by Conrad Aiken
From the indiscreet dream about Nora—strangely, obscurely, like the rayed light from a slowly opening door or window—or like a flood, too—or even, in another sense, like the blood pouring from a freshly reopened wound, releasing and thus ending the pent pain—the sense of the past came thickly and richly, the faces, the words, the mornings, the evenings. But not Nora, or Nora only briefly, for it was as if that first meeting in Washington Street—when he hadn’t even taken off his hat—had itself become the door, which, once opened, readmitted a world which had been obscured or lost. It was Enid, it was the first two years at the Frazer School of Fine and Applied Arts, the first two years in Boston, with Christmas holidays in New Bedford, the snow on the terraced lawns of County Street, the Chicken Hops, the sleigh rides to Buttonwood Park: and it was the motor-paced bicycle races—the first expeditions to the art galleries of New York, the steamer along the freezing Sound—the shabby unheated gas-smelling little hall bedroom of the West Eighth Street rooming house, where he had first met Karl Roth and Kitty, and plunged at once into the new and exciting world of Greenwich Village, with its cafés, its drinking parties, its freak poets and painters—male, female, and neuter—but above all its sense of adventure and freedom. Yes, that, and the sharp sense of reality which it had brought him for the first time, painting as a reality, with a real function in society, and life too as a reality, in a far richer and fiercer sense than anything in his childhood in New Bedford had prepared him for; but along with all these things, behind and beneath them, and lending a fresh vividness and iridescence even to the powerful ambition which they had suddenly quickened in him, was Enid. Iridescence—yes, exactly that; she had brought instantly an astonishing iridescence into everything that surrounded him. It had seemed far away, until Nora had somehow sprung it all back into focus again—but now his first meeting with Enid Severance, at Cousin Anna’s dinner party, and the drive to the dance in the snow, seemed actually more recent than his first meeting with Nora. Adolescent? No doubt. But there had never been such a first meeting before—there could never be such a first meeting again. White magic, all of it—the silver tissue of the shawl drawn by the lifted hands over the young shoulders, and the clear green eyes, young and candid, looking into his own, across the glittering table, between the candles, with a disturbed bewilderment of intensity and question, secret but unconsciously declared, which demanded to be probed even while it suffered and refused—the eyes that could listen, as it were, to nothing else, and turned away only to be turned back again, or after an interval to be found covertly watching—no, there could never be anything like that again, that lovely and naive surrender, which had, at one stroke, drawn him into a completely new world. And then the first “call,” at the absurd and ornate Victorian house, with the fretwork gables, the iron deer standing alert on the lawn in the snow, the wide piazza above the terrace (where later, in the summer, were to be tubs of blue and pink hydrangeas, and the enormous rubber plant)—the first stiff “call,” and meeting Enid’s silent and so obviously disapproving mother, watchful and nervous above her ceaseless knitting, glancing now at himself, now at the black marble clock, which ticked secretly, refinedly, on the mantel. And, after that, the uninterrupted chain of ever more frequent meetings, designed or fortuitous, their eyes everywhere seeking each other out, at every party, in every street, morning or evening, for the delicious renewal and deepening of contact, the exploration of the sense of touch, of which it had seemed so impossible that they could ever have enough. Physical? Metaphysical, rather. Their tangents had been universal, and everywhere—in the vibrations of texture and tone, in the aliveness of light—they had come together very slowly, without other bodily meeting than in the waltz, at a dance, or the gloved hand lightly held at the crowded skating rink, and in that sublimated intoxication, apple blossom and peach blossom, chestnut blossom and the tiger-throated nasturtium, the solemn bells of the Catholic church in the evening, or the far whistles of the tugs in the Bay, had seemed a sufficient bridge, a sufficiently corporeal language—it had been months before they had first kissed. Adolescent, yes—certainly. And perhaps this had been the initial mistake, if anything so profoundly beautiful could ever be a mistake: the poetry had been too pure a poetry, its further implications (of all that the body, and passion, could exact, or time and diurnal intimacy dishevel and destroy) had been too little understood; and when the prose followed, it had inevitably seemed only too ingrainedly prosaic. The realities had come too quickly and harshly, one after another—lack of money, doubts about his career, the interferences and disapproval of Enid’s mother, whose social “ambitions” for Enid had been so cruelly thwarted (good heavens, how she had been shocked at their going to live in a Boston boardinghouse!)—and then, later, the wholly unknown Enid who had cried out quickly with pain, in pneumonia, her eyes animal and unseeing—Enid pregnant—Enid in childbirth—yes, Paul was right, the shock of that “meaty and butcher-shop reality” had been too much for him, it had changed everything. Changed, or only seemed to change? Had the disenchantment been real, or only theoretical—a self-induced and half imagined thing? Had he been disenchanted (if indeed he had been) merely because he had expected to be, faced with these so many and so different realities, and was disenchantment itself therefore only a romantic fiction, or a fiction of the romantic? And how then had Nora so magically managed to give the whole thing back to him? Ah, perhaps because she had instinctively restored to him his belief in the illusion, his belief in the illusion as the only reality. Or, more simply, taught him that the real world was illusion enough!
