Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  “Nonsense!”

  “—but I fail to see the hurry.”

  “I see. You want to put it off—just as you always want to put off holidays for me and Buzzer, or getting a maid, or any of the other things that might make life a little more agreeable for me here—while you have everything you want! Is that it?”

  “If that’s the way you want to see it, certainly! But perhaps if you’ve got some brighter plan you’d be so kind as to tell me.”

  “George and Mabel—”

  “Oh, it’s George and Mabel again, is it? How nice!”

  “They’re very good friends of yours. Better than you know, and I think you might at least be grateful when they go out of their way to be kind!”

  “Go out of their way! Don’t make me laugh. I suppose George was going out of his way last night, when he came butting in here about Jim Connor.”

  “To be kind, exactly. And this was kind too. They suggested that we ought to take out education insurance. Which seems to me a very good idea.”

  “I see. So that’s where the money comes in.”

  “Exactly. How clever of you!”

  She smiled at him, a smile that wasn’t a smile at all, added the neatly folded shirt, with a sort of unnecessary emphasis, to the little pile of freshly laundered linen on the corner of the kitchen table, then turned, before he could speak, and presented the pile to him, one hand on top (the wedding ring, and the pearl), the other at the bottom—it was of course the mute but eloquent evidence of her slavery. Her eyes looked up at him with cold amusement—but, no, not amusement, they were too hostile, too beautifully feline for that—it was almost hate. Good old Enid!

  “And would you mind,” she said, “taking these up and putting them on my bed? And I think there’s someone at the door. It’s probably Mr. Peterson with the vegetables, and we don’t need any.”

  “All right. I’m going for the mail.”

  “In that case, perhaps you could take Buzzer along with you for a walk, if it isn’t too much trouble. I think it’s too cold for her to go in wading.”

  “Oh, no trouble at all!”

  “Thanks.”

  He looked steadily into the level eyes for any sign of a relenting, but none came; the exchange between them was hard, unflinching, motionless, almost unbreathing; and in the pause before he turned away he felt that even as he looked at her, with his love for her still intact and vivid, she was being borne backward and away from him by her own will—exactly, he thought, as if she were the figurehead of a ship, swept dizzily away from him, and with just that look of sea-cold inscrutability. Or the stone eyelessness of a statue.

  Damned handsome, he thought—dropping the laundry on the bed, and giving it a pat—damned handsome, even when she was angry—but jumping Judas, was there to be no end to it? No end to it whatever? Better an explosion than this everlasting smoldering, better a pitched battle than this guerrilla warfare, this merciless sharpshooting and sniping—and, good god, what a sharpshooter she was! She did him credit, she certainly had blood in her eye, she was the very devil!

  “No vegetables today, Mr. Peterson. No, nothing today! Is it going to rain?”

  “Well, kind of hard to say. Seems’s if it might burn off, but you never know, with the wind in the east!”

  “No, looks kind of dark.”

  The green truck with its piled boxes of cauliflowers, crates of pumpkins, crates of cranberries, was gone around the far corner at the turn of the street, under the bare dripping poplars; fog spat on the stone doorstep at his feet, fog dripped on the heaped leaves; and into the garden, as he went around the front of the house to enter it in search of Buzzer, the indiscreet dream about Nora once more slyly accompanied him.

  The indiscreet dream—the fleshly, the sensual, the whirling, the Rubenslike—But a strange figure was standing at the foot of the garden, by the river wall, had just come up the steps there from the Town Landing, a little man with a shovel over his shoulder—a tramp, a gnome, a furry-faced gnome, who hobbled forward in trousers much too big for him. The trousers were held up by a string tied round the waist, the short shapeless coat had apparently been made out of a dirty piece of gunnysack, even the little eyes, above the dirty whiskers, looked dirty—obviously the creature had come straight out of the ground, out of the earth, with the caked earth still on him. In the middle of the lawn he stood still, appeared to be mute, darting furtive glances, weasel-like, to right and left, then jerked a quick thumb toward the pump house.

  “I clean ’em out,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Name’s Pepoon, they all know me. I come to clean ’em out. Want yours cleaned? I live over the river, go ’round to all the houses regular, Bill Pepoon.”

  He jerked his hand again toward the pump house, an animal-like gesture, blinked the gray eyes under rusty eyebrows.

  “Want me to clean it? I got bags to take it away.”

  “Oh, I see. But I haven’t got one.”

  “Y’ain’t got one? What’s that?”

  Letting the shovel fall easily from his shoulder, he pointed with it once more toward the pump house, incredulous.

