The voice of her brother Hubert addressed her:
“Wake up, you cat. Why on earth do you always lie on landings? Why don’t you use rooms like ordinary people?”
On her part the brother-sister spirit of dispute did not fail to respond. “Just because rooms are always full of tedious, ordinary people,” she sleepily retorted.
“Well,” he said, “Uncle Henry’s bringing a chap to dinner who may not be so tedious. An essayist and professor of literary history. Damned clever, damned good-looking, and damned young. But he makes no money.”
With that, Hubert passed on to his room. But a sort of picture of him stayed behind in the darkness of the landing; he refused to be dismissed from her thoughts; and, though she hugged the warm darkness closer, she was compelled to go over in her mind, though dimly, and as something happening in a strange exterior world, many scenes and arguments from the past. He was always a dominant figure in her imagination, with his elegance, and his brains, and his worldly wisdom. “Yes,” she admitted to the shadowy figure, “you dress with distinguished taste” – if she looked up she felt she would see his elegant striped trousers in the glow of the radiator – “you are certainly handsome, with your black, pomaded hair, your long nose and your piercing, shrewd eyes. Your mind, such as it is, is ruthless; but it is a pity you have nothing to exercise your brains on save the notion of financial success. You are attractive – I perceive it, and I admit it – to women. But two things you are mortally afraid of – poverty . . . and me!”
The figure of her brother smiled back at her jibes with the air of one who retains his self-confidence. That, she remembered, was how he had always met her – as when she remarked that all he had learned at school was enough arithmetic to calculate the sum invested in his mother’s annuity. “Really,” she said to the smiling shadow, “you never needed school. From the first you saw things as they are.”
How she had scoffed at his lack of imagination when he went into insurance! But how, at the same time, he had flourished in that unseen city world she heard of out there in the cold!
He grew amazingly, she remembered, and lost in a few days all traces of the illusions of youth. At eighteen and one month he understood investment, and his knowledge, he had told her, confirmed an unfavorable opinion, formed some years earlier, of his father’s capacity. As regards his attitude towards their mother, she felt, secretly, and hiding her face in the cushions, able to approve him. Their mother was a weak, plump woman with asthma; she had no feeling for business and no brains (though there were men of science in her family and one of them, Uncle Henry, was in charge of Kew Gardens); so at eighteen and a half he interviewed her lawyer, and it was not long before that gentleman was ready to admit so shrewd, so informed, so businesslike a youth to the management of her affairs. At nineteen the house was organized to his liking; he ruled his mother, and as in effect he controlled the income, apart from what she earned by scientific journalism, was able to frustrate her own expensive desires. At twenty-one he had a handsome coupé and was a member of several night clubs. At twenty-five he had nearly completed the extensive foundations of what would presently be a considerable business. He argued that it was unnecessary to move from the moderate house in the lime avenue; soon enough his sister would marry and his mother would die, and there was no reason why he should give them more than they had already.
“But let nobody think that I dislike you,” she said, suddenly realizing that any one who overheard what was going on in her mind would have gathered that she thought unkindly of her brother. “It is only that you’re a fool for thinking you see things as they are.”
How are things? She asked herself that question, and as the difficulty of answering it became more and more apparent the figure of Hubert faded out of her reverie. Soon, too, she became impatient of the new argument, and let her mind sleep. Now she was in silence and warmth, wrapped up and hidden once more like a seed in the blackness of earth, with no knowledge of anything outside, conscious only of tiny internal changes, nor desiring the unknown splendor of summer suns.
§ II
The Gardens were under snow when she allowed herself to become party to an engagement with the young man whom Uncle Henry brought to dinner.
It was a sudden, an unpremeditated consent. They were walking in the Arboretum, she in the corduroy jacket and breeches of a student gardener, plowing her way through the snow with a green stalk in her mouth like a golden stable-boy. She pleased herself with the fancy that the gray clouds were showering down lilies-of-the-valley, and that she was flinging the faintly-scented missiles at Roland.
Roland was big, brown and scholarly, with a wave of dark umber hair; and very distinguished, very picturesque he looked in the white woods; and very apt were his quotations from the world’s literature, very distinguished, occasionally, his own original phrases. He was a hard and accurate shot with a snowball, and perhaps an unexpected pleasure that she experienced in the swiftness of his attack and the completeness of her defeat predisposed her to submission in another respect.
It was a physical contest, and she lost. In all other contests she had won. And now, in the glow of the moment, she let him kiss her – this after weeks of ardor on his part and ironical observation on hers. As they kissed she looked over his shoulder, and there across the white lawns she saw those steamy plant-houses whose warmth and secret life she so loved. Remembered sensations abated the sensation of the kiss. He took her into the hidden bamboo garden, among shivering plants, and there repeated his kisses. She was not so confident now, and soon she began to shrink, for he was so rough, so boreal, and she felt like a tender shoot that has come up in the snow and would have done better to stay underground.
