Landscape with figures
“A little lower and we shall come to his face.”
“He had a ridiculous coat on.”
“Too low. Mount him.”
“And I couldn’t see his legs.”
“They are important, certainly. But for God’s sake tell me about his
face!”
“Oh well, then! I don’t like a man to have a yellow skin, and
moth-eyebrows, and such a tiny mouth, and a jaw round instead of
square, and eyes that look and look without moving.”
“I see. Delicate hands and a tiny mouth. Not European, it’s true. Not
the sort of man who takes you in his grasp and sucks passionate kisses
off your mouth, as if he were licking an oyster out of its gape.”
“Oh, Licky, you’re dreadful! You won’t understand. I can’t explain. I
only mean there’s something about him that gives me the shivers.”
“Precisely—and deliciously. With a terrific, god-like power that comes
of the very calm and delicateness of his face.”
“I shall dream of him in the night.”
“A calm, shining and awful figure, with a golden skin and slanting
eyes, standing over you in a transfiguration; a visitor from some
untroubled Nirvana; a being without thoughts, looking with wonder at
your thought-troubled face. Not that thought troubles you much, my
Juno.”
“Oh yes, it does,” protested Ruby. “I wonder and wonder—sometimes for
hours. But not like you, Licky. You’re strange and say funny things.”
Lychnis suddenly changed her mood. “That’s for Ambrose to put down in
his book. Dear Ambrose——” She took his arm and studied his face. He
felt her eyes on him like the eyes of a violet. “Ambrose is a little
Chinese,” she said. “He’s calm.” Then suddenly: “You can’t tell what
thoughts are going on behind his serene, pink forehead. Does he ever
give you the shivers, Ruby?”
“Oh, never!” cried Ruby.
Then they took him for a walk in the groves of the bamboo, one on each
arm, and Lychnis whispered to him: “What terrific nonsense I’ve been
talking!” They mounted Terence’s tower, and purple night stole over the
Lotus Lake, and a myriad fireflies flickered over the forest.
21
Next morning there was a council of the Sages. It was very hot, and the
Sages lay in chairs on a lawn before the Pavilion.
“The position is as follows,” said the chairman. “I have received
an invitation, very much resembling a command, to make a ceremonial
call, along with the rest of you, upon the Mandarin who inhabits the
rock-island in the Lotus Lake. The invitation, or command—one moment,
please, Sprot—is written in English, and the Mandarin’s name appears to
be Lung, or, as he kindly translates, Dragon. The question is, Shall we
go? Now, my friend.”
“I say, Certainly not,” Sprot burst out. “Who is he, that we should
obey his commands? I vote we don’t go, just to show him we’re free,
independent Englishmen!”
Quentin whistled a few bars of the National Anthem.
“And in the alternative?” queried Lord Sombrewater.
“Stay here,” replied Sprot firmly.
“But that would hardly be courteous.”
“Why? They’re only Chinese. A lot of dirty, hugger-mugger, gibbering
Orientals. But let’s go away altogether, if you like. I don’t want to
stay. A place like this, where nothing ever happens, gets on my nerves.
I want to go back to England and see a good old flaring advertisement
of Beecham’s Pills. You know where you are, then.”
“And supposing,” asked Sir Richard, “they won’t let us go back?”
“What d’you mean?” Sprot went pale all at once.
Lord Sombrewater’s eyes were suddenly on Frew-Gaff. “Will you enlarge
that a little, Richard?”
“What I mean is this: One has been sensible ever since we landed of
the existence in these parts of somebody with very considerable power.
Looking back, one may perhaps see that influence, or power, working
even before we landed. And I myself am sensible of a deliberate,
forming hand, not only in events, but in our material environment, even
in the landscape. More than that—we are living at the generosity of
someone who can afford to be very slow and ceremonious in discovering
himself. I feel myself that underneath this prodigality of forethought
for our comfort there lies an immense sureness, based on power. I feel
that it is a kindly power, but it may be otherwise. In any case I am
not afraid. I am profoundly interested; and for that reason, as well
as for the sake of that high-breeding which I still hope distinguishes
some Englishmen, I vote that we accept the invitation, in appropriate
terms.”
“You express me exactly, Richard,” said the chairman, with an abrupt
nod—“except that I shall have something to add.”
“I think it’s very unfair,” said Sprot, “to those of us who are
uncomfortable in this valley. I do protest most earnestly against my
surroundings. Who are our neighbours here? Twelve lunatics who drivel
all day on a rock; a most suspicious-looking individual who rides about
on a goat, which is contempt of civilization; a flock of gibbering
servants; and a person who calls himself Dragon and lives on an island
in the middle of a lake. I ask you, Can anybody feel confidence in
people who behave like that?”
“What do you think, Quentin?” Sombrewater hoped to extinguish Sprot
in the draught of Quentin’s eloquence; but Quentin was lazy in the
heat, and Europe-sick, and only murmured of some scandalous adventure
with a brocaded young lady on a summer’s afternoon in Spain (where he
was engaged in the sale of electrical goods). She had consented, he
remembered, because of a poetical feeling for the warm and indolent
splendour of the afternoon, and there was a whole Spanish landscape in
her torrid embrace.
“Interesting,” said the chairman, “but irrelevant. Terence, I think we
can anticipate your views—and yours, Blackwood. Your vote is to remain,
I am sure, Fulke?”
