King Coffin: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  He turned quickly away, walked to the corridor and closed the door. Returning, he stared out at the palely brightening clouds, heard again that grazing patter of the drizzle on the pane, saw the little chain of fine bright beads which had been lightly etched there. But the rain could make no difference—it neither added to nor subtracted from the wide appearance and nature of things. The structure beneath it was exactly the same,—undiminished, loyal, unsentimental: what one had made, or what one was making, was still the same, kept its hard and clear identity. And the whole face of the world, if one now dared to see it thus, was one enormous growing “thing”—a vast and dreadful or beautiful flower: a flower which, if beautiful, was also terrible: as if the universe might be simply a single outrageous pond-lily whose roots were murderous. Yes, it was exactly that. The blood drawn up by that profound taproot made possible the thrust and loveliness of the blind enormous flower: the perfect synthesis of good and evil. And if this was so, if life was in essence really like this, why then was it possible to feel any compunctions? Unless, of course, one simply failed outright in one’s attempt to identify oneself at all points with life: failed, at it were, to stretch oneself co-terminally with the four points of the cross, and to become, oneself, cruciform.…

  The idea was not new, he had thought of it in fact at the very beginning, though not perhaps in quite such terms or so neatly. The structure of evil had been manifest and omnipresent, the evil in himself he had always quite recognized, or had at all events wanted to recognize: it needed no justification, was natural and right, and the whole action had in the end revolved quite properly around his decision to face the real shape of the world and to shape his own deed accordingly. But it seemed to him that he had never actually seen the vision, the tree-shaped vision, the lily-shaped vision, so clearly and perfectly as now. It was something of this that he had tried to put down in his rapid notes, the orderly sheets of which lay on the table beneath the map—but to look at them now was only to realize that vision is one thing, action or speech another. He said aloud, tearing the paper with deliberate hands:

  —Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics. Few are the mystics! I must have a drink, and I must go slow.

  But he made no move toward the kitchenette, where the whisky stood on the shelf, he stood still, aware that he was looking at nothing, he thought for a moment that perhaps the best thing would be to write, quite suddenly and quite simply—as if for the renewal of a lost contact with a swiftly sinking world—to Gerta. My dear Gerta, if it is not now, not already, too late—if now with the impediment in my speech removed——

  Impossible.

  It was not the conversation on the telephone with Jones which had done this—how could it be? It was not even clear that the conversation with Jones had anything to do with it. The logic of that, the logic of the consequences of that, was flawless: there had been no mistake: the whole thing now stood, from beginning to end, as perfect as a theorem in algebra. Jones, Karl Jones, would meet him on Friday, they would drive together to Concord—to meet the mythical partner and discuss the mythical advertising campaign—Jones had assented to the plan almost with alacrity—and with this was concluded the final pure curve of the idea. The ultimate cutting-off had thus been accomplished, the separation from humanity; the individual had asserted himself, stood alone in the full horror of a light which permitted no moral shadows: or none, at any rate, save those created by his own will and for his own purpose. The stranger had been identified—hadn’t he?—as Jones, and as such could thus be destroyed: the strangeness in Jones had been recognized, with its terror and its pure desirability; it had been observed carefully and inimically as the thing-that-wants-to-be-killed; it could be killed. There is no compromise with the object, no placid or reasoned acceptance of it. It is seen, understood, and destroyed. The vision is pure.

  Yes!

  But suddenly he felt that he must close his eyes; and opening them again, he as suddenly felt, for no clear reason, that he must clap his hands sharply together before him, turn quickly, look at something else, something new—do something, go somewhere. He clapped his hands together again, walked toward the waterfall without seeing it, revolved quickly away from it, and made as he did so a gesture with his hands such as he knew (and painfully) he had never in his life made before: a queer forward thrust of the hands, stiffly parallel, the fingers tensely apart, as if he were in fact reaching for something. It lasted only a moment, his arms fell limply to his sides, limply and a little self-consciously, almost perhaps ashamedly. This wouldn’t do, this wasn’t right at all! Once more he began to feel as if he were in some subtle way being indecently hurried; like a person who in stepping on to an escalator miscalculates its speed. It was as if one were rather cruelly and undignifiedly yanked, dislocated—and with that feeling of disgust with oneself which makes one disinclined for the time being to look at oneself in a mirror. To lose control——

  He stepped into the dark bedroom, approached the dressing-table mirror and without turning on the light leaned on his hands towards the obscure image which he saw coming forward to meet him there. For a second, the face that looked out at him was not his own face, but the face of Jones. It looked at him merrily, impertinently—exactly as if it were going to wink. It was only a trick of the light—it was because the light was behind him—the sharp illusion was gone as soon as it had come—but the effect was nonetheless extraordinary. The face was his own, of course, he leaned again towards it on trembling hands, feeling weak and shaken, and as he examined his eyes, his mouth, his cheeks, the wide and pallid forehead, it seemed to him that his face had somehow changed. It seemed, in fact, in some subtle and dreadful way, to have lost its meaning. There was no character in it, no significance—it had become a more featureless area: a kind of mask: something seen from outside …

  Had Jones done this?…

  It was as if Jones, in that moment of vision, had said something, or been about to say something: as if, in thus interposing himself, he had somehow managed to make some preposterous sort of statement or claim. He had been about to say “I am no stranger than you are”; or perhaps “Aren’t you really a stranger yourself? Have you thought of that?”; or else, simply, “Now you know what it is to be a stranger.”

