King Coffin: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  He drove slowly up Brattle Street against the traffic, switched off the windshield wiper when he noticed that the rain had almost stopped, and for the first time, listening to the loud irregular patter on the car roof, the large drops from trees, began to feel tired. His eyes were heavy and wanted to close, the whole length of his body felt relaxed and remote, his hands lay lightly and reluctantly on the wheel. The thing was dreamlike—everything had a dreamlike sharpness, the heavy immediateness and separateness of objects seen in a fever: the pale hands on the ebony wheel looked more real than his own; and the stopped sound of the windshield wiper was so palpable as to seem audible. The wet houses and fences, the dark rain-soaked trunks of elms, the blackened stems of bushes, went past him with an extraordinarily dense and meaningful solidity, each shape making a sound of its own—whish-whish-whish-whish; and from the total complex of noise made by the car itself each particular item was distinct: the faintly burred hum of the motor, the grazing clink of the key ring against the dash, the click-cluck of the clock, the delicate ticking of the watch on his wrist, the snicker of the wet tires on the slippery road. It was time made intensely audible, time made visible, time solidified in a concrete series of individual shapes—a slow-motion of time, almost in fact a “still.” As if, at a given moment, one could take a cross section of the universe, or slow down life itself to the point at which it was only once removed from death.… Was it that?

  He had already decided to leave the car on the opposite side of the street from the entrance, he got out and walked deliberately across the car tracks toward the massive Egyptian gates of gray granite. In the office which adjoined the squat little chapel he leaned against the counter and said:

  —A friend of mine, Mr. Karl Jones, is coming here this morning. Could you tell me when he’s expected?

  —Mr. Karl Jones? Yes, I think I can tell you.

  The man stooped over a table, ran his fingers slowly down a column of names.

  —Also I should like to know in just what part of the cemetery——

  —Certainly.… I see that we expect the interment to take place before nine. At nine or a little before. As for the other—if you’ll just wait a minute——

  Interment!

  An open book of grave-certificates lay on the counter, he found he was leaning above it, and began reading the blue certificate which was uppermost, still attached to its stub. Proprietors of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn. Vesper Lot 5000, Grave No. 591. This Certifies that ............ of ............ by the payment of twenty dollars, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, has purchased the right of interment in Grave numbered 591 in the Vesper lot which is owned by the Corporation, and has paid in addition Twenty-five Dollars to be added to the Repair Fund, for perpetual care of the grass. For each interment after the first, etc. Not more than two interments shall be made in the same grave, and the later interment shall be at least three feet below the level of the ground. When any such grave shall have become vacant, etc. Turning the leaf, he read on the back: Received of ............ five dollars for grading and sodding Grave No. 591.

  Grading and sodding. But how did a grave become vacant?

  —Ah, yes, just as I thought; it’s in the Vesper lot, and that’s right at the western side; if you go straight along the front here and turn up Glen Avenue, by the railroad——

  —Is it far?

  —Oh, no, only a few minutes, it’s just where Glen Avenue meets Vesper——

  —Thanks.

  A curious idea had occurred to him, he gave a little laugh as he went out and followed a workman with a wheelbarrow along the narrow tomb-lined road, it had occurred to him that it was a very neat and fitting opportunity for buying a grave—why not? And cheap at the price, with grading and sodding thrown in, and perpetual care of the grass. Across the wheelbarrow lay a rake and a hoe, and beside them, nodding in a square box, a dozen little potted plants: destined, no doubt, for somebody’s border—somebody’s counterpane. The workman was whistling softly, but stopped at once as he heard footsteps behind him, looked quickly sidelong as he was overtaken. The nod he gave was guarded, professionally friendly.

