“So I suppose I shall have to set to work to remember my own big moments?”
“It will not be an effort. They will come to you.”
“I don’t know that I shall give them much of a welcome,” answered Conway moodily.
But whatever the past might yield, he was discovering happiness in the present. When he sat reading in the library, or playing Mozart in the music room, he often felt the invasion of a deep spiritual emotion, as if Shangri-La were indeed a living essence, distilled from the magic of the ages and miraculously preserved against time and death. His talk with the High Lama recurred memorably at such moments; he sensed a calm intelligence brooding gently over every diversion, giving a thousand whispered reassurances to ear and eye. Thus he would listen while Lo-Tsen marshaled some intricate fugue rhythm, and wonder what lay behind the faint impersonal smile that stirred her lips into the likeness of an opening flower. She talked very little, even though she now knew that Conway could speak her language; to Mallinson, who liked to visit the music room sometimes, she was almost dumb. But Conway discerned a charm that was perfectly expressed by her silences.
Once he asked Chang her history, and learned that she came of royal Manchu stock. “She was betrothed to a prince of Turkestan, and was traveling to Kashgar to meet him when her carriers lost their way in the mountains. The whole party would doubtless have perished but for the customary meeting with our emissaries.”
“When did this happen?”
“In 1884. She was eighteen.”
“Eighteen then?”
Chang bowed. “Yes, we are succeeding very well with her, as you may judge for yourself. Her progress has been consistently excellent.”
“How did she take things when she first came?”
“She was, perhaps, a little more than averagely reluctant to accept the situation – she made no protest, but we were aware that she was troubled for a time. It was, of course, an unusual occurrence – to intercept a young girl on the way to her wedding… We were all particularly anxious that she should be happy here.” Chang smiled blandly. “I am afraid the excitement of love does not make for an easy surrender, though the first five years proved ample for their purpose.”
“She was deeply attached, I suppose, to the man she was to have married?”
“Hardly that, my dear sir, since she had never seen him. It was the old custom, you know. The excitement of her affections was entirely impersonal.”
Conway nodded, and thought a little tenderly of Lo-Tsen. He pictured her as she might have been half a century before, statuesque in her decorated chair as the carriers toiled over the plateau, her eyes searching the wind-swept horizons that must have seemed so harsh after the gardens and lotus-pools of the East. “Poor child!” he said, thinking of such elegance held captive over the years. Knowledge of her past increased rather than lessened his content with her stillness and silence; she was like a lovely cold vase, unadorned save by an escaping ray.
He was also content, though less ecstatically, when Briac talked to him of Chopin, and played the familiar melodies with much brilliance. It appeared that the Frenchman knew several Chopin compositions that had never been published, and as he had written them down, Conway devoted pleasant hours to memorizing them himself. He found a certain piquancy in the reflection that neither Cortot nor Pachmann had been so fortunate. Nor were Briac’s recollections at an end; his memory continually refreshed him with some little scrap of tune that the composer had thrown off or improvised on some occasion; he took them all down on paper as they came into his head, and some were very delightful fragments. “Briac,” Chang explained, “has not long been initiated, so you must make allowances if he talks a great deal about Chopin. The younger lamas are naturally preoccupied with the past; it is a necessary step to envisaging the future.”