Her senses flew to the forest. If there were orchids there, what lovely, what irresistible beings could be imagined! She silenced her thoughts. “You can act?” she queried, with some reminiscence of the thoughts silenced. “You can effect your will?”
“The actions of this being whom you have created,” he said, “are predestined in your imagination. I am, but to an extent I am in your mind. Consequently I am to an extent conditioned by your will. This is in a way captivity – charming, but still captivity.”
There seemed to be something elegant, as well as philosophical, in the dreaming of this flower. She knew well that his acts, his growing up through the warm water out of ancient mud towards the fierce tropical sun, all the functioning of his plant-body, were an affair of chemistry and mechanics: she had not expected this spiritual corona – why not, she asked herself, since we have one too?
Once more he woke up a little fire of words in her mind. “The responsibility of creation is important, and the world is defective in more than one respect.”
“Defective?” she wondered.
His passionate emotion spired up like a rare incense. “Existence is so beautiful and so short, subject to such melancholy disasters; the burning god who calls us from the sweet darkness of the waters to worship him, and fills our bodies with the tingling substance of life, himself slays us as a fair sacrifice.”
“And sweet and faint is the lily-scent, and heavy the water-scent,” she murmured.
The pale spirit became as it were clouded with his lily-anger. “Aye, and it is to be seen that this is a daughter of the burning god, a flower from the sun. Dewy one! you that shake the morning from gleaming petals, and at your blossoming there is a stirring of the song of birds! Deity, with your fragrant and golden beauty, your eternal and careless youth, your unpitying creativeness . . . !”
But she was tired of philosophizing; a little tired of play-acting. She made her way to the shore, therefore, and stood among the tendrils of myriophyllum. But now the sun in the tinted Indian sky became more sinister, the atmosphere heavier and more oppressive, laden with watching presences. There was a passing of thoughts, and a lurking in the palm-forest. Then, as she began somewhat hurriedly to find some way of escape from this place, she seemed to be seized, there was a foul breathing on her neck, and she was in the paralysis of an evil dream. Recognizing the spiny arms that had captured her, she screamed. Then a green, turbaned appearance looked into her face. . . .
“Really!” protested the Lily. “Really . . . !”
“Oh, help me!” she cried, terror-stricken. “Help me!”
“Pathological,” the Lily observed, and seemed to be considering what, if anything, ought to be done. “If the power of thought . . .” But now a white and radiant Being started from among the trees, tore the green nightmare away and hurled him into the lagoon.
What he did there was not of interest to Judy; her eyes were all for that fatal Flower. The Indian sun itself seemed to burn in his body; his flesh was dazzling sunlight imprisoned in Himalayan snow. And his eyelids were violet and passionate, his gaze ardent.
“I would like to thank you,” she faltered.
“Permit me,” he replied, and tipped up her chin and kissed her mouth with a sort of seraphic boldness. He then vanished among the palms.
She stood looking after him, entirely filled and captured by an inexpressible warmth and sweetness. Then, suddenly coming to her ordinary senses, she realized that she was still outside the greenhouse, gazing through the door with her lips pressed to the glass.
§ XV
By mid-day she was wondering whether there was anything wrong with her – that day-dream had been so vivid, so real. But also so sweet! At lunch-time, sniffing the commonplace aroma of mincemeat, she decided, on an empty stomach, to see a psycho-analyst. It was obvious, however, what any psycho-analyst would say. His conversations followed one another through her head.
But what have I done, she asked herself, other than create as a poet does? Is that pathological? She decided that she felt thoroughly fit, except that there was a marked distaste for Roland, and a sinking feeling in the chest, a disconcerting spasm in the region of the heart, a thrilling convulsion of the nerves, whenever she remembered the eyes of that Orchid.
At work in the afternoon nothing happened; everything was quite ordinary. She did not expect anything; she was busy thinking over her daybreak vision and wondering if there was any way of getting rid of Roland for a week or two. She feared Roland was bound to come in the evening. Could she go to bed with a headache? If she did, Roland would come to her room and be distressed and sympathetic (but rather more distressed – or, perhaps, impatient – than sympathetic). No means of getting rid of Roland occurred to her.
He came, and she was cold. She found it quite impossible to evoke in herself one single thrill of the nerves. He seemed tedious beside the Lily, infinitely plain beside the Orchid (and the only response that he got from her lips was when she suddenly remembered the glorious mouth of that flower).
The evening, from both their points of view, was a total loss; at nine o’clock she yawned her desire for sleep, and Roland stamped his foot in what seemed to her a merely pettish despair.
“I’m sick of asking what’s the matter with you!” he cried.
“Nothing’s the matter,” she replied, suddenly convinced, in the glamour of twilight, that her vision was reasonable.
“Well, what do you want to go to bed for?”
“I’m very tired,” she answered, not wishing to say that she had been up at daybreak, or that she was going to be up at daybreak to-morrow (and she must spend the night there sometime, to make acquaintance with the night-flowering plants).
“You’re not tired,” he said, “you merely don’t love me.”
