by Conrad Aiken
—As a matter of fact, I’m making the inquiry not on my own account, but for a friend of mine.
—I see.
—Well, do you?
—Well, I mean I’d be very glad——
—It would be rather a confidential matter.
—Well, I guess that would be all right—would you mind telling me who recommended us to you?
—I think that hardly matters. But if you want to know, my friend simply happened to be in your building—in School Street, I think he said—and saw your offices.
—I see.
—You feel you would have to have references?
—Why, no, certainly not, I didn’t mean that, I just wondered how you knew——
—But of course, if there are going to be difficulties, we’d better not be wasting each other’s time——
—Not at all, not at all! Please don’t misunderstand me! I was only——
—My own part in it is simply to make inquiries. It’s a matter of political advertising which requires absolute confidence. Do you understand?
The gentle voice seemed to hesitate, then said:
—Of course. What medium, may I ask, did you have in mind?…
—That hasn’t been wholly decided. What I was going to suggest—will you hold the line a minute while I consult my partner?
—Yes——?
Resting the receiver on the sill beside the bowl of apples, the earpiece downward, he crossed the room to the mantelpiece, lifted the notice of the art show from beside the candle, read it carefully, then went to the Colonial mirror which hung on the rear wall. His back to the light, he peered at the shadowed and elongated face which he saw there, leaned closer to it, grinned at it with a conscious evilness of expression, his hands all the while in his pockets, then turned again toward the window and stood motionless. The thing was so easy as to be meaningless. If it was all going to be as simple as this—! And the poor little man was so eager, so keen to get the job! Waiting there, hardly daring to breathe. Perhaps it would be a good thing to create a danger. If the enemy didn’t hit back——
Returning to the telephone, he lifted it quietly and said:
—Mr. Jones?
—Yes?
—My partner thinks that perhaps the best procedure would be for me to have a talk with you in person. Now as it happens, I’m usually not very free during the day, and I wondered whether it would be possible for me to come and see you this evening somewhere. Would it be convenient for me to call on you at your home, for instance? Or have you a telephone there?
—Why, yes, I guess so——
—I mean, do you live in Boston?
—No, I live in Cambridge. 85 Reservoir Street.
—Reservoir Street. Let’s see, just where is that?
—If you take a Huron Avenue car, it’s only a couple of minutes from the car. I’ll be there all evening, and I’ll be very glad to have a talk with you. I’m sure you’ll find we can give you satisfactory service, and our prices are very reasonable.
—I might come in about nine. Or if not, I’ll perhaps give you a ring in a day or two.
—The Cambridge number is in the book, if you should want to call me there—K. N. Jones.
—I see. K. N. Jones.
—And as I say, I hope we can be of service to you. We’re not a large firm, but I think we know our business as well as most!
Allowing the little boast to hang unanswered and plaintive on the wire for a few seconds, as if for the full savor of its eagerness, and for the completion of the picture, Ammen merely said “Very well,” and hung up the receiver without waiting for any further reply.
In the ensuing silence, it was curiously as if some one had left the room. He replaced the telephone on the table, then began once more to examine Gerta’s odd picture—but as he gazed at that surface of honeycombed silver it was not a lunar volcano, nor Gerta, he was looking at, or looking into, so prolongedly and earnestly, but the identity of K. N. Jones: the little man with the clipped mustache, the tweed hat, the fur-collared coat; the little man with the suave and deliberately ingratiating voice. It was as if he were sitting there, the one who wanted to be killed, in the depths of a mirror, his hands relaxed on the edge of the desk, towards which his curious inward-looking eyes were directed downward. The expression, and the attitude, were those of despair.
What was it, exactly, that had created this impression—which, though faint, was so definite?
And was the situation in any way altered by this?
But why should it be?
