Landscape with figures
experience. The unilluminated fact discomposed her.
“That statement you were to prepare for me...?”
He smiled to himself in the gathering brown darkness. “I am afraid it
is not quite ready.”
The night fell swiftly at last, faintly lit by a moon still low down
among the hills, like a lotus among great brown petals. Both felt the
weight of a fish when they went to put away rod and line. Soon all was
packed up, and Ambrose rowed the punt slowly away.
“You will put me on the island?” she asked.
“Certainly.”
“And tell my father?—explain to him?”
“I will.”
“And remain my friend when they all misunderstand and hate me?”
“Why, yes.”
“What a darling you are!”
He records that when he put her ashore on the Rock she kissed him and
wept. He rowed the punt slowly back through the lanes in the water-lily
leaves.
38
Lychnis made her way through its main gates into the walled collection
of courtyards and one-storied houses where the relatives of old Wang
and Yuan lived. During many days spent on the island she had made
acquaintance with numbers of them, and now they gave her an eager
welcome, overjoyed that the fair-haired and fairy-like stranger should
have accepted their invitation. But her first night, alone with two
Chinese girls in the lanterned chamber, was strange. They chattered
to her in a speech like the speech of birds; they rolled themselves
up fantastically on their queer beds; and, kind and affectionate with
her as they might be, she lay shaking by herself in the darkness,
unutterably alone.
With morning there were many things, apart from the pursuit of her
enterprise, to fill her mind. It was amusing to watch her companions
plastering their hair down with resin. Other young women came in to
assist at her toilet, some dressed, as was more usual among them,
in the ordinary costume of a Chinese girl; others, for the sake of
pleasing her, or because it was their custom, in robes copied from the
fashions of many centuries. An embarrassing interest was shown in her
affairs. They offered her a quantity of clothes to choose from, and
watched her with delighted and confusion-producing comment while she
managed the combination she effected of her own soft underclothes with
robe and trousers in heliotrope and green. They laughed over her. She
pleased them.
After breakfast, when she was introduced to some gentle elder women,
she was taken by four or five of her friends to a room with an effect,
in the clear morning heat, of pink and pale green and gold. There were
elaborate chairs, Chinese books, a chessboard in ebony and amber, a
stringed instrument (which later she learned to play), two or three
landscapes on silk, objects in ivory and jade and unknown precious
metals. An attempt was made at conversation of an explanatory kind.
The youngest of them—a demure, slender girl, who bent and twisted her
body with the grace of a willow in the wind—indicated names, such as
Golden Apricot, Blue Lotus, or Scarlet Moth. Then she put a question:
“Married?”
“Not married,” Lychnis replied.
“Those two married,” the child indicated, pointing to an elaborate,
indolent beauty, and a girl with a sad, intelligent face. “Hsiao’s
wives.”
Lychnis was shocked. They seemed so young for that hideous painter, and
it was tactless of the child to have introduced the subject. The beauty
smiled secretly, as if she had some fountain, and no mystical one, of
consolation, and the sad one wrung her hands. It was to be gathered
that the reactions of these two young widows were of the human kind,
not like those of their extraordinary relatives.
It occurred to Lychnis to ask whether Yuan was married. It came to
her that he might have a wife or two wives. There was an exasperating
titter. “Yuan!” Two or three shaped their mouths to his name,
producing an effect as if they were astonished, or scandalized, or
contemptuous—she could not tell what.
Then the beauty spoke—in English, surprisingly: “Yuan not a man—neither
is Wang Li.”
“You mean?”
But she would do no more than smile, and Lychnis leaned back on her
apple-green cushion, angrily wondering how to find out what she meant.
Was it meant that Yuan was a spirit, or ghost? A Yuan that was a ghost
might be more agreeable in the capacity of husband. She suddenly felt,
among these matter-of-fact and human young women, and there came with
it a dismaying sense of unreality, that she must have been dreaming
about some porcelain image in a museum or a figure on a scroll.
“Are you sad that Yuan is not a man?” asked the beauty, with quite
European cattishness.
“How well you speak English!” Lychnis graciously replied, desirous of
friendly relations.
At this also there was a titter, and the demure child explained with
readiness and a remarkable virtuosity in the method of allusion that
her lovely cousin had learnt this and more from Quentin.
Lychnis closed her eyes, not caring to learn whether the slender
young lady had also learnt at the same knee. Quentin, in his hateful
irresponsibility, she savagely reflected, knew no restraints. But how
would it be to spend the rest of her life among these twittering golden
mice? The sad one, the intelligent one, perhaps she would not lightly
permit herself what seemed to Lychnis to require the profound assent
of reason and imagination. Yuan might take her away, of course. She
suffered a wave of anger that he did not come.
39
Yuan was away in the mountains, and as day after day passed without him
Lychnis sank deeper into doubt and misery. Then at last he came back,
sought her out, spent all his time with her, and they began to weave
their lives into one strand. They spent days and nights in the Flying
Dragon, often at great distances from the valley; or sometimes they
sought strange experiences among the neighbouring forests and crags;
and the summer wore on to its full splendour. Afterwards she gave
Ambrose some account of these various experiences, and he chose three
or four to illustrate the progress of her relations with Yuan.
