Landscape with figures
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26
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