by Conrad Aiken
He sat still, staring, let the opened book slide to the floor, then rose and stood before her, jingling the silver in his pocket.
—Well, what do you suggest?
—Nothing.… Whatever you like.
—I see. You want me to make the decisions. Is that it?
No answer.
—By God, I could kill you when you take refuge in weeping and silence. It’s a damned dirty way of evading your responsibilities, if you ask me! I’m going back to the club. I don’t know where I’ll go from there. Anywhere. I’ll let you know——
He lurched into the hall, struggled into his wet coat, put his hat on, returned to the couch, where Bertha still lay motionless, squeezed her elbow once between finger and thumb, saying, “I’m off,” and a moment later found himself running along the slippery boardwalk toward Garden Street. In this street once. He got into a yellow taxi, which started moving before he had quite seated himself: he found himself on his back, and for a few seconds lay inert, uncertain whether he wanted to laugh or cry. Lights. The expensive hum of a Packard. Bertha at the opera, in the borrowed car. Mrs. Skinner, the old buzzard, sat behind them. “They were just finding each other,” she said. Just finding each other. Oh, yeah? And now they were just losing each other. One as easy as the other—now you see them and now you don’t. Close the eyes. Let the chin come to rest, where it will, on mother’s breast. Let us frolic on the hills at Arlington, under the shadow of the water tower. Wild barberry. Black-eyed Susan. Does some one see us. Is some one coming. Beams multiply in a scaffolding, the scantlings cant, the lashed ladder topples, falls, veers, descends dizzily down the booming well. She has bats in her belfry. Long sounds, long lines of sound, long lights on backs of sounds, rode like the Valkyrie, whooping through the tunnel. Let fall your chin on mother’s breast. No, you mustn’t here, this is too public, some one might see us, don’t, Andy, you’re too dreadful. The taxi ticking, Mr. Rodman said: I said: Mr. Rodman said: tu pupila es azul. Paid the bill. Saw the spittoons, garboons. The ice in the urinals, too, and the brass keys on the rack. Who’s on the rack? Beams multiply in a scaffolding, the scantlings cant, cross levers, struts and stays, footholds and handholds, giant’s jackstraws, you are lost among them, come down, oh, maid, from yonder height, get out from under before it all falls, it will fall, is falling, fam. sing. and all, go on and hoot your way into hell. Who was hooting? The dead man under the bridge, fumbling in darkness along slimy piles, bowing to the tide, felt hat in hand. Good evening, madam. Have they found me yet? Has my watch stopped ticking? What brick was it that spoke that about ticking? It was the train, over the joints, over the rails. In Rome too as the Romans too.
The silence——
—A dollar and a quarter. And ten.
—Thank you, sir.
—Don’t mention.
That probably surprised him.
The club was empty and still, opened before him spaciously and with marble echoes, followed him downstairs with subdued lights and sounds, with portraits of philosophers and a bison’s head, with shells from the Somme and a Chinese dragon on scarlet silk. The chessmen too. The Hoboken gambit? I’ll pawn my queen. The bar closed for the night, but water would do. A Lily-cup of waxed paper, cold water on greased skin.
At the locker, he refilled the silver flask, took a long burning drink, filled again, then placed six Lily-cups in a white row on the table in the bombproof, two of them filled with water: supplies for the night. Within reach of his hand, as he lay on the red divan. Better have a night-cap. Jitter might have been here, often was. You know, Andy, I think there’s something yellow about you. Close the eyes, to shut out swimming. Rest the chin on papa’s hairy chest. Not very comfortable. Screwed his head from left to right against the hard leather. Sleep drunkenly, tomato juice in morning, cold clam juice, ice water, cold shower set you right. Wake up, Andy, it’s time to get up: you have an appointment to tutor at eleven. That little Jew. Weisskopf. The long swift darkness swept over from left to right, here and there a streaked star, a dark pouring sound, the subdued roar of all blood. Bumwad, bumwad, bumwad, bumwad. Oh, bumwad. Now nausea plucking at the corners of the arid mouth, the twitch of sickness, the race between sickness and unconsciousness, the interstellar skid. The hands nerveless and placeless, now on the belly, now at the side, now hanging towards the floor, touching the cold leather, stubbornly conscious, waiting for something, afraid of sleep. Wake up, Andy, it’s time to get up. That was a footstep, near, menacing.
