Landscape with figures
He grinned and led her back, still in captivity, to the boats, annexing
the slow Ruby by the way, and as he drove his pair through the field
the labourers began to follow and gather in round them, with a kind
of singing chatter, like a chorus. Fulke, who was also on the bank, a
little shamefaced because he lacked the spontaneity of Quentin and the
two girls to run, started forward; but when the little crowd came near
the boats, Such-a-one raised his voice to such effect that they sped
across the field and vanished like rabbits among the bamboos.
“Odd, that,” said Quentin. “What is his secret charm? The authority
lay not in the tone, but in the words. Or did he perform a miracle—The
Manifestation and Evanishment of the Blue Men?”
“I believe anything, now,” Lychnis replied. “Every minute I hope to see
that dragon flying across the hills.”
Then there was a cry from Terence and a gesture like the waving of a
banner.
“He wants to go on,” said Quentin. “He’s losing sight of his
Peach-blossom friends.”
So the boats began to move slowly ahead, those four, with Ambrose,
following along the bank; and at everything Quentin said the girls
laughed, encouraging the flow of his spontaneity. Presently they
came to a village shadowed among huge rocks and trees. Variegated
ducks surrounded them and a flock of geese steadily testified with
outstretched necks to some difficult truth. The village was sombre,
mysterious and deserted, but a girl was searching for some object
among the pebbles at the water’s edge. She looked up, startled, at the
approach of five gorgeous strangers like ghostly mandarins and their
ladies, and began to make off with little tottering steps.
“Delicious object!” cried Quentin. “Totter, rather, to these arms
and the refuge of this beard, which is indeed a better beard than
any countryman of yours can produce. For the beard in these parts is
scanty,” he explained, turning to Ambrose, “as you will undoubtedly
record.” Then, seizing the girl by the skirt of her jacket, he turned
her about and pinched her chin and her yellow cheeks. She screamed.
At once from the shadowy houses there was a swift, silent arrival of
yellow-skinned relations, and the rest of the party drew together while
Quentin, with sparkling eyes and wide smile, faced the crowd. But
immediately the voice of Such-a-one came from the leading boat, suavely
rising and falling, and once more with mysterious effect, for the
gathering dispersed, not, this time, without conveying, through their
expressionless faces, some hint of a threat like the threat of geese.
Lord Sombrewater sprang out of his boat. “This is quite enough,” he
said, with acid authority. “Lychnis! Ruby!” He pointed, and they
returned to their window.
“Funny,” remarked Quentin to Ambrose. “Your Chinaman has some talisman
in his tongue. This will be useful should one of you go too far.”
12
Late in the afternoon they disembarked, and Such-a-one led them by a
steep road through a village to a solitary inn halfway up the mountain.
The moon came up behind the mountain, and soft hues and scents of the
spring night stole into the sky.
A warm, stirring silence. The inn slept, and Ambrose kept watch in the
road—before him a trembling emptiness of sky, and the fantastic roof of
the inn, and a candle burning behind the paper blind. The blind moved,
the candle was extinguished, and Lychnis and Ruby leaned out between
the bamboo shoots. They threw him down flowers, whispering good-night.
Then silence, breathing, scent-laden.
Ambrose was arranging the events of the day in his mind for purposes of
record. While his mind worked his eyes were fixed on the moon sailing
in a clump of bamboo beyond the inn, like a swan among reeds. His
meditations were disturbed, suddenly, by an outbreak of imprecation in
his near neighbourhood. It was Fulke. The language he used was like
thunder and earthquake among those silent mountains, and seemed to
Ambrose to give a distinctly reddish tinge to the sky.
He whistled, and Fulke paused like a nightingale disturbed in his song.
Then with a “That you, Ambrose? My God!” he resumed his theme.
“What is it?” asked Ambrose.
“What is it! I’ll tell you, so that you put it down in the records,
on parchment, with tender, fragrant little illustrations. What is it!
Only this. I asked Lord Sombrewater this evening if I might propose to
Lychnis. Lychnis!” He groaned at the name, at the stolen taste of a
pleasure never to be his.
“Oh yes?”
“Oh yes! You slug-flesh! You snail-guts! Don’t you want to know what he
answered?”
“As soon as you wish to tell me, revolutionary but propriety-observing
Fulke. I don’t know if you wish to tell Lychnis as well. That’s her
window, you know.”
Fulke looked up to her window, and Ambrose saw in the moonlight that
his face was all furrowed with desire and despair. He clasped his hands
together. “Exquisite—immaculate, goddess-minded,” he whispered, and
suddenly tore at his hair.
Ambrose drew him off down the road, pondering on the word “immaculate.”
The demand of the virgin and ineffective for immaculacy—he would have
liked to dwell on that, but it did not seem the right moment. “And what
did Lord Sombrewater say?” he asked.
“I asked him,” said Fulke, dwelling miserably on the scene, “if I might
ask Lychnis to marry me, and he looked at me for about three seconds
and said: ‘Why, certainly.’”
“I see.”
“He summed up my chances in exactly three seconds. ‘Certainly,’ he
said. ‘Walk straight in,’ as it were. Tell me, you duplicating jelly,
is he right?”
“I think so.”
