Chapter 1 of 16 · 3969 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES

_By_ RONALD FRASER

_NEW YORK_ BONI & LIVERIGHT _MCMXXVI_

PREFACE

This book is only an attempt to reproduce, in words, experiences that have come in contemplating the landscapes, flowers and figures in Chinese pictures and on their porcelain. It is the story of a human mind that follows the mysterious and half-wanton beckonings of such an experience until it is seized and understood. The originals of my three Chinese friends are to be seen in the print-room, the ceramic-room, and the Asiatic galleries of the British Museum. I am not attempting to convey any profound meaning, unless it be the meaning of that mystical proverb, “Everything comes to him who waits.” The system of thought that I attempt to reproduce is Chinese and very ancient. I have not been able to make up my mind whether it contains something of general value, or whether it is merely a thought-puzzle with which those who find pleasure in such occupations may amuse themselves.

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES

We take this flower-filled and graceful story of a summer visit to a valley of the Far East from the diaries and minutes of Ambrose Herbert. It grows from his leaves like an image of some choice, cultivated flower, some Asiatic lake-lily; there is, indeed, a delicate lily-smell, a faint water-smell, that teases the sense with a hint of queer landscapes, alien, impenetrable faces, in an unreal world of paradoxical dreams.

Yet they visited the real heart of that image, these seven men who called themselves, in a vein of humour, the Seven Sages, and it appears that they scarcely held their own, when it came to philosophy, with the uncompromising practitioners of wisdom they found there. After all, they were Europeans. Men of considerable sensibility, they yet did not give the things of the spirit undue attention; still less did they permit any vision of the universe they might have had to interfere with their way of life. They lived by common-sense adjustment to the more obvious in circumstances, occasionally, at sentimental moments, following a chance gleam—but not following it too far. Five of them, that is. The other two had gone wrong.

All seven were associated in business—Lord Sombrewater’s business—and he was their president. They travelled in his steam-yacht. In England it was their custom to dine once a week at Lord Sombrewater’s house or in his bamboo garden, to hear a little music perhaps, drink wine (except one of them), discuss life and the world. Now the industrial world was seething at this time, and Lord Sombrewater had seemed to retire his forces, leaving a picket here, an outpost there, a strong point where necessary, well held. He had withdrawn into the quiet of the ocean to mature plans, taking with him these friends and chief lieutenants, who had each something to contribute. Much business was done daily by wireless. He kept touch with reluctant Governments, and controlled his generals in charge of the field, with relentless hand. Ambrose remarks that a wise captain-general of industry will not omit to remember that the good faith of a deputy may fail, and he is certain that Lord Sombrewater, a silent man, harboured during his silences considerations of that order even in regard to his six friends.

Ambrose Herbert was annalist and minute-writer to the Sages. He was not himself a Sage. He recorded the sagacity of others, fitted for this exercise by the passionless receptivity of his mind. Every morning, every hour, he swept his mind clean, so that he might receive unprejudiced the impressions of the day, and no doubt that is why the lineaments of the people in his records, and the scenery, are so clear. It came to his ears that this passivity was looked on doubtfully in a man not yet senile, not yet even middle-aged, hardly mature; it was complained that he had no character, except in his being characterless; it was thought unfortunate. But Lord Sombrewater thought otherwise.

The first time we see them they are in far eastern seas. Lychnis, who is Lord Sombrewater’s daughter, Ruby Frew-Gaff and her father (the tall, polished Sir Richard, with pale blue eyes, Lord Sombrewater’s chief physicist) are in the motor-launch with the light-bearded and bard-like Terence Fitzgerald and Ambrose himself. Something had gone wrong with the pelagic trawls that they used for capturing plants out of the ocean. It seems to them a rather strange and other-worldly ocean, like a sea in a picture, or on a vase. It is afternoon. There is a magical warm scent in the wind, as if they were near some land of delicate spring. Terence, the poet-painter-seer, is riding in the bows, but his soul is afloat. Sir Richard is busy with the apparatus, and the two girls, who have stolen a forbidden plunge in the sea, are clinging to the sides of the launch like wet sea-snails. The ship, into which the Sages have committed the weight of their philosophy, the _Floating Leaf_, painted the colour of the bamboo, heaves gently a quarter of a mile off on waves of a dark liquid green, which is compared with the green of some claret glasses they used, and as the afternoon wears on the sky becomes the same colour.

