Flower Phantoms

by Fraser, Ronald

  Her thoughts did not seem at all strange to him. “This shall cease some day,” he answered, “and you shall enter the bosom of that One who does not suffer.”

  “That One!” She was illuminated. “That One uses me and my suffering. These are His visions, clouded with my own thoughts. Shall I give myself to Him altogether, for this last dark experience that He desires?” She pondered, until some far-away clash of weapons sent a chill to her heart. “Ah, my shadow-lord!” For the last time she swooned from his ambrosial kisses.

  She clung to him, for a cry rang out, and there was a wailing in a distant part of the palace. He folded her in his arms, and she imitated his contempt, though with trembling lips, until there came a patter of naked feet on the marble, a rushing of white-clad forms, and the searing of steel in her side.

  § XXII

  A moonlit lawn, a gleam of water, a spray of lime leaves quivering in an immensity of sky, and a dim figure on the lawn.

  She was not at all sure whether it was Hubert, or his specter. He seemed spectral and thin; an image made out of the ghostly substance of moonlight, an element in the illusion of sky and lawn and dark branch of lime. Or there was a veil of moonshine between him and her, and she had passed through it into another world.

  His voice came across the intervening distance, small and harsh with the cold of outer space.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And who is your companion?”

  “Nobody,” she replied.

  “Nonsense! One doesn’t sit with nobody doing nothing in the dark.”

  “Not in your world perhaps,” she scoffed.

  “You’re mad.”

  “No. Only different. It’s different on my side of the moonshine, that’s all.”

  “Don’t talk so strangely, for heaven’s sake! There’s no moonshine in my world, I can tell you, if there is in yours. Nothing but cold, hard facts. . . .”

  “Glittering, moon-reflecting facts. . . .”

  “Cold, hard facts, I said. And one of them is that if you find a girl under dark trees at night you’ll find some one else as well, if you look hard enough. I’m going to look now. . . .”

  Involuntarily she glanced back and he caught the gesture. She strove to overcome the distance between them, and achieve the sense of reality in which one can argue.

  “My brother,” she whispered to herself, and the world held a faint echo of meaning. She woke a little from a dream.

  “What business is it of yours? What do you mean by following me about?” she cried.

  He was coming towards her across the silvery lawn. He brushed past her, a ghostly hound. She stood quite still and heard him snouting in the undergrowth. The lime leaves suddenly fluttered in a slight wind, fluttered against the moon like small flags. He was at her side.

  “What did you find?” she mocked.

  “Nothing but this,” and he pressed an orchid into her hand. “The flower he gave you, no doubt.”

  She stared at it, and he stared at her face.

  “You flaxen Judy!” he gibed. “I can see the flush of your cheeks even by moonlight, and there’s a light in your eyes that’s more than the moon. A girl that looks like that has been kissed. I’ll find you out, I warn you. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “And I warn you,”– she was now pale, hissing flame – “if you interfere with me I’ll strike you with a madness. I’ll present you with a fact that will dissolve your little hideous reasonable world into a smoke of burning electric particles. I’ll teach you, poor dry-brain, wretched maimed mind that gropes along by means of brick walls, that there is strangeness and unreason in the universe. I’ll . . .”

  He stormed her down, but there was an uncertainty in his voice. “Be quiet! Be quiet, you tow-headed witch, and don’t stare at me.”

  But she stared, and they challenged one another across the lawn. The lime leaves fluttered again like scented moths.

  § XXIII

  The guests went early, and while there was still a trace of daylight, about ten o’clock, she bade Roland good night – the earliest she might without making his despair inconvenient – and fled to her moth-blue room. Her heart had been thumping all dinner-time, her nerves had trembled all the heavy June evening, at the thought of the secret that her room held. After some days of doubting and hanging back, she had almost resolved, now, to reject the criticisms of her intellect and surrender herself finally, in whatever way should be demanded of her, to her own unreasonable impulse. The resolution was taken and the moment was come. To her dismay and anger, she found Hubert in her room, studying one of her notebooks in a window-seat. She snatched it from him.

  “Is there no base trick that you will not play?” she asked.

  He stared at her. “You are excited, you gaudy mop.”

  She saw herself in a mirror, still dressed for the dinner-party, a long-legged, bold child; an apparition in dress of gold, with gold helmet and shoes, a glittering and terrible fairy fetched out of the fires of the sunset.

  “If I saw those shoulders on another girl,” her brother continued, “I suppose I should think them fascinating. It is odd – I imagine people must be getting moral, because really you’ve got practically nothing on. That frock comes practically to nothing, yet nobody notices.”

  “My room is private,” she said, with a glance into the shadows of the garden.

  “I am one of the few who know what is good for people. Any steps that I take are therefore justified. I consider it to be in the interests of everybody that I should know what you are about. It is therefore necessary that I should be in possession of all the evidence, by whatever means available. That is common sense. Ordinary sound facts. It is absurd to talk about trickery.”

  “To-morrow,” she said, “I shall leave the house and take steps to ensure that you cannot follow me.”

