King Coffin: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  —They don’t answer, shall I——

  —Try them again, please, there should be someone there.

  —I’ll try them again.

  The little lost bell went on crying in its widening wilderness; with each repetition of the doubled sound the universe seemed vaster and emptier; it was as if Jones’s front room had become the seed of a world. To be the cause of this, to be sending into the void the small sharp signal from which should radiate such an expansion of significance, was both imposing and frightening. This act of creation-at-a-distance perhaps involved responsibilities: and the wider the expansion of the universe before one provoked an answer, the more freighted with consequences might eventually be the answer itself. Listening, with the receiver loosely held against his ear, he looked out through the small windows towards the garage at the back of Hampden Hall, noted the wrecking car which stood at the top of the concrete runway, and the strong curve of the steel crane, and then suddenly there was a cessation of the ringing, a faint sound as of clearance, and a voice.

  —Hello? Karl Jones speaking.

  The voice was flat, soft, tired, he smiled affectionately as he heard it, it was as if Jones had come into the room and were about to be greeted with the very warmest of reassurances.

  —Ah, Mr. Jones. Perhaps you’ll remember that I called you up a little while ago about some advertising, political advertising.

  —Yes?

  —Well, now, I’ve had time for a careful discussion with my partner, our plans are fairly definite, and before we go any farther I’d like very much to have a talk with you.

  —Yes——

  —Now, my partner lives out in the country just beyond Bedford, near Concord, and I wonder if you would care to let me drive you out there, say tomorrow afternoon or evening sometime, to discuss it!

  —Not tomorrow, no, I’m sorry——

  —No?

  —No. You’ll have to excuse me, I can’t talk to you now——

  —Oh——

  —You see, everything is upset, we’ve had an accident, my wife has just had a stillborn baby—just this evening——

  —Oh, I’m very sorry—I’m extremely——

  —And tomorrow is impossible, as the funeral is in the morning at Mount Auburn——

  —I see, of course——

  —Yes, I’m sorry.

  —I suppose not for a day or two then——

  —No, I’m sorry.

  —In that case of course I don’t want to detain you, but would Friday perhaps be all right, do you think?

  —Perhaps Friday. Yes, Friday would be all right.

  —Suppose then I give you a ring at your office Friday morning, and we’ll arrange a meeting.

  —Yes, very well. You’ll have to excuse me now——

  —Certainly. I’m afraid I——

  —Good night.

  —Good night.

  He hung up the receiver on its hook, in imagination he listened to the retreating footsteps of Jones, the footsteps hurrying quickly up the stairs to that bright and dreadful bedroom on the third floor, on the ceiling of which the shadows were perhaps now again in motion. The footsteps were running up the stairs, the conversation on the telephone was already forgotten, Jones was returning to that sordid and huddled little human scene. The woman lay on a bed in the corner, a raised hospital bed, perhaps raised on wooden blocks, she was naked, her lifted knees were apart, beside the bed was a white enameled pail, a table with an enamaled tray on which were bloody cloths, steel instruments, forceps. Jones was returning to that stupefying smell of ether, to that hurried and meaningful silence, to the dead child and the unconscious woman, the doctor and the nurse. Sometimes, in such cases, didn’t they use artificial respiration? In another room, in one of the other rooms, one of the bedrooms at the back, the doctor was perhaps working over the small body of the child, blowing into its blue mouth, trying to warm it to life. Outside the door, Jones, as he passed, could hear him working, knew already that it was useless, went on to the front room to help the nurse. The woman lay on the bed in the corner, unconscious, she didn’t yet know, later she would have to be told. In the meantime, the pail must be emptied, its contents must be burned in the furnace. While the nurse stayed with the woman, Jones took the pail and went down to the cellar. In the cellar, he noticed that some one had spilled the wastebasket on the concrete floor, had left it lying there amongst the litter. He paid no attention to it, went slowly towards the furnace.…

  The front door of Hampden Hall creaked slightly, Jack was coming in with the dustcloth in his hand. The scene in Jones’s house suddenly became as small and remote as the picture in the finder of a camera, tilted brightly off and vanished, like a drop of light sliding off a leaf. He passed Jack on the stairs, and without sensible lapse of time was reading his father’s letter in the elevator. The glib phrases were sickening, were like a sickness. Wash my hands of you. Grateful if you’d be so considerate as to keep my name out of the courts. The writer of this anonymous letter says——

  The lights in the apartment were turned on, he must have forgotten to switch them off, he dropped the envelope and the letter under the table on the floor and without thinking went straight to the whisky bottle in the kitchenette, poured half a wine glass full, and drank it straight. The writer of this anonymous letter. Who could this be but Sandbach, who but Sandbach—behind whom was Gerta no doubt, and perhaps Toppan as well. But perhaps not Gerta? No, not Gerta, Gerta would have given him a more specific warning, she would have said something tonight if she had known, after all Gerta was honorable. Honorable? He began to laugh, laughed louder and louder, putting both hands down flat on the butterfly-table; his head hung lower and lower over the table as he laughed, the spasms of laughter wheezed into silence, and he found himself studying carefully the grain of the table, on the waxed surface of which two tears had fallen. It was extremely funny.

