Landscape with Figures 10 – Fraser · Verses Across
Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 10Chapter 9
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Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 10
Chapter 9
FraserEnglish
Ambrose found an opportunity, during the afternoon, to ascertain from the two girls their views as to the expedition.
He had gone ashore with them, at the instance of Lychnis, and they had climbed to the top of a humped green hill so as to survey the country. There they stood, under a plum-tree in blossom, protected, as Lychnis observed, by cousins of Terence’s messengers from Paradise. Lychnis herself was in a fragile plum-colored frock, out of compliment to them, and her red-haired fellow was in willow-green.
Behind, between two contortions of cliff, lay the sea. Far away, across the wrinkled and fissured hills, there were mountains with the unmelted snows of winter lying on their tops like petals of narcissus. The afternoon was spring-like, and there seemed to Ambrose to be a fragrance of lilies; but whether it came from distant fields or whether the girls were scented with it, he could not quite decide. But he suddenly remembered that the Chinaman had spoken of a great lake of water-lilies beyond the mountains of the interior.
Lychnis stood on the hill with her hands clasped behind her, frowning at the snows.
“Is that where we are going?” she asked.
“The indications point that way, I believe. Does it amuse you to go?”
“Oh yes! And really, if we don’t find something new, something strange, there, I think I shall die. Shall we perhaps discover some secret of life there, do you suppose?”
“You mean?”
Ruby was wandering about, rather bored, and Lychnis, as often before, talked intimately to her confessor. “I am so tired of reading books and meeting people and thinking, just to fill up the time. I am so tired of being conscious and trying to be more conscious. It is a disease that a drink of genuine life would purge out of the system. I want to become so that I’m waiting to get up in the morning just because it is another day to live; then, when I lie down in bed at night, sleep would be a deep physical pleasure. I wish it was a young world, with only a few people in it, and spring meant that one would go out of doors and ride away on some quest.”
“Romantic,” he observed. “And is not that what you are to do now, with your squires?”
“But it will be only us, and we only fill up the time, without zest and unconsciousness. Would you call my father whole-hearted any more? He knows now that he makes what is not worth making, and he has lost touch with life. Sir Richard lives merely intellectually, and he only knows about the how of things and argues fantastically as to their why. He makes out God to be a symbol in mathematics. Then Terence. His visions are old, and I think they are pathological and mad. His auras and reincarnations and glittering spirits from other planes, and all his vibrations and rhythms and things—they are the cloud-rack of a decaying personality. They are illusions of visions; and who would follow them to the world’s end, except daddy, more in contempt than faith? And as for Blackwood, he is so disillusioned that he wants to come to an end, and maltreats his mind with some old lost discipline for making it think of nothing, which it was never meant to do. And Sprot does not even know that there are thoughts, or doubts, or despairs. He’s merely a cell, and he can only market goods, I am sure without zest. No, Fulke is the only one who has any vision of a sweet and joyous world. He has youth in him, and desire, and all that. But his shape displeases me.” She looked up at the plum-blossom burning on the branches above her.
“There is Quentin. He has zest,” Ambrose observed.
“But what for? Yet he pleases me, and if I find nothing at the end of this journey I think I may let him please me more—if he can. For one can have pleasure if one can have nothing else. Yet there are certain things about love that I don’t thoroughly understand—you could tell me, if I could ask you. I think I could.”
Her head was bent in thought. Then she raised up her passion-lidded eyes, and Ambrose took the opportunity to examine her state of mind.
“Perhaps it is not life that you desire,” he said thoughtfully. “There is something else—you will understand what I mean some day.”
“You mean love, I suppose?” she asked, indifferent.
“No, not that.”
“I find love a bore,” she observed. “It might not be, I can conceive. Several have loved me, and Fulke now I’m afraid, and Quentin, if we are to call that love. And I love myself undoubtedly. When I see myself in the mirror I wish, sometimes, that I were a young man, and I feel that if I were women would love me, and I would take one—perhaps Ruby, though she is rather stupid. I could love a god, if he wasn’t too curly-headed and milk-white. Mine would be dark-haired, not fair, like Terence’s clumsy Irish heroes. But there are no gods, unless there are some lost here in China. Mine would have an air of profound thoughtfulness. If there were gods, do you think I would have a chance?”