“My vote,” said Fulke sullenly, “is to stay here, if we must, but to
send the girls immediately back to the ship.”
“Hear, hear,” said Sprot.
“Why?” asked Quentin, stirring.
“Because, in my opinion, as far as one of them is concerned, if
she doesn’t go away from this valley now she never will. She’ll be
bewitched, if she isn’t already, and go against Nature.”
“But how nice for her,” said Quentin, “to go against Nature! It will
be an experience. That’s what we all desire, I presume, and find so
difficult to get—experiences, strange experiences. People are so
unwilling to lend themselves to experience.”
“Ambrose knows what I mean,” replied Fulke, still sullen and hang-dog
with thwarted passion.
“May we this once invite you to contribute to the debate, Ambrose?”
asked the chairman, folding his plump, capable hands and looking down
at his papers.
Ambrose replied that as regards both the girls he could vouch that
their instincts were infallible for whatever was in accordance with
Nature, complex as the reactions of one of them might be and tortuous
in working to a conclusion. As regards what might prove to be in
accordance with Nature, it was inadvisable to dogmatize.
“Very well, then,” said Lord Sombrewater, shooting him a glance. “There
is a majority for remaining. And in deciding, myself, to remain, let
me say that I accept certain risks, as I may call them. All my life I
have taken risks, when I felt within myself a certain compulsion, which
was itself, perhaps, born of a hidden knowledge of what the result
was bound to be. I have never been wrong. I may be wrong, possibly,
this time. But do not the indications all point one way, and are we
not really compelled to see this adventure out? We are a band of men
who have come together because of a common interest. Business, yes—but
as well as that we are seeking something in life. Like all Europeans,
we are seekers after something vaguely defined. We find ourselves,
suddenly, unexpectedly, in a more than merely other-than-European
world. It is a world that so nearly resembles our own world that the
subtle differences are the more surprising. It is our world in a
slightly distorted mirror. Already some one or two of us find ourselves
uncomfortable. There is something in the environment that is not
agreeable to our conceptions of what ought to be, or indeed of what
is. But I am convinced, with Quentin, that we must not desert this
opportunity of experience, be the results what they may, until we have
searched it to its last end. We must go on. I propose it.”
Ambrose wondered how far Lord Sombrewater, or any of them, would go.
Lychnis, he fancied, would outstrip them in searching an experience to
the bottom.
There being a majority, the chairman’s proposal was adopted, and the
meeting broke up. Lord Sombrewater took Ambrose by the arm and walked
with him to the red mooring-raft among the reeds of the Lake. “A
somewhat obscure speech of yours, Ambrose,” he said. “I feel you know
my daughter better than I do, and better than any other man ever will.
I am her father, and my feelings are strong. One day, no doubt, she
will have a lover, and his feelings will presumably be strong too.” (He
seemed to think it unnecessary, though, that she should have a lover.)
“But you are detached, and the more observant. What were you getting
at? To what sort of eventuality did you refer?”
“I have not gone so far in my mind as to formulate an eventuality,”
Ambrose replied.
“You are an old pike,” said Sombrewater. “You never bite and you will
never be caught.”
22
Arrayed in harmonious splendours, they floated, next morning, in a
crowd of fragile and fantastic boats of red, yellow and black, through
lanes of flushed lotuses towards the Rock. Servants paddled them. Here
and there an unknown white bird with crimson beak walked sedately on
the carpet of leaves, or a green-headed duck dabbled with his bill
among the stalks of the water-lilies. The Rock itself, at the distance
of half a mile, covered with foliage and flowers, looked as if some
lake-dragon, rising from the fathomless bottom, had thrust up the
carpet of lilies with his back and fallen asleep on the water.
“It’s black and mysterious down there, among the stalks of the lilies,”
whispered Lychnis. “One would like to be a fish and swim down among
oozy roots. It must be wonderful to be a fish and nose about in a
reed-world. But aren’t they pure, the lotuses? Like the flushing
thoughts that sometimes come up from our black insides.”
“It is remarkable,” observed Quentin from under his canopy, “that a
creature with so much in the way of tripes should throw off the dewy
cobwebs of imaginations that one so often has.”
“Illusions,” said Blackwood.
“It’s lovely floating on water,” said Ruby. “I’m ready to live any
number of lives like this, Mr. Blackwood.”
He firmly shut his ascetic lips, and his eyelids too (notes Ambrose),
shutting them down on the bright summer-morning picture of Lychnis,
full length and slender in her floating casket of coral.
“You’re not frightened, Ruby?” queried her friend across the separating
leaf-carpet.
She shook her head.
But perhaps Lychnis herself was just a little dubious when they came
within a hundred yards of the sun-beaten Rock and closely saw its
dragon-spine ridge, its burden of pine and fig-tree, and its steep
side, with little exquisite summer-houses pat to the colour and design
of contour and foliage. And they were all a little silent when,
rounding the head of the island, they entered its shadow and paddled
under its towering wall. This was on the side of the Lake away from
their Pavilion; they were cut off, so to speak, from what they knew.
But the island seemed civilized and friendly enough. The wall of rock,
coming up sheer out of the depths of the Lake (one could see great carp
and wondrous fish nosing in crannies many feet below), was alive, a
wrinkled meditation in stone. Reeds fringed it here and there, foliage