Landscape with figures
“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.
9
Ambrose found an opportunity, during the afternoon, to ascertain from
the two girls their views as to the expedition.
He had gone ashore with them, at the instance of Lychnis, and they had
climbed to the top of a humped green hill so as to survey the country.
There they stood, under a plum-tree in blossom, protected, as Lychnis
observed, by cousins of Terence’s messengers from Paradise. Lychnis
herself was in a fragile plum-colored frock, out of compliment to them,
and her red-haired fellow was in willow-green.
Behind, between two contortions of cliff, lay the sea. Far away,
across the wrinkled and fissured hills, there were mountains with the
unmelted snows of winter lying on their tops like petals of narcissus.
The afternoon was spring-like, and there seemed to Ambrose to be a
fragrance of lilies; but whether it came from distant fields or whether
the girls were scented with it, he could not quite decide. But he
suddenly remembered that the Chinaman had spoken of a great lake of
water-lilies beyond the mountains of the interior.
Lychnis stood on the hill with her hands clasped behind her, frowning
at the snows.
“Is that where we are going?” she asked.
“The indications point that way, I believe. Does it amuse you to go?”
“Oh yes! And really, if we don’t find something new, something strange,
there, I think I shall die. Shall we perhaps discover some secret of
life there, do you suppose?”
“You mean?”
Ruby was wandering about, rather bored, and Lychnis, as often before,
talked intimately to her confessor. “I am so tired of reading books and
meeting people and thinking, just to fill up the time. I am so tired of
being conscious and trying to be more conscious. It is a disease that a
drink of genuine life would purge out of the system. I want to become
so that I’m waiting to get up in the morning just because it is another
day to live; then, when I lie down in bed at night, sleep would be a
deep physical pleasure. I wish it was a young world, with only a few
people in it, and spring meant that one would go out of doors and ride
away on some quest.”
“Romantic,” he observed. “And is not that what you are to do now, with
your squires?”
“But it will be only us, and we only fill up the time, without zest and
unconsciousness. Would you call my father whole-hearted any more? He
knows now that he makes what is not worth making, and he has lost touch
with life. Sir Richard lives merely intellectually, and he only knows
about the how of things and argues fantastically as to their why. He
makes out God to be a symbol in mathematics. Then Terence. His visions
are old, and I think they are pathological and mad. His auras and
reincarnations and glittering spirits from other planes, and all his
vibrations and rhythms and things—they are the cloud-rack of a decaying
personality. They are illusions of visions; and who would follow them
to the world’s end, except daddy, more in contempt than faith? And as
for Blackwood, he is so disillusioned that he wants to come to an end,
and maltreats his mind with some old lost discipline for making it
think of nothing, which it was never meant to do. And Sprot does not
even know that there are thoughts, or doubts, or despairs. He’s merely
a cell, and he can only market goods, I am sure without zest. No, Fulke
is the only one who has any vision of a sweet and joyous world. He has
youth in him, and desire, and all that. But his shape displeases me.”
She looked up at the plum-blossom burning on the branches above her.
“There is Quentin. He has zest,” Ambrose observed.
“But what for? Yet he pleases me, and if I find nothing at the end of
this journey I think I may let him please me more—if he can. For one
can have pleasure if one can have nothing else. Yet there are certain
things about love that I don’t thoroughly understand—you could tell me,
if I could ask you. I think I could.”
Her head was bent in thought. Then she raised up her passion-lidded
eyes, and Ambrose took the opportunity to examine her state of mind.
“Perhaps it is not life that you desire,” he said thoughtfully. “There
is something else—you will understand what I mean some day.”
“You mean love, I suppose?” she asked, indifferent.
“No, not that.”
“I find love a bore,” she observed. “It might not be, I can conceive.
Several have loved me, and Fulke now I’m afraid, and Quentin, if we
are to call that love. And I love myself undoubtedly. When I see
myself in the mirror I wish, sometimes, that I were a young man, and I
feel that if I were women would love me, and I would take one—perhaps
Ruby, though she is rather stupid. I could love a god, if he wasn’t
too curly-headed and milk-white. Mine would be dark-haired, not fair,
like Terence’s clumsy Irish heroes. But there are no gods, unless
there are some lost here in China. Mine would have an air of profound
thoughtfulness. If there were gods, do you think I would have a chance?”
She looked so comically serious that Ambrose laughed at her.
She was petulant at his laughing. “You don’t love me, do you, Ambrose?
You only think I’m funny.”
He says her sentence came at him like a flung blossom with a little
dart in it. He records his answer:
“I can make no talk when it comes to ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Really, I’m not sure
that I’m aware of feelings and desires and so forth.” He remarks that
he scarcely knew how to put it.
“Oh, I know,” she replied scornfully. “You only make notes. We are
all specimens. Still, that’s just as well, because if you were at
all likely to love me”—she flushed, now, at the word spoken before
in a rushing impulse—“there’d be nobody left to talk to. You know,
Ambrose....” She hesitated, looking about in the grass as if words