King Coffin: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  He crossed Tremont Street, entered the drug store, found an empty telephone booth by the front window, and began dialing with the stem of his pipe. In the next booth a voice was saying but I can’t, but you see it would already be too late, I’m way in here at Park Street, a woman’s voice, peevish and whining, softened and made more nasal by the wooden partition. He half turned to listen.

  —Hello?

  —Ammen speaking. I wanted to be clear——

  —Oh, Jasper; did you get my note?

  Gerta’s voice was anxious, a trifle high-pitched. She was self-conscious.

  —I wanted to be clear that there would be no one else there.

  —Of course. If there’s any one else I’ll send them away. I thought that would be understood, my dear.

  —All right. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or half an hour. I don’t expect to loiter at the meeting, if I stay at all.

  —Very well, if——

  He cut off the phrase by hanging up the receiver. No doubt she was now saying Jasper, hello, Jasper, hello, hello, while already he clasped the brass handle of the door. He listened again to the voice in the adjacent booth—but I said I was in here at Park Street, yes, at Park Street—and then went out. Like all fragmentary or uncompleted remarks, as in fact like Gerta’s unfinished phrase, it had an oddly ominous ring, a ring of fatality; and one’s sense of power arose precisely from the fact that one could thus cut them off oneself. As one should.

  And what now should be said to little Sandbach?

  He walked rapidly with the beginnings of the sentences, touched them against his teeth lightly with the cool pipe stem, let them down with him from the curb in Bromfield Street to pick them up again on the other side, allowed them to be dispersed by the lurid placard of announcements in the lobby of the Temple and to fall behind him on the wide stairs. His shadow rose huge and high-shouldered on the bare wall of the second story, dislocated itself sideways, raised an immensely long arm, and vanished against the open door, from which came the sound of several voices in animated talk. His shadow had, in fact, gone in ahead of him, and he followed it into the room with the feeling of having an immense advantage.

  There were half a dozen irregular little rows of folding chairs, and beyond these, by the little platform, Sandbach was talking with a few people, only a handful, it was clear that the meeting was a complete failure. Mrs. Taber was there, smiling her perpetual sweet smile under a pale purple bonnet, that immortal bonnet, and her husband the shyster lawyer, and Mrs. Hays the amateur psychoanalyst.

  —Here he is now.

  Sandbach crooked his elbow and pointed at him, pointed with his cigar, the dozen faces turned and looked at him with silent appraisal. They all seemed more than ever small and shabby, ridiculous, unreal, and as he bore down on them with his six feet two, stooping slightly forward, he was aware of playing Gulliver in Lilliput, his shadow was over them like a vast wing.

  Sandbach, as always when he was a little frightened, smiled too much and looked cunning, his face seemed to be all width and no height, the eyes and mouth made long insinuating horizontals. Difficult to say where the Asiatic began and the Semitic left off, it was very fawning and subtle, no doubt about that, one could see in him the uneasy fertility which attracted Gerta.

  —What do you think, Ammen, what do you say, the meeting is so small, it is a pity, this is our comrade Breault, shake hands with him, we thought as it was so small we wouldn’t try to have any speeches, but just have a little talk together, maybe. We could all go to my room in Allston Street. If you could come along, we were waiting for you.

  Mrs. Taber put her skinny little hand on his arm, and cooed.

  —Now do come, Mr. Ammen, I’m sure we need a little of your fine young cynicism!

  He looked over their heads toward the windows, then round the bare and sordid little room with its air of cheap varnish, he remembered the excitement of his first meeting here, when it had seemed that something real and vigorous was being done, something dangerous and profound. It had suddenly shrunk to the size of his hand.

  —No, Sandbach, I told you in my postcard that I was finished, I’m sorry, I just dropped in to tender my formal resignation. I’m afraid I no longer see any use in it.

  —I see. He no longer sees any use in it. If he ever did!

  —The sneer is gratuitous, but I had foreseen it.

  —You had foreseen my sneer? I made no sneer, I think I merely stated a fact.

