7
EARLY next morning Ambrose came on deck in a monkish dressing-gown with a fleecy towel round his neck. The wind had fallen. The morning was fresh and tender and delicate as a morning in a Chinese silk, and the sea was rippling and black like a lake. It was time for the matutinal exercises. Lord Sombrewater’s valet and the fierce Chink were in attendance with sponges and other matters; fresh and sea-water showers were fixed conveniently; but it seemed to Ambrose that there began to be something queer about these English habits in those far eastern seas.
Five of the Sages were already exercising, or standing under the showers with expressions of enjoyment or endurance. Lord Sombrewater was thorough but silent, and occupied himself with the punch-ball. Fulke Arnott, deep-chested, long-armed, bow-legged and hairy as an ape, felt his limbs with closed eyes and imagined himself a piece of Pheidias. Sprot, the pot-bellied and knock-kneed, produced in his throat a noise which he called singing, and Ambrose presumes that he felt in the remnant of his soul some echo of what in an ancestor may have been a free impulse. Terence stood under the fresh-water shower like a Druid. His exercises were those prescribed for occultists, and his mind, as the element drenched him, was concentrated on the purity of the element. Then he moved to the sea-water shower, and concentrated on salt health. When he had finished he moved over and stood by the rail, tall and stately, shading his eyes and gazing into the rising sun. Far and wide the little dark waves broke idly in tiny jets and sprays of white foam. “We float, not on water,” he was heard to say, “but on meadows of snowdrops and deep-leaved violets.”
Sir Richard Frew-Gaff was most amiable of the Sages at that time of the day. With his higher centres a little relaxed from the preceding day’s contemplation of physical reality, and warm with anticipation of another day’s work, he appeared benevolently, as it were, in the world of living phenomena, and cracked a couple of jokes. At the moment he was hanging by the knees on the horizontal bar and hailed Ambrose, passing in his white towel from the shower.
“Hallo, Ambrose!”
“Hallo!” The pale blue eyes of the scientist were looking at him upside down. “You’re pinker than ever—like a pink cherub in a white cloud.” Sir Richard swung and landed erect on the mat. “What’s the secret of your morning freshness, Ambrose? You must sleep like the sainted dead in paradise. Do you dream at all?”
“Not unless I want to.”
“Well, I envy you. I do not sleep too well nowadays.”
Ambrose would not expect to sleep, he tells us, if his brains were full of imaginations that chained him to the world of physical appearance.
Then Arthur Ravenhill came gravely from his cabin. He did not use the gymnastic apparatus. The functions of his body, assimilative and excretory, were regulated by the operations of his mind. He digested consciously, and his exercises took place in his inside. He was able to perform gymnastic feats with his liver and kidneys, and had in mind to achieve the supreme accomplishment and reverse the processes of the alimentary canal. He was very thin. He had the air, in fact, of one who has attained a considerable degree of self-mortification, and he was able at any time of the day or night to discipline himself into one of the four trances.
“Morning,” said Lord Sombrewater. “Didn’t see you yesterday.”
He stood with folded hands. “Having been led into sensual thoughts by the beauty of the afternoon, it seemed to me necessary that I should undertake the four intent contemplations. Thus, abandoning the idea that there is an ego, realizing that beauty is a glamour in the mind of that which has no ego, having rid myself of desire for any but spiritual forms of existence and then convinced myself that all existence, however abstract, is evil, the sensual images melted away.”
He passed through the group of gymnasts and stood under the shower like an ascetic at the door of his forest cave, who by chance receives cold water on the back of his neck.
“There’s a council this morning at nine,” Ambrose told him.
Last of all Quentin came striding from his luxurious bed. He certainly outshone the rest as a conception in muscle. The deck trembled and the apparatus shook with the weight of his leaps and his swinging limbs. From the great pectoral slab to the Achilles tendon he was a wonder—a muscular temple, a cathedral of bone and sinew, florid and huge. When he was holding a long arm balance on the parallel bars his torso resembled the junction of two branches of a beech. Within him, too, there was no mean nervous system and brain. He knew the classic poets, Greek and Latin, by heart, and was an expert in the art of post-mediæval, early Renaissance periods in all countries of the world. Ambrose describes him finally as a princely ruffian.
The exercises finished, they took coffee and met in council. At nine o’clock precisely Lord Sombrewater rapped on the table before him, and the Sages stopped talking. He was an expert in the chair. He had done a great deal of business in chairs, and from behind them. They afforded excellent opportunities for controlling large blocks of business by means of majorities, for giving harmless vent to the opinions of cranks, and for obtaining the consent of shareholders to reasonable proposals.
