Flower Phantoms

by Fraser, Ronald

  “Well,” Roland seemed to agree, “I don’t like it when she looks at the light for a quarter of an hour at a time till her eyes – those pale, unrelenting eyes – get so full of it that she doesn’t notice me.”

  “I gather she has offended you.”

  “No. Not that.” He impatiently brushed the hair from his brow – she knew his gesture: “I have offended myself. I do not succeed with her. She is so mocking, critical, and keen-minded. I can’t – do you know what I mean? – I can’t get the upper hand. I mean, she is not in love with me. Not abandonedly, not of necessity, and with that desperation, that addition of glorious madness we read about. She loves me, I fear, with discernment, though on occasion with ardor, I must admit. I must admit that, though I do not understand it. She has been eager, I must tell you, on occasion, and . . . how shall I put it? . . . experimental – within what is delicate, of course. But each time I seem to disappoint her.”

  She smiled. And then almost she wept. She had relied on his knowing how to summon up the resources of love that were hidden in her nature, and direct them on himself. But he had proved so clumsy.

  “You cannot be very adroit, I suppose.” Hubert spoke with a certain shade of contempt. “Instinct is lacking and you have not become expert by practice.”

  There was a sound of defeat in Roland’s answer. “I do not really know why she has said she’ll marry me.”

  “No doubt because you are handsome, incapable of business and hard up. Or really, I suppose, because of some unreasonable correspondence in your respective chemistries. Or again, as electrical engineers say, you are in resonance. It is absurd, but it is a fact, and we cannot disregard it.”

  “But I fear it is not a fact. The correspondence is not quite perfect, and the resonance is not more than almost complete. It is that infinitesimal disharmony that is so damnably baffling.”

  “Well, I must say I don’t understand it. Any man with an average amount of brains and good looks can make any woman in love with him, if he cares to take the trouble.”

  “Is that your experience?” asked Roland enviously.

  “My experience,” replied Hubert, giving the subject more searching attention, “is that it is easy to give movement and direction to a woman’s wishes, to become the object of her secret instincts, and thus, always prudently, to enlist her will on the side of your amusement.”

  “What cheek!” she commented. “And what a lie!”

  “But I think you have more than the average you mention,” said Roland’s voice. “Certain advantages – good looks, though by themselves they are nothing: a certain – what would one say? – distinction is almost the word – a grace, a charm, a magnetism, that is instantly effective with women and without it one does not interest them, except with great difficulty. Still, in this case, you have not dominated.”

  “Ass! She is my sister.”

  But this aspect of the question had ceased to interest Roland. Glancing, perhaps, through the window he had seen the delicate April sky, and made sensitive by love experienced a rush of emotion not referable to classic sources.

  “She is so lovely!” he cried. “When I die I shall never have found her description. She is an experience that has never been realized in language, Hubert. She is not Cleopatra, Nicolette, or Beatrice, though she has some quality of each, as passionateness, naïveté, and power of soul. She is a flower. Lily! Daffodil! If only I might be given one flash of vision, one swift phrase of searching beauty, one spear-pointed word to use with her – she would be my victim!” There was a pause, during which he evidently fell from his lyric height. “I must sound like a fool. But you know how maddening her beauty is – her beauty like a yellow radiance with that subtle remorseless brain thinking secretly in the midst of it.” His feelings surged again. “You know how exquisite, how fragrant, how . . .”

  Hubert interrupted. “As I said before,” he remarked, “she is my sister.”

  § VI

  They sat together one afternoon in the window-seat on the landing, in the April radiance of the fern-window, he dark and frowning with his desire for her, she slender, golden, young. She wore a white blouse and over it her jacket of brown corduroy, breeches of the same and puttees.

  Now he tilted back the small head and spoke almost on her mouth.

  “You are a golden lily.”

  She stared past him at the light of the window.

  “Your feet and your hands are snowdrops,” he continued. “You have daffodil-yellow hair.” She let her lashes begin to droop mockingly, but he went on. “Your flesh is narcissus-stuff.”

  Her eyes dwelt on him for a minute and the grasp of his hands tightened. “But my lips and eyes,” she pointed out, “you have not mentioned them.”

  “I’m coming to those,” he said grimly. “Your lips are poppies and breathe the opium of some paradise. Your eyes . . .”

  “One would say I was really an extremely hybrid flower,” she interrupted.

  “And your eyes,” he went on with desperation, “your eyes are the pale petals of the anemone. It is like staring into the golden eye of narcissus. There is something that looks out of a flower’s eye, but one cannot say where or what.”

  “I am now catalogued,” she replied, “but my description has not moved me. You must try again.”