Her shrinking distressed him, but he had not the skill to restore her to willingness, or the wit to leave her alone. He even tried, when they had left that icy garden, to snowball her again into submission. This, she perceived, was clumsy, and his inability to treat her in such a way as to reawaken impulse annoyed her.
They began to walk homeward, along a deep winter-shadowy path in noiseless snow, between rhododendron bushes that bore round, large and chilly flowers. He wooed her with compliments, and gave up snowballs for phrases.
“You look like some golden boy,” he said. “Your hair” – these words had given him some pains to assemble – “is cut in such a way that it seems to be a cap of gold, or helmet of saffron fire. Your eyes are a pale and mysterious gray, like a snowing sky, yet they have specks of a strong pigment, sky-blue and topaz; and you have surprising dark fringes, so that the eyes stare out under the shining hat like those of a princely, dreaming, mischievous, and cynical page in some wintry and Russian court.”
She found it interesting to be described, and slipped her hand through his arm. Thus encouraged he renewed the attack.
“You move in this white world like a torch.”
She did not think that good, and was silent.
“You are a yellow daffodil blooming in the snow.”
There was a chilly reminder there with her own sensations in the bamboo garden, and she shivered.
“A firefly among snowdrops,” he continued. He was looking at her tenderly, and she made use of her favorite weapon.
“And you are a polar bear,” was her answer. From the first she had given his compliments this sort of arctic reception, and replied to him with blizzards, to the astonishment of his soul. But this time he was exasperated.
“You are an annoying little devil!” he cried. “If I were a polar bear I’m damned if I wouldn’t hug you till you scrunched!”
“I think I should like that,” she replied, soberly examining the possibilities of such a situation.
He should not have then tried to kiss her.
“Damn it!” he protested. “I don’t know what to make of you. You don’t seem to mean what you say
. You don’t seem to know your mind!”
“I don’t,” she said. “It would be most interesting to find out what one meant, and what one wanted, and what one was really like inside. I’m sure one contains the most queer possibilities. And there are fires laid, if any one could light them.”
He was angry. “Psychological discussions are for the classroom.”
She made no rejoinder. They were passing the greenhouses.
§ III
After a few minutes of walking in a constrained silence, they found themselves outside the moderate and comfortable house in the lime avenue. It nestled under a weight of snow. There were red berries in the front garden, ferns in the window, and solid silver, reflecting a glowing fire, on the sideboard.
“Am I to leave you?” he coldly asked.
She glanced at him, standing there in the cloud of his own breath. It did not seem desirable that the matter should be decided there and then.
“Of course you are not to leave me. You are to come in and have tea.”
Shrugging, he consented.
“It is odd,” she reflected, as he took off his great shaggy overcoat, “how active a relationship between two people is; how rapidly ties are formed; how soon you find yourself more or less committed.”
The elegant Hubert was at home. “Hullo!” he said, looking at their faces, “what have you two been up to?”
“Nothing,” they both replied at once.
“Don’t tell me there’s anything on. Don’t say there’s any rot about an engagement.” Hubert brutally knew the world and was frank.
Did Roland, who looked so foolish, feel the same absurd excitement that she did on finding herself thus interestingly linked with him?
She pulled her brother’s pomaded hair. “Whatever we’ve been doing, it’s no business of yours, my child.”
He stared at her. “I perceive that the worst is about to happen.” He addressed Roland. “As my sister’s guardian . . .”
“You’re nothing of the kind!” she flamed.
“As my sister’s moral guardian,” he continued, “I require you, before you go on making love to her, and possibly, if you are a man of experience, making her fond of you, to state, apart from other matters on which I must make inquiry, the extent of your income.”
Roland, no man of the world, was helpless. “Some four or five hundred a year,” he lamely replied.
Hubert threw up his hands. “Good God! I always thought you were mad, Judy. . . .”
“But,” Roland stammered, “but we are not engaged. . . .”
“And you will not be,” replied Hubert.
Anything that Hubert denied her Judy must have. “Yes, we shall!” she burst out.
Then all at once she felt hopelessly compromised.
§ IV
The days were lengthening; the frost had given way to mud and warm rain. Scented rain it seemed to Judy, and sometimes she saw May in the February horizon. Here and there shoots were pushing up through the sticky mold, little spears that pierced into her heart and woke intolerable longings for the spring and the time of flowers.
She and Roland were eating their lunch in a shop with large windows near the station. Hubert happened to be at home, and although, with frank prophecies of disaster, he had withdrawn his opposition to her published will in regard to Roland, she preferred, sometimes, not to submit her private mind to his brutal inquisition.
“In February,” she observed, “it rains violets. The roofs of houses are wet with them and there are pools of them lying among the trees.”
“That is true,” said Roland, with an ardent glance. She did not return it. Roland was ardent in season and out, and she disliked it. Why could he not reply to her thought with something relevant and poetic?