Ambrose, as usual, takes occasion to note some details. He mentions the longitude, the latitude, the depth, and the temperature at various levels as registered by the deep-sea thermometer. In addition, he mentions some details with regard to the two girls; for instance, that their arms and legs (bloodless, because of the cold) make changing lights with their wet, plum-coloured bodies, and the patterns move rhythmically. There is no doubt which of the two he prefers. At least, whenever he describes them he gives Lychnis more space, possibly because she is far more complex in her nature and difficult to describe. He finds a key to the two girls in all their features. Ruby is red-haired, well-developed and dimpled. Her mouth is described as full and red, and (for those who have desires that way) of the kind which, more than any other that he has seen, Ambrose supposes might be thought kissable—that is to say, for an upstanding and not too subtle lover. Lychnis is called, amongst other things, flower-like or spritish. He speaks of a flower-like face, with some trace on it of spritish and fairy passion. Her mouth seems to arouse thoughts of a non-sensual order—in himself, that is, for he records a remark of the Sage Quentin that to kiss Lychnis on the lips would be to find heaven through the flames of sensation. But Ambrose asks, would a man want to maul the body of a primrose with his mouth? In writing of the afternoon under description, he takes opportunity to point out a relation between their minds and their physique. Ruby, with reddish hair and fine shining body, travels tirelessly in the sea like some fabulous, ocean-going fish, and she is not variable in her moods; but Lychnis slithers and plays in the fields of the sea fawn-like, and then she is to be seen at rest considering the waters, or grimacing behind a wave.

Presently Sir Richard, discovering where they were, commanded them with tones of displeasure into the boat. Ruby, who had only done what her friend ordered, obeyed, and Lychnis, stopping first to nose under the stern as if she were a whale, followed.

“This is really not very sensible,” he said, with an eye on their vascular systems. “Down below at once and get dressed.”

Lychnis stood on the deck for a moment consulting her inward heart. With her it was not a question of obeying or not obeying. In all matters she followed some secret and rhythmic way that unfolded itself to her at a suitable time. Ambrose transfers a sketch of her, standing there in her plum-coloured bathing dress, to his white pages. He discusses her head, shown against sky and sea, as a subtle and beautiful relation of browns and ambers and pinks. Her eyes were a surprising brown, greenish in face of the light, and her eyelashes made a line of blackish purple when the eyelids were lowered. Her hair seemed amber, light amber to brown, but often it held coppery lights too, and a sort of deep heliotrope sheen and shadow, as now, against sunset. The bloom of her skin, he says, was too delicate to injure with human language—he only indicates a flush of health under the tan of sun and voyage, and a vividness of colouring that came when her feelings were high. He does tell us that her mouth utterly satisfied the mind, with its pink deeper than coral, and a stain of some still richer hue—he never can decide what it is, and vermilion-purple is the nearest he can come to it. She had a way of turning up the corners of her mouth at him. Ruby called it making a fox-face. Then he speaks, geometrically, of certain curves which presented her to notice as a young woman. He makes more than a score of attempts, one time and another, to convey the movement and fine beauty of those curves, to describe certain relations between one part of her and another.

She replied to Sir Richard, showing small, sharp teeth and umber shadows in the delicious cavern of her mouth: “I couldn’t help it. There’s something funny in the afternoon, or in the sea—something that makes one feel dreamy.”

He smiled indulgently at her. “What does it make you dream of, visionary, yet not unpractical Lychnis?”

She answered his smile. “Do you remember the seascape in some dessert-plates of daddy’s at home? They came from Asia, I think—old, buried Asia. I thought I had got melted into that picture.”

Ruby, willing and adoring slave of the finer girl, never venturing to move without her except under orders, called from the companion-way: “Do come, Licky darling.” And Licky, her inward heart at that moment speaking, did not refuse. But she repeated to Sir Richard, as she went off: “I believe we have got melted into a picture. We are going to have an adventure in a dessert-plate.”

When the two young women came back again, clothed and glowing (we hear that the tiny cabin was electrically warmed), evening was on the sea. They drew off a little to watch their ship, a blotch of brown-green floating on deep green water under a sky of dissolving lemon fire. Terence Fitzgerald still rode in the bows, tall, rapt and motionless (except that a sigh would now and then escape him, with a sentence or two). For him such things as Ambrose notes, axes of reference and other matters of exact detail, were not of moment. He had a fair beard, and he was bard-like and communed with the lordly ones, riding in the bows of the boat. And presently, when the _Floating Leaf_ drifted across the disc of the sun, he lifted his hands up, and his brows furrowed in what Ambrose calls the pain of his vision. He spoke:

“I saw a cloud of them like peach-blossoms blown over the sea.”

“A cloud of what?” asked Sir Richard.

“The beautiful people.”

Sir Richard was tickled.

“They went sunwards, with an ecstasy on their faces, and we are to follow them.”

“Ecstasy’s all very well in these tricky waters, Terence, but I should prefer to see their navigation certificates.”

Terence smiled. “Believe me or not, my scientific Richard, we are to find a heavenly country.”

Lychnis gazed at him round-eyed and more or less believing. She was 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.

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.

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.”

“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.”