by Conrad Aiken
“Friends!”
“I should have thought you could have left it to me.”
“I don’t agree with you. It seems to me to concern me and Buzzer quite as much as it concerns you. But, of course, you wouldn’t think of that. You never do. Any more than it occurred to you to consider George.”
“Why the devil should I have considered George! What business was it of his!”
“He’s your oldest friend here, isn’t he? I should have thought it would be only natural.”
“Natural, my foot! It’s none of George’s business. For that matter, it’s really none of my business either. If Jim Connor takes a fancy to this place, and wants to have a holiday here, and give some poor half-starved devils of Greenwich Village poets and painters a rest and change, who the devil is George, or who the devil am I, that we should take it upon ourselves to kick him out! Have a heart, Ee—and don’t live all your life on County Street, New Bedford, or Beacon Street, Boston! Besides, I didn’t ask Jim Connor to come here, remember, and if I like Jim, and he likes me, that’s a mere accident. And in many ways a very fortunate one.”
“I don’t think the sneer at County Street becomes you.”
“Sorry, Endor!”
“And say what you will, respectability has its uses. It’s all very well for adolescents to want to live in slums—”
“Adolescents!”
“But when it comes to bringing up children, I draw the line.”
“So we’re bringing up Buzzer in a slum! Really, Ee, you’re losing your sense of humor a little. I haven’t noticed any slums around. Go out and look at the moonlight, my gal, and those lilacs waiting to be planted, and tell me it’s a slum! It’s lovely, and you know it.”
“No, Tip, I know all that. But it isn’t only this, it isn’t only Jim Connor, who is after all nothing but a jailbird, and those very nondescript young women he’s brought with him—”
“Nondescript! Ho, what an adjective.”
“Will you let me finish? Please? It’s the whole tendency, I mean, it’s your whole leaning towards this kind of thing. It simply isn’t fair to me.”
“I see. So you took it upon yourself to talk it all over with old George. Discussing my affairs with him behind my back.”
“Not at all! George brought it up himself.”
“Even going so far as to tell him—what you don’t know to be true—that Jim is going to continue stealing while he’s living here. May I ask how you knew that?”
“I thought it was assumed.”
“Nothing of the sort. You don’t know anything more about it than I do, and I know nothing. As far as I’m aware, Jim himself is still undecided. It seems to me a little reckless of you, not to say mischievous, to make statements which have no basis in fact, and to George of all people! I think you might have asked me about it first, at least, and taken the trouble to corroborate it.”
“Your usual tactics, I see, of putting me in the wrong. On a minor point!”
She rose before he could reply, began piling the dishes, very carefully, very precisely, her small hands white under the candlelight, the proud head turning quickly and angrily. Imperious, imperial—yes, even the full throat, which showed through the V-shaped opening of the smock, was imperial and intimidating, for all its mature splendor, and the dark curls, as she turned away and went toward the kitchen steps, themselves turned on the pink collar with a sparkling arrogance which seemed to sum up all vitality. He pushed back his chair, reached a hand to the piano, and struck a note, softly, with one finger. Her voice came to him again, from the door—she had paused, with her cheek half turned, as if she were looking out into the garden towards the little dead plum tree.
“The water, by the way,” she said, “is very low.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew.”
“Of course not! I suppose it was Buzzer’s bath—”
“And don’t forget, either, that I did a whole morning’s washing! The cesspool was flooded again.”
“The devil it was!”
“Yes. I called up Binney. He’s coming in the morning. He says we’ll probably need to have an extra one put in.”
He struck the one note again, listened to it idly, wondered for a moment if the candle flames could feel the vibration—but no, they were perfectly still, rose motionless in the quiet room, as steady and beautiful as peacock’s eyes, and the room around them as attentive—with its chairs arranged demurely against the walls of white wood, the lustrous mahogany lowboy, the Chinese embroidery of birds and dragons—as if it existed for them alone. Peace—peace—peace—the crickets were singing in the moonlight outside—the rhythmic incantatory sound was everywhere, came into everything, saturated everything, like a mist. Another night like this, poor devils, and they’d be singing a different tune. Was it love? Was it defiance? Or just a sort of mesmerism, a subtle electric response—or spiritual, even—to the earth itself? Exactly like himself and Enid. A mere sidereal response.
