Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  “I’m afraid I’ve been much too busy!”

  The quick oblique smile, intolerant, the oblique green flash of the eyes—lovely!—she was wearing the pale green smock, with the gold threads, the one that was his favorite—but was it a concession or a challenge? It went well with the soft-sheened silver-gray of the corduroy skirt, gave an added brilliance and liquidity to the eyes—as, of course, she well knew. Ah, these cunning, vain, merciless wenches!

  “They look marvelous,” he said over his shoulder, “but Terence says no blossom till spring after next.”

  Spring after next. The dream came like a fog between himself and the shining table, the poured coffee, the silver cream pitcher; it filled the morning-bright, fog-bright room, seemed to set everything at a distance. If Enid had allowed him to kiss her—that would perhaps have broken through the strange dull weight of it, the richly haunting burden—perhaps she too would then have shared in it! Or did she anyway? And did all things, even Buzzer? Perhaps. As it was, it was also as if she had somehow divined his infidelity, and as if her hostility were by a miraculous instinct directed precisely to that. And a hard morning ahead of her, and Binney coming, and himself probably delegated to look after Buzzer—instead of working on his picture—

  “Can I go waving this morning, daddy?”

  “Not waving, wading!”

  “No, waving!”

  “Well, you’ll have to ask your mummy about that. Maybe it’s too cold.”

  “Well then, we can go and look at the fiddler crabs.”

  “We’ll see. Perhaps it’s too cold for the fiddler crabs, too. How could they dance if their feet were cold? And come to think of it, young woman, what do you mean by walking round in your sleep the way you did last night? What about that?”

  “I didn’t either!”

  “Didn’t you, though! I heard a bang on the floor, a thump like an elephant jumping, or an elephantelope, or a rhinocerostrich, or a camelephant—”

  “How silly! There aren’t any such animals!”

  “—and when I went up to see what it was, there were you, standing in the middle of the floor, fast asleep, with your eyes tight shut.”

  “Mummy, isn’t daddy silly, he says I was standing up in my sleep! Was I really?”

  “Cross my heart and hope I die! And all you would say was mmm. I asked you what you were doing there, and you said mmm; and I asked you if you were asleep, and you said mmm; and I asked you if you wanted to go back to bed, and you said mmm. That’s all you could say, mmm. You must have thought you were a humming bird.”

  “Ho ho! I was a humming bird! But did I really, mummy?”

  “Yes, I guess you really did. Now have you finished, my pet? I’ll untie your bib. And you’d better run along to the bathroom. And when you’re ready, you can call me.”

  “No, I don’t want you to come—I can wipe myself.”

  “All right, darling. Aren’t you clever! But call me if you need me.”

  “Yes.”

  The bib untied, she ran quickly, on tiptoe, from the room, flapping her hands like fins against her thighs. A humming bird. Or a goldfish. Enid, her arms folded across her breast, one foot swinging, had perched herself on a corner of the piano bench, watching him eat his egg—the attitude was temporary and provocative.

  “I suppose,” she said, “you haven’t thought any more about the bills. But hadn’t we better discuss them?”

  “What is there to discuss, Ee? I thought we had decided—”

  “We’re very much behind with them. We owe Mr. Paradise for two months.”

  “Ah! The whistling butcher!”

  “And he’ll be coming this morning. We ought to pay him.”

  “Damn the butcher. All right. Why don’t you make him out a check? How much is it?”

  “Twenty-nine dollars.”

  “Holy mackerel. That won’t leave much.”

  “No, it won’t. And there’s the milk bill, and we still owe Homer for the last ton of coal we had in the spring, and we’ll be needing some more in a week or two—”

  “My god. All right, pay Homer, too. Or I will.”

  “I’m afraid something will have to be done. I shall need some winter clothes, and so will Buzzer, and now there’s this new cesspool—just how are you planning to manage, may I ask? We can’t go on like this, always getting more and more behind. It’s really getting to be too much of a strain. It really is!”

  “Damnit, as if I didn’t know it! Well, I’ll see. I’ll ask old stick-in-the-mud for some extra work. Or maybe I could get an afternoon’s work at the new women’s school in St. Botolph Street—”

  “I see! An extra day in town every week. I knew there’d be a catch in it somewhere! As if it wasn’t bad enough already.”