Opening Gerta’s little writing bureau, he sat down and looked through the recent letters in the pigeonhole at the right. One from her mother in New York, with details of an attack of sciatica and iodine treatment; a card signed Petra from Washington, with a photograph of the Adams Memorial by Saint Gaudens; his own postcard of two days ago inscribed “Dislocation Number One.” But nothing from Sandbach. Perhaps in the wastebasket? No. And after all, there was no reason why he should have written—yet. Quite likely they had arranged a meeting for today by telephone: to discuss the latest phase of the Ammen situation. And when they did, Sandbach would get a surprise: he would find himself perched on the top of a towering scaffold which had, as it were, grown up under him during the night. A nightmare.
85 Reservoir Street. 85 Reservoir Street!
The day opened swiftly to left and right, like an immense stage from which the scenery was being slid into the wings, the prospect widened, and far off he saw the godlike arm and hand thrust violently downward from the hurrying clouds, the index finger pointing silently at a single house, then gone like a whirlwind. The arm and hand were his own, the house would soon be his, all that was in it would soon be known. A map of Cambridge bought at Amee’s, a taxi from Harvard Square, and before nightfall a new and terrible circle would have been drawn. At the center of it, Jones was beginning to be immortal, beginning to be still.
VIII The Daily Life of the Stranger
The insomnia was not real, was not actual, since there was no real desire to sleep; it was merely the removal, in one dark strip after another, of insulation; the progressive laying bare of the bright nerves of perception; the painless flaying of the dark integument of consciousness. With the turning over, with the listening, now to the murmur of nocturnal water in the pipes, again to the faint tyang of the grandfather clock in the professor’s apartment next door, or again to the intermittent snicker of the little motor in the electric refrigerator; with the lifting of his hand from beneath his head on the pillow, or the sliding of his fingers along the edge of the half-cool sheet; with each separate action of the restlessness which divided, into marked and conscious sections, the time-chasm which would ordinarily have been void and unconscious, it was as if he stepped closer to his own true being and purpose. On the hours, which came softly on soft air from the dark campanile of Saint Paul’s,—the twelve, the one, the two—came also an incandescent indifference to sleep. To these and other sounds he could be as inaccessible as he wished, as little touched as by the diagonal of cold lamp light, from Massachusetts Avenue, which made a pale remoteness of the ceiling and threw into humble relief the little Buddha on its shelf. These immediate things, his room, his window, his bed, the soft sucking sound made by the curtains in the study against the wire screens, the creaking of a ventilator on the roof of the A. D. Club across the street, were in fact as remote as they could be: they stood at an infinite distance; to cross time and space to them would be like crossing the Milky Way. Their remoteness, of course, lay in their comparative unreality. They belonged now to another and dimmer time-space, they seemed so distant and so silent, measured by the nearness and loudness of his own heart, as to be without meaning and without motion.
And not heart so much as vision.
The vision was this little man, who now so obsessed him: this little man, his house, his clothes, his name, his daily orbit. He was here, in this room: walked like a fly across the ceiling, as if the ceiling were the la
rge white map—(now pinned to the wall over the table in the next room)—of Cambridge: on that map, with its concentric circles which marked the distance, in quarter miles, from the City Hall, a whole week of the life of Jones was now over and over again enacted. He opened his door in Reservoir Street, stooped to pick up The Herald, went in again. He opened the door later, and came out. From the little copper letter box—first unlocking it with a key—he extracted letters, glanced over them, selected some, replaced others. He walked to Huron Avenue, crossed it, and proceeded west to a block of one-story dingy shops between Fayerweather Street and Gurney Street; entered a grocer’s and left an order; then came out to wait for a streetcar. At half past five in the afternoon, he reappeared, carrying an evening paper; looked again in the letter box; unlocked the green door. The upper part of the door was of glass, and from across the street he could be seen going up a flight of stairs which turned to the left.…
His life went by the clock. He came out, to go in again; he went in, to come out again. The streets in which he walked were always the same. Perhaps that was why he so seldom lifted his odd, amused eyes or bothered to look left or right. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—on Friday he had left early, at a few minutes after eight, and come back at four. And at the other end of his life, the School Street end, his goings and comings were just as precise, just as methodical. Always the same route, the same apparently meaningless circuit round Pemberton Square, the pause for the reflective cup of coffee, then the accelerated descent of Beacon Street to the office. And at half past twelve, three-quarters of an hour for lunch, sometimes at a sandwich shop in Province Court, sometimes at the Waldorf in Bromfield Street.
