Chapter I: Part 1

Text size

LANDSCAPE
WITH FIGURES

_By_
RONALD FRASER

_NEW YORK_
BONI & LIVERIGHT
_MCMXXVI_

PREFACE

This book is only an attempt to reproduce, in words, experiences that have come in contemplating the landscapes, flowers and figures in Chinese pictures and on their porcelain. It is the story of a human mind that follows the mysterious and half-wanton beckonings of such an experience until it is seized and understood. The originals of my three Chinese friends are to be seen in the print-room, the ceramic-room, and the Asiatic galleries of the British Museum. I am not attempting to convey any profound meaning, unless it be the meaning of that mystical proverb, “Everything comes to him who waits.” The system of thought that I attempt to reproduce is Chinese and very ancient. I have not been able to make up my mind whether it contains something of general value, or whether it is merely a thought-puzzle with which those who find pleasure in such occupations may amuse themselves.

LANDSCAPE WITH
FIGURES

We take this flower-filled and graceful story of a summer visit to a valley of the Far East from the diaries and minutes of Ambrose Herbert. It grows from his leaves like an image of some choice, cultivated flower, some Asiatic lake-lily; there is, indeed, a delicate lily-smell, a faint water-smell, that teases the sense with a hint of queer landscapes, alien, impenetrable faces, in an unreal world of paradoxical dreams.

Yet they visited the real heart of that image, these seven men who called themselves, in a vein of humour, the Seven Sages, and it appears that they scarcely held their own, when it came to philosophy, with the uncompromising practitioners of wisdom they found there. After all, they were Europeans. Men of considerable sensibility, they yet did not give the things of the spirit undue attention; still less did they permit any vision of the universe they might have had to interfere with their way of life. They lived by common-sense adjustment to the more obvious in circumstances, occasionally, at sentimental moments, following a chance gleam—but not following it too far. Five of them, that is. The other two had gone wrong.

All seven were associated in business—Lord Sombrewater’s business—and he was their president. They travelled in his steam-yacht. In England it was their custom to dine once a week at Lord Sombrewater’s house or in his bamboo garden, to hear a little music perhaps, drink wine (except one of them), discuss life and the world. Now the industrial world was seething at this time, and Lord Sombrewater had seemed to retire his forces, leaving a picket here, an outpost there, a strong point where necessary, well held. He had withdrawn into the quiet of the ocean to mature plans, taking with him these friends and chief lieutenants, who had each something to contribute. Much business was done daily by wireless. He kept touch with reluctant Governments, and controlled his generals in charge of the field, with relentless hand. Ambrose remarks that a wise captain-general of industry will not omit to remember that the good faith of a deputy may fail, and he is certain that Lord Sombrewater, a silent man, harboured during his silences considerations of that order even in regard to his six friends.

Ambrose Herbert was annalist and minute-writer to the Sages. He was not himself a Sage. He recorded the sagacity of others, fitted for this exercise by the passionless receptivity of his mind. Every morning, every hour, he swept his mind clean, so that he might receive unprejudiced the impressions of the day, and no doubt that is why the lineaments of the people in his records, and the scenery, are so clear. It came to his ears that this passivity was looked on doubtfully in a man not yet senile, not yet even middle-aged, hardly mature; it was complained that he had no character, except in his being characterless; it was thought unfortunate. But Lord Sombrewater thought otherwise.

The first time we see them they are in far eastern seas. Lychnis, who is Lord Sombrewater’s daughter, Ruby Frew-Gaff and her father (the tall, polished Sir Richard, with pale blue eyes, Lord Sombrewater’s chief physicist) are in the motor-launch with the light-bearded and bard-like Terence Fitzgerald and Ambrose himself. Something had gone wrong with the pelagic trawls that they used for capturing plants out of the ocean. It seems to them a rather strange and other-worldly ocean, like a sea in a picture, or on a vase. It is afternoon. There is a magical warm scent in the wind, as if they were near some land of delicate spring. Terence, the poet-painter-seer, is riding in the bows, but his soul is afloat. Sir Richard is busy with the apparatus, and the two girls, who have stolen a forbidden plunge in the sea, are clinging to the sides of the launch like wet sea-snails. The ship, into which the Sages have committed the weight of their philosophy, the _Floating Leaf_, painted the colour of the bamboo, heaves gently a quarter of a mile off on waves of a dark liquid green, which is compared with the green of some claret glasses they used, and as the afternoon wears on the sky becomes the same colour.

Ambrose, as usual, takes occasion to note some details. He mentions the longitude, the latitude, the depth, and the temperature at various levels as registered by the deep-sea thermometer. In addition, he mentions some details with regard to the two girls; for instance, that their arms and legs (bloodless, because of the cold) make changing lights with their wet, plum-coloured bodies, and the patterns move rhythmically. There is no doubt which of the two he prefers. At least, whenever he describes them he gives Lychnis more space, possibly because she is far more complex in her nature and difficult to describe. He finds a key to the two girls in all their features. Ruby is red-haired, well-developed and dimpled. Her mouth is described as full and red, and (for those who have desires that way) of the kind which, more than any other that he has seen, Ambrose supposes might be thought kissable—that is to say, for an upstanding and not too subtle lover. Lychnis is called, amongst other things, flower-like or spritish. He speaks of a flower-like face, with some trace on it of spritish and fairy passion. Her mouth seems to arouse thoughts of a non-sensual order—in himself, that is, for he records a remark of the Sage Quentin that to kiss Lychnis on the lips would be to find heaven through the flames of sensation. But Ambrose asks, would a man want to maul the body of a primrose with his mouth? In writing of the afternoon under description, he takes opportunity to point out a relation between their minds and their physique. Ruby, with reddish hair and fine shining body, travels tirelessly in the sea like some fabulous, ocean-going fish, and she is not variable in her moods; but Lychnis slithers and plays in the fields of the sea fawn-like, and then she is to be seen at rest considering the waters, or grimacing behind a wave.