“My God! you don’t know how it hurts, Ambrose! You don’t feel pain or
anything like that yourself, do you? But I tell you, I suffer. Make
a note of it. Make a note that the infernal fluids that the spring
disturbs in the blood are hurrying from end to end of me with messages
of desire and love. But don’t make the mistake of supposing that I
am possessed by mere lust. The sensations of my heart are like the
sensations of the opening lilac. I am chaste, and I always have been,
and I only desire to worship her, kneeling among spring flowers. She
only thinks I am ungainly, I know. But my soul loves all that is pure
and virgin and flame-like and verdant and too good and lovely in
her for the world. She is just that. She is my Grail, and, in short,
chastity is a bloody obsession with me.” Wringing Ambrose by the hand,
he plunged away.
The moon, Ambrose noted, was now clear of the bamboos, swimming in
the shimmering skylake. He continued his meditations. It was not long
before the sound of a voice singing came to his ears, and presently
Quentin arrived, well satisfied with wine and adventure. He greeted
Ambrose mockingly, bowing and shaking himself by the hand.
“A custom I have learnt in the neighbourhood, O moon-souled one.”
“Can you tell me why it is,” Ambrose asked him, “that a remarkable
filthiness of language often goes with an unusual purity of mind?”
“You mean Fulke? These revolutionary environment-altering,
ideal-state-creating people always seem to suffer from a
prolonged adolescence, just as your opposite, return-to-nothing,
environment-rejecting Buddhist blokes, like Blackwood, seem to have
never had any adolescence at all. Early excess, perhaps, in their case;
late excess in the other. How terrible, Ambrose, are the results of a
wrongly-timed excess!”
“The observation shall be recorded. Don’t wake everyone up when you go
in.”
“I’m not going in. I shall breathe out the wine that’s in me and watch
Fulke worshipping the narcissus in the early dawn. You can go in. I’ll
relieve you.”
So Ambrose left him, with one last look at the bamboo grove and the
floating swan-moon.
13
Days of such journeying followed; sometimes they went in the boats and
sometimes wandered by dizzy paths along the sides of the zigzagging
mountains among groves of spruce, fir, or high up among pines and
slender cascades. The weather was very fair and warm, and the sun
was only dimmed by the shadow of the lapis lazuli crags that towered
threateningly over the path or by the jade-brown walls of a gorge.
At every turn there was some new glimpse of a sun-bathed horizon,
or a gleam of the sails of their boats on the shining, enamelled
stream. White cranes stalked among the emerald rice-fields. The roofs
of villages reposed under the hills, suitably to the contour, and
sometimes there were to be seen the quaint eaves of a temple appositely
jutting out. And sometimes the glistening cascade fell from their
very feet to some green trough in the snowy bloom of cherry, peach
and magnolia far below. The spring weather, the exhilarating air of
the heights, and a special comradeship that, as Ambrose notes, is apt
to accompany such an adventure—at any rate for the first few days—put
them all in good spirits with themselves and one another, and the
ravines and wrinkled, wizard-faced crags not infrequently echoed with
human song. Lychnis usually glided ahead, like a spirit that seeks the
consummation of life in some perfect gesture of the dance, and her
attendant followed with a more deliberate and serene enjoyment. Terence
came next, officially leading, often in colloquy with Such-a-one; and
the rest streamed out behind in ever-changing order, gay in their
coloured garments, like a marching troop of flowers.
They camped one warm night, there being no village and no inn, at the
mouth of an unusually gloomy ravine, where the mountains, towering
above them, seemed almost to meet. The moon was in her third quarter.
Three of the Sages—Terence, Frew-Gaff and Sprot—with Ambrose, were
standing among the reeds by the water’s edge, peering into the
mysterious, moon-dappled mouth of the gorge. Terence, profoundly
stirred in spirit, had received illumination, and his eyes were deep
pools troubled by shining moon-angels. He raised his hands up before
the mountains and exclaimed: “The Last Wall!”
“Meaning,” said Frew-Gaff, “that on the other side of this barrier,
which is to be pierced by means of this gorge, we shall find a sort of
Fairyland of Pantomime Peaches?”
“The land of the Peach-blossom People, undoubtedly, matter-dividing
Richard.”
“Dancing about in pink and purple tights, I suppose.”
“And as real as æther waves, fanatic particle-worshipper.”
“Well, after all,” said Sprot surprisingly, “there may be something
in what Terence says. There are more things in heaven and earth, as
Wordsworth reminds us. There is much that we cannot comprehend, and I
was never one to scoff at what is beyond our understanding.” It was
clear, Ambrose saw, that he had something up his sleeve.
“Let me feel your pulse,” said Sir Richard. “Ah! I thought so. The
spring and the excellent wine we drank at dinner, and something that is
no doubt aphrodisiacal in the night itself, have disturbed your blood.
I detect overtones of moonshine in the vibrations of your nervous
system. The sap is stirring in you; you are beginning to Sprot.”
“Clever—very clever,” replied the little man, with a certain
resentment. He would have shown it more positively, but he knew it was
better not to engage with these men in a contest of words.
“He has had a vision, perhaps,” fluted Terence from the gorge-mouth in
deep tones. “Illumination comes oftenest to those who are simple in
mind.”
“True,” observed Sir Richard.
“Not entirely a vision,” said Sprot, with a sudden falter. Then he
made up his mind. “Look here, you chaps, you mustn’t laugh at me for
once....”
“Go on,” said Frew-Gaff.
“How beautiful is the humility of those who have experienced the
Experience!” exclaimed Terence.
Sprot pointed a finger. “You see Blackwood up there?”