Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

He was pleased with his little analysis, and smiled out of the train window as they crossed the red-iron bridge. The tide was out; mud banks were showing, channeled and raw; a rowboat hung down the muddy slope at a steep angle, as if caught in the act of falling; and further down, by the bend of the river, the old dredger was at work. How peaceful, how eternal it all seemed! It would go on forever exactly like this, there was no doubt of it. Mud, sun, and tide, day after day, the bridge rotting, the marsh rotting, the old dredger rotting, and the sun calmly blazing down on everything—world without end. And a good thing, too.… The train was stopping. He got to his feet without thinking, and followed the others toward the platform of Appledore Station.

He walked the length of the platform and back, tapping the rolled newspaper against his knee, and looked at the early-morning people. Early-morning people—exactly! What was it that gave them so definitely an early-morning look? Not merely the somewhat orange-colored light of the early sun on their faces and hands—though no doubt that played a part in it. No, it was something in their half-sleepy, half-awake indifference, as if—though refreshed—they were not yet quite aware. The young married couple, sitting against the station wall on their upturned suitcases, were leaning a little forward, faintly smiling to themselves, but not saying a thing. It was almost indecent to catch them like that—they were actually, at this very minute, in the act of waking up, and totally incapable of thinking of anything but their own delicious well-being. The tall man beyond them, standing with his paper held up before him, was only pretending to read. Every now and then he looked up over the edge of the paper, looked away over the living marsh, as if that tide of reality out there was much too strong for him, much too strong for anything so pallid as the printed word. But the three schoolgirls, with their strapped books and lunch-boxes—there was certainly nothing sleepy about them! They teased each other, giggled, became suddenly serious; started to play tag, and stopped as unpremeditatedly as they had begun; and then ran up the ramp to the raised platform at the end where freight cars were loaded, and ran down the smooth cement surface, screaming with delight. Energy—good heavens, what it was to have all that energy! He had to step aside quickly to avoid being run into by one of them, the smallest—the swung lunch-box slapped his hand, the blue eyes looked up at him abashed but laughing, and then abruptly all three were gone, vanished, round the corner of the station, but of course only to be back again in no time.

It was in that small interval, as he himself turned round, smiling, to walk back again, that the little cat appeared. Tail in air, she advanced serenely and happily along the platform, putting down one white paw in front of the other, and if she came tentatively, the reason for that was at once obvious: the little creature was so manifestly delighted, so simply delighted, with everything and everyone she saw that she really didn’t know where to begin. So many wonderful people and things to investigate! You could positively see her feeling this, as she turned, first one way and then another. She had to go and rub her cheek against the delicious shoes and suitcases and ankles of the young married couple, making a lovely loop of her tail for their benefit, though they scarcely noticed her, truth to tell, so lost were they in their own world; and then she had to stroll back to a wooden box which lay on the platform, and sniff it daintily and distantly; and then rub her smile against one of its pointed corners. A kitten, rather than a cat—not half-grown—an ordinary, perfectly ordinary, gray-striped tabby with yellow eyes—but, good gracious, there had never been a creature so bursting, absolutely bursting, with love and good will!

He watched her coming toward him in her slow and intermittent progress, drawn every which way by distractions. She rubbed her sides against the tall man’s legs, she revisited the married couple, she went to the station door and looked in, meanwhile kneading her paws against the platform floor in ecstasy; she turned back, she turned forward—the little creature would obviously go anywhere, do anything, out of sheer love. He stooped and snapped his fingers, once, twice—and sure enough, she came at an eager trot, she came running, as if only too delighted to receive an express invitation, but nevertheless not in the least surprised. After all, that was what life was, wasn’t it?… Love, nothing but love! She twined about his outstretched forefinger, butted his knuckles, rearing up like a little goat to do so, all the while keeping up a continuous purring, an absolute uproar—and then, of course, she saw the three little girls, and they had to be attended to. Away she went, once more at a trot, and once more she was a huge success. And what more natural?

“Hello, Tib!”

“Hello, Tib!”

“Hello, Tib!”

All three cried their greeting, all three began stroking her and patting her. For a moment cat and children became inextricable; and then the smallest girl, the one who had bumped into him, or almost, took it into her head to begin jumping over the little cat. To and fro she jumped, back and forth, the other girls laughing; and so close, too, that he thought of intervening. But no, she never quite struck the cat, and the cat, although a little surprised by so much violence, remained quite self-possessed, sat quite still, watching the strange antics with complete trust.

Complete trust—yes! Good heavens, yes! And suddenly he was looking at the little cat with fascination. For this, he now recognized, was one of those rare creatures who are so essentially innocent, and good, and loving, as to be totally defenseless. This little creature, with her tremendous love, was already doomed, by her own wonderful simplicity—that entire trustfulness was nothing but an embodied invitation to death. In a world dominated everywhere by violence and evil she could not possibly live, or not for very long, and wasn’t it precisely this obvious impossibility that made her pathetic openness and innocence so bewitching?

And there was more to it than that, even. For as he turned and looked across the tracks toward the marsh—turning away, as a matter of fact, so that if the cat should be struck or hurt he would not see it—he became aware of the fact that he and the cat had now, together, constituted a unique and extraordinary relationship. The cat was innocence, or love, or both: the fundamentally innocent thing; and he himself, with his brilliant perception of the cat’s nature and need, was knowledge, godlike knowledge, with all its latent powers for good or evil. For was he not the only person here, on this early-morning platform, who had really seen and loved this little cat, and foreseen her tragic destiny? The others had been perhaps for a moment amused, or touched, but they had seen nothing of all this; for them the cat was simply another cat. Perceptiveness! Good heavens, yes—this was a case in point, it was indeed the case. It was the fundamental instance of the all-embracing, all-cherishing, all-sustaining power of perceptiveness. In this sense, the little cat’s life was in his hands.…

What an extraordinary thing! And how extraordinarily delightful!

He was still feeling pleased with the whole idea, and with himself, when the train came swiftly and silently toward the station. And turning then for a last look at the cat he saw that she had left the three little girls, and had gone up the sloping ramp of concrete at the end of the platform. There she sat, at the very edge of the raised platform, looking down at the tracks—not fifteen feet away from him—and then she began putting her white paws down the wall, preparing to jump, and just as the heat and shadow of the engine passed him, she jumped. Straight into the middle of the tracks, and the engine had gone over without touching her—but then he saw the agonized darting of the small body from side to side, seeking escape, the frightened back and head darting from side to side, and through an obstruction of wheel or truck the flash of an outstretched convulsive hind leg, white, and upside down; and then nothing. The train had stopped; the three little girls were clambering up the steep steps at one end, the married couple at another; the tall man had disappeared. No one had seen it but he—no one. It was as if nothing had happened.