“But they have no consciousness to be aware of themselves as possessing desires.”
“How do you know? What is consciousness? Anyway, that is what I am after, to know their queer civilization, what they have built up from their raw life; and, as fundamental, what it is in them that is in us too. I mean, what there is of common origin and, if you understand me, common experience.”
“I see.” But he was not inspired. He thought. “As to common origin, it is a question for scientists to agree upon, and inform us with Roman-pontifical authority what has been decided. It does not interest me. But as to what they have built up out of their raw life, how they have contrived to protect themselves against life, it is a question that interests a scholar, for it has its parallel in the humanities.” He spoke smilingly, as one who pretends something for a child’s amusement. “You will agree with me that life in itself, the mere passage of the mind and senses through the cold medium of time, is unpleasant, really very painful. We all take infinite pains to protect ourselves against it, and so, possibly, do your plants. Those who have no distraction for the nervous and muscular system, those who have nothing to do, sleep, if they can, and if they can’t go mad. The pleasures of thought, contemplation itself, are also a protection against life. The study of literature is the noblest distraction, and teaches us how noble men have distracted themselves in the past.”
“That may be so,” she answered, gazing with evident boredom into the well of truth, “but it is experiences that distract me, not descriptions.”
“You like your senses. The simple truth is that your senses are the chief part of you: you think with them. They are very delicate, I know. Very delicate and shy. I know it too well!”
She bit her lip, thinking. She knew that she was in danger of her senses – but could it be merely the senses that sent those curious intimations and threatened to be convincing about things that a critical and sarcastic brain really could not approve? Presently, from her seeming abstraction, came a teasing reply with spines on it, like the cactuses.
“Your simple truth might do for a character in a novel, where all truth ought to be simple. But you have not completely described me. No doubt I am not living to you, but only a character, a figment, an assemblage of images.”
He did not fail to demonstrate his opinion on this point, and she did not shrink, this time. And why, at this moment, had she provoked him? “Am I living to you?” he asked.
“Undoubtedly,” she said, “when you kiss me. You express yourself unmistakably, in kisses. Your style is vigorous and exact. But how could one know that anybody was living and real, except through the senses?” She was more interested in her thoughts, really, than in his love. “If one felt that there was some one or something that one could not see, hear, or feel, one could not let oneself be convinced. Although no doubt there are activities that we cannot perceive with the senses we have. If one could dream oneself down out of human life into the state of undifferentiated existence, might not one re-emerge in some other direction, as a plant, for example? At any rate one might see into the consciousness of plants. But that is just a theory, and one cannot consent to a theory, can one? They are always too neat to be true, aren’t they?” He kept a morose silence. “Aren’t they?” she plagued.
The relevance of his answer was not at once clear. “I shall never make you love me.”
A lover is not wise to permit himself this admission. But he looked so unhappy that at the least she felt some slight compunction.
“I do not see the point,” she observed, not without solicitude.
“I sometimes fear that you may turn out to be that uncomfortable thing, an artist. . . .”
“I wonder.” It was true that she was always trying to describe to herself her impressions of the plants, and always drawing plants or the parts of plants. These drawings, in particular, constantly dissatisfied her. They lacked something that looked out from the real flowers.
“It is certain,” he went on, “that you have experienced more than I. A man should precede a woman in experience, if she is to love him. What hope can I have, then?”
In view of his sadness, she put up her chin. “You are brown and beautiful, and you smell of tweed,” she pointed out. Then, though she protested “My work,” he sat down on the scorched stone and lifted her on to his knees. She shivered when the spikes of a cactus pricked her shoulder.
She suffered him, now, to search all her face and consider the slender body that he held in his arms. She permitted him to push aside the corduroy jacket, and the blouse, and kiss the hollow in her shoulder.
Presently she lifted her face.
“It would be exquisite to be hugged by a cactus, all prickly and hurting; to bleed to death in a delicious, agonizing embrace.”
“What a funny thing to say.” Again he hopelessly searched her eyes – the eyes of a silken cat – that were fixed on the tinted and exotic splendors of sunlight diffused in a glass sky. Then suddenly she stiffened her body, and shifted her gaze to the tangle where the huge, many-armed euphorbia grew. She sat up, pulled the corduroy jacket swiftly over her bosom and drew a little comb from her breeches pocket and arranged her hair – how it seemed to stream under the comb like waves under a glowing sun!
“There’s nobody,” he remonstrated.
“No, but really, I thought . . . I thought some one spoke!”
He looked at her in extreme bewilderment.
§ VIII
Next day Judy issued the most stringent instructions that she was not to be disturbed at her work by Roland. But with the certainty of solitude she found herself reluctant to enter that plant-house where her work lay. The experience that she guessed (against the arguments of her brain) awaited her was one that she feared. It was so irrational; or rather, rational in accordance with a so far-fetched reasoning. It would never be a thing to talk about, for one could not risk the suspicion of being the subject of hallucinations.