  “It’s a pump.”

  “A pump?”

  “Yes, a pump. Come and see it.”

  He opened the door, showed the little motor on the oil-stained floor, gleaming, motionless, an oilcan beside it, the red wooden pump shaft upright in its groove. The gnome stared at it, unconvinced.

  “Oh. Y’ain’t got one.”

  “No, it’s a pump.”

  “Well, if y’ever want me, name’s Pepoon, over the river, let me know. Know anybody else wants one cleaned?”

  “Thanks—no, I don’t.”

  “Cracky, a pump. And it looks just like—! All right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No trouble at all. Good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  He hesitated for a moment, casting an appraising eye at the Purington house, as if estimating his chances there too, but now a little skeptical, then shouldered his shovel again, and was gone almost at a trot around the corner of the woodshed and down into the lane that led to the Town Landing, where presumably he had his “bags.” His “bags”! Good god, what a conception. He was all of a piece, an earth-god, and an earth-god of the very lowest—and best!—order. A miracle, no less, and probably inspired by the lilacs. Willed by the lilacs! A terrestrial empathy.

  “Who was that funny man?”

  Buzzer, squatted by the woodshed door, had arranged her collection of white quartz pebbles in a neat circle, like a crown, on the grass.

  “Well, you know, Buzzer, I sort of think it was a god, I think it must have been an earth-god, just popped up out of the earth, like a jack-in-the-box!”

  “He wasn’t a god! How could he be a god! He was too dirty.… Did you see my pebbles? This is kingy, and this is queeny, and I’ve got the king and queen of the toenail shells.”

  “So you have. And what about a walk, my pet, to get the mail.”

  “The mail?”

  She raised the blue eyes, questioning, abstracted, looked beyond him, to the ends of the earth, as if considering the ultimate of all ultimate problems, then scrambled quickly to her feet, flapping the small hands, fin like.

  “All right, but don’t you touch them, now!”

  “No, I won’t touch them.”

  “And can we walk to the golf-links road and go to the secret place?”

  “Yes, perhaps, if there’s time, we can go to the secret place.”

  “And eat a checkerberry leaf?”

  “And eat a checkerberry leaf.”

  “And look for Indian Pipes?”

  “And look for Indian Pipes.”

  “You mustn’t just say everything I say!”

  “‘Blueberry, bayberry, checkerberry, cherry—goldenrod, silverrod, jackin-the-pulpit-berry—’”

  “‘Mayflower, columbine, lady’s-slipper, aster—which is the flower for your mistress, master?’ Ho ho—and milkw
eed pods full of silk—”

  “You can make a silk bed for kingy and queeny.”

  “If they aren’t all gone. Do you think they’ll be all gone?”

  “I don’t know, my pet. It’s pretty late, you know, and all those seeds have to get busy, and find homes for themselves before spring comes—ha, and this is something you didn’t know—I read it in a book.”

  “What, daddy?”

  “That seeds have hearts. Did you know that?”

  “Hearts that beat?”

  “Well, I’m not so sure about their beating, but they’re hearts, just the same. A little teeny tiny heart, and it’s called a corculum—”

  “A corculum! Ho ho! What a funny word!”

  “Yes, it means ‘little heart,’ see? So I guess you’ve got a corculum.”

  “Don’t be silly, I’m not a seed!”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. I might try planting you, you know!”

  Amused, intent on this entrancing world of bright images, images like pebbles to be arranged in rows or circles, to be strung like beads, the small blue homespun-clad figure, with doubled fists and lowered golden head, galloped ahead of him like a little horse. She ploughed through the drifts of fog-dampened poplar leaves, yellow and brown; kicked them, trampled on them; alternately raised and lowered her face, singing; half closed the blue eyes to feel the cool fog-drip on her cheeks, in her hair, the hands outspread—good lord, how wonderful, she was living in a world of her own, a burning and secret world of her own. The same world? a different world? A new world—that was it—the world of the poet, the first poet, the poet who saw simultaneously, for the first time, the sea and a flower. What! Dogs and horses in one and the same world—! It was a miracle.…

  The letter, when he opened Box 67 with the thin steel key, the blue envelope, addressed with the clear delicate handwriting—the bold T and K, the open-eyed “o’s”—how very odd that her handwriting always made him think of her eyes, as if the blue eyes looked up at him frankly from the envelope itself—the letter, carried in his hand, became at once a part of the indiscreet dream—and not merely an extension of it, but perhaps its very center. The letter, on its way from Boston, pernoctating, keeping its open-eyed vigil, had itself brought the sea change, the soft inland-going sea fog, and had brought, too, the obscure and all-troubling delicious dream, the half-seen sculptural shape of involved struggle, the hand lifted and vanishing, the face darkening as it turned away. Pernoctate—yes, the letter had kept a vigil, its blue eyes open all night, and it was this that had projected the whole thing—its influence had preceded it, even to bringing into his very sleep the half-guessed presence, the half-happy and half-unhappy joining and sundering, the ecstatic but broken embrace. Broken!

