Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“However, it was not at all my intention to say things that might injure you—not at all, not at all. What I want intensely, miserably, to make clear to you is that it is not in any real sense you that I thus shamefully betray and abandon, but humanity, the world, and, above all myself. In this particular case, I suppose I might say that the difficulty lies in the fact that when I came to you it was with the last failing spark of my wearied enthusiasm for love affairs. But it is really far more complicated than that—it is not fair to you or to me to let you suppose that I am merely a jaded Don Juan. Not so. My love affairs have been very few, very fugitive; and if now my love for you is as it were, stillborn, it is because at last my faith in beauty seems dead.… If you could realize, Sara, how much I want to love you! how infinitely healing it would be to me! But I am powerless in this, as I am in everything; I have no gusto for life; I am a mass of complex contradictory impulses that leave me in a mammering and at a stay. When I fall asleep at night it is with the hope that I may never wake. When I wake in the morning, it is with passionate resentment. I look ahead through the day in the faint hope that I may find the promise of one event that will be pleasant. If it happens that I am to dine in the evening with X, then I live through the tedium of the day, and all its exasperating trifles, in expectation of that one hour of pleasure—which, under so great a strain, usually turns out to be rather dull.…

“And then, finally, there are my obsessions, which I cannot explain. My latest is a horror of shaving! I cannot think of a razor, of a sharp edge of any sort, without a shudder which touches the very center of my vitality. When I take up my razor in the morning it is almost with a conviction that some obscure impulse will transmit itself to the blade, which will suddenly turn against my weak flesh.… By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world.…”

… What an admirable letter! How profoundly it would stir the chords of pity in Sara’s heart!… But the pace of the rain was beginning to quicken, a continual patter came from the dead leaves, and he rose, buttoning his coat. Ten minutes to six.… If he walked through the park, slowly, and then by the long way through Essex Street, he would reach the station just in time to meet Sara for dinner. He began walking. Leaves blew along the path before him, came down in streams from the blown trees. Incredible melancholy. All that was needed was a dejected faun shivering in a hollow tree and trying to blow a melody from his rain-soaked reed. Everything was gray in the gray light. Large drops from the boughs of trees pattered on the rim of his hat, and the crook of his stick, becoming wet, rubbed irritatingly on the palm of his hand. Sodden leaves; sodden newspapers; sodden world.

To be or not to be: no, that wasn’t the question at all, but whether or not to dine with Sara. To approach her through this silver jungle of rain, with all its bells; to weave himself like a shuttle through this vast and exquisite fabric of mercurial silver, finally coming upon Sara, in a green dress, waiting happily; to see for a flash the clear quality of her face in rain-light, and to hear the first full sound of her voice under an umbrella tense and murmurous with rain; to feel a drop of water on the back of his hand, and to hear her laugh—didn’t all this, after all, offer a sort of beauty?… Yes, no question, it did. But it was only for the first instant. After that came the tedious necessity of finding a restaurant where they would be safe from the eyes of acquaintances, the necessity of talking and talking with Sara, of touching her foot under the table, of spending three desolating hours of the evening with her—she wouldn’t let him off with less. Agonizing complications. Misery a thousand miles deep. If he did go to her, what should he say?… He would greet her wearily. She looked concerned—no, alarmed! “Henry! You’re worried. What’s the matter?” “Well, Sara—don’t be shocked—but to tell the truth I was wondering, all the way here, whether or not to abandon you.”… Would she cry—grow white? No—she looked far away, at nothing, compressed her lips. “I see.”… That’s what she’d say. “You see, Sahara, in a sense you’ve become for me, momentarily, a symbol of life itself. And if I speak of abandoning you, what I really mean is the abandonment of everything.” He couldn’t prevent a touch of vox humana getting into that last phrase—it was a shade too much like a sob, but then, anything was permissible when one was dealing with a woman. “I don’t think I mean suicide”—this was said slowly and ponderingly; the “think” was, indeed, masterly!… But suppose she simply, with a flash of amusement, answered, “Why not?”… Heavens!

He turned the corner, and there was Sara just as he had foreseen, in the green dress, waiting serenely under her tinkling umbrella. She laughed frankly.

“Henry, you do look dejected!”

“Why shouldn’t I? I’m thinking of committing suicide.”

“Do!”

“But first I must have some dinner—I’m starving to death!”

“Very well—I’m hungry myself.”

“And afterwards—I must kiss you.”

“No!”

“Yes. Just behind your left ear.”

“What an idea!”

“We’ll take a taxi and do a whirl about the city among the rain and puddles.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

A sudden fury possessed him. He stood still.

“Don’t be so damned reasonable! Only death is reasonable.”

He saw Sara looking at him with fright, as if she saw something horrible in his face. What did she see? A sharp green-lit vision of him hanging from a gas fixture?… A torrent of grief seemed to be released within him, he felt a quickening sensation in his tear-ducts; and, tightly clasping Sara’s forearm with his hand, he started walking again.

I.

Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps would it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one’s trouser pocket—a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a seashell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe—and, as if it were any one of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession—it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion. This was almost the first thing he had noticed about it—apart from the oddness of the thing itself—and it was this that now again, for the fiftieth time, occurred to him, as he sat in the little schoolroom. It was the half-hour for geography. Miss Buell was revolving with one finger, slowly, a huge terrestrial globe which had been placed on her desk. The green and yellow continents passed and repassed, questions were asked and answered, and now the little girl in front of him, Deirdre, who had a funny little constellation of freckles on the back of her neck, exactly like the Big Dipper, was standing up and telling Miss Buell that the equator was the line that ran round the middle.

Miss Buell’s face, which was old and grayish and kindly, with gray stiff curls beside the cheeks, and eyes that swam very brightly, like little minnows, behind thick glasses, wrinkled itself into a complication of amusements.