Presently Sir Richard, discovering where they were, commanded them with tones of displeasure into the boat. Ruby, who had only done what her friend ordered, obeyed, and Lychnis, stopping first to nose under the stern as if she were a whale, followed.

“This is really not very sensible,” he said, with an eye on their vascular systems. “Down below at once and get dressed.”

Lychnis stood on the deck for a moment consulting her inward heart. With her it was not a question of obeying or not obeying. In all matters she followed some secret and rhythmic way that unfolded itself to her at a suitable time. Ambrose transfers a sketch of her, standing there in her plum-coloured bathing dress, to his white pages. He discusses her head, shown against sky and sea, as a subtle and beautiful relation of browns and ambers and pinks. Her eyes were a surprising brown, greenish in face of the light, and her eyelashes made a line of blackish purple when the eyelids were lowered. Her hair seemed amber, light amber to brown, but often it held coppery lights too, and a sort of deep heliotrope sheen and shadow, as now, against sunset. The bloom of her skin, he says, was too delicate to injure with human language—he only indicates a flush of health under the tan of sun and voyage, and a vividness of colouring that came when her feelings were high. He does tell us that her mouth utterly satisfied the mind, with its pink deeper than coral, and a stain of some still richer hue—he never can decide what it is, and vermilion-purple is the nearest he can come to it. She had a way of turning up the corners of her mouth at him. Ruby called it making a fox-face. Then he speaks, geometrically, of certain curves which presented her to notice as a young woman. He makes more than a score of attempts, one time and another, to convey the movement and fine beauty of those curves, to describe certain relations between one part of her and another.

She replied to Sir Richard, showing small, sharp teeth and umber shadows in the delicious cavern of her mouth: “I couldn’t help it. There’s something funny in the afternoon, or in the sea—something that makes one feel dreamy.”

He smiled indulgently at her. “What does it make you dream of, visionary, yet not unpractical Lychnis?”

She answered his smile. “Do you remember the seascape in some dessert-plates of daddy’s at home? They came from Asia, I think—old, buried Asia. I thought I had got melted into that picture.”

Ruby, willing and adoring slave of the finer girl, never venturing to move without her except under orders, called from the companion-way: “Do come, Licky darling.” And Licky, her inward heart at that moment speaking, did not refuse. But she repeated to Sir Richard, as she went off: “I believe we have got melted into a picture. We are going to have an adventure in a dessert-plate.”

When the two young women came back again, clothed and glowing (we hear that the tiny cabin was electrically warmed), evening was on the sea. They drew off a little to watch their ship, a blotch of brown-green floating on deep green water under a sky of dissolving lemon fire. Terence Fitzgerald still rode in the bows, tall, rapt and motionless (except that a sigh would now and then escape him, with a sentence or two). For him such things as Ambrose notes, axes of reference and other matters of exact detail, were not of moment. He had a fair beard, and he was bard-like and communed with the lordly ones, riding in the bows of the boat. And presently, when the _Floating Leaf_ drifted across the disc of the sun, he lifted his hands up, and his brows furrowed in what Ambrose calls the pain of his vision. He spoke:

“I saw a cloud of them like peach-blossoms blown over the sea.”

“A cloud of what?” asked Sir Richard.

“The beautiful people.”

Sir Richard was tickled.

“They went sunwards, with an ecstasy on their faces, and we are to follow them.”

“Ecstasy’s all very well in these tricky waters, Terence, but I should prefer to see their navigation certificates.”

Terence smiled. “Believe me or not, my scientific Richard, we are to find a heavenly country.”

Lychnis gazed at him round-eyed and more or less believing. She was prepared to believe everything that sounded beautiful. “He’s in the dessert-plate, too,” she murmured.

Sir Richard started the engine and they went back to the ship. Ambrose notes how swiftly she loomed up out of the twilight, and adds that as they went on board a fierce, foreign face scowled at them out of a port-hole.

Ambrose had passed but a few minutes in his cabin, arranging his impressions and making a few colour notes, when Lord Sombrewater’s man knocked with a message. “His lordship’s compliments, Mr. Herbert, and will you be good enough to step along to his lordship’s room?”

Ambrose stepped along, and describes the two men whom he found before a decanter of sherry in the suffused light of the stateroom. There were bamboos and clouds painted on the delicate walls, so that they might have been sitting in the grove where the Sages held their sessions at home. Lord Sombrewater and George Sprot had each a cigar and a glass of sherry. The former always had a cigar and a glass of sherry at seven o’clock, and Sprot would have a cigar and a glass of sherry with anybody at any time of day. The two were in consultation, if that can be called a consultation where the one party is merely testing the reactions of the other party to his announcements.

Ambrose was greeted affably, but with swiftness and decision. “Come in, Ambrose. Sit down.” And Ambrose was in a chair. “A council to-morrow morning.” And Ambrose had made a note on his tablet. “A glass of sherry.” And the golden liquid was poured out. But Ambrose did not touch it.

Lord Sombrewater was economical in thought, in word, in movement. He wasted no man’s time, and no woman’s. He achieved his desires with the maximum of deliberation and the minimum of means, and he did not regard the achievement as an occasion for the wasteful output of sentiment. He had produced three things of importance—a world-business in electrical goods, a bamboo garden, and Lychnis. He had created the business by the remorseless application of drastic and ever-renewed principles of economy as regards both production and disposal. He had created his bamboo garden by an economy of mental effort, working to time-schedule, concentrated utterly during the appointed hour upon the subject in hand. And he had created Lychnis with an economy in the matter of demonstrative affection that his wife secretly thought distressing.