  The familiar sensation of breathlessness, the heart contracting on itself—and yet it was good, too—whatever the outcome, it was good. Joy either way, freedom either way. Enid had come nearer, she already stood nearer, this was the important, the essential, change; and this would be true even if Nora hadn’t herself yet made any decision. Or even if she had decided not to decide.

  “And that’s our old friend the Quaker burying ground,” he said quickly, feeling a little breathless, “with all the little headstones exactly alike—see?—and exactly the same size.”

  “Why, daddy?”

  “Well, it’s really rather nice; it’s to remind people not to be too proud, to be humble—no matter what they’ve done, or who they are. Not to boast. You see, the Quakers thought to put up a huge great pompous marble tombstone was like a boast, was like saying, ‘Ho, look at me, how grand I am! Ho, look at me, but don’t pay any attention to that little Smith fellow down there, with that measly little stone of his, like a school slate. Why, you’ve only got to look at his stone to see how unimportant he is!’ See?”

  “Yes, but suppose you were a king. Then couldn’t you be proud?”

  “Foo! A king. I’m afraid not many Quakers were kings. Or, no, come to think of it, perhaps they all were! And perhaps they all were proud!”

  “Well, if I was a king, I’d be proud, and I’m proud anyway!”

  “You look out you don’t have a fall, like old doctor Humpty-Dumpty. And all the king’s horses—!”

  “Ho ho, don’t be silly. Humpty-Dumpty was nothing but an egg! And now come on. And shall we go along the little path by the rope walk and into the woods? To the secret place?”

  “Yes, all aboard for the secret place.”

  The morning had perceptibly darkened, the sea fog lay close and smothering above the oak woods, the pine trees, the leaf-strewn wood path; above the fog there must be clouds; it looked like rain. A pungent smell of burning leaves rankled in the air, too, the smudge fires of autumn, smoke of the consuming world. On this path, in the snow, in winter—Buzzer on her little red sled, the leggined legs stuck out stiffly before her, going to the golf links—he must remember tomorrow to get the sled out of the cellar, and take a look, too, at the jugs of elderberry wine on the top of the cellar wall. And Paul’s dandelion wine. And the snow shovels.… The woods were silent, dripping; a chickadee chattered angrily, a catbird wailed; and at the secret place—the little hollow of pine needles and pine cones under a solitary great boulder of granite, green-lichened, surrounded by pines—while Buzzer built a house of pine twigs, and stood pine cones around them as trees, he opened the blue letter.

  No salutation—no signature. A single sheet closely and neatly written, written calmly and unhurriedly, too, as one could see by the care with which the margins had been kept, the text precisely balanced on the page. The longest letter she had ever written to him—which could have, of course, only one meaning—perhaps it would be better not to read it at all—? The burden of it was already manifest in the sudden closing of his heart.

  I think I know how it is with you, I think you will know how it is with me. Do you remember how we met, that first time in Washington Street, after we had come out of the vaudeville theater? I suddenly saw you again on the sidewalk, looking down at me, and I said, well, where did you come from, and you, without even so much as taking your hat off, said Oh, I fell from heaven. As casual as that, and of course if I hadn’t had too many cocktails for lunch at the Touraine there’d never have been any meeting at all. We’ve been very happy, haven’t we? Maybe because it was all just as casual and light as that. And I never felt that I was taking anything away from Enid, or any pangs of conscience, until I began to feel that you were beginning to have pangs of conscience. You have begun, haven’t you? And it’s funny, but I don’t really mind that at all, in fact I like it, for it makes me like you better—not that I didn’t like you anyway—and makes me like Enid better too. And Buzzer. But I expect we both knew it was bound to happen some day, and both kept a little something in reserve, so that when the time did come it wouldn’t hurt too much—isn’t that it?

  So, I think you’d better not come to see me any more. And I think you will like to know that I’m going to be married, next month, to the man you talked to on the telephone once, by mistake—remember?—and whose little painting of the Concord River you liked. I hope you’ll be happy, all three of you—I’m sure I’m going to be happy myself—but it was fun, wasn’t it? I shall always be glad it happened, and grateful.

