by Conrad Aiken
“You’re in rather a rush, all of a sudden, aren’t you?” he said.
“I wasn’t aware of it. It seems to me that it was you who were in a rush, until of course it suited you for reasons of your own to change your mind!”
“Need that have prevented your staying at the table until I had finished?”
“Why should I? Are you by any chance aware that I’ve had to eat my last three meals practically alone? You’re hardly the one to complain.”
“Was that any fault of mine?”
“Of course not, you’re never at fault, are you? You certainly didn’t need to go out with George last night—”
“Oh, no, one never must be polite—”
“To one’s wife, no! You can leave her alone as much as you like.”
“Of course. That goes without saying.”
“And are you going to help me with the dishes?”
“I don’t think I will, if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I don’t feel very much like it, in the circumstances.”
“Oh! So you’re going to be ungenerous, too, into the bargain!”
“Ungenerous! Do you know I haven’t had five minutes today for my own work? Not that you care about it. And tomorrow and next day in town—don’t make me laugh.”
He smiled bitterly, opening the garden door, holding the screen door open with his foot. She turned towards him, her wet hands held up before her, her eyes wide, handsome, fiercely satirical.
“And may I ask,” she said, “where you are going, then? I suppose you’re going to work in the garden?”
“I’m just going out. It doesn’t seem to me to matter much! And if I want to work in the garden, or anywhere else that suits me, I certainly will!”
She stood still, her hands still held oddly up before her, as he turned away and went out, letting the screen door clack sharply shut behind him, he was aware as if through his back that she had not moved, still stood glaring contemptuously after him, her whole attitude one of helpless rage—and it gave him a kind of base satisfaction, as of a blow struck and not replied to, to turn towards the pump house and simply leave her there, entranced by her own fury. Let her stare, let her glare, let her rage. He had met her halfway long enough, it was her turn to worry now, the shoe would be on the other foot! If she thought he was as easy as all that, at the mercy of her beauty, or his love for her, to be whistled to and fro like a servant, a shadow, she would have another think coming. He opened the pump house door, looked down at the neat little engine, unseeing. But, of course, Binney had run it, no water was needed. Still, he could pretend to be examining the shut-off valve, for she would now be watching him from the window, watching for any sign of weakness—and after a moment he could saunter down to the foot of the garden, look at the lilacs, the site of the new cesspool, the river, the weather.
Buzzer’s little garland of pebbles still lay on the wet grass by the woodshed door, and on the floor of the wood-shed, just inside the open door, the box of toenail shells, the box of pink boat shells; and beyond these, by the empty, or all but empty, coalbin, the rainbow-hued sawhorse, on which Karl Roth had squeezed out his remnants of tubes. Long ago, far away, a year ago—and if Karl hadn’t come then, and hadn’t, half as a joke, asked Jim to run down for the night, none of this would have happened. Jim would never have fallen in love with this village, these marshes, would never have come here again on his so peculiar mission, everything would still be at peace. Or would it? There was a perverse fate in these things, perhaps it all would have happened anyway, and the whole business of Jim was only an accessory—had it all really started with Nora? I think I know how it is with you, I think you will know how it is with me.…
He stood still; for a moment it was as if he had stopped breathing. He had a sudden sharp vision of Nora, so sharp as to make him feel empty-armed, empty-handed—blue-eyed shameless Nora, lying on the couch in the half-darkened room, and laughing as she lifted one leg in the air to pull on a stocking—looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, and laughing, the garter clasp bright silver against the whiteness of her skin. But suppose Enid really left him—suppose it came to the worst—would he really want to marry Nora? No. There was no question of that, there had never been any question of that. It was a different thing, as they had both known from the outset, and wholly without illusions. A different thing. He had always loved Enid—as who could better testify than Nora herself, who had always accepted the fact? By god, what a wonderful irony that was, if only Enid could be told! The supreme immorality—or was it a supreme morality? No, no morals in the bloodstream, no morals in hand or claw or mouth—it was a shambles. Fidelity—there was no such thing, or only relative.…
He lifted down the shovel from its nail on the woodshed wall, scooped a little earth from the lilac border, sprinkled it tenderly in the crescent-shaped hoofmarks on the lawn, where Terence’s horse had stood pawing, filled them in and patted them down. There—the lawn would be all right even if nothing else was. The house might collapse and everything else with it, his world be blown to smithereens, but the hoofmarks of Terence’s horse on the lawn would be obliterated. What the hell did the grass care? The uncut hair of graves.
He was hanging the shovel up again, when he heard her steps behind him, the heavy soft swish of the corduroy skirt. She stood on the grass before the open door, facing him, dark against the darkening afternoon, her arms jauntily akimbo. He made to go past her, merely allowing his eyes to slide unperceptively over hers, but she moved as he moved, turning, pivoting, and said:
“And another thing. I think it would be only decent—”
He went past her without any answer, walked slowly to the top of the terrace wall, stooped there to examine the subsidence of wet fresh sand where the new cesspool was to be. He felt of it with his hand, as if idly, appraisingly, and saw, out of the corner of his eye, that, after a moment’s dismay, and an awkward balance of hesitation, she had decided to follow him, was coming very slowly towards him, her hands still on her hips. The steps gingerly, self-conscious, on the wet grass, like a slow kind of dancing. Graceful, but infuriating. And standing above him, looking down at him, she repeated:
“I said there was another thing.”