  Mr. Taber began laughing offensively, then turned his back and walked away. Mrs. Hays, dressed in black, and as usual trying to look sibyline, put her head on one side and smiled condescendingly. Beneath their anger and hurt pride, of course, was their disgusting disappointment in losing his money, it was his own money which had paid for Breault. It was as if they were his employees, his servants, and he had dismissed them, their anger and hatred was slavish and cringing, they were clinging together against him.

  —I didn’t come here to argue with you, but simply to make a statement. Unfortunately I find that neither your ideas nor your feelings have any reality or importance whatever. I’m afraid I was mistaken in you—or mistaken in myself, which comes to the same thing.

  —Aren’t you carrying your subjective idealism pretty far? Now, Breault, you can see what happens when young men read too much Berkeley.

  —I can assure Mr. Breault that your concern about my reading doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I think you’re all a little grotesque, it seems to me a little shameful that I ever thought I had anything in common with you.

  —Very well, I don’t think we need to say anything further.

  —You aren’t dismissing me—I’m dismissing you. I’ll be grateful, but not excessively so, if you’ll take my name off your mailing list, and send back my books. Good night.

  He looked at Breault, who was embarrassed and blushing, and felt that he hadn’t yet done full justice to the situation. He laughed and put on his hat, then turned to Sandbach again.

  —If you only knew how funny you are!

  —Is anything to be gained from bad manners or impudence?

  —Manners are of the mob, Sandbach, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  He swung his back to them and walked toward the door, a woman’s voice said why he thinks he’s God Almighty, Sandbach and Breault had begun laughing very loudly, somebody whistled turkey-in-the-straw. From the door he half turned and waved his hand. For a moment all the faces were quite still, it was like a photograph, and his final impression of them was that they were all hungry.

  III The Background

  The evening had deepened, with the completion of this action, but again it was only as if the evening were a mere projection of himself, and its deepening, or his own deepening, was of course due to the very fact that the action had not been entirely satisfactory. It would have been better if he had made a formal address, a formal and drastic analysis: if he had dissected their pitifulness and futility before their very eyes, shamed them, horrified them. He could have quoted Martin—“I am sick of this oozing democracy. There must be something crystalline and insoluble left in democratic America. Somewhere there must be people with sharp edges that cut when they are pressed too hard, people who are still solid, who have impenetrable depths in them and hard facets which reflect the sunlight. They are the hope of democracy, these infusible ones.” To hell with their crowd-mindedness, their weak and slavish dependence on each other! What had their little anarchism to do with this? It was a contradiction in terms, an absurdity, they were themselves absurdities, and their unfitness was as clear in their sheeplike instinct of banding themselves together as in their sheeplike faces. Yes, this would have been better, he ought to have done it, but as usual his own sense of hurry—was it that?—had impeded him, his anger had produced the usual short circuit. At such moments one’s mere animal disgust became paramount, it was impossible to do anything but turn one’s back, it was a choice between that and killing them.

  To kill the
m, yes: what was necessary was a machine gun.

  The beautiful terribleness of the deed!

  He stood still in the dark canyon of Beacon Street, between the somber stone walls of his own canyon, at the bottom of his own sky, at the center of his own world, and aimed his pipe stem like a gun across the paving stones toward a small crowd which stood before one of Houghton and Dutton’s windows. The fascinating impulse was already quivering in his index finger. The stupid backs were cut in two by death’s mechanical rattlesnake chatter, the plate glass window was drilled shrilly from side to side, the falling glass made an irregular tinkling and chiming, and then everything was again silent. It was toward a group of dead men that he crossed the street, it was a group of corpses that he joined before the window, and looking over the heads he saw that the window had been turned into a little zoo, it was a cage of monkeys. A dozen little gray monkeys, with long ratlike tails, skipped, sat, or swung, stared sadly, peered out of kennels, or made rapid circuits of the interior, scarcely seeming to touch floor, wall, trapeze or platform in their soundless flight. Close to the window, in the foreground, oblivious of the onlookers, one of them picked with fastidious little black fingers at the posterior of another, and tasted what he found: the crowd laughed obscenely, face turned grinning toward grinning face, their animal blood thickened and darkened. It was Sandbach observing the obscenity of Sandbach, the foulness was irremediable.

