Conrad Aiken - Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress

The rich get richer and the poor get children.

In the meantime,

In between-time —

No, it was not a success; and now more than ever, in the light of the dream about Nora, it lacked the intensity, the intense simplification, at which he had aimed. The effulgence of this sun-blasted, blue-burning, ragged Cape Cod landscape, invisibly but passionately ablaze between the cruel reflectors of sun and sea, as if set on fire by a vast magnifying glass, was not really there, was only hinted at — and yet, if he could feel it so vividly, live into it so hard, and with all his senses, so love it, in all its roots and ruin, how was it that it could still continue to escape him? Where, exactly, was the failure? He looked, and looked again, stared through it, while the gramaphone squawked and ran down, and Enid’s iron, in the kitchen, clashed on its metal rest, and he found himself suddenly seeing the whole Cape Cod landscape as one immense and beautiful thing, from Buzzard’s Bay to Provincetown, from shoulder to sea tip, every detail clear, still, translucent, as in a God’s-eye view. The salt marshes rotting in powerful sunlight; the red cranberry bogs; the sand-rutted roads through forests of scrub pine and scrub oak, and the secret ponds that existed on no map; thickets of wild grape and bull-briar; fields of blueberry and hot goldenrod; grass-grown wind-carved dunes, inlets and lagoons, mudflats bedded with eelgrass, bare at low tide, haunt of the eel, the bluecrab, the horseshoe crab, the fiddlers; and the blown moors, too, with high headlands and dwarfed cedars and junipers, the dry moss and the poverty grass crumbling underfoot, the wild-cherry trees glistening with the white tents of the tent caterpillar under the dome of August blue: he saw it all at a glance, sun-washed and sea-washed, alive, tangled, and everywhere haunted by the somehow so sunlit ghost of the vanished Indian. The Indian names — and the English names — these, too, were a vital part of it — Cataumet, Manomet, Poppennessett, Cotuit, Monomoy — Truro, Brewster, Yarmouth, Barnstable, Shoot-Flying Hill, the King’s Highway — they ran through it like a river, ran gleaming into the past, ran too into the future. And the houses; the cottages of the sea captains — a mile of them in Dennis, the sea captains who had known St. Petersburg and Canton as well as Boston — or the porticoed and pagodaed mansions of the China traders; and the ruined farmhouses and barns, silver-gray ghosts, the sad shingles and clapboards smokelessly consuming, among wild apples and wild lilacs (like Weir Village) back into the burning earth from which they had risen — yes, it was all of a piece, all in one vision, it was in his blood, his eyes, his bones, he shook and lived and died with it. Christ, yes! But why, then, could his mystical and ecstatic vision of it be put to no better use? Ecstasy — someone had defined ecstasy as “farsight,” with the overcoming of the sensual perceptions of space and time.” As in El Greco — as in Van Gogh. But it wasn’t wholly true, for the sensual perceptions of space and time must be there, too — rarefied and essentialized, perhaps, but there. He could see that, he knew it deeply, it trembled in his hand just short of the canvas, and someday, god helping, he would get it. Someday — but, in the meantime, if there were only someone he could discuss it with, shamelessly! If it didn’t have to be so damned secret ! Enid — impossible. Roth — too cynical, too urban, too superficial. Paul — too analytic, too much from the outside looking in. Jim Connor — well, perhaps!

In the meantime,

In between-time —

He turned the easel back to the wall, and suddenly, for no reason at all, felt light-hearted, felt gay. The whole thing was too ridiculous, it was all a vast joke, a gigantic hoax of some sort, and if only one saw through it and refused to be hoodwinked, everything even now would come out all right — just as it always had before. Keep a stiff upper lip — that was it — and sing like the very devil. Whistle among the tombstones!

The world was made, dear — for people like us !

He half sang, half shouted, the absurd words, hoping they would reach Enid, added a “ho ho” of his own to them, sotto voce , and then walked quickly through the dining room to the top of the kitchen steps. It was time for the morning mail, time for the newspaper, time for the walk with Buzzer — time for escape into the blue. Enid’s cheeks were flushed with the ironing — it had the effect of making the cheekbones look higher, the eyes narrower and deeper. She put up one hand to brush back a moist curl from the moist and lovely forehead.

“And another thing,” she said.

“Yes, darling?”

She paused, frowning, to wriggle the bright point of the iron along the white hem of a shirt, flattening it as she went, then round a pearl button — how fascinating, how skillful!

“Since we’re on the subject of money—”

“Oh, yes?”

“There’s the little matter of Buzzer’s education. We can’t send her to the public schools here. They’re very bad, as you know — the children aren’t at all nice. It would be impossible.”

“But, Ee dear, aren’t you being a little premature?”

“Not at all. We can’t keep her out of school indefinitely — even with the help of doctor’s certificates — which would be dishonest, anyway — she’d be made to go, sooner or later. You can’t just put off thinking about it! And there are no good private schools within miles.”

“Public schools were good enough for me!”

“Yes. Timothy — yes, perhaps they were! But it’s another matter with girls, as you’d have known if you’d had any sisters.”

“An oversight. Of course, I’d probably have been a lot more refined in my tastes if I’d been sent to the Friends’ Academy in New Bedford, or Miss Nonesuch’s Nunnery for Beacon Street’s Best.”

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. And you’d be a good deal more intelligent about this, too. It’s just what’s wrong with you, with your whole outlook! It’s simply not fair to Buzzer, that’s the whole truth, and you’ve got to think about it, whether you like it or not. And plan for it. At your present rate of earning—”

“There you go again!”

“Will you allow me to finish?”

“Endor darling, you know I’m entirely in agreement with you, except for my hatred of these damned little snob-schools, where they turn out scatter-brained little one-design nincompoops, with social registers for brains and cash registers for hearts—”

“Nonsense!”

“—but I fail to see the hurry.”

“I see. You want to put it off — just as you always want to put off holidays for me and Buzzer, or getting a maid, or any of the other things that might make life a little more agreeable for me here — while you have everything you want! Is that it?”

“If that’s the way you want to see it, certainly! But perhaps if you’ve got some brighter plan you’d be so kind as to tell me.”

“George and Mabel—”

“Oh, it’s George and Mabel again, is it? How nice!”

“They’re very good friends of yours. Better than you know, and I think you might at least be grateful when they go out of their way to be kind!”

“Go out of their way! Don’t make me laugh. I suppose George was going out of his way last night, when he came butting in here about Jim Connor.”

“To be kind, exactly. And this was kind too. They suggested that we ought to take out education insurance. Which seems to me a very good idea.”

“I see. So that’s where the money comes in.”

“Exactly. How clever of you!”