Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

But as he moved toward the steps he saw her again. The eyes closed, the meek upturned face meeker than ever, she lay quite still. And as he sat down in the train, trembling and sick, with all that dreadful action still horribly vivid before him, and as if still in action, he felt like a murderer. He alone knew that she was dead. He alone could have saved her.

She had lived, and died, for him .

Smith and Jones, as far as one could tell in the darkness, looked almost exactly alike. Their names might have been interchangeable. So might their clothes, which were apparently rather shabby, though, as they walked quickly and the night was cloudy, it was difficult to be sure. Both of them were extraordinarily articulate. They were walking along the muddy road that led away from a large city and they talked as they went.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Smith, “it’s all over. No more women for me. There’s nothing in it. It’s a damned swindle. Walk right up, gentlemen, and make your bets! The hand is quicker than the eye. Where is the elusive little pea? Ha ha! Both ends against the middle.”

He struck a match and lit his pipe; his large pale unshaven face started out of the night.

Jones grumbled to himself. Then turning his head slightly toward Smith, in a somewhat aggressive way, as if he were showing a fang, he began to laugh in a peculiar soft insolent manner.

“Jesus! One would think you were an adolescent. No more women! If there aren’t it’ll be because you’re dead. You were born to be made a fool of by women. You’ll buzz round the honey-pot all your days. You have no sense in these matters, you’ve never had the courage or the intelligence once and for all to realize a woman. Look! here’s a parable for you. There are an infinite number of little white clouds stretching one after another across blue space, just like sweet little stepping stones. To each of them is tethered a different-colored child’s balloon—I know that would rather badly fracture the spectrum, but never mind. And behold, our angel-child, beautiful and trustful, flies to the first little cloud-island, and seizes the first balloon, enraptured. It’s pink. But then he sees the next island, and the next balloon, which is orange. So he lets the first one go, which sails away, and flies vigorously to the next little island. From there he catches sight of a different shade of pink—sublime! intoxicating! and again dashes across an abyss.… This lovely process goes on forever. It will never stop.”

Smith splashed into a puddle and swore.

“Don’t be so damned patronizing, with your little angel-child and toy balloons. I know what I’m talking about. Adolescent? Of course I am—who isn’t? The point is, exactly, that I have at last realized a woman. That’s more, I’ll bet, than you’ve done—you, with your damned negativism!”

“Negativism!—how? But never mind that. Tell me about your woman.”

“It must be experienced to be understood.”

“Of course—so must death.”

“What can I tell you then? You, who have always made it a principle to experience as little as possible! Your language doesn’t, therefore, extend to the present subject. You are still crawling on your hands and knees, bumping into chairs, and mistaking your feet for a part of the floor, or your hands for a part of the ceiling. Stand up! Be a man! It’s glorious.”

“Was she blonde or brunette?”

“If you insist, she was a Negress tattooed with gold and silver. Instead of earrings, she wore brass alarm clocks in her ears, and for some unexplained reason she had an ivory thimble in her left nostril.”

Jones laughed; there was a shade of annoyance in his laughter.

“I see.… I forgot to mention, by the way, that when the angel-child flew so vigorously from cloud to cloud his wings made a kind of whimpering sound.… But go on.”

“No, she was neither blonde nor brunette, but, as you suggested, imaginary. She didn’t really exist. I thought she did, of course—I had seen her several times quite clearly. She had a voice, hands, eyes, feet—in short, the usual equipment. In point of size she was colossal; in point of speed, totally incommensurable. She walked, like Fama, with her head knocking about among the stars. She stepped casually, with one step, from town to town, making with the swish of her skirts so violent a whirlwind that men everywhere were sucked out of houses.”

“I recognize the lady. It was Helen of Troy.”

“Not at all. Her name, as it happened, was Gleason.”

Jones sighed. The two men walked rapidly for some time in silence. The moon, like a pale crab, pulled clouds over itself, buried itself in clouds with a sort of awkward precision, and a few drops of rain fell.

“Rain!” said Jones, putting up one hand.

“To put out the fires of conscience.”

“Gleason? She must be—if your description is accurate—in the theatrical profession? A lady acrobat, a trapeze artist, or a Pullman portress?”

“Wrong again, Jones—if error were, as it ought to be, punishable by death, you’d be a corpse.… Suffice it to say that Gleason loved me. It was like being loved by a planet.”

“Venus?”

“Mars. She crushed me, consumed me. Her love was a profounder and more fiery abyss than the inferno which Dante, in the same sense, explored. It took me days of circuitous descent, to get even within sight of the bottom; and then, as there were no ladders provided, I plunged headlong. I was at once ignited, and became a tiny luminous spark, which, on being cast forth to the upper world again on a fiery exhalation, became an undistinguished cinder.”

“To think a person named Gleason could do all that!”

“Yes, it’s a good deal, certainly. I feel disinclined for further explorations of the sort.”

“Temporarily, you mean.… You disliked the adventure?”

“Oh, no—not altogether! Does one dislike life altogether? Do we hate this walk, this road, the rain, ourselves, the current of blood which, as we walk and talk, our hearts keep pumping and pumping? We like and dislike at the same time. It’s like an organism with a malignant fetid cancer growing in it. Cut out the cancer, which has interlaced its treacherous fibers throughout every part, and you extinguish life. What’s to be done? In birth, love, and death, in all acts of violence, all abrupt beginnings and abrupt cessations, one can detect the very essence of the business—there one sees, in all its ambiguous nakedness, the beautiful obscene.”

Jones reflected; one could make out that his head was bowed. Smith walked beside him with happy alacrity. It began to rain harder, the trees dripped loudly, but the two men paid no attention.

“The beautiful obscene!” said Jones, suddenly lifting his head. “Certainly that’s something to have learned chez Gleason!… It suggests a good deal. It’s like this road—it’s dark, but it certainly leads somewhere.”

“Where?”

“That’s what we’ll discover. Is it centrifugal or centripetal? The road is the former, of course. It leads, as we know, away from civilization into the wilderness, the unknown. But that’s no reason for supposing the same to be true of your diagnosis—is it? And yet I wonder.”

He wondered visibly, holding his coat-collar about his throat with one hand, and showed a disposition to slacken his pace. But Smith goaded him.

“Look here, we’ve got to keep moving, you know.”

“Yes, we’ve got to keep moving.”

They walked for a mile in complete silence. The rain kept up a steady murmur among the leaves of trees, the vague heaving shoulders of which they could see at right and left, and they heard the tinkling of water in a ditch. Their shoes bubbled and squelched, but they seemed to be indifferent to matters so unimportant. However, from time to time they inclined their heads forward and allowed small reservoirs of rain to slide heavily off their felt hats. It was Jones, finally, who began talking again. After a preliminary mutter or two, and a hostile covert glance at his companion, he said: