Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“I know it looks suspicious!” He gave a little laugh.

“ Very suspicious!”

“But I assure you it stuck earlier in the evening as well!”

“Oh, did it?”

“Yes, it did.”

Mrs. Trask smiled again, as if waiting for something—of course, she was waiting for him to precede her upstairs. What an idiot he was!

“I’m sorry,” he said again, in a heartfelt tone, and then added, “good night, Mrs. Trask.”

“Good night, Mr. Milliken.”

Irony?… No.…

And then, as he stood before his mirror, a brilliant thought occurred to him—a positive illumination. Of course! She was attracted to him! Any fool could see that! If he were to go downstairs again, and knock quietly at her door—very, very quietly—

No sooner said than done. He knotted the cord of his bathrobe about his middle, opened his door, and listened. Nobody stirring—the hall was dark. He crept out, descended the stairs softly—his heart beating with absurd violence—and on the landing beside Mrs. Trask’s door paused to listen again. Not a sound—Mrs. Trask must have gone back to bed. He lifted one knuckle, poised it fatally, and knocked—once, twice.

“Who’s that?”

Mrs. Trask’s voice sounded muffled, a little frightened. To his dismay, the Professor found that his own voice had unaccountably failed him. He stood and waited, in abject and appalling silence.

“Is that you, Mr. Milliken?”

Ridiculous! He must do something. He summoned up his waning courage.

“Yes, it’s I, Mrs. Trask.”

“Are you ill?… Did you want something?”

Another portentous silence—a positive abyss. The hallway reeled. But wasn’t this, thank heaven, an opportunity for escape?

“Yes, I am.… Have you any brandy, Mrs. Trask?”

“I’m sorry—” came the muffled voice—“I haven’t … I’d get up, but I’ve just had an attack of vertigo myself—”

“Oh, don’t bother, please … I just thought if you had any brandy—”

He turned in an agony of humiliation and shame, and confronted the stairs. Ruined! He had all but ruined himself. Good Lord, what would Molly say when she heard of this! They would have to move. At once.… He stood as if paralyzed, clutching the post of the stair-rail. And then, for no valid reason, he twice struck his forehead against the post, and went quietly back to his room.

I.

A hot, sticky August evening. Almost six o’clock. The freckled young man, whose name was Cooke, had his watch before him on the table where he was writing. His sleeves were rolled up, showing thin freckled arms with sparse blond hairs, and he had taken off his collar, which lay on the top of the bookcase. He looked down through the tall open window into Twenty-third Street and saw, across the way, the latticed saloon door perpetually swinging. A man in his shirt-sleeves, carrying his pale alpaca coat over his left arm, fanned his red face with a panama. He said something to the woman, then disappeared through the swinging door. A girl came out carrying a tin pail brimful of beer—“rushing the growler.” A dingy terrier briskly trotted round the corner, trotting obliquely, carrying its hindquarters well to starboard. He peered under the swinging door, with one paw lifted, and the cat, crouched on the brown steps next door, began to arch her back. Then a green-and-white street car, crowded, cut off his vision, and Cooke again regarded, somewhat wearily, his manuscript. He was using yellow paper—he had bought a thick block of it in a Ninth Avenue shop, hoping that yellow would make him more prolific. But it didn’t seem particularly to help him. At the top of the page “Beauty” was written, and twice underscored. Below it was one long paragraph, disordered with cancellations and interpolations. He completed the sentence: “but to stare at Beauty, to attempt to track it down, to set snares for it, to turn a powerful glare of consciousness upon it, is almost inevitably to frighten it away. Beauty is the chimera which exists only in imagination. It is the mirage, born of drought, which the more it is approached, the more it dissolves. It is the gold and purple Phoenix which is reborn only out of ashes.…” No, this wouldn’t do at all. He crossed it all out, peevishly. This, as he had only just finished learning at college, was a mere purple passage. He wanted something purple, certainly, but not this frayed and mothy purple as of the old stage-robes of the player King. Something like “the eastern conduits ran with wine”: that was what he wanted. He opened De Quincey again—it had been helping him, or discouraging him, all afternoon—and read a page, opened to at random; while he read, he kept pulling at his shirt, which was soaked through with perspiration, to detach it from his body. Damned discouraging—he would never capture the secret of that style.… Perhaps it would be better if he tried red ink, like Flodden, who had the next room, and whom he could hear moving on his bed.… Or should he go back to blank-books?… He opened his latest blank-book, where an uncompleted poem ended with the lines:

“Like Erisichthon, by a sad mischance,

Gnawest thou at thine own enfeebled limbs?”

Well, by God, that was pretty good! He would go on with it: the glamour of life was renewed in him by something connected with those lines: twilight, soft music, women’s faces—white under arc-lamps. He felt melancholy. After all, it was wonderful, living in a dirty boarding-house in the great city. He thought of the girl he had seen at Child’s in Madison Square the day before: she wore a lavender-colored soft dress and a wide straw hat. After lunch he had followed her irresolutely as far as Brentano’s. Then he had gone into Brentano’s—to read all the foreign magazines. He looked everywhere for clues to beauty, to some short-cut by which he could learn to write as he wanted to—with power and subtlety and magnificence. But what he wrote was always commonplace.

The six o’clock whistles began to blow. The tom-tom downstairs in the basement, where the dark dining room was, began its soft swelling clamor, ending in a brazen crash. He heard Billington, in the room over his head, push back his chair which screeched on the bare floor, and take several soft steps. Flodden’s bed began creaking agitatedly. The iron gate in the front yard clanged, and looking down he saw Mr. Ezra D. Ramsden, the detective (sour-faced idiot), walking up the path. He was carrying a paper package under his arm, and looking at the red headlines of a newspaper: the creaking of his shoes was audible and the basement door rang automatically as he went in.… Two fingernails ticked the door, and Flodden entered, his white Hapsburg face grinning, his bad teeth showing, and black gums.

“Alas,” he cried, “what boots it with incessant care: to strictly meditate the thankless muse?… Were it not better done, as others booze, to sport with Phyllis at the Palisades?”

“The Palisades tonight? Too damned hot.”

“Out in the vestry, too damned hot,” sang Flodden. He shuffled to the window in his red carpet slippers, and spat neatly to the path below. “It’s too hot for anything but cold baths and naps. That’s what I’ve been doing all afternoon, one after another. When I wasn’t in the bath, Mother Ramsden was; when Mrs. Ramsden wasn’t, I was; and vice versa and et cetera ad infinitum . And when I wasn’t either soaking or sleeping, I read the Lake , as being the coolest book I could think of.… Certainly the coolest of Moore’s! Ha, Ha.”

“Papa Ramsden is back from the Wild West with his disguise under his arm.”

“More likely it’s a touching little gift for the missus. Sister Susie, being in hopes, read the works of Marie Stopes. Now she’s in a sad condition because she read the wrong edition.”