“Well, I heard you!”
“I think it would be only decent, when you inform Jim Connor, if you will be loyal enough not to try to put the blame on me. I think it ought to be put to him as your decision.”
“Oh, you do.”
“Yes, I do.”
He stood up, smiling grimly.
“I’ll do absolutely nothing of the sort! And aren’t you taking quite a lot for granted? I haven’t said yet, have I, that I would inform Jim Connor of anything. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
She was silent, the flecked green eyes faintly narrowed, the lips barely parted. For the first time she appeared to be a little taken aback and a little shaken; she was trying to fathom him. She had folded her arms across her breast, stood slightly swaying.
“And now,” he added, “if you don’t too much mind I’ll try to get in the daily ten minutes’ work that is allowed to me. Or five. If you can spare me that much!”
He went past her again, smiling. Her lips were now pressed tight, the mouth beautiful and hard, and for the merest fraction of a second, as he passed, their eyes, engaging, locked in the purest and cruelest hate—it was an exchange of ice. There! Let her laugh that off. Let her work that out, in her bedtime thinking! And write to mamma about it. And go around crying on the public bosom. And put it in the papers. And tell Mabel and George and Paul. Let her stand there, like a statue of protest, under the dark sky, waiting for rain—it was not for nothing that she had a sense of the dramatic, and knew how damned handsome she was—but for once, by god, what a good thing it would be if she got her belly full of it! Let it pour.
In the studio, he turned the easel to the light, laid out the palette and the neat row of brushes—but what was the use. Impossible to concentrate now, to steady one’s nerves
in this turmoil, to peel one’s eyes of anger and hate—it was like a red film over everything.
“Van Gogh,” he said aloud, “my hat!”
The church clock was striking—Terence’s blue wagon rattled past along the street, Terence standing upright in it, the reins easily held, like a charioteer—old Mr. Fosdick, the town librarian, trudged by on his way to the library, an apple in his hand—thinking no doubt of his lost career in Rio de Janeiro, the twenty years sacrificed for nothing, looking after a shiftless bedridden brother—the phonograph in the Puringtons’ squawked its “In between-time, in the meantime” for the thousandth time, and then was silent, for the resumed dripping of the fog from the trees—it was all hopeless.
When at last the hall door opened, with its two-toned squeak, and Enid, still calm and implacable, asked him, in the blandest of voices, “Well, have you made up your mind?” he could stand it no longer. He merely said, over his shoulder, putting as much venom into it as he could possibly concentrate:
“Will you please get out?”
It was like a new voice between them. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before. And in the second before she turned, he saw in her eyes, her mouth, her whole face, even in the queer gesture of her hand on the glass doorknob, a something new and unknown, something hurt, which he had never yet seen there. It was as if a gulf had opened between them, and as if she had become a stranger.
III
“… The houses were made with long young sappling trees, bended, and both ends stuck into the ground. They were made round, like unto an arbour, and covered down to the ground with thick and well wrought mats, and the door was not over a yard high, made of a mat to open. The chimney was a wide hole in the top, for which they had a mat to cover it close when they pleased. One might stand and go upright in them. In the midst of them were four little trunches, knocked into the ground, and small sticks laid over, on which they hung their pots, and what they had to seethe. Round about the fire they lay on mats, which are their beds.… In the houses we found wooden bowls, trays, and dishes; earthen pots; hand baskets, made of crab shells, wrought together; also, an English pail or bucket, it wanted a bayle, but it had two iron ears. There was also baskets of sundry sorts, bigger and some lesser, finer and some coarser; some were curiously wrought with black and white, in pretty works, and sundry other of their household stuff.… There was also a company of deer’s feet stuck up in the houses, hart’s horns, and eagle’s claws, and sundry such like things there was; also, two or three baskets full of parched acorns, pieces of fish, and a piece of a broiled herring.… Having thus discovered this place, it was controversial amongst us what to do touching our abode and settling there. Some thought it best, for many reasons, to abide there.…”
—JOURNAL OF THE PILGRIMS
“I’m going out,” he said into the darkened room, through the half-opened door. “I’m going over to Jim Connor’s. To deliver your tender message.”
She made no answer. She was lying on her bed again, this time with her elbows raised, her hands above her head on the pillow, and her eyes (though in the obscure light he couldn’t be sure) turned up towards the sloping ceiling. Was there a handkerchief in one of her hands? Had she been crying?
“Did you hear me?” he said.
“Yes, I heard you.”
Her voice was averted, flat, stifled. She hadn’t moved.
“All right. And I don’t know when I’ll be back. If they should ask me to stay for supper, I think perhaps I will—just this once!”
He waited a moment for an answer, leaning against the doorjamb, but, as he got none, he went slowly down the stairs, through the studio, and into the tiny entry hall, where he took his oilskin hat and slicker from the wooden peg.
Ratio Binney’s chuckle of thunder—it was a murmur, rather—for a second time ran softly from the southwest round the sky, a continuous but stumbling sound; and when he stepped out into the street he found that it had already begun to rain a little—a drizzle so gentle, however, that its sound, even on the heaped leaves, was barely audible. The afternoon was no brighter, for if the fog had at last really lifted, the clouds had taken its place. The omens were all for a soft, settled rain, an all-nighter—in some ways the best of Cape weather. It would be good for the lilacs, bed the roots down, wash off the sand. They would settle, take their permanent place in the garden, their permanent place in the earth, and get themselves ready for the spring.
The spring! But would there be such a thing as spring?
He shut his teeth bitterly on the unspoken phrase, as if indeed he were biting the words, biting them to shreds, and walked slowly, unseeing, or only automatically seeing, past the white house, the red house, the house with the cupola; the house with the little cement-lined garden pool; the cottage with the catalpa tree (now naked) and the painted swing. Deserted, autumnal, resigned—the deserted village. The Scudders’ windmill yawed and moaned, a sad minor note, on top of its red wooden tower; he looked up at it and away, kicking the sodden leaves on the path—in no time at all it would be winter, there would be snow. Catching the early train, too, on pitch-dark mornings, Mr. Murphy coming over with a lantern to ring the doorbell, shout up at the window—standing there with his lantern in the snow, the collar of his sheepskin coat turned up, wearing a cap with earmuffs. And then, at the forlorn little station in the woods, the brightly lighted train coming slowly round the bend, its voice crying mournfully over the frozen trees, the bell clanging and steam hissing as it stopped by the frost-rimed unlighted boards of the platform: the dirty little train with its early morning card-players, heavy-eyed businessmen, high-school children on their way to school, and the Boston papers. Crawling through the winter morning twilight to Boston, to the gray slush-filled streets of Boston, the subway, the smelly crowds, and the everlasting school, the Frazer School of Fine and Applied Arts. Another winter of it, another year of it, the time for his own work always becoming shorter, perhaps at last vanishing entirely. Good god, what a vision.
“If you can’t do it with your eye, use a plumb line.”
“Miss Shea, why will you try to fill up every corner with extraneous objects?”
“Fine feeling for form and rhythm in that one, yes, but look—the color is so heavy it kills it.”
“My dear girl, exaggerate only for emphasis. Won’t you try to remember that?”
“All right now. Jump your eye down from the shoulder blade to the patella. You can see then how much your figure is out of balance. If you can’t draw, Miss Casani, how in god’s name do you expect to paint? Draw with the brush, draw with the brush.”
“Retouching varnish might help some of those dead spots, but remember you can’t paint a picture with nothing but varnish!”
“Empathy, empathy, empathy—”
“Miss Bloom, that brush of yours needs a shave. Can’t you see what it’s doing? Try a razor blade on it, cut those crooked hairs off.”
“And for goodness’ sake, hold your brush as if it were something more than the stub of a pencil!”
The dreadful roundelay of trite phrases, over and over again, day after day—plastic form, linear perspective, volume, weight, mass, tone—solidity, color-rhythm, luminosity, the Chinese vertical perspective—kinetic, static, calligrapher—balance, proportion—in Christ’s name, when you got right down to it, what the devil did they all mean? A pitiful pettifogging dishevelment of a process which must be a process, and an instinctive and automatic one, a fluid and unanalyzed action, or nothing. Paint, on a square of canvas—or a vision, which had somehow extended itself through the hand. And in between, the muddied sty of the teacher.
But where, exactly, did a picture come from?
BAKER STREET: TOWN LANDING.
He turned down the wet lane, his slicker rustling, the oilskin hat in his hand. The tall house, with its weathered shingles and heavy stone porch, stood gray and forbidding against the leaden river, the porch was deserted, save for a single rocking chair, bright red, tilted against
the wall—not a soul, not a sound. He stood listening at the foot of the steps for a minute, heard inside the house a rising murmur of voices, then walked softly down to the water’s edge and Paul’s canoe. The ribbed floor of it, usually spick and span in its bright varnish, was extraordinarily muddy—something very peculiar must have happened to it—certainly not Paul’s doing. A sodden cushion, too, which they had neglected to take in. How disgustingly typical. It reminded him, for no reason, of old Pop Amos and his newly painted boat, beside which he had sat all summer on the shore, in a kitchen chair, reluctant to put fresh work to use—horrified at the thought of that exquisite sheen exposed to the ravages of salt water and mud. Not like this! He pushed the canoe before him down into the rain-pricked water, took the wet paddle from beneath the rear thwart, stepped in and shoved off. The tide was coming in, nearly full, he could drift up to the bridge, and then paddle back. Time to think.