Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  The door clacked shut behind her—why the devil couldn’t she say who it was!

  “Well, Mr. Kane, guess we’d better get ’em in tonight. ’Twon’t do ’em no good to lay around here in the frost!”

  “You think there’s going to be a frost?”

  “A good one. I’ll come over after supper and bring a shovel.”

  “Okay, Terence. Let me know and I’ll give you a hand.”

  “They sure packed ’em up good. Quite a weight, too. I thought I’d bust a gut!”

  The three boxes lay like great coffins on the grass, the torn grass, the sand showing where the box corners had gouged through the thin topsoil, and Terence kicked one of them affectionately with the toe of a heavy boot.

  “And where did you have it in mind to put them?”

  Together they looked along the sloping garden, now growing dark, the bare little garden which led down to the river. The river gleamed almost unnaturally in the queer light—bat-light, he thought, betwixt-light, the hour of the mosquito—but later, of course, there would be the full moon.

  “Wants two nights for the full moon,” Terence added. “Guess we can make out to see, all right!”

  “All along both sides, Terence—right from the street on that side and from the back of the kitchen on this. And then a few across the middle there, halfway down, leaving just a sort of gateway through to the lower terrace. Where you built the wall.”

  “Never will I forget those fleas!”

  “Yes, that was funny.”

  “It was all them rats. Yes, sir, it was from them rats they come; foh, I never saw such filth in all my life, no, sir! Why, there was millions of them, that soil and muck and seaweed was full of them, and I begun scratching, and old Bill he begun scratching, we didn’t know what it was. But we found out, all right! Gorry! When I got home, I stood up on the middle of a blanket, without nary a stitch on, and a bucket of water beside me, and hoo didn’t the little buggers hop! It was all right for me, but poor old Bill, he was half blind, he couldn’t see much, and they sure did make him miserable! He was in a torment.”

  “I remember those rats; they lived in the cellar-hole, and down in the corner where the pigsty used to be.…”

  Terence chuckled, they both chuckled, then Terence took the reins of the horse, and began backing and turning the wagon.

  “I’ll be in later, then,” he said.

  “All right. Give me a shout. Sure you don’t mind, Terence?”

  “Glad to do it. No good putting dead lilacs into the ground, is there?”

  “No!”

  The reflector lamp had been lit in the kitchen, on the shelf behind the coal stove, and in the dining room the candle flames rose pale and tall on the table, where Enid sat witchlike, her elbows on the polished walnut, her cheeks on her fists. The yellow light narrowed and brightened the green gleam of her eyes, but he couldn’t be sure whether they quite looked at him. She was waiting, visibly waiting, and at once it was as if some obscure current had stiffened and frozen between them.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “George.”

  “Why couldn’t you have said so!”

  “Was there any necessity? He’s got something of considerable interest, you’ll find, to say about your friend Jim Connor.”

  “Oh, he has!”

  “Yes. And might I remind you that dinner is ready? I think he could have chosen a better time to call. He knows perfectly well what time we have dinner.”

  “Very well, you needn’t wait for me.”

  “Thank you, I’ll wait!”

  “I don’t think you’d better.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, nothing. But it might take some time!”

  He made this remark as if humorously, over his shoulder, looking back from the doorway. She still sat unmoving, but now the green eyes were subtly lifted and turned towards him, with an expression, however, which he hadn’t time to fathom. Good lord, he thought quickly, how lovely she is, it isn’t fair! Not fair to man or beast. Nobody has a right to be as beautiful as that, or if they have, they shouldn’t be allowed to sit in candle light.

  The studio was half dark, and George stood tall and white as a ghost by the fireplace, his striped palmbeach suit immaculate as always, the Panama hat in his hand. He was on his dignity, a little formidable and formal, the man of property come to uphold his rights.

  “Hello, didn’t Enid give you a light?”

  “Ah, I’m afraid I’ve come at an inconvenient moment, Tip, but I thought as you’d be going up to town tomorrow I mightn’t catch you—”

  “Not till the day after. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays!”

