A note, an apology, brought Roland back to her; a changed, reserved Roland who wooed her delicately and even (as she sometimes mockingly thought) with excess of consideration. They began again, on a basis of friendship: there were no caresses. Within him, she knew, there still burned the pain of love; but now to love there was added a sort of care, and it was agreeable to her at this time. How dear those days were that they spent in the Gardens – walking among the trees, hiding deep in some scented arbor under the temperate glass, or coolly disposed to meditation among sweet-scented shrubs – she did not tell him, except with a sort of derision; but often, in the midst of her thoughts, she would catch sight of his face, brown and intent, and she would think what changes had taken place in them both, and smile mockingly into the bushes.
Now it was towards evening, and the shadows under the cedar deepened: a touch of the darkness fell on her spirit, and she felt a vague fear. Roland observed that it was time for them to go home, and took both her hands and lifted her to her feet.
“But I can’t go home,” she said. “I must stay here to-night.” What was it that was happening to her?
He was a little distressed. “I’ve seen that you are working something out in your mind. There is something clamoring for release, for expression. You don’t quite know, I think, what it is. But oh, Judy, my golden dear, I can’t help you.”
“You are a darling,” she said, “to leave me alone.”
“I can’t stay here with you, or near you, while you work out your problem?”
“No, oh no! But Roland, if it was over . . .”
He stared at her. “How your eyes shine in the darkness! You darling cat! Judy. . . .” He struggled with his breath. “Judy! Judy! You do not love me?”
She put her two hands against his chest. “It is possible,” she whispered, “but it must be deferred.” Then she put up her mouth for him to kiss her, and swiftly escaped into the shadows.
It was dark under the fans of the weeping beech, but sunset still softly flamed in the western sky. She climbed into a high fork of the tree, and sat there in the solitude and silence of evening. The Gardens were empty; she was alone; but fear had left her. There came moments of exaltation in which she mounted with the swifts and gave herself to their long fallings and wheeling flights. Higher, and she was flying, flying in regions where thought merges with the swaying of sunset-warm winds; in far, evening-bright spaces of the sky, where calm clouds, bathed in the light of hidden suns, serene spirits that have accepted the will and movement of the universe, passed across high heaven accordant to an invisible wind. Then in a long sickening moment she had fallen the whole height of the sky, and labored wingless. The sunset died out, as if all hope had withdrawn from the universe, leaving chill darkness. The darkness grew more fearful. Depths of an uncertain blackness now seemed to open before her bewildered eyes. Her mind tried to grasp at the shapes of things, and there were no shapes to grasp. She reached out for something that was stable in a world of yielding branches, unresisting leaves and fitful winds among clouds. She bruised her forehead against the branch, for the reality of pain; but she found no salvation in pain, and descended from the tree and ran through the shadowy darkness of the Gardens in anguish for the familiarity of her own room.
The familiarity of the room did not fail her; but now she found herself in another kind of despair, a kind of dullness, exhaustion and malady of spirit. “It seems unjust,” she grieved, “that this unhappy condition should be the end of a summer of glorious experiences among flowers.” She wept miserably for vanished splendors. “I must quite forget them,” she thought, “and be relieved of this torture.” And now she tried to achieve forgetfulness of her experiences in a sort of disintegration of the mind. But in the minute of that painful dispersion her agony ceased. She had no need of the Gardens, she perceived, for she herself, a flower, was the creator of flowers. They claimed life of her mind, and she must surrender it to them, for the time. She understood, in a blaze of illumination, what needed to do, and slept impatiently till the daybreak.
At the first breaking of the flushed tips of the dawn, she set herself to the board, and flowers, strange flowers she thought them, sprang from the creative turmoil. She painted and drew all that day, and most of the night, and several following days, watching the curious and individual ways of her genius; thinking detached, ordinary thoughts; eating, sometimes, and sleeping a little; but in a rage to finish, intolerant of impediments, fierce for her children; and day and night turned as a wheel until necessity was at an end. Five midnights from the bitter midnight of beginning she felt that her inspiration was satisfied, and slept in celestial peace. Her room was a garden, bright with the flowers engendered in the flowerlike blossoming of her nature. It was a paradise, where she was received by smiling spirits, the blessed and fortunate who have opened their imaginations to the unknown power, and suffered the tortures, and become parents of beauty.
Her body died. She floated like a nebula high among stars, and had ineffable pleasures.
§ XXVII
She woke, in a cold and silvery daybreak at the end of summer, to a world that perhaps no longer contained anything to set her heart on with undue desire; for she had seen what the mind fumbles after, what the senses only half tell, and until that strange agitation should return, with its delicious accomplishment, who should lead her to more than fugitive delights? There was nothing to love or loathe out of measure – thus her thoughts ran during a day of restful meditation.