She stopped, on her way to the greenhouse, and said good-morning to three gardeners who were planting hyacinths in a bed. One was old, the second middle-aged, the third young.
“A lovely morning,” she proffered.
“Yes, miss,” said the old one, and the young one stared at her sulkily. But she had noted that her appearance often made youths sulky.
“Have you been here a very long time?” she asked the oldest gardener.
“Fifty years, miss.”
“Then you have a very long experience of plants. They are curious things, are they not?”
“Yes, miss.”
“There are plants that move about, as you know.”
“Yes, miss.”
“Have you yourself ever had any curious experience of a plant?”
“No, miss.”
Discouraging. At the brink of a profound experience one instinctively looks round for human company. But the young gardener seemed eager to help.
“I’ve ’eard of queer things since I took up with these ’ere ’ot’ouse plants,” he said. He was young and ready to stretch a point, if it should win him favor.
“I’ve ’eard of a plant wot spoke,” said the middle-aged one gruffly. “It repeated itself. It was a onion.” Thus he intimated his opinion of mysteries.
She tolerated his joke. “A cinerary protest,” she remarked, and passed on frowning.
The three, she knew (she was always vividly aware of herself), were looking at her saffron-headed figure as it went down the path with its boyish attire and its womanish glide. She imagined their observations. The angry, middle-aged one would use language in which an apparently incontinent aunt was somehow involved with the future of his eyes; the old man would reserve his opinion, or come out unexpectedly on her side and say that he doubted there was no harm in it; and the young one, purified by her lovel
iness, would make it known that if the middle-aged one had any more to say, he himself, on behalf of the good and the beautiful, would be ready to knock his head (described with an adjective that she felt was inappropriate as applied to heads) off his similarly described neck. Then she came abreast of two old ladies on a seat, and laughed to think of their horror could they have heard the language then passing in the sleek head of that demure, gliding girl.
§ IX
She stopped at the door of the plant-house and peered in. Then, setting her teeth in her lower lip, she turned the knob and entered the illimitable and mysterious universe in which her imagination was a flying angel. There was no wind in there – nothing but green-golden, rose-golden, brown-golden light in a sky of glass, a smell of heat and water and the bodies of plants, and a reverberation throughout the teeming plant silence. She held on a moment before letting the door quite close. She wanted to retain direct contact with the more usual world, just as, in her imagination, she always wanted to keep open the road back to common sense. She was nervous. She passed a half-hour in somewhat strained attention to work – she was engaged on a research into the curious relationships between the Western cactuses and the tropical Eastern euphorbias – and all the time it seemed as if somebody was creeping behind, twitching at her blouse (in the hot-houses she always pulled off her jacket) and stroking her hair. But hard as she might pretend to be occupied, and swiftly as she might turn her head, nothing was to be detected.
Then, as nothing happened (and what could happen, idiot? her brain contemptuously demanded), she began to think of Roland. How foolish it is, her thoughts ran, to be apprehensive of danger because one is alone. For nothing that can happen to one is really terrifying, taking a long view. Not even, say, the loss of one’s loveliness? Not even that, taking a long, a very long view. If Roland were here, he would be kissing me, between whiles; as often as possible, in fact. There is really, she pointed out to herself, developing the thought so as to occupy her mind, no limit to the length of a kiss; except, for those who have not true passion, the craving for food; no limit, for an artist can always breathe through the nose. It was her custom to ruminate in this manner, even when her senses were occupied. Often, when she was suffering his kisses, she would inspect her reactions to the single blurred eye that met her own (blurred also, she supposed); or she would admit to herself that the kiss was not satisfying, and coolly plan some voluptuous movement of her lips, or other device, to madden her friend with advantage to herself. But such exercises on her part would be unthought of if she were completely in love: these were physical fillips for a spirit that refused to go full gallop; spurs that one would not ask for, or feel, in the authentic passion.
She dismissed these thoughts with a shake of her daffodil head, and began a new search for mental occupation. She pondered, dimly, the adaptations of the cacti to the stimulus of light. Would they vary in some perhaps not measurable way when the light that came down through the golden and glassy medium of that universe was so magical? The stems of some phyllo-cacti before her, grown in the dark, were mere rods, instead of resembling fleshy leaves like the stems of those grown in the light. She seemed to be able to watch the photosynthetic organs of the atrophied cacti drinking in light, as a thirsty man drinks water. And the properly nourished ones were at it, too, steadily and complacently, with no glances of solicitude for their starving fellows. After all, there’s plenty of their sort of food, she reflected; no need, therefore, for anybody to be greedy. She remembered, of course, that in less generous surroundings they might have struggled ruthlessly for light, for existence. If “struggle” is not a question-begging word – she made a note of that for further thought. But here there was no need for anybody to starve – unless we presumably unseen gods of this upper world order otherwise. Is it upper? She answered herself, and question proceeded from answer, answer followed question, until she was quite translated into a world of plants that ate and communicated like men. If they could only come part of the way to meet her, as she had gone to meet them. If they would appear to her in a shape somewhat resembling the shape of men, so that one could speak of face, or eyes. She pretended, like a child, that they could. If they would dress their plant-thoughts in a kind of human speech, so that one could have a sort of conversation. But not in this house. One would not want to converse with these unpleasant plants. The thought spoilt the strange pleasure that she was experiencing. The Euphorbia, for instance, would have somewhat the likeness of one of those wrinkled, tightly packed old gentlemen that are seen on a fine spring afternoon: ghoulish and debauched specters of a lustful youth, stained corpses, infecting the sunshine, raised from the dead by miracle-working April.
