Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

III.

In May, the Brownlees went away to California, with every intention of staying there till one or both of them died. Their departure was as casual as their arrival had been: no fuss was made about it. They had their breakfast as usual, without the slightest deviation of habit, said their goodbyes unexcitedly, and at lunch were gone. Mrs. Holt took the occasion to give the room a thorough housecleaning, and Babcock in turn took the occasion to inspect it: he had thought it might be preferable to his own. He walked in after dinner on the same evening, lighted the gas, and examined it. It had two windows, being a corner room; that was its chief advantage; but in other respects he didn’t especially like it. The wallpaper was an affair of roses on trellises, the chest of drawers was painted a bright blue, and over the large old-fashioned wooden bed hung a steel engraving of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.”

Babcock’s motive for making this careful inspection was, in truth, a double one. His intention of transferring to this room was not very serious; but it had occurred to him that here, for his study of the next occupant, was material which he could not afford to ignore. Not that there was anything of importance about the room itself, or anything remarkable in it: but simply because, such at it was, it was destined in the nature of things to be the outer shell of whatever queer individual should next occupy it. This was a fact which was important; and in making the room’s acquaintance he felt that he was already, in advance, stealing under the barriers of that unknown individual. Here was the vast varnished bed he would sleep in: he would look out of the front window at the locust tree: he would place his hair-brushes on this blue chest of drawers: his neckties would hang from this mirror, his handkerchiefs would make themselves at home in this top drawer (from which Mrs. Holt had not removed the traces of talcum powder): and every morning on waking he would see Venus standing above him on her scallop shell. Babcock smiled a kind of cerebral smile of satisfaction as he foresaw all this. He felt like an inspired interloper. When he returned to his own room, and his table littered with papers, he was several steps nearer to the Thing-in-itself.

He had not foreseen, however, the delicious extra turn of the screw which fortune was to give to his pleasure. This was the arrival and installation, in the prepared room, of a rather charming young woman, Miss Mary Anthony, who came from Burlington, Vermont. She appeared one day at lunch, was introduced, and gave every promise (Babcock thought) of becoming an unusually interesting member of the community. She was about twenty-four; rather pale and intellectual in appearance; with a fine forehead, very white, and fine gray eyes—of which the pupils were remarkably large and dark, and, in a curious way, frightened; she was shy, but smiled easily; tall and graceful; and she had not bobbed her hair. She had taken a secretarial position in the bursar’s office, and she was, it soon appeared, a college woman herself.

Babcock was surprisingly excited by all this. This was indeed a find, a prize specimen. He was not above a normal interest in the opposite sex—far from it. He was quite willing to expose himself unscathed, his independence unimpaired. He had never had a love affair, and for some peculiar reason did not especially desire one; but his relations with women were easy and pleasant, and always aroused his curiosity to an unusual degree. He wanted extremely to know what they felt, how they lived, what they thought, what sort of clothes they wore. And no such first-rate opportunity as this had ever presented itself to him. This charming young creature was simply delivered into his hands; and her shyness, her apparent fugitiveness—something a little suggestive in her of one doomed by some sort of tension to celibacy—particularly sharpened the prospect of his pleasure.

Not only this, but also he could not help noticing at once that he had, in the present situation, an extraordinary advantage. This was the fact that he alone, of the boarding-house community, was capable of arousing in Miss Anthony a reciprocal interest. Wright bored her immediately; and poor Mandell, who was as unimaginative and humorless as he was sexless, simply did not exist for her. She was nice to him, as indeed she was to everyone, but that was all.

It was for Babcock that she reserved what vibrance of response she was capable of: if, in the first few days of her stay, he had suspected this—during that period in which he was making the preliminary explorations—he was soon to become convinced of it. He could talk to her (if he chose) of the things that interested her: of Verlaine and Rimbaud and Gauguin: of James and Dostoevsky and Havelock Ellis. In fact, her interests were if anything too perilously like his own, and he discovered in this at the outset a sense of power over her of which he would have to be sparing, lest she tend to become something of a nuisance to him. It would never do to rush it. The thing must be managed with care and precision, she must be alternately stimulated and repressed; and if she showed signs of coming forward too much, or of desiring to make, of the acquaintance, more than he himself wanted to make of it, he would have to be coldly indifferent to her.

This he managed with great skill for the first three months of her stay. Clearly he had baffled her. She did not know what to make of him. He was so charming to her at breakfast, or lunch, or dinner; now and then he would really let himself go, and talk to her freely (or so it seemed); and then again, of a sudden, he would become exceedingly remote, reply to her in amiable monosyllables, allow her questions to fall unanswered, or even, on occasion, avoid her altogether by absenting himself from the boarding-house table for days at a time. If he encountered her in the street he did not, as she obviously expected, pause to say something to her, but gave her merely the stiffest of bows. He could see, at such times, how puzzled, or even hurt, she was, and how she would hurry past him more fugitive than ever. She would lower her head and check her delicious smile and try to pretend that she had not meant to be quite so friendly. But it was apparent enough that she was deeply hurt and chagrined.

IV.

In August he went to the White Mountains for a month. He had made his plans for this some time before. Even if he had not planned the expedition, however, he would now have decided on such a move: for he could see, or, to be more precise, he could feel that his affair (to give it the name) with Miss Mary Anthony was reaching an acute stage. She was clearly fascinated by him. He could not be mistaken about this: his whole consciousness had, by degrees, devoted itself to this one problem. It was the most interesting thing that was happening to him at the moment—literature and philosophy had gone by the board. Gently, slowly, delicately, insidiously, he had wormed his way through her guard; his awareness had surrounded her completely; he saw himself as a kind of psychological octopus; a vampire; taking no personal interest in her, never for a moment allowing an atom of his own feelings to become involved, he had nevertheless attached himself to her with an exhausting completeness, and had, for her, assumed an exhausting importance. He had made not the slightest move toward the putting of the acquaintance on a basis of friendship. He had never once invited her to take a walk with him, or to go to the local movie with him—he had never given her an opportunity to see him except, casually, at the table. Lunch or breakfast or dinner over, he always rose immediately and withdrew. To her tentative smiles, in the hallway or on the stairs, he replied with a smile as formal and elusive as he could make it.…