“You know, your sister’s a strange young woman,” was all he had been able to say.
Hubert had been sitting in the open window, fanned by the spring breeze, engaged in mastering a pamphlet issued by an insurance company competitive with the one he represented. He had glanced briefly round.
“She’s loopy,” he had replied with economy of effort. Then, happening to catch a glimpse of Roland’s face – “Of course, I don’t mean that literally. Is anything particular the matter at present?”
“Oh, nothing’s the matter. Only . . .”
“Only what? Speak out, my dear fellow. You must put your case if you want me to deal with it.”
“Well . . . it sounds odd . . . but I really think, you know, she fancies those plants of hers have personality. I mean, yesterday, when I happened to meet her in a plant-house, she behaved as if the damned things were like people; as if we were being overlooked and overheard.”
Hubert had not shrunk from the unpleasant but obvious inference. He had looked (shrewdly, of course) at his friend. “Are you quite sure,” he asked, “there wasn’t some one there? I mean, naturally, a real, flesh-and-blood person. A man, in fact.”
This question he enjoyed repeating to Judith, who received it without comment.
Roland had flushed. “How can you suggest a thing like that?”
“You will admit it is a possibility?”
“Yes, but your own sister. . . .”
“Things like that happen, and when they do the woman involved is quite commonly somebody’s sister.” But it was no use talking to a fellow who had no sense of things as they are, a fellow who allowed his mind to be obscured by his desires, even to the point of a marriage that he could not afford. He glanced at her as he repeated this, but she made him no concession. “One ought to regulate things better,” his discourse to Roland had continued. “So many fools have married on behalf of the prudent, and it is additionally gratifying to enjoy what another has laid up for himself.” This he particularly liked telling her.
“I do not think, in point of fact, that what I suggest is the case,” he had then said to Roland. “I agree with you – I think she’s a bit funny sometimes. Not really loopy, you know, but I find in my experience that few people are quite sound on every point, and Judy is rather further from the normal, on most points anyway, than most people.” This he repeated to Judy with comments for her own ear.
“Is there anything to be done about it?” Roland had asked. He knew that Hubert was a practical fellow, who would always know what to do.
“There is nothing to be done, yet,” Hubert had replied. “Not yet.” He pondered something further. Really, he had reflected, some men are very ignorant, or blind; and sometimes one has to enlighten them – one really has to in the interests of general sanity.
“When are you going to be married?” he had asked. “Soon, isn’t it?”
“June,” answered Roland. Nothing seemed to have been conveyed to him. Oh! well, then – “The function of women in the world,” Hubert had explained to him, “is to bear children.”
When he had repeated this to Judy, and seen that her mouth was open, showing sharp little teeth, and her eyes beginning to flash topaz lightnings, he left the room abruptly.
§ XII
There had been some idea of spending April in Italy. In the morning Judy stated that this had become her definite intention. Within two days all arrangements were made and she was off with her mother and Roland. They did not come back until early May.
In Italy there had been no trouble. For Roland it was all sunshine, darkened only on some rare occasions by a sharp wind of irony. He obviously began to feel that the shining little piece in delphinium blue or amber yellow who created such a sensation in the Italian hotels was really his possession; he began to be proud. It was natural, then, that he should show some slight sign of distress when, within a minute of the return home she had sprung up the stairs and was standing in the summer splendors of the fern-window. It must have been odd to see her standing there in an elegant slip of a frock and modish hat, instead of in corduroys. Only the saffron flames of hair curled out in front of her ears to remind him that nature is unquenchable.
Seeing his doubts she reassured him with a smile. She had chosen the path she was going to take. She was going to give up her work in the Gardens. They would be married in less than a month, and she was going to embrace the life of any ordinary suburban young wife of beauty and intelligence – whatever sort of life that may be.
Lying straight and still once more in her own airy bedroom, she sank into a still sleep on that intention. But through all those days in Italy unknown processes had been taking place in her mind, and in the morning they came to the surface. With daybreak it was clear that one need not resign everything at once; one need not hesitate to pay just one more visit to the Gardens for the purpose of saying good-bye; indeed, one found in oneself the energy, even a certain eagerness, to review the whole situation, in order to reapprove one’s decision once more.
She lay under a coverlet of peacock blue staring at the first flame-point of dawn that woke in a crystal hanging on a bracket. In that moderate, solid, and comfortably furnished house her bedroom was like a precious cabinet or shrine for a golden image. The walls glimmered with the blue of a butterfly’s wings and crystals hung on silver brackets; the ceiling had the warmth of a sunrise; the windows were eastward so that the daybreaks of spring and summer flowed in like seas and drowned her in tingling splendors. Images and scenes rose before her eyes as she stared at the streak of fire in the crystal.
In a month’s time, she dreamily thought, it might not be so easy to lie in bed creating scenes and pictures. That required solitude. Anxiety stirred under her heart, as she remembered how she loved the white mists of spring and summer in her bedroom – the long delicious lonelinesses, the expectances in the scented darkness, the experiences of an indescribable whispering beauty, the trances in which she found something beyond pleasure. Her brain woke. She saw plainly that she did not want to be married; that is, she corrected, to be made to live constantly in close association with Roland. In the institution of marriage she now clearly perceived the whole gross-fingered incapacity of mankind for any subtlety in the manipulation of its affairs.