  Grateful! Dear delightful Nora grateful! He began to read the letter again, but found he couldn’t. The words were too good, too true, too tender, the direct and rich honesty was more than he could bear, so much more than he could ever possibly have deserved; and abruptly he felt that if he didn’t shout, or do something violent, he would burst into tears. He sat quite still for a moment, looked up through the red boughs of a pine tree into the gray fog, then suddenly he put out a hand, seized Buzzer by one ankle, pulled her to him, and hugged her passionately.

  “She’s grateful!” he shouted. “She says she’s grateful!”

  “Daddy, you put me down this instant! Look what you’ve done to my house!”

  “I can’t help it, my pet, she sa
ys she’s grateful!”

  “Who’s grateful! Now put me down!”

  “Mother Nature, that’s who. Did you ever have a pine tree tell you she was grateful? Did you? No, I’ll bet you didn’t.”

  “Don’t be silly! And you’re scratching me, too. You didn’t shave!”

  “I did too shave, you wretch—you and your houses!”

  “You’ve spoiled it, see? All those trees knocked down, and the house. Now you’ll have to help me fix it up again!”

  “You give me one kiss, and I’ll help you fix it up again.”

  “There. Now put me down. You ought to know better!”

  “All right. We’ll fix your palace up, my pet, and surround it with a grove of cedar of Lebanon and shittim wood, and put the Queen of Sheba in it, and King Solomon, too, and a lot of angels and archangels and cherubim and seraphim, and we’ll have a procession of kings for them, and music of dulcimers and cymbals and shawms and—sub-tone clarinets. And then, when we’ve done all that, what do you think—before the rain comes, which might be any minute now, we’ll go skulking like Indians by the secret trail down through the primeval forests to the river, and then we’ll prowl all the way home along the shore, keeping invisible, with our tomahawks in our hands.”

  “Where are our tomahawks?”

  “Here, this is a likely looking tomahawk, and here’s another.”

  “And nobody will see us?”

  “Shhhh, we mustn’t talk, you know. We must be stealthy!”

  “Shhh! Are we ready?”

  “Not a sound now—and be careful not to step on twigs! I’ll go first, to blaze the trail, and you follow. Come on!”

  From the wet sand bluffs by the river, when they emerged into the wide peace of fog, they could just make out the pale yellow sand bluffs of the golf links, opposite, and a solitary figure stooping to pick up a ball on the ninth green, solemnly replacing the metal flag in the hole. They slid down the slope of sand, filling their shoes; sat for a moment on the matted eel-grass, sea-smelling—the curled stiff wave of eel grass which everywhere lined the shores of the river—to empty out the sand; then resumed their prowl over alternate stretches of beach and tangle. The tide was out, the water waveless, leaden, fog-stilled; through the fog, in the direction of Paul’s lagoon, came the chug-chug of an invisible motorboat, and the cawing of crows. Bayberry and beach plum, mussel shells, clam shells—carapaces of horseshoe crabs, the little ones golden, the larger ones almost black—their footsteps crunched and snapped and crackled amongst these. They were in the wilderness—tomahawk in hand they were revisiting the Indian wilderness, the wilderness unchanged since the beginning of time. Unchanged? Unchanged save by a dream, perhaps—the dream threading the thickets, the fog, the beds of bubbling eel grass, the hushed and overcast noon, exactly as his own world, all morning, had been threaded and changed by the indiscreet dream about Nora. But now, subtly, that had altered again—it was as if, now, through the fog, a single beam of soft light had plunged downward to that obscure shape of shifting and involved struggle, had quickly lighted and lightened the sinister intricacies of the unknown, lighted the lifted hand, brightened the dark face before it turned away—so that suddenly the delicious embrace, the air-borne embrace, had shed all its burden of sorrow and pathos, all pang and pain, and become wholly benign. The secret was suddenly sunlit, the Rubenslike sensuality was sunlit, and the face, which was half Nora’s and half Enid’s, no longer reproached him in desolation as it turned away, but instead—or so it seemed—looked up at him almost merrily before it vanished. Had the dream changed? But how could a dream change afterwards? He must simply have been mistaken about it, not at the time seen it quite clearly—just as he had not known after all that the ecstatic and anguished face was as much Enid’s as Nora’s. Had Nora’s letter done this? I think I know how it is with you, I think you will know how it is with me.