As to appearance, he was short—six inches shorter, except for Sprot, than the shortest of his six companions. He was bald longitudinally from the crown. Yet he dominated. He had little plump, masterful hands. He had a swift, birdlike glance that dwelt shrewdly for a moment and divined motives. And in the name Sombrewater there was for Ambrose (who observes that such impressions came vaguely at sea) some reminder of the deep lakes and the torrents tumbling among the crags where he had built those murmuring factories—some reminder of the scenes that from boyhood must have entered into his lordship’s being, to flower in Lychnis, perhaps to dream in her, vicariously and uneconomically.

As for George Sprot, he was a plain, ordinary man, with nondescript hair and unbeautiful form and structureless, unintelligent face. He was a “practical” man, and he had been attached in some subordinate capacity to Lord Sombrewater’s enterprise, and invited to join the Sages (but he did not know it), as representing that great body of uninstructed, biased and congenitally foolish opinion by which human affairs are so largely ruled. His motto was, that one man is as good as another, but towards men who had achieved distinction in the fields of painting, literature and music he adopted an attitude of convinced disrespect. Towards an industrial viscount he adopted an attitude of careful familiarity which scarcely concealed his adulation.

Just at present he seemed to be in a state of distressing nervous excitement. One would have said that the restraint of his employer’s manner was irksome to him, that with some other man he might have been impatient. He was impatient with Ambrose, indeed, because Ambrose was in no hurry to ask questions, and with Ambrose he had no hesitation in showing it. His manner towards Ambrose, we learn, was the manner of a man towards a paid servant, though Ambrose was not, as a matter of fact, a paid servant.

Ambrose did at last put one necessary question: “Is there anything special for the agenda?”

Lord Sombrewater shot him a glance. “Mutiny of the crew.”

Ambrose wrote on his tablet, “Mutiny of the crew.” Then he asked, as usual: “Anything else?”

A sound like the collapse of a heart escaped from Sprot. “Mutiny!” he exclaimed, interrupting under compulsion of his feelings—“Mutiny! Don’t you understand? The crew have threatened mutiny. There is—you said so, I think, Lord Sombrewater—there is actual danger.”

“Mutiny is likely to be accompanied by violence,” remarked Ambrose.

“But, good God!” Sprot burst out, “don’t you see—I——” He met Lord Sombrewater’s eye (he was appealing, of course, to him through the protective ears of Ambrose). “Has it quite been realized that—er—that—er—we have women on board—girls? That——”

There was a knock at one of the doors, and he performed what must have given him the sensation of a considerable saltatory feat. He jumped, in brief. But it was Lychnis, in a flowered dressing-gown, with her hair shaken loose to dry. She shrank back a little at sight of Sprot, as a primrose might shrink from a boot.

She ran her comb through the waves of hair, making them crackle. “Did I hear you say there’s going to be mutiny?”

“That is so,” answered her father. He turned to Sprot. “Thank you for your advice, and, of course, not a word to the women.” Sprot was dismissed, in a condition of uncontrol that Ambrose thought pitiable. Ambrose was asked, by a motion of the hand, to remain.

It was the half-hour before dinner that Lord Sombrewater liked to spend with Lychnis. Regularly at seven-thirty o’clock he waited for her to come in from her adjoining room, and very often she did. Within limits his affection for his daughter might be said to be unconsidered. In regard to his daughter there was an abeyance of his deliberate personality. He loved her, in fact. Ambrose tells us that the enjoyment of his wealth and his rank had been first and foremost in the activity of acquiring them, as an end in itself; that it was a new and exquisite gratification to him when he got Lychnis to dower with them. He liked Ambrose to be there during those half-hours, partly because Ambrose gave Lychnis pleasure by his conversation and advice. Ambrose is aware that Lord Sombrewater thought him to be a harmless kind of man. He knows that by a method of his own Lord Sombrewater had formed the opinion, on consideration of his written work, that Ambrose was the man to transmit his daughter’s beauty, in the written word, to posterity. Terence Fitzgerald, who painted for the business those wonderful and inspiring posters of god-like men radiating auras of golden brilliance, was expected, likewise, to transmit her beauty on canvas and in verse; but Terence was not asked in for the half-hour before dinner. Lord Sombrewater had formed the opinion that Terence also was an innocent man, but he was a poet, and the behaviour of a poet was less certainly predictable than that of a white-minded recorder of things done. And, indeed, the innocence of poets, in juxtaposition with the innocence of maidens, is apt to work out unhappily, sometimes.

So Lychnis might go on brushing her hair, and Ambrose might, since somebody must if her beauty was to be recorded, describe what the rhythmic movement of her arms should reveal; and if, when her body twisted in the flowered dressing-gown as she flung her hair out, the line of breast or back or thigh should please him, he might be allowed to write it accurately down.

When dinner was finished, Ambrose and Fulke Arnott sat a long time over their coffee: in attendance, the fierce, foreign face that had scowled from a port-hole.

“There’s a council to-morrow morning, Fulke,” said Ambrose.

“Is there?” rejoined Fulke. “What about?”

“Mutiny of the crew.”

“Mutiny of the—— You mean——”

“I mean they are going on strike.”

Fulke Arnott, Ambrose says, was a young man with the soul of a Greek athlete in the body of a chimpanzee, the thoughts of a saint and the means of expression of a fish-porter. He describes him as the cleanest-hearted man who ever set himself to the task of self-expression in foul language. He allowed the fountain of his genius to play in a preliminary manner. “You mean to tell me that those stinking Chinks, those crawling, paste-coloured liver-flukes, those doped nightmare beetles, have had the bowels to go on strike?”

