall receive consideration.
In the meantime I would propose, as a practical contribution to the
discussion, that we inform the crew that we are entirely ready to fall
in with their suggestions and proceed to a Chinese port.”

The rest were silent. “I suppose it is the obvious course,” said
Frew-Gaff at last.

“In the absence of any better proposal, such as I had hoped to
receive,” said his lordship, “I think it is. We can discuss what to do
next to-morrow. Is that agreed?”

It was agreed, and the meeting broke up.

The next council took place, not on the following day, but some days
after. In the meantime there had been a tempest, with devils howling in
the wind and waves going all ways at once and other discomforts. The
_Floating Leaf_ got out of control, and now, by what all but Terence
called a stroke of luck, they were aground among the reeds in the mouth
of a river, perhaps a mile up-stream. The river debouched between
fantastic hills like green oyster-shells, and there were some queer
sailing craft, with masts like bent fishing-rods, and other strange
tackle, alongside. The sky was fantastic, like the hills, and there
was in the air a liveliness and odour of spring. Here and there on a
hill-top a plum-tree in blossom, and by a rock on the river bank a
clump of narcissus on green, springing stems. Here and there a willow
or grove of bamboo. “Much like _Arundinaria Simoni_, from here,” Lord
Sombrewater remarked. “Those bamboos should do well in the sea air.
Nothing like sea mists for bringing out their brilliance.”

Terence dominated the council. All of them were jubilant (except
Blackwood), having been brought safe out of danger of their lives.
Terence harped on the fulfilment of his vision.

“But what are we to do now?” asked George Sprot—“landed here like this?”

Sombrewater let his opinion be known at once. “Terence has convinced
me,” he said. “Henceforward we cannot do better than trust ourselves
entirely to his pink-footed fairies. Which direction is now indicated
by the Peach-blossom People, Terence?”

A light was on the brow of the bard. “They drift up-stream, between the
willows.”

“Well, now,” broke in Fulke Arnott, “it so happened that I was talking
just now to that fierce-faced Chink. Strangely enough, he knows this
country, and he says that the river is only navigable a few miles up,
except for small craft.”

“Then,” replied Terence, “we are to proceed in small craft.”

“Or until we meet some Green Figs going the other way,” put in Quentin.

Terence did not hear. “This morning as I was walking on the deck,” he
continued, “there passed by among the hills a man riding upon a goat.
He had a face of supernatural majesty and his eyes were terrible, and
he rode beside the river and on into the hills, driving his goat with a
branch of Peach-blossom.”

“The indications are plain,” said Lord Sombrewater. “We leave the ship
here in the care of Barnes and the officers. The crew, I am told, have
already disappeared, except for Fulke’s friend. We ourselves make a
journey inland with the portable wireless until the Peach-blossom cloud
comes to rest and attaches itself to a tree. If necessary, we accompany
the portent as far as Tibet, but personally I hope the destination of
these ghosts is within reasonable distance. What do you say?”

“I have a feeling,” said Fulke, “that it won’t be very far. That same
Chinaman spoke of a dragon that is famous in these parts. It lives, I
believe, in the hills yonder.”

“We must see that bird,” said Lord Sombrewater.

To George Sprot it was criminal levity to propose exchanging the
conveniences of their expensive machine for the discomforts and dangers
of an excursion through an unknown country, and all because of the
drivelling of a literary man.

“What will the ladies say!” he exclaimed.

“Naturally we shall consult everybody concerned. Shall we do so at
once?”

Taking Ambrose with him, the owner of the vessel went forthwith to
discuss matters with the captain. In twenty minutes the whole thing was
arranged, and Barnes was in receipt of full instructions as to the
course he was to pursue in case of trouble.

“I shall, of course, keep in close touch by wireless,” said Lord
Sombrewater.

“That makes it all quite easy,” said Captain Barnes. “There’s one
thing, though. We must have some sort of crew on board.”

“Oddly enough,” said the first officer, “that Chinaman butler and
man-of-all-work mentioned to me this morning that he would have no
difficulty in getting hold of a thoroughly reliable crew.”

“Did he indeed?” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Can you tell me whether
the said Chinaman had anything to do with the steering of us the night
before last in the storm?”

Captain Barnes laughed. “It’s a fact he was on the navigating bridge,
lending a hand. But still—what could he do?”

“Seems to me he took the opportunity to bring us to his own door. Well,
that’s that. I shall leave the maids behind. Our wives will need them
in any case.”

They went on deck and found the rest of the company gathered there. The
two mothers, with the advice of Mrs. Sprot, were quite definite; their
daughters should not go on such an absurd expedition. “This is the
maddest thing my husband has agreed to yet,” said Lady Sombrewater. “I
protested from the beginning. I protested against the voyage. I pointed
out that we were quite comfortable at home, but I was not listened to.
I protested against this outlandish China, but I was laughed at. I
protested during the storm. I had a feeling that we were being plotted
against. But nobody seemed to be able to do anything or have any sense
at all. And now look what a pickle we’re in, landed here like this, as
Mr. Sprot so rightly says. I protest——” She looked round for something
to protest against. “I protest against this kind of scenery. It’s most
un-English. My daughter shall not go.”

“Of course not, mother,” said Lychnis. But she smiled at her father and
pinched Ambrose’s arm.

Ruby saw it. “Oh, mother,” she pouted, interpreting the signs, “if
Lychnis is going, why can’t I go, too?”

“But Lychnis is not going,” said Lady Sombrewater, with firm reproof;
and Ruby, who was not so quick as she was red and white and lovely,
looked terribly confused.

“Then,” put in Quentin, “the sensations that we experience on our
journey will be very much abated in sharpness, because, for a man who
is pure in heart, like myself, there is nothing gives so much point to
the beauty of early morning, to the sudden revelation of a landscape,
the contemplation of the purity of flowers, the noonday rest, and the
bed among bracken under the winds of night, as the neighbourhood of a
couple of maidens.”

The three ladies glanced at the girls and at one another, and their
eyes were guardian angels. “I absolutely put my foot down,” said Lady
Sombrewater.

“And I mine,” added Lady Frew-Gaff. “In any case, if one of the girls
fell sick, who would look after her, I should like to know?”

“Oh, come now, my dear!” put in her husband. “I myself, though not an
expert, know a good deal about the body——”

“Encyclopædic Richard,” observed Quentin. “And for the matter of that,
I also know something of the body.”

“And Blackwood was actually a professional physiologist.”

“A physiologist is not a mother,” said Lady Sombrewater.

“The body,” observed Blackwood, “is but a collection of obscene guts
and unpleasant juices. Beauty is therefore a superficial illusion and
the reality is extremely revolting. The body——”

Lady Sombrewater waved the girls away. She was used to these
uncompromising declarations of the Sages, but she had not got to like
them, and she could still protect the girls.

“The body,” continued Blackwood, “is merely an involuted skin, highly
specialized at various points, and capable of sensations, especially
tactile sensations, which some—as, for instance, Quentin, who has not
received enlightenment—consider desirable. Man, in brief, is nothing
but a piece of skin capable, in contact with another skin, of a supreme
sensation which results in the establishment of a third sensational
skin. Of the behaviour of these skins and their obscene accompaniments,
and of the cunning fluids by which, for their extraordinary object of
perpetuation, the said skins are cleverly kept in what is curiously
known as health, I have a considerable knowledge. The two maiden skins,
therefore, would be in a position to receive expert assistance should
they fall ill and inexplicably wish to recover.”

“Mr. Blackwood!” began the three ladies at once.

But Lord Sombrewater put an end to the discussion. “We’ll settle all
that presently,” he said; and they heard in his voice their doom, and
perhaps (though Ambrose was not able to find out whether their thoughts
were precise) the doom of their daughters.

Ambrose found an opportunity, during the afternoon, to ascertain from
the two girls their views as to the expedition.

He had gone ashore with them, at the instance of Lychnis, and they had
climbed to the top of a humped green hill so as to survey the country.
There they stood, under a plum-tree in blossom, protected, as Lychnis
observed, by cousins of Terence’s messengers from Paradise. Lychnis
herself was in a fragile plum-colored frock, out of compliment to them,
and her red-haired fellow was in willow-green.

Behind, between two contortions of cliff, lay the sea. Far away,
across the wrinkled and fissured hills, there were mountains with the
unmelted snows of winter lying on their tops like petals of narcissus.
The afternoon was spring-like, and there seemed to Ambrose to be a
fragrance of lilies; but whether it came from distant fields or whether
the girls were scented with it, he could not quite decide. But he
suddenly remembered that the Chinaman had spoken of a great lake of
water-lilies beyond the mountains of the interior.

Lychnis stood on the hill with her hands clasped behind her, frowning
at the snows.

“Is that where we are going?” she asked.

“The indications point that way, I believe. Does it amuse you to go?”

“Oh yes! And really, if we don’t find something new, something strange,
there, I think I shall die. Shall we perhaps discover some secret of
life there, do you suppose?”

“You mean?”

Ruby was wandering about, rather bored, and Lychnis, as often before,
talked intimately to her confessor. “I am so tired of reading books and
meeting people and thinking, just to fill up the time. I am so tired of
being conscious and trying to be more conscious. It is a disease that a
drink of genuine life would purge out of the system. I want to become
so that I’m waiting to get up in the morning just because it is another
day to live; then, when I lie down in bed at night, sleep would be a
deep physical pleasure. I wish it was a young world, with only a few
people in it, and spring meant that one would go out of doors and ride
away on some quest.”

“Romantic,” he observed. “And is not that what you are to do now, with
your squires?”

“But it will be only us, and we only fill up the time, without zest and
unconsciousness. Would you call my father whole-hearted any more? He
knows now that he makes what is not worth making, and he has lost touch
with life. Sir Richard lives merely intellectually, and he only knows
about the how of things and argues fantastically as to their why. He
makes out God to be a symbol in mathematics. Then Terence. His visions
are old, and I think they are pathological and mad. His auras and
reincarnations and glittering spirits from other planes, and all his
vibrations and rhythms and things—they are the cloud-rack of a decaying
personality. They are illusions of visions; and who would follow them
to the world’s end, except daddy, more in contempt than faith? And as
for Blackwood, he is so disillusioned that he wants to come to an end,
and maltreats his mind with some old lost discipline for making it
think of nothing, which it was never meant to do. And Sprot does not
even know that there are thoughts, or doubts, or despairs. He’s merely
a cell, and he can only market goods, I am sure without zest. No, Fulke
is the only one who has any vision of a sweet and joyous world. He has
youth in him, and desire, and all that. But his shape displeases me.”
She looked up at the plum-blossom burning on the branches above her.

“There is Quentin. He has zest,” Ambrose observed.

“But what for? Yet he pleases me, and if I find nothing at the end of
this journey I think I may let him please me more—if he can. For one
can have pleasure if one can have nothing else. Yet there are certain
things about love that I don’t thoroughly understand—you could tell me,
if I could ask you. I think I could.”

Her head was bent in thought. Then she raised up her passion-lidded
eyes, and Ambrose took the opportunity to examine her state of mind.

“Perhaps it is not life that you desire,” he said thoughtfully. “There
is something else—you will understand what I mean some day.”

“You mean love, I suppose?” she asked, indifferent.

“No, not that.”

“I find love a bore,” she observed. “It might not be, I can conceive.
Several have loved me, and Fulke now I’m afraid, and Quentin, if we
are to call that love. And I love myself undoubtedly. When I see
myself in the mirror I wish, sometimes, that I were a young man, and I
feel that if I were women would love me, and I would take one—perhaps
Ruby, though she is rather stupid. I could love a god, if he wasn’t
too curly-headed and milk-white. Mine would be dark-haired, not fair,
like Terence’s clumsy Irish heroes. But there are no gods, unless
there are some lost here in China. Mine would have an air of profound
thoughtfulness. If there were gods, do you think I would have a chance?”

She looked so comically serious that Ambrose laughed at her.

She was petulant at his laughing. “You don’t love me, do you, Ambrose?
You only think I’m funny.”

He says her sentence came at him like a flung blossom with a little
dart in it. He records his answer:

“I can make no talk when it comes to ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Really, I’m not sure
that I’m aware of feelings and desires and so forth.” He remarks that
he scarcely knew how to put it.

“Oh, I know,” she replied scornfully. “You only make notes. We are
all specimens. Still, that’s just as well, because if you were at
all likely to love me”—she flushed, now, at the word spoken before
in a rushing impulse—“there’d be nobody left to talk to. You know,
Ambrose....” She hesitated, looking about in the grass as if words
might spring up there. “It seems funny to say ... I mean, all those men
are a nuisance in one way or another. When they look at me their eyes
are seeing me as a young woman. Daddy, even ... you understand? Fulke
displeasingly, because he’s like a chimpanzee and I find it insulting,
and Sprot sentimentally and disgustingly, and Quentin—rather
excitingly. And Sir Richard, too, Ambrose, though it sounds wicked of
me to say it, but I can’t help knowing. Terence, of course, pretends
I’m his inspiration. Do poets embrace their inspirations? I expect so.
And with Arthur Blackwood it’s the way he sternly doesn’t look at me,
and when I’ve been talking to him he always goes into four or five
kinds of trances. It’s all a nuisance. But you, when you look at me and
talk to me, though I know you perceive every inch and movement of me
and very many of my thoughts, but not all by any means, I don’t mind.
It is so, isn’t it?”

He bowed, and admired her standing up straight and frowning and flushed
against the stem of the young plum-tree. A pink blossom fluttered down
on her.

She held on the way of her talk. “Now you are admiring me and making a
mental note of my shape. You will record, later on, that the sky behind
the blossom”—she turned to look—“is all tender apple-green, because
it’s soon going to begin to be evening. Well, look at me.” She stood
up on the toes of her slender shoes, and threw her arms out and her
head back, so that he could study her breast and throat. He did so, and
discusses the twin blossoms of her, and her whole shape, as a relation
of subtle, slender curves that had a most stimulating effect on the
mind and carried it beyond thoughts of physical beauty to profound
thoughts of an informing creative spirit. He mentions that her throat
was a springing flowerstalk.

“There,” she said at last. “You have looked, and it’s nothing to me. It
would not be nothing if I were in love. I should be glad and happy at
being studied. But I’m glad to be quite assured that I’m not, because
now I know that one day, soon perhaps, I shall be able to ask you
questions—questions I could put to no woman, last of all my mother, and
no other man. You are the only soul in the world, Ambrose, who could
receive from a woman such questions as I shall ask you—the only soul
who could answer them without being silly. Soon—there are things I must
ask you soon. Over there,” she pointed to the distant mountains, now
cold and spiritual in the sinking sun—“over there, perhaps, we shall
find someone, and there will no longer be something missing. There will
be a note found to complete a music. And you,” she added with sudden
malice—“you shall be marriage registrar.”

Then Ruby came wandering back—a lazy, redheaded Juno—and with her hands
she clasped a mass of flowers to her bosom. “These are for the ship,”
she observed. “Why didn’t you come and help me when I called? And what
have you been jawing about? You’re always jawing, you two.”

“We’ve been talking most frightful stupid nonsense,” said Lychnis.

“I expect so,” replied Ruby with unconcern.

Then some of the others came from the ship, and they all gathered
flowers until the silver moon rose out of the fissure of a hill into
the tender, trembling sky. Mist began to form, and drove them back to
the _Floating Leaf_, and it was not long before there was nothing to
be seen but the mist and the moon, and here and there a plum-tree on a
black knoll rising out of the mist, and a flight of wild geese crossing
the sky.

Next morning, not unexpectedly, the Chinaman presented himself before
Ambrose in his cabin like a scowling apparition, and proposed, in
respectful and professorial language, that he should accompany the
party. “For,” said he, “a guide to the country, its manners and
customs, its flora and fauna; an interpreter of the language of the
people, and more especially of their state of mind in regard to the
several members of the party; a softener of passions; a holder forth
of the timely coin; and, if need be, one who can remind men at the
appropriate juncture of the unfortunate results that follow unthinking
interference with the obvious will of Fate—such a one would perhaps be
not without use to the party.”

“Are you such a one?” asked Ambrose.

“While striving constantly to imitate the tranquil humility of the
narcissus upon which we gaze through the port-hole, I am one who has
made not altogether unavailing efforts to acquire the technique of such
a one as I describe.”

“Then such a one had better address his further inquiries to Lord
Sombrewater.”

The other bowed and accompanied Ambrose to the owner’s room, where
he repeated his proposal. Ambrose noted with admiration how swiftly
his chief put on an impassivity that did not seem less than that of
the Chinaman. The little expressionless, pheasant eyes met eyes of
unreadable black lacquer, and Ambrose records that there seemed to be a
sort of communication going on, as between animals or birds.

Lord Sombrewater at once confirmed an impression which Ambrose
had himself long since received. “You are a man of considerable
understanding,” he said. “You have, very markedly, the characteristic
visage of a Sage.”

“I have gone but a very little way,” the Chinaman replied, “in
imitation of those who have obtained wisdom, or, more correctly, of
those who have learned to throw wisdom away.”

“You are a deft waiter as well.”

“That, noble viscount, comes of having perceived the inner nature of
plates, glasses, table-napkins and the like. It is in such a purely
menial capacity that I venture to offer my inexpert services.”

“In what capacity were you on the navigating bridge that night we were
driven ashore?”

“I desired to meditate from that exposed place upon the state of mind
of the master when he said, ‘The self-controlled man occupies himself
with the unseen and not with what is visible,’ and when he said,
‘Purify the means of perception, so that by doing nothing all shall be
accomplished.’”

“Oh, well, by the means you mention you have accomplished much—or
someone has.” Lord Sombrewater thought for a few minutes. He told
Ambrose, when later observations had told him a great deal, that he
was convinced the ship had been steered by some sort of energy-beam
from the shore. Then he decided. It seemed to be his method, at moments
in his career when important decisions were before him, to adopt any
plan that offered itself. It is probable that he decided on some
instinctive summing up of facts, or indications, intuitively perceived.
He unreservedly accepted the proposal that the Chinaman should act as
guide. “What shall we call him?” he asked.

“Such-a-one,” Ambrose suggested.

“Good. I nearly made him minute-writer in your place, Ambrose. I rather
fancy him. But we industrial princes can’t have people assassinated
when they are in the way.”

Ambrose considered the point. “I suppose not,” he said
thoughtfully—“not as a rule. But here nobody would ever know if you
waited till we were some way inland. Quentin would do it for you.”

Sombrewater laughed loud and long. “You ignore the possibility of any
affection a fellow might have for you.”

“No, no,” replied Ambrose. “I make due allowance for it in my
estimation of the probable course of events.”

Just after sunrise the next day ten figures in the costume of ancient
China (on the advice and with the assistance of Such-a-one) embarked
in a cluster of odd craft that lay alongside the _Floating Leaf_. Each
boat had a windowed cabin, like a gondola. On the sail of each was an
emblem like a flying beast. The Dragon, Quentin pointed out.

Lychnis went first, swaying like an amber chrysanthemum on its stalk;
Ruby followed, her plump, maiden curves voluptuously shown, as she
balanced, in plum-coloured silk; Lord Sombrewater in marigold and
green; Sir Richard in apricot, with a device in black like a system
of coordinates; Sprot in mauve; Blackwood in lilac; Terence in
flame-orange; Quentin in peacock-blue; Fulke in primrose with sleeves
of green; Ambrose, lastly, in misty white. Clustered in their boats
they seemed like flowers in fantastic baskets floating in the stream.

The resentment of the three ladies was soon forgotten in the excitement
of the journey. Indeed, it was not long before the sea and the
_Floating Leaf_ and the thought of their life in Europe seemed to
fall under the horizon of the mind, and they saw only the new beauty
and strangeness of the country where they found themselves. As Quentin
remarked, nowhere else in the world were such refined harmonies of
colour in landscape to be seen or such subtleties of tone. The river
wound secretly and intimately deep among the emerald hills, with their
dragon crags; now between lines of willows putting out a mist of
silvery-grey leaves, a mist deepened here into a tender blue, there
into a subtle rose; now through the delicate umber shadows of some
flowery gorge among jade-hued rocks. Here a bridge spanned the river,
springing from a group of trees and gracefully completing the rhythm of
the valley; there a village nestled by some profound logic in the nook
of a hill; once and again was some glimpse of the forest, or of the
white, slender beam of a rushing cascade that plunged down from distant
fells in harmonious passion. Over all floated white clouds like masses
of blossoms, and it was as if the forces of Nature and the hand of man
had united to suggest a landscape-dream of some profoundly meditating,
non-human spirit, in which man had his place with the plum-blossom, the
torrent and the black-bird on the branch.

They went slowly, by sail and pole, in three boats. Terence, as
mystical leader of the expedition, sat in the first beside Such-a-one.
Quentin took his morning exercise in the second, thrusting with the
bamboo pole, and Frew-Gaff his in the third. They called to one
another, startling coot, mallard and teal from the reeds. Ambrose was
with Frew-Gaff and the two girls in the third boat. Lychnis and Ruby
lay curled up on one side, looking out; Ambrose on the other.

A shout came over to them from Quentin: “How are the maiden skins?”

For answer Lychnis clapped the small hands that lay in her sleeves like
petals, and Fulke, in another window, was observed trying in vain to
catch her eye. Then, at another shout from Quentin, she asked to be put
out on the bank, and met him. It was a rice-field, and half a dozen
blue-clad labourers were at work there.

