Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  There—that would hold her! He couldn’t help chuckling to himself, as he crossed the dark dining room, guided by the path of light from the reflector lamp in the kitchen—dear innocent Ee, how Paul’s quaint vulgarisms always annoyed her! But possibly it wasn’t the best moment he could have chosen for it.… The indicator on the dial was still quivering a little, steadying itself down—thirty-four. Two points too high, there must be something wrong with the shut-off. What next! Temperament in everything, even in pumps, by god! He watched the needle until it finally came to rest, smiled, then turned on the water in the sink. Yes, it gushed too hard, the pressure was obviously too high—another job for Ratio Binney, and another bill. As if a new cesspool wasn’t enough.

  Returning, he began to whistle, then stopped, touched one note on the piano as he passed—perhaps that would mollify her. But no. She had laid her knitting aside, was sitting forward with her elbows on her knees, her flushed cheeks on her fists.

  “Two points too high,” he said.

  She made no answer for a moment, then leaned slowly back in the wicker chair, clasped her hands behind her head, and raised her eyes, now full and searching, to his. Her lips were slightly parted, but she was not smiling, though almost—he felt that she was looking, as it were, from one to the other of his eyes, and he waited, smiling a little himself.

  “Don’t you think,” she said at last very deliberately, “you ought to come to some decision about it?”

  “Good gracious, Endor dear, what is this! A decision about what.”

  “I assume George told you he would refuse to meet Jim Connor, or to have anything to do with him?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “It seems to me you might find that worth considering?”

  “George doesn’t know Jim, and I do. It doesn’t affect George one way or the other—which makes all the difference.”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course, it does.”

  “I’m afraid I fail to see it.”

  He leaned over her, leaned his face close to hers, took the point of her elbow in his hand, and wagged it affectionately.

  “Please, Ee, let’s be sensible about this—Jim Connor is really a very nice fellow.”

  She withdrew her elbow from his clasp, lowered her hands into her lap. It was a deliberate separation, a rebuke, and he straightened up.

  “What you mean is, that you won’t consider me at all. And in that case—” she smiled very brightly up at him, her head tipped a little to one side, the whole attitude charmingly defiant—“I shall of course have to consider what I shall do myself. Not only about this, about everything. It’s bad enough having Buzzer bullied in the streets by these little village toughs, knocked down and hurt, and learning to speak in the awful way they speak here—”

  “What are you talking about, Ee—come to your senses!”

  “Oh, no. I mean every word I say. I’m afraid, Timothy, you’d better think it over.”

  “I see. It’s a threat.”

  “It isn’t a threat. I’m just suggesting that for a change you think of our interests a little.”

  “I’ve never done anything else! But if you think I’m going to throw over Jim Connor just because of this silly business you’re very much mistaken.… That’s Terence at the door—I’ll have to go.”

  “Very well. If that’s more important—”

  She had spoken the word “important” with a curious and disturbing emphasis, a subtle but somehow pervasive air of finality, and in the silence that followed, broken only by the spurt of a resinous flame, a shrill jet from the imprisoned gas in a pine log, and farther off the sound of Terence’s hammering at the boxes in the garden, he suddenly found himself remembering—how absurd!—the random phrase he had used when putting Buzzer to bed, the bantering remark that the end of the world was at hand, and that he must be there to see it. Why the devil should he think of that? Or why, too, as if it were a no less sinister part of the same thing, did he think again of Enid’s watch, lying alone on her pillow, ticking and glowing in the dark solitude of her empty room? It had made him conscious, for some obscure reason, of death; just as the falling of the leaves, the sound and sight and chill smell of them, the feeling of hurry and departure, had produced suddenly, from his unconscious, his feeble little joke about the end of the world. “Ho ho—” Buzzer had said—“you can’t fool me! It isn’t coming to an end!” But wasn’t it—? Or what then had been in his mind, when, from the top of the wall by the lane, looking at the forlorn little house in the moonlight, he had had again a precise vision of precisely that, the end of everything that was precious to him? All this was subjective, no doubt—but it was easy enough just to say that, it was the old fallacy of trying to dispose of things simply by naming them, giving them pretty names—it really got one nowhere, explained nothing. The garment without a seam—good lord, yes, one’s conscious life was like that, there were no joins anywhere, everything flowed into everything else, flowed out of everything else, and the end must be—there seemed to be no escape from it whatever—either in admiration or despair. But not despair—no, not despair, not that, not that! Admiration certainly—wonder—even idolatry; or something, for example, like Buzzer’s pure astonishment. There was plenty of room for death, in this—plenty. Yes indeed. But did it really make finalities any more acceptable? He felt a little breathless, the familiar feeling of confused helplessness with which he always began a new painting—always, always—the panic of impotence! The world was always thus getting away from him, going too fast, whizzing off before he had time to shape it, or even—damn the luck—time to see it. It was always as if he were trying desperately to get hold of it before it was too late.

