4
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.”
“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.