She suffered as if such a creature were actually trying to ingratiate her; just as if she were really under his horrible inspection she turned this way and that, and every way some part of her, she felt, gave him pleasure.
Was there actually a voice, repeating her sentence of yesterday? “‘It would be exquisite to be hugged by a cactus, all prickly and hurting; to bleed to death in a delicious, agonizing embrace!’ Thank you, my dear, thank you. Ah, how it warmed my old nerves to hear that, and set them tingling.”
She realized that she had herself created this curious experience, but she hurried from the plant-house. For one who desired to come to some intimate knowledge of plants, it was a disappointing introduction.
§ X
In the fern-window that evening the still head that lay in the refuge of Roland’s breast was considering many things. She was engaged in deciding the future. He, she knew well, was distressed by her silence, by the impersonal stare of the tiny black holes in the midst of her cloud-gray irises; he knew that the brain in the midst of her golden beauty was remorselessly thinking, and there was no way of getting to know what passed. She understood that he wished to read her some lines of Horace that he had translated, hoping, no doubt, to win a moment of consent from her; but he had come by the wit to realize that its pure cadences would be mere uncouthness, its subtle climax a rude explosion, in the delicate silence in which she had wrapped herself.
The evening glow faded, and she heard Hubert suddenly push back his chair in the sitting-room downstairs, walk across the room and snap on the light. She stirred. Roland murmured her name, “Judith,” and sought to hold her more closely. But he woke in her no sign of life. She resisted the summons to her senses; she made herself dead to him, knowing that the vision that was now dawning on her spirit would demand self-dedication, if she was going to accept it, and denial of the world.
She heard spoken words. “Do for heaven’s sake speak,” he was urging her. “Or kiss me, or something, to show me I’m still existing.” His right hand was at his forehead. “Am I a ghost, or what?” he was exclaiming. She gave him a kiss, imitating passion, and resumed her debate. It remained to settle a number of doubts; whether she was sane; whether a state of mind is real; whether it would be worth while to follow out her experience; whether it would not be wiser to reject the kingdom of the imagination and enjoy the palpable world; whether, on the other hand, an experience might not be all, and the world nothing. It was the cold moment of a creative artist who has conceived unreasonable beauty; of a soul that has received, mystically, an absurd enlightenment.
She became aware that he was shaking her. It was treatment that she rather liked, ordinarily; but now she hotly resented it, and “Don’t!” she cried.
“For God’s sake, tell me what’s wrong!” he insisted. “Is anything the matter? Has something funny happened?”
Something funny! Her face burned in the darkness. Her experience, if she told it, would certainly be thought funny; it would be received with unbelief and derision, like the dreams of poets that they convey in ridiculous verse. How poets must distrust themselves as they write the stuff down, she said to herself; or at least, afterwards. She was not thinking of Horace when she thought of poets, but of Shelley and Keats (
wild men of the mind, her lover used to call them). Then, aloud:
“Nothing’s the matter at all.”
“Then why do you seem so strange?’
“Do I?” How did these things come out? Was her vision marked, somehow, on her face? Had it altered her eyes?
“You seem so far away from me,” he pleaded, and clasped her as close as possible, as if seeking to crush separation between their hearts.
At once she let all her doubts go. The actual world, the smell of a tweed jacket, Roland: these things were unquestionable. She sought refuge in the actuality of Roland, believing, as she turned to him, and saw the light of joy come into his eyes, that she had settled her questions and chosen her path.
§ XI
Happy as the conclusion of the evening had been, there remained for Roland a slight unpleasantness, a cause for perturbation. When Judy had gone to bed this faint flavor appears to have begun to pervade his mind; the consideration of it brought him to a state of real anxiety; and at last he mentioned the matter to Hubert, who now related the conversation, with cynical enjoyment, to his sister.
He came to her room for the purpose, bringing a scent of some expensive pomade, artificial and elegant, into the fragrance of the spring night. It was a habit of his to come and argue with her when she was in bed, if there was anything to argue about; or to talk with her, for he was fond of her, and she of him, in spite of his worldliness.
He sat on a chair by her bed, crossed his elegant and beautifully trousered legs, put his hands in his pockets and cocked his shrewd face at her.
Roland, unbusinesslike, had found it difficult to begin, he told her.
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