  The city of the dead. That was what they always called it. And certainly, if one paused to visualize the skeletons underground, all the placid bones lying horizontal in boxes, or amongst tarnished remnants of silver and wood, it was a city of a considerable size, a metropolis. But the whole surface of the earth, if one paused to think of that too, was nothing but a mausoleum: all that living surface was nothing but a rich mulch of death. And this little collection, at Mount Auburn, of the refined dead, the rich dead, the distinguished dead, the pretentious dead, was, if one saw it in due proportion, a very paltry affair. This absurd business of putting them all in one place, collecting them, as if they were rare stamps, or coins, or first editions! As if there weren’t time enough in which to duplicate them! Good God. The world would be the same forever. The same people would be arriving, and being important, and dying, forever. In this vault are deposited the remains of. Here lieth the body of. This stone is erected to the memory of. Here lie the remains of. In memory of. Sacred to the memory of. And they were all alike, in the long view they were all alike, all they ever managed to say was a feeble and stammering “I.” They said this with an air of extraordinary importance and bewilderment, made what they considered to be a unique gesture, and were gone. And then after them came the hordes, the shapeless hordes, the innumerable and nameless hordes, of the others, world without end, who would feel the same importance and make the same unique and imperious gesture. Each in turn would believe that in some extraordinary way he had really produced himself, wrought his own intelligence and power, created his own individuality. Each would say “I have this right,” “I have a right to happiness,” “I have a right to love,” “I must live my own life,” “I have thought this for myself,” “It is I who first felt this, thought this, needed this.” Each would believe himself unique.… And after him again would come, until the dying world was inherited briefly by grasshoppers and ants, the human swarm of others who would say and believe identically the same thing. All the Smiths, the Robinsons—the dead earth would become a tomb, sacred to the memory of the Smiths and Robinsons. And beneath it, like those who lay here now under inscribed stones, or broken columns, or slabs of marble engraved with the hour glass or the serpent, would sleep the whole human race.

  He looked angrily at the stones, and then away,—the little white lambs of marble with crossed forelegs, the doves, the cherubs, the angels, the skulls—all silent, dripping in the fine rain; even the wet spring flowers, the daffodils and tulips, had a mortuary look, seemed somehow morbid. He walked along the grim avenue, taking long steps on the neat gravel, outdistanced the workman with the wheelbarrow, came to the turning and Glen Avenue. Beyond the wooden fence was the railway line,—the hard note of the quotidian and temporary. In this corner of the cemetery, not yet so crowded, the family lots were fewer: the graves humbler; many of them were unmarked save by the little oval metal plaques which gave their numbers. Noting the succession of these he found easily enough the new excavation at the juncture of Glen and Vesper Avenues. Beneath a small tree—a Judas tree?—which was covered with pink blossom, and some distance back from the road, it appeared harmless and natural enough. He walked across the sodden grass, looked into it, observed the carefully sheered sides of wet loam, as glistening as if they had been cut with a knife, and the little pile of soaked earth which had been neatly laid on canvas beside it, and the curious cat’s cradle of broad tape which lay across the aperture in readiness for the coffin. The whole thing was indescribably ugly: it was obscene: the falseness of it was profound. This note as of carefully prepared artifice, of concealment and mitigation—! Christ.

  He turned, looked back over his shoulder toward the road, felt curiously ashamed and guilty: he felt sick: it was impossible to avoid the contamination, the sense of complicity and betrayal: it was himself who had done this, his own mind had conceiv
ed this dishonesty. And it was Jones who had been betrayed. To be standing here—to be seen standing here now——

  He must get away quickly, before they came.

  He must walk off a little way, perhaps to the tower and back, or to one of the ponds, and then, keeping always within view, return to the scene at the last moment, as if casually. That would be enough—there was no need for more—just to saunter by, have a last look, dismiss with a final gesture the dying world.

