Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— Mr. Cather, sir.

— Hello.

An attendant, deprecatory.

— Pardon me, sir, Mr. Cather, but would you like to be found here?

— Found and left.

— Yes, sir.

The long darkness swept superbly from left to right, the blood began its universal pouring over the small tossed body of the world, hurled it and whirled it, swung it obliquely through a screaming abyss, hoisted it again to a toppling pinnacle. Good evening, madam. This is my drowned hat that I am eating. We signed the contract. I am successful. When he saw the sparrow in the road, he got off his horse. It had a broken wing, the bones were sticking out. Of course, what did I tell you. More calmly now. More darkly now. Smoothly, on even keel, into the dark station, the tunnel, the banked lights stately and still on stone columns, birds of brightness, cold and light. I saw you before you saw me, yes, I did. Why didn’t you tell me, and, besides. I was walking there.

In pure light came the remote flight, the little flight of a flock, coming nearer and larger and brighter, the flight of little winged bones, winging through heaven, little wrist-bones and delicate ankle-bones and even figulas and femurs and scapulas, and each with as neat a pair of wings as you’d see on a bleeding sparrow, and every one of them on its way to a star, far off; or was it God himself? He watched them with one eye, while he picked up the skeleton and began to eat it; first the feet, then working slowly up the legs; and dry going it was, what with no sauce, no mustard, no Worcestershire, and the bones getting bitterer as he crawled right up through the pelvis, devouring all, and crunched the ribs. The spine tasted like the Dead Sea, like ashes in the mouth, getting worse as he crawled nearer to the skull; and the skull itself was a black mouthful of charcoal, which he spat out. And in mid-space then he saw behemoth in the act of biting off the conning tower of an interstellar submarine, one of these ether-going craft with one eye, a little way off to the southwest of a pink star, which was wearing white drawers, like a woman. And in a canoe then, in a canoe, a birchbark canoe, up the marsh channel, above the red bridge, in amongst the hosts of seething reeds in the hot salt sunlight — the bright drops on the paddles, the bare arms freckled and wet — is this the way to the Gurnett? — Oh, no, that’s the other way — you’ll have to turn round — yes, it’s the other way. The other way, to the Gurnett.

The other way, a long way.

And when he came, they gave him an oval reception.

(—particularly the smell of the pine-wood walls, soaked in sea fog, but pine-smelling also in the strong sea sunlight, smooth to the touch, golden-eyed with knotholes, and the wind singing through the rusty wire screens, fine-meshed and dusty, or clogged brightly with drops of dew, or drops of rain, or drops of fog — the morning outlook seaward, over the humped grass beyond the puddled tennis court, over the wild sea grass windblown, beyond the new house of bright shingles, where the new boy and girl lived, and then across the bay to Clark’s Island, and the long yellow outer beach, with its deserted and mysterious shacks of houses, and then the Gurnett — the small white twin lighthouses of the Gurnett — I was looking out of the window at this, at all of this, feeling the cool east wind from Provincetown, but with no mirage to show precisely where Province-town lay, and the voices came then over the low partition between the bedrooms. I was dressing, and as I put on my khaki shirt I looked at the fly-trap, which I had made out of fragments of window-screen wire, to see if my flies were all still alive after the night. What would they be saying now. The voices were low and secret, early morning voices, Uncle Tom and Aunt Norah. I removed the screw in the wall beside the washstand and peeped through into the maids’ room, saw a pink chemise very close to me, so close that I was frightened, and walked softly away, back to the window. Did Molly know I was there, that I was watching her day after day? I had seen them putting on their bathing suits. Afterward, when I met them on the porch, they were embarrassed, tried to pull down the short skirts over their knees, ran down the road giggling and looking back. Molly’s skin was very white, Margaret’s was brown.

But why should he come like this, Tom? It isn’t like him not to let Doris, or anyone, know. Perhaps you’d better go to Boston and see him. Do you think there’s anything wrong.