  “Useless,” he said. “A girl is helpless without a man; and as far as I can gather from your conversation it’s not a man you’ve got, but a Nobody.”

  His impertinence was not defensible, she felt; his case was weak in the extreme; yet she felt helpless against him. There was no way of preventing his actions, misconceived and blind though they were. She could not even have turned him out of her room, anxious as she was to be alone, because he had more muscle than she.

  “Will you please let me have my room to myself,” she commanded.

  “As there is nothing further to be gained by staying, I will go.” But he turned at the door, and sniffed, and searched the room with his inquisitive gaze. “What is the strange scent?” His nose sniffed a delicate plant-scent that floated in on the June air.

  “Hang it!” he exclaimed. “What is the mystery that clings to you? The house seems full to-night of some queer presence. Judith! Have you got some one hidden here?” He began to search, but in her wrath she made a gesture that stopped him.

  “Why can’t you tell us what it’s all about?” he asked, arrested, puzzled.

  “Will you please leave me.”

  She was possessed, for she had submitted herself to the inspiration of some profound interior will, whose majesty shone in her body and shamed him at last. He left the room.

  She locked the door after him, thrust off her clothes in one sweep, and sank into the window-seat, trembling and doubting. Outside, on the sill, stood an orchid in a pot, an orchid made out of the substance of starlight with deep suffusions of some heliotrope element. For background, the tree-tops, and fountains of lightning among summer clouds.

  “Ah!” she exclaimed, intoxicated with the heat and the June scents, “I want you!” She understood what desire was, at last, in the climax of June: her senses lived like tuned strings: she knew love.

  She wished that the wa
ves of passion would close over her, that she might drown and find an oblivion; but no vision arose. “Orchid! Orchid!” she sighed, not knowing by what name to call her lover, and put her mouth to the flower’s heart; but she could raise up nothing sharper than a memory, and one that became dimmer the more she tried to possess it. Perhaps it was because of her anger with Hubert – her nerves could not forget. Perhaps not in this house: possibly the imagination was chilled to inactivity by his neighborhood, and it was thus that he had frozen her dream when he found her in the Gardens. Her mind flew to the Gardens, the moonlit plant-houses, and she began a little thoughtfully to handle her clothes. Thoughtfully, because she feared what the ghostly beauty of those plant-houses on a summer night might do to her. But it was useless to stay here, cajoling a memory. She said to herself what she had not intended to say; a sentence came from a region of her that had been forgotten: “It would be better to be with Roland.”

  She pulled back the peacock-blue coverlet of her bed, and the white sheet, and lay down to consider her state of mind.

  Outside the window, against brooding summer trees, the image of her shadowy flower-lover had some features of the image of Roland. How queer if it should be Roland who reaped the advantage of her vision; if she should have learned in the arms of a shadow to desire a man!

  “Beast!” she exclaimed, thinking of Hubert; for now she was in the midst of contending forces, and it was he who had spoilt her peace. She lay and stared at the summer lightnings that glimmered in hanging crystals and gave a bluish shine to the walls, while thoughts that she did not want took possession of her. “It won’t do.” She decided to seek refuge from her thoughts, and the stuffy heat, and the loneliness and unprolific silence: she would visit the plants. She began to dress, and was standing by the window, still faintly doubtful and in fear of the brooding trees and the unearthly splendor of June, when she heard whispers on the landing. There was a crack of light under the door. That was Hubert’s voice, and her mother’s frightened exclamation. And Roland? What part was he playing? Roland was there too, but urgently protesting.

  A bang. “Unlock the door,” said Hubert’s voice. Then, “She has some one there, I’m certain!” The door shook.

  She made no answer, and quietly slipped into her frock. Then, riding the window-sill, she looked back at the glimmering room, the patches of dusky blue and snowy white where her bed was, the crack of light under the door. The flowerpot slipped from her hand and crashed on the tiles below. At that the door was shaken with vigor. “Good-bye, little fool!” she whispered, for Hubert.

  Presently, from the garden, she heard her door give. There was an irruption of light into her bedroom and heads appeared at the window. Hubert’s voice floated clearly down:

  “She has gone to the Gardens. I’ll follow her.”

  Then Roland, from far away – she swiftly understood that he had refused to enter her bedroom: “She is not to be followed. I absolutely will not allow it.”

  She escaped from the garden with the broken flower in her hand.

  § XXIV

  The night was heavy-scented, unearthly, a little ominous. Massive clouds moving along the horizon were charged with pale gleams and faint rumblings; thoughts of a god overcast with sultry and thunderous music. She scarcely recollected her flight, now: she only remembered an escape into shadowy valleys among tree-masses that shone in the moon like shoulders of mountains; and it seemed to her, as she emerged from those ghostly passes, that she was accompanied by voices of flowers. She was alone, save for certain presences, on the space of a lawn; long banks of rhododendron gathered in the moonlight with the surge and spurt of breaking rollers; branches of lightning quivered in brooding clouds and shone in the distant dome of the palm-house.

  The ghost of her Orchid lover was pleading: “You will come to me! You will not pass me by”; and perhaps his proud face showed a little anxiety, lest her spirit should drift from his in the limbo of free-floating memories.