“I’m tired of standing still,” Quentin observed, strutting and striding
in his magnificent robe, a blur of deep blue that gave emphasis to the
whole riverside scene.

“So am I,” she answered; “my legs want to run.” She picked up her robe,
and her green trousers flashed over the field like a pair of parrots.
Ruby, who had scrambled ashore after her, followed, and her legs
flashed like flamingoes.

“By the Virgin Mother, how beautiful!” Quentin sang out, and chased
them down the rice-field like a great swaying peacock. He caught
Lychnis first, as he came up with her among the bamboos, by her
streaming hair and forced her head back, so that all her face and
throat were exposed to him. She saw the red, smiling lips in the
frizzy beard pouting a suggestion of kisses, and turned her face
sharply aside. “The unburnt child dreads the fire!” He grinned his
contempt at her and gave a vigorous tug at the handful of amber hair.
“Rich, ungathered coral! Sweet, shadowy, unentered cavern of a mouth!
Unfleshed teeth! Little tiger that has not yet tasted a man! Little
fool!”

She stared soberly up at him. “Out of the strong cometh an excess of
sweetness, too luscious pomegranate of a man!”

He grinned and led her back, still in captivity, to the boats, annexing
the slow Ruby by the way, and as he drove his pair through the field
the labourers began to follow and gather in round them, with a kind
of singing chatter, like a chorus. Fulke, who was also on the bank, a
little shamefaced because he lacked the spontaneity of Quentin and the
two girls to run, started forward; but when the little crowd came near
the boats, Such-a-one raised his voice to such effect that they sped
across the field and vanished like rabbits among the bamboos.

“Odd, that,” said Quentin. “What is his secret charm? The authority
lay not in the tone, but in the words. Or did he perform a miracle—The
Manifestation and Evanishment of the Blue Men?”

“I believe anything, now,” Lychnis replied. “Every minute I hope to see
that dragon flying across the hills.”

Then there was a cry from Terence and a gesture like the waving of a
banner.

“He wants to go on,” said Quentin. “He’s losing sight of his
Peach-blossom friends.”

So the boats began to move slowly ahead, those four, with Ambrose,
following along the bank; and at everything Quentin said the girls
laughed, encouraging the flow of his spontaneity. Presently they
came to a village shadowed among huge rocks and trees. Variegated
ducks surrounded them and a flock of geese steadily testified with
outstretched necks to some difficult truth. The village was sombre,
mysterious and deserted, but a girl was searching for some object
among the pebbles at the water’s edge. She looked up, startled, at the
approach of five gorgeous strangers like ghostly mandarins and their
ladies, and began to make off with little tottering steps.

“Delicious object!” cried Quentin. “Totter, rather, to these arms
and the refuge of this beard, which is indeed a better beard than
any countryman of yours can produce. For the beard in these parts is
scanty,” he explained, turning to Ambrose, “as you will undoubtedly
record.” Then, seizing the girl by the skirt of her jacket, he turned
her about and pinched her chin and her yellow cheeks. She screamed.
At once from the shadowy houses there was a swift, silent arrival of
yellow-skinned relations, and the rest of the party drew together while
Quentin, with sparkling eyes and wide smile, faced the crowd. But
immediately the voice of Such-a-one came from the leading boat, suavely
rising and falling, and once more with mysterious effect, for the
gathering dispersed, not, this time, without conveying, through their
expressionless faces, some hint of a threat like the threat of geese.

Lord Sombrewater sprang out of his boat. “This is quite enough,” he
said, with acid authority. “Lychnis! Ruby!” He pointed, and they
returned to their window.

“Funny,” remarked Quentin to Ambrose. “Your Chinaman has some talisman
in his tongue. This will be useful should one of you go too far.”

Late in the afternoon they disembarked, and Such-a-one led them by a
steep road through a village to a solitary inn halfway up the mountain.
The moon came up behind the mountain, and soft hues and scents of the
spring night stole into the sky.

A warm, stirring silence. The inn slept, and Ambrose kept watch in the
road—before him a trembling emptiness of sky, and the fantastic roof of
the inn, and a candle burning behind the paper blind. The blind moved,
the candle was extinguished, and Lychnis and Ruby leaned out between
the bamboo shoots. They threw him down flowers, whispering good-night.
Then silence, breathing, scent-laden.

Ambrose was arranging the events of the day in his mind for purposes of
record. While his mind worked his eyes were fixed on the moon sailing
in a clump of bamboo beyond the inn, like a swan among reeds. His
meditations were disturbed, suddenly, by an outbreak of imprecation in
his near neighbourhood. It was Fulke. The language he used was like
thunder and earthquake among those silent mountains, and seemed to
Ambrose to give a distinctly reddish tinge to the sky.

He whistled, and Fulke paused like a nightingale disturbed in his song.
Then with a “That you, Ambrose? My God!” he resumed his theme.

“What is it?” asked Ambrose.

“What is it! I’ll tell you, so that you put it down in the records,
on parchment, with tender, fragrant little illustrations. What is it!
Only this. I asked Lord Sombrewater this evening if I might propose to
Lychnis. Lychnis!” He groaned at the name, at the stolen taste of a
pleasure never to be his.

“Oh yes?”

“Oh yes! You slug-flesh! You snail-guts! Don’t you want to know what he
answered?”

“As soon as you wish to tell me, revolutionary but propriety-observing
Fulke. I don’t know if you wish to tell Lychnis as well. That’s her
window, you know.”

Fulke looked up to her window, and Ambrose saw in the moonlight that
his face was all furrowed with desire and despair. He clasped his hands
together. “Exquisite—immaculate, goddess-minded,” he whispered, and
suddenly tore at his hair.

Ambrose drew him off down the road, pondering on the word “immaculate.”
The demand of the virgin and ineffective for immaculacy—he would have
liked to dwell on that, but it did not seem the right moment. “And what
did Lord Sombrewater say?” he asked.

“I asked him,” said Fulke, dwelling miserably on the scene, “if I might
ask Lychnis to marry me, and he looked at me for about three seconds
and said: ‘Why, certainly.’”

“I see.”

“He summed up my chances in exactly three seconds. ‘Certainly,’ he
said. ‘Walk straight in,’ as it were. Tell me, you duplicating jelly,
is he right?”

“I think so.”

“My God! you don’t know how it hurts, Ambrose! You don’t feel pain or
anything like that yourself, do you? But I tell you, I suffer. Make
a note of it. Make a note that the infernal fluids that the spring
disturbs in the blood are hurrying from end to end of me with messages
of desire and love. But don’t make the mistake of supposing that I
am possessed by mere lust. The sensations of my heart are like the
sensations of the opening lilac. I am chaste, and I always have been,
and I only desire to worship her, kneeling among spring flowers. She
only thinks I am ungainly, I know. But my soul loves all that is pure
and virgin and flame-like and verdant and too good and lovely in
her for the world. She is just that. She is my Grail, and, in short,
chastity is a bloody obsession with me.” Wringing Ambrose by the hand,
he plunged away.

The moon, Ambrose noted, was now clear of the bamboos, swimming in
the shimmering skylake. He continued his meditations. It was not long
before the sound of a voice singing came to his ears, and presently
Quentin arrived, well satisfied with wine and adventure. He greeted
Ambrose mockingly, bowing and shaking himself by the hand.

“A custom I have learnt in the neighbourhood, O moon-souled one.”

“Can you tell me why it is,” Ambrose asked him, “that a remarkable
filthiness of language often goes with an unusual purity of mind?”

“You mean Fulke? These revolutionary environment-altering,
ideal-state-creating people always seem to suffer from a
prolonged adolescence, just as your opposite, return-to-nothing,
environment-rejecting Buddhist blokes, like Blackwood, seem to have
never had any adolescence at all. Early excess, perhaps, in their case;
late excess in the other. How terrible, Ambrose, are the results of a
wrongly-timed excess!”

“The observation shall be recorded. Don’t wake everyone up when you go
in.”

“I’m not going in. I shall breathe out the wine that’s in me and watch
Fulke worshipping the narcissus in the early dawn. You can go in. I’ll
relieve you.”

So Ambrose left him, with one last look at the bamboo grove and the
floating swan-moon.

Days of such journeying followed; sometimes they went in the boats and
sometimes wandered by dizzy paths along the sides of the zigzagging
mountains among groves of spruce, fir, or high up among pines and
slender cascades. The weather was very fair and warm, and the sun
was only dimmed by the shadow of the lapis lazuli crags that towered
threateningly over the path or by the jade-brown walls of a gorge.
At every turn there was some new glimpse of a sun-bathed horizon,
or a gleam of the sails of their boats on the shining, enamelled
stream. White cranes stalked among the emerald rice-fields. The roofs
of villages reposed under the hills, suitably to the contour, and
sometimes there were to be seen the quaint eaves of a temple appositely
jutting out. And sometimes the glistening cascade fell from their
very feet to some green trough in the snowy bloom of cherry, peach
and magnolia far below. The spring weather, the exhilarating air of
the heights, and a special comradeship that, as Ambrose notes, is apt
to accompany such an adventure—at any rate for the first few days—put
them all in good spirits with themselves and one another, and the
ravines and wrinkled, wizard-faced crags not infrequently echoed with
human song. Lychnis usually glided ahead, like a spirit that seeks the
consummation of life in some perfect gesture of the dance, and her
attendant followed with a more deliberate and serene enjoyment. Terence
came next, officially leading, often in colloquy with Such-a-one; and
the rest streamed out behind in ever-changing order, gay in their
coloured garments, like a marching troop of flowers.

They camped one warm night, there being no village and no inn, at the
mouth of an unusually gloomy ravine, where the mountains, towering
above them, seemed almost to meet. The moon was in her third quarter.
Three of the Sages—Terence, Frew-Gaff and Sprot—with Ambrose, were
standing among the reeds by the water’s edge, peering into the
mysterious, moon-dappled mouth of the gorge. Terence, profoundly
stirred in spirit, had received illumination, and his eyes were deep
pools troubled by shining moon-angels. He raised his hands up before
the mountains and exclaimed: “The Last Wall!”

“Meaning,” said Frew-Gaff, “that on the other side of this barrier,
which is to be pierced by means of this gorge, we shall find a sort of
Fairyland of Pantomime Peaches?”

“The land of the Peach-blossom People, undoubtedly, matter-dividing
Richard.”

“Dancing about in pink and purple tights, I suppose.”

“And as real as æther waves, fanatic particle-worshipper.”

“Well, after all,” said Sprot surprisingly, “there may be something
in what Terence says. There are more things in heaven and earth, as
Wordsworth reminds us. There is much that we cannot comprehend, and I
was never one to scoff at what is beyond our understanding.” It was
clear, Ambrose saw, that he had something up his sleeve.

“Let me feel your pulse,” said Sir Richard. “Ah! I thought so. The
spring and the excellent wine we drank at dinner, and something that is
no doubt aphrodisiacal in the night itself, have disturbed your blood.
I detect overtones of moonshine in the vibrations of your nervous
system. The sap is stirring in you; you are beginning to Sprot.”

“Clever—very clever,” replied the little man, with a certain
resentment. He would have shown it more positively, but he knew it was
better not to engage with these men in a contest of words.

“He has had a vision, perhaps,” fluted Terence from the gorge-mouth in
deep tones. “Illumination comes oftenest to those who are simple in
mind.”

“True,” observed Sir Richard.

“Not entirely a vision,” said Sprot, with a sudden falter. Then he
made up his mind. “Look here, you chaps, you mustn’t laugh at me for
once....”

“Go on,” said Frew-Gaff.

“How beautiful is the humility of those who have experienced the
Experience!” exclaimed Terence.

Sprot pointed a finger. “You see Blackwood up there?”

Following his finger, they dimly saw the motionless form of Blackwood
seated cross-legged on a ledge of the mountain. He was in discipline.
“Yes,” they breathed.

“Well, I was up there talking to him, because I thought he might do me
a bit of good, and as we were chatting, about self-control and” (he
coughed) “purity and that sort of thing, and it was getting dark, we
both distinctly saw a man pass riding on a goat, like the one you saw,
Terence, beside the ship. He went down that narrow path very silent and
swift, ghost-like; but what got us both a bit startled was his eyes,
which were what you might call fierce and majestic, if I might put it
so.”

Terence took him by the hand, exclaiming, “Brother!” Then once more
addressing the mountain as “The Last Wall,” he stepped towards the
river and said, to some hypothetical listener, “I come.”

“Stop!” cried Sprot. Terence, knee-deep in the reedy water, turned with
an expression of inquiry.

“There’s more than ghosts in these mountains,” said the man of
business. “Gentlemen, I am not an artist, or a dreamer, or a scientist;
I am a practical man, and as such I keep my eyes and ears pretty wide
open, and perhaps I see things that escape some others. Now this fellow
Such-a-one, and his talisman, and all the tales we’ve heard about this
part of the world—what do you make of it?” He paused, a conjuror about
to produce an idea out of an apparently empty mind.

“Absolutely nothing,” said Sir Richard, looking down at him with
tolerance in his moonlit, distinguished face.

“Nothing, naturally, it being a matter plain to be seen without a
microscope, and hence not interesting to a scientific man. Well, Mr.
Poet Fitzgerald, wade into the river by all means, though I might warn
you against catching cold. As I said, I am a practical man. But there’s
something more than a feverish cold hidden in the blackness of that
split in the mountains, in my opinion.”

He stopped, and the others stared expectantly into the gorge.

“There’s dragons,” he exclaimed, like an explosion.

“Credo quia absurdum.” The voice of Quentin unexpectedly broke the
silence, and Sprot jumped round as if his fancies had taken on a
fearful reality.

“These mountains are certainly full of dragons,” continued Quentin.
“Listen!” They listened, and a murmur of rippling water came down the
gorge. “Do you not hear them drinking and swimming? Do you not realize
that all these past days, as we walked among contorted crags, we were
among dragons, twisting and grinning in their sleep? Look above you at
those gruesome, moonlit shapes among the mountains, and their light,
white breath drifting about the peaks. Look——” He stopped abruptly, and
resumed in a queer tone. “Look, in fact, at that one hanging in the
air.”

They looked and saw a great, beaked bird floating overhead with wide,
motionless wings. Their mouths hung open, and Ambrose ascertained
afterwards that their sensations were rather of astonishment than
alarm. Frew-Gaff was the first to bring his mind to bear on it.

“An aeroplane, by all that’s holy!” he exclaimed.

The bird wheeled round a great circle and vanished over the mountains.

“Then what silent engines!” replied Quentin. “I fear it is the Dragon.
Remember the emblem on our boats. It is clear that we have come here,
by the hand of Such-a-one, in the capacity of sacrifice for some annual
feast. Hence the respectful attitude of the surrounding population.
Sprot will undoubtedly suffer first.”

Sprot was pale, trembling. “The camp!” he muttered. “The girls!”

Taken by his infectious alarm, they rushed back to the camp. All
was well. The blue-clad stewards, under the assiduous tutelage of
Such-a-one, were prostrating themselves forehead to ground. The
others were looking up at the mountains with mingled amusement and
apprehension, as if they preferred to believe that someone had played
a rather uncanny joke. The girls, by their dishevelled hair, had come
from their pillows. This drew Quentin. “A girl fresh from her bed is
among the most intoxicating sights of earth,” he murmured to Ambrose.

Then Blackwood came flitting through the night with a not altogether
well-disciplined haste, asking: “What is it in the sky?”

The matter was pretty thoroughly discussed, without satisfactory
conclusion. “Anyway,” said Lord Sombrewater at last, “dragon or
aeroplane, the incident adds piquancy to the adventure. What do you
say, Lychnis? Would you rather go back?”

She shook her head. “On the contrary.”

“And you, Ruby?”

But Ruby had fallen asleep. “What a lovely morsel for sacrifice!” said
Quentin, looking down at her.

Ambrose’s narrative proceeds with the same observant calm; and it is
from the heightened colour of the things he has to describe, and the
heightened emotion of the conversation he has to set down, rather than
from any deliberately enhanced passion of his language, that we derive
our impression of the beauty of the Peach-blossom Valley. He shows
us the lagoons, the valleys, the oyster-shaped rocks and the distant
mountains, and he describes the reactions of his companions, without
intervention of sentimental comment.

It seems that in the misty, serene and summer-promising loveliness of
the next daybreak they embarked and entered the gorge almost without
waiting for breakfast, undeterred, confirmed even in their resolution,
by the disappearance of all the servants, except Such-a-one, who
explained that they regarded the manifestation of the Dragon as a
warning, and would undoubtedly spread the news, as they returned to
their villages, that the whole party had been carried away.

The mists had scarcely lifted from the quivering reeds, and the sky
was still all blue and rose, when they poled across the clear black
water and entered the gorge. There proved to be nothing formidable or
gloomy in the gorge. It was wide and, when mists lifted, warm sunlight
poured down among rock shapes of a dream, throwing queer shadows on
the water. Their passage along these fantastic corridors was slow.
The sails were useless, and the water was too deep for the pole, so
that progress could only be made by the use of paddles and by pushing
on the fissures and protuberances of the rock. But it was not easy,
for the boats were heavy, and either they were continually bumping on
a buttress or coming neatly to rest in an angle, or else one had to
paddle against the stream over an open sheet of water, for here and
there the gorge widened into a mountain-locked lake, and there were
arms of the lake running into green mountain-valleys, and wide bays and
beaches bordered with majestic groves of the tall, springing bamboo.
There were also dragon-hiding pools under contorted cliffs, black
waters and shadowy flights of fish.

They all worked silently with pole and paddle. At last Quentin wiped
the sweat off his face and asked: “Who’ll swim with me in the Gorge of
Dragons?”

“I will.” The voices of Lychnis and Ruby chimed high among the rocks,
echoed by Fulke Arnott.

“Wait a minute,” put in Lord Sombrewater. “Is it safe, swimming here?”
He addressed Such-a-one.

The Chinaman smiled gravely. “The river is warm and sweet and clear,
Excellence. There are few reeds in the channel, and there is nothing
more formidable, by day, than pike. These, however, are voracious.”

“I’m not frightened of fish,” said Lychnis. “I’ll kick them.”
Anticipating her father’s consent, she vanished into the interior of
her boat, followed by Ruby; and Ambrose remarks that, after the silk
robes in which they had for so many days suffered obliteration, the
manifestation of their naked limbs and plum-coloured bodies was quite
surprising. Soon four of the party were in the river—the two young
women, Quentin (whom Ambrose likens to a piece of live rock), and Fulke
(who was dragonish). They sported and splashed round the leading boat
like water-gods, or swam far ahead, dark little heads and shining arms
driving showers of water-drops. Then Lychnis and Ruby, when they were
tired of it, played at being hippopotamuses, like children. That was
on the suggestion of Lychnis; and Ambrose, leaning out of his window
when she plunged, saw her shortened body down under the water, and her
pale pretending face, her still eyes, when she floated up through the
water to breathe. She was followed by the dim mass of Quentin, who had
suddenly appeared beside her from under the boat.

“I nearly had you,” he said, spouting water from his mouth. “Drown with
me, and let us be drifted into some underwater cave, locked together in
a never-ending river-dream.” She made a fox-face at him.

The others swam in their turn. After the bathe they had a meal, and
some strolled in the groves and some slept in the warmth, and later
in the day they went on again, singing, and satisfied with the still
splendour of evening. They spent the night in a creek, among clumps of
bamboo.

It was during the following morning that the gorge began to open out,
as the mountain range through which they had passed declined into a
broken litter of jade-green hills, and they saw ahead of them the first
glimpses of the Peach-blossom Valley. They called it the Peach-blossom
Valley then because the journey came to an end there, Terence having
received the necessary intimation; but Ambrose tries over some other
names, as Willow Valley, and Valley of Emerald Hills, and Valley of
Blue Pines. They were so moved, it seems, by the composed beauty of
the scene that met their eyes as they left the mild opening of the
ravine that for a time they forgot each other’s existence and lived
alone in the delicate solitude of that dreamy landscape. The stream,
deep and slow, wound between willows, and through the willow-screen
they saw verdant lawns with a fleeting glimpse of deer. Beyond, there
were orchards of cherry, peach and plum, so that the valley seemed full
of low-drifting clouds, white and pink; above the clouds gleamed the
smooth emerald of the hills, the blue pines and quaint outcroppings of
jade-hued rock. Birds sang. The stream was fed by little tributaries
that murmured among the lawns. Tributaries and stream were spanned
by bridges of lacquer and here, among groves of bamboo, was the
yellow-tiled roof of a pavilion, and there, sticking up out of the
peach-blossom foam, a sunlit pagoda or a porcelain tower; and once, on
the verandah of a pavilion by the water, they saw a figure seated in
meditation, and once an angler under the willows.

“We are in water-colour land,” said Quentin. “This valley is done on
silk. I fear you others are too gross-minded to subsist here for long.”

