Vallisneria madness

Seated comfortably on the broad terrace of Professor Gordon’s palatial mansion, Tom Spencer stared abstractedly at the red disk of the setting sun, reflected in the turgid waters of the pool in the garden beyond the edge of the terrace as he listened to his host recount the fascinating story of the love-life of the vallisneria.

The cameo-face of the white-haired botany professor bore a whimsical expression as he declaimed, “Beneath the black surface of that muddy pool out there, the flowers of a score or so of this rare plant which I brought from tropical Asia, pass their entire humdrum life, except for one brief night of moonlit love—not unlike our human existence.”

Tom Spencer shifted his keen gray eyes to stare at the matted, ribbon-like leaves, floating on top of the water, which gave little indication of floral life below.

The old professor continued, “As you know from my lectures at Columbia, the vallisneria is a diœcious plant. On one night of each year, the night of the vernal full moon, the stem of each female flower begins to stretch, until its ghostly green and white bloom rises to the surface. Each male flower too feels that same impelling urge, ‘an instinct within it that reaches and towers,’ as James Russell Lowell says. Listen to how Maeterlinck, that great poet and scientist, describes their fatal wooing.”

He opened a book which lay on his lap, tilted it so that its pages were illumined by the fading sunlight, and read aloud:

“The green-coated male flowers rise in turn, full of hope, toward the flowers which already sway above them in the moonlight, awaiting them and summoning them to the magic world which lies beyond their native obscurity. But, when half their upward journey is done, they reach the limit that their too short stems can stretch, and are checked abruptly, before they can win their way to their indifferent sweethearts, who pridefully refuse to bend to caress them.

“Filled with yearning, the little heart of each male flower swells and swells until it breaks. In a magnificent effort to achieve his bliss, he tears himself from his stem, and in one incomparable flight rises to perish in love on the surface of the pool. Dying, but free and radiant, he floats for one brief ecstatic moment beside his beloved, then shrivels and floats away; while his mate closes the petals in which she has imprisoned his last breath of life, and shrinks back into the depths, there to ripen the fruit of that fatal union.”

The sun set, as Professor Gordon closed his copy of Maeterlinck. A twilight mist began to form above the surface of the garden pool. “How much more noble are the flowers than we,” he mused. “As Shakespeare says, ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’”

His athletic young guest narrowed his gray eyes and stared inwardly at the vision conjured up by the older man’s reading. “I wonder,” he breathed.

Professor Gordon broke the spell by saying in a matter-of-fact tone, “Well, my boy, you are to see tonight the mating of vallisneria, a sight which my colleagues would give their eye-teeth to witness.”

“I feel flattered——” Spencer began diffidently, shifting his broad shoulders in an embarrassed manner.

But the fine-featured old man silenced him with a deprecatory, “Don’t, then! You are more outstanding as a football player than as a student of botany. I invited you for other reasons than any outstanding ability you may have shown in your four years of studies under me.”