37
AT evening, when the sky was a flaming garden in the glass of the Lake, Ambrose and Lychnis sat side by side in a punt at a distant part of the shore, quietly fishing. Their punt was moored by two poles. Behind them a wall of reeds; before them the green reflection; a step beyond it the sky mirrored in an abyss. They were fishing for pike, perch and the like.
“Yes, it had been decided to return,” he replied to a question, “until Sprot disappeared. It is not known whether he went back to the Floating Leaf or whether—— Do you, perhaps, know what has become of him?”
“I haven’t a notion.” She hooked a gudgeon of suitable size through the appropriate membrane and cast her line. “Until it is known, I suppose, my father will stay on. I mean, he wouldn’t desert even Sprot. In any case I do not think he will go back just yet.”
Ambrose lifted his eyes for a moment from his float to glance at her—a reed-fairy with amber robe and amber hair, steadily holding her rod with slender hands, frowning at the float that bobbed in the ripples. She was a novice at fishing. It was certainly accurate to describe her as a most lovely young woman. The meaning of her words would no doubt be given presently. She had clearly brought him here to deliver it.
“They can’t bear it any more because Hsiao’s death doesn’t make any difference to Yuan and Wang. Why, Ambrose?”
“You know why. You have grasped the principle. They cherish the personality, and cannot endure the indifference to personality that Yuan and Wang display.”
“Yes,” she responded; “I do know. They cannot bear to think that they are of no more importance than a grain of dust, or a slug, or a tomato. What do you think about personality?”
“The strange thing about it is,” he pointed out, “that Wang and Yuan, who ignore it, have more of it. It is a strange truth. But we understand—do we not?—that the personality is not their own. They merely contain, as it were, something cosmical, something that streams and emanates from them.”
“It has the effect, merely, of personality,” she observed. “But it is very fascinating.”
“You find it so?”
“My float has gone.” It had disappeared in the clouds that seemed to drift under it.
“Don’t strike for a few seconds,” he put in. “It’s pike. They run off with the bait and begin to swallow it afterwards. Now!”
She struck.
“Don’t pull,” he continued. “Hold gently when you can.”
“I feel it,” she gasped. “I’m in communication. It’s wonderful to feel the weight of something in a world you can’t see.”
By a method of her own the fish was got into the boat. “It’s a pike,” said Ambrose, “but with improvements of Yuan’s.”
“Yes, I find Yuan fascinating,” she continued, when she had cast her line again.
“You are in love with him?”
“Must you put it in the diary? If he were a figure on a vase ... if he would behave as such after marriage ... I don’t know if I am in love. That’s what I have to find out. I couldn’t go away without finding out, could I? I must find out. Nothing else matters, and that is the sole reason why I am making so much trouble—not intellectual curiosity, or friendship, or anything like that, but simply an unanswerable desire to understand what is happening to me. At present it’s like this—I can’t do without him. I feel I must always be in his presence, watching him, hearing him. Is that love?”
“It is foolish,” said Ambrose, “to ask ourselves ‘Is she in love?’ We have no definition of love. We do not know what it is. This is the only question we need put, in the case before us: ‘Is your desire towards him strong enough, and more especially single enough, to decide you to make an experiment with him that would create a situation complex enough to be awkward from the point of view of some of the parties less intimately, but to an important extent, concerned?’”
“Yes, that is the question we ought to put,” she agreed. “The answer is——”
But he was momentarily engaged in pulling a fine red perch of about six pounds out of the water. He landed it, and they bent over the tank, to watch it swimming about in company with her improved pike.
“The answer,” she resumed, gazing at his image in the tank, “is that she doesn’t know, but she has made up her mind that the only way to find out is to live in conditions similar to those which would obtain if the whole experiment were in hand, and with this object she proposes to accept an invitation extended to her some time back and live on the island for a little while in close company with Wang and Yuan, sharing quarters with two or three of the Chinese girls. Is that the kind of answer you like? The kind of sentence, I should say.” They left the tank and went back to their rods. Brown shadows of night were now lurking in the luxuriant summer foliage of the valley.
“At any rate it leaves me clear as to your meaning.” He fitted out his hook with a fresh gudgeon. “You intend to pursue your experience, if necessary to the last conclusion?”
“Well—nobody could blame me if I did.”
“Nobody could, but plenty would. It is the custom to blame people who put things to the test for themselves.”
“You would not blame me?”
“Praise and blame do seem so profoundly irrelevant. Was that a bite? No. It is getting too dark to see. The chief point is that at present you are not sure. You will go near the terrible fruit of knowledge, but will you pluck it?”
“You see inside of me, Ambrose. I like it. Yes, there is perhaps something I cannot get over. I don’t know if I loathe that, or whether I like it. Perhaps you can tell me which. Or ... or what it would be like ... if something would make it ... easy.”
Her speech did not often falter. This little hard grain of knowledge in regard to physical facts she still hesitated to put to the test of 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.