  Sandbach, speaking of treachery!

  He turned away, up the hill, in the deepened evening, the darkened world, felt in every direction and dimension the swift growing and extension of new structure, new thrusts and explorations into the infinite, but all of it a little crazy, perhaps, a little headlong and awry. Why was this? The affair of the meeting had been, certainly, only a partial success, it was in some measure because he had gone there with his plans unformulated, with nothing but his anger and contempt, and therefore it had got beyond his control: or at any rate, his control had not been quite perfect. This remained tethered to him, as by threads or eyebeams, as if himself, the puppetteer, had become subtly and dangerously entangled in the threads of his own puppets, could not quite escape from them, found their voices still at his ears, like gnats. The meeting was still there, in Tremont Temple, Sandbach was still breathing thickly down his nose at Breault, Mrs. Taber cooed her professional old-lady’s sweetness, they stood in a group round the varnished platform and chattered about manifestos and propaganda and the founding of a paper or the revival of The Voice of the People, in Saint Louis, or The Anarchist, in Boston, or whether the No Hat Club might be re-established, or they should join the Socialists, secretly, and operate “from within.” Now perhaps they were rustling down the stairs, they were saying his name, Ammen, and again Ammen, laughing angrily, they walked in twos and threes into Pemberton Square and past the dark courthouse, under the dark windows made foul with the piled nests of pigeons. They must be dismissed, they had been dismissed, their path lay now at right angles with his. They had gone to Sandbach’s bleak room in Allston Street, to look adoringly at the portrait of Bakunin which hung above the fireplace of smooth-carven white marble, relic of a capitalist past.

  Dismissed. His fumbling amateurish past dismissed, his slave-self strangled and cast out. He would be an infusible one. He said aloud—egoism is the essence of the noble soul, every star is a similar egoist, I revolve like Nietzsche proudly amongst my proud equals. But then from the street and the houses, the hill of houses around him, came the ugly shapes of his amateurish past, the sordid ill-directed history of two years, the voices and faces of Sandbach, Gottlieb, Toppan, Mrs. Taber, Gerta (but with exceptions), the frequenters of the esthetic little candlelit restaurants on the hill, the shadowy denizens of the radical “parties,” smelly young women and unwashed young men. It had been a mistake, a miscalculation, but need one be too concerned about it? It was all there, no doubt, it was a part of him, this alien city was a part of him, was in a sense himself, it could be accepted and dismissed. It had now become simply a background, it had receded from him, like the evening itself with its pale stars, it would henceforth serve merely as the rich backdrop for the action to come. And for this purpose all that scene of the past would be useful: the meetings at Tremont Temple, at the printing press in Hanover Street, in Gerta’s room or Sandbach’s, the midnight conclaves at the C Bookshop: Gottlieb’s drinking parties, the literary young men and women, the lesbians and pansies, the endless pseudo-intellectual talk, the indiscriminate alcoholic amorousness: it now died away drowsily like the chorus fading off stage at the opera, fading and dying before the coming of that profound and meaningful silence in which the action will suddenly deepen to tragedy.

  The action to come.

  He quickened his step at the thought of it, the shape of it urged him forward, but at the same time he wanted to delay the meeting with Gerta, and crossed Beacon Street into the Common. Had Gerta, in fact, also become unimportant, dropped into that background? The idea was just faintly disagreeable. To cut oneself off, yes—but might Gerta still be useful? actively, or receptively, useful? Some one to talk to, but of course only partially, not with complete confidence. One must be aware of her duplicity henceforth, the doubleness supplied by Sandbach: Sandbach’s shadow would be always just over her shoulder. What one said to her must be calculated therefore for a double purpose, the echo must be taken into account, and this in itself would actually be amusing …

  He sat down on the bench under the light below Walnut Street. Two men came down the stone steps, talking, one of them paused to strike a match.