It was a landscape of unrivalled delicacy and refined distinction,
a tone-subtlety of pale pink and blue, amber and apple-green, with
harmonious notes of red and, in the hazy sky, of yellow. A soft wind
fanned them up-stream. The valley widened continually, and the channel
of the stream became lost in the first shimmering stretches of a
lagoon. Now on either side they saw other valleys opening out, and
beyond them glimpses of frowning pine-wood under azure and jade-brown
crags. Azalea flamed on the hillsides. Ahead of them the arm of the
lagoon on which they were sailing was studded with emerald islets, and
the oyster-shell rocks rose out of seas of lilies. The hills toppled
curiously, and in the strange perspective the distant mountains seemed
to zigzag and stagger a little—not, indeed, out of harmony with the
general effect of something artificial, composed and deliberately
fantastic in a scene which might have proceeded from the mind of a
classic artist.

Now they approached a part where the hills came right down to the
water, and the lagoon took a right-angled turn between gate-posts
of rock, the valley turning with it in its general design. Rounding
the rocks on their left-hand, they saw before them a reach of water
stretching away two or three miles, and perhaps a mile wide. This lake
also, softly lapping in the all-pervading sunlight, was studded with
islets of tender green; but in the middle of it—as near as they could
judge the middle—there stood a greater island of rock, lifted high
out of the water, crowned with pine-trees, flower-bearing, afloat,
as it seemed, in a water-meadow sewn with a million opening buds of
the lotus. The boats drifted unheeded while they all gazed at the
tremulous, tender beauty of the scene—lapping water; island rock in
lotus-meadow; reedy shores; blossom on emerald hills; beyond, a hint
of snow-capped mountains; and all poised before them, clear-cut and
delicate in a dream-medium of quivering, sun-saturated air.

With one accord they turned to Lychnis, as if to inquire what her
thoughts were. Her face had a flush like the tip of the opening lotus.
“The Dragon Altar on the Dragon Island,” she whispered to Such-a-one,
who was observed to be in the doubled-up position of one who makes
obeisance.

Nor would he lead them in the boats any nearer the rock.

“I’ll swim there,” said Quentin. “There’ll be lanes through the
lotus-meadow.”

“I desire you to be good enough to refrain on this occasion.” Lord
Sombrewater spoke peremptorily.

“Very well,” Quentin replied. “I obey. My heart is chastened, for the
moment, by the supreme and subtle distinction of the water-colourist
who composed this classic landscape, and there will be opportunities
for enterprise at a later date.”

“But where are we going to live?” complained Ruby. “We can’t live for
ever in these boats.”

“What does it matter?” asked Lychnis. “I’d like to go on floating for
ever among the lotuses, dabbling my hands in the lake, until the world
vanished and there was only a single lotus and my contemplation.” There
was profound passion in her voice, and Blackwood turned to controvert
the element of heresy in her point of view. But she woke from reverie
and made some inquiries. “This is perhaps the earthly paradise. Can
we stay here?” She addressed the Chinaman. “Is this valley for us?
May we live in those pavilions and contemplate in those porcelain
towers? Oh, Ruby! did you see the verandahs? What a summer we shall
have—water-parties and lantern-feasts!”

The black eyes of their guide, unreadable as boot-buttons, regarded her
child-like excitement. He bowed. “Nobody will prevent you, in these
valleys, from the enjoyment of whatever you may find at your disposal.
Let us explore the accommodative facilities.”

So they skirted the margin of the water for more than a mile, stealing
glances at the mysterious island. They passed many a reedy creek, where
carp, great and little, were swimming in hundreds, and green-headed
ducks; many a lawn coming down to the water’s edge, with willow-tree
or small, twisted pine; and at last they came to a mooring raft of
bamboo poles. There Such-a-one made fast, and led his party, in their
gay silks, by lawn and tall grove of bamboo toward the tributary
valleys. At well-spaced intervals he would indicate some pavilion,
designed and placed with regard to the surrounding contours, that was
at their disposal, and the party began to drop members at one or other
of these. Blackwood chose one by a stream not far from the lake for
himself alone. It had a copper-domed summer-house, where he could sit
and meditate by the water. Quentin, too, chose to be solitary, in a
gorgeous pavilion with a verandah and a pointed roof of yellow and
peacock-blue tiles. Next, farther away from the lake, Lord Sombrewater
chose an airy and complicated summer pavilion for Lychnis and Ruby,
Frew-Gaff, Ambrose and himself. Such-a-one bowed as they entered,
saying: “The Pavilion of the Yellow Emperor.” This Pavilion, situated
among lawns within the crescent of a forest of tall and splendid
bamboo, was a puzzle of open verandahs, screens, windows, interior
courtyards and little chambers and closets in threes. The massive roof,
weighted with curved rows of vermilion tiles, rose from a tangle of
upward-curling horns and grotesque monsters to a central and whirling
creature that was both dragon and spasm of forked lightning. The
furniture was exquisite, and in every room was a shrub or a flower—a
lily floating in a cistern or an oleander in a porcelain tub. A faint
scent of musk pervaded. The dwelling was provided with half a dozen
respectful menservants and three girls. There seemed more, because they
were all alike and always coming and going. The men were taller and
finer than those who had left in a hurry at the mouth of the Gorge of
Dragons. The girls, as Quentin remarked, were beautiful toys.

Lychnis and Ruby, with Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, vanished, and Ambrose
gathered from their voices, now near, now distant, that they
were exploring the mazes of the Pavilion. With Lord Sombrewater
he accompanied Terence, Fulke and Sprot on a search for further
accommodation. Behind the Pavilion, deep in the bamboo-forest, Terence
came on a graceful, tile-encased tower like a lighthouse among the
bamboo-leaf-spray, and elected to dwell in the topmost watch-chamber.
Finally, Sprot, entreating Fulke not to desert him, found a house of
lacquer and enamel, like a cabinet for a precious gem. There these two
ensconced themselves, neither very satisfied with the other.

Lord Sombrewater and Ambrose returned to the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion,
smiling and contented with the graceful fortune that seemed to have
befallen them. Lychnis stood at the door in a new robe of heliotrope.
A deep sash sheathed her hips, and her father, in his pleasure, put an
arm round the slender waist and kissed her. Then, “Where’s Such-a-one?”
he asked. “There are one or two things we ought to discuss.”

But Such-a-one had completely disappeared, so she told him.

“Indeed!” said he, turning his expressionless eyes, with a sharp,
bird-movement, on Ambrose.

Ambrose emerged from his chamber at the side of the house and
looked from the verandah across the quivering bamboo-forest. He was
composing his description of the morning’s adventure. Somewhere in the
neighbourhood he heard the girls chattering, and could not quite locate
the sound. Ruby’s voice came, calling him, and when he looked round in
bewilderment there was laughter. Then a lattice was pushed open at the
other end of the verandah, and Ruby put out her head and shoulders. She
had on a new jacket of geranium-red, and her copper hair was piled up
with combs of tortoise-shell. “Come in and see Licky and me,” she said.
“There’s a door on the verandah round the corner.”

He went into their room, making a note of the words “refined elegance”
for subsequent use in describing its shape and furniture. There was
an effect of green, gold and black; for the walls were green, and
the furniture was ebony, with marquetry of brass, tortoise-shell and
mother-of-pearl. A clear sunlight, tempered by the lattices, showed
him all the exquisite appointments. The ebony cupboard, with half-open,
gold-enamelled doors, contained a hint of richly coloured clothes, like
petals within the sheath. A profusion of silken jackets was scattered
over an ebony and ivory commode, and hung on the handle of a lacquered
cabinet and over a screen painted with butterflies. The curtains of an
ebony bed, like a houseboat, were drawn, disclosing a heap of garments
on the swan-white coverlet. Lychnis was seated on a stool by a window,
having her hair brushed (but she had forbidden the use of resin) by
a Chinese girl with black-bead eyes and almost imperceptible mouth.
At her side was a lacquer table, laden with ivory brushes, jade and
tortoise-shell combs, pigment trays in rare porcelain. There was a box
with a brass mirror in the lid, and tiny drawers for lip-salve, rouge,
powder, and pencil for the eyebrows. She had in her slender hands a
gilt mirror. She was keeping her head very still, but she put, with her
eyebrows, an inquiry as to his state of mind. He indicated satisfaction.

“This is very untidy,” he remarked. “How can you be so untidy in this
perfectly proportioned chamber?”

“We’ve been trying on the clothes,” said geranium-red Ruby. “It took an
awful time to make up our minds. I chose this.” She opened her wide,
black-bordered sleeves like a red butterfly, and turned on her hips to
show him the great black wings of her sash. Her cheeks were flushed a
deep crimson with her enjoyment, and he wondered if, with that and the
advantage that her magnificent figure got from the half-revealing silk,
she did not almost eclipse her slenderer companion. He turned round,
with a view to the formation of a considered judgment.

Lychnis, the last golden comb stuck in her hair, stood up, and the
wrap that had swathed her shoulders fell to the ground. She, too, had
a faint flush, knowing, perhaps, that she was offered for judgment; or
had she used, he wondered, a little pigment from the porcelain tray?
She turned slowly for him to admire her. She wore a chrysanthemum
robe—dusky flowers on a ground of pale amber. Her neck—as Quentin
was wont to say, you could break it by clenching the hand—was a
chrysanthemum stalk. The big bow at the small of her back gathered
her robe in and disclosed the slim, womanish swell of her hips that
he had so often tried to describe. She raised her robe slightly, to
display trousers of some texture crisp and brown, like the petals of
the flower. “And these comic shoes.” She pointed to them, and walked
towards him, putting her feet one before the other in tiny steps.
“Must we walk like that? Ruby’s beautiful when she does it. Am I?”

They were lovely, and friendly, those two young women. He watched
them both imitate the swaying and delicate walk of the Chinese girls,
up and down the room, while the maid put away the clothes, paying no
attention. “You’ll turn into Chineses,” he warned them.

They both sprang at him with cries of “Never!” and pushed and pulled
him from the room and along a corridor just to show what they could do.

But Lychnis abruptly desisted. “Hark! What’s that?”

It was a carillon of silver bells pealing in a tower of porcelain,
calling the Sages from their several retreats to a meal in the Yellow
Emperor’s Pavilion. Lord Sombrewater and Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, clothed
respectively in sunset crimson and turquoise-blue, were already seated
in a chamber more sumptuous, but not less elegant, than the bedchamber.
It was furnished with rich tables, and flowers, and great jars of
finest blue-and-white porcelain. The other Sages arriving, changed
likewise into robes of the most brilliant hue, refreshment was served
in the shape of fragrant tea, with a dish of cooked bamboo shoots and
other more doubtful ingredients.

“I shan’t examine this,” said Quentin. “It smells good, and I’ll risk
the transformation of my lusts that may result from ingesting the
cellular composition of beetles and slugs.”

“An insubstantial diet will do you no harm,” said Sir Richard. “If I
were to drain you of blood and transfuse the sap of a vegetable, it
might render your temperament less—shall I say?—ardent.”

“Ah, no! You’d find me doting on a cabbage, or in dalliance with a
brussels sprout.”

“You approve of our surroundings, I take it?” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are in the garden of an emperor.”

“Shall we stay here? What are the views of the Sages? It is pleasant,
certainly, beyond anything I have ever seen; but one or two
circumstances are a little mysterious.”

“It passes my comprehension,” said Sprot, “how anyone owning all
this wealth can leave it absolutely unguarded. We may be murdered in
our beds any night for the sake of the wealth that’s about us. These
servants—can you trust them? They’re not white men, you know. I kicked
one just now, to show who’s master here. I’ve always heard you ought to
kick native servants. But, as I was saying, all this wealth and not
a keeper, or a policeman, or even a ‘Trespassers-will-be-Prosecuted’
board.”

“It may be the custom of some Europeans to kick native servants,” said
Lord Sombrewater testily, “but I shall be obliged if, in this case, you
will use the extreme politeness they use with us.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly. But, if you will excuse me, all this gold
and tortoiseshell, and the bric-à-brac—I suppose that’s valuable,
too—who does it belong to? It must belong to somebody, I suppose. Or do
you think we might—er—appropriate ... as a souvenir, I mean?”

“I don’t suppose they’d object to your pinching it,” said Fulke. “It’s
clear there’s no capitalist system here.”

“Then you will be happy here?” asked Lychnis.

That brought him up short. “Yes, by the split kidneys of St.
Sebastian!—thoroughly, frightfully happy!” He added to Ambrose in an
undertone: “There’s always the Lake.”

“As for me,” put in Blackwood, “my summer-house down by the Lake is
of marble and has a copper dome. So beautiful are my surroundings
that I would readily stay here for ever, because of the exquisite and
continuous temptation to the senses. But can these servants not be
made to understand that I always have two lumps of sugar in my tea?”

“Sugar?” exclaimed Sprot. “What’s that got to do with meditation?”

“It’s a stimulant to the intestinal acrobatics,” said Quentin. “He
rewards his performing vestiges with two lumps of sugar.”

“And you, Richard?” inquired the chairman.

“It seems to me we are committed. True, it is a nuisance to be without
any facilities—no instruments, no materials, no laboratory—none to
speak of, that is. Yet the place is very pleasant. Not that I am
particularly susceptible to natural beauty——”

“It’s not natural,” broke in Terence unexpectedly. It was noticed for
the first time that he seemed dissatisfied.

“But the air is stimulating, and, as you know, I am something of an
optimist—in short, I particularly desire to find out what it is that
gives these little grassy mountains that peculiar blue tinge, and the
rocks simply shout for examination. Not that I am an expert geologist,
of course. Still, one can record some observations. And I would add
that I think we shall be at peace here. There is an air of happy
serenity that lies on the valley.”

“And you, Terence?”

Terence, in the attitude of Rabindranath Tagore in meditation, raised
his large, grey, poetic eyes. “I confess to a certain disappointment.
Dragons are somewhat outside my habit of dreaming, and the Chinese
gods are not, on the whole, attractive. I find something bland and
pawnbroker-like in their faces——”

“That,” put in Blackwood, “is the everlasting calm of those who have
learnt to despise the world.”

“I find it unheroic and fatuous. Moreover, I dislike the empty and
unmeaning classicism of this Gentleman’s Park. And these rhododendrons
and magnolias—they are so consciously ornamental and Chinese and
matter-of-fact.”

“Still,” observed Sombrewater, “you would not wish to depart just yet?”

“So long as I am allowed to remain in my tower and commune with the
myriad quivering spirits of the bamboo-forest.”

“By all means—if we may eat a few from time to time. I take it, then,
that it’s settled. We remain.”

“I shall remain,” observed Lychnis, “till all’s blue. One need not
starve, or stay out in the wet, for there are houses and servants and
food everywhere. And I would like to say,” she added, with a certain
diffidence, “that the matter-of-factness is only apparent. It seems
to me, Terence, that it hides something—what shall I say?—almost
unbearably passionate, all this classical restraint. Yes, the Pavilion
and the little bridges and the landscape and everything else. These
two paintings, for instance—the Flower-Spray. That empty, palpitating
background. It is more than an evening sky. The flowers—don’t you think
so, daddy?”—she appealed to her father to support her declaration
of faith—“the flowers ... oh, they are more than lovely! There is
something moves in them, behind them. Some great artist did that, with
the calmness of a poet-painter who has feared beauty and conquered
his fear. Then”—she looked round and gathered courage from their
attentiveness—“the Geese. Not very romantic, Terence. But the soul of
Geese is there, dear plump things! What is it Quentin would say in
philosophy? Divested of all accident of appearance. They are whatever
it is that is Goose at the perfect moment of evolution. The life of
the universe is seen through the Geese in that picture. The painter
has not hindered it with some sentimental pre-occupation of his own.
Romanticism looks silly beside that sort of reality. I—I did not mean
to have said so much. But it said itself. It was strange—those two
pictures hypnotized me. Something that is not quite life—more than
life; I can’t express it—moved in them, and words came to me.”

Quentin opened his eyes like a man waking from the illumination of
prayer. “O exquisite penetration of unfolding virginity! These are
the pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove, and we have
heard a voice from the invisible but all-pervading reality of the
universe. Now, I myself formed the same conclusion with regard to the
art of China in the days of my purity—that is to say, when I was about
thirteen. Some echo of those far-off days came to me as I studied my
dessert-plate. This band of creamy pink enamel. This domestic scene in
the centre of the plate. These two girls—what ivory-textured skins!
what lily-petal hands holding the battledores. If the beauty, and by
consequence the virtue, of the girls of this valley is anything like so
fragile——”

“It is very fine ware,” put in Sir Richard. “I would like to understand
their process more perfectly. Not that I am an expert in the
manufacture of pottery. I wonder, by the way, if these cabinets are
unlocked.”

“Obviously,” replied Quentin, “since there is no capitalist system here
and no police. One must lock up things when there are police. There!”
He opened a cabinet and brought out a piece of pottery. “By the
Virgin Mary! it lives. The cellular organization of it lives and the
integument is warm. It blushes under my fingers like a woman’s cheek.
We have here all that’s most precious in the world, including three
maidens.” He dug Fulke in the ribs. “Let us explore the mazy building.”

He led the party all over the Pavilion, discoursing in every room
with infinite learning on some precious object of Chinese art. Before
the ebony bed in the girls’ bedchamber he stood in an attitude of
respectful adoration. Lychnis tactfully withdrew, leading Ruby. He
spoke in a low voice: “And they lie there in each other’s arms, like
shepherdesses in a Boucher. That precious cabinet enshrines them. My
poor Fulke! To have seen, and to have no chance of possessing. But
come away from this holy place. It is not for the likes of us.” They
withdrew, Fulke suppressing a groan.

Finally, in a sort of study, they found a cabinet which contained what
appeared to resemble some kind of listening-in apparatus. “Now,” said
Frew-Gaff, “this is really remarkable.”

When evening fell, warm and flower-scented, they emerged, in their
summer-gorgeous robes, from the vermilion-tiled Pavilion, and filed
down towards the Lake. They stood on a lacquer bridge at the head of a
creek and looked silently across the sheen of water.

“Look!” whispered Lychnis, “the Rock!”

It seemed to float before them, in a vapour of evening. The middle and
upper reaches of the sky were clear and summer-foreboding, but clouds
loomed up from behind the mountains beyond the opposite shore, and
opened like large summer flowers.

The Sages went down and stood on a lawn by the water under a huge
flowering tree of unknown kind. Great petals, coloured deep rose,
floated down among them. Lychnis caught one in her hands and inhaled
its odour. Her petal-eyelids closed.

Fulke, roaming disconsolately at large, discovered a mooring-stage of
red painted bamboo among reeds, and there were two or three richly
coloured skiffs, with pointed bows and little masts, tied to it. He
leapt on the raft, and there was an outcry of waterfowl among the
reeds, loudly disturbing the silence. They listened.

“Shall we go out a little way on the water?” He invited Lychnis huskily.

But Lychnis stood quite still, looking at the Rock.

“You, Ruby?” To make Lychnis envious, perhaps.

“I’d rather stay here,” said Ruby, shuddering a little.

Nobody, not even Quentin, responded to his invitation. The evening was
so still. Perhaps a faint awe was on their hearts.

The deep colour faded gradually out, and the light died off the lapping
water. A fish leapt. Night stole over the valley and fell about the
Rock. One by one their hearts misgave them at the experience of beauty.
They quailed before the task of mastering it with their souls, and drew
away. Lychnis only still gazed, and Ambrose studied her.

“Come, my dearest,” said Lord Sombrewater, turning, as he went, to draw
her by the arm.

An ecstatic sigh escaped her. She seemed unable to move. Ambrose and
her father, and one by one the others, turned to see what held her so
fast.

The Rock was ablaze with orange-hued lanterns, as if in the middle of
the water a rhododendron bush had suddenly put forth flowers.

“Almighty, and as we hope merciful, God!” Quentin was spontaneously
upon his knees.

A rocket crept up the black sky, and twenty dying red suns were
extinguished in the Lake. Another and another.

“An extremely ceremonious welcome,” muttered Lord Sombrewater. “Who is
our host, I wonder?”

“Lavish, to say the least,” replied Frew-Gaff.

The display lasted an hour. The culminating device was a vermilion
dragon that writhed and grinned high up above the Rock. With that the
entertainment abruptly ceased, leaving the night darker.

“How shall we find the way?” asked Ruby, with a quiver in her voice.
But two or three servants, with kindly-meant if ghostly foresight,
appeared out of nowhere to guide them, and they went their several
ways through the spectral groves of bamboo, looking back now and then
towards the Lake.

Warm-hued lanterns decorated the Pavilion and filled the bedchambers
with a dim, wavering and unreal light. Ambrose retired and composed
his mind. But outside on the verandah he could hear Lychnis and Ruby
whispering and the swish of their robes on the floor.

“I don’t like it, Licky darling,” said Ruby’s voice. “I’m frightened. I
don’t like our room.”

“Well, daddy’s next door, and your father is somewhere close by.”

“I don’t like the place where we are, not by night.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

Hence the respect accorded to the visitors on their journey. Ambrose
received a glance from Lychnis.

“And hasn’t anybody ever got away with some of the boodle?” asked Sprot.

“To a very great extent we are unmolested because of the respect
which is paid, in this country, to intelligence. And no doubt many
suppose that because we spend a great deal of time in apparently
idle contemplation no wealth is produced. But visitors have had the
curious desire to remove precious articles to their own homes, and they
have, as you put it, got away. But that—do I divine the more interior
workings of your mind?—was because we did not stop them, as, indeed,
why should we?”

“I presume,” said Sprot, suddenly going turkey-cock red, “that one has
complete liberty of movement here?”

