Landscape with figures
different. But you and I live in heaven, don’t we? I presume a person
will be naked there? So you think the man on the island would not be
looking. He does strike one as being a gentleman.”
“Does he please you?”
“I find him mysterious. What Ruby dislikes about him, I like—I mean the
feeling that a cold and merciless god is looking at you. I wish I could
be as unself-conscious as that. It’s like being looked at by something
impersonal—the wind, the sky. Do you think he is a man? Or some human
spirit of the mountains? You do not think him supercilious, do you?
Those moth-eyebrows, I mean, and that slanting glance.”
“I think his mouth remarkable,” said Ambrose.
“Yes. It’s so small and innocent and unpitying, like a flower that
can’t feel, or suffer, or know of its own destruction. A mouth that
would look the same in torture. You can use that, Ambrose.” He smiled.
“A mouth that he surely never uses to eat or kiss with. Will you use
some of these words when you are writing in your diary?”
“Possibly. Do you understand all that he says?”
“What is the difficulty? I don’t find it a matter of understanding.
I don’t have to say to myself, ‘What does he mean?’ I feel it in my
bones.”
Ambrose pondered. “Perhaps you have the same means of consciousness as
these Chinese.” He remembered her remarkable insights.
“Do you suppose I am a Sage?” she asked.
“At any rate,” he replied, “you resemble them in certain respects. You
are at bottom only interested in what they would call the reality
behind the flow of phenomena. You actually do live in constant touch
with it, and find it exciting. Nothing else will ever quite give you
satisfaction. It is a faculty which men of action lose. If they didn’t
the flow of phenomena would cease.”
She stripped the dark leaves one by one from a bamboo.
“And what about men who record action and inaction with equal
dispassion?”
“Oh,” he answered, “they also sometimes get in touch with reality, in a
mild way. But about Yuan. What does he tell you?”
“He told me that when he has once thoroughly investigated the nature of
objects, and understood the identity of all things, he will do as his
great-grandfather wishes—abandon all desire, and wholly give himself
up to what he calls the unnameable. But he will go much farther than
his great-grandfather, he says. Already he is convinced of the ultimate
unreality of the world. He wishes one day to leave the world of
relativity, to contemplate Nature in its absolute aspect, and finally
to sleep a white and dreamless sleep of the mind, knowing only what is
beyond mind. This is what he said, and in this state he won’t know his
nose from his mouth, and his flesh and bones will be dissolved, and he
will drift with the wind, not knowing whether he is the wind itself or
a leaf riding on it.”
“In old age,” said Ambrose, “he will come down to the less picturesque
and more human mysticism of his great-grandfather. But first he has, as
you say, to put away desire.”
“He often does, already,” she answered eagerly. “He fasts in heart. It
is quite simple, apparently. You only forget there is a you, and when
there’s no you it can’t have desires.”
“Quite simple.”
“He says it is the more subtle desires, the desires of the intellect,
that trouble him.”
“No doubt they do. And in other matters he is without passions?”
“As far as I can see. Well—he’s not a neuter.”
“He has the eye of a man?”
She hesitated. “Of more than a man.”
“It has expression in it—warmth, feeling, electricity?”
“I don’t know. I cannot say what there is in his eyes. I can only say
that they are not dead. They have looked straight at mysterious things,
and they are unreadable. All his face is unreadable. He is like rocks
and forests. His eyes are the mysterious presences that are among
trees. And they slant beautifully.”
“And what is your chief feeling about him?”
“If only I could always think of him as a figure on a vase....”
She smiled at Ambrose faintly, enigmatically, baffling further inquiry.
Strange creature, she seemed to him, neither child nor woman—at any
rate half-fairy. “I don’t dare look at him very close,” she concluded.
“He’s so still, so different. If he came walking by now in a meditation
I should shiver. Oh! listen, Ambrose. Someone really is coming!”
Ambrose stepped back into the bamboo thicket, and the shimmering,
scented girl shrank in under his arm. There were voices, in English and
Chinese—chiefly little exclamations and some laughter. Whoever it was
passed on and the voices died out in the forest.
“Quentin,” whispered Ambrose, “and some young women we don’t know.”
They emerged on the white moonlit lawn, crossed the shadow of a great
cedar, and entered the house.
27
One afternoon Lychnis, Ruby, Ambrose, Quentin and Fulke were on the
island in company with Wang, Hsiao and Yuan. All were meditative, or
sleepy, and they lay about on a little turfy place jutting out from
the cliff a few feet above the water. They looked like a handful of
orchids. Lychnis lay on her front with her head hanging over the Lake.
She was gazing intently at the water, and her hair parted and fell
down on either side of her face, leaving the slender neck bare, as if
she had been laid on the plank of the guillotine. “How satisfying,”
muttered Quentin, “to wring that neck!”
Yuan regarded the neck, but no shade or thought of emotion appeared on
his countenance; nor did his fingers tighten.
“What a hateful thing to say!” said Ruby, who neither slept nor
meditated, and only lay motionless.
Old Wang, after studying her for some time, had been heard to murmur:
“The room has been made empty for the Master, but he does not enter it.”
Lychnis was fascinated by the water. She was thinking, if only she
could wriggle out of her tunic and trousers, shoulders first, and
slide over the cliff into the Lake and glide neatly among the stems of
the water-lilies! To dip the chin first, and the mouth, tentatively,
gingerly, in the cold element of a different universe; to bury the
eyes, next, in its queer sights; to feel it slide over neck and
back and legs; then suddenly to dart through it and surprise the
inhabitants, like an unexpected meteor.