  “Yes! Oh yes! I desire your kisses!” Hurriedly she held out, in the moonlight, a hand that was not taken, and pressed on towards the plant-houses. It was there that she was to receive the ultimate experience; and she must not listen too long to the whispers of a sad, pleading memory. Yet, in the flicker of a lightning flash, she saw as it were the glorious beauty and dazzling splendor of a face, so that her heart stopped and she must put her hands to her eyes.

  She was hurrying down a wide aisle of grass, a thread of gold blown down a night of trees. “In the shadow of the trees,” she thought, “there is a thronging of roses.” Over the lake the moon sailed, big, round and rose-yellow; ahead of her was a gleam in the roots of the sky, a shine of glass under clouds full of lightning and moody presences.

  “Let us stay here and dream again of that old happiness; here among trees.” She thought that cool fingers pinched her ear and a scented breath played on her cheek. She fluttered on, a bright roseleaf drifting.

  “Or there among palms and cascading ferns.” But she left the glittering palm-house on her right hand. Round as a bubble it loomed over her, full of brown gleams and indigo reflections, shining back the solemn June splendors, returning the lightnings that shivered up from cloud masses into the deep of heaven.

  She let herself into the plant-houses, and stole down those corridors of glass and moonbeams like some disguised atom of the sun, creeping to see how the plants live under the reign of his mirror. She went swiftly from point to point, in an agitation, seeking an unknown circumstance that should release her spirit for an adventure that she did not know how to begin. First she passed through a scented region of orange trees and camellias. There were many flowers in that fragrant forest, suffusing the moonlight with their deep tints; but though heavy and delicious odors intoxicated her, and lovely shapes invited her to delicate experiences in those temperate groves, there was no voice that compelled her to stay.

  “Here!” whispered her lover, “let us lie here in the shadow of the camellia, and the scented snow shall descend on our bodies.”

  “Not here!” she answered. “Not here!”

  Next she visited the tropical ferns. The moonbeams were green and gold in that moist sky; there was the silence of a fern-forest in primeval night, a stillness only broken, it seemed to her, by a faint sliding and far-off cry of some unknown thing. She was not afraid. The region was familiar, and always there attended her the vivid beauty of that flower, with whom she could take refuge if she would give up her unknown adventure. But if she could, she must be cruel to this drifting spirit who desired that she should lend him harborage and restore him for a little to the warmth and sweetness of life; she must ignore him, being under compulsion to flit and flutter from point to point like a golden moth seeking the place appointed for its mysterious dream. “Where am I to go? When will there be a change?” she asked. “The creeper climbing the walls seems to shroud the ruins of a temple,” she whispered, and gazed at the pattern of small leaves against the moonlight expectantly. There was nothing, and nothing happened under the spreading fans of the tree-fern, or when she pressed her face into a feathery mass of maidenhair – except that she seemed to receive a kiss on her mouth.

  “Not now,” she murmured, “not now”; and hurried on through a steamy and stifling corridor of white-veined and evil plants to the lily-tank.

  The stillness was more profound, the heat more oppressive, the moonlight more unearthly. Orbed and effulgent the lily floated on the water, a vessel formed out of the substance of starlight brimming with a distillation of moonbeams. In depths beneath him the world of water plants and all that tropical luxuriance of fans and blades and vivid stems was dimly redoubled. He became a star shining in the water, and as she stared into the dark universe where he swam the strange world where she was and her own golden body seemed reflected in the blackness of outer space. There was a moon-change. Among black shadows in a vast tangle
of vegetation surrounding a water moved the bulks of elephants come down after the fall of night to drink, and some emerged into the moonlight, gray and ghostly; crocodiles slept under lotus leaves, lulled into savage reveries; in warm mud tortoises remembered ancient continents; there was a smooth gliding of snakes in the forest. She perceived all sounds and movements of the night with new and subtle senses; her body was responsive to the most delicate stimulations, her spirit accessible to the shyest beauty. What body was this that felt in its tissues an intermingling of the moonbeams; what mind that was appeased by a tranquillity spreading like incense from the contemplation of a flower? She was in communion with the spirit of the Water Lily.

  “Flower of cold starlight!” she murmured. “Dweller in cool lakes among high mountains! What do you contemplate?”

  There was an answer: “I contemplate extinction.”

  She had some recollection of the young man who stood at her side. She knew that beautiful, ironical face, those mystic eyes.

  He was speaking. “It is not easy to contemplate extinction, within an arm’s length of your beauty.”

  There was a story that she could only half remember; one that partly emerged, as it were, from within another. A youth . . . a poet . . . who could not obtain her. . . . She looked into his face again and saw the profound sadness of his lowered eyelids. A youth . . . a poet . . . that she had known? Another spirit, wandering through homeless time, that entreated her for the warmth of her mind? She remembered a desire.

  “You will obey my wishes to-night?” Her voice wheedled him.

  “If you wished for my kisses.” His tones were level and melancholy. “But this singular desire . . .”