And as to love – nobody had yet shown her how to be in love. In the splendid mornings of May she regretted it. She desired to be in love, and if some one should teach her . . . this means, she pointed out to herself, that you are not virtuous: it cannot, however, be helped. Perhaps, as Roland fears, you really are an artist; one who accepts all experiences.
On this view of her nature, she saw that it would be idle to resist a desire that, as she now confessed, was vigorously calling. Not omitting to remember that there were experiences she had feared, hitherto, to accept, she slid from her bed and considered further measures as she brushed her hair in the dim mirror with a great tortoiseshell brush. She longed for the bath; her arms ceased moving while she pictured the flood of warm crystal sliding into the porcelain, in the light of daybreak. But it was important not to wake the household – and in any case the water would be stone cold at that shivering hour. Four o’clock, her watch said. Not too much time for what she was minded to do; but enough. She quivered like a narcissus in wind as she thought of the beauty that she must be about to experience. She stood for a few seconds in the window, stilled by the languid splendors that were in attendance about the door of the sunrise. She could see the tops of great stately trees in the Gardens, melting southward into a delicacy of rose-madder and water-blue. She imagined the dim lawns, the rhododendrons saluting the sun, and her heart leapt with passionate longing for them. In a minute, in a minute I shall be there, she said, struggling with the silken rope of her pajamas. At last the knot gave, and a faint dawn-breeze played on her body. It was delicious, but she could not
delay. Very hastily she pulled on the long silken stockings and slipped into the imponderable matters that she had discarded with her dance frock last night; over these her corduroys – and strange and heavy they seemed after a month’s disuse. Then she went by way of a drainpipe to the roof of a shed, and so escaped into the sunrise.
§ XIII
The policeman who saw her gliding along the Lower Kew Road was puzzled, but he let it go at that. He probably knew she was something to do with the Gardens, a student or gardener going to work very early, perhaps; or he may have decided that the bright-headed phenomenon was outside the scope of his duty. Others, abroad at that hour, were openly inquisitive. But at the Bridge she ran down to the towpath and sped along by the slow, sunrise-bearing river, unpursued, until she was opposite the Gardens. But then, how to cross the ditch – an impossible jump? She hunted about for a passage, remotely aware, back of her consuming intention to get into the Gardens, of a check. She was not baffled for long. A tree trunk offered what might have been thought advantages by a squirrel. She swarmed it and passed into the Gardens by means of a jutting branch, hand over hand, with swinging feet. The difficulty enraged her. One might have heard the indignant gasps that came from her chest. But in two minutes she was coursing over the grass, standing with bare head before the mountain-wall of trees, lifting her mouth to the flood of daybreak that surged over them.
At this strange hour the sky, the trees, all the lineaments of the world that grew from the mists of rose-madder and pale blue, were unreal. The air was full of a dim shimmer of birdsong, that mounted as the daylight increased and streamed in ever stronger pulsations from the invisible hearts of the bushes, from morning-bright chapels aloft in the cedars. The leaves sang. The universe was all an infinity of little green singing flames, each pointed leaf burning momently brighter, until the material world seemed to dissolve and float away in a wrack of flame and song.
With it, too, there was a dissolution in Judith. When a certain faintness, that arose from the excess of beauty, had passed, she found herself with means of knowing the plants and all that was going on around her – the drawing of food from the air, of water from the soil, the exchange of substances through the conductive region of the trunk, the transpiration of watery vapors through the pores of the leaves. The physiological processes she felt dimly, as she felt the inward changes of her own body: the action of their mechanical tissues she felt just as she felt the action of her own muscles. And certain other processes, analogous to the spiritual processes in man, she quite intimately perceived. Gazing up at the glowing blossoms of the chestnut, each blossom, she imagined, an almondy bower on a mountain side, she felt suddenly the alpine spirit and magnificent exultation of the tree. Advancing a little, she saw ahead of her, in the shadowy clefts of those green mountains, a mass of rhododendrons, white and red, and joined in their solemn adoration as they held their great lanterns to the rising sun. Then it entered her head that she must see and possess all the beauty of the place in the intimacy and wonder of that hour. The day was advancing quickly. The new sunlight lay on the open lawns in fine tissues of gold, although there was still dew in the long shadows of the bushes. She sped, therefore, from point to point, coursing like some golden fawn of the daybreak, leaving her slot in grass and sandy path and meadow of bluebells; and at this point she stopped with beating heart before hawthorn; at that before magnolia, lilac, broom, or irises in a bed: and at every point it seemed to her that she was saluted by the flowers; that some fair rhododendron smiled at her, shyly, like a Greuze girl; or a tulip bowed good-morning with high and disdainful neck. How gracefully they sprang, some of the plants! How splendid was the strong thrust of stalk or branch! With what lovely consideration did the great trees dispose their masses! And when at last she stood in the circle of the azalea garden, the flowers leapt and swirled about her like flames about the stake, delicate flames of love that desired to martyr her; and a wind blew with the ardor of their passion in it, and she opened her jacket, offering her lily bosom to their fierce tongues.
