3
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.