Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Well. That was the first night. As we separated, she again looked at me with that same brilliantly astonished look, as if I might be some sort of divine revelation, and quite unnecessarily shook my hand. I did my best to play up, of course—not unwillingly. Good heavens! It isn’t every day in my life that a beautiful young woman pays me that sort of compliment. We looked hard and deep at each other, smiling protractedly and deliciously, and arranged for another game of bridge in the morning. And then I went into the smoking room and found Peters and Marks and the other chap and chewed the rag with them for half an hour, and so to bed.

“Next morning we had the game of bridge—all very polite and formal, just as before. Mother suspected nothing. She was just as nice and sweet and innocent as she could be. As for Lovely, I had the feeling that she hardly dared to look at me. After an hour or so of bridge, we went out for a walk, abandoning Mother; but we’d scarcely got outside when she said that she had suddenly remembered that she had something she wanted to show to me: an Egyptian thing. So she ducked below and came back in a few minutes with a curious terracotta bas-relief of an Egyptian head—a woman’s head—young, beautiful, and with the eyes closed in sleep. And yet not as if altogether asleep, either—there was a kind of drowsy and voluptuous consciousness in the face, and one felt, as it were, a tremor in the closed eyelids—as if, perhaps they were closed merely for the duration of a kiss. Anyway, that was what I felt when I looked at it—perhaps partly because I could see that it was something of this sort that she felt. She was so obviously thrilled by it! Thrilled and mystified. I took the thing in my hands and stared at it—and then, prompted by all the subtle intangibles of that extraordinary situation, I achieved what I haven’t the slightest doubt was a stroke of genius: I told her that this was the face of the Egyptian goddess of love—I made up on the spur of the moment a fantastic name for her—and then solemnly, holding the thing between my two palms, I raised the beautiful somnolent mouth to mine and kissed it.…”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” said Fred. “And you a married man with eight children.”

There was a pause. The waiter put down three ice-cream plates, each bearing a little green Fujiyama of pistachio ice. Detachedly, with a slight frown of preoccupation, Bill decapitated the apex of the smooth cone. The Professor watched him, smiling. It was a good story—it was going to be a good story—and the Burgundy was warming his heart. And to think that Bill Caffrey was a lecturer in economics!

“Yes, that was a stroke of genius. I could see it at once. Just exactly the right thing, the one and only thing, for me to do. She believed me—she believed in the utter sincerity of my gesture. That will give you an idea of the sort of creature she was—rapturously and incorrigibly romantic, starved for love, and utterly, utterly, utterly unsophisticated. Perhaps you can guess from that, too, how I felt about it. Half fascinated and half terrified. I was simply being taken off my feet by the force of her passion for me. My own feelings—almost nil. That’s a slight exaggeration, but you see what I mean. I knew then, as I handed Smet-Smet, or Rert-Rert, or whatever the thing’s name was, back to her—when I saw the really idolatrous expression that shone in her eyes—that she had abdicated entirely, and that heart, soul, and body she was mine. And I knew also that it was too late for me to try to run—vigorous as the impulse was.”

“Oh, come,” said Fred.

“Vigorous—but, I admit, ambiguous.… And it must be admitted, further, that I didn’t run. At least, not very much nor very fast nor very far. I escaped from her shortly afterward, and didn’t see her again till the evening. She came out of one of the main doors to the deck just as I was going in. And I was so delighted to see her, in that unexpected manner, and she looked so extraordinarily beautiful in a black satin dress, open at the throat, with a Spanish shawl over her shoulders, that I was surprised into addressing her as Lovely. Explain that how you will. I swear I had no wish, of my own , to make love to her. Yet I then and there, and from that minute on, found myself doing it. I did it like a sleepwalker—automatically. My conscience simply went to sleep. My family ceased to have any reality whatsoever. I didn’t give them so much as a thought. Her attraction to me was so profound and so powerful that I was completely polarized by it.”

“Polarized!… You do find nice apologies for things,” said the Professor. “Polarized!”

“That was precisely it. I was as incapable of independent action as a magnetized watch. From that time, I behaved to her, and to her alone; no matter where I was or what I was doing. When I played bridge with the boys in the smoking room, it was all I could do to tell a king from a two-spot.”

“Well, well, well,” said Fred. “But let’s have a little less theory and a little more narrative.”

“No—that’s where you’re wrong; for the exquisite beauty of this episode is entirely in the incidents and overtones.… However, if you’re getting impatient for the dénouement , I’ll cut it short for you.”

“For heaven’s sake don’t ” said the Professor.

The three men sat silent for a moment, all three of them faintly smiling, as if in a queer kind of communion of spirit. The waiter removed the ice-cream plates and deposited coffee-cups and a silver pot of coffee. Cigarettes. Afterward, perhaps, a little syrupy glass of green Chartreuse. Fred poured the coffee, and Bill struck a match. Might they not—thought the Professor—adjourn afterward to the Parthenon, for Turkish coffee? But no, it would be too late. Already after nine. And already as delightful an evening as it could be. This story—how it opened like a flower! Bill’s odd and secret life, opening like a flower. Life was like this—the emptiness and sharp nostalgia of a departure, and then an unexpected and beautiful story. From the North Station, on a winter’s eve, to Smet-Smet, whose eyes were closed for a kiss.… But wasn’t Smet-Smet the hippopotamus goddess?… The Professor felt himself frowning; but, thanks to the warm burden of Burgundy, frowning with an amiable remoteness. He blew the ash from his cigarette—phhhh.

“That night, after the bridge-game, the adventure took a swift step forward, I knew it would—I knew it couldn’t be long deferred. We went out and climbed up to the boat-deck—B Deck. It was dark there, there were no lights, and not a soul in sight. The night was surprisingly warm—I suppose we must have been getting into the Gulf Stream. We went to the forward end of the deck, where we could get a wide view over the bridge and bow to the black sea, and stood there for five minutes without a word. Her hand was under my arm. And then, just naturally, without any preliminaries of excitement, we kissed.”

“Ah!” said Fred. “I knew it.… I notice these spiritual adventures always end in a kiss.”

“You needn’t be so superior about it—I was quite conscious of that ironic fact, even in the act of kissing. I thought to myself—‘Now, Bill it’s all over with you; you’ve now definitely let yourself in for it.’ And in a way I was very unhappy about it. I foresaw all the wretched complications, the evasions, the concealments, the necessities for furtiveness and secrecy, and the inevitableness—or is it inevitability?—with which this furtive-ness must poison the relation between us. I also foresaw the awful physiological or biological or psychological determinism which, in such a situation, carries one forward a little farther with each meeting, until disaster is reached. There is something magnificent and horrible in that. Relentless Nature. She has no pity on us. Once you give in to her at all, in the smallest particular, you’re a gone goose. There can never be any backward step. You begin by merely gazing, then you touch hands—ah, that exquisite first touch!—and then you embrace and kiss, and then you kiss more passionately, and the next time more passionately still—there is no breaking that spell except by flight. And there we were on a ship, where no flight was possible.…