He began: “The situation we have to consider is the following: our intention was to visit Japan. The crew we took on at Sydney, after that strange trouble we had there, seem to be under the influence of some mysterious fear. That fierce-faced Chink chose them for us, you remember. Well, they have intimated that they will sink the ship unless we land them forthwith at a Chinese port.”
“Why?” asked Sprot.
It was a question the chairman expected. Shareholders were apt to ask “Why?” His technique was to unfold just such a minimum of a situation as sufficed to answer questions.
“They allege, as a matter of fact, that they have wireless orders from their union.”
“Are all those Chinks and dagos and things in a union?”
“It’s international now,” put in Fulke Arnott. “I would like to point out to you the interesting features of this situation. We’re a quarry. The arch-capitalist escapes from Europe with his accomplices in search of a year’s quiet to mature his plans, and labour brings him to book in the middle of the China Seas. It’s good. It’s pretty. It’s encouraging.”
“It’s all that,” observed Lord Sombrewater. “It’s also pure nonsense. In any case I do not consider myself a fugitive.”
“I don’t want to imply that you ran away,” Fulke replied. “The fact is that your position is one in which you can afford to take a year off, so long as you watch the intrigues of the henchmen you’ve elevated and see that they don’t manœuvre you out of the position of control.”
“You begin to see the point. The central fact is my position. It is true that I own the mines, the railways, the crops, the whole activity of large pieces of several continents. If I cannot escape them, neither can they escape me. I am their light and air. Without my activity, races perish. Unless I continue to produce business enterprises, as Terence produces pictures and Richard Frew-Gaff his hypotheses, nations will starve.”
“My answer,” said Fulke, “is: Let them.” His green-brown eyes glowed. He had a vision, as Ambrose presently ascertained, of a few young men and women, few and free, living on nuts in a wood.
“We wander from the point,” said the chairman. “I do not believe for a moment that there are any orders from any union. The trouble is something quite different. But we have to consider what action we shall take. Let us have views round the table. What is your view of our action, Fulke?”
“In theory——”
“Never mind that. Let’s hear what another business man has to say. George Sprot, your views, please.”
Sprot, who had been agitatedly twisting his fingers, was flattered. “Defy them! If they won’t work, let them starve. If they mutiny, shoot them.”
“So useful, George,” said Quentin. “So practical.”
Lord Sombrewater tapped with his hammer. “Terence.”
“I saw a cloud of beings, the colour of peach-blossom, drifting over the sea. They swayed and bent like one branch blown by the same wind. They were going towards China.”
“Attach them, Terence,” exclaimed the irrepressible Quentin. “They’ll do instead of steam when the boilers go out.”
Once more the hammer. “Richard.”
“I suggest that we run the ship ourselves. Fulke and Lychnis and I can easily work out a theory of navigation. We can complete it in a few days. Some of us must be crew. Quentin’s a whole crew of stokers in himself.”
Quentin passed a remark which Ambrose faithfully records, but we need not trouble ourselves with it.
“That’s all very well, Richard,” said the chairman; “but in a tempest I should hesitate to trust entirely in your very harmonious calculations. And in any case, the officers have not deserted.”
“Well, let us be the crew.”
“I don’t know that Barnes would care to run the ship with a crew consisting chiefly of professors. Still, it might be practicable, after we had disposed of the mutineers. Blackwood?”
“I have nothing to suggest. It is a matter of indifference to me where I am or what I am asked to do.”
“Quentin?”
“I intend,” said Quentin, “to avail myself of the opportunities for experience in both countries, and I don’t mind which comes first. There are customs in both that I desire to experience. There are things that I want to see. And there are, I fancy, in Tokyo, examples of the miraculous flowering of Sung art, in which we meet with an idealism, a spirituality, that cannot but be ennobling. What moral grandeur! What ecstatic visions! And my Buddhist friend on my left should not fail to consider the Ukiyoyé, those pictures of the frail, vanishing world, those exquisite reproaches to our transitory desires, those——”
“Precisely. When we reach Tokyo the matter shall receive consideration. In the meantime I would propose, as a practical contribution to the discussion, that we inform the crew that we are entirely ready to fall in with their suggestions and proceed to a Chinese port.”
The rest were silent. “I suppose it is the obvious course,” said Frew-Gaff at last.
“In the absence of any better proposal, such as I had hoped to receive,” said his lordship, “I think it is. We can discuss what to do next to-morrow. Is that agreed?”
It was agreed, and the meeting broke up.