Conrad Aiken: Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress

“Of course not. I’ll be seeing you!”

“Good night.”

The tall white figure was gone, swerving quickly round the corner of the tumble down tollhouse, the thicket of rusty sumacs growing from the cellar holes, the clutter of rotting boards and shingles — he would be walking across the moonlit bridge, looking down at the dark swift water where the red sponges grew on barnacled rock, walking importantly in the moonlight, swinging the beautiful Panama hat, his errand accomplished. Smiling to himself a little too, no doubt, as he prepared the phrases for Mabel and turned up Chicken-coop Lane towards the pine woods and the cranberry bog and the cluster of houses on the Point. Snob’s Village, the natives called it — and with some justice, by god. They wanted everything their own way. Even to choosing the tenants for empty houses.

Tirra-loo — tirra-lee! Mr. Riley’s fishing nets lay like a mist on the grass and leaves, a ghostly blue, a milky blue, chicory-color, blue reticulated with silver, semined with silver, and he walked carefully round them, admiring the cork floats. Leaves on them, too, a fine catch of yellow leaves for breakfast, which at daybreak Mr. Riley would shake out in the frost. And Chattahoochee would be there, hoping for fish.

At the edge of the lane he paused, stood still on the bouldered wall, listened. The piano had stopped; except for the crickets, everything was silent. How small the house looked under the moon-charmed poplar trees — like something at the bottom of the sea, he thought, a sunken ship, something lost and forgotten. But Enid was somewhere there inside it, like a mermaid, and Buzzer asleep under the silver-gray shingled roof, and through a chink in the dining-room curtains he could see the warm glow of the candlelight, the gleaming corner of the piano. A strange and different reality it had, something safe and solid and enclosed, and yet wasn’t it actually less real, less permanent, than the unfathomable sea of moonlight in which it lay, the appalling emptiness of night and space? The terror of space would endure; but some day the house would be gone, and Buzzer, and Ee and himself — the bare earth turning frozen under the stars.… He shivered, smiled, jumped down into the road, where the gray ashes lay in the half-filled ruts, and ran up the wooden stairs into the kitchen.

“I do think,” Enid said levelly across the dinner table, as he sat down, her eyes and brow barely raised between the paired candles, “you might have been a little more considerate!”

“My dear Ee, how can I help it? If old George must come bumbling in just at dinner time — as you yourself pointed out—”

“That’s all very well. But you needn’t have gone out with him, knowing as you did that dinner was on the table, and everything getting cold. I should have thought—”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

“You’d better eat your eggs, they’re quite cold as it is! Besides, I should have thought that you’d have wanted to discuss it with George of your own accord, beforehand, and gone to see him.”

The half-smile she gave him was a little nettled, a little firm and cryptic, a slight frown went with it, and the grave eyes, barely touching his own glance for a moment, wavered sidelong, gazed preoccupiedly into the corner behind him. Her elbows on the table, in the pink-smocked sleeves, she was eating a biscuit in very small quick bites, the silver butter knife held lightly in her other hand. He noticed that her chair was drawn crookedly to the table, which gave her the effect of not quite facing him. Or of being poised for departure.

“Discuss what, dear.”

“Oh, come, Timothy!”

She was looking straight at him — for the first time, it seemed to him, in hours — and in a sense this was a relief. A challenging look, the beautiful eyes brilliant under dark eyebrows faintly lowered, the wide white forehead smooth in the soft light. And the richly modeled Botticelli mouth, so firm and lovely — what a disadvantage a man is at, he thought, in having, even at moments like this, to pause and pay tribute! Poor devil, he has to face treason in his own citadel.

He smiled and said:

“Well, I suppose you mean Jim Connor — especially as it appears you’ve been having quite a heart-to-heart with George on the subject yourself.”

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Is there any reason why you should?”

“Well, why not?”

“It seems to me it’s my affair. It’s to do with my friends, isn’t it?”

“Friends!”

“I should have thought you could have left it to me.”

“I don’t agree with you. It seems to me to concern me and Buzzer quite as much as it concerns you. But, of course, you wouldn’t think of that. You never do. Any more than it occurred to you to consider George.”

“Why the devil should I have considered George! What business was it of his!”

“He’s your oldest friend here, isn’t he? I should have thought it would be only natural.”

“Natural, my foot! It’s none of George’s business. For that matter, it’s really none of my business either. If Jim Connor takes a fancy to this place, and wants to have a holiday here, and give some poor half-starved devils of Greenwich Village poets and painters a rest and change, who the devil is George, or who the devil am I, that we should take it upon ourselves to kick him out! Have a heart, Ee — and don’t live all your life on County Street, New Bedford, or Beacon Street, Boston! Besides, I didn’t ask Jim Connor to come here, remember, and if I like Jim, and he likes me, that’s a mere accident. And in many ways a very fortunate one.”

“I don’t think the sneer at County Street becomes you.”

“Sorry, Endor!”

“And say what you will, respectability has its uses. It’s all very well for adolescents to want to live in slums—”

“Adolescents!”

“But when it comes to bringing up children, I draw the line.”

“So we’re bringing up Buzzer in a slum! Really, Ee, you’re losing your sense of humor a little. I haven’t noticed any slums around. Go out and look at the moonlight, my gal, and those lilacs waiting to be planted, and tell me it’s a slum! It’s lovely, and you know it.”

“No, Tip, I know all that. But it isn’t only this, it isn’t only Jim Connor, who is after all nothing but a jailbird, and those very nondescript young women he’s brought with him—”

“Nondescript! Ho, what an adjective.”

“Will you let me finish? Please? It’s the whole tendency, I mean, it’s your whole leaning towards this kind of thing. It simply isn’t fair to me.”

“I see. So you took it upon yourself to talk it all over with old George. Discussing my affairs with him behind my back.”

“Not at all! George brought it up himself.”

“Even going so far as to tell him — what you don’t know to be true — that Jim is going to continue stealing while he’s living here. May I ask how you knew that?”

“I thought it was assumed.”

“Nothing of the sort. You don’t know anything more about it than I do, and I know nothing. As far as I’m aware, Jim himself is still undecided. It seems to me a little reckless of you, not to say mischievous, to make statements which have no basis in fact, and to George of all people! I think you might have asked me about it first, at least, and taken the trouble to corroborate it.”

“Your usual tactics, I see, of putting me in the wrong. On a minor point!”

She rose before he could reply, began piling the dishes, very carefully, very precisely, her small hands white under the candlelight, the proud head turning quickly and angrily. Imperious, imperial — yes, even the full throat, which showed through the V-shaped opening of the smock, was imperial and intimidating, for all its mature splendor, and the dark curls, as she turned away and went toward the kitchen steps, themselves turned on the pink collar with a sparkling arrogance which seemed to sum up all vitality. He pushed back his chair, reached a hand to the piano, and struck a note, softly, with one finger. Her voice came to him again, from the door — she had paused, with her cheek half turned, as if she were looking out into the garden towards the little dead plum tree.