Landscape with figures
Ambrose pictures her standing on the top of her hill like a fluttering
flag. Lonely she must have been. It is lonely, he remarks, to be in the
advanced posts in the matter of human experience.
36
In the afternoon, lying idle and alone on the verandah, she reflected
that she had not spoken to Terence Fitzgerald for a long time. She
could not remember that he had looked at her with hate or resentment.
He had been aloof, but that was his habit, and it might be that still
he was bound to her in spirit, not resenting her actions. So she went
to her bedroom, put on a twelfth-century robe of amber with a design
of black and red butterflies, sped across the lawn, and slid through
the bamboo-forest, that was heavy and dark with summer, to the tiled
watchtower.
She climbed the stairs, peering through little windows that she
passed, and came to his blue-tiled room. It was littered with painting
apparatus. He sat at the window, in his bard-like, painter’s gown, with
his hands clasped, looking sadly out over the quivering bamboo grove.
When she came in his great eyes filled with fire and his voice rang
with joy.
“At last the high gods have told you to come?” Then reproach shadowed
his face. “But in that alien dress. This is not Lychnis, not my divine
inspiration materialized.”
“I have abandoned the other dress,” she replied, “for ever.”
“For ever!”
“I must look the part I am going to play.”
“But we are going back. Lord Sombrewater has decided.” He spoke with
great earnestness.
“Are we? Not quite yet perhaps.” She concealed her meaning, giving
him great distress. They sat together in the wide window, on a ledge
of pale yellow tiles. The poet eyed her long and dreamily; sometimes
(through dreaming) his knee touched hers, or his hand, if he spoke,
found it necessary to pat her fingers or her shoulder. The innocence of
the poet permitted itself some intimacies. But they woke no thrill in
her. She only leaned out and caressed the close ivy, or gazed up at the
swifts circling over a group of elms in the midst of the bamboo.
“The dress is alien, but it is enchanting,” he said, after a pause. “It
falls about you like an amber spell.”
“Paint me,” she replied. “I came to be painted, as promised.”
He obeyed. “I believe it is a spell,” he went on. “You are under a
spell, woven on you by your Chinese. The robe has definitely altered
your aura.”
“Is that the case? Tell me, has Yuan got an aura?”
“As far as I can discover,” said Terence, with the air of making a
mysterious confidence, “he has got practically nothing else.”
“You mean—no body?”
“No corporeal habitation at all—not to speak of. Does that interest
you? Is it a point of any importance?”
But she was watching the swifts, and only threw out an aside: “You must
write an article, ‘The Influence of Environment on the Aura.’”
“But it is profound, I can tell you—in fact, it is disconcerting.
I cannot understand these people. It is all part and parcel of the
mysterious, sinister unresponsiveness of the place. I am unhappy here.”
His grey eyes were mournful. “I sit all day without any illumination,
unvisited by any messenger from those mysterious worlds that touch so
closely on ours. The astral plane is quite closed to me.”
“Something has gone wrong with the trapdoor,” she ventured,
unsympathetically.
“Unvisited by anyone,” he added, with meaning. But she was absorbed in
the gliding swifts.
“I believe some evil spirit on the Other Side has done this by way
of a joke. Those three friends of yours, Lychnis, are elementals,
vampires.”
“It was you brought us here,” she threw out, with her eyes on the sky.
“The Peach-blossom People—pink feet, I remember.”
“It was to punish me for some error. They have brought me here and
blown out the candle of my vision. I cannot contemplate. My harp and my
tongue are silent; my hand is paralysed. And now the word descends on
me in the mists of morning that I must arise and go back to Ireland.
Everything is so designed and so finished, so dead; and I find your
friends so on top of life, so beyond the capacity to feel the world’s
sorrow, so smug.”
She spoke to the bamboo grove. “And so clean. And everyone is so happy.
And inspiration only comes to you when you are in an untidy, poverty
stricken, romantic country where the people are superstitious and
incompetent. In your Paradise everyone must be Celtic and ridiculous.
To be poetical, to have beautiful fancies and run to press with them
is diseased. You dress up the cold substance of experience with
starry crowns and gauze wings to make it look like fairies. A country
should produce either men who can think straight or men who can live
hard—especially the first. That is what compels me in a man.”
The wild anger that flashed in his eyes died down when she suddenly
turned her face.
“There is distress in your eyes, not scorn.” His concern became
apparent in a disposition to offer her the protection of his bosom.
At that moment, indeed, if Terence wanted Ireland, Lychnis wanted
England. Hypnotized by the wheeling of the swifts over the elms, she
had seen her home, and the pull at her was agonizing. The elm-clump
beyond the sea of bamboo was an island of the familiar in a sea of
strangeness. She suffered an intolerable desire for England, for the
Georgian house, for the tennis-lawns, the stables, the cornfields. Her
nerves stormed for the satisfaction that those old habits could give,
and her more complex desire for the undefined satisfaction that she
was pursuing in the Peach-blossom Valley all but suffered shipwreck.
But she gave no hint of this to the poet. He was friendly to her,
but because he loved her she must put him far away, increasing her
isolation. They sat in stillness and silence while the blazing summer
sun sank down the afternoon sky and the swifts mounted and swerved and
flickered high up over the elms.
