Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  BAKER STREET: TOWN LANDING.

  He turned under the silver-gray signpost, proceeded down the sloping sand road towards Jim Connor’s house, which stood high and dark at the river’s edge. One light in an upstairs window, one light downstairs—somebody must still be about. A figure detached itself from the shadows of the porch, came uncertainly down the wooden steps into the moonlight—it was Jim, wearing the perpetual cap, pulled down over his eyes, a cigar tip glowing under the sharp visor. The cap that was never off, even indoors.

  The half-shadowed prison-blanched face was smiling, the effect was oddly as of a secret smile existing by itself—only when one came nearer could one see the kind eyes in the shadow of the cap-visor. Typical, too—the watchful kindliness always a little in retreat, a little on guard. He remembered, suddenly, the time when Jim had come down from Taunton to spend the night, and when, trying to wake him in the morning, he had had to touch his shoulder—the poor devil had jumped half out of bed, terrified.

  “Hello, Jim?”

  “Hi, Timothy, old kid. What are you doing round here so late? Pretty late for you domestic fowls, isn’t it?”

  Old kid—that absurd favorite phrase of his.

  “Domestic—what about yourself!”

  “Oh, no, not me! I guess I was feeling a little depressed by it. I thought I’d just get a breath of this nice sea air before I turned in.”

  The voice sounded a shade sad, a shade tired, the gray-sweatered figure turned slowly, they walked down past the house to the beached canoe—it looked like Paul’s—at the water’s edge. In the shadow of the house, they stood still, the water lapping softly, sibilantly, on the sand, quarreling against the stone piers which supported the moonlit verandah above them.

  “Yes, the sea air smells good after all this sheer domesticity.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Well, I guess the girls don’t like it much. I have a feeling they don’t like it much. You’d think they’d at least know a little something about cooking, wouldn’t you, or be willing to try? We haven’t had a decent meal in two days. You get tired of sardines! And Kitty picking on Karl, and neither Kitty nor Lorna wanting to do any of the housework—yeah, this sea air smells good!”

  He smiled again under the visor, but the smile was melancholy and explanatory, he looked tired.

  “Maybe they’ll get used to it. Sometimes I think you expect too much of human nature, Jim—”

  “Do I? Maybe I do. I hadn’t thought of it. Lorna has a lot of talent, you know, she ought to be practicing, this is her chance to practice, with a good piano—if only Kitty would just try to take hold of things—but she’s not much like your Enid. No, old kid, you’ve sure got a jewel there!”

  “I’m glad you like her.”

  “A wonderful girl, a real woman—and beautiful, too. I’m sorry she doesn’t like me—”

  “So am I, Jim; but you know how women are.”

  “Sure. Don’t I just?… Did you have anything on your mind, Timothy? I haven’t seen you much.”

  “Yes, I know. And I can only stay a minute now. But there is something I thought you ought to hear, and I hoped I’d catch you by yourself. I thought it wouldn’t do any good to let Karl and the girls in on it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “May be nothing serious, either; but old George Pierce, across the river, has heard about you, mostly I’m afraid, from Enid, and got on his high horse, and of course he might make trouble.”

  “I get you—the civic spirit.”

  “I’m afraid so. Incidentally, I don’t want to know what you don’t want to tell me, but have you got any plans yet?”

  “No. I haven’t. But don’t worry, kid—don’t you worry. I’ll be all right.”

  “I just thought I’d better tip you off, anyway.”

  “Sure. Thanks. And I appreciate it, Timothy. But I’ll be all right.… By god, isn’t it a wonderful night? Doesn’t this make you want to paint? If I were only a poet, now, with a lot of succulent polysyllables—what’s the word, sesquipedalian? I have a fondness for long words, you know—it’s supposed to be a symptom for something—that’s what Paul says!”

  He dropped his cigar into the dark water, where it went out with a faint pssst, stared downward in amused silence for a moment, then added:

  “But it was left out of me, I guess—the best I can do is help the ones that have got it. You know, I’d like to give you a hand, Tip—you oughtn’t to be sweating at teaching, you ought to go abroad.”

  “Abroad! Don’t make me laugh. Damned nice of you, Jim, but as a matter of fact I’m a lot better off than most.”

  “Well, artists ought be supported by the state—”

  “In Utopia, yes!”

  “In Utopia. Look at those shells there, on that rock—what are those, kid?”

  “Those? Mussels.”

  “Are they good to eat?”

  “Sure they are—delicious, you steam them like clams.”

  “We’ll have to try them. If those girls could even learn to build a fire—this morning they damned near smoked the house out!”

