Part 3

“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 might spring up there. “It seems funny to say ... I mean, all those men are a nuisance in one way or another. When they look at me their eyes are seeing me as a young woman. Daddy, even ... you understand? Fulke displeasingly, because he’s like a chimpanzee and I find it insulting, and Sprot sentimentally and disgustingly, and Quentin—rather excitingly. And Sir Richard, too, Ambrose, though it sounds wicked of me to say it, but I can’t help knowing. Terence, of course, pretends I’m his inspiration. Do poets embrace their inspirations? I expect so. And with Arthur Blackwood it’s the way he sternly doesn’t look at me, and when I’ve been talking to him he always goes into four or five kinds of trances. It’s all a nuisance. But you, when you look at me and talk to me, though I know you perceive every inch and movement of me and very many of my thoughts, but not all by any means, I don’t mind. It is so, isn’t it?”

He bowed, and admired her standing up straight and frowning and flushed against the stem of the young plum-tree. A pink blossom fluttered down on her.

She held on the way of her talk. “Now you are admiring me and making a mental note of my shape. You will record, later on, that the sky behind the blossom”—she turned to look—“is all tender apple-green, because it’s soon going to begin to be evening. Well, look at me.” She stood up on the toes of her slender shoes, and threw her arms out and her head back, so that he could study her breast and throat. He did so, and discusses the twin blossoms of her, and her whole shape, as a relation of subtle, slender curves that had a most stimulating effect on the mind and carried it beyond thoughts of physical beauty to profound thoughts of an informing creative spirit. He mentions that her throat was a springing flowerstalk.

“There,” she said at last. “You have looked, and it’s nothing to me. It would not be nothing if I were in love. I should be glad and happy at being studied. But I’m glad to be quite assured that I’m not, because now I know that one day, soon perhaps, I shall be able to ask you questions—questions I could put to no woman, last of all my mother, and no other man. You are the only soul in the world, Ambrose, who could receive from a woman such questions as I shall ask you—the only soul who could answer them without being silly. Soon—there are things I must ask you soon. Over there,” she pointed to the distant mountains, now cold and spiritual in the sinking sun—“over there, perhaps, we shall find someone, and there will no longer be something missing. There will be a note found to complete a music. And you,” she added with sudden malice—“you shall be marriage registrar.”

Then Ruby came wandering back—a lazy, redheaded Juno—and with her hands she clasped a mass of flowers to her bosom. “These are for the ship,” she observed. “Why didn’t you come and help me when I called? And what have you been jawing about? You’re always jawing, you two.”

“We’ve been talking most frightful stupid nonsense,” said Lychnis.

“I expect so,” replied Ruby with unconcern.

Then some of the others came from the ship, and they all gathered flowers until the silver moon rose out of the fissure of a hill into the tender, trembling sky. Mist began to form, and drove them back to the _Floating Leaf_, and it was not long before there was nothing to be seen but the mist and the moon, and here and there a plum-tree on a black knoll rising out of the mist, and a flight of wild geese crossing the sky.

10

Next morning, not unexpectedly, the Chinaman presented himself before Ambrose in his cabin like a scowling apparition, and proposed, in respectful and professorial language, that he should accompany the party. “For,” said he, “a guide to the country, its manners and customs, its flora and fauna; an interpreter of the language of the people, and more especially of their state of mind in regard to the several members of the party; a softener of passions; a holder forth of the timely coin; and, if need be, one who can remind men at the appropriate juncture of the unfortunate results that follow unthinking interference with the obvious will of Fate—such a one would perhaps be not without use to the party.”

“Are you such a one?” asked Ambrose.

“While striving constantly to imitate the tranquil humility of the narcissus upon which we gaze through the port-hole, I am one who has made not altogether unavailing efforts to acquire the technique of such a one as I describe.”

“Then such a one had better address his further inquiries to Lord Sombrewater.”

The other bowed and accompanied Ambrose to the owner’s room, where he repeated his proposal. Ambrose noted with admiration how swiftly his chief put on an impassivity that did not seem less than that of the Chinaman. The little expressionless, pheasant eyes met eyes of unreadable black lacquer, and Ambrose records that there seemed to be a sort of communication going on, as between animals or birds.

Lord Sombrewater at once confirmed an impression which Ambrose had himself long since received. “You are a man of considerable understanding,” he said. “You have, very markedly, the characteristic visage of a Sage.”

“I have gone but a very little way,” the Chinaman replied, “in imitation of those who have obtained wisdom, or, more correctly, of those who have learned to throw wisdom away.”

“You are a deft waiter as well.”