“Precisely that.”

Fulke’s face was greasy with excitement. “Then, Ambrose, we may solemnly thank God. We meet in the eastern hemisphere what we ran away from in the west. We learn this hour, comrade Ambrose, that the blinking revolution is world-wide, and the New World is about to be.”

“With a population of Chinks, as described?” Ambrose asked. It appears that Fulke Arnott was a sidereal chemist whom Lord Sombrewater, on discovering that he knew about the interiors of stars and had a touch of quaint, constructive genius, had attached to his works with instructions to reflect upon the interiors of furnaces. It amused Lord Sombrewater to employ a revolutionary with advantage to his business, and he was fond of his conversation. Fulke on his part admired his employer as an artist, while attacking him as the world’s greatest grinder of the faces of the poor.

“What do the others make of it?” he asked.

“Sombrewater discloses nothing.”

“He has the personality of a dynamo.”

“Sprot is alarmed.”

“Naturally, the snail-gutted bourgeois.”

“Frew-Gaff says they can’t get the better of our trained intelligence.”

“He believes in science, Frew-Gaff does.”

“Terence thinks it’s very wonderful. He says the high gods are leading us.”

“It’s my belief the high gods are leading us up the garden. What about Blackwood and Quentin?”

“I haven’t told them yet.”

“It’s no good looking for Blackwood now. He’s in a trance in his cabin.”

Ambrose smiled as he thought of Blackwood in his cabin, striving to hide from life and desire. Blackwood, a too sensitive man, found the strain of life in an industrial society more than he could bear. Also, he was not successful in achieving his somewhat exquisite desires. He failed, for example, with women. Unlike Fulke Arnott, he took no consolation from dreaming of a perfect world. Fulke was for changing his surroundings; Blackwood, on the other hand, had convinced himself that there never can be happiness for anyone, and he found this belief sustaining. He had therefore embraced what he understood to be the pure doctrine of Indian Buddhism, and spent his time dodging existence by a method of protective mimicry, in which he imitated the appearance of Nothing. He had resigned the position of physiological adviser in Lord Sombrewater’s therapeutic apparatus department, and now lived in a cottage and occupied himself with the technique of self-destruction. But, as he was soon miserably to learn, he had the processes without the reality; the form quite without the inspiration.

“Quentin, I imagine, is not in a trance?” Ambrose queried.

“Quentin!” Fulke’s brow blackened. “With Lychnis and Ruby for certain. Showing off his bushy beard and his princely figure in the light of the moon. The libertine! The outsize, libidinous, bearded rat!”

“One would not describe him as a rat. There is something too royal and magnanimous about him.”

“Oh, no doubt. He has a royal air. And ruddy cheeks. And fine red lips. And a chest like a beechtree. And the legs of Ulysses. And arms that hug. The sort of man that young girls dream of.”

“It cannot be denied that he is a refined scholar.”

“You don’t grudge him his successes. Nor do I, you fish! In that realm of endeavour you only have to try and you are successful. But they don’t know, poor innocents, how deceptive size is. It’s the promise that attracts them. The performance is apt to be disappointing.”

“You are warm. And—may I say?—there is a certain odd discrepancy between your declared views on sex purity and the somewhat promiscuous and even sordid habits of your imagination in that regard.”

“Pink-cheeked Ambrose, rosy-fingered Ambrose, continent Ambrose, I don’t reconcile anything. I am the only man in this ship who doesn’t reconcile his ideas with one another, the only one who isn’t a blasted walking logic, the only one——” He stopped and patted Ambrose on the shoulder. “Come on; let’s go up on deck. I forgot I’m a Sage. The trouble is, you know, Ambrose, that, I mean to say—I shouldn’t mind if it wasn’t Lychnis. He can do what he likes about Ruby, but when it’s Lychnis—— She’s too good to be seduced by anybody but a winged, frowning Eros, and there aren’t such things. What time is it? She and Frew-Gaff and I are going to begin a new series of calculations to-night. The wonder that girl is, Ambrose! She feels about mathematics the way some people feel about flowers. She told me once that formulæ bud and blossom for her like roses. She’s all rhythm, that girl. She has the most astonishing perceptions about physical reality, and all unknowingly. It’s my belief that with just a little more she’ll find herself accidentally in possession of some extraordinary secret. She has something in her that no one else in this ship understands, something mysterious, insight—I don’t know what to call it—and she is unconscious of it. The wonder! The darling! Put that down in your notebooks and ponder it. I can see in your eye that you are composing sentences as I go along, you soulless, metal-minded register.”

Ambrose remarks that he couldn’t do better than record the conversation as it fell.

Presently they were on deck. They found Quentin with Lychnis and Ruby (in cloaks of emerald and rose respectively, with glimmering shoes), showing off his bushy beard and his heroic figure in the light of a yellow rose-leaf moon. The ship was moving gently in the foam-flowering fields of the sea. Above them, against a swaying almond-tree of stars, could be seen the head of a seaman looking over the canvas of the navigating bridge. There was no sound but the sound of the sea and Quentin’s rich voice and the girls’ laughter.

“Five-and-twenty past nine, Lychnis,” said Fulke.

“Oh, bother!” She frowned. But the thought of the calculations, once planted in her consciousness, began to attract her. “I’ll come,” she said; and chose to descend to the lower deck by an iron ladder that the sailors used in passage from foc’s’le to bridge. She vanished into the darkness like some faint emerald emanation.

“And your mother wants you, Ruby,” said Ambrose.

