Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

The excitement of the decision, the unanimous decision, the whole audience standing on chairs, the ridiculous knock-kneed dance of Romero as he shook his two gloves together in the air high over his head, all this was much less impressive than Zabriski lying on the table to be rubbed down, just saying laconically I was overtrained, I knew two days ago I couldn’t make the weight. Fifteen pounds was too much, now I know better.

He fell asleep under the hands of the rubber, while his fiancée was having a drink with the manager outside the door. Sure, she was saying, I know, you don’t need to tell me, I wasn’t born yesterday. You just watch him next time.

And, of course, yes, there would be a next time. He pulled the yellow sheet out of the machine. Twelve o’clock. Cush had stood up and was putting his coat on.

“If you’re going down, will you take this, Cush? I want to write a letter.”

“Sure. Good night.”

“Good night.”

IV.

But it wasn’t a letter exactly—he got up and began looking at the photograph of the James family once more. What he wanted to say to her was something about that—something about those people sitting there in a garden. If it were somehow possible to say that. To make her realize what that could mean.

“My dear, instead of writing you a letter, in the ordinary sense of the word, or instead of arguing with you further about this issue which has reared its scaly head between us, or telling you again for the thousandth time that I simply cannot bring myself to believe in this easy and casual habit of promiscuous flirtation, which you and so many other men and women eagerly defend, I am going to do something else. Perhaps this means that I’ve given up all hope of convincing you, perhaps it doesn’t; it may even mean that I think any attempt to do so is now too late, since the gulf between us is already so immense that the wings of Father Imago himself seem too frail for such a voyage. Are you in fact not already lost to me? am I not lost to you? When we argue about it, no matter how amiably, we speak in turn, but neither of us listens, neither of us hears. It is no use my repeating again that I do not like to see you being kissed by every Tom, Dick, and Harry who claims that privilege on the ground of his friendship for us both; it is no use my saying that I experience a deep revulsion, a deep schism of the spirit, when I see you yield yourself, not unwillingly, to attentions even more sensuous than these, not only in my presence, but in the presence of other people as well. You will merely reply, wearily, that I am jealous, which I am; or that I am a prude, which I am not; you will say again, as you have so often said, that these things do not matter, that these little physical manifestations do not matter—as if one could ever for a minute separate the physical from the spiritual, as if the body were not just as much a part of the soul as the soul is a part of the body. If body and soul are indeed at all separable, which I doubt, then they are separable only in the sense that a pair of dancers is separable: as long as they dance, they are one; when they separate, the dance is over, something vital has come to an end. It is this disunion which seems to me evil, seems to me destructive. To love with the soul, but not with the body, is to love God, and that is perhaps a kind of death; to love with the body, but not the soul, is certainly a kind of death, for it starves the soul as swiftly as the other starves the body; only when we permit body and soul to love together do we really live. Before me as I write is a photograph of three people. What I really want to tell you about is these three people. I would like to tell you what they mean to me, what art-shape they made of their lives, what it might mean to you or to anybody to realize what they are as they sit there—”

He dropped his hands from the machine in a sudden despair. It was impossible, it was a kind of absurd day-dream, it was unreal, he ought to have known better. It could not be done, would never be done. It could not be said. You felt these things or you didn’t.… Instead, they would quarrel, and then quarrel again, they would quarrel day after day and night after night, there would be no end to it forever.

I.

The dandelion seed, when it blows, does not know where it is going: it will cross miles of meadow, sail over forests of pine, travel down mountain gorges, be caught for a day in a cobweb, and at last find its growing place in the least likely of spots. It will perhaps try to grow in an old shoe, or an empty tomato tin, or a crack in a wall. And, of course, it will have no memory of the poor plant, leagues away, from which it set out on its journey. There is a kind of pathos in this, and something beautiful also. And it is with just such an image that I always think of Coralyn, that gallantest of creatures, when I try to tell her story. There is, to be quite truthful, no story—at best, only the materials for a story. Life seldom arranges itself in an obvious pattern. It may surprise us—and often does—or it may shock us, or turn swiftly from melodrama to comedy, or from the humdrum to tragedy; but how few lives do we know in which there is any perceptible “form,” any design of the sort that novelists employ! Coralyn’s story is at best a chronicle—hardly even that. It is a series of episodes, an uneven progress in time; it is as aimless as the voyage of the dandelion thistle, and almost as purposeless. And as I look back on it, with its span of five or six years, I even wonder, sometimes, whether Coralyn, any more than the thistledown, remembered where she had come from, or knew where she was going. This is an exaggeration, of course—that she did, now and then, remember, was attested by those strange despairs into which now and then she would suddenly pass. Abruptly, she would drop her gayety, her frivolity, her tomboyish violences and absurdities, and be plunged into a half-hour of despair and weeping with which I never in the least knew how to deal. Did she, at such moments, remember and foresee? Did she have some sudden foreknowledge of doom? She would never tell me. All that she would say to me, when I tried to comfort her, was the phrase (which always struck terror to my heart), “I’m afraid! I’m afraid.”

What was it that she was afraid of? Was it life itself, perhaps? Not, certainly, in any obviouse sense. She was a brave girl, clear-eyed, clear-headed, straightforward (with some exceptions), and I never knew anyone who so consistently, even recklessly, took life with both hands. It may have been this, indeed, that she was afraid of; she may have guessed, sooner than we did, and more accurately, the dark forces that were at work in her and to what end they would bring her at last. For there was little or no self-deception in Coralyn. If now and then she flinched a little from telling us, or telling me, the truth about herself, I am sure she never flinched from facing the truth where it most, after all, matters—in her conscience and consciousness. When she had occasion to be dishonest, she knew it.

One of the earliest instances of this was at the very beginning. She had come to act as secretary to my wife, who was an authoress; Mabel had found her through a local employment agency. What Coralyn was doing in New Haven, where we then lived, we couldn’t make out. She was vague about this, only telling us that she was a graduate of a Western university, that she came of an old Virginia family, that her relatives were, with one exception (a cousin), dead, and that she had come East simply because of a conviction that there were more opportunities, of a mildly literary sort, in New England. Heaven knows where she had got this idea, or why she should, of all places, have picked out New Haven. Possibly the presence of the university had something to do with it—I seem to remember that this is what we thought at the time. Anyway, we both liked her and believed her. She was charming, gentle, quiet, refined, never obtrusive, delightful to look at without being exactly pretty, and extremely intelligent. She was then, I think, about twenty-two. One had only to see her for a moment to realize that she was by no means the ordinary sort of secretary. She was always quite beautifully dressed, but without any flashiness, and struck me as singularly uncorrupted by those minor vulgarities of the moment which so many of her generation regarded as the sign manual of sophistication. If she rouged, one didn’t guess it. In fact, the most pronounced impression she made, with her candid forehead and gray eyes and straight carriage, and a kind of touching simplicity of speech, was of an almost frightening unworldiness and innocence. I know now, of course, that this appearance was by no means entirely true—or true, at any rate, only to the role for which she had cast herself. And isn’t this a very essential kind of truth? She was escaping from something of which, for various not very good reasons, she was ashamed; and she was molding herself, or trying to, very courageously, according to an ideal.