Landscape with figures
breathe in the streaming clouds and blow them out again in your faces.
I shall fill my chest with the atmosphere and leave you all gasping for
breath. You will entreat me for life, and I shall give it—on terms.”
“I don’t need air,” replied Lychnis. “I subsist on the æther.”
“You are the æther,” he answered, “or whatever medium there is on which
all things are founded. Without you....” At this point she deftly
skipped out of earshot—or, to be more exact, with Ambrose, nearly out
of earshot. “Without you,” he continued, to the wild, surrounding
forest—“without you we should not subsist at all. There would be
neither matter to desire cleavage with you, nor spirit to imagine the
immortality of love.”
“Your knowledge of the bawdy literature of the Middle Ages is more
profound than your physics,” interrupted Sir Richard.
“I create my physics, as per necessity, to conform with my imagined
world, like God,” he retorted.
Sir Richard smiled, in his courteous, grave way. “I confine my
observation to the world which has been created by the distinguished
colleague whom you mention. I find there traces of the existence of
consistency, order, law, and nothing beyond that, but those traces lead
me confidently to suppose that in due course we shall find the whole
mechanism to fall out pat.”
“I see the day coming,” said Quentin, “when some mechanico-scientific
bloke will pull the universe to pieces just to see if he can reassemble
it. I hate you people who are always poking in the works. Everyone
does it now. People buy cars. Do they drive them? No. They spread them
out on the lawn. Do people listen-in? Never. They muck about with the
valves. There is no art; there is only psycho-analysis. We pull up
all our flowers nowadays to examine the root-hairs and the system of
water-absorption. The wonders of the deep have vanished since we took
to dredging the Pacific. There’s no universe left; there’s only a
shedful of spare parts. I am the only child of Nature now living.”
“A child, yes,” said Sir Richard, “and ungoverned, save by whim.
Spontaneous as a jet of spring water, but every wind blows you towards
a new quarter. You are a man without self-direction. You cleave where
your desire leads you.”
“I was wrong,” said Quentin gaily, “when I said that I was the only
child of Nature living. Here are a dozen others.”
They had come down between overhanging rocks from a considerable height
of crag into a glen full of small pines and boulders, and before
them stood a great hump of mountain range and wind-tossed forest. On
their right hand was a little stony hill with small bushes on it and
an arbour, or summer-house. A stream—or, rather, a kind of flowing
moat—surrounded it. And in the arbour, or under the bushes, or by the
stream were men—men in mandarin robes—engaged, all of them (save two,
who were chatting mirthfully by the stream), in a meditation that
seemed characterized by an expression of hilarious vacuity. Some had
long black moustaches, others scanty white beards. All had their hands
folded in their sleeves, and all had a look—a look of youth, that, as
Lychnis said, was most unsuitable and monkey-like on their wizened
faces.
The party filed by the little mountain of meditation, glancing
sideways, but no one of its strange inhabitants took any notice of them
at all, even though Sprot went close up and peered at them across the
stream (without making any intelligent observation), as if they were
inhabitants of the Mappin Terraces.
“Wizards,” whispered Lychnis—“or Sages.”
“Wizards, Adepts, Rishi,” her father replied. “The sort of thing
Blackwood tries to be. Extreme cases of Blackwood.”
“I think not,” put in Quentin. “Taoists, I fancy, not Buddhists. There
are fundamental differences.”
“Lunatics, if I may be allowed an opinion,” said Sprot—“from the local
asylum. Blackwood ought to be with them.” He grew warm. “I call it
preposterous that grown men should be allowed to sit all day on a rock,
grinning. They ought to have something better to do.”
“It is unpractical, isn’t it?” observed Ruby. “I despise men who don’t
do something.”
“And I simply can’t think,” said Lychnis, “why anybody ever does
anything at all. Because really there are so many reasons against doing
things—except, perhaps”—she pondered a little—“the things that bring
you new and strange experiences, and those, after all, involve you in
disappointment.”
Quentin winked at her. “Ætherial Lychnis,” he replied. “You will soon
be ready to join the gentlemen on the rock. As for me, I have been
a man of action—muscular action. I am a motor man. Yet, to have you
always near me, I will dissolve my fleshy substance, and consist of
a vacancy that meditates on nothing. I’ll be no more than a large,
empty shirt dreaming on a clothes-line. We’ll become sighing winds and
mingle our particles. We’ll be two doctrines of inaction, inert in one
another’s arms.”