The rose emanation went slowly and sulkily after the emerald, and Ambrose delivered his message on the subject of mutiny with a gesture towards a light that outlined a door in the swaying foc’s’le.

“Well, I’ll take ’em on single-handed, in defence of virginity,” said Quentin, “though chastity requires no defence, for, as Judas Thomas tells us, chastity is an athlete who is not overcome. How beautiful is the story of Perpetua, the virgin martyred at Carthage, and of Thekla, for whom the lioness fought with other beasts in the arena! No, Ambrose. Purity is absolute. The pure virgin cannot be defiled, for her heart is not in the work. And that is why we need have no scruples regarding her.”

“Thekla?” asked Ambrose. “I am not acquainted with that story. I must look it up.”

At ten o’clock precisely Ambrose reported to Lord Sombrewater, who was playing bridge with his captain and two of the three ladies—Lady Frew-Gaff and Mrs. Sprot. Ruby’s red head was bent over a book and Lady Sombrewater knitted. The three ladies did not differ in appearance more noticeably than sparrows. Indeed, they closely resembled sparrows, among the painted bamboos. They had all three been very pretty girls, and that was why their husbands had married them. They had married them before they knew exactly what kind of prettiness and what accomplishments they required women to have. As regards Lady Sombrewater, the very negative of her husband, Ambrose wondered how Lychnis had been gotten out of that nonentity.

“And where is Lychnis?” she asked, as he came in.

“She’s with Sir Richard Frew-Gaff and Fulke Arnott, doing sums.”

“Queer girl. I missed her after dinner. I thought she was with you.”

“She and Ruby were with Quentin after dinner,” the captain innocently said.

Lord Sombrewater’s eye was expressionless, like a pheasant’s. The three ladies exchanged glances, glanced at Ruby, and when she glanced up from her book simultaneously glanced back again.

There was silence for an hour.

“Game and rubber,” said Mrs. Sprot at last.

“And bedtime,” added Lady Frew-Gaff. And there was a great pushing back of chairs and shaking of handbags and jingling of coins and picking up of dropped odds and ends. The choleric Chink came in with Bovril and whisky-and-soda, and as he went out again, with a last furious good-night, the ship gave a distinct heave.

Then Lychnis came in. “Yes,” she replied to a question, “there’s a wind blowing. Terence is outside sniffing it. He says it’s full of the Peach-blossom People. He says they keep on flicking the tops of the little waves with their pink feet.”

“And what did you say to that?” asked her father.

“I said no doubt it was true. He looks at the waves a lot, so he ought to know. I told him about my waves.”

“Your waves?”

“Light waves and that. Calculations about them, in rhyme and blank verse. We had wonderful ones to-night—long flat ones like trains and some like falling rockets, and a series like the rhizome of a bamboo that keeps on putting out a new shoot. Fulke nearly cried because a demonstration of Sir Richard’s was so beautiful.”

By an understanding convenient to everybody, Lady Sombrewater retained the right to use a tone of authority with her daughter, and now she ordered her daughter to bed. Swiftly she went to bed herself, thus putting disobedience out of sight. The other two ladies followed, shepherding Ruby.

It very often happened that Ambrose spent the last half-hour before bedtime in conversation with those two. It was Lord Sombrewater’s custom to drink a whisky-and-soda and to smoke a cigar, and Lychnis would chatter or gloom or behave idiotically, as her mood might be. To-night she gloomed.

“Cross to-night, Licky?” asked her father.

“Dissatisfied.” She pulled a lock of hair over her eyes and bit it—a trick of childhood when people looked at her and she was sulking.

“What beautiful hands Sir Richard Frew-Gaff has got!” she said. “They move like beings, with minds, contriving things. Mine are merely something to finish the shape of the arm.”

Ambrose looked at her arms and hands—orchids waving on stalks. Fit to express passion, they might be considered. He looked at her feet. She had pale green stockings to go with her emerald dress, and dark green snake-skin shoes. Her dress was a sheath to the flower of her body. Underneath, as Lady Sombrewater had told him, thinking him a most suitable recipient for the confidence—underneath she wore tenderest stalk-green silk. She liked to feel that her clothes were petals, a living integument of nature.

“Been working too hard?” said Lord Sombrewater.

“No,” she answered emphatically. “I don’t think I work at all. What I do comes to me, and it’s not tiring.”

“Well,” he observed, “it makes you scratch your head a good deal, judging by your hair.”

Her hair was erratic in disposition. Loosed from control, it grew and flowed from her head in fan-like streams. There was evidence that her hand had been plunged recently in its depths, for the tonic effect of irritation on the sap of her genius. She took out the pins, and her hair spread and rippled down her emerald dress, so that to the queer, associative mind of Ambrose she seemed to gloom from a torrent of some cascading tropic fern. The high forehead, heavy with thought, the considering eyes, with the lids and the shadows that spoke of what he chooses to call her plant-like passions, were seen in a wavy, ferny fountain. Nor does he stop at that in his curious description. He often describes her as plant-like, but here he talks of her as having affinities with the insect. He says that she produced an effect on him as if she were an insect, with a remote, non-human mind, regarding him from among the fronds of a fern.

“Still, I’m not tired,” she said, enigmatically smiling.

“Nevertheless, you had better go to bed,” put in Ambrose.

She walked towards the door (painted cloudy between two painted clumps of bamboo) of her bedroom. She walked with small steps in a line. It was in her walk that she became a woman. One saw that her knees and back were a woman’s. In the open door she twisted round on sinuous hips and thrust out a hand through a torrent of hair in a gesture of good-night.

“Why is she so often moody, do you suppose?” asked Lord Sombrewater when the door was shut.

“She is twenty-two. She is likely to be dissatisfied until she is mated,” Ambrose observed.