  He searched in her eyes, and she kept them still and blind as deep water. Presently he gave out the result of a prolonged inspection. “The iris is light cloud-gray. Or blue? Topaz? Impossible to decide. Mostly a bluish-gray, but there are certainly streaks or spots of a fiery topaz. The pupil is a black well. One can see no bottom.” His face impended. “It is mechanical. There are little sudden contractions and expansions. The eye when you look into it is made of very curious stuff.” His voice carried a note, one would have said, of fear – the fear of a romantic when the light fades for a moment off his illusion. “My God! Judy, the human eye is a very terrifying thing. It’s so inhuman. There’s no soul in it. It’s a machine. A lot of cloudy, spongy, extremely queer stuff, with a sinister black hole. It’s expressionless, when you look close. Laughter, kindness, everything that makes people human, seems to disappear. What a strange and terrible thing mind must be; how curious, how frightening, those movements in a queer kind of matter that one calls thought. I can’t stand it!” He stood away from her, to recapture the humanness of her eyes, but still they seemed so light, so changeless, so impersonal. “For heaven’s sake, what is going on behind your eyes!” he exclaimed. “Can’t you stop staring at the window!”

  She smiled, under her cap of fire, to break the spell of fear in which, as she saw, he had become bound. “I was thinking of a forest of waving ferns, inhabited only by large silken cats.”

  “Oh, you and your ferns! Are you plant-mad, Judy?”

  “It is possible,” she replied. “When I get among them . . . something happens. When I am in that universe bounded by tinted glass, in an ether magical with light, warmth, my critical wits leave me. I become an irrealist, like you, and live in a self-created world. There’s a glow, a smell of heat and water, of mold, of the green bodies of flowers. I see a sort of order, a reality, in the relations of flower and leaf and viridescent stem; or, I should say, behind them: it is suggested. And sometimes there is a strange thing happens – as if spirits I have known, spirits of people who are dead, clung in the flowers and were beckoning me.” She pondered deeply, striving for means of expression adequate to her experiences – then gave it up. “But oh! I don’t know. . . .” And she reflected that he would not have understood her: she had been where he was not delicate-minded enough to follow.

  The sadness that she felt must have shown in her face, for he took and kissed her. “My golden lily! I could eat you.”

  “Ah! Now you are talking sense!”

  She saw his swift hope, when he per
ceived that he had succeeded in interesting her senses, and it seemed maladroit of him, greedy. She fled into her armor of criticism. “But you must understand, my Roland, it is no good using that language about flowers with me. I live with them. I know them. I know the world of the plants, their thoughts, their feelings, and I have intimations of strange experiences among them. No image, therefore, that you could fetch from the furthest of your literary excursions would ever cope with the real flower, or with the experience, or with any experience . . .” she began to expand her thesis.

  “I disagree,” he said, professionally wounded. “The great poets can make effects with words that nature could never hope to equal.”

  “Well,” she admitted, “it is true that what you said then about eating me was effective. It makes me realize the depth of your love. Sometimes I bite the hearts out of roses. I am a sadist, with flowers.”

  “You are lovely, cruel, and irrefutable as life itself. Ah! There is a new change in the sunset-irradiated iris-cloud. Have I used some expression that amuses you?”

  “Irrefutable,” she said. “You have stirred your public with the word ‘irrefutable.’” But she held him at arm’s length. “Will life always be irrefutable, I wonder? There must come a time, I suppose, when life will become senile, and fail to effect its will. Or some formidable change in the condition of the planet . . .”

  “The words sound most beautiful on your boyish mouth,” he interjected.

  “. . . some change,” she continued, “which even life, tough as it is, can’t stand. Or a dissolution of matter, so that there is nothing which can exhibit the characteristics. It will be sad for scientists, when the subject of research disappears under their own vanishing hands.”

  “And what will there be left?” he asked, depressed, doubtless, by her detachment.

  “The original nothing, I presume. Whatever that may be. A chance for some one to invent another kind of reality.”

  “This is an education for me,” he responded, not without resentment. “I am improved by your conversation. I didn’t really hope that you would say love would be left. Still, it is an achievement to have awakened these reflections. You express them well. Myself, I am not expressive, as you so often and so rightly say, unless I have access to dictionaries and books of reference. But are you not just a little sad” – he spoke sardonically – “that on the occasion to which you refer there will no longer be any means for the contact of lips in love; not even memories to remember it?”

  “You are getting angry with me,” she said, suddenly lifting her small, golden head. “I like it.”

  The fire was dying out of the fern-window and they were in the shadows of dusk. It came to her suddenly that she was desirous of kisses. He drew her close. She became very still, and let her restless mind drowse.

  “Why have you said that perhaps you’ll marry me?” he presently asked, bewildered, no doubt, by her changes of mood.

  “Because I love you,” she whispered, “at moments, unreasonably.”

  “Why do you love me,” he pressed, “at moments, unreasonably?”

  She replied to his question with a shyness that stroked from his nerves the last anguish of pleasure (there was a sting, too, in what she said): “In this matter of kissing me, at any rate, you are sometimes not unconvincing.”

  Now she let her nerves drown under the torrent of his kisses. It was vehement enough to overwhelm any resistances or protests of expiring criticism.