He walked on the ceiling like a fly: it was easy to see him there: easy to meet him, at the bottom of those awful little streets: he came quite suddenly around the corner of Vassal Lane, for example, so suddenly that Ammen jumped, and laughed, for a moment forgetting that Jones did not know him by sight. To turn and saunter away, obliquely across the street, with averted face, and taking cover behind a coal truck, had been very simple. Vassal Lane. That had been an exception, too, in the routine, for Jones had gone there, to the house at the corner of Alpine Street, the first thing in the morning, directly after breakfast. Moreover, he had gone there as if with hesitation: to begin with he had passed it, merely pausing to look rather earnestly at the door; and he had then sauntered, rather slowly, all the way to Fresh Pond Avenue. There, standing across the street from the Pumping station, he had waited for fully five minutes, alternately staring at the pond and the row of half-fledged willows by the station. A dark day, with now and then a little spatter of rain. On the way back, he went into the house—a two-family house like his own—and stayed there about five minutes. It was the sudden meeting with him, at the corner of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street—(he hadn’t thought Jones would have had time to get so far)—that had first suggested the advisability of hiring a drive-yourself car. Sitting in the closed Buick, parked now at one place and now at another, but usually on the south side of Huron Avenue, it had been easy to see without being seen. For the observation of the area immediately round the house, it was in fact ideal: but of course no good for following. For that, it had been necessary either to board Jones’s streetcar at Appleton Street, having seen him get on, or to lie in wait for him at the top of the ramp in Harvard Square.… Thanks to the little man’s regularity, both had been quite simple.
The neighborhood was detestable—it ought to be burned down. With all its inhabitants. A typical suburban swarm of wooden two-family houses, all exactly alike, brown shingles, dirty white-railed porches and balconies, one or two with projecting flagpoles. Here and there an attempt had been made at a clipped privet hedge: but for the most part the little front yards were bare, except for a forsythia bush or two. At exact intervals, for miles, the cement walk branched in toward a porch, from which opened two doors, one for the lower part of the house, one for the upper. On the right of each house another narrower cement path led to the cellar doors, at the rear. It was along this—on Monday evening—that he had seen Jones, with bare pink hands, bareheaded and wearing an old black sweater, trying to roll a heavy ash can on its rim. It was too much for him—it kept sitting down, wrenching itself away from his fingers. But after a deep breath or two, the hands still resting on the rims, the head bowed, he managed to heave it up again and to roll it a little farther toward the street,—toward the grimy border of ringed earth at the curbstone where week after week it waited for the ash man. The entire street was marked in this fashion. In front of each shabby little house was the deep pair of rings, grooved in the earth, where ash can and garbage can rested. And the inevitable residue of onionskin and eggshell and orange peel.… Sickening.
The clock in the professor’s room sounded, through the thin walls, its tyang—half past two.
He thought of the map, with its concentric circles,—Reservoir Street, one and three-quarter miles from City Hall, at its south end, where it joined Highland Street; but where Jones lived, a little farther. By Yellow Taxi, a fifty-cent fare from the Square.
K. N. Jones. 85 Reservoir Street.…
It had turned out to be Karl—not Kenneth, as he had guessed.
But who was the woman who was seen now and then passing the windows, with a white cloth bound over her hair? It had been impossible to make out whether she was old or young, or what she looked like. Once she had come down the outside stairs at the back, to the cement path, but before he could get a good look at her she had rapped her dustpan twice, sharply, on the edge of the ash can, and gone in again. It might be either his wife or his mother. It might be his sister. It was even possible that there were two women, not one; for occasionally she had seemed taller than he expected. But of this it was difficult to judge. Whoever it was, or whoever they were, thus far they had never come out of the house while he was watching. Probably his wife.