  “Endor, darling, listen—”

  “You’d better run along, Terence will be waiting for you.”

  “Will you listen? No lilacs in the world, not a hundred, not a hundred million, are as important, you know that. They can go to hell, the whole damned galaxy and parade of them, and all of them with frozen feet, from here to kingdom come. Don’t you know that?”

  “You made it quite obvious—”

  “Nothing of the sort, Ee. It’s simply that they’ve got to be done—”

  “Very well, why not run along and do them.”

  “They can wait.”

  “So can I, Tip—I’m quite used to it.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little bit difficult about this?”

  “You mean mulish, I suppose? Why not say it?”

  “I didn’t mean that at all. It won’t help matters to put words into each other’s mouths—”

  “I’ve told you what I think—”

  “Why don’t you listen to what I think—”

  “—and you’ve apparently refused to consider it. That seems to me final.”

  “I didn’t mean it to be as final as all that. Damnation, Ee, you can’t split up the world into blacks and whites as easily as all that! Try to see it, please—I’m in a very difficult position, painful on all sides, and I really want to do what is best.”

  “Yes, Tip, you find it very hard to give up anything, don’t you? Even for me, or Buzzer!”

  “I don’t think that’s deserved.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then that’s all I’ve got to say. Except to repeat what I said before, that I shall of course have to consider what I shall do. I suppose I’ve got a right to do that!”

  “Of course, darling.”

  “Run along then and attend to your lilacs. I suppose you’ll be late—I shall probably be in bed. And would you mind trying not to disturb me—? I’m very tired.”

  The green eyes flashed up at him, a cold and lovely dismissal, flashed up and away; for the barest perceptible instant their eyes met; but no, they hadn’t really met at all, it was rather as if her own glance had slid through his own, through and inward, striking it aside—he felt exposed, he felt plumbed! Beautiful, yes, but he was dismissed.


  “Very well,” he said. “But I may not be as late as all that—sorry you’re tired!”

  Damn—her bedroom door would be closed—that was what she probably meant—the pressure was to be maintained overnight, she was going to be implacable. Admirable, too, when she was like this—that was the unfairest part of it; for anger so extraordinarily suited her particular sort of beauty, the fierce, small, pseudo-witchlike thing which he so loved. Green flame, cold flame, flame-in-ice—the narrow hard intensity of the sibyl—but with something disarmingly childlike as well. What a demon of a little girl she must have been, and how beautiful! Like Buzzer. But with less sense of humor—she was always a prey to his sense of humor; and he couldn’t resist, as he passed through the dining room, touching the one note of the piano once more, for final comic comment: it would infuriate her. And he allowed the kitchen door to clack behind him with unnecessary violence.…

  Terrence, in blue overalls, grinning among the dismantled boxes, the disheveled clusters of lilacs, looked like a part of the moonlight himself. It was a scene from a ballet, blue-lighted, mysterious—nymphs, or naiads, or dryads, would materialize at any moment, and dance to an orchestra of blue-coated, man-sized crickets. The shouting of the crickets was positively outrageous. And the moon, the all-but-round moon, over the Puringtons’ shed, looked down at Terence as if it were about to make some very special and secret use of him.

  “Gorry,” Terence said, holding up leafless lilac bushes in either hand, “there’s thousands of ’em. All labeled, too—pinks, whites, and purples. Not so much root as you might think, either—won’t be much trouble. Don’t have to dig the holes so deep! How you going to mix these colors, Mister Kane?”

  “Not many pinks and whites, Terence—only a sprinkling—so just stick them in where they come. It will be all right. Have you got a shovel?”

  “Oh, sure, I got the old faithful. I’ll begin up by the road there. Put ’em about a yard apart, I reckon—”

  “All right—I’ll start behind the kitchen. No use trying to keep the topsoil, I suppose—!”

  “No, you can’t help it. A little fertilizer will put that right. A little prime horse manure. I’ll fetch you over a nice wagon load, come Monday—what’s the good of feedin’ a horse, if she don’t give you manure? Yes, sir, I’ll dig it in around ’em so you’d never know the difference, the sand won’t hardly show at all!”

  “Will they want water?”

  “No, they won’t want no water. Dry as a bone is the best, and stomp ’em in firm with your foot, that’s all.”

  “Okay, Terence! I’ll be seeing you!”

  Terence struck a match, lit his clay pipe, the humorous face wrinkling in the intermittently sucked flare, the brown eyes shrewd, warm, and earthy, then stooped for his shovel and an armload of lilacs. The polished shovel blade burned blue as he turned it.