  § VII

  A few days after, in the morning, Roland came seeking Judy throughout the plant-houses in Kew Gardens. She had forbidden him to do it; but he explained that he desired to see her at work; to know what it was about those flowers and ferns that, as he may have surmised, made her a little mad; to surprise her, if he might, in the supposed condition, observe her, and try to understand. Flowers were all very well. He knew about them, of course, through the images in literature. Without doubt he was aware that they existed, as the occasion of numerous fancies and thoughts to do with grace, purity, transience and the like. But she believed that his heart never missed a beat at the sudden advance of a troop of daffodils in a meadow; an azalea blowing like flame did not bewilder him with irrational suggestions, that one distrusted, of a presence hidden in the wind, of words spoken soundlessly about one; he did not feel the teeming of an unperceived order of existence, an inexpressible reality.

  “I saw you,” he told her presently, “through the glass of the cactus house as through water, and you looked like a tow-headed nymph in some African river full of dim, prickly weeds.” The door was not locked and he had stolen in, closing the door quietly, with the idea of watching her at work. While he stood with his hand on the door-handle, she had turned half round and seemed to stare into the tangle of cactuses and euphorbias; it might have been the very tiny click of the latch that disturbed her. Then she bent her small, shining head over the plant on which she was operating, and stood there capably with her back to him, her legs straddled, her elbows busily moving, and sometimes she cleaned a knife on the seat of her breeches.

  After a few minutes of stillness, it seems, he felt he should be compelled to speak. The silence was broken, and the dry heat relieved, only by an intolerable drip of water from a tap somewhere. The sun burned in the glass roof as in the fierce and scorching sky of the Sahara. In the end he broke the tension involuntarily, found quite unexpectedly that he had loudly turned the knob of the door and was shuffling his feet.

  “I wanted to observe you,” he apologized, at the stare of her eyes, “and you were so charming that I began to desire you.”

  “The state is not favorable to observation,” she said shortly. “I could never work if I felt like that.”

  “Your behavior, though, when you found that some one was present, was not a little odd,” he contested; “for one so self-possessed and so icy-proof against poor desiring devils like me you seemed a trifle confused. Why did you look so anxiously into the tangle of plants, as if to reassure yourself that some one was safely hidden?” He must have seen plainly, and obviously it was baffling, that nobody was hidden; it was quite clear that he and she were alone in the hothouse – alone, but for the brooding plants, and the prickly silence. But for him there was no voice in the silence; there were no eyes among the plants. The thought that he might come near to her state of mind perished.

  “Why have you come when I told you not to?” she demanded, still in a little confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I wanted to see you at work . . . what it is that interests you so much.”

  Ordinarily she would have put his question off with some irrelevant answer. To-day, she was discomposed enough to reply, speaking low, as if she could be overheard: “It is necessary that I should know the life of plants.” Perhaps she still had some hope that he would understand her.

  “Oh, life!” he interjected. “Nasty raw stuff!”

  At that she recovered. She perceived that for him reality was merely verbal; the situation could be saved by the manipulation of words. She glanced at him, leant against the trays and crossed one leg over the other. “You do not like your life crude. Even your kisses,” she mocked, “are a trifle literary. Exquisite, but chosen and just. They smack of the midnight oil. I admit it. No . . . not now.” She prevented him.

  “I don’t know why . . . the image is possibly far-fetched . . . but for the moment your eyelids remind me of the petals of pansies.”

  “I was up late last night,” she answered.

  He stood away from her and examined her face. “Your eyes,” he said, “are ringed with a faint, purplish darkness as of imagined pansy petals. The image is not far-fetched,” he concluded. “It is true.”

  “But still, it is an image. More flowers!” She groaned.

  “There is no flower here that can equal . . . Oh,
hell! I was beginning again. But really it is true, what I was going to say, that there is no flower in all these gardens that can equal the texture and sweetness of your skin.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I could show you something in the orchid house . . .”

  She broke off. The flower she spoke of was the subject of certain intimate thoughts. The beauty and the strength of that orchid were mysteriously more efficient with her senses than the beauty and strength of Roland.

  “I agree,” she recovered, “that I am perhaps unequaled in this particular neighborhood. Most of these plants are extremely ugly and horrible.”

  These words were spoken with emphasis, as if meant for ears.

  He glanced at the cactuses, the huge many-armed euphorbias.

  “Those spiky things look as if their flesh would be unpleasant,” he observed.

  “Extremely loathsome.”

  “Their habits distasteful.”

  “Excessively revolting.”

  “And their life, that raw stuff we were speaking of, unpleasing, like the life of butchers and some kinds of old men.”

  “You have said it,” she concluded. “But they are not all like that. The bodies of most plants are pleasant, and some are very delicate and aromatic. You are not, of course, to think that I am trying to isolate the life of plants as if it were a juice. It has now been positively shown by physicists and chemists that there is really no such thing as life. What I seek is to know their desires. . . .”

  “Desires? How can plants have desires?”

  “They have needs,” she pointed out; “therefore probably desires.”