Landscape with figures
“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.
5
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.”
6
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.
7
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