The waitress brought their luncheon – eggs and coffee for her, the charred ruins of a steak pie for him. He must choose something masculine like steak. He produced on her always an effect of masculinity – of tweed, tobacco and clumsy thought.
“Why did the waitress smile at us so kindly?” she inquired.
“Because we are lovers. And not unpresentable,” he modestly added.
It was the case. Everybody smiled on them. As a scientific student, one who must not overlook any fact, she had to admit that she herself was an object of rare loveliness. People had often told her so; and there she was, anyway, in the huge mirror, so golden and delicate that it surprised her. She stared at her own mysterious light gray eyes. As to Roland, she had to admit a distinguished appearance. There was a refined sort of scholarly beauty hiding in the strong lines of his brown, handsome face. It was a beauty that might become spiritual. There was in his nature – she had seen it in flashes – a light that if it woke might illuminate his lovemaking. Certainly they were a handsome couple, and it was true that people smiled on them. Sometimes it was not unexciting to be smiled on as if one were a bride. Sometimes their smiles were gaolers.
She would not talk. She felt reflective and spiritual and full of delicate sensations. The second egg, as she thoughtfully tapped it, seemed too gross a food for the ethereal condition of her body. She left it, and amused herself with gazing through the plate-glass windows. The light in the sky fascinated her and she fell into a queer state of mind.
The rain had stopped, the crocus-clouds were drifting out of the sky, there was a warmth of the sun and faint stirring of the earth.
“You are forgetting your egg.” It was Roland’s voice and she met his eyes studying her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s the glass. I mean, I felt the light on me and I was thinking what it would be like to be a plant in a greenhouse.”
“What nonsense!” He spoke roughly, but there was anxiety in his face. “Your pale, pale eyes looked so queer,” he added.
If he could but have followed her into the world of her imagination! But he only sat there consuming steak and kidney pie like a porter. She did not understand him. For Roland reality seemed to be verbal; but his range of perceptions was limited, and that was perhaps why his juggling with words was unsuccessful. He was literary, and life did not emerge from his synthetic experiments. And into his flimsy world of phrases there rushed gross appetites, untranslated. He had no delicacies of his own: they were all verbal and vanished before the onrush of desire. Appetite! Bad enough in the matter of food, but in the matter of love . . . she shrank from him. Yet she knew this was not quite fair. She knew that her nerves made rather a bogy of his desires. And she knew that there was in herself, deep enough down at present, a person who would not shrink.
She defended her dream. “Why shouldn’t one know what it’s like to be a plant?”
“Because plants are entirely different.”
“Your knowledge, except where classical literature is concerned, is defective,” she pointed out. “We know now that the plant and the animal are not so different. They breathe, there is circulation of fluid by pumping, pulsatory movement from cell to cell, and similar nervous mechanism. All life is the same. A daffodil and I are similar creatures in dissimilar circumstances. . . .”
“You are right,” he interrupted. “You are a daffodil, a yellow daffodil.”
She frowned. “If you can’t talk reasonably on a scientific subject I will go back to work.” She gave him no opportunity to protest, but left the table and demanded her bill. She had seen the plant-houses in a vision and her soul longed for them – for the heat, the living silence, the secret activity and thinking of plants. For there were presences among the plants, unseen and noiseless forms, green spirits mimicking the appearance of leaf or stalk. “I believe,” she thought, trying to see herself, “that I am more poetical than scientific. But there are points of contact between these two types of mind.”
§ V
From her lair under the fern-w
indow she heard Roland and Hubert discussing her in the parlor. They had left the door open, and it seemed to her that it might be in everybody’s best interests for her to overhear. That was a leaf from her brother’s book, she reflected, and cocked a snook in the direction of the elegant figure that would be sitting in a chair in the sunny window – too self-confident to have to stand in an argument – while Roland restlessly fingered the curios that her father had collected in his travels.
It was the first day of summer time. She had found the unaccustomed length of the afternoon somewhat inconsonant with the virginal and shrinking beauty of early April. It had seemed a little unearthly and produced some disharmony in her which Roland had not the skill to deal with.
“Where is she?” asked Hubert. “Do you want me to say something to her?”
“She is sitting on the landing under her ‘fern-window.’ I left her there, I distrust that window. It gives her queer feelings, evidently, for her eyes go strange when she gazes at it.”
“I shall have it taken away and a window of ordinary glass put in its place,” said Hubert with decision. “I cannot imagine, in any case, why anybody should choose to have a window of glass you can’t see through with patterns of ferns all over it. Windows are meant to see through, and to let light in.”
“It does let light in,” she heard Roland reply. “It seems to gather and intensify and whiten the light. Sometimes in the afternoon, she says, it’s like sitting under a Niagara of light with trees flaming down in it.”
“Sensible people do not sit on landings gazing at ferns in a window. They sit in rooms. That is what rooms are for. Or if it is summer, in gardens. That is what gardens are for.”
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