Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Sure, if you like!”

“All right.”

“You think there’s something wrong?”

“Yeap, I do. D’you see that chair on the porch?”

“No.”

“Take another look.”

I did so, and sure enough, on the little side-porch, next to the cow-yard, I could make out the wheel-chair, lying on its back, with its wheels in the air.

“That’s queer,” I said.

“And not so funny!… Let’s go down there.”

It took us about ten minutes to get to the Willard footbridge. The flooded river was almost up to the level of the bridge; and as we walked cautiously along the slippery planks, we could hear crazy shouts from the cow-yard. For the moment, we could see nothing, because of the low, straggling lilac-hedge which ran across the front corner of the yard. But when we had passed this barrier we stood still in sheer astonishment.

The two women had gone completely mad.

I’m sure they had seen us approaching; but if they had, they paid no attention to us. Round and round the cow-yard, which was half mud and half water, they were dancing in a grotesque, hobbling circle, like a pair of scarecrow bacchantes. They were so drenched with rain and mud, from head to foot, as to be hardly recognizable. Raising and flapping their arms, they shouted incessantly and incoherently something that sounded like “ Bow down, Isaac! Bow down, Isaac!”; and as we ran forward we could see that the huddled object in the mud, which now and then they paused in their dance to kick, was old Isaac, but scarcely distinguishable from the filth in which he lay. The red rubber boots pointed mutely toward the river. It was when he saw these, I think, that Captain Phippen shouted something harshly at the two women; and, suddenly quieted, they drew a little way off from us and stared at us with the dull, curious surprise of animals. Without protest or comment, almost without interest (standing on a corner of the porch), they then watched us pick up the lifeless body and carry it, dripping, into the house. At first I thought Isaac was dead. It seemed incredible that such a shapeless thing—covered with water and mud and blood—could be alive. The sight of his face—no longer recognizably human—sickened me. But Captain Phippen, hardier than I, opened the soaked waistcoat and discovered that Isaac’s heart was still beating.… I was only too glad to be sent for the doctor.

Two days later, nevertheless, old Isaac died, a sacrifice to the Lord. An embarrassed coroner and jury gave the cause of his death, officially, as “an apoplexy, induced by over-exertion.” During this time, and for a few days after, Mrs. Willard and Lydia, who had both become suddenly very meek, were left unmolested; the town authorities were uncertain what to do with them. Was it a murder? Or, if not, what was it?… The State authorities were more decided. A week later we heard that Lydia and her mother had been “spirited” away, as the papers put it, to the asylum.

And on the same day the Reverend Mr. Boody left town very hurriedly. Mr. Perkins had again mentioned him (it seemed) in the pulpit of the Congregational Church. “As a direct result of the maunderings of this primitive and predacious fanatic …” said Mr. Perkins, among other things …!

But was it only that? I hold no brief for poor Mr. Boody; but it seemed to me that the affair wasn’t quite so simple. Though it was true enough, apparently, that several people had seen the two women driving back from the revivalist meeting just before the tragedy, “as if hell possessed them.” And even then (Mr. Greene said) “They were singing!”

I.

The first I heard of it—and heard of them—was, of course, from the irrepressible Paul. Naturally. Nothing went on, in that little English country town, that Paul didn’t at once know; and nothing he knew could remain for more than five minutes a secret. He was everywhere, with that long aristocratic nose of his, that hawk-bright and frost-blue stare—whether it was to make quick notes on his little pad for a sketch, or to make a sketch itself, or to take elaborately careful photographs of some obscure “subject” which was later to become, as he put it, an “idea.” You would meet him anywhere, everywhere. Perched on a stile, miles from anywhere, in the middle of the marsh, you would find him waiting to get a very special and particular light on the reeds, meanwhile writing out, in his tiny needle-sharp handwriting, any number of color charts for proposed landscapes which read like poems, like Imagist poems. Once I discovered him astride an old wreck of a steamroller, which had been abandoned by a corner of the muddy little river. And once flat on his belly in the very middle of the path to the shipyards, taking, from that earthworm angle—angleworm?—a peculiar fore-shortened photograph of some up-ended, half-finished fence posts. In fact, he was into everything.

But people, too—he was just as excitable about people, just as curious about them, as about anything else. He was a “collector” of people, and especially the odd and queer ones, or the brilliant ones; and if his extraordinary studio was a perfect museum of oddments—shells, old bottles, misshapen stones, dead leaves, dead insects, broken dolls, whatever had taken his fancy, or struck him as suggestive—so his salons were full of the most surprising people imaginable. He didn’t care where they came from or what they did, so long as they had character, or were handsome, or were amusing—those were the three tests. The social mixtures, at these semi-occasional salons , were simply indescribable—women with blue hair, yogis, dipsomaniac composers, circus dwarfs, countesses, mannequins, chorus girls—but it made no difference, they always seemed to have a good time, Paul saw to that; and of course Paul himself had the best time of all. Whether he was discussing the psychological implications of surrealism with a pale Belgian poet, or giving amusingly amorous advice about her make-up to a pretty, an extremely pretty, young society photographer, it was all the same to him. He enjoyed life immensely.

It was no surprise to me, therefore, when he came under my lighted window, late one summer evening, and told me, laughing excitedly, that he had something to show me.

“What is it?” I said.

“Come down and see.”

When I had joined him in the cobbled street, and repeated my question, he asked one of his own—he asked if I knew that a fair had come to town. As a matter of fact, I did. Early that day I had seen the first of the brightly-striped tents and pavilions going up, and the gaudy gypsy wagons drawn up in a ring on the playing-salts, and the ditch being dug behind a canvas screen, for a latrine, and the fantastic red-and-gold horses of the merry-go-round emerging proudly from their dirty covers. It was the fair’s annual visit to the town, for a week of penny gambling and loud music, but there was nothing so remarkable in that. And I said so.

“Ah—but have you seen it all—have you seen the Drome of Death?”

“The Drome of Death?”

“Yes—and my pair of vikings!”

“Vikings! A pair of vikings! What on earth are you talking about?”

“Then you haven’t seen it all—not by any means. My dear fellow—the most beautiful pair of human beings you ever saw in your life! Come along, or we’ll be too late.”

We hurried along the High Street then, to the little cliff that overlooks the playing-salts, and there below us was all the glare and uproar of the fair—the crowds, the shouts, the strange squealing watery music of the merry-go-round, with its circling and nodding horses, the rows of painted swing-boats, with their tense and silent occupants clinging to the ropes as they darted up from light into shadow, and down into light again—it was all exactly as usual, exactly as it always was. Or so I was thinking, until I heard a sound that seemed to me unfamiliar. It sounded like a motor-bike being accelerated in bursts, each louder than the last—a crescendo of mechanical roars, and then a dying fall, and another crescendo of roars, and a third; and looking down from our parapet to see if I could find where it came from, I saw the Drome of Death for the first time, and then below it, in a dazzle of spotlight, standing on a little raised dais of bright red plush, with the two motor-bicycles beside them, the vikings.