Landscape with figures
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.”
30
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