In the kitchen, under the luminous whitewashed rafters, Enid had turned on the tap, was rinsing the dishes, shaking the water off her hand. He pulled the screen door towards him, caught it against his foot, and said:
“Well, for goodness’ sake, why so secretive, Ee? Why not tell a fellow!”
“Your door was shut, so I assumed you were painting.”
“Damn. And just as I’ve finally got some grass to grow.”
He stepped into the bright sea of moonlight, feeling for all the world as if positively it might lift him off his feet, float him up over the roof top, over the trees, and went slowly to the white-shingled pump house behind the kitchen. The old w.c. A good idea, that had been, moving it from the back of the yard, and turning it into a pump house—one more example of the unwearying adaptability of nature. After all, too, the function was roughly the same, if a shade more refined. And those squashes that he had grown on the former site, the former unsavory site—those man-eating squashes—by god, would anybody ever forget them? They hadn’t been squashes at all, they had been saber-toothed tigers. And leaves the size of howdahs, or palanquins, or something.… In the cool dark, he stooped toward the compact little engine, fitted the crank handle to it, spun it, spun it again. It caught, coughed, wheezed, then gave three barks in rapid succession and was off.
“Like a lamb,” he said. “Like a lamb!”
The pump shaft groaned musically in the bricked well below him, he heard the first chuckle of flowing water from underground, the indicator over the kitchen sink would be beginning to fidget and dance; but averting his eyes from the thought of the new cesspool, as from the three ghostly boxes of lilacs which lay like coffins on the lawn, he averted his attention from all this as well. Damn. And doing a whole morning’s washing. And not bothering to tell him about it, just ordering Binney herself. And George. And Nora. And Jim Connor. And the bills—the next thing would, of course, be the bills. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. It was all becoming a colossal, an overwhelming joke, a sort of decuman wave of joke, which was piling up to sweep away everything—himself, Enid, Buzzer, the house—everything. In fact, it was ceasing rapidly to be a joke at all. Peace—peace—peace—sang the crickets. Peace? The hell you say, he thought. We ask for peace and they give us a stone. If indeed even a stone. They give us nothing.
“I suppose you couldn’t bear,” Enid said as he opened the door, “to lend me a hand with these few dishes.”
“I don’t know whether I can bear it, if you choose to put it like that, but I will.”
The challenge again—her eyes flashed handsomely at him, with something that was almost like admiration, and returned to the steaming dishpan, the Himalaya of soft suds in which she was waggling the dish mop. She was humming a little, under her breath, as she always did when she was preoccupied, or tired, or annoyed—tonelessly, tunelessly—a charming and pathetic sing-song which always tickled him, and endeared her to him. No ear for music at all—or was it that she was p
racticing the Chinese whole-tone scale? Very modern and polychromatic, he had often told her, and written, as it were, without signature. The indicator danced in its dial over the sink, from the pipes came the regular half-musical joog—joog—joog of the pumped water pressing its way everywhere, to every corner of that elaborate arterial artifice of pipes, to every tap, and into the cold heart of the great tank buried underground. But no, of course not, it was the engine that was the heart.
“And is that all?”
“That’s all. I’ll be in in a minute. And thank you.”
“Don’t mention.”
Her pink sleeves rolled back to the elbows, she reached bare-armed to toss a checkered cloth over the clothesline which stretched across the kitchen, and almost simultaneously, as he entered the dining room, he heard something thump heavily on the floor overhead, in Buzzer’s room. He stood still and listened.
“Something must have fallen, upstairs,” he said.
“Probably the doll.”
“She didn’t have a doll.”