She began to be influenced increasingly, it appears, by the silent and
deliberate guidance of his mind. He had means of conveying his thoughts
to her without speech, and this means he used more and more effectively
as their intimacy deepened. One afternoon of serene and golden beauty
they were strolling, steeped in this conversation, through a birch-wood
among the hills. They came upon three Rishi, or mountain wizards,
contemplating the smoke of incense in a green circle under the trees.
Behind the Rishi was a porcelain image, shrined among leaves, a thing
of infinite stillness. The two friends silently joined the group; Yuan
leaned against a birch trunk, chin in hand. Lychnis lay prone. But from
time to time she looked round at Yuan, for he seemed to have withdrawn
his mind from her, to have plunged himself, without thought for her, in
the contemplation of the smoke of incense. And the three Rishi were of
the most repulsive ugliness—the first huge and sensual, with a belly
that burst through filthy rags, distended ears, and the face of a demon
of wrath; the second small and thin, with the face of a froward newt;
the third deformed in the spine, crab-armed, lascivious and cruel.
They took no notice whatever of the newcomers, and sat for so long in
a tremendous immobility, like that of the brooding porcelain figure,
that the flap of a leaf overhead reverberated through the forest and
seemed to echo down long passages in the mind. Their foul and repulsive
appearance began to be more incongruous with so profound a stillness;
their ugliness was so clearly not the sign of any present passion that
they seemed to grow unreal. They might be about to vanish. She suddenly
perceived in their faces the signs of immortal, worldforgetting youth.
Then came a solitary message from Yuan, that these were men who had
left behind them the passions of the world and given themselves to the
experience of reality. “It is the presence of reality,” he said to her
mind, “that displays the unreality of the outward world.” The wrathful
one stirred faintly at the passage of thought from mind to mind; his
wrinkled eyelids perceptibly twitched.
Yuan returned to the contemplation, and Lychnis found herself being
drawn in—wandering, rather, in a world of fancies on the edge of what
was too cold and uncongenial for her to enter. At first the sensations
in her body intensified. There was an itch for movement in legs and
fingers. She was acutely aware of the thrust of her chin in her hand,
the strain of the muscles at waist and abdomen, a fly buzzing in her
hair, a pebble under her knee. But a gentle wind played on her calves
and head. Discomforts faded. She became aware of the beautiful lines
and relations of her body. She relaxed, and the tree-roots on which
she was lying seemed to embrace her, to gain contact with her; the
life of the tree gained contact with her life. She turned on her back
in the embrace of the birch-tree, and began pondering on the delicate
tracery of leaves, swaying and glowing in the peaceful sky. She was in
a world of trees—birch, poplar, chestnut and ash; tall silver trunks,
brown twisted trunks, smooth boles, tender shoots, branches carrying
a weight of ivy; green tranquil leaves, broad, flat leaves hanging on
long stems, white fluttering leaves like clouds of butterflies; in a
world of pale green and misty substance, and deep green with dark,
lucid caves, splashes of golden yellow, blurs of red-brown. There was
an imperceptible, infinite rustling, an unseen flitting of birds,
sometimes a note; a tranquil diffused light, and beyond the tree-tops
an immense pure well and medium of light, a warm sun-drenched region
of inter-stellar space, longed for by the senses. The roots under her
body stretched up to a silver trunk that lifted its weight of foliage
into the world of foliage and light, lifting her spirit with it. She
was among myriads of leaves, exulting, whispering choirs. It seemed to
her that the spirits of those who have loved the light of the sky dwelt
in them, tasting the sun and the warm winds, saturated with light,
with air, with the unseen medium of life and being. A profound calm, a
strength of reposed, victorious soul, pervaded the leaves, a dignity of
that which fears neither life nor death, not subject to them. Sometimes
a bevy of young leaves fluttered with a gust of angelic laughter, or
there was a vast stir of passionless conversation, a communion of
those who are beyond passion, reposing in the myriad forest leaves.
She felt, certainly, a presence. It was what she had perceived in the
hideous faces of the Rishi. A presence that was not a presence; a
presence seen in the structure of beauty, but yet it was not beauty;
she found it also in music, in a formula, in the valley, in the eyes
of Yuan, but it was not any of these; not happiness or unhappiness,
nor life or death, but pre-existent and yet non-existent—such phrases
from Yuan’s conversation came to her mind. She turned her gaze to the
serene and smiling face of the porcelain figure among the leaves. It
was a thing of great stillness. It was inactive, but it seemed charged
with activity. “It lives,” was her first thought; and pat came the
silent answer from Yuan: “It more than lives. There is more than life.”
A vista was opened to her. The presence in the life of the trees, in
the not-life of the figure, in the unreal faces of the Rishi, was the
same presence—the intangible, the unnameable. She perceived a reality
outside thought, unhuman and without the warmth and pleasure of
thought, a reality that she could not grasp with mind or senses; but
the experience of it brought joy.