Lord Sombrewater accepted this with considerable reluctance. “No doubt there is something in what you say. The observations of a spectator are certainly very illuminating. I hardly seem to be putting her in the way of getting a mate, though, at present.” He smiled, passing it off.

“It would be difficult, no doubt, for her to find one among those on board.” He wondered whether, in fact, Lord Sombrewater was not even consciously hiding her away.

“How does she react towards Quentin?” he was asked.

“It is to be presumed that it is a matter of indifference to a flower what wind carries the pollen, or whence.”

“You are doubtless right.”

“Without pursuing a misleading analogy too far, it is to be remarked that a certain type of flower-minded and flower-passionate young woman is often strangely careless in selecting a lover.”

“That is so,” said her father slowly.

Early next morning Ambrose came on deck in a monkish dressing-gown with a fleecy towel round his neck. The wind had fallen. The morning was fresh and tender and delicate as a morning in a Chinese silk, and the sea was rippling and black like a lake. It was time for the matutinal exercises. Lord Sombrewater’s valet and the fierce Chink were in attendance with sponges and other matters; fresh and sea-water showers were fixed conveniently; but it seemed to Ambrose that there began to be something queer about these English habits in those far eastern seas.

Five of the Sages were already exercising, or standing under the showers with expressions of enjoyment or endurance. Lord Sombrewater was thorough but silent, and occupied himself with the punch-ball. Fulke Arnott, deep-chested, long-armed, bow-legged and hairy as an ape, felt his limbs with closed eyes and imagined himself a piece of Pheidias. Sprot, the pot-bellied and knock-kneed, produced in his throat a noise which he called singing, and Ambrose presumes that he felt in the remnant of his soul some echo of what in an ancestor may have been a free impulse. Terence stood under the fresh-water shower like a Druid. His exercises were those prescribed for occultists, and his mind, as the element drenched him, was concentrated on the purity of the element. Then he moved to the sea-water shower, and concentrated on salt health. When he had finished he moved over and stood by the rail, tall and stately, shading his eyes and gazing into the rising sun. Far and wide the little dark waves broke idly in tiny jets and sprays of white foam. “We float, not on water,” he was heard to say, “but on meadows of snowdrops and deep-leaved violets.”

Sir Richard Frew-Gaff was most amiable of the Sages at that time of the day. With his higher centres a little relaxed from the preceding day’s contemplation of physical reality, and warm with anticipation of another day’s work, he appeared benevolently, as it were, in the world of living phenomena, and cracked a couple of jokes. At the moment he was hanging by the knees on the horizontal bar and hailed Ambrose, passing in his white towel from the shower.

“Hallo, Ambrose!”

“Hallo!” The pale blue eyes of the scientist were looking at him upside down. “You’re pinker than ever—like a pink cherub in a white cloud.” Sir Richard swung and landed erect on the mat. “What’s the secret of your morning freshness, Ambrose? You must sleep like the sainted dead in paradise. Do you dream at all?”

“Not unless I want to.”

“Well, I envy you. I do not sleep too well nowadays.”

Ambrose would not expect to sleep, he tells us, if his brains were full of imaginations that chained him to the world of physical appearance.

Then Arthur Ravenhill came gravely from his cabin. He did not use the gymnastic apparatus. The functions of his body, assimilative and excretory, were regulated by the operations of his mind. He digested consciously, and his exercises took place in his inside. He was able to perform gymnastic feats with his liver and kidneys, and had in mind to achieve the supreme accomplishment and reverse the processes of the alimentary canal. He was very thin. He had the air, in fact, of one who has attained a considerable degree of self-mortification, and he was able at any time of the day or night to discipline himself into one of the four trances.

“Morning,” said Lord Sombrewater. “Didn’t see you yesterday.”

He stood with folded hands. “Having been led into sensual thoughts by the beauty of the afternoon, it seemed to me necessary that I should undertake the four intent contemplations. Thus, abandoning the idea that there is an ego, realizing that beauty is a glamour in the mind of that which has no ego, having rid myself of desire for any but spiritual forms of existence and then convinced myself that all existence, however abstract, is evil, the sensual images melted away.”

He passed through the group of gymnasts and stood under the shower like an ascetic at the door of his forest cave, who by chance receives cold water on the back of his neck.

“There’s a council this morning at nine,” Ambrose told him.

Last of all Quentin came striding from his luxurious bed. He certainly outshone the rest as a conception in muscle. The deck trembled and the apparatus shook with the weight of his leaps and his swinging limbs. From the great pectoral slab to the Achilles tendon he was a wonder—a muscular temple, a cathedral of bone and sinew, florid and huge. When he was holding a long arm balance on the parallel bars his torso resembled the junction of two branches of a beech. Within him, too, there was no mean nervous system and brain. He knew the classic poets, Greek and Latin, by heart, and was an expert in the art of post-mediæval, early Renaissance periods in all countries of the world. Ambrose describes him finally as a princely ruffian.

The exercises finished, they took coffee and met in council. At nine o’clock precisely Lord Sombrewater rapped on the table before him, and the Sages stopped talking. He was an expert in the chair. He had done a great deal of business in chairs, and from behind them. They afforded excellent opportunities for controlling large blocks of business by means of majorities, for giving harmless vent to the opinions of cranks, and for obtaining the consent of shareholders to reasonable proposals.

He began: “The situation we have to consider is the following: our intention was to visit Japan. The crew we took on at Sydney, after that strange trouble we had there, seem to be under the influence of some mysterious fear. That fierce-faced Chink chose them for us, you remember. Well, they have intimated that they will sink the ship unless we land them forthwith at a Chinese port.”

“Why?” asked Sprot.