“Always sensual, Quentin,” she replied.
By now they were at the edge of the deep forest that clothed the great
flanks of the mountain. Out of the forest rose craggy peaks that they
did not that day propose to climb. Lord Sombrewater, Sir Richard and
Sprot were already spreading the lunch. The wind had died, and they
sat in a thicket, listening to the last spasmodic sobs of the gale,
and looking out under the leaves that protected them away down the
mountain-side and across the glen they had traversed. Far down, one
among many fantastic outcroppings and erections of rock, was the little
mountain of meditation, and the dozen motionless figures could still
be descried. Here were no pavilions or eaves of temples. They had
come away, as it occurred to the mind of Ambrose to think, from the
civilized and composed harmony of the Peach-blossom Valley to outer
spaces undealt with by any ordering mind.
“This is undoubtedly for Terence,” said Sir Richard. “This is untidy.”
“And what do you think of it all, Fulke?” asked Lychnis.
These were the first words she had spoken to him that day, and he
brightened (unreasonably), as if he hoped she might love him, after
all. Yet he couldn’t agree with her opinions. “I am with Ruby,” he
said. “Men have no right to lie and dream about abstractions when there
is so much ugliness and misery in the world. They ought to be building
the New Jerusalem.”
“In China’s green and pleasant land,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Well,
let ’em. We don’t want it in England.”
“They’d have a better chance here,” retorted Fulke. “There’s no
capitalist system here that must be destroyed before you can build.
What lovely thing did the capitalist system ever produce, I ask?”
“My daughter,” suggested Lord Sombrewater. “Very definitely, I think,
it produced my daughter.”
Fulke ignored that. It was, as Ambrose notes, one of those unfair
arguments. “We could make England as lovely as this,” he said, “with a
little preliminary destruction and the aid of science.”
“Sheer, criminal balderdash!” exclaimed Sprot.
“What I can’t understand about you builders of superfluous Jerusalems,”
said Quentin, “is your utter dependence on your surroundings. Now I can
be happy in a Houndsditch slum. Where I am, the heavenly city is about
me. I am content with what I find. I do not ask to see the distant
scene—one step enough for me.”
“Don’t blaspheme,” said Sprot, who was a Christian.
“Ruby thinks it’s heaven where it’s comfortable and she can sleep,”
said Lychnis. “Personally, I can’t form the least idea what heaven may
consist in. It certainly isn’t in my heart. It isn’t round us here,
even—still less if Fulke turns it into a red-villa Jerusalem, or even a
marble one. Are those twelve on the little mountain in heaven? A little
too wizened for such a place, perhaps. One somehow expects heaven to
be full of beautiful Greeks. And I suppose one expects to be the only
woman there. Do you expect to be the only man there, Quentin?”
“I should hope so,” he answered, “since I expect to obtain heaven when
I....” She silenced him with a gesture, but his red lips smiled in his
frizzy beard.
“At any rate,” she went on, “one will not see western Europeans there,
unshaved Polish Jews, cross-looking, mingy English tradesmen. I would
like to see a man who didn’t look as if he was preoccupied with a corn.
Not that I wish to be rude to any of you. I love your sweet, lined,
thought-laden, nerve-ridden European faces. But when may I expect to
see a face that is all pure beauty? When, Ambrose?”
“I should think you very well might about here,” he answered. “The
Dragon perhaps. Someone who lives on that rock in the Lotus Lake.
Someone who broods on the stupendous forces of Nature out of the heart
of repose.”
“But Chinese can’t be handsome,” said Ruby. “They’re so fatuous, or
else so fierce—and in any case so foreign.”
But Lychnis suddenly held up her small orchid-hand enjoining silence. A
wind came rustling along the forest, and boomed out across the valley
like some fabulous dragonish bird. Sprot moved uneasily. “Someone
coming,” he muttered.
“Terence’s goat-rider!” Ruby clung to her father’s arm.
He came riding along the edge of the forest, seated on a goat of more
than natural size. He drove it with a branch of peach-blossom. His
dress was fantastically rich, and he had a little red button in his
hat. His face was plump and imperious; his tiny mouth ineffably calm.
He turned in his saddle as he rode past, and the dark, slant-slit
eyes in his face of dry gold bored into the thicket where they were
hidden—terrible eyes, attentive and fierce, like the eyes of the tiger
when they shine and are rapt with the mysterious and dreadful forces of
Nature.
20
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.”