“I simply must know what it’s like to be a water-creature.” A sentence
had emerged from the depths of her water-feelings.
“You can,” said Yuan, “by entering into subjective relationship with
them.”
She looked at him as one who balances an infinity of considerations.
“No doubt. But how does one enter into subjective relationship with,
say, a water-beetle?”
“First,” began Yuan, “by forgetting self; then by emptying the mind....”
But old Wang interrupted, as if to give the young man instruction on an
important matter. “Those who know, say nothing,” he observed; “those
who say, know nothing.”
“But,” said Lychnis, “that makes conversation so difficult.”
“Why converse?” Wang asked her, with a sardonic grin. “Speak only when
compelled, and then reluctantly, and only in the words of the Sages.”
“In the meantime,” said Yuan, who, in relation to his
great-grandfather, was only at the beginning of wisdom, “let us take a
walk under the water.”
Lychnis lifted her head and glanced round at Ambrose. “Among all those
plants? I’m not afraid, but isn’t it rather impossible?”
“I’ll dive in and save you,” said Quentin.
“I don’t like you under water,” she replied—“a spread-out monster with
a dim, waving beard. Besides, I’ve no costume.”
“That is not a thing that matters—” began Yuan.
“Of course not,” put in Quentin, with immense approval.
The Chinese gentleman continued: “What I mean is, that we go as we are.
It is not a miracle.”
The scattered orchids stood up, mystified, and undulated in a gay chain
along the paths on the side of the cliffs. Presently Yuan halted at
a place where glassy-green steps led down into deep waters between
reed-clumps.
“A good place for pike, no doubt,” remarked Ambrose.
“You are a fisherman, then?” Yuan suddenly enveloped him, as it
were, in an all-seeing gaze, which, while extremely polite, was also
extremely inexorable.
“I fish, and meditate, and compose my thoughts.” Ambrose returned his
gaze with a polite stare which, so Lychnis told him, was beautifully
inflexible.
“Then we will fish and meditate together.”
“With the greatest pleasure.”
The two men bowed, and Yuan led the way down the glassy-green steps.
They found themselves entering a roomy, inclined tunnel of some
substance so transparent that they seemed to be entering a partition
of the water. One by one they stepped down, taking a last glance, when
their eyes came to its level, across the many-leaved surface of the
Lake. In a few minutes they were walking in the depths of a forest
of stalks where strange creatures loomed. It was very silent, very
dim, very still, under that ceiling of flat leaves, or under an open
sky of lake-water. Sometimes a flight of small, ghostly fish darted
invisibly through the stalk-forest, or suddenly wheeling their sides in
a light-beam became a thousand rainbows. Sometimes a beetle-creature
struggled up skywards through the water, swimming as if faint for
heaven. Or swans swam overhead like June clouds, or thrust their
snaky necks down between lilies. A cormorant, breaking the limit
of the water into a shiver of crystal, passed them in silent white
pursuit of a hurrying fish. And in one region of the brownish-greenish
water-universe a solemn carp, opening and shutting his mouth like a
machine, took part with myriads of his kind in a mazy, rhythmical,
interminable, involuted and apparently purposeful dance.
“Just like human beings,” observed Quentin.
“Why do they do that?” asked Lychnis. She and Ruby were walking on
either side of Yuan; Fulke was following with despairful, scowling
face. “Are they happy?”
“They obey their nature,” said Yuan. “According to the doctrine of
Hsiao, they are Sages.”
“They cannot be Sages,” she put in, “because they have never been
conscious. To be a Sage means to have abandoned human consciousness and
to have adopted the demeanour of a fish or a vegetable.”
But he merely stood with bent head considering the glaucous lairs of
the water-world. He was not thinking. He was abandoned, unconscious of
self or of any process, to what his eyes saw. He was in relation with
the water, the fish, the beetles, through the reality which filled him
and them and superseded delimitation. He had ceased to exist. He was
no longer separate. But an onlooker would have been struck by his
self-possession.
Fulke went close to Lychnis and faint-heartedly touched her. His desire
to put his arms round her nearly achieved itself. Distracted by himself
and by his desire, he was now without inward resource. Entangled in the
inhibitions of self-consciousness, he blushed, stammered, and did not
know how to stand or where to put his hands.
Ambrose made notes on the behaviour of all concerned.
“Lychnis.” Fulke faltered a whisper.
She gave no sign of having heard.
“Lychnis. I.... Why won’t you talk to me? I could answer your
questions.... I....”
She made no answer.
“I know things, too. I am intelligent. Oh, slime and hell! I hardly
know what I’m saying!”
“Yes, yes. You are very intelligent—very nice.” She spoke as if
half-asleep.
He stumbled back over the damp sand to Ruby. “Look at her!” he
exclaimed. “She’s following him. He’s drawing her into his own mad
world. What can we do, Ruby?”
“I don’t know.” Ruby was dejected, alarmed. “She’s funny. I do wish she
wouldn’t be. You don’t think——” She stopped. “I don’t like it much
here. It’s not a place for people to be. Could I go back? Would they
mind?”
“My God!” he answered. “I think I’ll come with you. She’ll be all