How is it his students know of the elderly mother and young niece, for certainly he never mentions their existence? Because one of the students, the lively fair-haired Bessie Perfect, boards in a house on Downing Street, which is just two streets away from Simcoe Street where the three members of the Flett family reside.
Another student, Jessie Saltmeyer, attends the First Methodist Church where the Flett family worships each Sunday morning.
And then there’s the student Miss Lena Ballentyne; Lena Ballentyne’s father, a dentist, is acquainted with old Mrs. Flett, and has in fact fitted her, twice, for false teeth. And who else? Well, tiny Clarence Redfield, out for a weekend stroll, once encountered the three members of the Flett family walking on the banks of the Red River. They were carrying a picnic basket and a folded bit of carpet to spread on the ground. The feebleness of small families! But also the compensating weight of their self-sufficiency.
In the halls of Wesley College these scraps of information are pooled and savored. It is pointed out by Miss Saltmeyer, almost as an afterthought, that Professor Flett’s mother is not all that elderly after all, and that during the spring and summer season she raises a good-sized crop of flowers on the vacant land next to the Simcoe Street house and purveys them to the various flower merchants who have opened shop around the city. Someone else contributes the information that the “niece” is not a true blood relation, but only the daughter of a family acquaintance whose wife died in childbirth. All this lore is fascinating to the students of Introductory Botany, but chief among the fascinations is the fact that Barker Flett is an unmarried man. This curious and wonderful anomaly offers them hope for their own lives: a handsome thirty-three-year-old man who has yet to find his life’s companion.
They can’t help wondering if there might not be a tragic broken engagement in his past — and this possibility has been so often discussed by succeeding waves of students that it has acquired by now the hard sheen of authenticity. It exists in several versions: a sweetheart snatched from life by summer fever, a fiancée judged unsuitable because of high church leanings, because of tainted character, because of madness in the family, because the salary of a professor at Wesley College would never stretch to meet her material needs.
In fact, there is no broken engagement in Barker Flett’s past, no severed union of spirit and body. Professor Flett, who is perfectly aware of the legends that romance around him, smiles at the thought. His smile, like his voice, is beautiful, but it is a smile hatched from a frustrated asceticism, and the suspicion that love is no more than a diminutive for self-injury. His own society is what he favors. A quiet winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamp light, a comfortable austerity. Or else a solitary hike in a summer meadow, botanizing all the day long with just his pocket knife and specimen bag and a sandwich or two for company. True, he has three times in his adult life visited the rooms of prostitutes on Higgens Avenue, but these he thinks of as educational episodes which touched nothing in him that might be termed authentic. It may be that he is one of those men who feel toward women both a delicate sensibility and a deep hostility. He is not, in any case, in mourning for a lost love, as his students want to believe; he mourns only a simplicity of life that was briefly his, and now is lost.
Never was happiness more firmly in his grasp as in the summer of 1905, his twenty-second year, living alone in two back rooms at the top of a Simcoe Street boarding establishment, bent over his small student desk and completing his dissertation on the western lady’s-slipper, genus Cypripedium.
He loved this flower. (The “lady,” of course, was Venus.) He could have drawn its sensuous shape even in his dreams. Dorsal sepal, column, lateral sepal, sheath, sheathing bract, eye, and root. A common plant, yes, but belonging to the exotic orchid family. This delicate, frilled blossom was his. He had worked on it (her) for months, and now he possessed the whole of its folded silken parts and the pure, classic regenerative mechanics that lift it out of the humble midcontinental clay and open its full beauty to the eye of mankind — and to his eye in particular. (He believed this without vanity.)
The intensity of his gaze on this single living thing awakened in him other complex longings. He ached anew for release from his body — those ladies of Higgens Avenue — and the obliteration of all he had found brutal in his life thus far, beginning with the dumb, blunted angers of his parents and brothers, a family from whom the supports of education, culture, and even language had been withdrawn. He longed to separate himself from the mean unpaved streets of Tyndall, Manitoba, where he spent his boyhood, and from the crude groping for salvation and sex he apprehended everywhere around him. Bliss lay in the structure of this simple flower he was attempting to reproduce on a sheet of white rag paper: a petalled organism, complete in itself, obedient to its own rhythms and laws and to none other. Years later, looking back, he remembers how tenderly he held the watercolor brush in his hand, how the sun falling through the windowpane struck the top of his wrist and the edge of the water glass, and how the whole of his existence lightened correspondingly.
His euphoria was to be short-lived. Principal MacIntosh at the College asked him to redirect his research toward the development of hardier grains, reminding him that Methodism was a social, as well as spiritual, religion and thus concerned with the quality of human life — and here the old man underlined his words with fervor — human life on this earth. For the enlightenment of young, impressionable Barker Flett, he quoted the words of Jonathan Swift: “Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
Young Flett was obliged to give up his dabbling in lady’sslippers and to concentrate on hybrid grains. Moreover, as if that were not sacrifice enough, he was to be burdened with the teaching of introductory chemistry and physics as well as botany, and one year later, after poor Blaser was discharged (having been found to be a “user of alcohol”), he was assigned to teach the elementary zoology course as well. Overnight, it seemed, the singleness of his concentration had been shattered.
Worse, he returned to his rooms on Simcoe Street one evening in late September to find his mother installed. On her lap lay a tiny infant, arms thrashing, legs kicking, stomach arching, its lungs inflated, howling out against the injustice of the world.
Have I said that Clarentine Flett deserted her husband Magnus in the year 1905? Have I mentioned that she took with her the small infant who was in her charge, the young child of Mercy Goodwill, her neighbor who had died while giving birth?