“Until one transgresses the ordinary laws of ceremony,” answered Yuan.

“What I mean to say is——” began Sprot.

Lord Sombrewater enjoined silence on him, and exchanged explanatory and
understanding glances with Yuan. But Sprot meant to assert himself.

“What I mean to say is, that we are British. The might of the British
Empire——”

“If I may anticipate your remarks,” said Yuan, “there is, in a sense,
no British Empire. There is only myself and a few friends.” Lord
Sombrewater resumed his attitude of attentive politeness, and Hsiao
transferred his inspired contemplation to the other half of the melon.

“No Br——!” began Sprot.

“It is possible that occasion may serve to demonstrate that we have
here facilities for the complete destruction of any empire that ever
was, except the empire of contemplative activity. But what have we to
do with the making or unmaking of empires? It breaks into the day so.”

“I take it,” said Lord Sombrewater at last, “that you have in your
hands discoveries of which you make no use—no industrial use, shall I
suggest?”

“Precisely. We use them only for our convenience and for the
convenience of visitors—as, for instance, you will, I am sure, agree
that our fireworks have an unrivalled variety and brilliance.”

“Marvellous!” said Quentin. “I love fireworks.”

“And we have done much to improve the weather.”

“These discoveries,” asked Sir Richard, leaning forward, “are
discoveries of physical science?”

“They are what physical science is hoping to discover by tortuous
methods of its own. In the West, if I may say so, you seek reality
through the examination of appearances, and you have little sense of
it. Here we experience reality and are able to reproduce phenomena, as
may be desirable.”

“Indeed! Very interesting,” said Sir Richard, biting his lip. “You have
laboratories....”

But Fulke burst in: “My God! these people could build the Ideal
State in about ten minutes, and they sit here thinking and enjoying
themselves.”

“Those who think do not enjoy,” said Blackwood. “It is in a state of
non-thinking that one approaches the final bliss of annihilation.”

“Bliss of your big toe!” said old Wang, waking suddenly. The veils fell
from his eyes, and one saw that they were used to looking fixedly at
things non-human, that they were full of an almost dreadful humour. “In
argument on matters of reality,” he added quaintly, “there are no rules
of courtesy.”

“It is not to be thought,” said Yuan, “that we dream of Utopias. We
contemplate reality, each of us from generation to generation in his
own way. We perceive the inward structure of things, and occasionally,
when apposite, one of us may bring up a discovery from those profound
fishings, in the shape of a picture, a poem, or a mechanical
contrivance. There have been men of our family who saw that it would
be spontaneous to destroy their surroundings in order to shape them
according to a greater perfectness perceived in contemplation. They
obeyed their natures, but it usually happens that we pass in due time
(as my great-grandfather has passed) beyond all interest in the seen
world, and lose ourselves in the experience of what is beneath all
appearance, whether of life or death.”

“Well,” said Lord Sombrewater, “we have already detained you from your
contemplative activities long enough for one day. I look forward to
many pleasant conversations; and I desire to thank you on behalf of
all of us for the very kindly way in which you have looked after our
interests for some time past, and for your really lavish provision for
our entertainment and comfort.”

The company rose. “Oh, but may I ask one question?” said Lychnis, with
timidity. The Chinese girls twittered round her, smoothing her clothes.
“Did you—I can’t help wanting to know—did you actually fetch us here,
or have we come of our own free wills?”

There was a certain feeling of embarrassment, but Yuan, who had been
regarding her with profound attention, replied: “We were informed of
your intention to visit Asia, and since then it has been our most
earnest desire that Fate would guide you to this valley.”

Lychnis hoped that the rest of their desires in regard to the party
would prove convenient, being so difficult to resist. Then aloud: “But
supposing you hadn’t liked us?”

“We did like you. We allowed ourselves the gratification of studying
your very pleasing appearance, and only the laws of politeness
prevented us from listening to your elegant conversation.”

“You saw us!” cried the Sages.

“Look!” said Yuan, introducing Lychnis to a cabinet in the wall.

She looked in, and swung round at him on her hips. “The _Floating
Leaf_! My mother, knitting under the awning! Oh! can you see inside
things, too? Or in the dark?” She flushed and frowned, remembering her
afternoon with Ambrose under the plum-tree in blossom, when she had
given herself to his regard.

“This adds a terror to life,” observed Quentin. “It teaches us to be
careful.”

“One can invent many things when it is appropriate to invent them,”
said Yuan, “and there are several matters on this Rock that may
interest you during your visit to our valley.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Sombrewater, and indicated a desire that the
boats should be brought. So they were conducted back to the stairway,
but not before Hsiao, rising abruptly from his meditation, had executed
in three or four sweeps a painting of half a melon.

“What skill!” exclaimed Terence. “What sweeping brushwork! And
really, what a significant melon! One would say that it was the most
significant object in the universe. It leads the mind out to those
half-realized worlds that are interwoven with ours.”

“It is merely,” said Hsiao Chai, “that I have drawn the reality of the
melon. You are a painter, too, I know—a European painter; that is, a
painter of superficial appearances.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Sir Richard, “he paints souls, emanations,
auras and things.”

“Oh, that!” said Hsiao, with indifference, and they descended the
stairway to the marble quay. They floated off in the little boats down
water lanes among the lotuses, and once more the three brilliant and
bowing figures resolved themselves into one.

“It is a charming dragon,” sang out Quentin to Lychnis; but she pulled
out her jade combs and disappeared in a cascade of hair. “Just as,”
notes Ambrose, “some slender and savage fairy might vanish in a forest
cave to interrogate her thoughts in solitude.” For, as she confessed
in due course, her mind was entirely taken up with a picture of that
still unexplained island, with its marble quay, its writhing staircase,
its pavilions, paths and cypresses, its vermilion theorem in some
unfamiliar geometry perched up in the trees.

He tells us that there was no doubt in his mind that their journey
to the valley had in some way been compelled by that keen-eyed young
man, or by his hilarious great-grandparent, but for what object was at
present not clear.

In due course the visit was returned by the three Chinese gentlemen,
who brought with them several beautiful girls. To entertain them,
Lord Sombrewater decreed a picnic; so under an enamel sky, blue to
apricot, tables were spread on the lawn between the horns of the grove,
and echoes of laughter and sprightly conversation quivered among the
delicately shimmering clumps of bamboo. Before them an exceedingly
up-to-date lawn-mower was cutting green swathes in a carpet of daisies,
like a plough driving through the Milky Way. Willow and elm and
plane-tree were mirrored in the glassy lake. Everybody was happy—even
Blackwood, who enjoyed the opportunity to reject the opportunity of
enjoyment. Old Wang Li, wearing the appearance of an aged villager
who has for some time lapsed from mental efficiency, laughed much
to himself at nothing; but from time to time there issued from his
vacuity some startling observation, and terrifying depths of knowledge
were sometimes revealed in a sudden lightning that flickered through
the veils of his eyes. Hsiao Chai abandoned himself frankly to the
pleasures of the table and occasionally to silent contemplation of the
landscape. Yuan engaged in discussion with a certain smiling ardour and
charm of youth. But it seemed to Lychnis that he, too, was absentminded
part of the time, even when he discussed. His eyes, she said, were
not seeing what was around them. There was a rapt, a heart-chilling
look in them, she said, as if they pierced through appearances and
contemplated realities that might have been frightening for ordinary
people to perceive. Ambrose makes it clear that there was nothing
impolite in the behaviour of the three guests. They were self-effacing,
unself-conscious and simple, but, watching their patrician faces,
one felt oneself to be in the company of great gentlemen. It was
beyond their power to obscure themselves. All three were in touch, as
inconspicuously as might be managed, with some fountain—in communion,
secretly, with some tremendous reality. They had become vehicles for
it, and it could not be hidden. With Wang it flowered in unexpected and
unreasonable laughter; with Hsiao in the frown of creative inspiration;
with Yuan in an imperious raptness of gaze. On him also there sat
a certain majesty of self-dedication and the foreknowledge of some
difficult paradise.

As the meal progressed, the system of thought that was to be inferred
from the talk of the three Chinese gentlemen seemed to the others more
and more curiously upside down. But perhaps not to Quentin.

“You are a man to be much admired,” said Hsiao at some free remark of
his.

“So he is, indeed,” said Lord Sombrewater dryly, “though it has
been our experience, on our travels, to hear him referred to less
sympathetically.”

“That is doubtless because men seek to impose their own ideas of
conduct on the rest of mankind,” observed Yuan.

“He has discarded purpose,” said Hsiao. “He behaves as his impulses
dictate.”

“I am appreciated,” said Quentin.

“He despises,” continued Hsiao, “the artificial bonds that check
our natural impulses. He has become primitive. He gives rein to his
nature. He gratifies it, and this is right, because life is short,
and our days should not be occupied with conforming to external
practices and submitting our natures to impossible inhibitions. There
is only one virtue, and that is to behave according to our natures.
Men are remembered not for their virtue or their wickedness, but
only for having lived to their full bent. And all is soon enough
forgotten. Indulge, therefore, the ear and the eye, the mouth and the
belly—indulge the desires of body and mind.”

“I am understood,” said Quentin.

“It will be observed,” put in Yuan, “that Hsiao has halted in the
pleasures of sense. He has been caught, like a fly in amber, in the
beauty of appearances. He perceives, and indicates to us, the spirit,
the underlying reality of Nature, but he permits himself the desires of
sense, thus adding to the sum of human emotion. Such a man is not the
perfect man.”

“I should think not, indeed,” said Sprot. “Such a man is most
dangerous.”

“And what in your view is the perfect man?” asked Lord Sombrewater,
with interest.

“The perfect man,” replied Yuan, to an accompaniment of profound
hilarity on the part of Wang Li, “is without passion, desires nothing
and indicates nothing. He has the appearance of a fool and is usually
ugly. In speaking I depart from wisdom. In speaking we limit truth.
Yet, to come in the neighbourhood of definition, let me say that the
perfect man neglects himself and is preserved; forgets himself and
is remembered; takes what comes; makes no plans; eats what he likes;
sleeps without dreams; wakes without care; breathes deep; conforms to
custom, lest he become self-conscious; seems to be of the world while
his thoughts are with eternity; uses language while communing in
silence with what is beyond language; ignores the distinction between
spirit and matter; is neither benevolent nor malevolent, wicked nor
good, adding nothing to the sum of human emotion; and, his mind being
utterly in repose, he dwells for ever with the unnameable.”

“That again,” said Quentin, toying with a dish of spiced wild duck, “is
me.”

“But does not the true Sage calmly await annihilation?” ventured
Blackwood.

“The true Sage awaits nothing, calmly or otherwise.” It was Wang Li who
thought fit to speak. He spoke or kept silence at random, recognizing
no rule. “He pays no heed either to becoming or ceasing-to-be.
He rejects distinctions of life or death, remaining as nearly as
possible unconscious until, in the course of Nature, he returns to the
non-relative—which is not to be described as annihilation.”

“Mr. Blackwood is wrong,” said Hsiao, with decision, “in rejecting
life. One should reject nothing that is in accordance with Nature. And
Wang Li is wrong to spend his years in a state of unconsciousness. For
even now as he talks to you he is unconscious. He is not even conscious
that he is unconscious—otherwise there would be in his mind the shadow
of pride, which is a shadow of passion. He is with eternity, and only
peripherally speaks. Yuan, I fear, is going the same way. For me, the
object of life is enjoyment. One is born and one will die. In between
one has life. I do not reject it. I accept it and gratify my senses
while they can be gratified. I perceive the unnameable, but one can
perceive without embracing. When one has returned to the unnameable one
will have no senses. In the meantime, from the point of view of the
senses, death is a fact; life’s another.”

“Neither is a fact,” said Wang, his eyes lit with a terrifying gleam of
amusement. “There is only one Fact. From it all apparent distinctions
derive. In it they disappear.”

“Do you mean to say,” clamoured Sprot incredulously, “that I ... Me
...” (he pointed to himself) “am not a fact?”

“You are as the shadow of a non-existing cloud passing over a lawn that
isn’t there,” said Quentin, with a wink at Hsiao.

“Did I hear a voice?” asked Wang. “How can I, that am not, hear a voice
from nothing?” And Sprot clasped his head in desperation, proving
himself to himself by the hardness of his skull.

The meal came to an end in a somewhat startling manner, for Wang ceased
abruptly from conversation and entered a trance of contemplation, while
Hsiao went fast asleep.

“This,” said Lord Sombrewater to Ambrose, “is a great compliment.
I quite see that it may be regarded as the last gesture of true
refinement.” He rose, and with Frew-Gaff and Ruby followed Lychnis and
Yuan, who were strolling among the paths of the bamboo grove. “I desire
to hear more of the conversation of that young man,” he remarked.

“I don’t believe he is young,” said Sprot to Ambrose. “I shouldn’t be
surprised to find he was a hundred. I don’t like these people. Did
you ever hear such views? And I think it very wrong to let Lychnis go
walking off confidentially like that with a young married man. He’s
sure to be married. And anyway, he’s a foreigner—more than a foreigner.
In my opinion a Chinaman’s more than foreign—like a frog. You don’t
suppose”—he came closer to Ambrose—“you don’t suppose Lychnis would
... I mean, a nice young girl wouldn’t....”

“I should recommend you, as a mental exercise,” said Ambrose, “to
formulate to yourself more precisely what is in your mind. It makes my
record of the conversation more precise.”

Lord Sombrewater beckoned, and he joined the brilliant figures in the
bamboo grove. Yuan was discoursing of the bamboo and Lychnis listening
bright-eyed.

“There are many plants here that I have not seen before,” said Lord
Sombrewater. “They are of a rare beauty.”

“We have assisted Nature,” said Yuan, smiling.

“How do you propagate? May I ask?”

“In the usual ways—by seed, by division, by cuttings of the base of the
culm, by cuttings of rhizomes. Layering is impossible for most of these
plants. We create a favourable position for them, and make special
soils and dressings.”

“The warmth and the sea-mists are helpful, I have no doubt. What about
rats and voles?”

“We have exterminated them, except for some that we keep for special
purposes.”

“They really are very beautiful plants,” said Lord Sombrewater, with
envy.

“It is most wonderful,” replied Yuan, “when all of them over an
immense region flower at once.”

“And do you find that they die?”

“They disappear.”

“Many travellers have agreed that the plants die after flowering.”

“How are the plants renewed? My opinion is that they do not die, after
flowering, until they have given off suckers from the roots.”

They discussed technical questions of extreme difficulty. Lychnis and
Ambrose followed in a world of fluttering green butterflies, peering at
spikelet and bract, while Yuan described and demonstrated, until Wang
Li and Hsiao were heard calling from their barge.

At a suitable interval from their first visit to the Rock they were
bidden to a water-picnic, and thereafter with increasing frequency to a
luncheon-party, or a supper, or some excursion with various members of
the family, male and female, among the intricate and distant windings
of the Lake. They were invited into the most interior chambers of the
house itself. Lychnis and Ruby made friends of young girls or married
women with exquisite names. The depression that some of the party
had begun to feel lifted, and there was great gaiety and friendship.
Messengers were soon dispensed with, and all their arrangements were
made by wireless, once they had learned to use the apparatus discovered
in a cabinet on the day of their arrival at the Pavilion. It was,
Ambrose reports, a better instrument than any known in Europe, the
principle of it, Sir Richard and Fulke agreed, being in advance of
European physical knowledge—a thing guessed at, but not grasped. They
began to know the coves, shrubberies and summer-houses, and some of
the mysteries of the island; and they began to see what Sprot and
Fulke called the sinister side of their hosts’ lives. The weather was
wonderful—clear, warm and mellow, with mist in the morning. Peaches
and apricots ripened on the brown flanks of the island, and the two
parties spent glorious days and wonderful summer evenings about the
Lake and the valleys among those fantastic oyster-shell hills. The only
rule that Lord Sombrewater made was that Lychnis and Ruby were on no
account to visit the Rock unless accompanied by himself, Sir Richard
Frew-Gaff, or Ambrose.

Ambrose found that in one way the task of keeping the record of their
activities began to present difficult problems. Wang, Hsiao and Yuan
baffled analysis and gave him no confidences. Their characters did
not seem to have recognizable springs. Merry old Wang said little
and laughed immoderately, smiting his clean, blanched-yellow old
head without obvious occasion; his sayings, moreover, usually seemed
inappropriate and without sense. Hsiao, who with his top-knot resembled
an inspired turnip, drank a great deal and painted divinely. Yuan was
perhaps easier to understand. He had a certain candour, almost an
impulsiveness; but then, as his great-grandfather said, he had not
yet quite learned to cease from activity and return to his centre.
He ranged abroad and vanished sometimes for days at a time, while
his elders kept to the Lake and the island, and seemed to find great
contentment in an almost perpetual motionlessness. He liked to be
among mountains and pines. “He persists,” Wang said, “in riding among
wind-storms and adding to the sum of human emotion.” And then he
explained that for countless centuries every generation of the family
had produced a Sage. There was always one to whom it came as nature,
and in his own generation the mantle had fallen on Yuan. But Yuan had
yet much to learn. Ambrose thereupon grasped the situation—Wang was
a complete Sage, a perfect or superior man, as they put it. Yuan’s
father, Sage of another generation, was on a pilgrimage. Hsiao was a
side-line. Yuan, the beginner (from the point of view of the Europeans
he was already far enough on the way to wisdom), was in training. Like
the elders, he would spend hours in the neighbourhood of a flower or a
water-fowl—he used courtesy towards flowers and animals—and more than
once in her walks Lychnis came upon him wrapped in his meditation,
self-unconscious, quite lost to the world. It charmed her.

In another way Ambrose’s task became easier, because, as their
reactions to their strange circumstances became stronger, and as their
troubles increased, the Sages all came with their confidences. Even
Ruby had something to say and advice to ask, and Lychnis made him
absolutely her conscience and heart.

Late at night, when the moon was up and Ruby and the rest of the
household were asleep, Lychnis crept from the curtains of her black,
roomy bed, and stole out on the verandah. Ambrose perceived her,
standing in the moon like a pink crêpe-de-Chine ghost with a white
core, her feet together and her hands behind her head, in a lovely,
dart-like attitude, as if she were balancing for a flight into the
scented, dark heart of the foliage. Waiting a moment to observe
accurately the excellent shape of her head, with the hair drawn in to
the neck, and to commit to memory certain curves of her bust, which
slightly lifted the front of her glimmering shift and purified the
soul like a vision of the Grail, he stirred. She turned, smiled, and
vanished, returning again with a wrap like a mist about the moon. They
sat side by side.

“It is hot, is it not?” she asked.

“I was composing my account of the day,” he answered. “I want your
impressions.”

“Do you record impressions of all of us?” she inquired.

“Most of you, from time to time, tell me things that are of interest.”

“Of interest! You have interests, of course. One forgets that.”

“Oh yes, I have interests. To record with accuracy the essentials of an
episode—that is one of them.”

“What an interest! Really, an interest is not very interesting—not so
interesting as a passion. You have no passions?”

“They only cloud the vision of clear-eyed desire,” he answered—“in
fact, they actually prevent attainment.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got a passion,” she observed—“a sort of general,
unattached passion. If it suddenly fastened on someone the results
might be frightful.”

“Abeyance it, and give me to-day’s impressions.”

“Oh, impressions! Well, in the first place, it’s hot. Then—I don’t
quite know what impressions I have. I mean, they may come from inside
me. Can one make impressions on oneself?”

“Let’s hear.”

“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.

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.

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?”

On investigation it turned out that Lychnis had disappeared. There was
no sign of her anywhere. “Where can she be?” asked Ruby, with tears in
her voice.

They all stood on the lawn staring over the Lake like men who have lost
a vision. Sombrewater and Frew-Gaff, returning late from a geological
expedition in the mountains, were met with the intelligence by an
almost elated Sprot.

“I knew it,” said the little man. “I have warned you, Lord Sombrewater.”

Lord Sombrewater turned and stared at him so that he began fumbling
with his collar. “You have warned me of what?”

He had nothing to say.

“Be so good as to keep your thoughts to yourself.”

Lord Sombrewater went abruptly into the Pavilion.

Lychnis, in the meanwhile, was off to the south-west with Yuan in the
Dragon. The stars were on fire in heaven; there was a space of white
light about the moon; far below slid the perfumed forest. She sat
behind Yuan in the hollow body of the creature, and he, slung between
the wings, bent this way and that, wheeling and dipping his fantastic
chariot; and sometimes, when he had climbed the peak of the wind, he
would fling himself forward, and she would see the dark, rushing world
beyond the streak of moon on his shoulders as they swooped on a hundred
miles through the night. Then, after a few moments of rest on some hill
that loomed up out of the void, a soft purr of his mysterious engine or
a beat of the wings and the chariot sprang up and forward like an eagle.

Slung behind him, sometimes touching him, Lychnis felt with her body
that Yuan knew the air, knew all the roads, the precipices, the rapids
of the air. He behaved as a far-travelling bird would behave, beating
along the vast empty ways of the night with repeated crutch-strokes,
or spreading out silver wings along the swift surface of a wind. Or,
if he wearied, the tiny engine was switched on, and they traversed the
sky with the speed of a meteor. Through him she knew the airways and
lent him her movements, balancing and clinging with him on the huge
precipice-face of the winds they were climbing, giving herself without
shrinking to the fearful descent into a huge, opening nothingness.
From time to time she caught a glimpse of his cheek. He threw her
back an unsounded word, and she made noiseless answers with her small
whispering mouth to his ear. He was intent and still, and his stillness
held her, so that in spite of the dark void below she had no fear. Only
the wind and the world moved, and they seemed intensely still in the
midst of the sky, with their small heads so close.