“That, noble viscount, comes of having perceived the inner nature of plates, glasses, table-napkins and the like. It is in such a purely menial capacity that I venture to offer my inexpert services.”

“In what capacity were you on the navigating bridge that night we were driven ashore?”

“I desired to meditate from that exposed place upon the state of mind of the master when he said, ‘The self-controlled man occupies himself with the unseen and not with what is visible,’ and when he said, ‘Purify the means of perception, so that by doing nothing all shall be accomplished.’”

“Oh, well, by the means you mention you have accomplished much—or someone has.” Lord Sombrewater thought for a few minutes. He told Ambrose, when later observations had told him a great deal, that he was convinced the ship had been steered by some sort of energy-beam from the shore. Then he decided. It seemed to be his method, at moments in his career when important decisions were before him, to adopt any plan that offered itself. It is probable that he decided on some instinctive summing up of facts, or indications, intuitively perceived. He unreservedly accepted the proposal that the Chinaman should act as guide. “What shall we call him?” he asked.

“Such-a-one,” Ambrose suggested.

“Good. I nearly made him minute-writer in your place, Ambrose. I rather fancy him. But we industrial princes can’t have people assassinated when they are in the way.”

Ambrose considered the point. “I suppose not,” he said thoughtfully—“not as a rule. But here nobody would ever know if you waited till we were some way inland. Quentin would do it for you.”

Sombrewater laughed loud and long. “You ignore the possibility of any affection a fellow might have for you.”

“No, no,” replied Ambrose. “I make due allowance for it in my estimation of the probable course of events.”

11

Just after sunrise the next day ten figures in the costume of ancient China (on the advice and with the assistance of Such-a-one) embarked in a cluster of odd craft that lay alongside the _Floating Leaf_. Each boat had a windowed cabin, like a gondola. On the sail of each was an emblem like a flying beast. The Dragon, Quentin pointed out.

Lychnis went first, swaying like an amber chrysanthemum on its stalk; Ruby followed, her plump, maiden curves voluptuously shown, as she balanced, in plum-coloured silk; Lord Sombrewater in marigold and green; Sir Richard in apricot, with a device in black like a system of coordinates; Sprot in mauve; Blackwood in lilac; Terence in flame-orange; Quentin in peacock-blue; Fulke in primrose with sleeves of green; Ambrose, lastly, in misty white. Clustered in their boats they seemed like flowers in fantastic baskets floating in the stream.

The resentment of the three ladies was soon forgotten in the excitement of the journey. Indeed, it was not long before the sea and the _Floating Leaf_ and the thought of their life in Europe seemed to fall under the horizon of the mind, and they saw only the new beauty and strangeness of the country where they found themselves. As Quentin remarked, nowhere else in the world were such refined harmonies of colour in landscape to be seen or such subtleties of tone. The river wound secretly and intimately deep among the emerald hills, with their dragon crags; now between lines of willows putting out a mist of silvery-grey leaves, a mist deepened here into a tender blue, there into a subtle rose; now through the delicate umber shadows of some flowery gorge among jade-hued rocks. Here a bridge spanned the river, springing from a group of trees and gracefully completing the rhythm of the valley; there a village nestled by some profound logic in the nook of a hill; once and again was some glimpse of the forest, or of the white, slender beam of a rushing cascade that plunged down from distant fells in harmonious passion. Over all floated white clouds like masses of blossoms, and it was as if the forces of Nature and the hand of man had united to suggest a landscape-dream of some profoundly meditating, non-human spirit, in which man had his place with the plum-blossom, the torrent and the black-bird on the branch.

They went slowly, by sail and pole, in three boats. Terence, as mystical leader of the expedition, sat in the first beside Such-a-one. Quentin took his morning exercise in the second, thrusting with the bamboo pole, and Frew-Gaff his in the third. They called to one another, startling coot, mallard and teal from the reeds. Ambrose was with Frew-Gaff and the two girls in the third boat. Lychnis and Ruby lay curled up on one side, looking out; Ambrose on the other.

A shout came over to them from Quentin: “How are the maiden skins?”

For answer Lychnis clapped the small hands that lay in her sleeves like petals, and Fulke, in another window, was observed trying in vain to catch her eye. Then, at another shout from Quentin, she asked to be put out on the bank, and met him. It was a rice-field, and half a dozen blue-clad labourers were at work there.

“I’m tired of standing still,” Quentin observed, strutting and striding in his magnificent robe, a blur of deep blue that gave emphasis to the whole riverside scene.

“So am I,” she answered; “my legs want to run.” She picked up her robe, and her green trousers flashed over the field like a pair of parrots. Ruby, who had scrambled ashore after her, followed, and her legs flashed like flamingoes.