  “Good heaven, Ee, you can’t have it both ways! You might at least try to be reasonable! If you want more money, I’ll have to do more work—money doesn’t grow out of the ground, you know.”

  “No, and it doesn’t grow out of part-time teaching at second-rate art schools either! The whole arrangement is bad. I should have thought—”

  “Second-rate! Perhaps you should have thought before you married me!”

  “Indeed, yes! Perhaps I should!”

  “Now, Endor, darling, listen—”

  “I should have thought, if you don’t mind my saying so for the hundredth time—”

  “Make it the thousandth, why not—?”

  “Will you please listen to me?—that a whole-time job in town was the only possible solution.”

  “Oh, my god. Must we go into that again? You seem to be forgetting that I’ve got my own work to do. Or to try to do!”

  “Your own work. Of course! I suppose you still think that must come first. It doesn’t matter if we have to go without proper clothing, does it, or have all the shopkeepers dunning us month after month—”

  “You needn’t exaggerate—and there’s no point in being melodramatic about it either.”

  “I’m afraid it’s the facts that are melodramatic, since you choose the word, and not me. Oh, no! But this is where discussion always ends with you, isn’t it? In an accusation. I’m in the wrong, as usual! But I think we’ve reached the limit, and I think you’d better consider what you’ll do.”

  “Ee darling, you know I’ll do anything I can, but you can’t expect me just to give up my own work, offhand, like that! You can’t!”

  “If you’d wanted to do portraits—”

  “I don’t want to do no portraits, no, ma’am!”

  “The upshot seems to be that I do a great deal of your work for you.”

  “That’s a new view of it!”

  “It’s true. You’d better think it over. And if you don’t mind too much, will you take Buzzer out this morning? I’ve got all the ironing to do.”

  “I thought Mrs. Kimpton was coming to do it.”

  “We can’t afford it. And besides, as I’ve told you before, she’s not clean.”

  “Not clean! How can that possibly affect ironing!”

  “I won’t have her in the house with that dreadful feather boa round her neck.”

  “Very well. When I’ve laid the studio fire, and carpet-swept this room, and made my little bed, my little solitary bed, and carried in the wood—”

  She was just rising, just saying her ironic “thanks!”, her eyes widening and brightening as if to let him see better the intensity of her unspoken anger, when the sound of bird-note whistling came cheerfully from the garden, the bird-fluting of Mr. Paradise, the butcher—Paradise, absurd name for a butcher!—and the white-coated figure went quickly past the dining room windows to knock at the kitchen door.

  “All right, Endor. And there goes our twenty-nine dollars. And if Ratio Binney comes about the cesspool while I’m out, you’ll have to deal with it yourself. That’s all I can say!”

