Landscape with figures
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.
31
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.
32
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.