  The bright blue eyes twinkled mischievously behind the black-corded glasses, the magisterial headmasterly head, with its close gray curls, inclined just perceptibly forward in the ghost of a bow. He slapped his hat, as if irritatedly, against his knee, turning slowly towards the struck match, the lighted candle on the mantel, the piled pine logs and pine cones in the wide fireplace.

  “Forgive me, old fellow—how stupid of me. Of course.”

  “Sit down. What’s on your mind?”

  “Didn’t Enid tell you?”

  “Well, she murmured something about Jim Connor—”

  George motioned with his hat towards the picture on the easel, as he sat down.

  “Looks kind of familiar,” he said. “Charming, my boy! Weir Village, isn’t it?”

  “Large as life.”

  “And twice as natural!”

  He crossed his long legs, first carefully pulling up the exquisitely creased white trousers.

  “Well, what about Jim Connor?”

  “That’s what I want to know. What we all want to know.”

  “Who is ‘all’?”

  “I won’t mention any names, if you don’t mind, but I’ve talked it over with several people—”

  “The town fathers, I suppose?”

  “No, not yet. Of course not, Tip. I wanted first to see you.”

  “Very kind of you.”

  “Not at all. And you needn’t be sarcastic!”

  “All right, go ahead.”

  “Perhaps you could tell me something about him. I think we have a right to know a little more—unless, of course, you want to be responsible for him, which personally I wouldn’t recommend! There is such a thing as being an accessory before the fact, you know—you’d be conniving!”

  “How so? I don’t know a thing.”

  “You know he’s a thief! And we hear that he’s going to continue being a thief while he’s living here.”

  “You know more than I do then!”

  “I judge merely from what Enid said.”

  “Enid’s only source of information, as far as I am aware, is myself.”

  “Well, my dear fellow, you must realize what we feel about it. We can’t allow thieves around, you know—there is such a thing as law, after all! Just the same, I don’t want to be unreasonable, and as he’s a friend of yours, I thought it only fair to give you and him warning.”

  “Warning?”

  “Exactly. It will be my duty as a citizen to notify the police.”

  (Damn! So that was what they were up to—! And Enid too.)

  “Now look here, George—”

  He broke off, gave an angry little laugh. It was funny—it was really too funny. The upright but misguided Jim—and yet, was he misguided?—causing all this fuss. And the idea of notifying poor old bewildered Uncle Cy William, the Town Constable, who had never made an arrest in his life! But George was leaning back in his chair, smiling cynically, his curled leonine head outlined against the open window—he was going to be difficult, he was going to be truculent. The defender of the faith—confound his impertinence! And the worst of it was that, within his limits, he was perfectly right.

  George was saying, twirling the Panama hat round a raised forefinger:

  “How long exactly have you known him, by the way, Tip? It isn’t as
if he was really an old friend of yours, is it?”

  “I think I told you. He came up to town with my friend Karl Roth, the painter—that was last spring. I liked him. He struck me at once as one of the few honest people I ever met.”

  “Honest!”

  “Yes. I mean it. The stealing is only an idea, a protest—he’s an anarchist and unlike most anarchists he practices what he preaches—doesn’t believe in trade for profit or in property being used for profit by barter. And so he steals merely in order to redistribute goods which he thinks are unjustly divided—he doesn’t make anything out of it himself—not a cent—gives it all away to the poor and deserving. With a special weakness for helping starving painters and poets.”

  “And you believe that!”

  “Of course I do. He’s perfectly candid about it—he even notifies the police himself, sometimes in advance, when he’s planning a haul, so as to get himself arrested and air his views in court. Sends the district attorney a picture postcard! They’re tired of him. They’d much rather look the other way, I can assure you! And he’s actually done a lot of good—he’s helped some of the poor creatures a great deal.”