  Dispersed, interrupted for a moment, disturbed, whirled aside like the morning fog on a current of air, in idly glistening and lazy convolutions, the in
discreet dream about Nora was turned away only to return again, all-surrounding, all-entering, all-coloring: its hands were his own hands on the rumbling carpet sweeper—the sweeper carpet, Buzzer called it, trotting behind him, pretending she was a horse—it maneuvered with him under the dinner table, bumped the gate-legs, rattled out from the faded Chinese carpet onto the bare black floor boards at the sides (for Buzzer these were oceans, very dark and cold and deep) and followed sinuously every familiar curve and slope of the ancient uneven floor. It licked up the breakfast crumbs—it was the breakfast crumbs. It was the Chinese embroidery of motionless birds and dragons, the silent but alert piano—ready at any moment to burst out in the C-sharp minor Prelude, or the Cathédrale Englouti, or the little Brahms waltz—it was the all-too-eloquent thump of Enid’s iron on the ironing board in the kitchen—it was the whole house, himself, everything. Strange—very strange—he must be hallucinated. Why should a dream be so damned persistent? It was everything, but also, subtly and dangerously, it changed everything. The near at hand, certainly—but the remote no less, too. The fireplace in the studio, with the wood ash neatly brushed back from the brick hearth, to make a soft ashen wave under the andirons; the red scaly pine logs, brought in from the woodshed in the fragment woven-wood basket; the crisp pine cones tucked under the crossed logs for kindling, the bright brass jug of the Cape Cod fire lighter standing as if expectantly in its corner—it was in all these as he touched them, watched eagerly by Buzzer, her hands flapping excitedly, but it was also just as importantly discoverable and discernible in the far-off or merely imagined. The river, moon-tide brimmed, hurrying down to the Sound, past the sand dune and the derelict breakwater (ah, what a wonderful nocturnal fire that had been), and then, beyond the iron-framed lighthouse, joining the sea in the quarrelsome tiderip—it was there, too, tossing Paul’s canoe, spanking the under bow of George’s catboat. It was the sea gulls screaming over Mr. Riley’s nets and bobbing lobster buoys, offshore; or, inland, at the head of the river, the harsh har-har-har—har-har-har-har of the crows, the high bright circling of the eagles. Somehow, through that luminous and all-permeating dream, Nora, who had never been to the Cape, never even seen this little village, had taken complete and magical possession of it. Possession—of course, the very word for it—it was possessed, he was possessed—it was a kind of witchcraft, a sort of effluence from the unconscious, a psychic wave which had washed over the world and given it a new and astonishing brilliance. Everything, in that current, looked suddenly more alive, glowed importantly in its own light and right, seemed to have taken on an added and peculiar significance: the grains of wood, the texture of the linen sheet as he smoothed and folded it, the pillow as he patted and plumped it, the fluttering and sucking of the muslin curtains against the fog-bright screens. And the lilac trees, as he looked down at them from the bedroom window, resting his hands on the low sill, the lilac trees in the fog, which Chattahoochee was now investigating with tolerant curiosity, were already as good as in blossom. It was June of another year—another summer, another love.

  Another summer, another love. The slow pang, melancholy, delicious, recapitulative, filled his breast, extended down his forearms, even to his fingertips—it was a physical thing, as actual as pain or fear. In the Purington house next door someone had put on that everlasting record, the worn-out record, and the blurred magnified words added themselves satirically to the odd and exciting theme, the threat of a crumbling world.

  In the morning,

  In the evening;

  Ain’t we got fun?

  Not much money, but, O honey,

  Ain’t we got fun?

  The world was made, dear,

  For people like us—

  The words followed him, fading, as he went down the stairs, became a meaningless gabble, then reappeared stridently as he entered the studio again and turned the easel for a look at the half-finished painting.

  The rich get richer and the poor get children.

