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.