—Mr. Cather, sir.
—Hello.
An attendant, deprecatory.
—Pardon me, sir, Mr. Cather, but would you like to be found here?
—Found and left.
—Yes, sir.
The long darkness swept superbly from left to right, the blood began its universal pouring over the small tossed body of the world, hurled it and whirled it, swung it obliquely through a screaming abyss, hoisted it again to a toppling pinnacle. Good evening, madam. This is my drowned hat that I am eating. We signed the contract. I am successful. When he saw the sparrow in the road, he got off his horse. It had a broken wing, the bones were sticking out. Of course, what did I tell you. More calmly now. More darkly now. Smoothly, on even keel, into the dark station, the tunnel, the banked lights stately and still on stone columns, birds of brightness, cold and light. I saw you before you saw me, yes, I did. Why didn’t you tell me, and, besides. I was walking there.
In pure light came the remote flight, the little flight of a flock, coming nearer and larger and brighter, the flight of little winged bones, winging through heaven, little wrist-bones and delicate ankle-bones and even figulas and femurs and scapulas, and each with as neat a pair of wings as you’d see on a bleeding sparrow, and every one of them on its way to a star, far off; or was it God himself? He watched them with one eye, while he picked up the skeleton and began to eat it; first the feet, then working slowly up the legs; and dry going it was, what with no sauce, no mustard, no Worcestershire, and the bones getting bitterer as he crawled right up through the pelvis, devouring all, and crunched the ribs. The spine tasted like the Dead Sea, like ashes in the mouth, getting worse as he crawled nearer to the skull; and the skull itself was a black mouthful of charcoal, which he spat out. And in mid-space then he saw behemoth in the act of biting off the conning tower of an interstellar submarine, one of these ether-going craft with one eye, a little way off to the southwest of a pink star, which was wearing white drawers, like a woman. And in a canoe then, in a canoe, a birchbark canoe, up the marsh channel, above the red bridge, in amongst the hosts of seething reeds in the hot salt sunlight—the bright drops on the paddles, the bare arms freckled and wet—is this the way to the Gurnett?—Oh, no, that’s the other way—you’ll have to turn round—yes, it’s the other way. The other way, to the Gurnett.
The other way, a long way.
And when he came, they gave him an oval reception.
II
(———particularly the smell of the pine-wood walls, soaked in sea fog, but pine-smelling also in the strong sea sunlight, smooth to the touch, golden-eyed with knotholes, and the wind singing through the rusty wire screens, fine-meshed and dusty, or clogged brightly with drops of dew, or drops of rain, or drops of fog—the morning outlook seaward, over the humped grass beyond the puddled tennis court, over the wild sea grass windblown, beyond the new house of bright shingles, where the new boy and girl lived, and then across the bay to Clark’s Island, and the long yellow outer beach, with its deserted and mysterious shacks of houses, and then the Gurnett—the small white twin lighthouses of the Gurnett—I was looking out of the window at this, at all of this, feeling the cool east wind from Provincetown, but with no mirage to show precisely where Province-town lay, and the voices came then over the low partition between the bedrooms. I was dressing, and as I put on my khaki shirt I looked at the fly-trap, which I had made out of fragments of window-screen wire, to see if my flies were all still alive after the night. What would they be saying now. Th
e voices were low and secret, early morning voices, Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah. I removed the screw in the wall beside the washstand and peeped through into the maids’ room, saw a pink chemise very close to me, so close that I was frightened, and walked softly away, back to the window. Did Molly know I was there, that I was watching her day after day? I had seen them putting on their bathing suits. Afterward, when I met them on the porch, they were embarrassed, tried to pull down the short skirts over their knees, ran down the road giggling and looking back. Molly’s skin was very white, Margaret’s was brown.
But why should he come like this, Tom? It isn’t like him not to let Doris, or anyone, know. Perhaps you’d better go to Boston and see him. Do you think there’s anything wrong.
