Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Everything, of this sort, was implied in that first rather shy and fugitive kiss. And what was not implied she immediately went on to say . She said that she had fallen in love with me the minute she saw me: she had begun to tremble violently, and had wanted to come right up to me, there on the deck, and speak, but had not dared. She had then quite deliberately waited till I had taken my seat in the dining saloon, in order that she might seat herself at the same table. Astounding. And then she said, when we began to talk, my voice—just think of it, my voice! —put the finishing touch on it. She said her reason simply forsook her. And when, in the morning, I lifted Smet-Smet to my lips and kissed adoringly the beautiful terracotta mouth, it appears that I had put an enchantment on her that would never, never be broken. She knew then, once and for all, that the thing was fatal.

“Of course, I replied in kind. I said all sorts of absurd and frantic things. I told her—what was true enough—that I had never in my life seen anyone so beautiful, and that I, too, in the same way, had been completely swept off my feet. Isn’t it extraordinary, the madness that comes over one on these occasions? I held her in my arms and stared into her eyes and said ‘Lovely! Lovely! Lovely’ over and over again. And nevertheless, I was thinking to myself ‘I must get out of this,’ and wondering how soon I could decently make my escape. And the very fact that I was aware of this duplicity, of this horrible treason, made me redouble the ardor of my embrace and the ecstasy of my speech. I had allowed her to assume that I was as much in love with her as she was with me; and in the face of this, and of the really appalling intensity with which she loved me, I saw nothing for it but to surrender unconditionally, at the same time hoping that the good ship Imperator would break all records and reach New York at least three days before she was due.”

“Zeus and Atropos!” murmured the Professor. “Now if it had been Fred, he’d have been wishing that it was a World Cruise.”

“You bet,” said Fred. “Shall we proceed to whisky and soda?… Let’s have a whisky and soda.”

He signaled the waiter and gave the order. Bill unrolled a long oilskin tobacco-pouch and began filling his charred and battered pipe.

“However,” he resumed, “we weren’t so far sunk that we could ignore the practical social difficulties that lay ahead of us. And so the disagreeable element of secrecy was introduced at once. I explained that I had friends on the ship, and that I would therefore have to be very careful; she, on her part, added that of course there was her mother to be considered. We couldn’t simply surrender ourselves to this— passion —and blindly ignore all consequences. We would have to plan a kind of cold-blooded campaign of discretion and secrecy, not to say deception. So it was arranged that we should have three hours a day; one in the morning, one in the afternoon (when her mother always took a rest), and one in the evening after the bridge-game and before I joined my three friends in the smoking room. In this way, we thought, we could probably keep the thing as inconspicuous and normal as the usual sort of ship-acquaintance, and avoid anything in the nature of gossip. This was unpleasant, and gave me a bad moment of panic—if only because, in this illicit way, it took our affair for granted, and gave it a twisted kind of legality. I was now in the position of an accepted lover, but without in the least being in love. I, who had never in my life been unfaithful to my wife, and never desired to be, and I didn’t even now desire to be, was being railroaded into a clandestine liaison of really grandiose proportions.… Here’s how.”

“How,” said Fred.

“How,” said the Professor.

Ruminating, they sipped their whiskies. The bartender was shaking cocktails for two college boys who leaned with careful nonchalance, in wet raincoats, against the bar. The snow, one of them was saying, had turned to rain.

“That touches the spot,” said the Professor. He put down his glass and smiled. He felt extraordinarily good-natured. “Lovely! Lovely! Lovely!”… Bill’s phrase, in Bill’s suave and intense and—yes— gauzy voice, ran in his head hypnotically.

“To resume. I’ll cut the thing short—for of course you can imagine the next few stages well enough for yourselves. Nothing much happened in the morning and afternoon of the third day—but in the evening, when we climbed up to the boat-deck again, things began to happen pretty fast. She was in a frenzy—had an idea that I had been cold to her all day—accused me of avoiding her, not looking at her—and so forth. Naturally, I denied this, and took the easiest way of doing so—I embraced her ardently and kissed her, swearing that if I had appeared to avoid meeting her eyes it was only because I was so afraid of giving myself away in public. She hugged me, she kissed my hands, she ran her fingers up inside my coat sleeves, and then, beginning to cry, she told me about her husband.… It appears that he was a typical American businessman—successful, energetic, cold, hard-boiled , as the saying is. She had been married to him for five years—he was twelve years older than she—and for the first year or so she had been more or less happy. But then she began to discover their temperamental differences. She was passionately in love, and he was not. She was romantic, and he was not. She wanted adventure, color, excitement, parties, music, poetry, art—you know the sort of things: a kind of American Emma Bovary; and he, alas, became every minute more absorbed in his business life, a mere walking ledger. What relaxation he sought was in his club or on the golf-links, and always alone. In a nut-shell, he was indifferent to her because he was sexless. Nothing new in the situation, of course—we read about it every other day in the divorce cases. But it astounded me, as it still astounds me, that anyone could have married such a being as she was and remain indifferent. She said he had no tact, no understanding, whatever: gave her things, of the kind that money could buy, and gave generously, but never gave himself. A perfunctory kiss at breakfast, and another when he came home from the office. And there had been no children.…

“ Quae cum ita sint , she was unconsciously ripe for such a misadventure as befell her with me. She thought me romantic-looking; and I had then only to kiss Smet-Smet, and murmur to her how nice it would be if we could fly away together to Tahiti or Karnak, and she was certain that in me she had found her great lover, her ideal. In fact, she said so. That I was myself married—I had fortunately mentioned this at the outset—didn’t affect her in the least. No matter what happened, she said, she would now and henceforth be happy all her life, by virtue of this memory. She now knew—so she said—what it was to love and be loved. Just think of it! She had extracted all this from a few clandestine embraces on B Deck and the paltry half-dozen romantic phrases which I had managed to recall from my reading of soupy love-stories in the cheaper magazines. If that isn’t an irony, what is? I was horribly ashamed of myself—I’ve never in all my days felt so miserably cheap and dishonest. A perfect cad. And yet, when I looked back over the affair I couldn’t, to save my neck, see any point at which I could decently, or mercifully—yes, mercifully—have behaved otherwise than as I did … Good God!”

He paused, removed his pipe from his mouth, stared at the ashes in it as if a little surprised, struck a match absent-mindedly, without using it blew it out, and then resumed.

“Yes.… That’s how it was.… And you can imagine exactly how it affected me. I exerted myself, on the one hand, to make love to her more passionately; and on the other hand, I had my eye perpetually on my watch, or my ear on the ship’s bells, so as to reduce our meetings to a minimum. I worked my three acquaintances for all they were worth—told her that they were already a little suspicious, and that I would have to be a good deal more careful. Pretended also that I had some very important work to do—reading for lectures, et cetera. She took it like a lamb, believed me without question. And—heavens!—how astonishing it was, to go down from that dark upper deck, where we stood for an hour under the stars, absolutely immobile with passionate absorption in each other, in that blind state of panic when the whole universe seems to flow into one’s soul—to go down alone from this to the smoking room and hear Peters saying, in his lazy drawl, ‘Well, according to Einstein—’ or Marks telling the other chap the theoretical value in tricks of each card in a bridge-game. That, in addition to my own singular detachment—call it dishonest if you like—gave the thing an exotic unreality, a nostalgic remoteness, of an unmatchable loveliness. I experienced a profound feeling of gratitude that such an adventure should have befallen the least romantic of men: and I was terrified, with the genuine sacred terror, when I wondered what the future might hold in store for me.