  “The whole thing’s a fake, my dear Tip, and I’m surprised you don’t see through it, I really am! Why, those dingy little poets and painters are nothing but parasites, it’s just a dishonest and easy living for the whole lot of them. Mind you, I don’t care what he does in New York or Greenwich Village—let him do it all he likes down there! But, by gosh, it’s another thing when he comes up here, and takes the most expensive cottage in town with his ill-gotten gains, and proposes to use this as his center of operations! That’s too much, yes, sir, that’s a bit too much.”

  “You’re quite safe. He doesn’t rob houses, and you won’t miss any of your silver. You can reassure Mabel!”

  “It doesn’t make any difference, as far as I can see, what he steals.”

  “Only department stores. He specializes in robbing big department stores. I think it’s kind of nice, at that!”

  “You’ve got a right to your own opinion, but, my dear boy, I beg you to consider your position very carefully. I don’t want to see you get into any trouble.”

  “Who’s likely to make trouble?”

  “I am! And you can tell him that from me. And you can tell him he’d better keep out of my way. I don’t want to meet him. Nor his houseful of very peculiar-looking friends.”

  “There’ll be no occasion, I assure you.”

  “They all look like crooks to me!”

  “They’re quite harmless, they’re just a little crazy.”

  “Every man to his own taste, said the farmer, as he kissed the pig! Anyway, you tell your friend Connor that I’ve warned him, and that I reserve the right to inform the police without further notice. I trust that’s quite clear?”

  “Quite, my dear George. I’ll take Connor your tender message. Not that he’s really a friend of mine—I hardly know him!”

  “If you’ve got any sense, you’ll drop him. But I must be going.”

  “I’ll walk down to the bridge with you.”

  Good old George—so well-meaning, but such a righteous idiot! Hopeless to expect anything else of him, of course—one had only to look at the beautiful suit, the hat, the suède shoes, the neat black spectacle cord—but how damned exasperating. And what had he been saying to Enid? Or she to him? The thick was plottening, and with a vengeance, it looked like being a first-class mess. The property instinct—this was what came of owning a colonial mansion and a Pierce-Arrow car, by god! You couldn’t blame him, but all the same he was somehow less pleasant to consider than poor honest Connor, for all his crack-brained confusions and inconsistencies. Connor was at least generous.

  They walked down the Town Landing lane in the dark. The big moon was just rising over the pine woods across the river, the crickets were chirping like mad, faster and faster, doubtless in a last passionate effort to keep themselves warm. Already the night smelt of frost. He turned his head, saw the dim light between the dining-room curtains—a shadow moved briefly across them, Enid must have decided to begin without him. But no—she was playing the piano; the little Brahms Op. 39 waltz came plaintively into the night, across the rustling of the trodden leaves and the iterated zeek-zeek-zeek of the doomed crickets—it was, of course, a protest. He smiled, and said:

  “A pity you won’t meet them, though—Roth would amuse you. And those gals are a scream. Gosh, what a night!”

  “Jove, yes! My dear fellow, of course there’s nothing personal in it, and I’m thinking as much of your good, yours and Enid’s and even Buzzer’s, as mine. A fine sort of scandal to get your family mixed up in! But never mind.… I hear your lilacs have come.”

  “Yes. Terence is coming over to put them in before the frost.”

  “You’ll have to get a move on. They’ll look well, all along that wall—you know, I often think of that little plum tree—wasn’t that the strangest thing you ever saw? Covered with blossom, not an inch of branch that wasn’t covered with blossom, and then dead so soon after—a week, was it?”

  “One week. A suicide, if there ever was one. Why the devil should it want to commit suicide?”

  “Oh, well, my dear boy, there are more things in heaven and earth—a good way to die, though.”

  A little smug, a little suave—but sincere, too, it was old George’s attempt at amends, and had better be accepted as such. A car was rattling over the loose boards of the bridge, the headlights shot up the sandy rise of the road, throwing the heaped leaves into brilliant relief. Yes, the little plum tree—how beautiful it had been and how touching—he remembered just exactly how it had looked, remembered it with a pang, for now it must be uprooted, thrown away. Poor little thing.

  “Well, good night, I must turn back. Ee will be waiting.”