—The whole thing is very queer. Do you think he suspects. Do you think we ought to say something to Doris.
—I think you’d better go to town and see him. Before anything worse happens. He ought not to come here, if that’s what he’s thinking of doing. I’m sure he suspects. It would hurt him too much to see it. It would be better if you talked to him.
—We’d better put off the picnic till next week. Too bad to disappoint the kids again, but it can’t be helped. It was queer to begin with that he let Doris come here alone, with the children, when he could perfectly well have come, too—his business was only an excuse. I think they had already quarreled about it.
They were talking about Father and Mother, and I went close to the partition, to listen, holding my breath; but the voices stopped, the door opened, and I heard Uncle Tom going down the stairs, and Aunt Norah pouring water out of the pitcher into the washbowl. No picnic at the Gurnett this week—the third time it had been postponed. Porper would probably cry when I told him, but instead Susan and I could take him down to the front beach and build villages out of shells, and show him the dead seal. In that little cleared place between the banks of eelgrass, flat and sandy at low tide, where the horseshoe crabs were. The new boy and girl, too, Warren and Gay, except that Gay was always crying, as when we had taken her to the log cabin in the pine woods and tried to make her undress. Had she told her mother and father about that, the little sneak.
———particularly the morning walk to the village, along the Point Road, past all the houses and windmills, the wild cherry trees and crab apples, to get the morning mail. The wooden windmills were the best, with their wings of fine white-painted slats, and the great wooden tanks at the top, and the strong girders of white-painted wood, and of these I couldn’t decide whether I preferred Daisy or Sunbeam. Of the metal ones, there were five Comets and three Aermotors, and our own Vulcan, the only three-legged one on the Point. They were all going busily in the east wind. The Tuppers had a special little shingled tower, with a red railing around the top, where Frank Tupper went with a telescope to watch the yacht races in the bay, but this I passed quickly, looking at the house and garden out of the tail of my eye, to see if Gwendolyn was there. Had she got the box of candy I had left on her porch for her, with the heart on it, and our initials. Would she laugh at me. Did I dare go in the afternoon to the drill of the Company at the Camp. Would she have told Frank about it, and would Frank say anything. When we were playing cross-tag I had caught her by her pigtail, and she had looked at me in a very queer way, half angry and half pleased, and then had refused to play any more. What was this about Father and Mother. Was it because she went sailing all the time with Uncle David, just like last year, and walks to the beach always at night after Porper and Susan had gone to bed. The stage passed me, coming from the morning train, the one named Priscilla, painted a bright yellow, with red wheels, and toothless Smiley driving the horses and saying “Giddup, giddup” out of the side of his mouth, spitting tobacco juice. I would be in plenty of time for the mail, in fact I would have time to go to the drugstore and have a chocolate milk shake at the marble fountain, which always smelled of vanilla. If it rained in the afternoon, we would play Gonko in the playhouse, and perhaps make some new racquets out of shingles. If it didn’t rain, I would go for a row in the dory, through the long bridge and up into the marsh channel towards Brant Rock and Marshfield, for the tide would be low, and I could explore the channels. If I got stuck, I could pretend to be just clam-digging, the way Uncle Tom always said the yachtsmen pretended to do when they got stuck on the mud flats in the bay. They always took pails and shovels with them in case they got stuck, and then rolled up their trousers and went digging, as if that was what they had come for. Or perhaps Uncle David would invite us out in his cabin motorboat, late in the afternoon, with Mother, and Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and that would be fun, except that I didn’t like Uncle David. I heard Molly saying to Margaret in their room when they were going to bed that he was always drunk. Did that mean falling down. I had never seen him fall down. But I had seen bottles under the bunk in the cabin of the motorboat several times and he had bottles in his room downstairs, on the table under the row of dried and mounted seaweeds, which Uncle Tom and I had put there the year before.