Time had no meaning, and space twisted and wheeled around them. Soon,
very far off, under a slanting beam of the moon, there came, as if the
edge of space were advancing toward them, a glimmering of white petals,
a flush of sacred lilies floating on the dark pool of the sky, lotuses
waving about the feet of some Boddhisatva, for whom the Dragon was
bearing on his back a beautiful captive to minister to his contempt of
desire. But before the lilies came close, Yuan leant forward, and the
dark pool of the world rushed up and engulfed them. The forest streamed
up and out like black foam. Yuan hung over it, a silver moth, then
brought the breast of the Dragon to the flood of a gleaming river. “The
jungle,” he whispered.

There was a clamour of wild creatures. It suddenly faded to a far
distance.

“They smell a flesh-eater,” he murmured.

Around them a circle of silence spread outwards till the distant
circumference of howling died. But there was a movement. They seemed to
Lychnis to be surrounded by looming shapes, by moving jewelled hands
gesturing in darkness. There were movements in the unseen masses of
foliage on the banks—swift movements of night hunters, slow movements
of ancient creatures. There were long plungings and swirlings in the
water. A vapour of heat drifted over them. The river flowed by unseen,
and the Dragon held his breast to it like a soul in the flow of time.
There were presences. Glancing at Yuan, half-visible, Lychnis found
him, now, less than human, or perhaps more. Over the jungle there
gleamed those lily petals, and a light from them seemed to illuminate
his face. The eyes became oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold.
The small closed mouth was a carved symbol of eternal serenity. He
became a god, and she found him almost intolerably strange.

“Forget your humanness,” murmured the mask. It was like a breath of the
jungle speaking. “Forget it and know the creatures of the jungle.”

They were drifting a little down-stream towards the bank on their
right. They were aware of a movement in the reeds, an arrival of
concentrated silence. The darkness watched them. Then the reeds waved
and parted, and there shone at them two savage emeralds. Lychnis,
feeling the beautiful ferocity that crouched for her, glanced at Yuan,
perhaps to see if she could share her experience with him. But he was
in combat with the tiger, putting out the fierceness of the tiger,
meeting, subduing the hunger that was about to spring. He entered
through the deeps of being into the nature of tiger, and in some sort
of wrestle in the realm of the tiger’s understanding dissipated the
desire that sought to satisfy itself on Lychnis’s flesh.

They became aware that the knot of silence was resolved. Presently as
if the tiger had spread some kind of intelligence, howling was heard
again in the distance, and before long the rim of howling contracted.
The forest had forgotten them. They were free in it.

“You are not afraid?” The pale gold mask uttered voice.

“Only a little.” But her fear was a fear of the being beside her. All
other fear had vanished and survived only in that. “Are you never
afraid?” she asked. “Here, or in the sky?”

“The personal I,” he answered, “the individual local Yuan, was a mass
of fears. But the man I am becoming, the man whose I is vanishing, the
god-saturated man, cannot experience fear. The wine-drunken man is
not afraid, and if he falls out of the cart he breaks no bones. The
god-intoxicated man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the sky all
is well.”

“I am not god-intoxicated, as far as I know.”

“Nevertheless your perceptions are like those of one who is thus
intoxicated. You perceive rhythms that only the heart of the infinite
perceives.”

“I had not thought I was anything out of the way,” she said.

“Will you walk in the jungle under the cloak of my understanding?” he
asked.

“Oh yes!” She was instant. How often, at night, one had heard some
young man, or some older man, or even an aged man, say: Shall we walk
in the wood a little? But this was to reenter the Garden by night, and
walk in Eden with an archangel, or even with the Lord God. Possibly to
see the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Looking at Yuan, to follow
him, she asked herself: Are you the Serpent? He was leading her to
knowledge, certainly, but not of good and evil, for he had said good
and evil are local oppositions; in the unnameable they become one.

He was looking past her, boring into the reeds. She liked the dark,
oblong eyes with their gimlet centres of blackness. She liked the
imperious line of the cheek.

“We will not land here,” he said.

They shot up and sideways, skirting the trees like a dragon-fly; came
down presently at a place where wild beasts drank. He made fast there.
She had a curious sensation, she told Ambrose, as Yuan helped her down
from the machine. It was strange, she said, to put her hand into his
foreign hand. (No doubt the being so much with Ambrose, the perpetual
comradeship that was between them, had trained her to note things.)
Pleasant? Unpleasant? Not altogether unpleasant. Some slight antipathy,
the diarist supposes. Certainly she forgot the sensation at once as
they made their way into the darkness, the thrilling terror of the deep
forest. She had no objection at all to the envelopment of her person by
his cloak of understanding. If she had any sort of antipathy to his
flesh, she had none whatever to his mind. He walked the forest like
some shepherd of tigers. The snakes and insects let pass one of their
kind, startled only by the shadow that followed him, bright-eyed and
staring. They were mounting, and presently, when they had crossed the
spine of the hill, the ground fell again slightly, only to mount beyond
them in wave after wave of forest until the further waves had a white
ridge, and far off, gleaming in outer space, were the snow-petals, the
sacred lilies of ice.

Lychnis gasped. “I’m not sure—I think I’m afraid. They are so huge, so
cold.” Fear of the mountains had entered her, and with it a host of
other fears. She began to look round anxiously, to shrink. He was her
only refuge from fear, and she shrank from him, too. Looking at her,
she felt he divined the whole secret of her.

“You are afraid now?” he asked. “It’s natural. Fear must come in before
it can be cast out. One must be conscious before one is unconscious.
Sit down with your back to a tree.” He prevented, in some way, her
impulse to look down in case a snake was coiled where she was to sit.

She obeyed him. He sat down opposite, with his back to a tree, and drew
from his garment a small sort of flute and played. She found presently,
as she listened to his slow, meditative theme, that she had forgotten
her fear of the mountains. She began to gaze at them, seeking to become
conscious of them, to shape the vague and profound emotion that they
gave rise to, and express it. “Eternity,” she said. “They are eternal.”

“On the contrary,” he replied. “In a little while they will have gone,
and an ocean perhaps will flow there.”

“Then it is I that am eternal, and the mountains made me remember.”

“Eternity is in you, but you are not eternal.”

Swiftly a thought of old Wang Li came to her mind.

“The truth that can be stated is not truth,” she shot at him.

He smiled. “The truth can be played with the flute, though. Listen.”

It was so, she thought, hearing something behind the notes he played
that was like the mountains, but with no terror. And she saw without
shrinking that the glittering eyes of fierce beasts were gazing
steadfastly from the darkness, and tenderer creatures were near them.
Then a python swayed down his head from the branch of a tree close
by, and she put out her orchid-hand and touched the ivory skin. All
that she remembered afterwards, for at the time she was not conscious
of python, tiger, or deer; only of that which sounded from Yuan’s
flute, that sang, as she put it, to itself in her and in the beasts,
the intoxicating godhead that remains when ice vanishes, music is not
listened to, and spirit itself has disappeared into nothing.

But afterwards, when the spell of the singing flute had lifted,
she came to the conclusion that the experience of sublimity is
unnecessarily serious. “I should prefer something suaver,” she told
Ambrose, “more restrained—the god without the intoxication.”

Lychnis told Ambrose that the coldness of her reception, when she came
back next morning, was a surprise to her. “I was only thinking and
thinking of what I had seen and done in the night, of how I felt about
Yuan,” she said, “and to find all that anger was horrible. There has
been a change. Sir Richard frowns at me. Sprot is delighted, the little
beast, because he can impute something to me. Fulke hates me. I prefer
it. But our party is breaking up, and it is not like it used to be.
I can’t help it. They have no business to interfere when I am going
through with an experience.” Her anger rose. “They shall stay here
until I have finished with it, or I will stay here alone, or with you.
You will never be against me?”

He saw that her mind was in tumult, but by no means altogether because
of the trouble she had got into with her father and the others. In
any case she had an inextinguishable obstinacy. It appears that she
had come back alone across the Lake in a boat, pre-occupied, lovely
with the flush of her thoughts, only to find herself when she stepped
on shore among grave and resentful faces. Her father was indoors.
“Naturally,” she said, “he would never question me before all the
others. He and I have always had our quarrels in private.” Ruby, too,
was indoors.

It was the incredible Sprot, almost dancing with the pleasure of his
accusing thoughts, who put the question: “Where have you been?”

She looked round at Fulke, in her eyes a command that Sprot should
die. But there had been a change in Fulke, and he only glowered at
her. Quentin answered her appeal with a grin of somewhat resentful
amusement. She had therefore to speak for herself:

“Mr. Sprot, I am sorry to learn that you have to leave us.”

“What on earth do you mean?” he stammered. “I am not leaving. Your
father has not said so.”

“I have said so.”

“I won’t leave.” He squared up. “And what will you do about it?”

“If I see you anywhere about to-morrow morning I shall ask Yuan to
attend to you.” She went to the Pavilion, and they all watched her
walking with bent head across the lawn. Then they turned to consider
the case of Sprot, who was palely protesting that he would in no
circumstances go.

“Especially,” said Quentin pleasantly, “with the country in its present
state, when the traveller is more than likely to meet with robbery and
violent outrage.”

“I appeal to you.” Sprot clasped, as it were, the knees of Sir Richard
Frew-Gaff. But Sir Richard politely regretted that he could do nothing,
and walked away.

Sprot exploded. “It’s perfectly scandalous that hard-working,
reasonable-minded men should be at the beck and call of a piece of
goods like that! Why does everyone pay so much attention to her, I
should like to be told. She doesn’t work. She doesn’t produce anything.
What right has she to say what shall be? Walking off like a sprig of
lilac with a ‘You clear out!’ and all—her and her fat-faced Chink. It’s
my opinion....”

“We don’t want your opinion,” said Fulke morosely.

“Yes, we do. You run away and weep with your Ruby,” said Quentin, with
a wink to the rest.

Fulke flared. “You shut up, you stinking mud-pump! I’ve had just about
enough of your interference.”

“No naughty temper,” said Quentin, and being strong, though a sinner,
he immersed young righteousness in the Lake.

A native servant came down with a message that Lord Sombrewater would
be glad if Ambrose would step up to the Pavilion. Ambrose therefore
left the group on the shore of the Lake, thinking that the harmony of
the party was indeed sadly disturbed, and the serene lawns and fine
brooding trees disfigured by their quarrelling. Lord Sombrewater was
with Lychnis, she moody, he severe. But it was his custom to approach
a quarrel with his daughter in a business-like spirit, and he had not
allowed the matter to interrupt his eleven o’clock cigar. He motioned
Ambrose to a seat by a little lacquer table.

“Good-morning, Ambrose. I want you to know that there are now no
restrictions on my daughter’s liberty of movement. She may go where she
likes and with whom she likes, and I”—he spoke without bitterness—“I
wash my hands of it. I admit that it was foolish to make rules for
a daughter who takes as much notice of my wishes as the very solid
gate-post of this Pavilion. Facts are facts. She has argued with me,
and I think conclusively, that her life is her own. I have fully agreed
that her friendship with Yuan is not a matter with which I am closely
concerned. We must face the facts, and I see that it is useless to
attempt to control her. I want you to convey this to the others. Now,
Lychnis, I have done what you have asked. Will you kindly leave us?”

“I never said that you do not come closely into my life. You do. I want
you to.”

He waved her away. Ambrose knew that he would never hear in what
terms they had quarrelled. But this dismissal, he perceived, was a
retaliation on Lord Sombrewater’s part. If she had no place for her
father, if she desired to be independent, she would be independent,
very much so, and alone; she should feel the cold. Her eyes, Ambrose
saw, filled with tears as she went through to her green-and-gold
bedroom, and there was no turning on her hips at the door to make a
friendly gesture. No doubt she felt that another harbour was closing to
her.

“When I made a rule that she should not do this or that, I made a
mistake,” said his lordship, and his cigar had gone out. “Lychnis makes
her own rules as she goes along. She acts by an inner light, and cannot
see why others should have any views on the matter except the views
that are so clear to her. No doubt she is right, as maybe we all are,
in some deep sense; but it is hard, when she does these strange things,
for those who have merely to watch and trust. I find it difficult,
Ambrose. I love my daughter. I am jealous, and find it hard to be shut
out from her inner life. If I were in her heart, no doubt I should
agree that whatever she did was good. I should know what was going to
happen, and I should not now be afraid as to where the necessity under
which she doubtless acts might be going to lead her. I am honoured, as
one should be, for having created a thing that is useless and beautiful
... but not, very naturally, by the thing. What do you say?”

“I say,” Ambrose replied, “that this is false sentiment. Love of a
father is one thing; love of someone else is another. You should not be
jealous of any kind of love that is not specifically yours to claim.
Without jealousy, or, as our Chinese friends would say, without desire,
or, as I may qualify it, without the addition of an inappropriate
desire to the specific and proper desire of a father, or of a lover, as
the case may be, there would exist no clash, or undue passion.”

Lord Sombrewater observed him. “You would not permit anything that
might occur to alter whatever the relation between you and Lychnis may
be?”

“There is a specific and possibly unique friendship between Lychnis and
me which, if I do not allow it to be disturbed by irrelevant humours,
can be left to take care of itself.”

“That tells me little.”

“Not having been choked by weeds, it has become a thing by itself, with
life and a destiny. I have only to keep it pure of irrelevant desires.”

“You are an extraordinary man. If you would not mind my asking—if
anything were to happen, and we left her here in China, would you miss
her? Would you, let us say, be aware of a hiatus?”

“The mind,” Ambrose records himself as saying, “is its own place, as
the poet so justly says, agreeing with our Chinese friends. Desire
perishes, and that which is without desire is immortal.”

“I’m hanged if you don’t out-Wang old Wang!” Lord Sombrewater relit
his cigar. Then he suddenly exploded: “And by God! Ambrose, I agree
absolutely with Lychnis about Sprot! Out he shall go!”

It was lucky, Ambrose thought, that there should be someone handy to
take off the full torrent of Lord Sombrewater’s emotion.

Lychnis, when she had given Ambrose an account of her doings, went
swiftly in her short white dress under the heavy summer trees to the
mooring-raft of red-painted bamboo, unfastened her coracle, and paddled
through water lanes among lotuses to the island. She saw Hsiao in an
arbour by the water’s edge, and waved in a friendly manner, but he
was asleep. She brought her coracle to the marble quay, ascended the
dragon-staircase, and sped along the ridge of the island, passing old
Wang in meditation by a dung-heap. She climbed into the vermilion
summer-house among the tree-tops, but Yuan was not there. She went out
on to the verandah, and stood looking down over the scarlet rail into
the Lake, where golden shapes of fish were passing like half-visible
summer clouds. She saw the roof of Hsiao’s arbour and his two feet
sticking out.

She went into the bare, sun-swept room again, and swung out an
instrument from its cupboard. Not familiar with its use, but perceiving
the principle of it and the method of adjustment by some scarcely
conscious effort, she made the whole countryside disclose itself
to her. First of all, there appeared in the field of view that
dozen of queer philosophers on the rock over towards the mountains;
next, through too wide an adjustment, a tract of country which she
recognized—a little hill near the _Floating Leaf_, with a plum-tree,
now in fruit, where she had talked with Ambrose, and Ruby had come
back with her arms full of flowers. It was strange that she could hear
the leaves rustling. She did not look for the ship. To see those three
ladies knitting under the awning would have been to jolt the progress
of a dream. She came back to the Peach-blossom Valley, and turned with
a gesture of wrath from the spectacle of Sprot in altercation with
her father. Then a few moments of growing impatience, until she found
Yuan, waist-deep and busy in an enclosed pool at a distant point of the
island. She heard the Lake rippling and the wash of water when he moved
or plunged his hands in the pool. Breeding experiments, she thought.
She had meant to go to him when she should have found him. It was so
with her now that she demanded his presence constantly. But he was
busy; he might prefer to be alone. She paused to inquire into her state
of mind, realizing that she found it a necessity to be with him, and
wondering what that might amount to.

Now that she had found him it did not seem right to watch him. She
paced the open rooms and balconies of that airy summer-house, like a
slim fly caught in a scarlet cage; going out to feast her heart on the
Lake, now a garden of lilies, white, rose, and golden; returning to the
instrument to see if Yuan was still at work. She opened a cabinet of
drawers, found it full of paintings on silk, and idly inspected them.
There was a portrait of a young boy. It was so perfect a work of art,
a unity composed of an infinite number of rhythms, that its effect on
the mind was hypnotic. The tone was a variety of rich browns touched
with a lotus flush of almost unbelievable precision. The young boy was
kneeling on a lotus daïs with his hands joined in prayer. The eyebrows
were delicate as small painted moths. The tiny mouth was like a flower
that will never open and wither, beautiful and small and calm. The eyes
were purer than the deep and velvet pansy. Was it a boy, after all,
or a girl? She saw in the face a certain severity of saintliness, the
signs of a state of mind that she could remember, when she had been,
as it were, both boy and girl, with a desire for heaven. But what was
solemn and beautiful in the face was a shadow, a foreknowledge, of some
predestined renunciation, of some experience circled round with burning
flames, seen from afar off, before the thought of pain had meaning.
Pondering thus, she realized with a shock that the features were the
features of Yuan.

She looked at the image in the long-sight instrument, saw that Yuan was
still at work, and returned to the portrait.

Could Hsiao have painted it? Could he have received that sublime
inspiration in the stupor of wine? If he could paint a melon, when he
was drunk, in a way to disclose cosmical secrets, why not the portrait
of a saintly young boy? There was no signature. That was like Hsiao.
For him not the painting, but the contemplation in which he conceived
it. She understood that. The painting was a mere discharge, the symbol
of an experience fully grasped.

The face was not so much Yuan’s as the face of some perfect being,
predestined for the bliss of non-existence seen in the vision of an
artist. Not so much Yuan’s face. With the portrait in her hand she
returned to the instrument, and found after a little experimenting
that it was possible to deal with the field of view so as to fill it
with the image of a small object. She studied the image of Yuan with
the shame of Psyche studying the revealed face of the god. There had
been a change. The mild face of the boy had become severe, even fierce,
from the discipline of contemplation; in the place of innocence was
the calm, unvarying gaze of eyes that have rested on a reality that is
neither pure nor impure. She was afraid, as she had been afraid before
the mountains, and put the portrait away and swung the instrument back
into its cabinet. But first, with a swift mounting of her fear, she saw
that Yuan had left his pool, and was coming towards her with his eyes
fixed on hers.

He was coming to her. He would be there in a few minutes. He had only
been looking at the scarlet nest in the tree-tops, of course, and he
could not have descried her figure, where she was. But he would know,
and in a rush of passion she hated his insight and his domination; in
her mind she saw his face again, serene and alien. Her flesh shuddered.

Soon he stood between the scarlet posts of the doorway, yellow-brown
against a deep blue sky, attentive, impassive.

They were alone till the afternoon, when Sir Richard and his daughter,
both a trifle constrained, came over to the island with Fulke. The
sight of those three restored to Lychnis a sense of reality. In the
morning she had been drawn into the realms of Yuan’s vast interior
life, fascinated, hardly conscious that her identity was submerged.
Now in the afternoon, with her friends by, she could look on him as
an object, a man with whom she could enter on given relations, regard
being had to other considerations, as, for example, his race, her
father’s wishes, the pull of her home in England. She became happy,
contented that she should be in that frame of mind.

There was to be a water-party after sundown, and they spent the
afternoon making a promised inspection of some of Yuan’s laboratories
hidden in the rock. There they saw various matters in their several
stages of advancement.

“What funny old frights!” whispered Ruby, when she saw the artificers
at work. “I really believe they are the twelve men we saw looking so
idiotic on that rock.”

And certainly the twelve ancient or middle-aged gentlemen, who were
achieving machines of extreme delicacy out of an apparently vacant
stupor, did seem to be the same. For Sir Richard, when he saw the
artificers at work, the problem as to how Yuan procured his apparatus
was solved. “I wondered whether you sent plans to Europe,” he explained.

Yuan smiled. “I do not want to lay Europe in ruins. No. I indicate the
nature of my mechanical problems to these friends of mine, and they
work out the details in contemplation. They know the inner secrets of
platinum and ebonite and wood.”

“You are kind to Europe.” Sir Richard’s upper lip was firm. It is
inconvenient that the amateur should know more than the professor,
and it was only because of the paramount claims of science that he
endeavoured to draw Yuan into a discussion. The two gentlemen talked at
great length, while Lychnis listened entranced, and Ruby yawned. But
discussion was not easy, because Yuan was dealing in symbols that were
entirely strange and in realms of experience where his companion had
never been. Some formulæ that he wrote down were excessively pleasing;
to Sir Richard they meant as much as the experiences of a mystic, while
Lychnis recognized that they were indeed precisely that.