  The words seemed actually to hang in the air; and it was with a feeling of automatically echoing them that he said aloud:

  —Now you know what it is to be a stranger. Now you know! Jasper Ammen.

  And certainly, now, he was looking at himself from an immense distance, and with a detachment which amounted really to cruelty and enmity. Or was it fear? Or was it amusement? One could say calmly, now, that the face was absurd, one could say that it was just an arrangement of lines and planes and colors, that it was obscene, that it was ugly. It was as surprising and as mean, as vital and objectionable, as definitely something to be suspected and distrusted and perhaps destroyed, as some queer marine creature which one might find on overturning a wet rock by the sea. It was conscious and watchful, its eyes looked out of the pool of the mirror with a hard animal defensive sharpness, clearly it was dangerous and alert. It might have to be killed. If one were to put out a hand or a stick and touch it——

  But the thought was unbearable, he flung himself on the bed and said:

  —I must try to sleep. I must try to get a few hours sleep.

  He closed his eyes, and immediately the conversation with Jones on the telephone began to repeat itself. Not tomorrow, no. I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me. I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident, my wife has just had a stillborn baby, and tomorrow is impossible as the funeral is in the morning at Mount Auburn. Yes, I’m sorry. No, I’m sorry.… Perhaps Friday. Yes, Friday would be all right.… The dreadful shameless gentleness of the voice, the soft accent of concern, in which nevertheless there was no self-pity: the naked raw glibness of the confession on the telephone, the awkward glibness—the ordinary humble unavoidableness of the ca
lm voice having to say such things on the telephone—You’ll have to excuse me now—as if he merely had an engagement for lunch, or had to go to the toilet. It had seemed so entirely simple, so almost meaningless, this series of tragic and placid statements, there in the corner of the marble-floored hall, beside the wrought-iron grill of the elevator; as if they might have been discussing the weather, or the prospects for the baseball season: except, of course, for the careful gentleness of Jones’s voice, the rather unsophisticated and surprised gentleness, calculated for the occasion. Not quite calculated, either—for what had been really disconcerting was the natural sound of the sorrow in the voice, as if Jones, taken off guard, didn’t know how to conceal his suffering. And thus, the whole scene had come to him over the telephone—the smell of ether in the garden, the revolving clotheshorse lifting its spiny arms in the lamplight, the empty ash can waiting at the curb, the doctor’s car, the shabby cellar, the coal-bins, the swiftly moving shadows on the ceiling of the upper bedroom, and then that moment when the shadows had suddenly ceased to move, and finally the woman’s cry, so queer, so quavering, so soft——

  Christ!

  He opened his eyes quickly and blindly, as if to do so would stop the whirl of impressions and phrases—it was if he were drunk, or sick, and sought any sight of the world, any fragmentary and lurching vision of a wall or ceiling, to check the wild swoop of his vertigo. And now the daybreak was square and bright in the little window, as sharp and immediate as the tiny jeweled picture in the finder of a camera, each moving cloud separate and round and distinct and with a color forever its own, never to be repeated, immortal. It was as good as a cinema, as comforting as the sight of moving water, he lay and watched the irregular regularity of the cloud-procession, listened to the faint intermittent claw-grazing of the little rain, tried to fix his attention there, to avert his attention by averting his face. And for a while it was in fact as if he had managed to fall asleep with his eyes wide open. He felt like a cat, with the cunning of a cat, allowed his mind to be lulled by the activity of his eyes, permitted all the motion of his consciousness to concentrate there on the surface, in those two points of sight. His hands were still, his body was still, his feet were softly pressed against the footboard of the bed, he breathed as lightly as possible. It was the process of becoming a cloud, or of becoming nothing but a consciousness of cloud: even the sounds came to him only indistinctly and tangentially: he refused to admit them: the bell-sounds, the car-sounds, the slamming of a door, the milkman hurrying along the hall, clinking his bottles, the first morning hum of the elevator, summoned down to the second floor by Jack, the janitor—aware of these, he also dismissed them, allowing himself to become simply a recipient of light. It was all like a world of glass, translucent, brittle, precarious, but infinitely precious. It was like having an enormous pain, which even to breathe was to invite: as long as one held one’s breath, it vanished. When one breathed again, one tried it cautiously, round the edges and corners, one sent down to begin with the tiniest little tentacle of air, a silver thread of exploration——

  But it was no use. It was all no use. As soon as one did try to breathe, that preposterous and incredible mountain of sensation was there again, the unbelievable shape once more had to be believed. As in a nightmare the figure of the old woman seen in the street reappears vaguely again in the distance at the quayside, or on the ship, perhaps altered and unrecognizable, and later is heard mounting the stairs behind one, with a sort of scrambling and sinister haste, coughing and sneezing as she comes, and to one’s gaze over the banisters lifts at last the face of which the horror, hitherto not admitted or confessed, is freely and lethally given, so to his consciousness, through all its elaborate structure of dispersal, came the beginnings and misremembered fragments of that conversation with Jones. It could not have happened, and yet it had happened: that he should have leaned there at the public telephone in the hall by the elevator, with Jack standing at the front door to take his last nocturnal look at the weather, holding a dust-cloth in his hand, and that instead of an unruffled arrangement of the final plan should have occured this sudden plunge into the murkiest and ugliest and most painful of unsolicited intimacies——

  But why should it be painful? Why should he want both to think of it and not think of it?