“Well, why don’t you go and see! For heaven’s sake, Tip, why do you have to be so helpless!”
“Helpless!”
Helpless.… He lifted a candle from the dinner table, shielded it with one hand, and went quietly up the narrow stairs to the second floor. The upper hall was ablaze with moonlight. A great splash of it lay on the rugless floor and halfway up the wall, it poured through the low window—and to stand there, with his embarrassed candle, was exactly like being inside a camera during a time exposure. Must be what a film feels like, he thought, when you open the shutter: a sensation of flooding. Every cranny indecently exposed: or is it the world that’s exposed—? Helpless! He said it aloud as he opened Buzzer’s door; and there was Buzzer, standing bolt upright in the middle of the floor beside her bed, her eyes closed, her hands still crumpled against her cheek in the attitude of sleep. Yes, how extraordinary, she was fast asleep. She swayed a little, gropingly, as if trying to find something to relax against—how lovely, like something growing at the bottom of a stream, rooted among pebbles, wavering but tethered! He put the candle on the chair.
“Well, of all the nerve,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing, floating round in the moonlight like this! Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Mmm,” she said.
“I should think so. I suppose you fell out, eh?”
“Mmm,” she said.
“And had the sense not to wake up.”
“Mmm.”
“Well, I congratulate you. Now just stay asleep, and I’ll put you back, and you’ll never know the difference, see?”
She murmured against his neck, his cheek, as he lifted her back into bed, but she was already receding, she was already gone, and the firm little face, on the pillow, instantly averted itself into its chosen dream. What shape did she make of it? What shape was her world? What shape did she make of himself, his hands that touched her, the night sounds, the moon-maddened crickets? Ah, they were all there, in her dream, as a wonderful and forever-sustaining music, an unfailing love—it was the world as it should be, but as it so seldom, or so briefly, remains. Or were there terrors as well—? Yes, even here there were terrors. But fleeting, already dissipated, gone. Peace—peace—peace—sang the crickets, and here, at any rate, they were quite right. But downstairs—!
He heard Enid crossing the dining room—perhaps she was going to play the piano again? That melancholy and tender little waltz, with its series of murmured unanswerable questions. But no, she had gone on, had crossed the hall, he heard the two-toned squeak of the studio door, she was in the studio. Lighting the fire, perhaps, drawing the brown curtains, settling herself with her knitting; but, whatever she did, studiously ignoring the latest picture on the easel. Adolescent, of course! It was the old cry, the old war cry. Why don’t you grow up, Tip? Why not, indeed! Damn.
The doors to his own and Enid’s rooms were open, and he went into Enid’s to look for a moment from the north window toward the lagoons at the head of the river—he knew in advance how they would be sheeted with moonlight, as in winter they would be sheeted with ice. A single green light twinkled at the Point—somebody must be in Paul’s boathouse, probably Paul himself going out in his canoe. A tiny ticking sound reached his ear—it was Enid’s wrist watch, lying forgotten on her pillow, the small radium dial glowing faintly and hopefully in the dark. Why should there be something so moving, so touching in that—why, suddenly, did it make him think of death? Ridiculous. He straightened up, glanced through the open door beyond, which led into his own adjoining room, then returned into the hall, blew out the candle, and went slowly down the stairs.
In the studio, Enid was already sitting before the fire, her knees crossed, her back to the easel. The firelight flickered rosily on her face, her throat, her hands, flashed along the moving steel needles, twinkled in the buckles of her sandals. The bare white walls danced with light, the whole room seemed to be breathing flame. He went around her, turned the easel away, towards the bookcase, then approached the hearth and pushed back a log with the toe of his shoe.
“Besides, what I don’t see is,” she spoke without looking up, frowning prettily, the green flame-washed eyes lowered to the narrow strip of jersey which dangled from her needles, “what you can possibly get out of it.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Enid—!”
“What I don’t see is what possible good it can do you. I could understand your sacrificing yourself, and even me and Buzzer—”
“Sacrifice!”