———and beyond the golf links, where I always left the bicycle path, paved with broken clamshells, to walk along the edge of the course, among the bayberry bushes and cherry trees, hoping for lost golf balls, prodding in the poison-ivy with a stick, beyond this the boarding house kept by old Mrs. Soule, where we had stayed last year and the year before, with the hen houses at the back, and the little sandy-rutted road which led down to the cove and the stone dyke where beach plums grew. The floors were painted gray, with white speckles, the whole house had a marine smell like a ship, conch shells lined the path and stood against the doors, and on the lawn, among the croquet wickets, I had found four-leaved clovers. Molly Soule always sat alone in the swing, large-eyed, pallid, her thin little hands around the ropes, looking sadly at us, because we never played with her. Nobody ever played with her, because her name was the same as her mother’s, and she had no father. She was always hanging about and watching us from a little distance, and would run away and cry if we said anything to her, especially the Sanford boy, who asked her so many times what her name was. This was where I played baseball with Father in the evening, or ran races with him from one telephone pole to another. Was it true that he was coming again this year. Why was it that this year we were staying with Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and Uncle David, instead of at the Soules’. Though it was nice, particularly as Uncle Tom knew so much about the wild flowers, and had that nice little tin cylinder to bring back the flowers in, the one he had brought all the way from Switzerland a long while ago. It hung over his shoulder on a strap, and we had found swamp pink in the marsh near Pembroke woods, and arrowhead, and ghost-flower. Jewelweed, on the way to the Standish Monument, pickerel weed, and buttonbush. If only he could go more often—we already had more than fifty kinds, pressed in the blank book, it would be easy to get a hundred before the summer was over. Why was he so thin, and his knees so funny, and he always wore that funny yachting cap with the green vizor, his ears sticking out at the sides, walking in his bathing suit over the humped grass to the Point with the rowlocks jingling in his hand. I said to him that I thought I was getting fatter. He gave that nice little chuckle and said, No danger, Andy. Why was it he and Uncle David had never learned to swim properly——
———when we got to the oak woods we decided after all to go to the pine woods instead, because the oak woods were smaller and closer together, there were no logs to build with, and no room anyway; so we took Warren and Gay with us and we sat in the houses of logs while it rained, and only a few drops of rain came through the roofs, which we had made out of pine boughs. Susan was in one house with Warren, and Gay was in the other with me. I asked if we should take our clothes off and go to bed, pretending it was night, but she said no and began to cry. Warren and Susan had taken off theirs. Warren didn’t mind, but Gay said she wanted to go home, and I was afraid she would tell her mother. So I told her about the villages we made of shells on the beach, and the dead seal.
—It’s swarming wit
h maggots.
—What are maggots.
—Little white worms, millions of them, and it smells so bad that you can smell it all the way up to the house when the wind is right.
—Do you go bathing every day, we go every day, and we have a sailboat at the Point.
—I have a dory of my own, and my uncle has a motorboat which he takes us out in. It has a real cabin with doors that lock.
The smell was so bad that we couldn’t get very near to the seal without feeling sick, but I showed her the maggots. Then Mother came down the hill walking very slowly, with Porper holding her hand. She was carrying a red silk parasol over her head.
—Porper wants to see the village. Show him how you build houses, Andy and Susan, I want to read my book. Are these your little friends? What are your names, children? Oh, you’re the little girl and boy who have just moved in next door, aren’t you.
We made houses out of rows of quartz pebbles in the sand, in between the beds of eelgrass. First they all had to buy their land from me with shells for money: scallop shells were five dollars, clam shells were one dollar, toenail shells were fifty cents. Mother had made a pile of dried eelgrass to lean against, and was reading a book under her parasol. Warren sold quartz pebbles to us for building material. Susan kept the bakery shop where we bought bread and cakes, Gay was the grocer. I built a house for Porper, and showed him how to go in and out of the imaginary door, and where the bedroom was, and how to go along the streets without stepping into the other houses by mistake. The tide was way out, all the mud flats in the bay were showing, and a little way out two men with a dory were digging clams.
—Shall we dig some clams for supper, Mother?
—Not today, Andy.
—When are we going to the Long Beach for a clambake, and to see the Gurnett. Tomorrow?
—Not till next week, I’m afraid. Now don’t bother Mother, she’s reading. And she may take a nap, she’s very tired and sleepy, so don’t disturb her.