Yes; for this all-releasing dream, this dream of the pure embrace, airborne and wind-blown, this whirling and halcyon love, in which the beloved face had become one with his own, the white shoulders and breasts and clinging thighs and knees as if his own body, the throbbing embrace hung ecstatically in sunset light—this ever-clearer dream, as it glowed creatively down from plane to plane of memory, through trapdoor after trapdoor, like a lantern casting down its light through successive floors of a dark house, touched now his childhood too, brought that back as near and clear as Enid, and with precisely the same fresh and vernal significance. Like those tiny Japanese folded flowers, made of desiccated wood and tissue, no bigger than seeds, which open out, when put in water, to become irises or almond blossoms, or dark leaves, these images now opened to join the others. The intense and radiant reality, above all, of a girl’s face, a hand, a hard green acorn on a branch, the sunlit iris of an eye, the hairs on a grasshopper’s leg, the swimming colors of a wet stone, the intricacy of ordinary grass, or the inexhaustible mystery of the simple dust that lay in a country road, this dust that was warm and friendly under one’s naked foot, and between one’s toes, this extraordinary stuff that was the earth’s substance, the very earth—suddenly he knew these things again as vividly as he had known them in his childhood in New Bedford, and as vividly as Buzzer—who followed him intently, silently, oak-branch in hand—knew them now. It was like coming alive again. He was alive again, and the whole blazing world alive with him, everything belonging to everything else, and everything with one and the same meaning.
He stopped, stood still, stared down at the beached dory which lay on the sand before him, its galvanized iron anchor, sea-gray, half-buried in the sand, then, drawing his feet together, jumped neatly over it, brandishing his tomahawk in the air.
“Tirra-lirra, tirra-lee!—” he said.
“Daddy, you were supposed to be quiet! They’ll know we’re coming!”
“Let them know. That was my war cry, see? And now they know that every Indian, every man-jack of them, must bite the dust!”
“That wasn’t a war cry. You said that yesterday.”
“Did I? Well, perhaps I did. But it doesn’t matter. It’s as good as fee fie fo fum.”
“Ho ho! That was what the giant said, silly!”
“So it was. But it was a kind of a war cry, just the same, to let the Englishmen know he was coming. Shall we go for a sail
in this dory? An imaginary one, you know, with imaginary oars and an imaginary sail, on an imaginary river. Hmm, I see it’s got a name, too, it’s called Catfish. Now why do you suppose it’s called Catfish? Doesn’t look like a cat, doesn’t look like a fish, doesn’t look like a catfish—”
“What does a catfish look like, daddy?”
“Well, you see, a catfish has whiskers, like a cat—”
“Ho ho, does it really? But it couldn’t miaow like a cat, because fishes haven’t got any voices.”
“Foo! Don’t you remember the fish that talked in the frying pan?”
“That was only in a story. It couldn’t really talk. Shall we go for a sail?”
“Well, I’m afraid not, my pet. It’s late, and I think maybe we’d better get a move on. Let’s see how quickly we can get there—you run, and I’ll walk with my seven-league boots, and we’ll be across the road and past the blacksmith shop in a jiffy, and then over Mr. Riley’s nets in a single leap—come on now, a little speed! And it’s going to rain, it’s going to pour pitchforks—”
He clapped his hands and she was gone at a gallop, scrambling up the sand path by the beach plums to the bridge road—the bridge loomed gray and ghostly in the thinning fog, a car came rattling over the loose boards, kicking and rumbling, and when he emerged on to the road, under the dripping poplars, the small blue figure was already halfway across Mr. Riley’s field. In another moment she had gone down out of sight into the lane that led to the Town Landing, reappeared bustling up the steps to the lilac hedge by the pump house, and then finally vanished around the corner of the kitchen. Extraordinary child—where the devil had she come from? Extraordinary to think that this was Enid and himself, Enid and himself conjoined!—That summer, before she was born, when day after day, waiting, they had played three-handed bridge, Enid and himself and Enid’s mother, fanning themselves in the stifling heat of the County Street house, drinking iced lemonade out of tinkling glasses, listening to the four-noted clink of the well chain in the garden through the opened windows—that summer, she had not existed. The ripening pears hung heavy among hot leaves in the garden, the box hedges smelled dustily of the sun, the cherries had long since been gathered and eaten, the green clusters of the grapes, under the broad laves, were beginning to redden, to purple. And New Bedford, with its old wharves and stone warehouses, the Point Road leading to the Fort, and the wide hot Bay, which one could see from the little hexagonal cupola at the top of the house, all the way to the blue islands, was complete and alive, as it had always been. But there was no Buzzer. And then the terrifying reality of the childbirth—Enid walking to and fro, her hand pressed to her back, the beautiful mouth curved and tense with pain and apprehension; Enid holding on to the banisters, desperate, her whole body arched and taut like a bow—and at last, late at night, the animal throe in lamplight, the quick and sickening divulgence of the bloodstained little animal, with its cry of misery, which was Buzzer, which was to become Buzzer! Astonishing, that out of such horror, and a chrysalis so ignoble and so violent, such beauty and brightness could have emerged—how the devil was one to explain it? And nevertheless, now, in the light of the all-exploring delicious dream of Enid and Nora, perhaps one could at last accept the bloody roots—the roots were no longer to be reprehended, they had their own dreadful and lightninglike beauty, they were oneself, one’s hand, one’s heart, one’s god.…
Yes, but there was Ee still, this ominous attitude of Ee’s—
The thought checked him, as he went up the wet wooden steps to the garden, the house was silent except for the irregular fog-drip from the trees on the kitchen roof—spat-spat-spat—and as he passed the kitchen window he looked quickly in, over the sink, but Ee was nowhere to be seen. The ironing must be finished, perhaps she had gone out. The pump-house door was open, and out of the pump house, bareheaded, the inevitable yellow foot rule in his hand, stepped Ratio Binney. The shrewd Yankee face, the quick gray eyes, the narrow smile, the corduroy trousers.