  “Yes, sir, and they say plantin’ in moonlight is always lucky.”

  “The better the night the better the deed!”

  The Unitarian Church clock began striking—ten o’clock. Or could it be eleven? or nine?… But time, in such moonlight as this, obviously ceased to exist, became, by any ordinary human standards, incommensurable. It poured, it flowed, it was all at one level, like a sea—it was simply space, and to be measured, if at all, only by distances, as wave from wave, hand from hand, face from face. A moon, moons, half a moon—one elm-tree tip to another, frosted with pure light—the creeping diagonal of dense shadow, like enchantment, along a white picket fence—the slow tide of silver mounting up the still slope of a shingled roof, and then pouring soundlessly away over the rooftree to leave it again in primordial darkness—good god, when you stopped to think about it what a terrifying and unearthly business it was. It was enough to give you the shivers. And when you thought of the whole world, or half of it, revolving in space through this lethal and ethereal light, itself looking dead and frozen, with its cold barnacles of houses—what must it look like, seen from the moon? Dreadful no doubt; like a vast skull; or worse still, like an exposed and frozen brain. And that mackerel sky, up there, those shoals of silver fish swimming softly away over the moon, momentarily touching and dimming it, but not obscuring it, themselves brightening or darkening in serried and evanescent rows, yet so orderly and precise—and the bare dark trees reaching upward towards them—yes, the whole thing, he thought, was exactly like a quick cold shiver over the very top of the brain—frost on the eardrums, frost on the eyeballs, frost on the nerve ends! It was a taste, in advance, of the marrowy and foul bitterness of death.…

  His shovel rose and fell; cutting the soft topsoil, cutting the gritty sand, hacking through the stretched vital roots of the poplars. As fast as he dug the holes, the moonlight filled them; exactly as the holes scooped on a beach fill with the sea. Cold roots, cold soil, cold sand—his hands, pressing down the lilac roots, disentangling and spreading the living radicles, clawing the mixed sand and loam over them, became themselves cold and earthlike, harshly imbrued in the stuff they worked in; they took on something of the coarse violence of earth; so that it was unpleasant, even unnatural, to touch his clothing with them. A time, times, half a time—the upright lilacs began to look like a hedge along the wall above the lane, it was beginning at last to be impressive, and he jumped down into the lane, among the dead leaves, to admire his handiwork. Yes, already the garden had changed, was changing. It had suddenly become organized. A slum! What on earth had made her think of that. Really, the extraordinary things Ee managed to think of! With a river like that, and a house and garden like this, and a moon like the end of the world! A lunar slum, a slum all compact of mercurial magic, a shape of silver vapor—the sheer impudence of it! Typical of the sort of thing one says when angry—the straws clutched at by the madman, clutched at in his own hair. Good old Enid. Or was she perhaps partially right? It was so difficult, sometimes, to distinguish between the simple and the shabby, between the plain and the merely dreary. But a slum!

  A purple, a white, a purple again, a pink. Who ever heard of a pink lilac? Must be a façon de parler. By god, what a sight they would be when they all blossomed! The House of a Hundred Lilacs, they could call it, with engraved purple notepaper. Then, at any rate, Enid would like it—that, at any rate, she would like! Or would there be no “then”? Of course—how ridiculous. She hadn’t meant it as seriously as all that, it was because she was tired, a good night’s sleep would put everything to rights again, everything would be all right in the morning. A whole morning’s washing. The cesspool flooded. Old George butting in and messing up the Jim Connor business, as if it wasn’t already bad enough. Poor Ee, no wonder her nerves had been on edge. But in the morning, with the sunlight bursting in through the kitchen window, shining into the kitchen sink, silvering the tall upright cylinder of the boiler, and Buzzer singing upstairs, and himself rumbling the carpet sweeper over the dining room rug, and the kettle squealing on the stove—yes, it would probably be all right; this blasted moonlight, with its uncanny unreality, would be gone; and all these obscure pressures and shadows with it. She was probably already asleep, and lying, as she always did, with one hand reversed above her head, her elbow on the pillow, the neat small face, closed and serene, turned a little to one side. But suppose she was awake! And suppose she was still awake, when he himself went up to bed, lying awake there, but with her door closed—? Ah, that stretched and conscious silence, the taut and agonized silence as of eyes staring in the darkness, the silence as of carefully withheld breathing! And would you mind trying not to disturb me? Damn.…

  “Yield to me, lilacs,” he said aloud bitterly, “and ye shall bear!”

  He straightened up, for his back was beginning to be tired, heard an upper window rattling open in the Purington house, behind him, and then voices.