The curious thing was the repugnance which the actual scene had aroused in him from the beginning—from the very beginning. There was something really loathsome in it. The paltry houses, the ill-paved street, the ash cans, the litter, the air of furtiveness and meanness and defeat which overhung the whole neighborhood—there had been something in this which seemed a little outside his calculations. Of course, the unexpected was to be expected. Jones, Karl Jones, was not the sort of fellow who would be found living in a huge and grand apartment house—far from it.
The cheap fur collar had not meant that.
Nor the tweed hat.
But to find just this kind of meanness and sordidness, the sight of Jones wheeling an ash can with bare hands, then dusting, with dusty hands, the ash from the knees of worn trousers——
And all with such an air of good cheer and confidence. The cock-sparrowlike sideways tilt of the head, the ridiculous little strut of accomplishment with which he returned along the cement path! This was something to tighten the muscles in one’s arms, to contract the fingers, to narrow the eyes. But just the same——
No, the objection was not real, could not be real, all this was a natural part of the strangeness, it was inevitable; and in its way, also, it was a fine enough sharpening of the whole point that in its discovery it should bring with it a pullulating ant heap of new and all-too-human experience: to have blundered thus into such an unforeseeable quagmire of the deformed and spiritually unvirtuous—horrible though it might be—was of the very essence of the chosen adventure. To think, for instance, only of the names of those streets, as contrasted with their actual nature—Vassal Lane, Alpine Street, Fayerweather, Fresh Pond Avenue—Alpine, of all things, in a district as flat as a dried river bed, and as noisome! And all the shabby purlieus, moreover, of filled-in clay pits and mudholes, acres of festering tomato tins and sardine tins, rusted fragments of cars, old bedsprings, blown paper, greasy rags. When the wind came from the northwest, one smelt a sour and acrid smell of slow burning, the animal odor of smoldering human refuse, worse than the ghats of India: it drifted day-long
from the reclaimed quarries by Fresh Pond, covering the entire forlorn suburb of wretched houses in its bitter miasma. To think, in the morning, of opening one’s windows to that! In the evening, if one walked forth toward the pond, in search of the picturesque, perhaps a sunset over Belmont to lift one’s eyes to, one saw also the shadowy and sinister figures which poked, like hobgoblins, at a score of sickly little flames in that waste land, prodding with sticks to see if here or there some object might be salvaged from the heaps of refuse. Only the trees, in that district, had any dignity, the willow-trees;—and especially the one, an old one, with a trunk as massive as an oak, which stood at the junction of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street. And this had been useful. Its great girth gave excellent cover.
Of course Jones was poor—no one would live in a neighborhood like that if he could help it. If the Acme Advertising Agency did any business at all, it must be infinitesimal. No further proof of this was needed than that he had himself, twice, spent part of a morning in the bare hall outside the office—not a soul had come or gone in the whole time. And of course Mister T. Farrow must be a thing of the past—if he existed, he had at any rate never been seen. Perhaps Jones had just bought the name and good will. Anyway, apparently, Jones just sat there—three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon—without doing a thing. Once or twice, the telephone had rung, but it had been impossible to overhear what Jones was saying—it might even have been his wife.
What did he do there?
Perhaps that was where the whisky came in. Though he never showed any signs of it.
Or perhaps most of his business was mail-order advertising, the preparation of sales-letters—which could be managed largely by correspondence. A typewriter could be heard there intermittently, and used, moreover, with quite respectable speed. But always, then, came the long silence. In fact, it had soon become only too obvious that the fruitful end for observation was not the business, but the domestic, end of Jones’s little life-pattern—the study of the house, although a great deal more difficult, would in time be more rewarding. But how to manage this? To be seen hanging about there day after day, or even sitting in a car, would ultimately attract attention—it might not be Jones, it might be any one, but it would be dangerous. There was the problem of the postman, for instance.…