Landscape with figures
“There are people,” he observed, “so securely in alliance with our
friend Yuan’s unnameable that they do not fear to step down into the
world and drink deeply of its pleasures.”
“You, too, have tasted—” she began, and relapsed—refused, swiftly, to
meet him in a common experience. “There are so many ways of approaching
what it is I desire to say,” she continued, “and no words for it. But
it really doesn’t matter. The chief thing is that nothing any longer
matters, except the continual experience. One is so at peace.”
“The peace of God,” Ambrose interjected.
“I suppose one must say ‘God.’ But there is a great danger of being
misunderstood.”
“This experience,” he observed, “is enjoyed in various forms by many
people, yet it is one experience. The truth is one truth, expressed
with modifications due to climatic or other circumstances. It is named
after the system of Jesus, or Mithra, or Buddha. There is the Holy
Ghost, or the intent contemplation; the paradise of Nirvana or the Holy
City, with tastefully-jewelled gates—a hundred different expressions of
the same thing. There is a form of the experience marketed by priests,
another by wine-merchants at twelve and sixpence the bottle, and this
has the advantage that it augments the national revenue. But whether
the experience in itself has anything at all to do with reality, we are
not in a position to decide.”
“I am glad you can laugh at it,” she said, with friendliness. “It
is the mark of those elected to salvation that they can laugh at
themselves. Those who have known truth laugh a lot—like Wang. I have
learnt that.”
“You have learnt a great deal, Lychnis.” Lord Sombrewater entered the
conversation. “Does there remain any region of experience which you
have not understood?”
Ambrose perceived from her enigmatic smile that she understood her
father’s question. She did not seem willing to give an unequivocal
answer. Lord Sombrewater had no hesitation in questioning her
intimately before him, and it would have been in accordance with her
own relation with him to reply plainly. But she did not answer plainly.
He noted that there had been some change, and wondered whether he
should not seek an opportunity to withdraw.
“There is no region of experience that I have not understood,” she
replied.
“Upon exploration, I presume?” queried Lord Sombrewater.
“It is a question whether a thing that has not been physically
experienced can be understood,” she murmured.
He turned his head away in swift impatience.
“Hallo! hallo!” A stinging shout travelled to them across the lawn. It
was Quentin coming back from an expedition with Fulke Arnott and Ruby.
Seeing Lychnis on the verandah, he rushed over the lawn like a bear,
leapt the rail, put his arm round her, where she clung to the post,
and kissed her full on the lips. Then he drew back and gazed at her,
saying reverently: “The Holy Spirit returns. The morning dew is once
more seen on the flowers. The lamp of heaven shines, banishing for ever
the dissensions of this little band and, as we hope, the bad temper of
our host. If you require a husband, command me——” He paused for her
reply, and Lord Sombrewater remained still, shading his face with a
plump, capable hand. She shook her head, laughing. “Then I will be your
virgin for ever,” he exclaimed.
But she looked at him so that he began to laugh, and laughed until he
shook the verandah.
“Tell me,” she desired him, “if I answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a plain
question, would you believe that I told truth?”
“I should never listen to what you said,” he replied, “but to you
speaking. There is no question of believing you. There is that in you,
I perceive, that cannot disguise itself with lies. But permit me,
once more, before I resign the world. We have not seen that autumn
gold-brown hair for so many days, those shadows like mauve asters—or
are they heliotrope?—those copper lights, those dahlia-red lips, that
delicious cavern, those little white teeth....” He kissed her again.
“And now,” prayerfully folding his hands, “to that All which is more
than Nothing, that Nothing which is less than Everything.” He looked
sideways at her.
“You are a restless man,” she said, smiling. “You have no peace in you.”
Ruby and Fulke Arnott followed on to the verandah, he sheep-faced, she
with her radiance a little qualified.
“The wedded pair,” Quentin announced—“at least, not yet wedded in time.
A marriage has been imagined, let us say, and will shortly be achieved
in matter, between—and so forth. Rejecting Achilles, Venus prefers and
elevates the chimpanzee. I am envious. I have no morsel.”
Fulke glowered, powerless to silence him. He would not look in the
direction of Lychnis. Ruby, on the whole, tended to behave as if it did
not matter what Lychnis had done, since it was Lychnis who had done
it, and always provided that Lychnis made no attempt to recapture the
affections of Fulke. But her impulses were checked by the somewhat cold
behaviour of her father, who presently came out on the verandah.
“Good-afternoon, Lychnis,” he said. “Back again?”
She smiled at him and said nothing.
“To-morrow we depart, early in the morning.” Once more Lord Sombrewater
entered the conversation, abruptly. He glanced at his daughter,
Ambrose saw, for the effect of his words. She displayed nothing but an
infrangible placidity.
“Thank God!” muttered Fulke. “Back to dear, dirty old Europe, with all
there is to fight in it. By the tripes of St. Francis——”
“Fulke, dear!” It was Ruby who remonstrated.
“I forgot, darling.” He glanced at Lychnis, and went scarlet. “What I
mean is, I long sometimes for the good old fight against the forces of
capital....”
Lychnis laughed out—a laugh of pure, satisfying joyousness. “Fulke—my
dear Fulke—you are coming to life too, like Quentin. You are all coming
to life again. For I must confess,” she explained, “that you had all
become a little faded before I went to stay on the Rock. You had lost
personality, you know, beside Wang and Yuan.”