37
At evening, when the sky was a flaming garden in the glass of the Lake,
Ambrose and Lychnis sat side by side in a punt at a distant part of the
shore, quietly fishing. Their punt was moored by two poles. Behind them
a wall of reeds; before them the green reflection; a step beyond it the
sky mirrored in an abyss. They were fishing for pike, perch and the
like.
“Yes, it had been decided to return,” he replied to a question,
“until Sprot disappeared. It is not known whether he went back to the
_Floating Leaf_ or whether—— Do you, perhaps, know what has become of
him?”
“I haven’t a notion.” She hooked a gudgeon of suitable size through the
appropriate membrane and cast her line. “Until it is known, I suppose,
my father will stay on. I mean, he wouldn’t desert even Sprot. In any
case I do not think he will go back just yet.”
Ambrose lifted his eyes for a moment from his float to glance at her—a
reed-fairy with amber robe and amber hair, steadily holding her rod
with slender hands, frowning at the float that bobbed in the ripples.
She was a novice at fishing. It was certainly accurate to describe her
as a most lovely young woman. The meaning of her words would no doubt
be given presently. She had clearly brought him here to deliver it.
“They can’t bear it any more because Hsiao’s death doesn’t make any
difference to Yuan and Wang. Why, Ambrose?”
“You know why. You have grasped the principle. They cherish the
personality, and cannot endure the indifference to personality that
Yuan and Wang display.”
“Yes,” she responded; “I do know. They cannot bear to think that they
are of no more importance than a grain of dust, or a slug, or a tomato.
What do you think about personality?”
“The strange thing about it is,” he pointed out, “that Wang and
Yuan, who ignore it, have more of it. It is a strange truth. But we
understand—do we not?—that the personality is not their own. They
merely contain, as it were, something cosmical, something that streams
and emanates from them.”
“It has the effect, merely, of personality,” she observed. “But it is
very fascinating.”
“You find it so?”
“My float has gone.” It had disappeared in the clouds that seemed to
drift under it.
“Don’t strike for a few seconds,” he put in. “It’s pike. They run off
with the bait and begin to swallow it afterwards. Now!”
She struck.
“Don’t pull,” he continued. “Hold gently when you can.”
“I feel it,” she gasped. “I’m in communication. It’s wonderful to feel
the weight of something in a world you can’t see.”
By a method of her own the fish was got into the boat. “It’s a pike,”
said Ambrose, “but with improvements of Yuan’s.”
“Yes, I find Yuan fascinating,” she continued, when she had cast her
line again.
“You are in love with him?”
“Must you put it in the diary? If he were a figure on a vase ... if he
would behave as such after marriage ... I don’t know if I am in love.
That’s what I have to find out. I couldn’t go away without finding out,
could I? I must find out. Nothing else matters, and that is the sole
reason why I am making so much trouble—not intellectual curiosity, or
friendship, or anything like that, but simply an unanswerable desire to
understand what is happening to me. At present it’s like this—I can’t
do without him. I feel I must always be in his presence, watching him,
hearing him. Is that love?”
“It is foolish,” said Ambrose, “to ask ourselves ‘Is she in love?’ We
have no definition of love. We do not know what it is. This is the only
question we need put, in the case before us: ‘Is your desire towards
him strong enough, and more especially single enough, to decide you
to make an experiment with him that would create a situation complex
enough to be awkward from the point of view of some of the parties less
intimately, but to an important extent, concerned?’”
“Yes, that is the question we ought to put,” she agreed. “The answer
is——”
But he was momentarily engaged in pulling a fine red perch of about six
pounds out of the water. He landed it, and they bent over the tank, to
watch it swimming about in company with her improved pike.
“The answer,” she resumed, gazing at his image in the tank, “is that
she doesn’t know, but she has made up her mind that the only way to
find out is to live in conditions similar to those which would obtain
if the whole experiment were in hand, and with this object she proposes
to accept an invitation extended to her some time back and live on the
island for a little while in close company with Wang and Yuan, sharing
quarters with two or three of the Chinese girls. Is that the kind
of answer you like? The kind of sentence, I should say.” They left
the tank and went back to their rods. Brown shadows of night were now
lurking in the luxuriant summer foliage of the valley.
“At any rate it leaves me clear as to your meaning.” He fitted out his
hook with a fresh gudgeon. “You intend to pursue your experience, if
necessary to the last conclusion?”
“Well—nobody could blame me if I did.”
“Nobody could, but plenty would. It is the custom to blame people who
put things to the test for themselves.”
“You would not blame me?”
“Praise and blame do seem so profoundly irrelevant. Was that a bite?
No. It is getting too dark to see. The chief point is that at present
you are not sure. You will go near the terrible fruit of knowledge, but
will you pluck it?”
“You see inside of me, Ambrose. I like it. Yes, there is perhaps
something I cannot get over. I don’t know if I loathe that, or whether
I like it. Perhaps you can tell me which. Or ... or what it would be
like ... if something would make it ... easy.”
Her speech did not often falter. This little hard grain of knowledge
in regard to physical facts she still hesitated to put to the test of