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.