Landscape with figures
of the seven Sages, listening in their chairs. Had Richard Frew-Gaff
ears, he wondered, to hear her turn the stars and all physical reality
into voices of ghosts? Did Blackwood receive some whisper of the truth
Wang aimed at him? Quentin listened with limbs stretched out in a
rigor of emotion. Terence he dimly perceived with hands wrung between
his knees, frowning perhaps on some new, queer beauty. Sombrewater
had bowed his head in his hand—understanding too fully that he had a
strange lost girl for a daughter. Fulke and Ruby, no doubt, were making
love among the trees, perhaps out on the starry Lake; perhaps they
heard and were afraid.
His mind returned to the lute-player in the grove. Now she was making
a music that was icy and terrible. Image of pine, lake, and crag
became faint and vanishing. There was nothing human in it, but only a
loneliness of Himalayan peaks and a coldness of outer space. It was the
vision of Yuan. The coldness descended even on the heart of Ambrose as
he was floated near upon the edge of extinction. The starry sky, the
lawn, the grove, the bright gilded bridge, swam, and there was nothing
solid. Suddenly her plectrum tore the strings with a sound like the
rending of silk. There was silence, and out of it there grew a divine
laughter.
46
Ambrose gave a pull with his paddle and drove his canoe head-on into
the grey and misty margin of an islet. He shivered, for the cold of
daybreak was still on the water. He had meant to stop here, at the bend
of the Lake, and look finally at the valley and the island, to reflect
on the march of time, taste for a due moment an emotion nobler than
sadness, as the beloved valley and the rich experience of the summer
faded from bright now into dim past. But valley and rock had vanished
in morning vapour. There was nothing but an islet glimpsed in a sepia
mist, a blur of willow, a crag high overhead in the vapour, a dejected
heron brooding on one leg in the shallows.
Idle for a moment, he let his craft drift out from the reeds. Even the
Lake itself, he reflected, some current in it, was bearing him away
towards the river, towards the hidden Dragon Gorge. He dipped a blade,
and paddled slowly across the water, past islets of reed and bamboo
that stood out of the mist, looking for some place where a lane in the
mist might give him a glimpse of the Valley. Once, indeed, there was a
rift, a view of what seemed some part of the Rock. He was like a man
seeking in his memory for something familiar and forgotten.
Silently over the water came Lychnis in her white dress, paddling
alone, looking steadfastly in front of her. Their boats rasped.
“I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I did not mean to intercept you.”
“It seems to be fated that our paths in life should drift together.”
She spoke very coldly, and he admitted to himself that something was
gone from their relationship. He cleared his mind—opened it to the
possible implications of that change. They came to him.
“The mist is lifting,” he said, and they both looked back over the
islet-studded water. The distant Rock, the shore of the Lake with their
own mooring-raft of bamboo, a deep grey blur, came into sight like a
dream remembered at morning when sleep cannot be regained.
She turned her head steadily away, and the mists closed again, blotting
out lake and islet and crag. A voice came from her. “One had pleasant
days there.” The blade of her paddle hung, and the voice came from her
again: “It is not the same, only remembering.”
She sped her canoe, and he watched her become a blot of white and pale
brown, vanishing in grey vapour.
47
Under the leadership, once more, of Such-a-one, the homeward journey
began. Sprot had been released from imprisonment on the mountain of
meditation. The mists lifted soon after they had entered the Gorge of
Dragons; the autumn sunshine was warm; violets were to be seen where
lawn or grove came down to the water’s edge, and a memory of early
summer lingered among the sombre brown shadows under and about the
cliffs. Lychnis would not let them camp in the creek where they had
spent a night when they were journeying the other way. The violets were
ghosts, and the autumn song of birds was an echo, for it seems that her
firmness of heart had left her when they entered the Gorge.
So they went swiftly on, helped by the seaward current. Lord
Sombrewater watched Lychnis with anxiety, and Quentin lay in wait,
hoping to catch some advantage out of her reaction. But she shunned
everyone, and was a fiend to Ruby, who lay in her boat.
Late at night they came to the mouth of the Gorge and pitched their
tents (but not where they had pitched them before) and slept. Ambrose,
however, preferred to keep watch for any portent that might appear, and
at dawn, when he was fishing among the reeds at the deep-flowing mouth
of the Gorge, Lychnis came to him, sweet with the morning, flushed with
despair.
“It has gone,” she said flatly. “Gone! What shall I do if I am seduced
and deserted by my experience that I loved, Ambrose?”
“Do you consider,” he asked, “that you have had the experience of God?”
“Do women have the experience of God unless they are in love?” She
laughed a little, twisting her fingers among the reeds. “God? It is
not a word that means anything. I only had an experience. I don’t know
how to describe it, unless you have had it yourself. I had come to see
the world, men and trees and mountains, as a varying manifestation
of the same substance. I saw that everything was continuous, and the
pine and pheasant on the branch were only another form of me. Me, did
I say? There was no longer any me. Something else was there, and it
gave me joy. It was more wonderful and satisfying than anything I had
ever supposed could happen. I felt myself a piece of the universe, no
longer in opposition to it, an unhappy little piece of separation. The
infinite and inevitable had taken the place of my soul, and now it has
left me, and however shall I get it back?”