From the laboratories they went to the gardens and hot-houses, full of
unfamiliar plants and insects; from the gardens and hot-houses to the
breeding-grounds; and it was here that even Sir Richard’s scientific
mind shrank a little at sight of some of the monsters Yuan had created,
in what seemed an irresponsible way. In particular a frightful cross
between an ape and a tiger shocked his moral sense. But Yuan took no
pains to justify himself, and only replied that all those who help in
the great work of creation will have their jokes from time to time.

Towards evening Yuan left them to make his preparations for the
water-party, and Sir Richard sat by the Lake with the two girls
pondering deeply on the afternoon’s talk. He evidently desired to
unburden himself, and found a certain difficulty in speaking to
Lychnis, the only possible listener. But in the end, if he was
displeased with her, the contents of his mind were too much for him.

“That man could alter the world,” he said, turning to her somewhat
constrainedly at last. “I do not pretend to be an expert in more
than one or two of the sciences we touched on, but I know enough to
recognize that what he says is of first-class importance. Do you
understand, my dear girl, that he has discovered all we know in
physiology by pure contemplation? I would go farther and guess that
physiology is no problem to him at all; he simply perceives the
nature of the body, and it is my opinion that he will live for ever.
There seems practically no nervous expenditure. He avails himself of
some sort of cosmical energy and forgets about his own organization,
which has become merely the sphere, so to speak, in which the energy I
speak of is present. And I don’t mind confessing that I am completely
baffled in my own branch. He talks, Lychnis, as if he had experienced
everything he knows, as if he actually saw, felt, even heard, physical
reality. He proceeds, as it were, from insight; and, really, there
doesn’t seem to be anything hidden. Odd, if reality should, after all,
be something more than a state of affairs in a field of electrical
stresses. It is profoundly disconcerting. It is as if the most refined
discoveries of science should prove to be familiar to an ape or to an
idiot. They are ape-like, these friends of yours, and a trifle idiotic.
I am not an anthropologist—not an expert—but I perceive something
orangoid in your friends, in the disposition, for example, of the lower
limbs horizontally, in the posture of the hands.”

Sir Richard, forgetting his constraint, seemed to ask for sympathy; but
she was angry with him for his frame of mind towards her, and made only
some brief reply.

The mood which they all fell into, staring out over the Lake at
the warm shadows of evening, was broken by the dip of paddles and
the simultaneous arrival, with the party from the Yellow Emperor’s
Pavilion, of Yuan, Hsiao and Wang, with several slight and exquisite
girls. They had a remarkable faculty, those three, of waking from
reverie on the tick of an appointment. Lychnis sat and watched as each
one, in gorgeous robe of mediæval China, stepped from the dusk of the
water, like some mystery of the summer night breaking into flower.
Darkness fell swiftly, and an ochre moon rose over the sombre side of
the valley. She sat on in silence, white and wraith-like among those
shapes of splendour, and they gathered around her, waiting on her will,
and there was a consciousness that for all of them for that moment the
universe turned about her. Ambrose records that it occurred to Yuan and
himself at the same time to announce to her that all was ready, and
they stood, the two of them (Yuan in a magnificent robe of deep green,
himself in dark amber), looking at one another across her moon-golden
head. Ambrose immediately gave place, and stood, so Lychnis afterwards
told him, smiling complaisantly at the glimmer of stars that was
breaking over the trees.

Soon they were all out on the Lake in a ceremonial barge, towing a
cluster of painted boats, and the island became a dark complex in
the moonlight, illuminated by the dying reflection of a farewell
rocket that shot up from the point. In answer Yuan lit a score of
lanterns—orange, violet, and brown—swaying moons that cast unearthly
reflections in the Lake. But there was silence among the visitors, a
certain uneasiness, because of the relation that had arisen as between
Lychnis and Yuan and as between those two and the rest.

But Lord Sombrewater would not permit any breach of etiquette, and
presently there was a murmur of talk under the ochre moon as the barge
swished slowly through dark red lilies towards the distant sources of
the Lake, where they were to picnic by the waterfalls. Two or three
of the Chinese girls perched like finches on their favourite, their
amusing Quentin, and soon enough there was plenty of laughter at
his incomprehensible jokes. Ambrose, sitting beside Frew-Gaff, took
opportunity to observe that there was no cause for any reasonable
anxiety.

“I suppose Sombrewater is right,” replied Sir Richard. “It is not that
I suspect Lychnis for a moment of folly, as you know; but in this world
we must be ready to hear of strange things. I know it; but really, if
we were told, one day, of a marriage with this Oriental (who exerts
an extraordinary fascination, I admit), I should have the creeps. I
somehow cannot tolerate the thought of a union between an English
girl—a girl like Lychnis—and him.”

The thoughts that arise in the brain, Ambrose observed to himself, are
governed, like economic men, by a master of whom they are not aware.

“I have been compelled to give Ruby the same freedom of movement,”
added Sir Richard. “She is quite capable, I am sure, of looking after
herself. A very sensible girl. We shall have no surprises from her.”

“And as to Sprot?” queried Ambrose.

“He refuses to go.”

“Lychnis has spoken to Yuan.”

“I wonder what Yuan will do.”

Ambrose looked at Sprot, who was showing a certain defiant and stupid
courage in face of the danger of staying, which he preferred to the
danger of going away. Appositely they passed three white pelicans on an
islet. They had monstrous beaks, those pelicans, the creation of Yuan.
And Ambrose wondered, with Sir Richard, what Yuan would do.

When they came to the waterfalls among the high rocks at the Lake’s
source the moon was shining into the night-sombre valley, and they
disembarked and climbed and spread supper in face of the golden and
shadowy scene, and the murmur of their talk was subdued to the steady
diapason of the main torrent that poured from the crags, not dissonant
with the peace and ordered serenity of the landscape. Nothing moved.
Far off the island slept, small and brooding. A spirit of peace fell on
them all.

“You are philosophic in great comfort here,” observed Lord Sombrewater.

“We are civilized,” Yuan mildly replied. “It is not philosophy to
evolve noble and consolatory systems, or systems of despair, among
misery and ruin. Those who require to perform their meditations among
desolations or desert wastes are merely unable to cope with the claims
of a domestic environment. Contemplation is an activity that can
only be pursued by people who have mastered Nature. It is only then
that pure reality can be seen. In all other circumstances thought is
conditioned by the actualities of being, and is directed towards the
problem of evil or some antithetic good. Here we have so wrought that
we are free to take part in the experience of a reality that is, as it
were, behind. Our environment does not hinder us; our bodies claim no
attention; we forget ourselves; we cease to be, and what is everlasting
rushes in to fill the place of what was.”

“You seek annihilation,” murmured Blackwood.

“Seek your big toe!” replied Wang, going to the foot of the matter with
characteristic efficiency. Indeed, as he lifted his right eyelid, he
seemed to emit a trickle of some elemental force that could have dried
up the cataract. “In seeking death, you seek what does not exist.”

“Perhaps I have been wrong,” sadly admitted Blackwood. “I must seek, I
see now, for some deeper life.”

“Seek your eyebrows!” retorted Wang. “In seeking life, you seek also
what does not exist.”

“Then what on earth is a man who is all wrong with the world to do?”

Wang opened him with the blade of insight. “You do not get rid of
desire by sitting on it. That is what your thoughts of annihilation
are—desire gone to mildew. Only they think in terms of annihilation who
are extremely conscious of self. Abandon your methods. Desire neither
life nor death, and eat red meat.”

“I fear I have sadly misinterpreted the wisdom of the Sages,”
Blackwood faltered, and actually the moon glowed in a tear on his cheek.

“This is the beginning, and only the beginning, of wisdom,”
replied Wang. “Retrace your steps, give rein to the passions of a
man, and in ten years’ time you may take some gentle exercise in
self-forgetfulness.” With this somewhat paradoxical statement he seemed
to close himself to all outside influence, and the spray of the moonlit
cascade gradually wetted his old bald head.

“It seems likely,” remarked Sir Richard, “that Hsiao will presently be
altogether forgetful of his body, since the goblet in his hand contains
about a pint and a half of your really very powerful and delicious
wine, and that is the third I have seen him consume.”

“In the days when Hsiao thought in terms of good and evil, of restraint
and excess, he used to be very sick,” Yuan replied. “Rid the mind of
purely relative distinctions between drunk and sober, and you will not
be troubled with the gout.”

“Thank you for that recipe,” said Quentin.

“Wang Li does not take wine, I notice,” said Lord Sombrewater.

“That is because he requires no aids to contemplation.”

“Then why does Hsiao take it?” asked Ruby.

“He is an artist, which is a weakness of the will, and he needs some
attachment to the illusions of sense.”

Lord Sombrewater had been deeply pondering. “It seems to me,” he said,
“that there is something to be argued for our western habit of life.
You here—I do not speak of the mass of your countrymen, who present, if
I may say so, the appearance of an immense swarm of toiling insects—you
in this valley have abandoned the world to its fate. You have
abandoned, so it seems to me, much that makes men specifically men, and
you have become the abodes of great impersonal forces. Sometimes when I
talk with you I feel I am talking with the nightwind, or the moonlight,
or the spraying waterfall. God-intoxicated, you have given up your
organisms to be the dwellingplace of the great unknown principle of the
universe, and any pleasure, any joy, that is in you, is its.”

“Precisely,” said Yuan. “Our bodies, to a more or less extent,
according to the measure of our renunciation, become temples of
godhead. Using your western phraseology, we have come strangely near to
Christian doctrine.”

“That is so; but my point is that in the West most of us hold that it
is the business of man to forget God, to immerse himself, while he is a
man, in his no doubt blind and temporary manhood, so that he may work
out whatever the purpose of creation was in creating him. It is the
duty of man to erect his ego into a god. He must be immensely conscious
of himself and the world, immensely unconscious of the universe. He
must be tremendously aware of man and his destiny. In Europe, in
America, we have formed the idea of Destiny and Progress.”

“And do you progress?” Wang Li suddenly spoke like a voice coming out
of the wind.

Lord Sombrewater began to search in his mind for the answer to that
question. But, except Frew-Gaff, the others did not await his reply,
and wandered off as their fancy directed. Hsiao disappeared. Quentin
attached a couple of admiring young girls and drove off Sprot, who
tried to accompany him, with lively pictures of his approaching fate.
Blackwood retired thoughtfully to a dark corner alone; Terence was
listlessly meditating on Yuan’s aura; Fulke and Ruby gloomily watched
to see what Lychnis would do. But Lychnis only sat with two Chinese
girls on the cliff-edge at the side of the torrent, and they were all
holding out crystal goblets in their orchid-hands to catch the spray
drops. They talked in their own languages and seemed well contented
with each other. Fifty feet below them the swaying moons of the barge
smote strange colours on the foam of the rapids, and the cluster of
small tethered boats streamed and leapt astern. Above them dreamed the
motionless Wang Li, with the moon on his scanty white beard.

An hour passed, and Sombrewater and Frew-Gaff were still in
conversation with Yuan. Ambrose surveyed the party, and there came
to his mind, as he watched Yuan, the description Lychnis had made to
him of eyes that were oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. He
sought, too, for an adequate description of the power that lurked in
the disposed beauty of that petal-mouth of dark enamel. He traced the
effect of power to the absence of muscular compression, of visible
will. It was unconscious and placid, like the dark, fathomless Lake,
where doubtless men had been drowned. Then suitably to his thoughts
came Sprot, with terror-stricken face, scrambling up the rocks, crying
out: “Hsiao! Hsiao the drunken painter! Hsiao is drowned!” Wang Li
dreamed on.

The visitors gathered together and discussed what Sprot called
the fatality in tones of horror or dismay. Sombrewater sadly but
efficiently put questions to the witness. “I saw the body bobbing about
in the wash under the bank,” Sprot averred. “A frightful-looking thing.”

“You are quite sure it was ... our friend Hsiao?”

“Absolutely. That fearful, black, waving top-knot. It was awful—awful!”

Presently they turned towards Yuan, who was studying a glistening fern.

“He does not seem to realize ...” said Lord Sombrewater. “He cannot
have understood ... I had perhaps better speak to him.” He approached
Yuan. “Yuan, my dear friend, I am afraid we have terrible news. Hsiao
has been drowned.” Yuan did not look up. “Hsiao is dead.”

“Quick and dead are relative terms,” responded Yuan. “Hsiao is Hsiao.”

“The blow has stunned him,” whispered Sprot, and suddenly found the
basilisk eye of Yuan upon him.

“You would desire, I gather, that the party should break up?” Yuan
inquired.

“But, my God——” began Sprot.

Sombrewater silenced him. “We would naturally not wish to go on
merrymaking,” he said to Yuan.

Yuan seemed to fall in with their wishes. The party descended the rocks
in silence, and boarded the vessel with eyes turned from the bank. Wang
Li remained. He was in contemplation, and need not be disturbed, Yuan
said. They floated off on the current, Quentin and Terence at the oars.

“Will you not extinguish the lanterns?” asked Lord Sombrewater.

“As you wish,” Yuan politely replied.

Lychnis watched. The death of Hsiao did not greatly affect her, she
admitted. It was a pity, certainly. In any case death did not seem to
be reality to her, and her heart approved Yuan’s demeanour. Suddenly a
scream rang out, and Ruby pointed hysterically to the hideous floating
corpse. With a shudder Lord Sombrewater turned to Yuan. “We must
recover him.”

“Why?” Yuan asked. He did not seem to be able to understand this
preoccupation with a trivial event.

The following was compiled by Ambrose after listening to both the
girls. At two o’clock in the morning a lamp still burned in their
bedroom. Ruby, with a garment in her hand, was being addressed by
Lychnis, who still wore her white dress and had not even unbuttoned her
shoes.

“Can’t you see, little idiot, that death’s not important? It isn’t
real. Neither is life real. Life and death are not real. Something else
is, and that something else is in Yuan and Wang Li, and it goes on and
is everywhere, and death doesn’t make any difference. Yuan and Wang are
dead, too. I mean they are not alive in the way we understand life.”

But Ruby was not in an amiable mood. “At any rate,” she said savagely,
“there’s no doubt that we shall go away now from this horrible place.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I heard daddy say to your father that he couldn’t feel comfortable
here again. ‘With those cold-blooded freaks,’ he said.”

“Oh! And did my father agree?”

“I think so. He nodded.”

“Well——” Lychnis was aware of an unwonted nervous disturbance, a desire
to cry, at the secession and hostility of her obedient friend. She
concealed it. “It’s time we were in bed.” She stood up, unfastened her
dress, and let it slide to the floor, bending meanwhile on Ruby her
frowning brows. “We shall stay,” she added definitely.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lychnis closed her eyes, not caring to learn whether the slender
young lady had also learnt at the same knee. Quentin, in his hateful
irresponsibility, she savagely reflected, knew no restraints. But how
would it be to spend the rest of her life among these twittering golden
mice? The sad one, the intelligent one, perhaps she would not lightly
permit herself what seemed to Lychnis to require the profound assent
of reason and imagination. Yuan might take her away, of course. She
suffered a wave of anger that he did not come.

Yuan was away in the mountains, and as day after day passed without him
Lychnis sank deeper into doubt and misery. Then at last he came back,
sought her out, spent all his time with her, and they began to weave
their lives into one strand. They spent days and nights in the Flying
Dragon, often at great distances from the valley; or sometimes they
sought strange experiences among the neighbouring forests and crags;
and the summer wore on to its full splendour. Afterwards she gave
Ambrose some account of these various experiences, and he chose three
or four to illustrate the progress of her relations with Yuan.

She began to be influenced increasingly, it appears, by the silent and
deliberate guidance of his mind. He had means of conveying his thoughts
to her without speech, and this means he used more and more effectively
as their intimacy deepened. One afternoon of serene and golden beauty
they were strolling, steeped in this conversation, through a birch-wood
among the hills. They came upon three Rishi, or mountain wizards,
contemplating the smoke of incense in a green circle under the trees.
Behind the Rishi was a porcelain image, shrined among leaves, a thing
of infinite stillness. The two friends silently joined the group; Yuan
leaned against a birch trunk, chin in hand. Lychnis lay prone. But from
time to time she looked round at Yuan, for he seemed to have withdrawn
his mind from her, to have plunged himself, without thought for her, in
the contemplation of the smoke of incense. And the three Rishi were of
the most repulsive ugliness—the first huge and sensual, with a belly
that burst through filthy rags, distended ears, and the face of a demon
of wrath; the second small and thin, with the face of a froward newt;
the third deformed in the spine, crab-armed, lascivious and cruel.
They took no notice whatever of the newcomers, and sat for so long in
a tremendous immobility, like that of the brooding porcelain figure,
that the flap of a leaf overhead reverberated through the forest and
seemed to echo down long passages in the mind. Their foul and repulsive
appearance began to be more incongruous with so profound a stillness;
their ugliness was so clearly not the sign of any present passion that
they seemed to grow unreal. They might be about to vanish. She suddenly
perceived in their faces the signs of immortal, worldforgetting youth.
Then came a solitary message from Yuan, that these were men who had
left behind them the passions of the world and given themselves to the
experience of reality. “It is the presence of reality,” he said to her
mind, “that displays the unreality of the outward world.” The wrathful
one stirred faintly at the passage of thought from mind to mind; his
wrinkled eyelids perceptibly twitched.

Yuan returned to the contemplation, and Lychnis found herself being
drawn in—wandering, rather, in a world of fancies on the edge of what
was too cold and uncongenial for her to enter. At first the sensations
in her body intensified. There was an itch for movement in legs and
fingers. She was acutely aware of the thrust of her chin in her hand,
the strain of the muscles at waist and abdomen, a fly buzzing in her
hair, a pebble under her knee. But a gentle wind played on her calves
and head. Discomforts faded. She became aware of the beautiful lines
and relations of her body. She relaxed, and the tree-roots on which
she was lying seemed to embrace her, to gain contact with her; the
life of the tree gained contact with her life. She turned on her back
in the embrace of the birch-tree, and began pondering on the delicate
tracery of leaves, swaying and glowing in the peaceful sky. She was in
a world of trees—birch, poplar, chestnut and ash; tall silver trunks,
brown twisted trunks, smooth boles, tender shoots, branches carrying
a weight of ivy; green tranquil leaves, broad, flat leaves hanging on
long stems, white fluttering leaves like clouds of butterflies; in a
world of pale green and misty substance, and deep green with dark,
lucid caves, splashes of golden yellow, blurs of red-brown. There was
an imperceptible, infinite rustling, an unseen flitting of birds,
sometimes a note; a tranquil diffused light, and beyond the tree-tops
an immense pure well and medium of light, a warm sun-drenched region
of inter-stellar space, longed for by the senses. The roots under her
body stretched up to a silver trunk that lifted its weight of foliage
into the world of foliage and light, lifting her spirit with it. She
was among myriads of leaves, exulting, whispering choirs. It seemed to
her that the spirits of those who have loved the light of the sky dwelt
in them, tasting the sun and the warm winds, saturated with light,
with air, with the unseen medium of life and being. A profound calm, a
strength of reposed, victorious soul, pervaded the leaves, a dignity of
that which fears neither life nor death, not subject to them. Sometimes
a bevy of young leaves fluttered with a gust of angelic laughter, or
there was a vast stir of passionless conversation, a communion of
those who are beyond passion, reposing in the myriad forest leaves.
She felt, certainly, a presence. It was what she had perceived in the
hideous faces of the Rishi. A presence that was not a presence; a
presence seen in the structure of beauty, but yet it was not beauty;
she found it also in music, in a formula, in the valley, in the eyes
of Yuan, but it was not any of these; not happiness or unhappiness,
nor life or death, but pre-existent and yet non-existent—such phrases
from Yuan’s conversation came to her mind. She turned her gaze to the
serene and smiling face of the porcelain figure among the leaves. It
was a thing of great stillness. It was inactive, but it seemed charged
with activity. “It lives,” was her first thought; and pat came the
silent answer from Yuan: “It more than lives. There is more than life.”
A vista was opened to her. The presence in the life of the trees, in
the not-life of the figure, in the unreal faces of the Rishi, was the
same presence—the intangible, the unnameable. She perceived a reality
outside thought, unhuman and without the warmth and pleasure of
thought, a reality that she could not grasp with mind or senses; but
the experience of it brought joy.

And dimly, only dimly, she felt Yuan beside her in the sea of forest
thoughts, leaf thoughts, as if he guided her where she floated. In
the apprehension of him, in that realm of experience, there was no
distaste. She felt closer to him when her senses were submerged. She
was where there are no distinctions of this and that.

Her thoughts were broken into by spoken words. The Rishi were coming
to the end of their contemplation, and they returned to the world in a
state of unhuman gaiety. There still sounded in them the mirth of the
Paradise where they had been.

Their gaiety abruptly came to an end. “There are two imperfect beings
in contemplation with us,” said the demon of wrath.

“One,” added the newt, “is very imperfect, being full of half-thoughts,
and even whole thoughts, and long pauses of irrelevant dreaming. Those
who have thoughts in their minds should not gather round the smoke of
incense.”

“The other,” contributed the third, “is nearly thoughtless, nearly
unconscious; but he impedes the flow of reality into himself and among
us by some attachment to the passions and desires of men.”

“A brother!” piped the newt, with a gurgle of newt-like laughter, “an
immortal, has drowned the never-ending merriment of the immortals in a
draught of red and serious desire!”