“Yes I do, silly.” She kissed him, trying once again to lend a little flavor to her kiss by remembering the Orchid. But she could not remember him voluntarily.
“You do not love me,” he repeated.
“Oh well then,” she replied, seeing a chance and tentatively grasping it, “perhaps after all I don’t. . . . Oh yes I do, I know I do,” she added hastily. “I mean to marry you . . . to be your wife . . . in June, in a month . . . or perhaps in July . . . or August . . . at any rate, this summer . . .”
He refused to believe her, and she went to bed, leaving him black and brooding.
§ XVI
Later, Hubert came to her room. She set her teeth, determined to resist his appalling common sense till the last.
“What’s this I hear about putting off your wedding?” he began.
She had her own methods of evading his inquisition. No use to deny or protest. “And supposing I decide not to marry at all?” she suggested. “Why should a woman marry?”
He ignored this tempting question for the moment; it was not one of those occasions for arguing academically with her far into the night. “What you’ve got to do, my girl, is to marry, and to marry at once.”
“Why should a woman marry when she is economically independent?”
“You are not economically independent.” He stuck ruthlessly to the actual case. “True, you make something with your journalism, but that’s not independence, for you.”
“What is it when added to Roland’s money?”
“Something paltry,” he answered shortly. “Nothing less than ten thousand a year is an income.”
“You want me to marry a poor man, then. Why don’t you wait until some one rich wants to marry me?”
“Because I want you off my hands. If I did wait you’d only get some other silly fancy in your head, and I should have this trouble all over again. No, my girl; you’re going to marry Roland and I’m going to see you do it, and when you’re married I’ll take Roland and put a few grains of sense into him a
nd make him turn his talents into something lucrative. I’ll make him dress well, to start with. No man can do anything successfully who isn’t well turned out.”
“Your proposal doesn’t attract me. The more Roland gets, the less what I have will seem, and the more dependent on him I shall be.”
“My dear, good idiot, the point is not, for the moment, that you should be economically independent; the point, for the moment, is that you should marry. A woman isn’t sane until she’s married. It isn’t nature for a woman to be economically independent . . .”
“I merely don’t agree,” she interrupted, shivering because her brain examined his proposition with signs of a disposition to perceive truth in it. To an artist all propositions seem true.
“When you’re married you’ll see that,” he went on. “You’ll drop a lot of nonsense when you’re married, and a lot more when you find you’re going to have a baby.”
“Who said we were going to have a baby?” she parried. “As a matter of fact” – she felt strangely uncovered and helpless and childish as she said it – “as a matter of fact we’re not.”
He looked at her with speculation. “Don’t tell me,” was his conclusion.
“We’re not,” she protested, still more confused, but hiding it.
He looked again shrewdly. “My dearest Judy, you are my sister, and of course to me you are more or less ordinary; but let us examine the facts and the probabilities. . . .” And he talked to her with brotherly disinterestedness.
“That’s enough out of you,” she said, looking at him as indifferently as possible from under her hat of fire.
“Yes,” he said. “You may have cold, calculating eyes, like a cat’s; but you are a sensationalist like a cat too, and what I say is right. It always is!”
She caught hold of his sleek hair and pulled it until he pinched her ribs so hard that she had to leave go. It was a friendly tussle such as they were accustomed to, but with a slight added pinch of seriousness, and even, on her part, of temper.
“I won’t have children till I’m a hundred,” she told him. “Not till I’m so old that I don’t mind giving up my own individual life and letting them have it instead.”
“Theory,” he observed.
What was she to put up by way of defense? Somehow, with Hubert, no proposition seemed to hold water but his own.
“Your views about women,” she observed, “are all founded on one specious book by a strutting rooster. He’s a cock crowing on a doorstep, that man; the conceited cockbird ridiculously telling us all what he’s done. You have also some experience with the emptier-headed kind of girl. You gravitate towards them, naturally, because they can’t answer you back: just as some men gravitate towards those who don’t resist anybody, and then boast of their conquests and say that all women can be obtained.”
“I like you in this mood,” he answered. “I like you when you talk wittily about the world, about what is. You have some knowledge of human nature. I have more. Should I be right if I guessed that some other man has come along and supplanted Roland, as they say, in your affections?”
“You would not,” she replied, with glad promptitude.
He was just a little taken aback. “Well, something’s biting you,” he said at last, “and I shall find out quickly enough what it is. I advise you to marry Roland; marry him at once. Take my advice and you’ll find you’ll be happy. A woman needs a man she can hang on to, and nothing goes right till she gets one. Will you take my advice?”
“Probably not.”
“If you don’t I shall certainly do something about it.” He took his hands out of his pockets and stood up. “I give you a month to decide.”
“What infernal cheek!” she exclaimed, staggered, but he was already outside the door.
What was she to do, if she could use neither her beauty nor her brains successfully against him? And what would he do on his part? There was nothing that could be efficacious to deprive her of what she desired.