She looked so comically serious that Ambrose laughed at her.
She was petulant at his laughing. “You don’t love me, do you, Ambrose? You only think I’m funny.”
He says her sentence came at him like a flung blossom with a little dart in it. He records his answer:
“I can make no talk when it comes to ‘I’ and ‘me.’ Really, I’m not sure that I’m aware of feelings and desires and so forth.” He remarks that he scarcely knew how to put it.
“Oh, I know,” she replied scornfully. “You only make notes. We are all specimens. Still, that’s just as well, because if you were at all likely to love me”—she flushed, now, at the word spoken before in a rushing impulse—“there’d be nobody left to talk to. You know, Ambrose....” She hesitated, looking about in the grass as if words might spring up there. “It seems funny to say ... I mean, all those men are a nuisance in one way or another. When they look at me their eyes are seeing me as a young woman. Daddy, even ... you understand? Fulke displeasingly, because he’s like a chimpanzee and I find it insulting, and Sprot sentimentally and disgustingly, and Quentin—rather excitingly. And Sir Richard, too, Ambrose, though it sounds wicked of me to say it, but I can’t help knowing. Terence, of course, pretends I’m his inspiration. Do poets embrace their inspirations? I expect so. And with Arthur Blackwood it’s the way he sternly doesn’t look at me, and when I’ve been talking to him he always goes into four or five kinds of trances. It’s all a nuisance. But you, when you look at me and talk to me, though I know you perceive every inch and movement of me and very many of my thoughts, but not all by any means, I don’t mind. It is so, isn’t it?”
He bowed, and admired her standing up straight and frowning and flushed against the stem of the young plum-tree. A pink blossom fluttered down on her.
She held on the way of her talk. “Now you are admiring me and making a mental note of my shape. You will record, later on, that the sky behind the blossom”—she turned to look—“is all tender apple-green, because it’s soon going to begin to be evening. Well, look at me.” She stood up on the toes of her slender shoes, and threw her arms out and her head back, so that he could study her breast and throat. He did so, and discusses the twin blossoms of her, and her whole shape, as a relation of subtle, slender curves that had a most stimulating effect on the mind and carried it beyond thoughts of physical beauty to profound thoughts of an informing creative spirit. He mentions that her throat was a springing flowerstalk.
“There,” she said at last. “You have looked, and it’s nothing to me. It would not be nothing if I were in love. I should be glad and happy at being studied. But I’m glad to be quite assured that I’m not, because now I know that one day, soon perhaps, I shall be able to ask you questions—questions I could put to no woman, last of all my mother, and no other man. You are the only soul in the world, Ambrose, who could receive from a woman such questions as I shall ask you—the only soul who could answer them without being silly. Soon—there are things I must ask you soon. Over there,” she pointed to the distant mountains, now cold and spiritual in the sinking sun—“over there, perhaps, we shall find someone, and there will no longer be something missing. There will be a note found to complete a music. And you,” she added with sudden malice—“you shall be marriage registrar.”
Then Ruby came wandering back—a lazy, redheaded Juno—and with her hands she clasped a mass of flowers to her bosom. “These are for the ship,” she observed. “Why didn’t you come and help me when I called? And what have you been jawing about? You’re always jawing, you two.”
“We’ve been talking most frightful stupid nonsense,” said Lychnis.
“I expect so,” replied Ruby with unconcern.
Then some of the others came from the ship, and they all gathered flowers until the silver moon rose out of the fissure of a hill into the tender, trembling sky. Mist began to form, and drove them back to the Floating Leaf, and it was not long before there was nothing to be seen but the mist and the moon, and here and there a plum-tree on a black knoll rising out of the mist, and a flight of wild geese crossing the sky.