  He gave a bitter little laugh as they turned, they were both silent till they had reached the steps to the front porch of the house, emerging once more into the moonlight. The short grim smile under the sharp visor again, the detached smile under the hooded but kindly eyes—he was putting out his hand.

  “Well, thanks for coming over, kid—you’re honest, the way I like people to be honest. Will I be seeing you tomorrow?”

  “I’ll try to drop in, in the afternoon.”

  “I wish you would. It might help me out. You never know.”

  “Okay, Jim, I’ll try.… Good night.”

  “Good night, Timothy.… This Pierce guy, is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. He’s a good fellow, too, you know.”

  “Yes, I guess I know. Good night!”

  “Good night.”

  He watched the tired figure go slowly up the stairs, disappear into the heavy shadow of the porch, heard the door shut behind him—he had gone back into his Utopia, his singular dream of Utopia. Gone back to Karl, to Kitty, to Lorna—to the cynical Karl, who used him and sponged on him, to Kitty who hated him, to Lorna who perhaps loved him, perhaps didn’t, perhaps only used him too—Christ, what a tragic joke it all was, what a hell of a Utopia that was! He stood still, listening, for a moment—he thought he had heard a sound as of angry voices from one of the open windows upstairs, a sound of quarreling, two voices, male and female, in brief sharp interchange—but if so, everything was again silent. Utopia, by god—! It was more like a crucifixion.

  And this gaunt blazing-eyed woman, Lorna—where the devil had she suddenly come from, how the devil had she got hold of him—with two children, according to Karl (who thought it was all a wonderful joke), and a tubercular husband in the New York Customs House—and she planning to be a concert pianist!

  It was cold, he walked quickly—looking up, he saw that the moon was now almost directly overhead, swimming rapidly, dizzily, like a spun silver coin, through a shoal of silver mackerel. It gave to the whole night a sense of ominous hurry, a sense of finality, of falling, of impending end. The downward-going vortical swirl of everything, of all nature, the swirling and inward funneling death, like those marvelous late Van Goghs, where all shapes seemed to be centrifugally or centripetally self-consuming—trees burning spirally on whirling and burning hillsides, burning their own doomed intensity, the hillsides themselves an exhausted flame of grass and bushes, the very rocks exhaling fiercely away in the final ecstatic “Ahhhh—!” of creative death. If one could only get hold of that—strip one’s vision nakedly down to that—

  The familiar feeling of breathlessness again, of defeat, of closing one’s eyes, lest one see too clearly the very limitedness of one’s own vision, the trembling ineffectiveness of one’s own hand, the fumbling quick makeshift which, at the last moment always, and in a panic, one had to substitute for the real thing! He entered
by the front door—the lilacs could wait till morning, to be a surprise—and stood still by Enid’s empty chair in the disordered studio. The three half-burned pine logs, glowing and hissing, to be up-ended against the sooty sides of the brick fireplace—the lamp on the bookcase to be blown out, with its little cold after-smell of kerosene—the two-toned squeak of the hall door—his hands to be scrubbed in the small bathroom, with the nailbrush, to get the grit and sand from under his fingernails—the everlasting toothbrush, the everlasting voracious w.c.—and then the quick climbing of the stairs, taking his candle, the quiet undressing, lest he wake Ee—or was she still awake, lying awake?—and the noiseless getting into bed in the small moon-flooded room …

  Ee’s door was closed.

  The house was silent.

  II

  “In the morning, (16th November,) as soon as we could see the trace, we proceeded on our journey, and had the track until we had compassed the head of a long creek, and there they took into another wood, and we after them, supposing to find some of their dwellings; but we marched through boughs and bushes, and under hills and valleys, which tore our very armour in pieces, and yet we could meet with none of them, nor their houses, nor find any fresh water which we greatly desired and stood in need of, for we brought neither beer nor water with us, and our victuals was only biscuit and Holland cheese, and a little bottle of aquavite, so as we were sore athirst. About ten o’clock we came into a deep valley, full of brush, wood-gall, and long grass, through which we found little paths or tracts, and there we saw a deer, and found springs of fresh water, of which we were heartily glad, and sat us down and drank our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drank drink in all our lives.… There grew also many small vines, and fowl and deer haunted there; there grew much sassafras. From thence we went on and found much plain ground, about fifty acres, fit for the plough, and some signs where the Indians had formerly planted their corn.…”

