Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

About all this she was, I am sure, quite explicit with herself. I imagine she said to herself: “Now Coralyn, you little fool, here is your chance! Let’s have no sentimental nonsense about it. It won’t help the Wassons to know things about you that they needn’t know. It won’t help you either. For the love of Pete, keep your mouth shut, be a lady, be refined, or learn to be, and take one clear step upward or forward to the sort of life you want to lead. Onward to literature and New York and, maybe, a good marriage!… And anyway there’ll be good ‘contacts.’”… And she played her part to perfection. Mabel—poor soul—always said she was the best secretary she ever had. Not only in the mere drudgery, either—for by degrees, as the two women came to know and like each other, Coralyn was more and more called upon to act also in a critical capacity. I myself was never much use at this. My wife was a writer of best-sellers—historical romances and such—and my own tastes simply didn’t happen to run in that direction; my passion for Trollope was Mabel’s despair. But Coralyn, as by degrees she came out of her shell, or was invited out of it by Mabel, and as she was more and more permitted to step out of her position as employee and assume that of friend, became, as Mabel used often to say, invaluable. She was an excellent judge of “what the public wants,” and with this, also, she was an uncommonly keen judge of detail, and of matters of style. When I came home from the office at the end of the day, as that first winter passed, it was increasingly often that I found Coralyn still in the drawing room with Mabel, discussing the latest novel over a cup of tea or a cocktail. From this, it was by the easiest of transitions that she became Mabel’s most intimate friend; in so far as poor Mabel, who never had much genius for friendship, could be said to have an intimate friend. Coralyn was kept not only for tea, but for dinner. She was kept not only for dinner, but overnight. She stayed with us for week-ends, she sometimes ran the house for us when we went to New York, she filled in at bridge, she helped with the preparations for parties, and, in short, she ended by becoming, before many months were over, practically a member of the household. Which, as I see now, was exactly what she was after.

And this brings me to the first point, in the story, at which I myself became at all intimately involved with Coralyn; I will try to tell it as simply as possible. From the outset, I had been fearfully attracted to her. So much so, I recall, that at first I was almost studiously rude to her, out of a sort of instinctive fear. At the time, Mabel and I had been married ten years. We had no children, we had separate interests, and while we were as fond of each other as the average married pair, nevertheless we were no longer, naturally, wildly in love. Just the same I was, as I always was, extraordinarily fond of Mabel, had the very highest admiration for her, and wouldn’t have hurt her for worlds. Nor had I ever had any great desire for extra-conjugal adventures, or to be any kind of Don Juan. All this came into my mind when Coralyn appeared; we had no sooner looked at each other than I experienced a dread. I knew that I attracted her; I knew that if I let her guess that I too was attracted there would be trouble; I wanted to see her, but also I wanted to avoid trouble, and to avoid hurting Mabel. Consequently, while I took great pains to tell Mabel that I thought Coralyn an admirable person, I was, as I say, very often deliberately rude to Coralyn herself. I made a point, from time to time, of quite obviously avoiding her. On several occasions when it happened that we were left alone in the house together I made palpably lying excuses and left her; I could see that she was distressed. If she tried to draw me into conversation à deux , I would answer her monosyllabically, or retreat to my study for a pretense of work; there to smoke cigarettes one after another and to wonder what would happen.… I might have guessed.

For it is plain enough now that my tactics were precisely the worst in the world. What could have been better calculated to attract the girl than this studied unapproachableness, this air of remoteness and superiority? Particularly when one recalls that she herself was drawn to me from the beginning, and also that she was at that very time struggling almost obsessedly to get away from her own sense of inferiority and obscurity. The result was that I became for her a symbol; I was the obstacle itself: for the time being, the goal itself; I was something to be overcome. I doubt whether she phrased this explicitly, or separated out the various elements of which the complex was composed. She only knew, instinctively, that she was there, in that queer house, simply to be near me, and in the hope of getting nearer still. Much later, years later, she told me that she had from the outset thought me the nicest man she had ever met, and the wisest—adding, to soften the blow, that she had also always thought me something of a fool. She didn’t exactly want to fall in love with me—what she wanted was to learn from me, to make me a kind of father, or even (I don’t know at which stage she thought of this) a father-lover. But the motive anyway was a desire for knowledge; she simply thought I could help her.… I often wonder whether I ever did.

II.

Certainly not at the first climax of our little affair, our absurd little affair. There was never anything more grotesque, more delicious, more ridiculous, more lovely, more pathetically or beautifully a failure. It was early in the spring that it came about. Suddenly, one day, my wife was invited by wire to give a lecture in Baltimore as substitute for another lecturer who had failed to appear. As it happened, we had just lost our two maids; a comic interlude into which I won’t digress. Mabel was in a panic. Who was to look after things—the dog, the cat, the canary, not to mention poor Philip, her husband? It was then that Coralyn stepped forward; this was her cue for effective—oh, very effective—entrance. This was the chance for which she had been waiting, and for which she and I, for months past—she consciously and I unconsciously—had been elaborately preparing. It was not for nothing now that we had had so little to do with each other, had spoken together so little, had appeared even to avoid each other. More than once Mabel had reproached me for my indifference to Coralyn. She had, therefore, not an atom of a suspicion that she was about to be betrayed. She accepted Coralyn’s offer with joy, took the first train out of New Haven, to be gone for three nights, and there, heaven help us, we were.

What happened was inevitable; if only because we had resisted it so long. We came together as naturally as leaf touches leaf or the grass bends to the wind. As soon as we sat down together at the dinner table, and looked at each other across the candles, we both knew it; our talk became a mere subterfuge; and when afterwards we went out to the garden, where it was growing dark, and she put out her hand to touch a lilac bud, it was really to me she put out her hand, and I took it. When I kissed her, she laughed into my mouth, and turned her face away, and then turned it back again. After that, everything was madness.

And the next day it was madder still, but in a different way. For the first time I knew Coralyn as she really was—a hoyden, a tomboy, the very wildest of creatures; her mouse-like demureness had merely been a surface. She assured me she was not in love with me—why should she be? She laughed at me for being a sentimental fool—I told her that I, for my part, was falling in love with her; which indeed I was. I sat on a tree stump in the garden, while she smoked a cigarette. I felt very wretched.