"She is growing old, James," he said wistfully. "She is sick and old, and I am all she has. She is very like me, in many ways, and her company has been good for me, but some day soon I must kill her, quickly and painlessly, before disease cripples her any further. It will be the kind thing to do."
I was all wound up inside. They were right in the town—this was mad, abnormal, unhealthy—but he had every reason to be as he was. A man wholly wrapped up in his science, lonely and misunderstood, suddenly confronted by these exotic, almost animal blossoms: no wonder his curiosity and imagination had been aroused—no wonder solicitude had become something like affection. And in their turn, I realized, these strange plant-animals had learned to look to him for the things which Nature, in this environment, did not provide. They were amazingly quick to adapt: I had known that from the first. So it was that when he fertilized them, taking the place of the missing males, the female flowers accepted him and gave him the weird affection which Nature stored up in them for their normal mates.
That affection, in Nature, assured the species of continued life. It was a blind mechanism, designed by evolution to defy drought and disease and famine. Nature has implanted it very strongly in most animals, but rarely in plants. The female plants looked on him as a mate; the young buds, in their turn, found in him a parent. Oh, it was all very simple to explain in terms of biology and psychology—except to thick-headed, well-meaning village folk of the kind that live in Springville, N.Y. They thought him crazy now, but they would think worse than that if I ever breathed a word of the truth in his defense.
There isn't much more, as it happens. What it was—a hunch—some flash of intuition—maybe the common sense I am supposed to have inherited from my Scots ancestors, and which has made Charles the figure he is on Wall Street—I don't know. I may have remembered the toupee and the bow tie and a word dropped here and there, and put a few numbers together. But next morning early I went down to Melchizedek Hobbs' little flower shop on Main Street to see Abigail Jones.
Abigail's brother had been my best friend in school, and is today, but she and I had never hit it off. She was a good twelve years older than either of us, and she was the perfect figure of the soured, dessicatedly righteous virgin whom we characterize by the tag, "old maid".
The shop showed plainly the care she devoted to it. Everything was immaculate—painfully so—and the potted plants were trim and crisp, the cut flowers fairly sparkling. I wondered where they came from, for there had been nothing but the Zulu roses in Melchizedek Hobbs' greenhouse, and then I remembered that the Jones family had had fine greenhouses of their own when I was a boy. That was when two and two made four, and I finally made up my mind.
I told her plainly, in so many words, what the trouble was. I took due blame on myself (and I am sure she has never forgiven me) and did my best to point out in a calm, rational, scientific manner that what had happened was the result of purely natural causes operating in a perfectly logical way. Her face never unfroze, her eyes never as much as glinted, and I don't know to this day whether she did what she did because she wanted to or because she thought it was her Christian duty.
As I say, she heard me out without turning a hair. It was only when a sudden flash of inspiration came to me at the very end, as I was halfway out the door, that I thought I saw a bit of a twist on her prim lips. I remembered then that my uncle had had a very fine, large bull, and I told her so.
What happened that night, was in a sense, tragic. The bull got loose, as it had done before. It rooted and rampaged down the length of Spring Street, breaking through the Sutherland's new hedge, plowing up the Pitkins' dahlia beds, scaring a grey mare and spilling out two spooners in a buggy, chasing Constable Nate Williams up a lamp-post, and topping off the evening by raging through Melchizedek Hobbs' greenhouse from end to end. By the time a posse had ramped through after it, and been chased by it, and hosts of small boys and frantic dogs had followed them and fled before them, the species Zulu rose was extinct in the Western Hemisphere.