  But it was impossible to stay here.

  He could perhaps go up on to the roof, look down from there at the traffic in Massachusetts Avenue.

  Or down to the river and the stadium.

  Instead, a few minutes later, he found himself walking into Harvard Square, bought a paper, went into Gustie’s and had a quick drink, crossed the street to the delicatessen place and had another. He held the paper before him with both hands and gazed at it without reading it, listening half-consciously to the talk.

  —well, I should worry, I told him if he didn’t come by half past ten it would be gone, and it’s gone.

  —served him right.

  —Sure. It’s his own funeral. Next time——

  —crazy as a bedbug.

  —and two whisky sours, that’s three to come!

  —and besides I don’t think he could really afford it. No, I don’t.

  —You don’t think so.

  —No, I don’t think so.

  —can’t make out what his position is there, he’s always coming in, every evening, and they give him a handout——

  —I heard he was unfrocked for something.

  —poor themselves, too; Ada, she’s the oldest, working as a cigarette girl at the Palace——

  —No. It’s a local beer. Only local.

  He turned away from the counter, rising, went out, proceeded along Boylston Street till he came to the river, stood on the bridge and looked down at the dark luster of the water. Two men were standing close together on the float of the boathouse, talking intermittently in low voices: one of them stooped, put his hand into the water, then stood up again and wiped it with a handkerchief. They went slowly up the gangway into the club, which was dark, he heard the door close behind them, and at that moment he felt a single drop of rain on the back of his wrist. The sky was covered with broken clouds, ragged and hurrying, it was like a disordered mind, like a flight of disordered thoughts: with his hands on the parapet of the bridge, he tilted his head back and watched them, so long and so intently that at last he felt it was not the clouds which were moving but hi
mself. And when he turned away, it was with such an acute feeling of giddiness that for a second he thought he was going to fall.

  XII What It Is to Be a Stranger

  If the whole apartment house had seemed hostile, on his return to it in the evening, and uglier and more prisonlike than ever after his telephone talk with Jones from the pay station in the hall (in the shadow of the elevator), it now seemed, in the soundless turmoil of time, nothing but an enormous and elaborate trap. Lying down for the twentieth time, fully dressed, on the dark bed in the dark room, he stared through the little square of window: not for any sight of the clouded and hurrying sky, but for a sharper vision of Hampden Hall. In mid-air, it was if he could reverse himself, return from halfway across the street (or from the roof of Widener Library) to see his own building from outside; as if in fact he were a bird, looking in through his own window, looking cynically downward at the dark figure on the bed which was himself. Seen thus, under the hurrying heavens, the building was simply nothing but a monster: it stood upright and unapologetic, in the midst of the mad universe, a queer hard brickwork organism with hot metal arteries and tingling nerves of copper, breathing the night air through huge vent holes on a flat roof of tar and gravel. Inside it were the human lice on which it nourished itself—it had gathered them together for the night. Among these of course was himself, lying there with his hands beneath his head; now staring out past the roof of the A.D. Club to meet the gaze of his projected spirit, which hung there like an angel in modern dress, now returning for a scrutiny of the little Buddha on its shelf. It was a prison, a trap; but it was more than that, worse than that—the whole building had seemed somehow sinister as he approached it; and after the telephone talk with Jones it had begun to seem definitely evil. The impulse to take flight had been sharp enough, he had wanted to hurry out again at once, to go anywhere, to drive a car madly into the country, even perhaps simply to go to town and get drunk. But disgust had inhibited this impulse, disgust and something else—a fear, a suspicion, an uneasy edge of self-doubt. Not fear, no—disgust, disgust, disgust, this queer new horror which, rising periodically in the back of his mind, almost on the back of his tongue, made him want to close his eyes lest he should see the world in the very act of changing its shape. And all this was not because of the telephone talk with little Jones, of course not, not at all—at most the telephone talk was a part of it, it had certainly not changed anything. No, what was sickening was the way in which all the details of his plans, his scheme, were now at every point working so well together but in a sense not quite his own: as if his own speech came back to him, from a mouthpiece, translated into an unfamiliar language. There was an ugly sort of distortion in it, everything was meanly and sneeringly caricatured, as by concave and convex mirrors; it was like the strange drawling and snarling sounds which quite ordinary and pleasant words or voices can become in a dream. With a desire to escape this he had thought of going to town, or even of simply taking a long walk, but at once to realize that the thing was inescapable. Much better had been the impulse to put it all down, to make the last entries in his journal of the adventure, add the last date to the column of dates on the map, and even to attempt to codify these impressions as if for the novel. Almost immediately, he had found himself trying to outline a queer sort of essay, a philosophic essay, but not quite philosophic either, perhaps psychological was what he meant, but of course without in the least being able to get at the thing: he had written intermittently for hours, now and again going out to walk from end to end of the long dimly lighted corridor, pausing at the one end to look down toward the river, and at the other to watch a late car or two speeding urgently along Massachusetts Avenue. All night, the world had seemed full of clocks—the grandfather clock in the professor’s apartment sent its soft tyang through the walls, Memorial Hall and Saint Paul’s dutifully and sadly echoed each other, the dreary wooden steeple of the Unitarian Church added its deeper note; but even with these to mark the passage of his feet along the corridor, the expensive shoes placed swiftly one in front of the other, the heels slightly scuffed and dragging, his eyes intent on the slight swerve with which the right foot as if carelessly placed itself, even with these the sense of time had not been so much marked as diffuse. He had got up only to sit down again, had flung himself on the bed only again to rise and begin walking, or had paced the crooked corridor only once more to sit down and try to write. It might be four o’clock, it might be five. Above Beck Hall, the sky had begun to brighten. There was a little patter of rain, a little grazing of rain, on the window. It was as if it had touched his skin, it stung him to a sudden but perhaps false alertness, he jumped up and went back to the table, looked sharply at the map, sat down.