§ XIV
When she was satisfied of that experience, she allowed her eye to be caught by a glitter of glass, eastward, under the risen sun. Tropical friends lived there, she reflected; and they too must receive a visit. But as she wandered that way, she found herself a little tired, a trifle sobered. Some vague consciousness of her state of mind stirred in her brain, and a vague thought of Roland, of Roland as an intruder. She permitted herself a little ironical smile. In that mood she gave but perfunctory glances at her acquaintance in the great palm-house, and further on, among the tropical ferns, the temperate flowers and the economic plants. She passed the orchids and pitcher plants, and thoughtfully considered the question of the cactuses. She was very reluctant to enter the plant-houses. Strange things had happened to her that morning, and things yet stranger might happen with the addition of heat and silence and magical glass. There were extremes of experience to which she was not yet ready to give herself.
Her body was tired out, and she sought to rest herself by leaning against the jamb of the glass door that gave on the tropical lily tank. She began to think long involved thoughts, her eyes fixed on the green-bladed shafts of Thalia geniculata, by the edge of the water, bright strokes in the midst of that emerald world. It was very hot in there, and the plants were opening their vivid, bladed leaves in a silence as of some equatorial noon. Her imagination went out of her, as she rested, and wandered in the plant-world, not boldly, for her naked soul had become very sensitive to an impression of presences watching and considering. The damp atmosphere became oppressive with its burden of invisible beings. Was it possible that the imaginations of the flowers could also go forth from them to enter into conversation with some third part of her, freed in a rare sleep of the body and mind? The scene had changed a little while she was pondering. Now she seemed to be on the shore of some lagoon in Southern India, a sheet of water bordered by a palm-forest, covered with budding water lilies and a delicate tracery of small floating leaves, and already, though it was early morning, the sun burned intolerably in a tinted sky. It was her custom, in reverie, to people the world with her own creations. They arose, doubtless, in memory; but it was some reservoir more remote and secret than memory that furnished the figures of this dream. For she found herself in the midst of a strange drama, in which there was an action without limbs and words spoken without a voice. There was before her a Being, arising, it seemed, from the scarcely opened bud floating on the lagoon, whom she must recognize and name the Water Lily, a personality that emerged from the flower, a pure, intellectual and elegant spirit, meditative and destined to sadness.
There were words in her brain that seemed to have been woken there by some ray of thought, or desire, that proceeded from the flower – “Float here beside me.”
Even in her dream, if dream it was, she smiled; and stood out of the dream and smiled at herself as an object in it. For she was conscious of a very human inhibition. “How absurd!” she reflected, as she began to slip out of her clothes. “But to be naked before a flower . . . this flower, at any rate, this pale and spiritual Being.”
A swarm of small fishes in the lagoon, darting from some gloomy lair under the tracery of leaves, flashed back the burning sun with their golden bodies, and her soul longed for the water. But now others were watching her. A green, palmlike emanation made her feel as if she were being stared at, and there seemed to be a thronging, among the tree trunks, of dark and Indian forms. And was that a flower-hand clutching at a silken garment, or one of those small monkeys that gibbered in the palm-forest? But a dusky and lovely creature, the person of some precious rose from a Rajah’s garden, was at her side smiling and flushing. “You are so beautiful and so new,” were the words that woke in her mind. “That is why they regard you, these vulgar ones.” For answer she kissed the scented and intoxicating creature.
The thoughts of the Water Lily floated from him, as it were, like an ar
oma. “Hide yourself near me in the water. Great beauty is not for the vulgar, but for the cultivated. The spectacle of what is beautiful, what is new, what is sad, is not for the gross.”
Was there petulance, contempt, resentment in the nature of this spirit? Some trace of the passions of the plant-body?
“Ah, but indeed,” came to her from the Rose, “such crystal and radiant beauty has never yet been given to us.”
Now she looked down at her body, and saw the truth of those images that had been whispered to her in another world, for indeed her flesh was of the texture and purity of a flower. She had come to be half of their world. The southern sunlight was more radiant and intimate to her. Her bare feet were kissed by little feathery plants that swarmed down to the lagoon. Delighted, tingling from the sun, she stepped into the water and was in conversation with the Lily, swimming and floating and entwined with the limbs of plants, and a crocodile drowsing there ignored her. But suddenly all that was human of her seemed about to drown in this queer region of being, and she clung in a panic to any chance straw of conversation.
“Do you exist?” she asked abruptly.
He seemed to ponder. “That is a question. Would it not be difficult to say what it is to exist?” Now the lagoon and the glowing sun and his answers became more dreamlike. “How can one be certain that another exists, or indeed that there is any self? But you can be certain, in a sense, that I exist as I appear to you, for you have made me in this form within the world of your consciousness, and you are to this extent my Creator.”
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