  You’ll have to excuse me, I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident——

  An accident! The word looked a mile long, he was walking slowly from end to end of it, sparrows were chirping on the window ledge above Plympton Street, he must have slept. It was a quarter to eight, and still lightly raining. There was no time to lose, for Jones would probably go to Mount Auburn early—it wasn’t the sort of thing one dawdled about. And to make the necessary inquiries, one would have to get there first.

  XIII The Stranger Becomes Oneself

  The impulse was absurd, but he obeyed it, obeyed it with a kind of angry arrogance, he turned away from the Merle, deciding not to have any breakfast at all, and walked quite deliberately in the wrong direction, his back to Mount Auburn. At this point, when the pattern of one’s life was all speed and no detail, it was idle to ask oneself the reason for one’s decisions: one simply followed one’s feet. He followed his feet in the drizzle, the gray light, down Bow Street to Saint Paul’s Church, looked up at the Siennese tower—or was it Verona?—to observe through a light cloud of rain that the clock was on the stroke of eight, and that he would be in time for the Angelus. And as he entered, and stood at the back of the ornate and hushed interior, watching the priest and the mass-servers begin the service for three or four women and himself, and hearing the bell strike its first faint triad of notes far up in the steeple, he became aware that he had really been intending to do this for a long time. It was only the other day, in fact, that he had almost done so——

  —Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.

  —Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.

  —Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, mater dei, ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

  Blessed Mary, God’s mother, pray for us, now and in the hour of our death.

  He tried to remember, while the priest and the mass-servers intoned the responses, and the soft bell again sounded its remote three overhead, just when this had been, and what had made him think of it. Et verbum caro factum est. Et habitavit in nobis … Ave Maria. The Latin phrases echoed with silver purity in the hollow church, as always the Catholic service seemed curiously hurried and casual, almost undignified, and yet from this very appearance of carelessness, even in the shambling movements of the surpliced priest and mass-servers, came all the more a sense of power and certainty: they themselves might cough or stumble, be graceless or inaudible, but the mystery sustained them. He watched them, frowning—half listened to the final sentences; suddenly the thing was unceremoniously finished; and it was then, as he turned again toward the door, that he remembered. It had been the very morning——

  The thing shocked him, he walked quickly along the wet brick sidewalks of Mount Auburn Street.

  It had been the very morning of his first discovery of Jones. And his purpose in the notion of going there, of course, had been simply to see if actually, in the church, he might not find his victim: some member of the congregation might turn out to be the supposititious Jones. He remembered it now quite clearly; he had thought of it while he was taking his shower, hearing the bells of the Angelus through the little window—the window from which he had then watched Mrs. Finden drying her hands and arms, putting on her rings. Yes. It seemed very remote, a long time ago, very remote, and oddly bright and innocent: it had been spring; and although it was still spring, somehow now it seemed as if he were looking back to it from another season, another year. The plan had then been formless, of course, and this had given it the charm and vagueness of all new things, new undertakings—the stranger had not yet been discovered or his stran
geness identified—the whole problem still remained metaphysical—a mere formula—and it was now possible to recognize that at that stage there had been an unmistakable sense of freedom which had at once, with the actual selection of Jones, disappeared. But more curious still was the fact that today, of all days, he should again have the impulse to go there. This was very peculiar, it had about it the air as of a compulsory completion of some obscure sort, like a forced move in chess. The idea had occurred to him casually, no doubt, but could he be sure that it had occurred without some deep reason? Its queer appropriateness—the appropriateness of the whole thing, the scene, the service, the words themselves—suggested a kind of rootedness in the pattern which it would be painful to investigate.

  But it hardly mattered.

  With the fine rain cool against his face and hands, like an added sensitiveness, he walked quickly, his raincoat half unbuttoned, and at the corner of Boylston Street, by the Square, found that his car had already been brought out for him; the man was waiting in it with the door open, stepped out as soon as he saw him. For a moment after entering, he sat still, stared ahead through the delicately misted windshield, looking at nothing, thinking of nothing. He could drive straight to the cemetery. Or he could go first to the house in Reservoir Street, wait till Jones came out, and then precede him to Mount Auburn—which would of course be easy. But he felt indifferent; it was perhaps unnecessary to take so much trouble; there was little, after all, to be gained in seeing Jones emerge from the house to the undertaker’s car, or in knowing whether it would be Jones or the undertaker who would carry the coffin. What did it matter? The thing was nearly finished. It would be enough to get a glimpse of Jones at the cemetery, a final glimpse—and if he went at once there would be plenty of time for the asking of questions and the taking up of a good position.