Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

I did try, however, as might have been expected; but in vain. I found that she had disappeared; this was six months later. I spent an entire day in New York, a day of misery, tracing her from one address to another. At the last, in West 22nd Street, I drew a blank. The janitor said she had left two months before, owing rent, and had never sent for her things. There was some mail for her, too—she had apparently not left a forwarding address at the district post office. Was I a friend of hers? Did I want to see her things, or take them away?…

I went into a dusty storeroom in the cellar, with white-washed walls, and under a dull gas-jet looked at the pathetic remnants. A trunk full of worthless oddments. A few books—a copy of Daniel Deronda , one of What Maisie Knew , a file of clippings from newspapers (mostly culinary), a pair of Japanese slippers, a gray tweed coat which I had seen many times before, and a box of letters—there was little enough. I took the copy of What Maisie Knew , and told the janitor to do what he liked with the other things; I also took the letters, giving the janitor my address, in case Coralyn should turn up; though somehow I felt sure she wouldn’t. Then, after paying Coralyn’s rent—the first and last time I ever paid Coralyn’s rent—I took the letters home unopened, and locked them in my desk.

Five years have passed. Is Coralyn still alive? Is she dead? What has become of her?… Almost against my will, I hope she is alive, for I desperately want to see her again—why? Am I still in love with her?—But at the bottom of my heart I hope, for her sake, she is dead.

In retreat. In full retreat. In disorderly retreat. In flight. In full flight. In disorderly flight.

He walked along the sidewalk with eyes downcast, meditating morosely. An unimportant rain pattered on his hat and shoulders, spotted his spectacles, touched here and there a cool spring on his cheeks or chin. He noticed, in a small puddle on the brick sidewalk, a rusty hairpin. Further on, he observed also a rusty buckle, lost from a galosh. Does one speak of a single galosh? Galosh and goulash. Another hairpin. Dead matches. Cigarette ends, yellow at one end and black at the other. And an empty match-box, with a picture of a ship. Some crumpled tinfoil.

One’s mind was like this—a puddled sidewalk littered with such odds and ends. Or like this exposed cellar which he was now passing, whence the building had been removed: a chaos of rubbish, piles of mortar and dead bricks, plaster-covered beams, twisted pipes, a bed spring, a scarred radiator lying on its side, and at the bottom of all, a melancholy wreck of a furnace, its torn pipes gushing cold air. And the rain falling gently and impartially on it all.

What is the mind after a defeat? A battlefield covered with the dead and dying. A field incarnadined with dying images, with dead affects, whence a few wounded percepts try to crawl away to secrecy through the red grass. Heavily defeat. In disorderly retreat. After the anguish, one must find peace. After the love, one must find forgetfulness. After the idea, one must find annihilation.

If love was not reciprocated; if one’s love was not understood or valued; if one could not find a convincing expression or action of one’s love; then one’s being is an opened horror of cellar, whence the building has been razed. One’s heart is a furnace with torn pipes, exposed to the hostile infinite, the unfamiliar rain. And thus, one dies. One becomes dead. An organization disorganized.

Mud was beginning to spatter the worn toes of his shoes. And he observed spatters of mud on the white stockings of women.

How could one project, in satisfactory form, this desire for annihilation?

Not in suicide, but in imagination?

A small boy in a blue sailor suit, with a knotted silk tie, and spots of mashed potato on the blouse—and a round sailor hat on the back of his head—himself that small boy—years and years and years before—

He stared in at the shop window in Liberty Street, the toyshop window. There were battleships of cardboard, lead soldiers slotted in rows in a cardboard box, a toy combination bank of steel, a red and yellow tin monkey, with a red cap, who depended with prayerful paws from a cord, a pile of comic valentines, an air-rifle, a box of BB shot. But there was also, in the middle, a goldfish bowl, bright in the light, filled with crystal-clear water. It was otherwise empty—moveless, still, eternal. He read, slowly, a second time, then a third, the placard. Two water-snakes had inhabited this bowl. Of a sudden, obeying a simultaneous impulse, they had begun eating each other’s tails. They had thus formed a ring, which, as they devoured, became smaller. Smaller and smaller this ring of snake had become—till at last, as each snake performed the final swallow, they had both abruptly vanished. They were gone. Gone into the infinite. And here, of course, was the bowl of water to prove it.

Yes, some such action as this would now be the perfect, the appropriate action. Some such image of annihilation, the giving of form to some such concept of flight from reality—this would be a divine relief.

A nest of sodden matches in the gutter as he stepped across.

Ghosts, for example. A ghost, or sequence of ghosts, reality with each progression becoming less real. Would this be an image for what it was that he desired?

Three men sitting apart in the compartment of an English train, an English train dawdling through sleepy sunlit country. Hop-fields with multitudes of upright poles; and geometrical designs of twine, laced and interlaced, like a cat’s-cradle, for the vines. Oast-houses, cowled like nuns, with their air of brooding alertness, as if they expected something from the southwest. Cottages of orange-lichened tiles, and fields of sheep.

Time hung heavy; time hung palpably; the train stopped, gently panting, for a long while at a small station, where empty milk-cans were clanked on to the asphalt platform. Except for this sound, everything was profoundly still. One of the three passengers in the smoking compartment put down his Daily Mirror and looked out of the window. He smiled a little, to himself, as if pleased with some secret cleverness of his own; then glanced amusedly at each of his fellow passengers. The one opposite him was looking at an Ordnance Survey map. The other one, at the other side of the carriage, was staring out at the landscape.

“Now I suppose,” said the smiling one, “you don’t believe in ghosts?”

The man addressed in this surprising fashion lowered his map. He eyed his vis-à-vis suspiciously. The idea of a conversation seemed somewhat repugnant to him.

“Ghosts?” he said, raising his eyebrows rather superciliously.

“Yes, ghosts. You probably don’t believe in them?”

“It all depends on what you mean by believing?”

The third man turned his head sharply, uneasily, toward the two talkers, and then as sharply away again. He appeared to be annoyed. The train gently, imperceptibly, began to move from the station. The black and white sign slid past—“Ham Street.”

“There’s an article in this paper about ghosts. The writer says that he has seen many ghosts—hundreds of them—and that they are never, in appearance, human. Mere wisps of fog. Or the usual sort of hobgoblin thing you read about in shilling shockers. He doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a human ghost.… Do you agree with him?”

The man with the map merely grunted and allowed his moving eyes to follow the moving fields and cherry orchards. His interlocutor, baffled, gave a little laugh of annoyance. But he was not so easily to be put down.

“I see that you don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.