  —Well, I’m a great soup-eater. I’m very fond of soup. Now I’ll eat meat only once a day as a rule, but I’m very fond of soup …

  They went down the curved brick path toward the pond, talking about soup. This too to know! But Gerta was waiting there, leaning out of her window with a bitten apple, Gerta was the question, and perhaps the answer was in the affirmative. And perhaps especially, perhaps all the more so, because now, with the intervention of Sandbach, something of the purely personal pressure between them would have ceased: the relation could be calm, sexless, cerebral: the other aspect or possibility would be once and for all removed. He could make her listen, make her the receptacle of his hate, compel her to be, as it were, the praegustor of his new poisons, observe her horror. She could be forced into a half unwilling alliance, and one of which she would of course intensely disapprove. And she wouldn’t dare to interfere, she wouldn’t dare to discuss it with Sandbach. Or would she? And if she did, would it so much matter? But how much should he tell her? She posed as a liberal, a radical, as emancipated—but how much would she dare? To test and press her, in this direction, would be delicious, would be an important part of the venture, the experiment—yes, she would be indispensable——

  He ran up the steps, remembered how once he had found there, on just such an evening, a woman’s handkerchief and ten dollars in neatly folded bills, touched the iron railing with his hand, and in another moment, admitted by the old Negress, Sally, was on his way up the carpeted stairs. Apollo stood listening in his plaster niche in the curved wall, as well he might: from the front room, that of the two gay girls from Haverhill, came the sound of the eternal radio, did you ever see a dream walking, well I did, did you ever hear a dream talking, well I did, he heard them laughing, and through the partly open door saw one of them, the younger one, in her knickers, her back turned, one foot on a stool to pull up a stocking.

  On the floor above, a shaft of soft light across the stair rail told him that Gerta’s door was also open, she was standing between the two candles by the fireplace, her elbows on the mantel behind her, wearing her blue painter’s smock, she had let down her hair, which had fallen in dark ringlets on her shoulders. Her sleeves were rolled up, her arms were bare. The effect was calculated and she looked at him gravely. Keeping his hat on, he said:

  —Don’t you ever get tired of your esthetic candles?

  —I think they’re very restful. I notice y
ou use them yourself.

  —I have them, it’s a concession, but I don’t use them. I suppose you had a reason for lighting one of them?

  —Simply to light up your lovely death mask.

  —That’s very apropos.

  —What?

  —Nothing.

  —I’ll put them out if you like.

  —Don’t bother.

  He went to the window and looked out at the Charles River Basin, the rows of lights along the Esplanade reminded him once again of the Steinlen lithograph, Ballade d’Hiver, it was as if winter had returned, the snow was falling.

  —Why have you been avoiding me, Jasper.

  —Have I been avoiding you?

  —Of course. But I don’t think we need to be quite so dramatic with each other.

  —I wasn’t aware of any drama?

  —Then what about your postcard. Postcards. Dislocation number one and number two.

  He turned around, looked down at her somber face, white and calm between its dark parentheses of hair, and smiled. He had her in the palm of his hand.

  —I’m afraid I move too quickly for you, don’t I?

  —Why can’t you be simpler? The whole thing is quite simple.

  —I didn’t say it wasn’t. You merely mistake my insistence on clearness for drama. That’s why I say I move too quickly for you: you don’t follow me: neither you nor Sandbach. You and Sandbach.

  She was in the act of seating herself, crossing her knees, she looked upward at him with baffled affection, deliberate affection, and he returned the gaze downward with a conscious narrowing of his eyes, but amiably. She stroked her silk-stockinged knee with a fingertip, ruffling the smock’s edge to do so.

  —Me and Sandbach: you put us together invidiously, don’t you.

  He took off his hat and bowed.

  —Again too quick, but not drama. Perhaps in due course I’ll tell you all about it. My postcards were a mere statement. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to give you a signal.

  —I don’t say you owed me anything, but we’ve been good friends, we might even have been better——