Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

He turned into the little shop, and climbed up the crooked old-fashioned stairs to the print room, and began turning over the big portfolios of Japanese prints. The Utamaros were far too expensive—and so were the Hokusais; but nevertheless he lingered over them for a little. What a lovely thing, this Utamaro of the three fisherwomen, with their pink-and-gray kirtles, and the wicker basket on the pale sand beside a starfish, and the twilight-pale water! Goodness—goodness—goodness. It was to enter into another world, to gaze at this—a world of serenity and perfection, of the lovely and the immortal. But twenty dollars!… He closed the portfolio and opened the next, which contained the Hiroshiges. Bad prints, most of them—the late uprights, and in garish dyes: too much aniline purple and poisonous green. And the occasional good ones—a few of the Tokaido road set—were costly. Fifteen—twenty-five—ten—seven—twelve—all beyond his means. There was one two-dollar print—but it was a rather commonplace and superficial fishing-boat affair, and much too bright. He turned again, and yet again, his eye seeking first the price-mark in the lower right-hand corner of each print; and then suddenly he was arrested by an upright Hiroshige landscape which was marked “one dollar.” Heavens! Was it possible? Could it be possible? It was a print he had never seen before—entitled “Field of Flowers.” And it was exquisite—it was like a poem—it was like a piece of music by Debussy. It was blue, and yet it was not blue—green, and yet not green—opalescent—a field of narcissus and daffodils in the spring, with a gray oak-tree arching over a winding path. Good Lord! Good gracious! His hand positively trembled as he held it. The ethereal evanescence with which that meadow faded into the distance, like a crepuscular sky in which one is only half-conscious of the stars! And those tiny butterfly ladies pausing under the tree for a talk, as if the wind, for just a moment, had let them rest there!… He stared and stared; and then, “I’ll take this,” he said to the waiting salesman.

A find!… A veritable find!… He plunged out into the bright sunshine again, as if leaving behind him that enchanted field of flowers (though in fact he carried it under his arm, tenderly), and blinked at the garish street. What an astonishing thing—a print like that for a dollar—for a single dollar! A Hiroshige that positively sang in his heart, that flung open a gateway to the impossible, the inaccessible, the intangible, the impalpable azure of the soul! It was exactly the miracle he had hoped for. It was exactly the thing that met his needs. It was exactly—precisely—ah! He paused in his step, faltered, inhibited by the bright intensity of his thought. For was it not true? Yes, it was true; it was exactly what the affair with Gwendolyn ought to have been, and hadn’t been.…

He stood still at the curbstone, waiting for the stream of traffic to pass, and as he stood so, preoccupied, he felt a delicious and treacherous decision trembling, in his soul, on the brink of crystallization. To give away this print—to give it to Gwendolyn—wouldn’t that be to give away the very thing, the precious and indefinable thing, the fragrance of his idealism, which Gwendolyn had not deserved? Wasn’t it precisely this, after all, that he was entitled to keep? Wouldn’t it be, in the upshot, the very finest of poetic justices that Gwendolyn should have missed this beauty, have failed to see it, and that he should himself preserve and guard it?… It was still only a quarter to ten. There would be time enough for him to take it back to his room, if then he should hurry to the station in a taxi. To do, or not to do. The stream of traffic came to an end; it was now possible to cross, but he did not cross. He turned back again, with a queer exultation in his heart, and hurried toward his room.

How easily—reflected Smith, or Jones, or Robinson, or whatever his name happened to be—our little world can go to pieces! And incidentally, of course, the great world; for the great world is only ourselves writ large, is at best nothing but a projection of our own thought, and of our own order or disorder in thought. It was a moment’s presumption that led a genius to write that genius and madness are near allied; proximity to madness is not a privilege of genius alone; it is the privilege and natural necessity of every consciousness, from the highest to the lowest; Smith and Robinson are as precariously hung in the void as Shakspeare himself. Do we not know that even the animals go mad? Have we not been informed that an ant, afflicted with a tumor of the brain, will walk in circles, bite his neighbors, and in every sense behave abnormally? His internal order, or habit, has been changed—and, ipso facto , the external order has been destroyed. By that little speck of accidental matter, unforeseeable, gods (perhaps) have been deposed, stars dislodged from their orbits, moons turned into alarm clocks. The fair page of the world, thus re-set, becomes a brilliant but meaningless jumble of typographical errors.

And thus—thought Smith, or Jones, or Robinson—it is with me. At this very moment some little atom may have taken, in some tiny crossroad of my brain, the wrong turning. Some infinitesimal dead leaf may have lodged itself, in my thought’s stream, against some infinitesimal twig; and the consequences may prove incalculable. On that dead leaf of matter or feeling or thought will depend the whole course of my life. In an instant it will be as if I had stepped through this bright cobweb of appearance on which I walk with such apparent security, and plunged into a chaos of my own; for that chaos will be as intimately and recognizably my own, with its Smith-like disorder, as the present world is my own, with its Smith-like order. Here will be all the appurtenances of my life, every like and dislike, every longing or revulsion, from the smallest to the greatest; all the umbrellas—so to speak—of my life, all the canceled postage stamps and burnt matches, the clipped fingernails, love letters, calendars, and sunrises; but all of them interchanged and become (by change) endowed with demonic power. At a step, I shall have fallen into a profound and perhaps termless Gehenna which will be everywhere nothing but Smith. Only to the name of Smith will the umbrella-winged demons of this chaos answer.

It is now—thought Smith, or Jones, or Robinson—past midnight, and this apartment house, with all its curious occupants, is asleep. The janitor has locked the outer door; the row of mother-of-pearl electric buttons (one for each occupant) is inert, for lack of inquiring fingers to complete their respective circuits; the brass letter-boxes yawn darkly for the absent postman; the elevator has settled down for the night on the fourth floor, to which it was brought by a late-comer at twelve-forty-three. Even the water in the innumerable pipes has gone to sleep, become stale and torpid. And here, in my room, I pace to and fro, thinking how easily I could change all this. Perhaps I would achieve this gradually, and step by step, just as I pace to and fro across the four rugs from Persia which cover the floor; item by item I would tear down the majestic fiction which is at present myself and the world, and item by item build up another. Exactly as one can stare at a word until it becomes meaningless, I can begin to stare at the world. What in heaven’s name are these rugs? What in heaven’s name are these walls, this floor, the books on my mantelpiece, the three worn wooden chairs, the pencils in a row on my red table? Arrangements of atoms? If so, then they are all perpetually in motion; the whole appearance is in reality a chaotic flux, a whirlwind of opposing forces; they and I are in one preposterous stream together, borne helplessly to an unknown destiny. I am myself perhaps only a momentary sparkle on the swift surface of this preposterous stream. My awareness is only an accident; and moreover my awareness is less truly myself than this stream which supports me, and out of which my sparkle of consciousness has for a moment been cast up. And how easy—once more—to slip back into the flux itself, into that deeper current, that primordial chaos, which is really I! My own Gehenna, now as always, awaits me there within, with all its horrors and all its magnificence.