Yuan did not change countenance, but he drew her away, and they were
followed as they went down the rocky path among the birches by sounds
of immense hilarity. This is the life he is destined for by family
tradition, reflected Lychnis, and he is to become like these, though
not so ugly.

His conversation on the way down was somewhat of that which is more
important than desire and life, beside which human pleasure is
insignificant. “Those,” he said, explaining the point of view of his
three acquaintances, “who have once found the satisfaction of non-being
desire it, and they shun the things that belong to existence, as, for
example, friendship and love.”

That might not be inconvenient, in some circumstances, was the thought
that presented itself to her attention. It came forcibly at first, then
faded in a myriad quivering forest thoughts, at the heart of which, in
a radiation of light and power, through a wisp of the smoke of incense,
the image of the porcelain saint eternally smiled. An unearthly smile,
it was, without scorn and without pity—a smile that made all human
experience seem irrelevant, and all human language conceited.

At the height of summer the rains came; the fiery flowers and the
fantastic hills were extinguished in a blur of rain, in a steam and
smell of rain throughout the valley, in clouds of rain drifting among
the crags, arrows of rain slanting across the Lake.

For a day or two Yuan and Lychnis stayed at home, amusing themselves
in the laboratories, talking in the library, studying paintings on
silk, handling bronzes and porcelain, looking out at the rain. They
had plenty to say and do, but the deluge had a voice for Lychnis, and
she desired to feel the drench on her body, to be enveloped in the
embrace of warm rain. The third day, therefore, they took a punt and
a cormorant, and went fishing, with only the protection of a flat
umbrella, she in her glass-green silk, he in his hunting costume of
russet-brown with a note of crimson. Forthwith they were gasping under
the minute insistent drive of the myriad rain arrows. They made their
way down the squelching path, among dripping laurels, to the shore.

She laughed. “We are in the power of the rain. It’s delicious.” And he
smiled back, knowing how softly and surely the rain prevails.

“See,” he called, “the subject for a picture—Rain on a Sheet of Water
and Ducks swimming under a Willow.”

They found their punt, and she remembers the touch of his wet hand as
he helped her on board. They pushed off, and the rain fell steadily and
softly all about them. The sky was full of grey, swirling veils; pale,
driving gusts swept the leaves and the white lilies. The shore receded,
there was a blur of willows in a slant of rain, a glimpse of rock like
a grey core of rain, and then they were together in a warm, misty
oblivion.

Lychnis put up her face to the soft downpour, taking warm caresses
on her eyes, in her mouth. The rain drenched her, soaked into her
hair, smoothed the silk robe to her body so that she seemed stripped,
blinded her, beat her, knew every part of her, and prevailed. She felt
shameless and searching caresses down back and limbs, between her
breasts and over her torso, on knees and feet. The rain was possessing
her, but the face of the rain that watched her was Yuan’s. She held up
her mouth to the down-drenching lover, saying, “I adore you.”

The voice of Yuan replied, “Water-lily.” He was regarding her,
she realized, with a keen gaze, more than ordinarily prolonged and
remorseless. He held her with his gaze, as if he admitted, now, a
special relation between them, and wished her to admit it, too.
Close to her, shut in by the changing wall of rain, he seemed big
and immediate, like a god, like the rain-god. His features, his
yellow skin, his piercing eyes, the slash of crimson on his brown
tunic—sole note of colour in a drifting, grey universe—had a terrifying
distinctness. He was very close and real and living, though his
life—the life behind his unreadable eyes—was not the life of men.
Perhaps because it was not Yuan who looked at her, but the swirling
rain, not Yuan, but the voice of the universe who spoke, distaste for
his flesh vanished. Yuan was dissolved and received into the body of
the rain, and she desired him. Past and future vanished; all else was
shut out; there was no earth or heaven—only herself in a space of warm,
saturating water, floating on water; herself, a cormorant with a fish,
and the god of the universe. In his eyes, deep and unreadable and
fascinating like the black lake-water, she was about to drown.

He came towards her. She felt her hands taken. The face, impending,
intent, was close to hers. The mouth, a calm flower in the rain, was
stretched out to her.

She offered herself to the terror of his mouth and the fierce and
shining infinity that looked out of his eyes. There was no person in
them, only a stupendous power. Yuan had vanished; what held her was
not Yuan. Her own body, her own person, seemed also to dissolve and
stream away in the rain. There was a sudden blinding drive, a hurricane
embrace of rain, and in the midst of it his small mouth was a spot of
fire.

Next day they climbed up among the crags in gusty weather, and as
evening drew on they were overtaken by a shower. There was a mountain
temple by a torrent in the shadow of a rock. They crossed the torrent
by a bridge and took shelter.

While Yuan contemplated a bronze image of Kwannon, Lychnis looked
out at the crags, the pines, the valley below where the torrent fell
booming. Far away was the Lake and the island in a mist of rain. Or
sometimes she watched Yuan. She had abandoned everything to him, and
waited for what he might be about to command. She was living in the
intoxication of what seemed an unending now, and made no conjectures as
to what might happen when now ended.

All day their talk had been of the regions where he had taken her with
the power of his mind (and where she had followed easily), of tree
life, of insect life (a weird region), of chill regions beyond, out of
which life takes origin. This seemed to her cold talk for lovers, and
she fancied she was ready that it should become warmer.

She called to him: “Yuan.”

His voice answered from within: “Lychnis.”

“We are like the gods up here. Down there I see the world, where Wang
Li is.” Her mind did not admit the thought of others on the far side of
the Lake.

“Do the gods live for ever, and are they eternally happy?” she asked.
Her thoughts were all of an immense duration of happiness in some
illimitable space of light, with dim shapes of mountains and pavilions.
But a shadow fell across her mind, an annihilating thought of a
cessation, of a space of nothing, of her lover wilfully dissolving in
emptiness, deliberately ceasing to be.

At her question, a swift, stony chill seemed to pass across his face.
“Your question has no relation to reality,” he coldly replied.

“I know you think it,” she answered. “I see quite well that it is
absurd. You have made me understand that life is relative and all that.
But it is a queer thought for a woman in love. My brains have all gone,
you see, because of it, and I—the I that is the living Lychnis, and
this body—clamour to be recognized.”

She had not spoken to him or to herself so boldly before, but the
thought of what he was always calling the eternal, non-existing
Lychnis, with no body for caresses, the Lychnis pre-existent in a
state precedent to matter and intelligence and life, was not congenial
to her. But was she ready for an alternative? At once her words
presented their own meaning clearly to her mind, and she experienced
a terror that she chose to find delicious. There he was, tall and
brooding, near her in the gloom of the evening. She was ready to
think of herself as having been seized, as captive to the masked,
expressionless god.

A gust of wind boomed in the roof of the hut.

“It is chilly here,” she said. “Are we going away to-night to the
forests in the south, where it is so warm?”

He stood close to her, and her orchid-petal hands lay in his. She
divined a formidable debate in his mind, and wished that she could have
read the eyes that gazed past her through the window. If he did not
take her to the forests.... If they stayed here.... This might become
her bridal chamber. She let the thought take her fully, and in the face
of reality looked through the window for an escape. There was only rain
and frowning crags and the valley, and perhaps the shadow of a picture
of someone far off who could have given her advice. The bridal chamber!
She was happy as she was, after all, in a now that might as well be
unending, and perhaps, if she was to be possessed by Yuan, it would
have to be in the glow of that moment of assent in the rain-world, now
somewhat past.

He made no reply to her thoughts. With him it was crisis. He chose the
flowering moment of desire to show his contempt for it. Most probably
the moments of silence were an eternity of the anguish of renunciation.

“Is anything the matter?” She caught some faint shadow of dismay on the
strong mask of his visage. “Are you displeased?”

There was no answer. There had been a change in Yuan, like the change
that comes over a man at the moment of death. Her breath troubled her,
and she beat in terror at the gates of his mind. “Oh, Yuan! Yuan!
Answer for pity’s sake!” But he had closed the gates of his mind
against her for ever. She stormed, now, to come in, to be his, to
accept the whole sequel of her actions, to accept the experience to
which she had given herself in its entirety. But the experience had
committed treason against her; she was forsaken of God.

“Oh what has happened? What is the matter?” she pleaded. “Why have
you gone cold to me?” But she pleaded with a porcelain idol in a dark
mountain temple. Her lands still lay in his like lilies in the hands
of an image. She tore them away, and took hold of the window-sill and
bowed her head into them and sobbed, until the fear of the universe
that had turned mercilessly against her silenced even her sobbing with
its formidable cold. Then there was a movement on the still face of
the image; the god put out a ray of protection against the terror that
threatened to overwhelm her, but he left her without refuge from her
grief and dismay. She was to face that, he seemed cruelly to determine,
unaided.

After a time he touched her on the shoulder and beckoned her to follow
him. She went after him into the twilight garden behind the temple, and
there he plucked a peach from a little tree and bade her eat it. “This
fruit,” he said, “is only for the favoured of God when they have become
fitted to endure deep experiences.”

Saying this he walked away, and she followed him across the torrent,
homeward through rain that beat her now and loved her no more. He held
his face from her. Once, indeed, he turned to her suddenly, and she
seemed, almost against credence, to see an expression of suffering.
But before it had gained a hold even on her memory it was gone, and he
strode on again.

The oppressive heat of summer was over, and during the still nights
when the lotus fades Lychnis heard of the wild geese flying southward.
She saw nothing of Yuan for nine days. But entering the summer
pavilion among the tree-tops one brilliant night of autumn she found
him seated cross-legged on the floor, in a haze of moonlight, ragged,
bare-chested, in a rapt meditation. He made no sign of having perceived
her. She sat herself down in his neighbourhood and waited, recognizing
in the moonlight—ghostly remembrance of summer sunshine she was used to
there—details of the bleached, airswept room. Her eyes were drawn to
the space of vast, shimmering sky in the door. A branch of pine thrust
across that space, she remembers, and she watched the delicate shadow
of the pine-branch swaying slightly on the bare floor, travelling
remorselessly like time towards the idol seated by the doorway. He was
so still that soon she believed herself to be dreaming.

When at last a voice issued from his profound immobility she felt the
assault of terror, as if a phantom had spoken. “There is an imperfect
being in contemplation with me,” the figure said.

“It is I, Lychnis,” she answered meekly.

He seemed scarcely aware of her. He was indeed dead in the body. “An
echo reaches me. A voice that spoke once in the world of unreality.”
His tones were the high, uncertain tones of a spirit. He turned his
face, and it was illuminated by an unearthly brilliance. It was like
talking with a god enthroned in a ghostly radiance of the night sky,
and the floor between them seemed a gulf of interstellar space.

“Here on this lonely earth,” she answered, “speaks a mouth you have
kissed.”

“What do you desire of me?”

“I desire to talk about ourselves and about love.” She was suddenly
sharp and insistent. One sees her seated on a cushion, her head bent
attentively towards him, or hanging somewhat like a child’s, and when
her head was hanging like that, one learns, it was because she had
become aware of a new, surprising element—an element of disrespect.

“Ourselves? Love? Self and love are renounced and forgotten, or if
remembered they are the remembered pain of some past life.” He spoke
like a dreamer in paradise, unwilling to wake.

“That is taking things very seriously,” she said, speaking thoughts
that astonished her as they came into her mind. “Perhaps, after all,
love is not a thing to be taken so seriously.” A quiver of pain
troubled her as she said it, remembering what delights she had thought
to obtain from life and love.

Did he stir in his cave of radiance? “The moment of love is past. It
was perfect, and needs no addition. In any sense that is not tedious it
lives forever, and may be continually enjoyed by those who live in the
blissful regions of non-being. The personal in love is nothing.”

“All the same,” she put in, “it is delicious.”

“In love,” he repeated, “there is one moment that is eternal. As in
art there is a moment of perfect balance, which cannot be added to or
diminished without ruin, so in love.”

“Then,” she said, mocking, “I am for promiscuity. The more moments the
better.”

“But the delights of the lover and the artist,” he replied, “if they
could be prolonged for ever, would not be worth even a hint of the
experience of non-being.”

Alongside this verbal exchange, alongside the mockery that had come so
unexpectedly to life in her mind, she was hurt with images of days they
had spent together. She resumed: “I will not talk mockery. Let us be
plain about the issue. We loved. We experienced the beginnings of a
perfect life together. You have broken it. You have made a renunciation
in accordance with the tradition of your family. You have sacrificed
me to attain your queer paradise. I want you to satisfy me that it was
right to do so.”

He said nothing for a long time. She thought that he might reply with
questions: whether they had indeed loved; whether their life together
would have remained perfect; whether, indeed, there had not been
already a hesitation on her part. Then he spoke:

“The supreme experience of the senses is the renunciation of love.”

This did not seem to her an answer. She still waited, and soon he
spoke again, looking steadily out through the doorway into the space
of moonlight. His face was frozen and pure. “Do you still trouble my
peace?”

“I grieve for our beautiful ruined love. I cannot, cannot forget it.”

His tones fell now with strange modulations, and there came to her
cadences of the flute he played to her in the forest. “The shadow of
the pine-branch travels across the floor, reaches my foot, passes over
my body, but does not enter me. It is thus with the memory of love.
It is thus also with the memory of the world. Around me, when I was
a boy, I saw a world of rock and grass and blue sky. Then, when I had
meditated on these, and perceived the secret life of water-meadow,
torrent and flower, the seen world dissolved. Rock and grass became
vaporous like the sky. I saw trees like apparitions, landscapes of
shifting smoke, mountains of mist beyond mountains of mist melting
endlessly away into an infinite horizon of æther. The world became a
contemplation in the smoke of incense. It has gone, and now I meditate
on what has taken its place. I am possessed of what is greater than
joy. I have come into the calm of nothingness, into the lightless and
ineffable regions of non-being, where there is neither splendour nor
darkness. It is an ecstasy. There is no ripple from the created world;
no tremor of the pain or passion of men; nothing that appertains to the
mind of men; nothing in terms of thought and feeling, of aspiration or
regret. The pure lily is no more than the filthy fungus; the loftiness
of mountains and depth of waters are as the flatness and mud of the
river-bed. I believe in the unnameable, without shape or substance,
infinite and inexpressible; one in man, plant and inanimate matter;
spirit of spirit, origin of origin, form of form. I believe in the way
that cannot be followed, the truth that cannot be taught, the life
which is more than life. It does nothing, yet there is nothing which
it does not achieve; creates all things, yet in itself is not; all
worlds and systems of worlds are born in it, yet it cannot be seen or
heard; in its nothingness life and death and all modes of conceivable
being reside; it does not exist, yet it is home to the soul of man. It
is ineffable. I therefore renounce the world. I renounce joy and pain;
the vision of spring and the solemn reaping of autumn; the delight in
mountain and tree, in cloudscape, in the fierce tiger, in the flight of
wild geese. I renounce the pride of life and the pleasure of the body,
and I renounce for ever the memory and taste of love.”

The cadences that came like waves out of the moonlit silence ceased.
His visage was white and numb. One could not tell if the deep, oblong
eyes were seeing or if they were blind. Did he breathe? Did the bare
porcelain chest move? He might have been some hypnotic image, drowning
her resentment in sleep.

But the rim of the moon came suddenly into the doorway, making a
change, releasing her from a spell. It was intolerable that he should
despise the memory of their intimacy, and reject all she had given him
of her mind and senses. “Why, why did you kiss me that time?” she
asked, in a storm of protest.

“I do not remember,” said the calm voice.

Now he seemed immensely foreign and impenetrable, as if she had been
in love with a creature. Fiercely she remembered the Jupiter swan that
had made love to her that first morning, in a fit of inexplicable
desire. Had it been like that with Yuan? No communion of spirit at
all? Her ideas about him had been fictions of the mind. The angry
desire to be kissed once again by that fiction whose mouth was a spot
of fire at once consumed her. She longed in a storm of resentment to
wake his senses again, to see those flower-lips crumpled with the
fire of passion, to see them grey with the ashes of it. But what art
had she to tempt him with? Or, indeed, what art could have equalled
the natural beauty of her shape, the fragile and intoxicating bloom
and mystery of her person, the troubled loveliness of her mouth, of
her eyes? Troubled, certainly, they were, but in them was a gleam of
that unstriving and creative energy on which her lover meditated. In
those subtle and moving relations between shoulder and breast, in the
ineffable curves of her body, shone openly his uncreated principle from
which all order and beauty proceeds.

These, maybe, were his thoughts, and evidently he perceived hers. “That
which is accidental in your loveliness has no force with me. Only the
eternal has force. The eternal shines in you.”

Once again, amazingly, there streamed up in her a fountain of mockery,
but the icy reality of his renunciation froze her mockery at her lips.
“I believe,” she said, hesitatingly—“I believe that I am more of an
adept than Yuan, for I could laugh. I could laugh like old Wang and
the Rishi. I am less bound to the world and to passion than Yuan if I
can laugh. To renounce is to be bound by the tie of renunciation.” But
no sign of emotion or any response appeared on his face, and swiftly
once more she fell under the hypnotic spell of his stillness. He could
not be mocked into life. She had to meet him in the reality in which
he rested. “I am a woman,” she said. “I see no opposition between your
unnameable and my now. Time may surely be made delicious, for the
unnameable must be in time, too, and in the usage of love. It certainly
is for a woman.”

“The supreme experience of the senses,” he repeated, “is the
renunciation of love. The renunciation is imperfect if it is only made
by the one. You have apprehended the bliss that I now experience. I
brought it to your spirit, but your own nature made you capable of
receiving it. Your thoughts and desires are not altogether of earth.
The earth in you is earth, not of human flesh, but of the narcissus.
You have eaten the mystic peach. Why cannot you therefore go all the
way with me and renounce your share of what we had in the world?”

She felt a vague terror. She faltered. “Even the narcissus needs the
usage of love.”

“Why do you not learn to attain the full ecstasy of contemplation in
the heart of the unnameable?”

“I do not desire to sit here motionless, like a dreaming flower,
without texture or colour, and receive in my dream a seed from your
dream to beget a dream.”

“It is life that is a dream,” he corrected. “To dread the unnameable is
to be a lost child that dreads to find home.”

“Home! You have found home ... through me!” She received illumination.
“You brought me here as an excuse for renunciation, as an exercise; you
used me to make your renunciation as difficult, as exquisite, and as
notable as you could. And now, perhaps, some shadow of earthly passion
makes you urge me to accompany you. I will not. I have a home for my
spirit as well....” She broke off, for now terror snatched at her like
the cold hand of death. It was the dread that he would paralyse her
life and make her sit there for ever in a cold and spiritual trance.
There was some unknown and compelling reason why she should escape;
there was some urgent and unrecognized desire. The satisfaction of her
being, she now knew, was elsewhere. With a cry she fled from that bare,
moon-swept pavilion, and left the symbol of her experience staring into
the moonlight.

Ambrose finds it difficult to decide from the recital that Lychnis
gave him what was her dominant mood during the following days. There
was an element she did not dwell on, but it was important—an element
of incredulity, perhaps, at finding her grief supportable. We see her
flitting about the woods, driven, in company with the leaves; the
wind was her own bewilderment. Mostly she went with her eyes on the
ground. Sometimes, no doubt, she would stamp her foot in anger for the
pleasant days Yuan had ruined, and wring her hands out of helplessness.
But it seems there were also days of which she tells little—days when
she surprisingly lost her trouble in adoration of their splendid
heedlessness. That heedlessness was a character of the universe with
which she now discovered in herself a surprising affinity.

Of one critical day she told nothing at all until long after, and for
some time Ambrose left blank pages in the diary. But one day he was
able to fill them in.

All was turning brown in the woods. Not a green leaf of summer.
Nothing but early twilight falling over the mountain hut, and sad
autumn rain. Yet, oddly, she did not feel a commensurate gloom. The
clouds drove across the sky, now lowering and resentful, now swift
and angry, now melting in vapour of tears, now piling onward high and
contemptuous. But her spirit did not answer these changes; it remained
calm; it derived a satisfaction from the magnificence of the moving
cloudscape; it exulted, even, in the deep and steady passion of the
waterfall pouring from the wooded shoulder of a mountain, in the vast
tranquillity of the high crags that floated above seas of rain. She
stood in the shelter of an overhung rock—a tiny, green-robed figure in
the majesty of the mountains—and examined her state of mind. Where was
her grief? Washed away on the rain that swept in gusts over the distant
Lake. Where was the bundle of moods that made up her troublesome self?
Blown away on the winds that tore through the pines, shattered and
obliterated like the leaves of summer. Had she any regret for her
loneliness? She was incredulous to find that she desired no companion,
that she had need of no human being. Had she any fear of the solitude
of the mountains? She looked round at the wizard shapes of pine-tree
and rock to see if she could frighten herself, and there was nothing in
her mind but a strange, sweet, and growing exultation. All alone under
the huge overhung crag she laughed her tiny insect laugh—and checked
herself, for surely it was absurd that she felt no grief. But there it
was, a sensation as if waves out of heaven had flowed into the body
that her self, Lychnis, had vacated. Such a thing was preposterous, she
decided; and pursued her way homeward, resolvedly denying the almost
intolerable pleasure that invaded her. She walked with the heavy gait
of one who suffers.

