by Conrad Aiken
“—keep the bouquets——”
“—where, as the orchestration thins, towards the end, the different sections of the orchestra rise, as soon as they finish their parts, and go quietly out, and the lights in the hall are extinguished one by one, to the last note and the last light. Just like that. I’m being used like Gil, in the making of a piece of music; I’m being used; and if nothing else ever happens to me again in all my life, this will have been enough to justify it, and to give it dignity.… To change the subject, Key, I’ve got some first editions I could sell you.”
“First editions! What would I do with them?”
“Or you could have them as security on a loan.”
“No, Blom, I don’t want no first editions; I want a train to Concord. What about taking the subway down, and stopping for a nightcap at the Manger.”
“Yeah, sure. But I can warn you, Key, I’m going to curse your conscience like the very devil! You wait and see.”
“Henry, you can keep the change out of that—if they’ll give it to you. And good night.”
“Good night, Mr. Key, and thank you, sir. Good night! Good night.”
Key lit a cigarette as he rose, Blomberg took out his pipe and held the bowl of it in his hand, reflecting that he would not have time to light it until they got to the North Station. Eight-twenty. As they descended the marble stairs, the sound of time once more came around him, oppressive and rich and nostalgic, and again as if in the form of the train itself, the train to Mexico. They would be taking a train. This time tomorrow, where in God’s name would they be? In a strange world, on their way to a strange world, on their way to the unknown. And Noni, above all——! He closed his eyes to that notion, the notion of that terminus, and watched Key precede him into the street and the mild May evening. Was it going to be all right? He smiled grimly, looking down at the funny little man, and wondered. “The odds are even,” he muttered to himself, “the odds are even, the odds are about even.” He might give twenty-five, he might give fifty—he might give nothing at all. But the fact that he had suggested the drink at the North Station—and something in the persistence of his attention, his dwelling, even though it was in itself somewhat hostile, on the circumstances of the situation, was just possibly indicative of a latent sympathy and desire to help. If he didn’t—but the idea was unthinkable, it was to plunge at once into chaos again, a swarm of irreconcilables and accidentals and impossibles, exactly like the senseless hurry and confusion of Washington Street, which they were crossing towards the subway station. There was no one left to turn to now; no one. Except possibly Edes at the office. But no.
In the crowded subway train, they stood close to the door, Key reading his paper, which he held before him with one hand, the other reaching up for a handhold. His absorption was complete: it was as if he had already forgotten the whole thing, wiped the slate clean. Nothing—not even life and death—could be allowed to come between Key and the stock market. For a moment, Blomberg felt himself becoming angry and bitter, it distressed and shamed him to be thus helpless and at the mercy of another, and so appallingly dependent, moreover: particularly as in the very moment of his self-indulgence he could so sharply visualize, in advance, his telephone call to Noni, and her terrible disappointment. “Hello, Noni—it’s no good.” “Oh no, Blom; no, oh no!” “Yes, Noni, it’s no good. It’s absolutely no good; I can’t raise a single solitary cent more. We’ll have to put it off. We’ll have to wait. We’ve got to think of something else …” “But Blom, we can’t wait, we can’t, you know we can’t, we’ve got to go now!…” And then the dreadful waiting silence, in which they would both listen, as it were, for the sound of comfort, relief, or some impossible reprieve, some sudden and wonderful Christmas tree of an idea which would make everything as simple as daylight. But in vain. They would know that it was in vain. Mexico, that fabulous land, that land of savage ghosts and bloodstained altars, began to swirl and vanish like smoke, undulated once more away from them, foundered like a red cloud. And with it, Noni’s dream.
The train had climbed up out of the subway into the bright light of Canal Street, swaying lightly, the noise died behind them, now they were stopping. Key folded his paper, looked up with amused and primmed mouth. He said:
“Where were you.”
“I was in Mexico already. And enjoying every minute of it.”
He said it bitterly, as they went out on to the elevated platform, and until they had descended the wooden stairs and emerged into the street, Key made no answer. They walked, side by side, toward the far corner of the station front, past the drugstore, the florist, the shoe shop.
“I’ve got fifteen minutes,” Key said, “just time for a nice little nightcap. Not that I won’t have to have another when I get to Concord. Gosh, when I think of Dooley and that car——”
He smirked, and chuckled, remembering; they turned sharp right and entered the horseshoe-shaped bar. As they swung themselves on to the stools, the little white-mustached bartender nodded smiling, and said:
“Whisky?”