  “Gladys?”

  It was Mrs. Purington’s voice, remote, sing-song, whining.

  “Yes, mother.”

  “Have you got enough bedclothes? It’s going to be cold.”


  “Yes, mother, enough clothes to sink a ship!”

  “That’s good.”

  Cold: it was going to be cold. In fact, it was cold already. And it must be late. But they were nearly finished, thank goodness, he turned and saw that Terence had reached the bottom of the garden and come back, had begun putting in the few that were to stand along the terrace wall. A dozen more, or a dozen and a half, at most. He thrust his shovel into the dark pine-smelling woodshed, closed the door.

  “I’m knocking off, Terence,” he said, standing at the top of the terrace wall. “I’m going to walk down the road a bit. Do you mind finishing it by yourself?”

  “Won’t take me about another ten minutes, not that.”

  “By gosh, if I stooped just once more, my backbone would snap right out of me! Like a spring. How do you do it.”

  “Guess it’s all in being used to it! I was born with a shovel in my hands. But it’s work, at that.”

  “It is. Thanks a lot, Terence. How do you think it looks.”

  “Looks fine. Yes, sir, in about two years it’ll make a fine show. Not much blossom next spring—”

  “No?”

  “No, they’ll want about a year’s growth of wood first, and to make some roots too—but then, by gorry, they’ll give you blaze enough—it ought to be a pretty sight. Got ’em in just in time, too—I can feel the frost in my sciatics already!”

  They looked together along the row of lilacs by the Purington fence, as orderly as if they had been there forever. A patch of white sand glowed dimly at the foot of each, like a little circle of phosphorescence, and the dangling labels, too, shone white in the moonlight. Terence shook his head.

  “A hundred!” he said.

  “Felt more like a thousand!… Well, good night, Terence, and I’ll see you Monday.”

  “Yes, I’ll be over Monday with a nice load of manure, and put ’em to bed good.… Good night!”

  “Good night.”

  He heard the shovel strokes resume behind him, heard them still as he turned to the left to pass the Purington house, and then, as he stepped into the moonlight-stenciled street, he was engulfed abruptly in an astonishing silence. The crickets, all but a few, were still, now—their slower zeek—zeek—zeek—zeek was merely the moonlight made audible, the thin threnody of the moonlight itself. Peace be with you—pax vobiscum! Lucky little devils, just to crawl into a hole in the ground, freeze quietly into sleep, and forget everything until another year, another summer! Another summer, another love. He walked quickly, the leaves rustling under his feet, retracing the steps that he had taken only a few hours before, when he had come back empty-handed—empty-hearted?—from the post office. Nora, silent, was a different, an unknown Nora, it wasn’t like her to be silent, it could mean only one thing. Perhaps she had finally decided to marry that architect chap from Clark College and settle down—perhaps he never would see her again. Would he mind? It had been good, it had been merry: a comic genius—the muse of comedy—had presided over the affair from the very outset: never, in all their clandestine meetings, had they had an unhappy moment—not even when she had been so sick that time under the ailanthus tree in the moonlit back yard. Another summer, another love! Had they been in love? Was he in love with her now? Not as he was in love with Ee—odd, too, how they had never once called each other by their Christian names, or even by any nicknames—nothing but “you,” “you.” On the telephone always—“Hello? Is that ‘you’?” “Yes, it’s ‘me’—is that ‘you’? And who is ‘you’?” ‘“ME!’”… And then her delicious giggle, muffled and averted as she turned her face away from the telephone, the so characteristic half-checked giggle, as if it were all so dreadfully naughty, the whole thing—so dreadfully and delightfully naughty, but so dreadfully nice too, and himself and herself the naughtiest of all naughty people in a naughty but enchanting world! Enchanting, yes—the word was like a pang.… But had he really been in love? For the oddest thing of all was the way in which the first few months of the affair, so gay and light-hearted, had actually given him back something precious and lost in his relationship with Enid. The something that had been lost, or overlaid, after the birth of Buzzer; as if some kind of bloom, or illusion, had vanished, or been obscured, on the sudden intrusion of that so different reality. Yes, childbirth—who could have foreseen the effect of childbirth? That butcher-shop and meaty reality—as Paul so brutally put it, and quite right too!—was something for which love’s young dream hadn’t at all been prepared. A loss of belief! And Nora—dear delightful humorous Nora!—had somehow magically restored it. How the devil did such things happen? And why the devil weren’t they admitted! Shams everywhere, shams in love, shams in hate, shams in marriage or divorce, shams deeply bedded even in the secret self. The eye loving before the heart or hand admits, the heart hating when the hand delights. It was all a mess.…