Then, fronting her, in a thicket by a glade, she perceived the merry,
blanched face of Wang Li, peeping among brown leaves that fluttered
and danced on his aged bald head. A wild fawn nuzzled in his hand. He
called her, and she approached him with the demure gait of one who is
sorrow-stricken, but underneath this dissembling her heart beat like a
bird’s, for she seemed to be standing within the play of forces that
flowed from him. Out of the corner of her eye she stole a glance at
the smiling, scant-bearded visage. He was unguessably old, yet younger
than the flowers that had been in the glade that April. He was full of
a frightening, unhuman wisdom; on his face there played the wrinkles
of a vast laughter. And unmistakably she found in herself something
corresponding.

“So Yuan has abandoned you,” he said, “and you do not know where to
find some relief from your temporary sorrow.”

She caught his eye. There were lightnings in it before which her
dissembling vanished like silk on hot coals. She broke into peal
after peal of laughter, and Wang beat his old head in an ecstasy of
merriment. The fawn cropped the grass in complete indifference.

But swiftly she became grave again. “I do not understand myself,” she
told him.

“It is simple enough.”

“All the same, I don’t understand why, when I was so dearly in love
with Yuan....”

“In love with your left knee!”

“What do you mean then? Was I not in love?” She reflected, almost
prepared, now, to believe it. “It is true, there was always a
hesitation. But I can explain that.”

He doubled up with laughter.

“I really can. There was a difference of flesh between us. He was a
foreigner, you see.”

The echoes of his laughter drifted to the mountains.

She was a little mortified. “It is insulting of you not to believe
me. I only know that I shall never love any man again.” Now the deep
pleasures of the summer came back to her heart, giving it a twist.

The fountains of Wang’s mirth were too much for him. His bleached and
shrunken old body could hardly contain the elemental upwelling. The
universe itself laughed at her in his old eyes as it had rained in
Yuan’s. “Let us walk,” he gasped; “let us go home.” He wiped tears from
his cheeks. Then once more the beauty of it overwhelmed him. “She can
never love again!” He held his sides.

“Well,” she expostulated, “there is nobody. I could not love my father
or my old friend Ambrose. The rest bore me. I do not want love. I have
this queer new pleasure in me instead.”

They scrambled down the valleys, he subject to recurrent fits of
amusement. She could not withstand him, and at last allowed herself to
regard Yuan’s seriousness and her own bewilderment as a joke. “What has
come to me?” she asked the old Sage.

“Death,” he answered.

Was this true? She felt as one who recognizes that a tide is about to
seize and drown her.

“If not dead, you are dying,” he continued. “Did not Yuan give you the
mystic peach that shrivels the soul and leaves a house for another
inhabitant?”

“But you said I am to love,” she protested, displaying an agitation
that came uppermost in spite of herself, an agitation that did not
really seem to belong to her. “How can I love when I am dead and have
no desire?”

“Cannot the immortal take pleasure in love—in compelling lips, in hands
that awaken, in...?” In so-and-so and in so-and-so. The old man made
her blush with his account of the delights of the senses.

“But you,” she interpolated—“you are a Sage ... you are above
desire....”

“A Sage is not necessarily a drivelling idiot,” he replied. “I am very
old. It is more than a hundred years since I was interested in what may
interest a younger man, and the immortal in-dweller has other objects
with me. But there was a time.... The unnameable, when he takes the
place of the self, has no objection whatever to making use of the
furniture. But he is master of desire.”

“But why did I not stay with Yuan and meditate with him for ever?”

“Because you are a woman and have more sense. Oh, the seriousness of
these young men! He will get over it, as I did. But he has done his
duty.”

“But why did he give me the peach?” She had so many questions to ask.

“The immediate occasion was your firmness of heart in following the
strange beckonings of the imagination. In consequence you have lost
your soul and gained the no-soul. This is immortality. Regard yourself
as one of the lucky ones of the world, for infinity now lives in you.
Joy and sorrow will be lost in transcending experience. None can
withstand the silent and invisible force that possesses you, and nobody
can take it away. Accept what has happened to you, young woman. Regard
yourself as being dead to the world, and at the same time, when your
lover kisses that coral mouth, bite his lip with your little teeth.”

They had come to the shore of the Lake, and he took her back to the
island in his boat. She gave herself to the tide of immortality that
was flowing into her throat, choking the life in her. She had become
very serious now, but suddenly he looked up and said: “What fools
we are to speak what cannot be spoken, imagining that what we say
corresponds with reality!” His ironical laughter rang out over the Lake.

Once more Ambrose is sitting with Lychnis on the verandah. It is a warm
autumn afternoon, and they are taking pleasure in the sunset glory of
aster, dahlia and chrysanthemum that surrounds the Pavilion, and in the
golden cloud-rack of leaves that now drifts on the lawn.

She came back, he tells us, so self-possessed, this once moody and
relentless fairy. She had a certain calm dignity, unself-conscious and
convincing—because, as Wang told her, she had lost her self in what is
more authoritative than self; she had opened the way and permitted in
herself the play of forces that brook no questioning, at once terrible
and lovely.

She was perched on the rail of the verandah, clinging to a post, in a
fit of meditation, and sometimes a leaf drifted against her cheek or
shoulder.

“I realize now,” she said, “how completely I had forgotten you all. I
do really think you had passed—all of you—utterly out of my mind. It
is surprising. It would have been quite easy never to see you—any of
you—again.”

“So loosely,” remarked Ambrose, “are people bound to one another! It is
true—many men might be one’s father, or one’s husband. It is a habit
formed accidentally.”

“I find it odd that my lot should have fallen with just you and the
others.”

“You do not find it disturbing that human relationships should be so
fluid, sentiment so flimsy, and the universe so heedless?”

“I find it beautiful. I should hate the world, now, if it were not all
death and change. I have no use for anything that is not inexorable. I
like the universe to stare pitilessly—with eyes resembling Yuan’s. It
is only the cold and the passionless that I can admire. Ambrose, fancy
a universe all mushy with love, like an over-ripe pear!”

“Excellent!” Ambrose remembers being conscious of enthusiasm in his
voice, more surprisingly of a flush on the flower-texture of her face.

“Yuan helped me to enter the mind of tiger and eagle, to become the
tiger and the eagle, and I found in them what I now find in myself,
something I can’t describe—something immense. I have been a tree, too,
you know, and a lotus, and a beetle. What I found in all of them Yuan
has now become. He has given himself entirely to the contemplation of
it in its nakedness, untransformed into bird, or mountain, or man.
I did not want to follow his example, I suppose, because there are
things I may find amusing in the world. Wang says that, having found
the kingdom of the unnameable, the world has been given to me as well,
and this is in order. But I think I have still just a little farther to
go. The peach hasn’t quite done its work, and when I’m entirely dead
perhaps I shall be like Yuan.”

Lord Sombrewater came along the verandah and sat down beside Ambrose.
His eye was more pheasant-like than ever. He was glum. Lychnis had
given him the outline of her story, and informed him of her willingness
to go where he liked, but she had not given him certain information.
He could have got it with a question, but he did not care at any time
to get his information by direct questioning, and this was a question
somewhat difficult to put.

Ambrose replied to her thoughts.

“There are people,” he observed, “so securely in alliance with our
friend Yuan’s unnameable that they do not fear to step down into the
world and drink deeply of its pleasures.”

“You, too, have tasted—” she began, and relapsed—refused, swiftly, to
meet him in a common experience. “There are so many ways of approaching
what it is I desire to say,” she continued, “and no words for it. But
it really doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that nothing any longer
matters, except the continual experience. One is so at peace.”

“The peace of God,” Ambrose interjected.

“I suppose one must say ‘God.’ But there is a great danger of being
misunderstood.”

“This experience,” he observed, “is enjoyed in various forms by many
people, yet it is one experience. The truth is one truth, expressed
with modifications due to climatic or other circumstances. It is named
after the system of Jesus, or Mithra, or Buddha. There is the Holy
Ghost, or the intent contemplation; the paradise of Nirvana or the Holy
City, with tastefully-jewelled gates—a hundred different expressions of
the same thing. There is a form of the experience marketed by priests,
another by wine-merchants at twelve and sixpence the bottle, and this
has the advantage that it augments the national revenue. But whether
the experience in itself has anything at all to do with reality, we are
not in a position to decide.”

“I am glad you can laugh at it,” she said, with friendliness. “It
is the mark of those elected to salvation that they can laugh at
themselves. Those who have known truth laugh a lot—like Wang. I have
learnt that.”

“You have learnt a great deal, Lychnis.” Lord Sombrewater entered the
conversation. “Does there remain any region of experience which you
have not understood?”

Ambrose perceived from her enigmatic smile that she understood her
father’s question. She did not seem willing to give an unequivocal
answer. Lord Sombrewater had no hesitation in questioning her
intimately before him, and it would have been in accordance with her
own relation with him to reply plainly. But she did not answer plainly.
He noted that there had been some change, and wondered whether he
should not seek an opportunity to withdraw.

“There is no region of experience that I have not understood,” she
replied.

“Upon exploration, I presume?” queried Lord Sombrewater.

“It is a question whether a thing that has not been physically
experienced can be understood,” she murmured.

He turned his head away in swift impatience.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

“Jump? I tried once! Those devils always seemed to know what you were
thinking about, night and day, and when I jumped one of them gave me a
twitch that sent me in head first. Not till my dying day shall I forget
it. I couldn’t remember where I was for a week. My God! if I had my way
with them!” He went purple at the thought of the indignities to which
he had been subjected. “Go back you may,” he added, “but you go without
George Sprot.”

“There are some experiments that I greatly desire to make,” added
Frew-Gaff. “I believe I can reproduce some things we have seen lately,
if I can only grasp one or two principles that baffle me.” He kindled
his brows.

“That you never will,” thought Lychnis. She despised them for having
hopes and fears. It was all one to her, she told herself, if she were
slain there that night. She was looking out through the window of the
inn. Opposite, a toppling jade crag flamed with a faint fire of sunset
from beyond the Valley. The scene did not move her greatly, she found.
She was calm in face of the once heart-hurting beauty of sunsets. She
turned once more to examine her thoughts, all upside down as Ambrose
had put them. He sat there with his back to her, but the current of all
her moods was toward him.

As the last rays of light departed from the Chinese landscape, stranger
here to them than in the Valley, they heard sounds of considerable
excitement in the village. They all went out into the street, and
presently little crowds of chattering peasants began to pass the inn.
The innkeeper came out at Lord Sombrewater’s request. Such-a-one had
vanished.

“Ask what the trouble is, Lychnis,” commanded Lord Sombrewater.

“Refugees,” the innkeeper conveyed, standing impassively with his hands
hidden in his sleeves.

“What is happening, then?” she asked.

He directed their gaze across the Valley. A young moon had risen over
the zigzagging mountain, and there on the precipitous side of it, not
half a mile from the inn, were a hundred lights—the camp-fires of the
revolutionaries—and on other hills there were other lights.

Even as the Sages were looking at one another, and Ruby and Fulke,
in each other’s arms, were making appointments for eternity, a flash
came from the hillside. The revolutionaries had discharged their
field-piece. The shell burst very short. They tried again, with the
same effect, and this seemed to put them in a frenzy, for they began
a furious cannonade and opened fire with their rifles. But not a shot
came over the village, and they slew nothing but the breeze. The
villagers, perceiving that the strangers were miraculously protected,
sought to share in the working of the charm, and soon the party was
surrounded by a dense crowd of bead-eyed Orientals, chattering in the
dark. The flash of guns and a flare in the sky told that the attack was
proceeding over a wide front.

Lychnis watched the proceedings with unconcern.

Very soon, perceiving the uselessness of his artillery, the enemy
commander changed tactics, and seemed, from the noise that his troops
made, about to deliver a hand assault.

“There are perhaps five thousand of them,” muttered Sombrewater.
“Richard—if we could get the girls away? If you could steal down to the
river and get off in the boats?”

“It could be tried,” said Sir Richard tentatively. “But it is for you
to go, Arnold....”

“Leg it with me,” suggested Quentin, prepared to die if his last hours
might be amorous.

“I will not leave this spot in any circumstances whatever,” Lychnis
answered, low and decisively.

Lord Sombrewater was about to speak, but the words perished in his
mouth, for at that moment the colossal apparition of a dragon, with
eyes like burning topaz, writhed in fearful silence through the Valley
and vanished among the hills. The clamour of the attack ceased, and the
people of the village prostrated themselves.

“We were rewarded by heaven,” said Quentin devoutly, “for the purity of
our lives!”

But the attack was forward again. The enemy came on, yelling like
pandemonium, and one after another the flame-beasts came galloping out
of the mountains, and where they passed through the attacking forces
their trail was blazed with paralysed men.

“This helps,” exclaimed Sombrewater, “but they’re still swarming up
every valley. Do you see them where the flame goes? They’re not being
held.” He sought for his daughter’s hand, and she gave it him. She wore
the smile of a holy one. It had come to her that there was nothing but
a quietness akin to the quietness of space in her heart. The world
might crack and she would be calm, for there was now nothing in her
subject to death.

It was true that the enemy were not being held, but the mind that
was defending the Sages had reserves in hand; indeed, he disposed of
the attack in a way that was cynically humorous. In the days when
Yuan had taken interest in appearances his interest had been keen and
productive. As he had told them, he was able to reproduce appearances
and conjure up phenomena. The secret of the toys he had devised for the
defence of the Valley had been communicated, in accordance with family
tradition, to the engineers, and they, doubtless, were handling the
matter at the present time. With great subtlety the fiery dragons were
managed so as to force the attack into certain defined areas. They did
not kill, except inadvertently, and, once he was used to them, they
served to provoke the enemy to defiance, so that he was gradually drawn
on. Yet for a long time it seemed to the Sages as if the defence must
fail. But now the dragons were followed by monsters in human form, with
blue, scowling faces and tongues of red fire, who floated over the
forest. Their robes seemed to blow and flap in the breeze, disclosing
the limbs of demons; shadows of hate lurked on their brows, and their
green eyeballs glowed balefully. Each carried a scimitar under his
arm, and one of them, by way of preparatory gesture, cynically shaved
a forest from the mountain. The revolutionaries were checked, but amid
scenes of compulsion and terror their commander forced his way to the
village—a big, hideous man—hewing and slaughtering with an immense
curved blade.

He was on them, with a dozen followers, before the Sages realized
what had happened, and Fulke and Ruby were already in their hands.
The commander himself, smiling like a death’s head, fixed his eyes on
Lychnis and swung his blade. She found herself looking darkness in
the face, and there was only one thought in her mind—Ambrose would
die too. His existence and hers would disappear in the non-existing.
Already from the cold threshold she looked back at the world, and saw
it as a bright place where those who had learnt to stare in the face
of darkness might command and enjoy desire. Then she saw Ambrose. His
eyes were very far away. He, too, was looking in the face of darkness.
Or did he not love her then? For her, now, he suddenly became the
darkness, the heedless, the unnameable. It was in him, in him, that her
existence was to disappear.

The bandit lifted his curved blade. It swung once, twice, hissing,
and she still brooded on her revelation. But Such-a-one appeared
at an upper window in the inn with a device in his hand, and at the
third death-bringing swing of the blade he dealt with the chemical
composition of the bandit in such a way that the characteristics which
distinguish the living from the dead suddenly ceased to be present.
Thus also with his followers.

The din and yelling were now terrific. Lychnis ran to help Ruby, who
had fainted, and tended her while the conflict raged. The angel of
annunciation had visited her and her eyes shone, and Ruby, coming to
herself, perceived that something had happened to her friend. “Oh,
Licky,” she exclaimed, “are we dead? For you look like a spirit in
heaven.”

“Yes,” answered Lychnis. “I have died, and I am looking back at the
world. I see that I never knew till I died what it was that I wanted.”

But Ruby, seeing the battle and hearing the din, was puzzled. “I do not
know what you mean,” she murmured. “I only feel that you have become
different from the living.”

“It is true, my dearest—really true.” Lychnis smiled at her friend.

A vast blaze of light thrust the reeling hills out into blackness,
and they saw a mass of the enemy pallid and paralysed in the ghastly
glare. Then Ruby shrieked, for a monstrous flame-demon swung a
scythe through a huge circle of the night, and the men who had been
standing huddled before him stood no more. The rest of the attacking
horde turned to save themselves while they could. Then, with a hiss
and a roar that seemed to blast the forests, fire sprang from every
hillside and streamed over the flying forces. The sky became full of
burning villages, and the ears were stifled with the streaming of
unearthly flames. Stricken phantom hosts scattered in panic terror
along the spines of the mountains; crags of burning sulphur toppled
down upon them in obliterating thunder; the mountains themselves seemed
to collapse upon flying armies of spectres; and of the actual and
substantial fugitives who sought among the rocks for some cover from
this spectacle there was none whose heart was not squeezed and ruptured
by the cold hand of fear.

Our friends watched in silence until the cynical and jocular fireworks
came to an end in fitful lightning and muttering thunder. The terror of
the Dragon was in their minds. But there were two in whom terror had no
place.

They did not at once enter the paradise that was now theirs. They did
not even speak of it to each other. They pondered the golden future
in secret, and only sometimes, by a glance more subtly effective than
kisses, acknowledged that their blood ran to the same rhythm. For those
who feed their hearts on the substance of eternity there is no haste.

At last, on a spring morning, the _Floating Leaf_ lay in Southampton
Water. They stood at the rail, the two of them, looking at the bed
of smokestacks, masts and cranes that flourished in the Hampshire
foreshore. It was necessary that something should be said, now that
this daily companionship was to end.

He regarded her steadfastly. The corners of her mouth were turned up,
and she smiled faintly at the water.

“You are making a fox-face,” he observed.

“I was thinking of the Valley.”

“Pleasantly?”

“Oh, very pleasantly! But how far away it seems, and how strange the
things we all talked about, even the words we used! They would sound
comic in this atmosphere. Was it real, or did we dream it? Or is this
unreal, England and these liners and railways?”

“All life is unreal, as you and I know,” he answered her. “We accept
it, because we must; but sometimes reality is felt. It sticks through,
and the world seems queer beside it. You and I have it for always in
our hearts.”

“That is true,” she said, “even if we dreamt, even if we did really for
a time live in a landscape on a vase or a silk. But how did it come to
you, this experience of unbreakable, calm joy that has come to me?”

“I came by it years back, in war and disaster.”

“Why do you and I have it, and not the others?”

“I cannot answer that. It is predestination. There are some that cannot
help but be saved.”

She touched his hand. “We are in love with one another, are we not,
Ambrose?”

He answered, “Yes.”

“It took me so long to find out. One could not recognize a happiness
that was so wonderful and so close. Why did you not tell me?”

“I did not want to plant love in you. I wanted it to come of necessity,
from the centre of your being.”

“Did it hurt, when you saw me in love with Yuan?”

He smiled.

“Oh!” she cried, “I love you because you are cold and unmoved and
unescapable, like Fate! I love you because you do not desire me and
my beauty is nothing to you. I die and am forgotten in the night of
your being. You are death and change itself, the beautiful, pitiless
universe in which we are all swallowed and become nothing.”

“You also,” he answered. “We have eaten the peaches of immortality,
you and I, and we are no longer you and I. We have tasted the fruit,
the substance of the universe, that is eaten in the endless fields of
Nirvana. We are dead, and we can descend into the world like gods, to
command and enjoy desire.”

“You do desire me?”

“Yes, my flower, my insect.”

She was in his arms, face to face with his unswerving regard. What she
found in his eyes must have contented her.

“You understand—everything?” He asked to hear her say “Yes.”

“Everything.”

“And this time there is nothing to get over?—no repugnance?”

Once more she drew up the corners of her mouth, and, “On the contrary,”
he heard.

He kissed her, and there was that in his embrace to catch away her
breath with surprise and joy.

When Lord Sombrewater came along the deck and saw them sitting together
he was struck by something new in their attitude. An immense and
unexpected possibility presented itself to his mind.

“What’s this?” he asked, with his swift, birdlike regard.

Lychnis told him, and he made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction.
“Well, really, this is most gratifying! As you must marry—I suppose you
must—some day——”

“To-day,” she interpolated.

He was somewhat taken aback. “We’ll see—we’ll see. Time enough. But
if it must happen, I’d rather a thousand times it was Ambrose than
anyone else in the world. Really, very gratifying—very gratifying—and
surprising. You old pike! I shall feel that her husband has not taken
her away from me—has not——” He coughed. “A half-share, perhaps—really,
not more than a half-share. Why, with Ambrose you’ll hardly be married
at all.” He beamed, and they exchanged a tingling glance. Then,
formally, they received his blessing. “God bless you both—a thousand
times. You old pike!” Lord Sombrewater blew his nose and, as a second
thought, went off to announce the news to the Sages, and, in due
course, to his wife.

They sat side by side, and looked at the smooth water and the spring
sky, and wondered at the instant and almost intolerable reality of the
happiness that was in them.

* * * * *

Ambrose did not forsake his notebooks upon his marriage, but he does
not write much about himself or intimately about Lychnis. One sees
them, though, with that infinite serenity in their souls, contemplating
the world with instructed affection and containedly giving themselves
to the surprises and exquisite pleasures of love.

* * * * *

Lord Sombrewater seems to have regarded the birth of a grandson with
mixed feelings. Apparently it was not somehow what he had expected.

+The End+

Transcriber’s Notes:

• Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
• Text enclosed by pluses is in small caps (+small caps+).
• Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
• Redundant title pages removed.

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