“Two!”
The hand was already on the bottle; the glasses were already on the mahogany. Key sipped water through the sparkling cracked ice, then neatly tipped into it the bright jigger of liquor. He said:
“And when do you think you’ll get back?”
“Don’t know. That’s one of the catches. Nobody here knows exactly how long it takes. Might be two weeks, might be a month or more. It’s wonderful, Key, how little anyone knows here about Mexico. Even the railway tickets, they don’t know about—apparently nobody ever dreamed of going down by day coach, without a Pullman, before—I’ve had three different quotations on the cost, and chosen the cheapest: Mr. Albumblatt, at the South Station. Bargaining for railway tickets is a new one! Jew against Jew.”
“Well, I wish you luck. And send me a postcard of the doings.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
“Keep the change.”
“Which reminds me. They don’t even know how often we’ve got to change. Or where. You’d think we were going to the South Pole, or an uncharted jungle! All we know is we’ve got to change at St. Louis, one o’clock the next day, and wait there four hours. After that, we seem to be in a desert. We’ll be like the babes in the wood—none of us ever went west of the Hudson before.…”
Something, in the way he had spoken the last two sentences, sounded a shade too despairing; he hastened to correct the impression, by giving a little laugh, adding:
“But I suppose it will be kind of fun. I’ve always wanted to see my own country first!… Hadn’t you better be moving, Key?”
“Yeah. I’d better be moving.”
Key looked up sidelong at the clock, finished his drink, then with every appearance of leisure took out his wallet, opened it with an air of faint surprise, his eyebrows slightly raised, and extracted from it what looked like a folded check. The perforated edge! He proffered it between two fingers, and smiled cynically.
“You don’t deserve it, Kid, but there’s your hundred. Buy yourself some candy on the train! And if you could get some sense into the head of that crazy woman——”
He was already in easy motion towards the door which led from the bar into the hotel lobby.
“Thanks, Key.”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t tell you what this will mean to Noni.”
They passed through the lounge bar, entered the vast sonorous hall of the station. A truck passed with chattering bell. Key turned, putting out his hand.
“Good luck, Blom. I’m going to run. But I wish to God it was you she was marrying!”
They shook hands silently, then Key began to lope towards his platform, with a final sidelong grin, and wave of the arm, which were somehow almost derisive. In a moment, the absurd little figure was out of sight; and in another Blomberg was standing in an illuminated telephone booth, still smiling to himself while he dialed. Mexico came round him like a cloud of strange voices and faces, sw
armed into and over him, he felt himself trembling a little; it was all beginning, despite everything, and despite his own profound incredulity, to be true. It was true! Fantastic, but true. Noni’s voice, very light and bright, very warm and near, came over the telephone:
“Hello?”
“Noni! Blom speaking. Now be calm. Do you understand? Calm. Be nothing but calm, for I’ve got good news.”
“I’m already calm, Blom. I knew you had.”
“Hell, you mustn’t take the wind out of my sails like that, you confounded woman, you! What fun do I get out of life?”
“Well, I can’t help it, can I, if I know? What have you got.”
“I’ve got, to be exact, one hundred, one hundred, bucks. Count them.”
“Key gave it? Bless his heart.”
“Key gave it, bless his heart!”
“That’s lovely.”
“It is, and I’m now on my way to the South Station to get the tickets from my dear friend Mr. Albumblatt. Did you hear? Albumblatt. Sounds like a piece of music by Bach! The latest quotation was about sixty-four, so I’d better take it. Now do you want me to come and help you pack? Or shut up the house, or anything? Or do you want to see me. And will you tell Gil, or shall I.”
“Gil’s here now.”
“Oh!”
“He’s downstairs.”
“Oh! Then I suggest we meet at the train, South Station, or rather at the platform entrance—the entrance, mind you—at twelve-thirty. O.K.?”
“O.K. And listen, Blom——”
“Listening, Noni.”
“This is important, Blom, dear——”
“Shoot.”
“I said it before, you remember, but I’ll say it again——”
“Speak, my lamb.”
“We must keep the whole thing just as cheerful, and normal, as we can. There mustn’t be the slightest sign—on either your part or mine—to make Gil uneasy. I think we can do that, don’t you? As a matter of fact, it’s going to be rather a lark!”
“Of course, Noni. Word of honor, and cross my heart, and hope I die.…”
Die: he bit his tongue. Damnation! But the clear silver of the reply came without hesitation, and with a little laugh:
“Faux pas number one!”