It was a question the chairman expected. Shareholders were apt to ask “Why?” His technique was to unfold just such a minimum of a situation as sufficed to answer questions.

“They allege, as a matter of fact, that they have wireless orders from their union.”

“Are all those Chinks and dagos and things in a union?”

“It’s international now,” put in Fulke Arnott. “I would like to point out to you the interesting features of this situation. We’re a quarry. The arch-capitalist escapes from Europe with his accomplices in search of a year’s quiet to mature his plans, and labour brings him to book in the middle of the China Seas. It’s good. It’s pretty. It’s encouraging.”

“It’s all that,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “It’s also pure nonsense. In any case I do not consider myself a fugitive.”

“I don’t want to imply that you ran away,” Fulke replied. “The fact is that your position is one in which you can afford to take a year off, so long as you watch the intrigues of the henchmen you’ve elevated and see that they don’t manœuvre you out of the position of control.”

“You begin to see the point. The central fact is my position. It is true that I own the mines, the railways, the crops, the whole activity of large pieces of several continents. If I cannot escape them, neither can they escape me. I am their light and air. Without my activity, races perish. Unless I continue to produce business enterprises, as Terence produces pictures and Richard Frew-Gaff his hypotheses, nations will starve.”

“My answer,” said Fulke, “is: Let them.” His green-brown eyes glowed. He had a vision, as Ambrose presently ascertained, of a few young men and women, few and free, living on nuts in a wood.

“We wander from the point,” said the chairman. “I do not believe for a moment that there are any orders from any union. The trouble is something quite different. But we have to consider what action we shall take. Let us have views round the table. What is your view of our action, Fulke?”

“In theory——”

“Never mind that. Let’s hear what another business man has to say. George Sprot, your views, please.”

Sprot, who had been agitatedly twisting his fingers, was flattered. “Defy them! If they won’t work, let them starve. If they mutiny, shoot them.”

“So useful, George,” said Quentin. “So practical.”

Lord Sombrewater tapped with his hammer. “Terence.”

“I saw a cloud of beings, the colour of peach-blossom, drifting over the sea. They swayed and bent like one branch blown by the same wind. They were going towards China.”

“Attach them, Terence,” exclaimed the irrepressible Quentin. “They’ll do instead of steam when the boilers go out.”

Once more the hammer. “Richard.”

“I suggest that we run the ship ourselves. Fulke and Lychnis and I can easily work out a theory of navigation. We can complete it in a few days. Some of us must be crew. Quentin’s a whole crew of stokers in himself.”

Quentin passed a remark which Ambrose faithfully records, but we need not trouble ourselves with it.

“That’s all very well, Richard,” said the chairman; “but in a tempest I should hesitate to trust entirely in your very harmonious calculations. And in any case, the officers have not deserted.”

“Well, let us be the crew.”

“I don’t know that Barnes would care to run the ship with a crew consisting chiefly of professors. Still, it might be practicable, after we had disposed of the mutineers. Blackwood?”

“I have nothing to suggest. It is a matter of indifference to me where I am or what I am asked to do.”

“Quentin?”

“I intend,” said Quentin, “to avail myself of the opportunities for experience in both countries, and I don’t mind which comes first. There are customs in both that I desire to experience. There are things that I want to see. And there are, I fancy, in Tokyo, examples of the miraculous flowering of Sung art, in which we meet with an idealism, a spirituality, that cannot but be ennobling. What moral grandeur! What ecstatic visions! And my Buddhist friend on my left should not fail to consider the Ukiyoyé, those pictures of the frail, vanishing world, those exquisite reproaches to our transitory desires, those——”

“Precisely. When we reach Tokyo the matter shall receive consideration. In the meantime I would propose, as a practical contribution to the discussion, that we inform the crew that we are entirely ready to fall in with their suggestions and proceed to a Chinese port.”

The rest were silent. “I suppose it is the obvious course,” said Frew-Gaff at last.

“In the absence of any better proposal, such as I had hoped to receive,” said his lordship, “I think it is. We can discuss what to do next to-morrow. Is that agreed?”

It was agreed, and the meeting broke up.

The next council took place, not on the following day, but some days after. In the meantime there had been a tempest, with devils howling in the wind and waves going all ways at once and other discomforts. The _Floating Leaf_ got out of control, and now, by what all but Terence called a stroke of luck, they were aground among the reeds in the mouth of a river, perhaps a mile up-stream. The river debouched between fantastic hills like green oyster-shells, and there were some queer sailing craft, with masts like bent fishing-rods, and other strange tackle, alongside. The sky was fantastic, like the hills, and there was in the air a liveliness and odour of spring. Here and there on a hill-top a plum-tree in blossom, and by a rock on the river bank a clump of narcissus on green, springing stems. Here and there a willow or grove of bamboo. “Much like _Arundinaria Simoni_, from here,” Lord Sombrewater remarked. “Those bamboos should do well in the sea air. Nothing like sea mists for bringing out their brilliance.”

Terence dominated the council. All of them were jubilant (except Blackwood), having been brought safe out of danger of their lives. Terence harped on the fulfilment of his vision.

“But what are we to do now?” asked George Sprot—“landed here like this?”

Sombrewater let his opinion be known at once. “Terence has convinced me,” he said. “Henceforward we cannot do better than trust ourselves entirely to his pink-footed fairies. Which direction is now indicated by the Peach-blossom People, Terence?”

A light was on the brow of the bard. “They drift up-stream, between the willows.”

“Well, now,” broke in Fulke Arnott, “it so happened that I was talking just now to that fierce-faced Chink. Strangely enough, he knows this country, and he says that the river is only navigable a few miles up, except for small craft.”

“Then,” replied Terence, “we are to proceed in small craft.”