§
XVII
On a hot morning towards the end of May she sat wearily on the stone edge of the Water Lily tank, eating her sandwiches. The plant-houses were empty of visitors, for it was lunch-time. The Gardens were aflame with the full splendors of May, but she was unhappy, for an invisible barrier seemed to have been interposed between herself and the plant-world. She had tried many ways of repeating the state she had been in that morning, including alcohol, but all was in vain; and now even her work was unsatisfying and fruitless, her experiments lacked inspiration, and her drawings were dead. The way into the plant-world was lost, and perhaps it had never existed, save in illusion. If so, life held out no attractions, and there was nothing for it but the impending marriage with Roland. But how wonderful that would have been, she thought, feeling some stir of the May, if Roland could be changed into the starry person of that Orchid. She had known now for one moment at the waking end of a dream how love enters the body like a sweet madness, and changes the world.
She sighed, sitting among reeds by the waters of a river, tears for the lost kiss of that passionate flower started to her eyes; a mocking voice floated to her like an emanation from the pale, meditative Lily.
“Have you borrowed those dew diamonds from the small leaves of Salvinia auriculata, as a gift of jewels for that faithless lover?”
There was now no semblance of the Lily: nothing but the white cup on the stream and the cold, floating words as of a voice; a communion established in a world of green stalks and blades between her being and the being of this flower.
“Tell me,” she eagerly answered, “about your life.”
“Life is disastrous.”
The voice did not remember her: it was but one of a myriad opening lily buds that spoke for all lilies: they had no individuality, perhaps, no memory – or but a fugitive soul and a faint memory like a fading scent.
“Life is very short, very sad.”
Now thoughts came to her from another quarter, where the Sacred Fig, the Fig of Krishna, was dreaming:
“If any spirit hath opened to the sun of the Supreme, the Infinite; that is neither living nor lifeless; that cannot be described, yet it abounds in means and objects of satisfaction; that dwells not in perishable cells and tissues of stem or leaf, but within its essential nature, inconceivable, unsurpassed; root, leaf and flower of the universe, begetting itself from itself; possessing the attributes of purity, beauty and irresistible splendor: that spirit knoweth how we may escape from existence and, when we fade, fade forever into the Supreme, the Infinite. For the desire of the sun and of seeding, all the illusory pleasures of projected existence. . . .”
“Tedious, isn’t it?” agreed the Water Lily to her sigh. “This Supreme, this Infinite – what is it but a consolation? The Supreme is Nothing. When we fade, we fade – we that flower to one pulsation of the sun, struggling for a brief flame-point of individuality – into the unconscious bosom of Nothing, who pays no heed to desire. But it is blindly ordained that while we flower we shall reproduce: and this is our fate, the fate of our generation, to flower and reproduce and fade; and so it shall be with us and our successors to the end of time. As to the doctrine of this Fig – I despise it!”
“I have no objection to his doctrine,” she said; “it was only that I was desiring to see another Shape.” And she looked vainly through the emerald jungle of reeds and deep-bladed trees for that tropical splendor.
Now the form of the Water Lily arose from the flower and stood clearly before her, hovering over the river, and there was in the midst of him a most delicate flush of pink: – “Ah!” he seemed to convey: “That Orchid! That love-engine! That epiphyte!” The pink flush faded. “Let me tell you that the hopes and pleasures attaching to the processes of inflorescence and pollination are the most cruel of illusions.”
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sp; “He is certainly unsentimental, this pallid flower,” she thought.
His answer proceeded. “If the Water Lily is indifferent to hope, attaches no value to sentimentalities, seems ruthless and formidably cold, the Water Lily has copied reality. The Water Lily is the icy truth in flower.”
“But there is also a moment of delicate poetry, this pure flush of pink in the tip of the white petal. You are unsentimental, no doubt; but I do not find you formidable, and I doubt, really, whether you are cold.”
His semblance shrank. “Nevertheless, you perhaps assent to that truth of the Universe that I express in my form and nature – a purity arising from mud, and flowering into annihilation.”
“Oh!” she replied, “I will assent to anything that is well or charmingly argued.”
He became very still, as if he would give consideration to something. He seemed to enjoin repose. “Attend once more to the Sacred Fruit.”
Again thoughts came from the Fig: “All creatures that live are subject to grief, because of their desire. Grief issues from desire, and pleasure from grief, and grief again from pleasure. Pleasure and grief are an eternal cycle of seed and flower, flower and seed.”
“I gather,” said Judy, “that this world of yours is not, as I had supposed, one where every individual is happy in the simple fulfillment of function?” Warm and sweet-smelling was the earth, the moist pebbles; delicate the reed-smell, heavy the leaf-smell. She had thought it desirable to inhabit this warm, moist and scented universe.
It was the Water Lily who replied. “Happy! Did you imagine the plants were not sensitive to pain; that they did not suffer in the physical disasters of which they are daily in danger? Happy! in a world where the struggle for life is such that if you relax one nerve, one cell, for an instant, some thrusting neighbor will obtain your place in the light? A world where loathsome parasites are everywhere seeking for your vitals! A world in which you are the food of noisome snails and other creatures . . . !”
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