“By the foul liver of St. Eno ...” began Fulke. “I’m sorry, my dearest.”
“Well I’m blessed!” exclaimed Sir Richard. He looked uncertainly at
Sombrewater, bit his lip, and gravely said his say. “It is reported,
Arnold, that there are bandits in the countryside.”
“I am disinclined to remain,” Sombrewater replied. “We must trust to
the name of the Dragon. He owes us that, I think. What do you say,
Lychnis? I do not desire to force you to go or to stay.”
“Let us go.”
“We are at one, then, on this, at any rate.” He spoke testily. “You had
all better begin to pack.”
They departed, except Sir Richard. Lychnis also made as if to go to her
room.
“Your room has been changed,” Ambrose had to point out.
She turned, puzzled. “By whose orders?”
“At my request, Lychnis,” said Sir Richard gravely.
“What does this mean, Richard? I had not been told of this.” Lord
Sombrewater was sharp.
“I had in mind to save her the inconvenience of the questioning to
which Ruby would no doubt subject her.”
“This is not at all kindly done, Richard. You say in effect——” His
lordship’s anger was rising, and then he seemed to realize the weakness
of his position and turned on his daughter. “For God’s sake, Lychnis,
tell us—are you my daughter still, or ... or another man’s wife ... or
... my God! this hurts me ... his mistress!”
Ambrose watched the scene with interest. The dusk was gathering. The
questions seemed to flap and flutter against the luminous calm of her
spirit like blundering bats. She stood among them smiling a little
(though her breast did indeed heave somewhat), and replied: “You compel
me to answer a question that seems impertinent. What is it to anyone
here what has happened to me while I have been away? But if you place
so much importance on the difference between one state and another, and
if it hurts you to be kept in suspense, I will tell you—I am a virgin.”
There was silence. Then Sir Richard spoke: “I beg your pardon,
Lychnis,” and went into the Pavilion.
When he was gone, her father hugged her and kissed her on both cheeks.
“Thank God, my darling, you are still my daughter! You belong to no
other man.” He drew back, and looked at her as if to reassure himself.
“It is true—quite true—is it not?”
She suffered his kissing and his question, and answered: “Quite true.”
Then he, too, went into the house; but whether he felt quite sure that
he was secure of her love and sole possessor of her, Ambrose doubts.
Lychnis, on her part, looked at Ambrose with a somewhat dubious smile.
“In his business affairs my father has much of the calm of Wang Li. He
makes use of impersonal forces, and that is why he is pre-eminent. But
in his relations with me he is destroyed by desire. It is odd, is it
not? They do not realize, they do not mind, that morally I was Yuan’s
mistress. I was prepared”—she spoke to him with a hesitation that was
unusual in their talking together—“I was prepared to be his entirely. I
did not shirk that, Ambrose. It was only accident that I was not. You
understand that, don’t you?”
“In such cases it is so often accident.”
“In such cases.... Am I a case?”
Her eyes were the dusk looking at him, the brown autumn night,
the velvety secret of interstellar space, the cold and heedless
contemplation of God. He feasted on the beauty of it, when she had gone.
45
The last night in the valley was deep and secret and starry, deep
blue with a streak of night-changed green where the bamboo grove was,
mysterious with secret processes in grove and torrent, blue and starry
like a still painting on a screen. Not far from the Pavilion a stream
flowed slow and deep through a tunnel of trees and hanging creeper.
Ambrose stood by a gleaming gilded bridge, listening to the rhythm of
the water, feeling the close, secret life of the foliage. Over against
the living wall of the grove he saw cigar-ends moving in irregular
paths, fantastic planets in a dense æther. Over the bamboo flickered a
myriad superb fire-insects, creation of Yuan’s. Beyond the grove burned
a million gold stars.
The gurgle of the mysterious river in the darkness was flowing sound,
hypnotic rhythm, music streaming out in streaks of some foreign colour
through the thick and shifting blue substance of the dark night. After
some time, he tells us, he became aware that his strange and peaceful
meditation now held a different element—a queer thridding, an insect
noise coming from within the grove of bamboo. Of a sudden it rose high
and clear, and he remembered that it was Lychnis—Lychnis with her lute,
playing the thoughts and motions of her spirit. “Lily-blossom of the
world!” he murmured to the dim lilies that swayed at his feet. “Cold
loveliness of being that buds for a moment of time out of the secrecy
and darkness of unbeing!” He worshipped at this living monstrance of
the body of God.
Then again he listened intently to the queer realities of spirit that
she was creating with form and movement in the night. The plectrum that
had made a thridding of crickets now made a whispering of the leaves
of the bamboo. Next, solid and clear out of her vision, a sound like
the patter of pearls raining on a temple of porcelain. With composure
and quiet deliberation she made her lute sing the secret of life of the
valley, strength of giant pine, depth and stillness of the lake, high
wind among crags; in it dreamed the exaggerated shapes of Yuan, Hsiao
and Wang Li. It was there in the grove she sang. Ambrose gazed, as one
gazes with the mind into an experience striving to see what is there,
as if he should see her at the heart of the grove in a transfiguration.
But there obtruded upon his gaze, now used to the darkness, the figures