Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

I.

Four o’clock struck in the church tower he was passing—the wide bronze rings of sound fell over him mingled with a fine powdery snow. He looked at his watch—how absurd!—and found that the church was quite right. This seemed the last straw in his boredom, and as if instigated by it, he turned out of the quiet square, beginning to be patched with white under dim lamps, with here and there a black wheel-track showing, and moved listlessly toward the shopping district. “Why didn’t I go?” he thought—without more than waving the vaguest of hands towards the imaginary destination or destiny. Then—“Middle age is a slow crucifixion.” And then again, knocking snow from his coat, “I can’t stand this damned solitude much longer.” However, here were the shop windows, a long gaudily jeweled row of them, pouring their colored lights across the snowy pavement and illuminating brilliantly the hordes of feverishly gesticulating pedestrians, the prowling taxis, the furtively creeping beetle-like limousines, the wet sides of horses. He went slowly, like a heavy moth, from window to window. He pulled his mustache, he stared, stamped his feet, devoured with dry eyes all that he saw—opal necklaces, gold cigarette cases, umbrellas with carved ivory handles, embroideries of Chinese scarlet, opera glasses, microscopes—good God! what a strange collection. He felt as if he were somehow incrusting his soul with these things—he seemed to himself to be like one of those singular boxes, known to his childhood, covered all over hard, rough and coruscating, with small sea-shells. Yes, exactly, and the box itself empty. Sea-shells—sea-shells. He thought of sea-shells with great pleasure, and then of the sea, the twilight valley floors of the sea, the strange soft trees that grow there, and himself as somehow a denizen—what precisely? A tortoise incrusted with barnacles, indistinguishable from his bed of shells, immemorially old and white. Yes, something like that.…

“I should like,” he said to the florid Jewish shopkeeper, “to look at some oddity in the way of a set of chessmen.”

“An oddity?—Yes.”

“A wedding gift, under peculiar circumstances. Something rather—” he waved a claw.

“—Rare?”

“—Old.”

A Chinese set with dragons, a Hindu set with elephants, a Japanese set of carved cherry-wood, daimyos, priests.… No, these weren’t quite the thing. The Jew looked at him intently under wrinkled lids like a parrot’s. Was his tongue, also, as hard and dry and old as a parrot’s?… The Jew hunched his shoulders almost up to his ears.

“Ah—I think I know what you want. But it can’t be had.”

“You mean—”

“You were thinking, no doubt, of the set of the ‘Twelve Disciples’?”

Astonishing! He had never heard of the set of “Twelve Disciples”; and yet there could be no question that it was what he was seeking.

“Exactly!”

“Ah! But it is lost.… And even if it were found, who could afford to buy it?”

“Oh! Afford!…”

“Ah—you are right—what does it matter?”

“And what is it like, this set of the Twelve Disciples?”

“Like? It is—but don’t you know?”

The Jew, leaning on the glass case, peered at him, he thought, somewhat peculiarly.

“How should I? I’ve never even heard of it.”

“But you said—!”

“Ah—forgive me—it is true that when you mentioned it—how shall I say—it seemed to me in some remote way—familiar. That was all.”

“Ah. I see—I see!… You thought you remembered it.… And if you think, if you concentrate upon it—if you turn, in your mind, a sudden light upon it—”

“I beg your pardon—?”

“—You don’t see it any more clearly?”

“Why, no—how should I?”

“Oh.… But the set really is quite ordinary—as carving. Nothing remarkable.”

“Then why is it so valuable?”

“Perhaps because it is generally considered mythical.”

“Mythical?… It doesn’t, after all, exist?…”

“So some would say. As for me—”

“You believe in it?”

“I believe in it.… I have even, in dreams, seen it.”

He found himself staring at the Jew, on this, as if at the revelation of some sort of obscure miracle. Yes, it appeared, the set of chessmen, in dreams; it came, in dreams, to this Jew. For a moment it seemed, in the oddest of ways, more tangible, it gave out a gleam and came nearer. Thirty-two pieces of ivory, close-clustered, one of them fallen over, and a candle lighting them. Had he dreamed this himself? It was vivid, and vivid was the hand he put out among them to right the fallen piece. But the fallen piece was stubborn, resisted, became massive.… He lifted his hand from the glass showcase, and stepped back. He had a sense of having resisted, barely resisted, and with an effort that left him trembling, a temptation not the less vast for having been incomprehensible. It was with a feeling of yielding to some obscure small issue of this temptation that he now said, with a conscious jocoseness that did not conceal excitement:

“And the piece that has fallen over—which piece is that?”

II.

The effect of this remark was extraordinary. The tempo of the adventure—for adventure it unquestionably and profoundly was—instantly quickened. It was as if the stream on which they were being swept had not only broadened and taken on a dizzying speed, but had, as suddenly, dived underground through a phantasmagoric darkness. Specifically, he found himself looking at a Jew who had somehow changed—he was less the shopkeeper, less, even, the human being, and more—something else. What, exactly? More imposing? That, certainly; and also, singularly, more luminous—he gave out a light, and his eyes, looking down, seemed in the kindliest of manners to indicate that this light must also be a guidance. What it was that the Jew said he didn’t catch. It was merely a short, vague exclamation, followed by a smile and a stare which were a little frightening in their suggestion of extraordinary intimacy. After that, it was as if every step taken was taken the more elaborately to insure for the ensuing talk the right seclusion and secrecy. The iron shutters outside the window were rattled harshly down and locked, the door was locked, the lights in the show window were switched off, leaving the heap of jewels, oddities, silks, and carvings in darkness. From outside in the night mingled with the subdued murmur of the street, came, even more subdued and tenuous, sounds of a bell, slowly struck, and as if blown down from a very great height.… When, having followed his host through a passage and up the stairs, an uplifted tall candle flinging cascades of banister shadows over the richly ornamented wall, he entered the room over the shop, it was with a vague sense of having come an incredible distance in space and time—the street seemed far away, remote seemed the snowy square where, surely only a quarter of an hour ago, the clock had struck four; remotest of all seemed his own poor lodgings where the fire probably needed replenishing. Had he not, even, come a long way from himself—was his name still Dace?…

“The piece that has fallen over!” said the Jew, and gave a short laugh. He had set the candle on the chimneypiece, where its light, duplicated in the dusty mirror, was sufficient to show a faded room crowded with odds and ends. “That’s shrewd—that’s shrewd. That goes, certainly, to the root of things.… So you knew, all the time!”

“Knew?…”

“You were merely drawing me out, leading me on! Well, well! That was clever.”

Dace met the Jew’s richly insinuating stare with bland and genial acquiescence.