Conrad Aiken: The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Here I come!” she cried, taking his arm affectionately. “My room is over there—behind that corner. You can climb?”

“Climb?”

“Stairs?… Five stairs—one, two, three, four, five—poof!”

“Well, I think I might!”

“Come then! I go first. It is dark, a little.”

They had crossed a moonlit stone-paved court and entered a cavelike doorway, and were climbing the gas-lighted stone stairs. The last flight was completely dark, and she disappeared ahead of him, her slippers going pat-pat on the dusty stone. He was trying to feel his way along the wall when a match spurted, the gas went puff , and he was flooded with light from her open door. She was standing there, with a finger on her lips; and when he had entered the low attic room, with sloping walls, she closed the door behind him.

“My friend below asleep,” she said. “You like my room? Nice, eh?”

“Delightful! Geraniums, too.”

“And nice curtains, and a nice bed?”

“Charming!”

“Ah, you are frightful! You don’t look, you don’t like it, and you think only of your cravat! Egoist!”

“No no!”

“ Oui oui! But see—I have pity on you. Look now.”

She pulled out the top drawer of a chest of drawers, clutching him by the sleeve. “Look!”

Well! You could have knocked him down with a feather! Astounding! The drawer was filled with neckties! Every kind! Striped, plain, diamonded, knitted—two dozen at the very least! It was like Christmas—he could feel the eyes fairly popping out of his head.

“Choose one,” she said, thrusting her hand among ties as one might dip among goldfish in an aquarium. “You like this one?”

She held up a heavy blue satin, luxuriously thick.

“Ah!” he cried, “a beauty! It’s beautiful. May I have it? You will let me buy it from you?”

“Buy it?” She looked blankly at him. “Buy it?”

He held the tie in his hand. She turned her shoulder against the drawer and slowly pushed it shut. Taking off her tam-o’-shanter, she flung it angrily on the bed. Then, leaning against the drawer, she looked at him with narrowing eyes, standing perfectly still.

“Oh,” she said, looking at him with an extraordinary in tensity of detachment. “You would like to buy it.”

“Why, of course! Why not?”

“Certainly not! ” she cried, stamping her foot. “You can put it on and go! I give it to you.”

“Oh!” he stammered, suddenly perplexed. “What have I—’

“Put it on and go! Quick !”

“I beg your pardon!” he cried. “I didn’t mean—”

“Here! Give it to me.”

She snatched the tie, whisked it round his collar, tied it swiftly, tucked the ends under his waistcoat, and then went lightly to the door and threw it open. She pointed dramatically down the stairs. As he hesitated, she gave him a little push. She was smiling: ironically, cynically, with an infinite contempt.

“You will not permit me to see you again?”

“Good night!”

“ Mademoiselle , forgive me! And let me thank you!”

“Good night!”

“You will not even shake hands with me?”

“Good night!”

Implacable, she began slowly shutting the door. In the narrowing crack of light he descended, keeping close to the wall, which smelt of damp white-wash. His heart was beating with uncomfortable violence.… Well!… Well!… Who could have foreseen—who could have guessed—that it would be like that! He had offended her! She had expected—had she expected him to—make love to her? No, no. It was just that he had been—had been— too greedy! Seeing all those ties in that drawer!… Oh, oh, oh. And it had been so nice talking to her, and perhaps he would have asked her to come out to supper with him—

He stood still in the court for a moment, still breathing a little fast. The moon was shining. The light from her attic room gashed across a tiled roof opposite, and a shadow moved in the gash of light.… Well! He had his necktie. And it would really have been too late, anyway. Perhaps it was just as well.… Too bad, too bad.

It was a minor episode in my life—happened when I was taking my examinations for college—and I will tell it briefly.

My family—which consisted of my father, my mother, and my brother Phil—had just moved to a rather shabby little boarding-house in Oxford Street. It was one of our recurring periods of poverty: the “old man” was always impractical; just as we had really got our heads once more above water he would buy a lot of worthless securities, and down we would go again, from a house to a flat, from a flat to a boarding-house. Phil and I never understood these remarkable alternations of fortune: but I suppose my mother did—poor thing—well enough. Anyway, when my father died, a few years ago, we found that he had accumulated, during his life, a good-sized trunkful of beautifully engraved and embossed securities which weren’t worth a penny. There were enough of them to paper the walls of a house, and they would have looked very well.

Neither my father nor mother were particularly “social,” and it was therefore all the more surprising that, in the Oxford Street lodgings, they should so suddenly have made friends of the Lyntons. We all sat at one long table, of course, like a Last Supper—and some sort of acquaintance with the other boarders was inevitable; but we had survived many such exposures, before, without making any friends. The Lyntons, however, seemed from the outset to amuse my father (who was rather a shy man) inordinately. I think my mother was not so convinced—for she was a queer, bitter sort of frustrated “highbrow,” and very critical—but even she, for once, unbent a little. In a very short time, an extraordinary intimacy had sprung up between the Lyntons and the Beebes which, if it involved my mother and father more than Phil and myself, nevertheless involved us too.

In fact, almost the first thing I remember about the life at Oxford Street was going to a circus with the Lyntons—a party so incredibly gay and frivolous that Phil and I, who were more accustomed to seeing the old people play cribbage, or now and then, in a wild moment, poker (the chips being broken matches, the stakes nil), were absolutely staggered. And Mrs. Lynton was the life of the party. Mr. Lynton was a good laugher—a very good laugher. His foxy eyes would close themselves up into watery slits, his beautifully pointed Vandyke beard would prod at his necktie, he would wriggle to and fro and emit far-off falsetto cries, and become quite helpless—especially when it was Mrs. Lynton who had provided the cause.

But Mrs. Lynton was better still. O how she laughed! She laughed at the elephants, she laughed at the kangaroos, she laughed at the monkeys, at the clowns—she had only to roll her brown horse-chestnut eyes at Mr. Lynton, and he too collapsed almost into the sawdust—even my father succumbed, and my staid intellectual mother. It was only Phil and myself who got rather tired of this surprising and sudden and motiveless gayety. Eventually we struck rather a false note in the party by adopting (in taciturn unison) a stubborn silence.… The older people thought we were prigs.

And that circus lasted us for days. No meal passed without three or four hilarious passages devoted to it. A mere word sufficed to set them off.

“And do you remember that little monkey with the pink behind?” Mrs. Lynton would say, and it would all begin over again.

“And the kangaroo skipping softly in and out under that little door!”

“And the smells! the smells! the smells!”

“And the way that clown would spit into the bottle!”