  His father’s letter——

  It lay on the floor between his feet, the phrases of it looked up at him like round eyes—he had flung it there to forget it, flung it down in anger and hatred, but now it watched him. The phrases had of course stuck in his mind, only because they had so sickened him with anger and disgust—the typewritten phrases of a typical businessman’s smoothness and complacency. I do not presume to advise—as you are doutbless aware—far be it from me—I can only report that the writer of this anonymous letter says—tired of your irresponsible behavior—dragging my name into the police courts—not enough that you were a continual worry to your mother—and so on and so on.

  Somebody had written to him, obviously—probably Sandbach. And Gerta must have given him the address.

  And they were threatening police action?

  He looked down at it, pushed it farther under the table with his toe. The hard, firm, coarse signature, written with large open letters and a heavy pen, lay there like some ugly relic of his own past, something hateful and obscene, something to be destroyed. The angry energy of hypocrisy——

  To find this waiting for him in the letter box, with its menacing special delivery stamp, had undoubtedly made its contribution to his increasing sense of evil and ugliness, it had at once occurred to him—so right was his intuition—that it might be better to destroy it unread; but also it had occurred to him that it might actually contain something in the way of news. It was as if, even through the unopened envelope, he had been able to feel a threat, the encroachment of something: perhaps, however, only because the arrival of a letter from his father was in itself so unusual. He had waited, called up Jones first—keeping the letter in his pocket—and it was odd now to consider the intimate and by no means accidental connection between the two things. So intimate, in fact, that had he read the letter first he might not have telephoned to Jones at all. At any rate, it would have been necessary to consider it, to consider whether in the light of this threat the immediate project had not better be abandoned, the meeting with Jones postponed; perhaps even to consider the substitution of some one else for Jones, since it was now possible that Toppan knew who Jones was. The letter lay in his pocket speaking of this, while he himself spoke with Jones; just as later, in his room, the conversation with Jones spoke softly and disconcertingly through the curt phrases of the letter. It was peculiarly right that the two things should thus have coincided in time—but it was also peculiarly unpleasant.

  He teased a cigarette from the opened packet on the red table, lit it, walked to the window. The smoke drifted backwards over his shoulder in a wide flat band of gray, undulated a little towards the floor, then softly dispersed in an upward vagueness towards the ceiling by the bathroom door. He watched it, saw the last pale thread of smoke lick neatly over the top of the door, and suddenly remembered that long ago he had meant to make a study of drafts in this fashion. “The flight of cigarette smoke is only a draft made manifest.” He said this aloud, as he crossed the room to open the door to the corridor, he said it with amusement, and then added:

  —There goes the professor’s clock.

  The clock had struck the half hour. Standing just outside the corridor door he blew upward a long soft plume of smoke, blew it towards the top of the doorjamb, b
ut not forcibly: with the effect, therefore, of merely releasing, for observation, a trial balloon of smoke, a willing cloud. After a barely perceptible pause, the smoke billowed downward very slightly and then swooped in a long wide dispersed wave upward into the room. Keeping quite still, lest his own movement create any artificial current of air, he repeated the action: again the smoke swirled neatly, after a moment’s hesitation, into the quiet room—obviously the air in the corridor was warmer than the air inside. This being the case, the current near the floor must, of course, flow the other way. Stooping close to the linoleum floor he exhaled a soft cloud before him. It wavered, broke, and came loosely backward across and round his face. Exactly as one would expect.

  The same thing would probably be true of the doors to the bedroom and the kitchenette?…

  The bedroom worked beautifully—the draft was sharper, more dramatic, the smoke was as if violently seized, hurled headlong down invisible rapids. But the kitchenette, presumably because its window was shut, or simply because it was out of the path of the main currents, was a disappointment: the movement of the smoke, whether at floor or ceiling, was scarcely perceptible, sluggish, equivocal. In fact, it would go exactly where propelled. He blew cloud after cloud into the little boxlike room, it hung swaying and gently convolving over the table, over the white enameled refrigerator, over the gas stove, almost motionless, passive. It was like a backwater of a river: it was stagnant; and looking at it he became abruptly aware of the profound nocturnal silence. It was that moment between night and morning when the traffic is stillest, the brief interval between the end of the night life and the beginning of the day—the hour when life is at its ebb. In hospitals, people were now in the act of dying. And in Reservoir Street, at this instant——