  In the meantime,

  In between-time—

  No, it was not a success; and now more than ever, in the light of the dream about Nora, it lacked the intensity, the intense simplification, at which he had aimed. The effulgence of this sun-blasted, blue-burning, ragged Cape Cod landscape, invisibly but passionately ablaze between the cruel reflectors of sun and sea, as if set on fire by a vast magnifying glass, was not really there, was only hinted at—and yet, if he could feel it so vividly, live into it so hard, and with all his senses, so love it, in all its roots and ruin, how was it that it could still continue to escape him? Where, exactly, was the failure? He looked, and looked again, stared through it, while the gramaphone squawked and ran down, and Enid’s iron, in the kitchen, clashed on its metal rest, and he found himself suddenly seeing the whole Cape Cod landscape as one immense and beautiful thing, from Buzzard’s Bay to Provincetown, from shoulder to sea tip, every detail clear, still, translucent, as in a God’s-eye view. The salt marshes rotting in powerful sunlight; the red cranberry bogs; the sand-rutted roads through forests of scrub pine and scrub oak, and the secret ponds that existed on no map; thickets of wild grape and bull-briar; fields of blueberry and hot goldenrod; grass-grown wind-carved dunes, inlets and lagoons, mudflats bedded with eelgrass, bare at low tide, haunt of the eel, the bluecrab, the horseshoe crab, the fiddlers; and the blown moors, too, with high headlands and dwarfed cedars and junipers, the dry moss and the poverty grass crumbling underfoot, the wild-cherry trees glistening with the white tents of the tent caterpillar under the dome of August blue: he saw it all at a glance, sun-washed and sea-washed, alive, tangled, and everywhere haunted by the somehow so sunlit ghost of the vanished Indian. The Indian names—and the English names—these, too, were a vital part of it—Cataumet, Manomet, Poppennessett, Cotuit, Monomoy—Truro, Brewster, Yarmouth, Barnstable, Shoot-Flying Hill, the King’s Highway—they ran through it like a river, ran gleaming into the past, ran too into the future. And the houses; the cottages of the sea captains—a mile of them in Dennis, the sea captains who had known St. Petersburg and Canton as well as Boston—or the porticoed and pagodaed mansions of the China traders; and the ruined farmhouses and barns, silver-gray ghosts, the sad shingles and clapboards smokelessly consuming, among wild apples and wild lilacs (like Weir Village) back into the burning earth from which they had risen—yes, it was all of a piece, all in one vision, it was in his blood, his eyes, his bones, he shook and lived and died with it. Christ, yes! But why, then, could his mystical and ecstatic vision of it be put to no better use? Ecstasy—someone had defined ecstasy as “farsight,” with the overcoming of the sensual perceptions of space and time.” As in El Greco—as in Van Gogh. But it wasn’t wholly true, for the sensual perceptions of space and time must be there, too—rarefied and essentialized, perhaps, but there. He could see that, he knew it deeply, it trembled in his hand just short of the canvas, and someday, god helping, he would get it. Someday—but, in the meantime, if there were only someone he could discuss it with, shamelessly! If it didn’t have to be so damned secret! Enid—impossible. Roth—too cynical, too urban, too superficial. Paul—too analytic, too much from the outside looking in. Jim Connor—well, perhaps!

  In the meantime,

  In between-time—

  He turned the easel back to the wall, and suddenly, for no reason at all, felt light-hearted, felt gay. The whole thing was too ridiculous, it was all a vast joke, a gigantic hoax of some sort, and if only one saw through it and refused to be hoodwinked, everything even now would come out all right—just as it always had before. Keep a stiff upper lip—that was it—and sing like the very devil. Whistle among the tombstones!

  The world was made, dear—for people like us!

  He half sang, half shouted, the absurd words, hoping they would reach Enid, added a “ho ho” of his own to them, sotto voce, and then walked quickly through the dining room to the top of the kitchen steps. It was time for the morning mail, time for the newspaper, time for the walk with Buzzer—time for escap
e into the blue. Enid’s cheeks were flushed with the ironing—it had the effect of making the cheekbones look higher, the eyes narrower and deeper. She put up one hand to brush back a moist curl from the moist and lovely forehead.

  “And another thing,” she said.

  “Yes, darling?”

  She paused, frowning, to wriggle the bright point of the iron along the white hem of a shirt, flattening it as she went, then round a pearl button—how fascinating, how skillful!

  “Since we’re on the subject of money—”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “There’s the little matter of Buzzer’s education. We can’t send her to the public schools here. They’re very bad, as you know—the children aren’t at all nice. It would be impossible.”

  “But, Ee dear, aren’t you being a little premature?”

  “Not at all. We can’t keep her out of school indefinitely—even with the help of doctor’s certificates—which would be dishonest, anyway—she’d be made to go, sooner or later. You can’t just put off thinking about it! And there are no good private schools within miles.”

  “Public schools were good enough for me!”

  “Yes. Timothy—yes, perhaps they were! But it’s another matter with girls, as you’d have known if you’d had any sisters.”

  “An oversight. Of course, I’d probably have been a lot more refined in my tastes if I’d been sent to the Friends’ Academy in New Bedford, or Miss Nonesuch’s Nunnery for Beacon Street’s Best.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. And you’d be a good deal more intelligent about this, too. It’s just what’s wrong with you, with your whole outlook! It’s simply not fair to Buzzer, that’s the whole truth, and you’ve got to think about it, whether you like it or not. And plan for it. At your present rate of earning—”

  “There you go again!”

  “Will you allow me to finish?”

  “Endor darling, you know I’m entirely in agreement with you, except for my hatred of these damned little snob-schools, where they turn out scatter-brained little one-design nincompoops, with social registers for brains and cash registers for hearts—”