“—if there were any real use in it. If they were useful connections, I mean. You won’t live in New Bedford or Boston, where you might pick up portrait commissions, or steady teaching—”
“I don’t want to do portraits.”
“—you throw away chances like that, and the connections I could have given you, for which I should have supposed some sacrifices might have been justified, and then live in this dreary little village where there’s no life at all for me—”
“It’s the first time I’d heard of that!”
“Well, it’s high time you did hear of it, for it’s true, and if you’d had any consideration you’d have thought of it yourself. And then, as if all that wasn’t enough, Tip, you make life more difficult still by associating with these really shabby and dreadful people. What earthly use can Roth be to you—or those dirty little females—”
“Really, Ee—!”
“Yes, dirty!”
“Roth’s a little cheap, and I know it, but he’s a good painter. Or interesting, anyway—by gosh, he’s at least alive, which is more than you can say for those Boston mummies! What’s more, it seems to me this is a question for me to decide. Not you. I must take what’s good where I can find it, that’s all. I’m afraid I don’t find it in the pure waters of County Street—give me the adulterous Greenwich Village sewers any day! And as for picking out my friends merely because they might be useful, good god, Ee, I never heard anything so revoltingly cynical and selfish and utilitarian in my life! You ought to be ashamed.”
“I suppose it’s selfish of me to ask you to consider the futures of Buzzer and myself! Is that it?”
“It isn’t as simple as that.”
“Oh, yes, it is. That’s exactly what it is. There are limits to what you can expect a wife to give up. This notion of living like your noble pioneer ancestors, without help, without maids, doing all our own work, is all very well, but you ask any of your friends what they think of it! Ask Paul, ask George, ask Mabel! I happen to know!”
“I see. So you’ve been crying on the public bosom.”
“I haven’t. They’ve made their feelings only too abundantly clear. And I can assure you it’s very humiliating.”
“Ah. So they’ve been crying on your bosom.”
“Not at all. They’ve merely been rather tactlessly sympathetic. And I assure you I haven’t enjoyed it in the least. It’s not exactly pleasant to have Mabel heavily hinting that you don’t properly p
rovide for us—”
“Mabel! Well, of all the damned impertinence! And do you mean to say you listened to her?”
“Why not?”
“You ought to have turned your back. It’s none of her damned business. That spoiled, empty-headed, card-playing, prattling sybarite! Well, for the love of mud! Really, Enid, there are times when I have to blush for you. And this is certainly one of them.”
“I think you might do a little blushing for yourself.”
“No, thank you!”
She was silent, except for the steady clicking of the needles, her face had hardened (he noticed), with a sort of hard serenity, and he felt that his own face had hardened too, as if in answer. He sat down for a moment on the stool by the fire, but jumped up again, thrust his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers, went abruptly to one of the front windows. Drawing the curtain a little aside, he looked out across the moonlit street, at the white picket fence of the Rileys’ house. The Riley garden, beyond, was drowned in a sort of milky penumbra, lay entranced in the great cone of pure space-light, the elm trees still and ghostly; and beyond these again, farther off, the white steeple of the Unitarian Church was achieving a lunar brilliance of architecture that made it seem positively to soar. A white night, with a vengeance! Nuit blanche. A light winked on, in an upstairs room of the Riley house, showing a square of yellow curtain, then winked out again. Behind him, from the distant kitchen, he heard the final click, the sighing moan, with which the pump had shut itself off. Enough water till morning. It would serve as an excuse!
He turned back to the room and said:
“I just want to look at the dial. I want to see what the pressure is. If you don’t mind.”
“I thought it was always the same?”
“It’s taken to varying. And sometimes gets too high.”
“Then perhaps you’d better tell Binney about it in the morning.”
“I’ll see!”
“And you might have a look for the cat while you’re there.”
“Oh, he won’t be back all night—it’s the wrong season. He’s away—as Paul so felicitously puts it—ramming!”