  He hurried back to the road, and found that it made a loop towards the fence at this point, rejoining Vesper Avenue farther on,—it would be possible, therefore, by walking around this, examining methodically all the inscriptions, the flowers, the trees, to fill in the time and reappear at the right instant. He knocked the bowl of his pipe against the palm of his hand, but decided not to smoke; took the right turning; found that he was staring at the hideous stones and their monotonous inscriptions without seeing them, listening to the passing of a train, beyond the fence, without turning his head. Who departed this life, to the sorrow of his wife and three children … In hopeful rest I here remain … My faith to heaven ensnare … The phrases and sentences were all alike, so many precise wounds of the chisel in Vermont marble or granite; and if the rain had made them more vivid to the eye, they were too familiar to be meaningful to the mind. More actual than the death it symbolized was the cutting in the stone; it was as if only the stones were real, and the incised marks on them, half filled with water, more important than the thing they chronicled. In the gentle and windless drizzle, the scent of the flowers—the lilacs, the narcissus, the daffodils—was oppressive, stifling; it was like the smell of ether; weighed on the consciousness like a cloud; and with his pipe in his hand he was thinking this, and feeling as if he had been half anaesthetized, and walking amid the intermittent patter as if half asleep, when he heard behind him the sound of a car.

  It could not have been better managed—he was at a safe distance, just far enough away to be unnoticeable—he stood still and watched the black limousine come slowly along the avenue and stop. There was a moment’s pause, the black door swung open, the hand that had pushed it was visible for a second and then withdrawn, and Jones, stooping, stepped down to the grass-edge. He was wearing the derby hat, turned round toward the car buttoning a soiled raincoat, he appeared to be saying something, his head a little on one side, and as he did so a second figure stooped from the car, holding with gloved hands a small white box. From the other side of the road a workman had mysteriously appeared, as if from nowhere, and the three men began to walk slowly across the grass toward the little grave, their heads just slightly lowered. The man who held the box wore a black frock coat—presumably the undertaker. The box he held was hardly bigger than a shoe box, it was astonishingly small, it made the whole affair seem more than ever ridiculous and meaningless. That it should all have come to this—that all the elaborate structure should amount only to this—! This absurd little ritual in the rain.

  He watched them group themselves before the grave, Jones standing a little in the rear, as if in a measure detaching himself from the queer proceedings, and then the undertaker placed the coffin on the cat’s cradle and the workman began to lower it. Jones, with his hat still on, and his hands in his raincoat pockets, suddenly turned away and began to walk quickly toward the car: the undertaker, after a final look into the grave, while the workman drew up the bands, followed him. Apparently, not a word had been said. The whole business had been done in silence. No earth had been flung; only the soft rain fell into the grave.

  It was unbelievable. And yet it was what he had expected?…

  He found himself standing very tensely, as if he had been about to take a step but had inhibited it—his weight slightly forward; without conscious decision he began to walk toward the little scene, saw the two men get into the limousine, and had just reached the juncture of the two roads when the car passed him, driving slowly. Scarcely a yard away—their two orbits at last almost touching—Jones was sitting upright, his small chin raised as if proudly or challengingly, his blue eyes fixed straight ahead on the road beyond the driver. He was pale, it was obvious that he hadn’t slept, and it was just as obvious that he hardly knew what he was doing or where he was. Possibly he had been drinking. Beyond him, the undertaker was looking out of the window on the far side with an air of professional embarrassment, touching his gloved fingers together. Neither of them was speaking. In another minute, the car took a sharp left turn, and moved off toward the Egyptian gates. He watched it flash slowly in and out among the columns and pyramids and vaults, saw it make a final swing to the right, and then disappear.

  And as it did so, a strange thing happened to him. He felt that he had died.

  He must have known that this would happen—for when the car had turned to the left, and for a brief interval crept along the road which paralleled the one on which he was himself standing, he had suddenly felt an almost overwhelming impulse to run, to shout at it, to keep abreast of it, shouting—like the people on a wharf who rush excitedly, desperately, along the dock’s edge as the ship begins to move, trying to keep up with it, trying to hold it, crying to it, as if they were mere bodies whose souls it was taking away. He had felt this, but of course had done nothing. He had stood still. And it seemed to him now, as he stood motionless, watching the departure of that somber limousine, with Jones inside it, as if life itself were going away from him, moving farther and farther away, fading and dying like the melancholy last flare of sunset seen for a moment through lifting rain. The thing was finished.

