15
AMBROSE emerged from his chamber at the side of the house and looked from the verandah across the quivering bamboo-forest. He was composing his description of the morning’s adventure. Somewhere in the neighbourhood he heard the girls chattering, and could not quite locate the sound. Ruby’s voice came, calling him, and when he looked round in bewilderment there was laughter. Then a lattice was pushed open at the other end of the verandah, and Ruby put out her head and shoulders. She had on a new jacket of geranium-red, and her copper hair was piled up with combs of tortoise-shell. “Come in and see Licky and me,” she said. “There’s a door on the verandah round the corner.”
He went into their room, making a note of the words “refined elegance” for subsequent use in describing its shape and furniture. There was an effect of green, gold and black; for the walls were green, and the furniture was ebony, with marquetry of brass, tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl. A clear sunlight, tempered by the lattices, showed him all the exquisite appointments. The ebony cupboard, with half-open, gold-enamelled doors, contained a hint of richly coloured clothes, like petals within the sheath. A profusion of silken jackets was scattered over an ebony and ivory commode, and hung on the handle of a lacquered cabinet and over a screen painted with butterflies. The curtains of an ebony bed, like a houseboat, were drawn, disclosing a heap of garments on the swan-white coverlet. Lychnis was seated on a stool by a window, having her hair brushed (but she had forbidden the use of resin) by a Chinese girl with black-bead eyes and almost imperceptible mouth. At her side was a lacquer table, laden with ivory brushes, jade and tortoise-shell combs, pigment trays in rare porcelain. There was a box with a brass mirror in the lid, and tiny drawers for lip-salve, rouge, powder, and pencil for the eyebrows. She had in her slender hands a gilt mirror. She was keeping her head very still, but she put, with her eyebrows, an inquiry as to his state of mind. He indicated satisfaction.
“This is very untidy,” he remarked. “How can you be so untidy in this perfectly proportioned chamber?”
“We’ve been trying on the clothes,” said geranium-red Ruby. “It took an awful time to make up our minds. I chose this.” She opened her wide, black-bordered sleeves like a red butterfly, and turned on her hips to show him the great black wings of her sash. Her cheeks were flushed a deep crimson with her enjoyment, and he wondered if, with that and the advantage that her magnificent figure got from the half-revealing silk, she did not almost eclipse her slenderer companion. He turned round, with a view to the formation of a considered judgment.
Lychnis, the last golden comb stuck in her hair, stood up, and the wrap that had swathed her shoulders fell to the ground. She, too, had a faint flush, knowing, perhaps, that she was offered for judgment; or had she used, he wondered, a little pigment from the porcelain tray? She turned slowly for him to admire her. She wore a chrysanthemum robe—dusky flowers on a ground of pale amber. Her neck—as Quentin was wont to say, you could break it by clenching the hand—was a chrysanthemum stalk. The big bow at the small of her back gathered her robe in and disclosed the slim, womanish swell of her hips that he had so often tried to describe. She raised her robe slightly, to display trousers of some texture crisp and brown, like the petals of the flower. “And these comic shoes.” She pointed to them, and walked towards him, putting her feet one before the other in tiny steps. “Must we walk like that? Ruby’s beautiful when she does it. Am I?”
They were lovely, and friendly, those two young women. He watched them both imitate the swaying and delicate walk of the Chinese girls, up and down the room, while the maid put away the clothes, paying no attention. “You’ll turn into Chineses,” he warned them.
They both sprang at him with cries of “Never!” and pushed and pulled him from the room and along a corridor just to show what they could do.
But Lychnis abruptly desisted. “Hark! What’s that?”
It was a carillon of silver bells pealing in a tower of porcelain, calling the Sages from their several retreats to a meal in the Yellow Emperor’s Pavilion. Lord Sombrewater and Sir Richard Frew-Gaff, clothed respectively in sunset crimson and turquoise-blue, were already seated in a chamber more sumptuous, but not less elegant, than the bedchamber. It was furnished with rich tables, and flowers, and great jars of finest blue-and-white porcelain. The other Sages arriving, changed likewise into robes of the most brilliant hue, refreshment was served in the shape of fragrant tea, with a dish of cooked bamboo shoots and other more doubtful ingredients.
“I shan’t examine this,” said Quentin. “It smells good, and I’ll risk the transformation of my lusts that may result from ingesting the cellular composition of beetles and slugs.”
“An insubstantial diet will do you no harm,” said Sir Richard. “If I were to drain you of blood and transfuse the sap of a vegetable, it might render your temperament less—shall I say?—ardent.”
“Ah, no! You’d find me doting on a cabbage, or in dalliance with a brussels sprout.”
“You approve of our surroundings, I take it?” observed Lord Sombrewater.
“We are in the garden of an emperor.”
“Shall we stay here? What are the views of the Sages? It is pleasant, certainly, beyond anything I have ever seen; but one or two circumstances are a little mysterious.”
“It passes my comprehension,” said Sprot, “how anyone owning all this wealth can leave it absolutely unguarded. We may be murdered in our beds any night for the sake of the wealth that’s about us. These servants—can you trust them? They’re not white men, you know. I kicked one just now, to show who’s master here. I’ve always heard you ought to kick native servants. But, as I was saying, all this wealth and not a keeper, or a policeman, or even a ‘Trespassers-will-be-Prosecuted’ board.”
“It may be the custom of some Europeans to kick native servants,” said Lord Sombrewater testily, “but I shall be obliged if, in this case, you will use the extreme politeness they use with us.”
“Oh, certainly, certainly. But, if you will excuse me, all this gold and tortoiseshell, and the bric-à-brac—I suppose that’s valuable, too—who does it belong to? It must belong to somebody, I suppose. Or do you think we might—er—appropriate ... as a souvenir, I mean?”