“Calling this experience, for convenience, the experience of God,” he
replied, “one can only reply that God is not to be thought of as a
common seducer. Believe me, before long the satisfaction you speak of
will again fill your heart. Why, there is no cause for despair. This
reaction was to be foreseen!”
Her slender body was enshrined within the radiance of the rising sun
in a frame of burning willows; her hair was an aureole of gossamer;
but the heart in the midst of her was black. “I cannot feel hope!” she
exclaimed. “I think God will forget me. He must have so many friends.”
“A thing not really worth saying,” he replied.
“You are angry with me.” She lifted her face to study him. “You are
almost not impersonal.”
There was a silence. She would not sit down beside him. It seemed she
must say something that desired to be said with the advantage that
standing gave her. Or was she about to take flight before it could
say itself? There is a disguised desire in her, was his thought—some
powerful desire that she does not recognize, yet, for what it is.
“You cannot comfort me,” she told him. “My coldness of heart, that
made me laugh, has left me, and I am weak enough to be crying for the
Valley and the Pavilion, and all those summer days and the deep nights,
and—and Yuan. Ambrose—Ambrose—” She seemed on the point of vanishing,
but she spoke on: “You are a man of whom I can ask this—the only one.
You are calm, passive. You will not mind. You see, your memory is so
marvellous, you will never forget one hour of all the weeks we spent
there or one thing that was ever said. And you have seen my soul
stripped naked, so that it is wrong I should ever be the bride of
another man. I desire you to marry me, so that I can always be near you
and look in your mind and be reminded of the Valley, and always possess
the days we spent there. Will you, Ambrose?”
She blushed very furiously.
Ambrose sat and looked steadily at his float passing him slowly on the
stream. He smiled queerly to himself. Desire has marvellous ways of
presenting itself to the mind, he reflected. Then, aloud: “In all this
it seems to be assumed that I should be prepared to remain a flawless
and in no way troublesome glass in which you could feast your heart
on the scenes of the past. I ought to warn you—the assumption, which
you perhaps make, that I should be a cold, convenient husband, is
unjustified.”
She swayed on her feet, and her eyes stared at his unreadable face as
if a spear from an unseen hand had smitten her side, and she was at
grips with the reluctant secret of death. The delicious cavern of her
mouth opened, but no words came. He gave her no help. He met her stare
coldly, giving no shadow of a look that might carry the word of love.
“Think that over,” he added, and returned to his fishing.
48
Late in the afternoon, three days’ journey from the Gorge, they put up
for the night at a mountain-village inn. The inn was high and isolated,
the innkeeper attentive (obedient to the sign of the Dragon). But he
warned them that a band of revolutionary troops was thought to be
approaching the neighbourhood, with fire and sword.
“Are they, the festering blackheads?” Fulke’s revolutionary sympathies
were a little alienated since his engagement to Ruby. “A lot of
scrofulous thieves unworthy of the high name of revolutionary. By the
giblets of St. Francis’s little dog——! I beg pardon, my darling.”
“You were going to remark,” put in Quentin, “that these do not carry
bricks for the New Jerusalem.”
The Sages, the two girls, and Ambrose were gathered in the eating-room
of the inn, talking, and watching the effect of sunset among the hills.
Lychnis alone was silent, turning a matter over and over. Apparently
she had recovered her firmness of heart, but not the transcendent
experience. She had come to a point where she was indifferent to the
past and future. The green tip of a budding flower of joy was fighting
the winter snow and icy wind, the cold death in her mind.
The Sages and Ruby were apprehensive, at the same time somewhat
boastful. Ambrose found a great deal to amuse him in their
conversation, for, strangely enough, each considered that he alone
among all the others had probed the experience of the summer to the
bottom. Blackwood, perhaps, was the most jaunty. He did not really
quite know where he stood in regard to life, but he fully trusted
that he should soon find out, and in the meantime took an extra lump
of sugar in coffee. Ambrose surmises that the words of Wang Li had
given sanction for the release of impulses too long pent up and not
dissipated or re-directed, and in the first capital they came to there
would be an expenditure of energy.
Sprot was assertive. “I always said,” he pointed out to them, “that
you would come round to my point of view. You admit that I was right
about....” He did not venture to name names.
“A fool,” observed Lord Sombrewater, who had no longer any regard to
Sprot’s feelings—“a fool is a man who knows from birth what it takes
others seventy years to find out.”
But Sprot was not put out. “I do hope,” he continued, “that we are not
in real danger here.”
“If we are not,” observed Frew-Gaff, “it will probably be due to your
friends in the Valley.”
“I would like to feel certain that we shall see Europe again,” put in
Blackwood anxiously.
“I trust,” said Frew-Gaff, “that the Dragon will fulfil his
obligations. I fear, from what the villagers say, that we are in for
trouble.”
“It would always be possible to go back,” said Fulke. “We had a
wonderful time there, after all. I for one should be contented to stay