“Yeah, kick me.”
“I guess that’s all, then. You’ve got the tourist cards——”
“I have, and I’ll have the tickets, and I’ll have my little bag, and I’ll try to pick up a guidebook.”
“Bless you, Blom dear—so we’re off to Clixl Claxl—and a new world!”
“A new world.”
“Good night!”
“Good night.”
He heard the click with which she had hung up the receiver, the little sound of cessation itself, and suddenly a feeling of anguish possessed him; a powerful cramp of pain, shutting about his heart, his vitals, his whole body. It was with just so slight a gesture, at last, that she would finally have taken her leave of them, hung up her receiver on the world. The wire was dead, he listened in vain, then he hung up his own receiver and strode forth into the station again. He smiled grimly, and whistled a ghost of a Bach tune, and thought of the walls of Elsinore, and Key, and Gil; and once more the sound and swiftness of the journey came around him, palpable almost as a stream of light or water. The wheels, the bells, the whistles, the sliding and whirling land, the centripetal and tumultuous descent into the Inferno, the descent into Mexico—Oh God, how were they ever going to endure it? It was as cruel as forgetting, or like throwing flowers into the sea. Flowers into the sea.
II
Boston and Albany—Boston and Albany—Boston and Albany——Boston—Springfield—Westfield—Pittsfield——
Everything had dissolved in time and sound, everything was dissolving and in solution, the only remaining reality was the train. The earth was a dream, the past was a dream—that they had met, the three of them, on the platform of the South Station, Noni in blue, with a blue-winged Viking hat, and the shiny black hatbox, and gladstone bag, laughing, and Gil in a shabby brown tweed suit with a broken suitcase, looking a little solemn and strained through the thick spectacles, and Gil’s flat-chested little sister bringing a book, and himself standing tall and a little embarrassed among them,—Blomberg the crane, Blom the steam shovel—all this was nothing but a kind of vision, a fragment of ether-dream, a little picture seen in a picture book, brightly colored but unreal. It was gone, and Boston was gone, and the Berkshire hills, with the spring buds barely showing, where only a few weeks before he had seen snow under the trees, ice in the ponds, on the Indian-haunted road to Deerfield, these, too, had fled soundlessly away into a past which had now neither meaning nor existence. Those people might still be there, the Berkshires might still be there, and the Puritans who had conquered the Indians, and the wilderness which had conquered the Puritans; but the train, hollowing a golden and evanescent tunnel through the darkness, fleeting and impermanent as a falling star, denied all things but itself. “Good-by, Gil; good-by, Noni,” the flushed little face had cried, with open mouth, and Noni had stooped and kissed her, the black hatbox bumping against her knee, and the book had almost been forgotten, thrust at the last moment under Gil’s arm, it had all been flurried and confused, as with all partings; as if the reality, in its contrapuntal hurry to take shape at all, had somehow not taken, or been able to take, its proper shape, or had even fallen short of reality. “And good-by, Mr. Blomberg,” she had murmured hurriedly, half-averting her face—ah, these Jews, if they’ve got to be Jews, and have Jewish names, they might at least look like Jews—and so on to the train and into motion, and out of time, too, in the sense that they had now become time. All day, all night, the landscape whirling and unfolding and again folding, rising and falling, swooping and melting, opening and shutting, Blomberg gliding evenly among the haunted birches and junipers of the Berkshires, a puritan among puritans—and weren’t the Jews, after all, the oldest puritans in the world?—Blomberg defending the stockade at Deerfield in deep snow, Blomberg bowling at ninepins with the Dutch trolls of the Catskills, Blomberg gazing down from the railway bridge at Hendrik Hudson’s little ship, the Half Moon, which vanished away down the broad river like a rose petal into the sunset. And what was it the Negro porter had said, there on the platform at Albany, while they waited to change trains—said to the fat lady, who insisted that this was the train to Chicago? The train now gave him the rhythm, embodied the burred voices, brought them back alive and eerie out of the past—Okay, lady, you can take it, but if you do you got to change, this ain’t no through train, this train goin’ to Cincinnati, yes, ma’am!