  Finished!… Finis coronat opus. King Coffin …

  Before he knew it, he was in his car, was driving fiercely down Mount Auburn Street. He was angry, he half closed his eyes and said aloud, bitterly—it oughtn’t to be like that; to think that it was like that; my God, that it should be like that! The rain had stopped again, the sky over Boston was brightening, a pale beam of sunlight glistened for a moment on a distant roof and was extinguished. To write to Gerta—to write now to Gerta. Yes. He decided not to take the car to the garage, but parked it immediately in front of the fire station in Eliot Square, and hurried on foot to Boylston Street before they could have time to notice it and protest. Let them protest! By all means. Let them look him up, and come hunting for him—the more the merrier. View halloo! In Boylston Street, he stepped into the Western Union office, sat down, drew the yellow form toward him on the glass-topped table, seized the chained pencil, and began to write.

  My dear Gerta—the impediment in my speech removed——

  He crossed it out, took a fresh sheet, closed his eyes for a second, and began again.

  “My dear Gerta—the master builder builds better than he knows. Things have happened. I write too quickly to shape my thoughts, this is—so to speak—the final dislocation. Is it the shadow of Kay, and were you right after all? You were wise, anyway, you saw the queer shape of things more clearly than I, and I can now salute your narrow vision with respect if not with gratitude. To hell with gratitude! I don’t know any longer what it all is, the show is too profound, goes too fast, it begins to escape me, if you know what I mean, or care to know, but with the impediment in my speech removed I can at least say that the thing will be perfect as it now stands, or only lacking in perfection as it lacked you, or a clear vision of you: but even this I can now look back to with Kaylike detachment. That isn’t quite all of it either, there must be a halfway point which would be good—too difficult, however, for me to try to analyze for you now. No, it’s all too despicable.… Ammen.”

  The large electric clock over the counter said nineteen past nine. He sealed the yellow envelope, and addressed it; then marked it, after a moment’s thought, Not to be delivered till eleven o’clock. At the desk he said:

  —This is important, do you understand? It might be a matter of life and death. I want this note delivered to this address at precisely eleven—not a moment before, and not a moment after. I’m willing to pay for it. Can th
at be done?

  —Yes, sir—at eleven o’clock—we’ll send the messenger and have him wait there till the correct time exactly. Walnut Street?

  —Right.

  His calculations might or might not be exact—it was difficult to tell—but it ought to make a very nice little gamble. It was Gerta’s day at home, she wouldn’t be going to the Museum, and the chances were, of course, that she wouldn’t have gone out before eleven. If she had——?

  The sun was coming out again, the rails in Massachusetts Avenue were brimming and sparkling. It was spring, it was more than spring, it was almost summer. There would be track meets at the Stadium, boat races, perhaps a revival of the straw hat. In another month Gerta would go to Ogunquit, Greenwich Village would move to Provincetown, everywhere the human being would be creeping out of his cellar or attic to lie naked on a beach and admire the beauty of his body, as if it were something of transcendental importance. Young ladies would be photographed on headlands doing ridiculous dances with wisps of scarf. In secret places in the Maine woods, in half darkened bedrooms of seaside boardinghouses, in the warm hollows of Cape Cod sand dunes, lovers would once more be renewing the flesh at the expense of the spirit, as certain that in this way they had discovered God as that a year hence they would be embracing the same partner.… The wrens go to it, and the small gilded fly.

  He looked through the wide window of the Merle as he passed, saw the Findens sitting at the table at the front. He had always thought they might be lonely, had thought of asking them to come and see him, to come and have coffee or a drink. Opening the screen door, he leaned in and said: