Landscape with figures
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.
8
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.”