“I don’t suppose they’d object to your pinching it,” said Fulke. “It’s clear there’s no capitalist system here.”
“Then you will be happy here?” asked Lychnis.
That brought him up short. “Yes, by the split kidneys of St. Sebastian!—thoroughly, frightfully happy!” He added to Ambrose in an undertone: “There’s always the Lake.”
“As for me,” put in Blackwood, “my summer-house down by the Lake is of marble and has a copper dome. So beautiful are my surroundings that I would readily stay here for ever, because of the exquisite and continuous temptation to the senses. But can these servants not be made to understand that I always have two lumps of sugar in my tea?”
“Sugar?” exclaimed Sprot. “What’s that got to do with meditation?”
“It’s a stimulant to the intestinal acrobatics,” said Quentin. “He rewards his performing vestiges with two lumps of sugar.”
“And you, Richard?” inquired the chairman.
“It seems to me we are committed. True, it is a nuisance to be without any facilities—no instruments, no materials, no laboratory—none to speak of, that is. Yet the place is very pleasant. Not that I am particularly susceptible to natural beauty——”
“It’s not natural,” broke in Terence unexpectedly. It was noticed for the first time that he seemed dissatisfied.
“But the air is stimulating, and, as you know, I am something of an optimist—in short, I particularly desire to find out what it is that gives these little grassy mountains that peculiar blue tinge, and the rocks simply shout for examination. Not that I am an expert geologist, of course. Still, one can record some observations. And I would add that I think we shall be at peace here. There is an air of happy serenity that lies on the valley.”
“And you, Terence?”
Terence, in the attitude of Rabindranath Tagore in meditation, raised his large, grey, poetic eyes. “I confess to a certain disappointment. Dragons are somewhat outside my habit of dreaming, and the Chinese gods are not, on the whole, attractive. I find something bland and pawnbroker-like in their faces——”
“That,” put in Blackwood, “is the everlasting calm of those who have learnt to despise the world.”
“I find it unheroic and fatuous. Moreover, I dislike the empty and unmeaning classicism of this Gentleman’s Park. And these rhododendrons and magnolias—they are so consciously ornamental and Chinese and matter-of-fact.”
“Still,” observed Sombrewater, “you would not wish to depart just yet?”
“So long as I am allowed to remain in my tower and commune with the myriad quivering spirits of the bamboo-forest.”
“By all means—if we may eat a few from time to time. I take it, then, that it’s settled. We remain.”
“I shall remain,” observed Lychnis, “till all’s blue. One need not starve, or stay out in the wet, for there are houses and servants and food everywhere. And I would like to say,” she added, with a certain diffidence, “that the matter-of-factness is only apparent. It seems to me, Terence, that it hides something—what shall I say?—almost unbearably passionate, all this classical restraint. Yes, the Pavilion and the little bridges and the landscape and everything else. These two paintings, for instance—the Flower-Spray. That empty, palpitating background. It is more than an evening sky. The flowers—don’t you think so, daddy?”—she appealed to her father to support her declaration of faith—“the flowers ... oh, they are more than lovely! There is something moves in them, behind them. Some great artist did that, with the calmness of a poet-painter who has feared beauty and conquered his fear. Then”—she looked round and gathered courage from their attentiveness—“the Geese. Not very romantic, Terence. But the soul of Geese is there, dear plump things! What is it Quentin would say in philosophy? Divested of all accident of appearance. They are whatever it is that is Goose at the perfect moment of evolution. The life of the universe is seen through the Geese in that picture. The painter has not hindered it with some sentimental pre-occupation of his own. Romanticism looks silly beside that sort of reality. I—I did not mean to have said so much. But it said itself. It was strange—those two pictures hypnotized me. Something that is not quite life—more than life; I can’t express it—moved in them, and words came to me.”
Quentin opened his eyes like a man waking from the illumination of prayer. “O exquisite penetration of unfolding virginity! These are the pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove, and we have heard a voice from the invisible but all-pervading reality of the universe. Now, I myself formed the same conclusion with regard to the art of China in the days of my purity—that is to say, when I was about thirteen. Some echo of those far-off days came to me as I studied my dessert-plate. This band of creamy pink enamel. This domestic scene in the centre of the plate. These two girls—what ivory-textured skins! what lily-petal hands holding the battledores. If the beauty, and by consequence the virtue, of the girls of this valley is anything like so fragile——”
“It is very fine ware,” put in Sir Richard. “I would like to understand their process more perfectly. Not that I am an expert in the manufacture of pottery. I wonder, by the way, if these cabinets are unlocked.”
“Obviously,” replied Quentin, “since there is no capitalist system here and no police. One must lock up things when there are police. There!” He opened a cabinet and brought out a piece of pottery. “By the Virgin Mary! it lives. The cellular organization of it lives and the integument is warm. It blushes under my fingers like a woman’s cheek. We have here all that’s most precious in the world, including three maidens.” He dug Fulke in the ribs. “Let us explore the mazy building.”
He led the party all over the Pavilion, discoursing in every room with infinite learning on some precious object of Chinese art. Before the ebony bed in the girls’ bedchamber he stood in an attitude of respectful adoration. Lychnis tactfully withdrew, leading Ruby. He spoke in a low voice: “And they lie there in each other’s arms, like shepherdesses in a Boucher. That precious cabinet enshrines them. My poor Fulke! To have seen, and to have no chance of possessing. But come away from this holy place. It is not for the likes of us.” They withdrew, Fulke suppressing a groan.
Finally, in a sort of study, they found a cabinet which contained what appeared to resemble some kind of listening-in apparatus. “Now,” said Frew-Gaff, “this is really remarkable.”