Landscape with figures
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.
3
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.
4
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.”