— The whole thing is very queer. Do you think he suspects. Do you think we ought to say something to Doris.

— I think you’d better go to town and see him. Before anything worse happens. He ought not to come here, if that’s what he’s thinking of doing. I’m sure he suspects. It would hurt him too much to see it. It would be better if you talked to him.

— We’d better put off the picnic till next week. Too bad to disappoint the kids again, but it can’t be helped. It was queer to begin with that he let Doris come here alone, with the children, when he could perfectly well have come, too — his business was only an excuse. I think they had already quarreled about it.

They were talking about Father and Mother, and I went close to the partition, to listen, holding my breath; but the voices stopped, the door opened, and I heard Uncle Tom going down the stairs, and Aunt Norah pouring water out of the pitcher into the washbowl. No picnic at the Gurnett this week — the third time it had been postponed. Porper would probably cry when I told him, but instead Susan and I could take him down to the front beach and build villages out of shells, and show him the dead seal. In that little cleared place between the banks of eelgrass, flat and sandy at low tide, where the horseshoe crabs were. The new boy and girl, too, Warren and Gay, except that Gay was always crying, as when we had taken her to the log cabin in the pine woods and tried to make her undress. Had she told her mother and father about that, the little sneak.

— particularly the morning walk to the village, along the Point Road, past all the houses and windmills, the wild cherry trees and crab apples, to get the morning mail. The wooden windmills were the best, with their wings of fine white-painted slats, and the great wooden tanks at the top, and the strong girders of white-painted wood, and of these I couldn’t decide whether I preferred Daisy or Sunbeam. Of the metal ones, there were five Comets and three Aermotors, and our own Vulcan, the only three-legged one on the Point. They were all going busily in the east wind. The Tuppers had a special little shingled tower, with a red railing around the top, where Frank Tupper went with a telescope to watch the yacht races in the bay, but this I passed quickly, looking at the house and garden out of the tail of my eye, to see if Gwendolyn was there. Had she got the box of candy I had left on her porch for her, with the heart on it, and our initials. Would she laugh at me. Did I dare go in the afternoon to the drill of the Company at the Camp. Would she have told Frank about it, and would Frank say anything. When we were playing cross-tag I had caught her by her pigtail, and she had looked at me in a very queer way, half angry and half pleased, and then had refused to play any more. What was this about Father and Mother. Was it because she went sailing all the time with Uncle David, just like last year, and walks to the beach always at night after Porper and Susan had gone to bed. The stage passed me, coming from the morning train, the one named Priscilla, painted a bright yellow, with red wheels, and toothless Smiley driving the horses and saying “Giddup, giddup” out of the side of his mouth, spitting tobacco juice. I would be in plenty of time for the mail, in fact I would have time to go to the drugstore and have a chocolate milk shake at the marble fountain, which always smelled of vanilla. If it rained in the afternoon, we would play Gonko in the playhouse, and perhaps make some new racquets out of shingles. If it didn’t rain, I would go for a row in the dory, through the long bridge and up into the marsh channel towards Brant Rock and Marshfield, for the tide would be low, and I could explore the channels. If I got stuck, I could pretend to be just clam-digging, the way Uncle Tom always said the yachtsmen pretended to do when they got stuck on the mud flats in the bay. They always took pails and shovels with them in case they got stuck, and then rolled up their trousers and went digging, as if that was what they had come for. Or perhaps Uncle David would invite us out in his cabin motorboat, late in the afternoon, with Mother, and Uncle Tom, and Aunt Norah, and that would be fun, except that I didn’t like Uncle David. I heard Molly saying to Margaret in their room when they were going to bed that he was always drunk. Did that mean falling down. I had never seen him fall down. But I had seen bottles under the bunk in the cabin of the motorboat several times and he had bottles in his room downstairs, on the table under the row of dried and mounted seaweeds, which Uncle Tom and I had put there the year before.