The train to Cincinnati, the train to the west, the south, the train into darkness and nothing—
Unreal, but also uncannily real, the business of settling into the empty car, the car filled with smoke, the forward door open and swallowing smoke, scooping smoke, like a hungry mouth, while they climbed swiftly, and then less swiftly, and at last laboringly, and with delayed rhythms, into the Berkshires, along ledges of rock, above brawling little mountain streams, past deserted farms and stations, tilting slowly round an embanked curve to stare intimately, for a lost moment, into an old apple orchard—settling into this motion, this principle of placelessness, Gil flushing and smiling, self-conscious and awkward, as he lifted Noni’s black hatbox up to the rack, and hung the raincoats. And all the idle chatter, in the empty car, with only half a dozen salesmen for company, and a woman with a child, and the Italian foreman, and the Mexican. “Air-conditioned!” Noni had cried. “Air-conditioned—I like that! But it is, in a way!”—as a particularly thick cloud of smoke whipped downward in a defile and swept over and past them. She had put her handkerchief to her mouth, coughing; it was then that he first thought she was already showing signs of fatigue, signs of strain, signs of the struggle to keep up appearances. And all for Gil, the bewildered but good-natured Gil, Gil peering a little anxiously at them both, perhaps already suspecting a secret, some sort of leag
ue against him, but too decent to ask questions, as yet. As yet! But the time would come. The time was sure to come. It was all absurd, wild, mad, meaningless—what good could it do—what good could it do anyone, Gil least of all! What good can it do, Noni? What good can it do? He said it half aloud, staring out into the shapeless speed of night, through the black lustered window, for he had said it to her so often—on the swan boat, in Boston, as they plied solemnly round and round the little pond in the Public Garden: “No, Blom; you will see,” was all she had said—and in the bar of the Ritz, and in the upstairs cocktail room of the Lincolnshire, eating potato chips and peanuts, “No, Blom, you will see”—and as they walked across the Common towards the golden dome of the State House, showing bright through the fledgling leaves of the beech trees, the elms: “What good can it do, Noni? What good can it possibly do?” And then the blue-winged head turning towards him, almost merrily, with the patient, “No, Blom, you will see!”
Christ, it couldn’t be true, none of it was true! Only the train was true, with its prolonged quadruple cry into the night, its banshee wail across the darkened counties of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—only this was true, and himself sitting with the guidebook on his knee, vibrant as himself—and the blue coat swaying by the window, and the black bag above him in the woven brass rack, the label dangling, too, and swaying, turning now the leather side and now the celluloid. And his long hands, with the dark hairs on the backs of the fingers, and the headache, and the strained eyes.…
But he turned abruptly, and looked back, and there they were: it was true: Noni with her knees drawn up on the seat, lying on her side, her head pillowed in a folded coat against the window sill, the small white hand half-folded beneath her chin, the eyes closed but conscious: and opposite her, across the aisle, the top of Gil’s head, tipped at an angle, the thin tawny hair disarrayed in sleep, showing above the next chair back. Noni was pale, and the eyes, behind the closed eyelids, were thinking. The hand, too, was conscious. She knew the train, she knew the night, in its half-sleep her whole body was aware of the violent magic of time and place which was affronting them, and in its own subtle rhythmical oscillation, half submissive and half reluctant, it made its awareness manifest. With her eyes closed, she was living time, feeling it and taking it, this minute and the next and the next, this hour, this transit, this speed, and all the complications of texture with which they were woven. Her knees, under Gil’s raincoat, the green plush chair back, the two punched ticket vouchers which the conductor had ingeniously wedged in the parallel thumbholds of the window shade, the dimmed lights in a row along the bronze ceiling of the hurrying car, the ever varying sound of the wheels, singing and throbbing beneath them, the weight now thrown to one side now to the other, sudden staccatos of rattles as they clattered over a crossing, and the hard resonant rails now seeming to groove musically upwards almost into one’s body, then to withdraw again, until one felt effortless and ethereal, swung in a circle on the lightest of cords, out into space itself—all this he could see her knowing, even now, almost as if she were saying it aloud to him. All this, and how much more! Noni on the great circle to Mexico, taking her heart as an offering to the bloodstained altar of the plumed serpent, alive now between Gil and himself, and looking with closed face at both of them—her face, closed like a flower, but ready to open as soon as the sun shone—and this, too, she knew and waited for, the sun that was already pursuing them westward across the dark rondure of the turning world. Presently the first ray would leap up over the curve of the earth’s surface, leap after and overtake them, shoot beyond them into the waiting west. St. Louis, the unknown Mississippi River, magnificent red aorta of a rank continent, the Bayous, Missouri, Texas.…