“Or until we meet some Green Figs going the other way,” put in Quentin.

Terence did not hear. “This morning as I was walking on the deck,” he continued, “there passed by among the hills a man riding upon a goat. He had a face of supernatural majesty and his eyes were terrible, and he rode beside the river and on into the hills, driving his goat with a branch of Peach-blossom.”

“The indications are plain,” said Lord Sombrewater. “We leave the ship here in the care of Barnes and the officers. The crew, I am told, have already disappeared, except for Fulke’s friend. We ourselves make a journey inland with the portable wireless until the Peach-blossom cloud comes to rest and attaches itself to a tree. If necessary, we accompany the portent as far as Tibet, but personally I hope the destination of these ghosts is within reasonable distance. What do you say?”

“I have a feeling,” said Fulke, “that it won’t be very far. That same Chinaman spoke of a dragon that is famous in these parts. It lives, I believe, in the hills yonder.”

“We must see that bird,” said Lord Sombrewater.

To George Sprot it was criminal levity to propose exchanging the conveniences of their expensive machine for the discomforts and dangers of an excursion through an unknown country, and all because of the drivelling of a literary man.

“What will the ladies say!” he exclaimed.

“Naturally we shall consult everybody concerned. Shall we do so at once?”

Taking Ambrose with him, the owner of the vessel went forthwith to discuss matters with the captain. In twenty minutes the whole thing was arranged, and Barnes was in receipt of full instructions as to the course he was to pursue in case of trouble.

“I shall, of course, keep in close touch by wireless,” said Lord Sombrewater.

“That makes it all quite easy,” said Captain Barnes. “There’s one thing, though. We must have some sort of crew on board.”

“Oddly enough,” said the first officer, “that Chinaman butler and man-of-all-work mentioned to me this morning that he would have no difficulty in getting hold of a thoroughly reliable crew.”

“Did he indeed?” observed Lord Sombrewater. “Can you tell me whether the said Chinaman had anything to do with the steering of us the night before last in the storm?”

Captain Barnes laughed. “It’s a fact he was on the navigating bridge, lending a hand. But still—what could he do?”

“Seems to me he took the opportunity to bring us to his own door. Well, that’s that. I shall leave the maids behind. Our wives will need them in any case.”

They went on deck and found the rest of the company gathered there. The two mothers, with the advice of Mrs. Sprot, were quite definite; their daughters should not go on such an absurd expedition. “This is the maddest thing my husband has agreed to yet,” said Lady Sombrewater. “I protested from the beginning. I protested against the voyage. I pointed out that we were quite comfortable at home, but I was not listened to. I protested against this outlandish China, but I was laughed at. I protested during the storm. I had a feeling that we were being plotted against. But nobody seemed to be able to do anything or have any sense at all. And now look what a pickle we’re in, landed here like this, as Mr. Sprot so rightly says. I protest——” She looked round for something to protest against. “I protest against this kind of scenery. It’s most un-English. My daughter shall not go.”

“Of course not, mother,” said Lychnis. But she smiled at her father and pinched Ambrose’s arm.

Ruby saw it. “Oh, mother,” she pouted, interpreting the signs, “if Lychnis is going, why can’t I go, too?”

“But Lychnis is not going,” said Lady Sombrewater, with firm reproof; and Ruby, who was not so quick as she was red and white and lovely, looked terribly confused.

“Then,” put in Quentin, “the sensations that we experience on our journey will be very much abated in sharpness, because, for a man who is pure in heart, like myself, there is nothing gives so much point to the beauty of early morning, to the sudden revelation of a landscape, the contemplation of the purity of flowers, the noonday rest, and the bed among bracken under the winds of night, as the neighbourhood of a couple of maidens.”

The three ladies glanced at the girls and at one another, and their eyes were guardian angels. “I absolutely put my foot down,” said Lady Sombrewater.

“And I mine,” added Lady Frew-Gaff. “In any case, if one of the girls fell sick, who would look after her, I should like to know?”

“Oh, come now, my dear!” put in her husband. “I myself, though not an expert, know a good deal about the body——”

“Encyclopædic Richard,” observed Quentin. “And for the matter of that, I also know something of the body.”

“And Blackwood was actually a professional physiologist.”

“A physiologist is not a mother,” said Lady Sombrewater.

“The body,” observed Blackwood, “is but a collection of obscene guts and unpleasant juices. Beauty is therefore a superficial illusion and the reality is extremely revolting. The body——”

Lady Sombrewater waved the girls away. She was used to these uncompromising declarations of the Sages, but she had not got to like them, and she could still protect the girls.

“The body,” continued Blackwood, “is merely an involuted skin, highly specialized at various points, and capable of sensations, especially tactile sensations, which some—as, for instance, Quentin, who has not received enlightenment—consider desirable. Man, in brief, is nothing but a piece of skin capable, in contact with another skin, of a supreme sensation which results in the establishment of a third sensational skin. Of the behaviour of these skins and their obscene accompaniments, and of the cunning fluids by which, for their extraordinary object of perpetuation, the said skins are cleverly kept in what is curiously known as health, I have a considerable knowledge. The two maiden skins, therefore, would be in a position to receive expert assistance should they fall ill and inexplicably wish to recover.”

“Mr. Blackwood!” began the three ladies at once.

But Lord Sombrewater put an end to the discussion. “We’ll settle all that presently,” he said; and they heard in his voice their doom, and perhaps (though Ambrose was not able to find out whether their thoughts were precise) the doom of their daughters.

Ambrose found an opportunity, during the afternoon, to ascertain from the two girls their views as to the expedition.

Comments

Landscape with figuresChapter I: Part 1

0%37 min left in chapter