Conrad Aiken - A Heart for the Gods of Mexico

“To be candid, Gil,” and he tapped on the tablecloth with the prongs of his fork, “I hadn’t really thought about it. I’ve been too damned busy just getting it arranged!”

“Just the same, doesn’t it strike you as odd—?”

“I don’t know — Noni’s of course sometimes impulsive.”

“Yeah, Blom, but not like this, it’s not really like her, in a thing so important — she’s usually, if anything, rather deliberate.”

“Well, maybe you’re right. What were you thinking about it.”

“That’s what I thought you might know.”

“Me? No.”

He shook his head slowly, smiling at the slightly swaying tweed figure, the earnest eyes. Gil looked back at him rather fixedly for a moment, then said:

“When was it exactly that Noni first talked to you about it?”

“Sunday afternoon. Just after she had called up you . And then I saw her later that evening of course.”

“I thought maybe she might have told you earlier.”

“No. That was the first I knew of it. She told me she’d already talked with you and the lawyer.”

“Well, it’s really very funny. It’s not a bit like Noni — after all these years, so suddenly like this—”

He stared out at the sliding landscape — a farmhouse surrounded by tall trees, two red silos, a car speeding levelly along the flat road parallel with the train, a vast plowed field with the plow lines telescoping in swift perspective — then added:

“Not, of course, that I’m not frightfully glad. As you know.”

“You bet. I think it’s simply grand, Gil. My own only real regret is that you fellers haven’t got together years ago.”

“Yes. It’s just a little bewildering. But I suppose she must have had her reasons. For the sudden decision, I mean.”

“Possibly. Just possibly! But my guess is that she just up and did it on the spur of the moment. Because if she had any special reasons, it’s not like Noni to conceal them. You know as well as I do, Gil, that the one thing Noni cannot do is keep a secret!..”

Smiling broadly for the exchange of this shared knowledge, he elicited deliberately an answering smile from Gil; Gil’s face relaxed, lost the slight sadness which had clouded it; for the first time he seemed to feel a little at ease. With just a hint of some reservation, nevertheless? Gil had perceptions, Gil was no fool. In a way it was a dirty trick — the mere deception, quite apart from the nature of the deception — to keep anyone so lucid, so lucid by nature, thus helplessly in the dark. It wasn’t fair; it wasn’t fair even to himself. An accessory after the artifact! He smiled at the thought, whistling the little Bach tune. For a moment he felt almost gay; smoke sprawled in sinuous shapelessness past the window, the swift shadows forming and vanishing beneath it, the sun shone, the hurrying train drew him powerfully into its deep-rhythmed nostalgic hypnosis. Again and again the engine, far ahead, cried for the innumerable crossings of this dull rich flatland, its voice now half stifled, now clear, as the wind shifted. Whooooo — whooooo — whoo-whoo —a somber and deep-timbred voice, whose tone he likened, as he listened, to the color of bronze, the color of winter sunlight on black ice. Everything was so beautiful — everything — but then the cold metallic pang shut round his heart once more, for all this beauty was nothing at all but the backdrop, the décor, for Noni’s dream, Noni’s ballet, of which the end might so easily be tragic. The reason for all this beauty, this wonder — the train, the new and strange landscape, the incredible adventure, this hurrying breakfast table with Gil and himself sitting at it, and all the unshaped but already so powerfully creative future beginning even now to tower in vaguely predictable color and form above them — the reason for this was the possibility that Noni might die. It ran through the landscape, ran through the whole world, like a shadow. It grew in a dark corner of the picture like the deadly nightshade. It was the first note, offstage, tentative and tender, of the tragedian’s song, the goat song. Goat song in Mexico.…

The thought was almost intolerable, it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from jumping to his feet, muttering some sort of excuse, and fleeing to the smoker. But Gil was saying:

“Careful, Blom! Here’s Noni now.”

Not like the deadly nightshade, no, beautiful as that was — but the narcissus!

“Noni, you’re late!”

“Don’t you envy me? I overslept! Positively.”

“I don’t believe it. I suppose you and Gil know the one, speaking of all the train stories we know, about the fellow who was too tall for a sleeping car berth, and had to open the window and put his feet out?”

Noni’s blue eyes were naughty with delight, she was already beginning to laugh.

“No,” she said, fascinated. “No, you can tell us!”

“Well, when he took his feet in , in the morning, he found he had two red lanterns and a mailbag …”

“Fie! I don’t call that a story at all! Did it happen to you , Blom?”

The bland Negro waiter interrupted her glee; they sat back while with swift legerdemain he moved water bottle and sugar bowl to spread the new cloth, flung down and arranged his handful of bright silver. How well she looked, despite the ever-so-slight flush, and with what perfect unselfconsciousness she managed things! She sipped her water, looked over the glass brim to inspect their fellow voyagers, looked out of the wide window, studied the breakfast menu with delight. Then, with her hand on Gil’s sleeve, she said:

“It’s a lovely book!”

“What book, darling?”

“The one Nancy brought. The Cloud Messenger , it’s called, it’s a Hindu poem, very old—”

“Ah!” Gil said; “too highbrow for me. More to Blom’s taste!”

“Blom, you would love it. You must read it! So refreshing in this wasteland — a lover separated from his sweetheart who sends a cloud to her with a message — isn’t that nice? isn’t it lovely? — and the message is the poem—”

She broke off, her own eyes clouding, clouding even as she looked at him, the glass of water held before her: it was as if she were reading the poem, the message, watching that passage of symbol-bearing cloud, in his own eyes and face, retreating magically to another time, another life, another language. Strange counterpoint; for somehow he felt that while she thus held fixed before her, embodied in himself, the past, and explored it lovingly and deeply, she was also aware of the rushing and violent present, fluid beneath and around them, and the future, toward which the train was speeding, unknown but already as fixed and marmoreal as the past. A sibyl — she was like a sibyl. Was it the prospect, the terribly real prospect, of death, which now gazed with such manifest divination out of the grave eyes and gave the fair face such a wonderful stillness? The sunlight touched her hair, to which a slight untidiness lent an additional charm; he noticed with pleasure the copper color in the little braids that crossed the top of her head, as against the slighter gold of the light wind-stirred fibrils at the temples. The cloud messenger — the Megha Duta — he had seen the title as they stood in the South Station, talking with Nancy, and had then wondered what it might be. And now there seemed to him to be something curiously and esoterically appropriate, a sort of obscure fatality, in Nancy’s choice. For Noni was herself a kind of cloud messenger, and so was the train, and so was all motion, whether it was a going-toward or a coming from: a vanishing signal, of fleetingest poignancy, like the blue shadows that flew away over these empty fields under the flying smoke. Impermanent, impermanent! she seemed to say; and then suddenly the blue eyes were laughing above the glass of water, laughing at Gil and his passion for detective magazines — and the conductor was coming down the aisle — and she said, between sips of ice water, “Now I suppose he’ll be taking another yard of ticket—”