  “Good night, old man, and don’t take it too unkindly of me.”

  “Of course not. I’ll be seeing you!”

  “Good night.”

  The tall white figure was gone, swerving quickly round the corner of the tumble down tollhouse, the thicket of rusty sumacs growing from the cellar holes, the clutter of rotting boards and shingles—he would be walking across the moonlit bridge, looking down at the dark swift water where the red sponges grew on barnacled rock, walking importantly in the moonlight, swinging the beautiful Panama hat, his errand accomplished. Smiling to himself a little too, no doubt, as he prepared the phrases for Mabel and turned up Chicken-coop Lane towards the pine woods and the cranberry bog and the cluster of houses on the Point. Snob’s Village, the natives called it—and with some justice, by god. They wanted everything their own way. Even to choosing the tenants for empty houses.

  Tirra-loo—tirra-lee! Mr. Riley’s fishing nets lay like a mist on the grass and leaves, a ghostly blue, a milky blue, chicory-color, blue reticulated with silver, semined with silver, and he walked carefully round them, admiring the cork floats. Leaves on them, too, a fine catch of yellow leaves for breakfast, which at daybreak Mr. Riley would shake out in the frost. And Chattahoochee would be there, hoping for fish.

  At the edge of the lane he paused, stood still on the bouldered wall, listened. The piano had stopped; except for the crickets, everything was silent. How small the house looked under the moon-charmed poplar trees—like something at the bottom of the sea, he thought, a sunken ship, something lost and forgotten. But Enid was somewhere there inside it, like a mermaid, and Buzzer asleep under the silver-gray shingled roof, and through a chink in the dining-room curtains he could see the warm glow of the candlelight, the gleaming corner of the piano. A strange and different reality it had, something safe and solid and enclosed, and yet wasn’t it actually less real, less permanent, than the unfathomable sea of moonlight in which it lay, the appalling emptiness of night and space? The terror of space would endure; but some day the house would be gone, and Buzzer, and Ee and himself—the bare earth turning frozen under the stars.… He shivered, smiled, jumped down into the road, whe
re the gray ashes lay in the half-filled ruts, and ran up the wooden stairs into the kitchen.

  “I do think,” Enid said levelly across the dinner table, as he sat down, her eyes and brow barely raised between the paired candles, “you might have been a little more considerate!”

  “My dear Ee, how can I help it? If old George must come bumbling in just at dinner time—as you yourself pointed out—”

  “That’s all very well. But you needn’t have gone out with him, knowing as you did that dinner was on the table, and everything getting cold. I should have thought—”

  “I’m sorry, darling.”

  “You’d better eat your eggs, they’re quite cold as it is! Besides, I should have thought that you’d have wanted to discuss it with George of your own accord, beforehand, and gone to see him.”

  The half-smile she gave him was a little nettled, a little firm and cryptic, a slight frown went with it, and the grave eyes, barely touching his own glance for a moment, wavered sidelong, gazed preoccupiedly into the corner behind him. Her elbows on the table, in the pink-smocked sleeves, she was eating a biscuit in very small quick bites, the silver butter knife held lightly in her other hand. He noticed that her chair was drawn crookedly to the table, which gave her the effect of not quite facing him. Or of being poised for departure.

  “Discuss what, dear.”

  “Oh, come, Timothy!”

  She was looking straight at him—for the first time, it seemed to him, in hours—and in a sense this was a relief. A challenging look, the beautiful eyes brilliant under dark eyebrows faintly lowered, the wide white forehead smooth in the soft light. And the richly modeled Botticelli mouth, so firm and lovely—what a disadvantage a man is at, he thought, in having, even at moments like this, to pause and pay tribute! Poor devil, he has to face treason in his own citadel.

  He smiled and said:

  “Well, I suppose you mean Jim Connor—especially as it appears you’ve been having quite a heart-to-heart with George on the subject yourself.”

  “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Is there any reason why you should?”

  “Well, why not?”

  “It seems to me it’s my affair. It’s to do with my friends, isn’t it?”