Part 2

“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 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.”