  —JOURNAL OF THE PILGRIMS

  Blue, blue-bright, gray-bright, gray—the fog-bright sun, the sun-bright fog—there had been a change overnight, a sea change, the sea had come rankly inland and upriver, the small screened window was pale with it, the fine wire screen hung softly luminous with sea dew. Sounds of dripping, too; the heavy patter, irregular and slow, of fog-drops from the poplar trees on the low roof overhead; and the thud of a fallen twig; or the sliding scrape of a dead leaf. But the change was not only this change, the change of weather—it was also something else, there was another change as well—older and stranger shapes hung in the softened light, melted into it, came out of it, were a part of it—and as he looked, or half looked, listened, or half listened, the dream and the actuality seemed but indivisible aspects of the same thing. The indiscreet dream about Nora—! Sharply and deliciously the slow bright turmoil of obscure shape swam upward out of the shadow, as if one glimpsed, through dark water, the turning and involved rondures of a sculptured group, a hand, a face, lifted, lifted as if alive, and then gone. Gone, but the emanations, the meanings, the thrust of the hand, the dark look of the face before it turned downward and under, hung, sang, vibrated, shone, in all shape and sound, ticked with the watch under the pillow, dripped with the sea fog, gave form to the window, extended themselves in and out of the fog-soft, fog-bright room, seemed even co-dimensional—like an aura—with himself. An aura? But which was aura and which was reality? This body—which jumped from bed, hurried down the stairs, shaved its blond face in a small dull square of mirror and plunged itself into the deep green-cold bath—which listened, as it pulled on its socks, to Buzzer singing in her room, or, as it pulled on the khaki trousers, to the church clock striking—was this, after all, only an aura for the dream? Was the whole world only an aura, a sort of Saturn’s ring, for the strange and delicious dream, and the dream itself the only reality—? Was that sculptural dream the real core of the world, its only true meaning?

  “Tirra-loo—tirra-lee—shadows rising on you and me—”

  The lilacs, in the morning fog, were a hundred years old already, they stood orderly and precise and hard in the sun-bright fog, sharply outlined where they stood on the terrace wall against the gray river, like sticks in snow. Sand was scattered on the grass, too, which would have to be raked gingerly, or brushed back into the borders, and the deep crescent hoof marks of Terence’s horse, which would have to be filled in and patted down. Shadows rising on you and me—very true, as one looked down from an autumn window; but where did they rise from, what was their source? From the dream? Like fog from the unconscious? Lilacs in sea fog, lilacs standing knee-deep in a dream?

  The indiscreet dream about Nora went down the stairs with him like a suppressed radiance, like a dulled singing; the cat shot past him on the stairs—Skippity-skap!—he said, flicking at the striped tail with his hand, and in the dining room, over the little round white table, Buzzer’s round face opened a round mouth for the tilted spoon of porridge.

  “I’m eating porridge,” she said.

  “Porridge! No.”

  “Yes, porridge.”

  “And why, may I ask, didn’t you come to wake me this morning?”

  “Mummy wouldn’t let me. She said you were sleeping.”

  “Foo! How could you wake me if I wasn’t sleeping? Answer me that!”

  “And Chattahoochee was out all night, the naughty cat, and came in hungry as a bear and all skedaddlish—”

  “Skedaddlish—who ever heard such a word—”

  “And he drank his milk like anything, slup—slup—slup—slup.”

  “Quite true. He always drinks his milk four tonguefuls at a time—just the way you ought to eat your porridge.”

  “I shouldn’t either! Ho ho, how silly! As if I was a little cat!”

  “A red-haired cat.”

  “It isn’t red—it’s gold!”

  “Red.”

  “Gold! And I saw the lilacs, too—”

  He kissed the golden, corn-silk golden, curls, pushed the freckled nose solemnly with one finger, went quickly down the gray steps to the kitchen, but Enid, standing at the blue-flame stove in the far corner, didn’t turn, merely said, thus checking his impulse to go to her and kiss her:

  “Your breakfast’s ready. I’m not having any.”

  “Not having any! Why not, Ee?”

  “Thank you, I don’t feel very much like it. You can take the toast and coffee. I’ll bring in your egg in a minute.”

  “Didn’t you sleep, darling? Coffee might do you good.”

  “I slept quite well, and I won’t want any coffee! Will you take it, please?”

  Ah—so it was going to be like that. The preoccupied little hum again, the curved lips compressed a little, the dark curled head turning curtly and quickly—the shadow of the quarrel again, the closed bedroom door. They hadn’t slept together, she hadn’t allowed him to come and sleep with her! He took the coffee percolator from the table, hesitated.

  “I think I’ll just take a look at the lilacs first.”

  “Couldn’t they wait till after breakfast? I’ve got a hard morning ahead of me, and we’re late as it is.”

  “Very well, Ee. Have you looked at them yourself?”