In the afternoon, a sad afternoon of late summer, when the spirit knows that but a few more days of the authentic splendor shall return before the advent of the year’s evening, her thoughts were interrupted by Hubert, who knocked respectfully at the door. She was quite ready for the world, now, and answered, “Come in.” He entered on tiptoe, and indeed the world entered with him, and the states of mind she had known in the summer now seemed very far away.
“It’s all right,” she said. “The fit’s over.”
“Ah!” His air changed. The respect for her productive privacy that he had shown during the last few days was no longer needed: but there was a perceptible increment of deference in his manner – was she not now a client? He looked anxiously at her drawings; but his anxiety was at once relieved, for with swift judgment he perceived that the obtainable sterling equivalent of the goods was considerable. “It will need a large expenditure to create the necessary fuss about them,” he said, with the glad voice of one who has the first option on a good thing; “but it can be done. They are queer, you see.”
“Not exactly representational art,” she replied.
“But there is something that sticks out of them – I don’t mind admitting it. Though for the life of me I can’t say what. We shall have to get some highbrow to write something. Is it a deal?”
“What are you going to charge me?”
“Ten per cent., as you’re my sister.”
“I’ll let you have it,” she said, “as you’re my brother.”
He grinned.
“You don’t mind my being a little mad, now?” she inquired.
“Nothing is mad that results in financial advantage.”
“But what do you say, now, about my being economically independent?”
“You’re not economically independent. You’re dependent on me.”
“I really feel,” she admitted, “that part of my success will be due to you.”
“Practically all of it,” he answered.
“Did you guess what was happening from the first?”
“Yes. And as soon as I was certain of it I cleared the way for you, with the results we see around us. I am always right.”
“Well, advise me again,” she begged. “Ought I to marry Roland?”
“Yes, if you can’t marry some one like me.”
“I think I would,” she said, “if you were not my brother. For your common sense no longer has any terrors for me. In fact, I rather like it, and you know your way about.”
“I will admit,” he said handsomely, “that I do not altogether understand what goes on in your mind. But I can see that you have experiences that are important to you, and fortunately productive.”
“And you still advise me to marry?”
“It cannot do any harm.”
“And to marry Roland?”
“I take it he will do as well as any one?”
“Better,” she said, with cheeks burning. “He rather pleases me.”
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” said Hubert, obviously detecting her secret. “An odd thing, a habit. One gets to think one is fond of people. I really came up to tell you that he’s waiting downstairs now.”
“Let him come in five minutes. He must see my flowers.” Her heart thumped; she put on a cornflower-blue frock, and brushed her yellow hair with the tortoiseshell brush. “Have I changed?” she asked of her image in the long mirror. “Has this alteration that I feel so strongly inside me had any effect on my exterior?” But it was the same tow-headed Judy that stared at her with eyes of a mysterious light gray. She touched her lips with paint and shook her frock into place with a wriggle. “It’s the sense of the world coming back to me,” she told herself. “I feel it. I shall encourage it.” But at a glimpse of the pale and pictured sky her heart was smitten with the grief of a remembered music.
When Roland came in, however, she did not beat about the bush, and kissed him as if she acknowledged all rights. Roland, on his part, did not press them. He did indeed take her to the window-seat and adequately demonstrate his joy.
“Oh, that was actual!” she exclaimed. “There was something comforting in the reality of that!” But she perceived that he was not listening.
“Flowers!” she heard him say.
He left her side and made his inspection.
“What do you think of them?”
“Large as life,” he said, smiling. “And much less natural. I told you once that poets can make effects with words that quite eclipse anything in nature. Thus you. You are a poet and artist. Reality, call it what you like, looks out of these flowers. A matter of relationships, proportions . . . synthetic power . . . rhythmic vitality . . . There are so many words. Literature, perhaps, cannot achieve what painters and musicians can achieve. I have tried. It has at any rate given me understanding.”
They were silent for a long time, and the evening seemed to be sad with a sadness in his voice. Afternoon had waned, the day was going westward with ashen torches, the trees were turning silver under pallid and remote skies. A wisp of smoke curled up from a fire in the garden where already some fallen leaves were heaped, and some dead flowers, shriveled and pitiful beside the living glories of late summer – dahlias, hollyhocks, sunflowers, and all that appear when the splendor of the year is full, and coming soon to decay. Now, as she meditated on the burning, and memories of June floated away like smoke into the empty air, the garden became crowded with a bodiless and memorial throng; it seemed to her that a prince, dead in the flesh and now but a ghost in her imagination, was laid on the pyre; and she thought, if she strained her attention, that she heard a sad and heavenly music, such as fills the heart with desire for the peace of death and the glory of unseen things. Clearly she saw the form of that vanished Flower, laid on the pyre, and she was wrung, looking out safely from the arms of her lover, by a remembrance of his splendor and pride and eagerness in life. The pyre burned brightly, and now his memory fled to the formless expanses of heaven on flames that grew in the pure and evening air in the ghostly resemblance of petals of bright flowers. Not many mourned for the dead, for the many get but little advantage from even the most passionate and beautiful of tragic lives; but they grieved, such as love to be moved by sad occasions, for pity of their own doom. Presently faint words were stirring in the air, and there reached her the fading voice of a pale, meditative ghost. In vain she resisted the voice.