“Oh, good morning, Mr. Kane! I was just taking a look. I couldn’t raise anybody from the house—”
“Morning, Ratio. You couldn’t? Guess Mrs. Kane must have gone out—”
“Yes, I rang and rang, and knocked on your kitchen door. Mrs. Kane said something on the telephone about the cesspool—?”
He pointed, with the yellow rule, towards the foot of the garden, the new lilac hedge.
“Yes, I know.”
“What seems to be the trouble.”
“Well, I guess we just use too much water. And the cesspool seems to be overflowing. The water stands there, down in the corner—seems to be a sort of little cave-in starting. Come and see it.”
The broad circle of sand, in the angle made by the new lilacs, still showed where the cesspool had been dug, the deep well of bricks sunk in the ground—in spite of repeated reseedings the grass above it was still sparse. Damn, and this would mean a further delay! At the edge nearest the terrace wall Ratio kicked with the toe of a scarred shoe at a small subsidence, where the sand was wet and smooth, as if just washed up from below.
“Hm. That’s what it is. Been spilling over on this side, see? Too much flow to be carried off at the bottom. You’ve got to remember you’re not much above sea level here! And that’s always liable to make trouble. I see you’ve been putting in some bushes. Looks very nice.”
“Lilacs, yes.”
“Yes, sir, that’s exactly the trouble, seem’s if! Too bad, too.”
“What do we do about it, Ratio?”
“Only one thing to do. That’s what I said to Mrs. Kane, if that was what it turned out to be. Put in another cesspool. An off-set. Won’t need to be so big, say a little more than half the size, and a drain into it from near the top of this one. Yes, I guess that’s about all we can do, but that’ll fix it. That was a big cesspool, too. You folks sure must use a lot of water!”
“I guess we do. How much is it going to set us back?”
“Can’t tell, Mr. Kane, not till I know how much brick we’ll want. Not much labor in it, though. We ought to do it in a day, easy. Guess it won’t cost you too much.”
“Okay. I suppose we’d better have it. Not too healthy, having this happen!”
“Oh, it won’t do any harm about that, but of course if it goes on falling in it won’t improve your garden much, and it might even take to backing up.”
“I see.”
“Yeup. Well, I’ll send the boys over in a day or two. Too near sea level, that’s what it is. There was only ten feet of water, remember? when we drove that well up there. No time at all.”
“Yes, I remember. And will you take a look at the shut-off, while you’re here. It shoves the pressure up a little too high—about thirty-four.”
“Oughtn’t to be more than thirty-two. I’ll just set the valve back a mite. Pity to dig it all up just when you’ve got it looking so pretty, but that’s what life is, just one durned thing after another. And as they say, one man’s sorrow is another man’s cash!”
“Okay, Ratio, and ain’t it the truth!… What’s it going to do, rain?”
“Looks like being what these Cape Codders call a tempest. I suppose you’ve lived here long enough to know that almost anything here is called a tempest? But I don’t guess it’ll amount to much. A chuckle of thunder, maybe. But you never know with these sea fogs, it might burn off. Well, I’ll set that valve for you, and send over the Rollo boys.”
“Thanks, Ratio!”
“No trouble.”
The engine began its alternate wheezing and barking—three, five, three, two—as he opened the kitchen door, the kitchen pipes were ringing with the remote pump-strokes underground, the indicator danced over the kitchen sink, but the house was silent. The ironing board had been put away, there was no fire in the blue-flame stove, no indications of cooking, and in the dining room the table had not been set for lunch. He stood still by the piano, listening—in the gray stillness of the room he could hear the watch ticking busily in his tr
ouser pocket—Chopin’s Preludes were open on the music rest—under Buzzer’s little table by the window lay the saucer of milk, apparently untouched, for Chattahoochee—it was all very odd. Like a deserted ship. No Enid. And what had become of Buzzer? She might be upstairs—or she might, of course, have gone over to Mrs. Murphy’s kitchen, looking for cookies. Mrs. Murphy’s special supply of cookies, with holes in the middle—very likely. But what about lunch? He struck a triad on the piano, softly, and another—thought of Paul’s remark about Puccini’s use of consecutive fifths—and then went through the little hall, past the stove—which would soon have to be started, damn it—and into the studio living room.