Beastly, hearing our arguments, butted in with: ‘Jabbering like two old washerwomen!’
Captain Negodyaev smiled a propitiatory smile: ‘We the philosophers of life are merely the naughty children, while the others are the good children. In the end, Mother Nature puts us all to bed.’
Beastly nodded his head heavily and guffawed loudly as he did so. While Captain Negodyaev talked philosophy, an English dame who read a Ouida novel looked at him disapprovingly through her lorgnon. ‘You mustn’t talk quite so loud and gesticulate quite so much,’ I advised him. ‘These people think it shocking bad form to get so excited about mere God and the Universe.’
‘Well,’ he rejoined, ‘if it really comes to that, I never laughed so much as when I saw your English people playing cards last night. Not a sound, not a movement, as though they were in church. The monotony of it would be enough to kill any normal human being. In Russia somebody would long have jumped up, expostulated and called another a cheat and a liar. But these here — they sit like stones. Incorrigible people!’
At first I had to share a cabin with Beastly, but unable to stand his stinks any longer, I got Uncle Emmanuel to change places with me. But he got out, holding his nose. ‘C’est assez!’ he said. ‘How I understand you!’ Nobody wanted to share a cabin with Beastly. So, in the end, the General with the mad eyes was induced to try his luck, and emerged successfully out of the experiment, remarking that to him all stinks were immaterial. But, anyhow, most of the voyage Percy Beastly was ill, and Berthe attended to him.
In the morning we entered the harbour of Hong-Kong. The clouds mixed with the mountains, so that one could hardly tell which were the clouds and which were the mountains. Two red-tabbed staff-officers in pale khaki drill came on a white steam launch flying the Union Jack and asked: ‘Is there a General Pokhitonoff on board?’ They were informed that there was one. And the General with the mad eyes, lest he should stir the native races into rebellion against the British Crown, was not allowed to land.
The General was a man who invariably agreed to everything — under protest; and so, having registered his protest in a letter to the Captain, he remained on board, while Sylvia and I went on shore. We took the Peak railway. And as we ascended the hill in it, ‘You look upon the Other World,’ I said, ‘as a sort of furnished flat where everything has been prepared for our arrival. I believe that world is more like music seeking its rebirth in its own inspiration; and man like a composer who awakens life to make it echo to the cadence he has plucked out of its own deep sleep, to suggest to him new secrets and new melodies.’
‘Darling, you speak so loud that everybody can hear you.’
‘I don’t care. I am speaking the truth.’
‘Oh!’
‘What?’
‘Bother this fly,’ she said.
‘There is more impudence in a fly than in many a grown man or woman.’
‘Do we get out here?’
‘Yes. This is where all the snobby people live — up hill,’ I said, stepping out. ‘And all the plain folk (the Governor excepted) live down hill, being conveniently looked down upon (the Governor excepted) by their brethren up the hill.’
I walked arm-in-arm with Sylvia, and because I did not want the ants to climb up my trousers, I walked quicker and quicker, the ants, like all other creatures of God, having to take their level chance, some of them perishing under my heels. They ran along quickly, with a serious preoccupied air, over the stony ruins even as we humans climbed the hills — the rotting eruption of nature among which we had come to life. And, behold, a solitary beetle who, too, had come out for a walk this lovely spring day, traversed the path, seeking indolently whom he might devour.
‘Darling, please don’t run so fast, please don’t pull me along—please!’
‘Do you want these damned things to climb up your legs?’ I slackened my pace, and at once one of the accursed creatures, who hurt out of all proportion to their size, climbed up my ankle and did his worst. I shook him off. If I could, I reflected aloud, I would come to an understanding with the ants, a modur vivendi, and let them live — while they work out their salvation, whatever it may be! But I cannot be bothered to — and so I crush them under foot rather than be incommoded. And so do we all one another. What a ludicrous world!
Then we found ourselves in a park, with the sea stretched at our feet. What a lordly feeling! A gust of wind stirred amidst the trees and shook some green leaves from their branches; for a moment they remained tremulous. The hot sun dipped its beams into the cool green waters below, and they sparkled with enjoyment. The sky, responsively playful, sent white downy clouds chasing each other across the azure. Sylvia looked at me with that infinitely tender look reserved for the only man who really matters in the world.
I looked at her.
She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Tired. I want to lie down.’
‘Shall we go to the hotel?’
‘Yes.’
We work, I reflected, but no one knows why. ‘There,’ I said, stopping and pointing down with my stick, ‘ants also work.’
‘Yes, darling, they do. But what they can do isn’t worth anything, is it?’ she said, looking at me with a sweet appeal of reasonableness as if she were sorry for the fated insignificance of the ants but could not overlook it since it was manifest to all.
‘Isn’t worth anything — you mean to the world?’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘It isn’t a question of size. The universe in its aggregate has possibly not more, but less sense than the ants and is striving to speak through them, to realize its own soul in tangible work towards truth. The universe is awakening from sleep into life and is groping, building, that is, provisionally calculating, erecting outposts that will last for a time in order not to lapse back into the sleep where all is blurred as in a delirium. Our work here is merely the “over” which the world puts down in order not to get muddled in its calculations. But the auditor adds up, adds up without cease: He is trying to realize His full wealth, to get at last at the correct sum. For the Devil, I may tell you, is swindling Him of His possessions.’
‘The devil he is!’
‘And that is our work. That is what the ants are doing: registering the dream. But one must realize what that means and not register for registration’s sake. You must have something to register, and for that you must continually dive back into the dream to bring out the pearls.’
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘and you never bought me that little imitation pearl necklace after all.’
‘The whole trouble is that we don’t know whether the universe is directing us or we are directing the universe. Some hold that the universe is directing us to direct her. But the truth is probably that we all, the component parts of it, are propping up one another and cannot decide whither to go — as it really does not matter. The universe may not be going anywhere at all, but sensing the fatal barrenness of going anywhere in particular, for exactly the same reason is afraid of standing still. And so it is just restless. We are just restless. We do not know what it is we really want.’
‘But, darling, you know very well what I want. You’re only pretending you don’t.’
‘Perhaps when we get sick of wanting something in particular, and sick of wanting nothing in particular, we shall get sick of wanting anything at all, and then we shan’t want anything. Sooner or later we shall get sick of not wanting anything. Till we get sick of being sick.’