“How shall I capture the myriad beautiful griefs that flutter on my spirit like wings of birds, plaintive birds, wheeling and skimming in this silvery and mournful evening of the summer’s end? The dead have faded before ourselves into the lightless regions. They have given us a foretaste of the bitterness of oblivion, and enabled us to feel the grief of our own decease. Life is short, splendid and beautiful sunflowers. It is a brief opening to the glory of light, a swift closing and return into decomposition. This is a mystery – that the immense processes of the universe, the ponderous integration of diffused particles, the reduction of ethereal space through ages of time to reproductive matter, the slow invertebration of mud and delicate contrivance of vegetables, should end merely in the opening of a flower, the brief anguish of consciousness. Life has nothing more treasurable, glorious geraniums, beautiful asters, than the grief of living; the most valuable moment of existence is that moment when we perceive the sadness of having been. Only eternity is kind, for it is forgetfulness, and in it all flowers and all existence vanish. The evening cloud has a golden light on it, and presently it changes, and soon there is only the emptiness of space, the silence of nothing, the memory of us is gone. . . .”
The waves of his words died away, and a chill wind of the silver dusk stirred so that the flowers shivered, and the flame-petals of the pyre shrank from it. She, too, shivered and suddenly turned to her lover for protection, shutting out mysteries and the summons of strange beauty, until her spirit should have been a little renewed.
“Let us shut the window,” she said. “It’s cold. And it is senseless, irrelevant, all this talk of life and death.”
“I heard no talk,” he said, “but I understood that you had a vision. You were very quiet, and now there are tears on your eyelids, tiny crystals with a gleam of sunset.”
“I give them to you. Taste them.”
He kissed her eyelids. “Do you indeed love me?” he asked.
“Yes! Oh yes! I love you, and you are real. Hold me while I tell you something.”
He held her fast. “You have learnt me,” she said, “and you know, perhaps, how to handle me. You know, don’t you, that I can’t always be in love?”
He nodded. “I know, and it doesn’t matter.”
“And that sometimes you mustn’t even try to awaken me?”
“I may sometimes make mistakes.” He seemed a little bewildered. “Trial and error, you know.”
“But at the present minute . . .” She closed her eyes on the last gleam of daylight in the shimmering blue of the walls, and offered her mouth. For the time being the ghosts were laid.
THE END
NEW & FORTHCOMING TITLES FROM
VALANCOURT BOOKS
R. C. Ashby (Ruby Ferguson) He Arrived at Dusk
Frank Baker The Birds
Walter Baxter Look Down in Mercy
Charles Beaumont The Hunger and other Stories
John Blackburn A Scent of New-Mown Hay
Broken Boy
Blue Octavo
Nothing But the Night
Bury Him Darkly
The Household Traitors
Our Lady of Pain
A Beastly Business
Thomas Blackburn The Feast of the Wolf
John Braine Room at the Top
The Vodi
Basil Copper The Great White Space
Necropolis
Ronald Fraser Flower Phantoms
Stephen Gilbert The Burnaby Experiments
Claude Houghton I Am Jonathan Scrivener
This Was Ivor Trent
Francis King To the Dark Tower
Never Again
An Air that Kills
The Dividing Stream
The Dark Glasses
The Man on the Rock
C.H.B. Kitchin Ten Pollitt Place
The Book of Life
Hilda Lewis The Witch and the Priest
Kenneth Martin Aubade
Waiting for the Sky to Fall
Michael McDowell The Amulet
Oliver Onions The Hand of Kornelius Voyt
Dennis Parry Sea of Glass
Robert Phelps Heroes and Orators
J.B. Priestley Benighted
The Other Place
Forrest Reid The Garden God
The Tom Barber Trilogy
Henry de Vere Stacpoole The Blue Lagoon
John Trevena Furze the Cruel
Sleeping Waters
John Wain Hurry on Down
The Smaller Sky
Hugh Walpole The Killer and the Slain
Keith Waterhouse There is a Happy Land
Flower Phantoms Page 10