Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

Of course, I may be talking through my hat. Nobody can know better than I do how impossible it is to judge a situation like this from the outside. The intangibles, in a marital relationship, are as shadowy as they are numberless. I know only too well how, just by a step-by-step process, two excellent people can gradually reach a point where life together seems to them insupportable, and for extraordinarily little reason. They may find, one day, all of a sudden, that as a result of these tiny accretions, they hate each other. Perhaps you and Jim have reached such a point; though I must say that when I lived with you I saw no sign of it. You always seemed cheerful enough; and if you didn’t seem to have a lot to say to each other, that didn’t necessarily mean much. After all, you can’t go on talking to the same person for a lifetime with the same gusto that you shared during your courtship! But I don’t think too much importance should be attached to this. Go about a little more, take a few holidays separately, and the chances are it will take care of itself.… On the other hand, if you have got to a point where you really hate each other, or where you really hate Jim (for I gather that Jim doesn’t want you to go), then my urgent notice to you, Blinks, is to go slow, take lots of time, and think it over for at least a year before you do anything revolutionary. Whatever you do, don’t be headlong. You may regret it all your life.

This sounds pretty preacherish. It’s like those times when you used to argue with me about the use of going to school, of learning this and that and the other, and I used to take you by the hand and walk you along the river with me and scold and cajole you out of your sulks. I can remember one of those walks vividly. You were about sixteen, and you were all of a sudden terribly bored with everything—school, your home, your friends, Germantown. You wanted to be allowed to go to New York and go to work. Do you remember? Some friend of yours—Alice Whipple, I believe—had just gone there and wrote you what a fine time she was having, being perfectly independent. You were sick of restraint, you wanted to break out and start a life of your own. I can remember sitting by the water with you, somewhere, and arguing, and how by degrees we found that we had stopped arguing and instead were having a silly game of throwing pebbles into the water; and then both of us suddenly realized what a good time we were having, and how much we cared for each other. You got up and flung your arms around me and began kissing me as if it were the first time, almost as if we were lovers. I felt for you suddenly as I used to feel when you were three or four, when you used to call yourself my ‘lap-bird’ because you were so fond of sitting on my lap. My dear Winky—

That’s all I’m going to say. I want you to be happy; and all this nonsense, and this blather of confession of my own worthlessness, will be excused maybe if it helps you out.

I’m staying here for another month, and then G. and I will go to Bruges for the summer. G. hasn’t been well, and the change will do her good. She has an old friend there whom she is anxious to see—a former schoolteacher. G. will stay with her, and I shall put up at a pension. Then, at the end of the summer, we’ll come back here, d.v., and struggle through another Parisian winter, floods and all.…

Give Muffet a “scratchy” kiss from me, and my best to Jim. Goodbye, and drop a line, sometime, to your dilapidated father,

HOWARD BOND.

I love you very dearly.

I.

His greatest pleasure in life came always at dusk. Its prelude was the reading of the evening paper in the train that took him out of the city. By long association the very unfolding of the grimy ink-smelling sheets was part of the ritual; his dark eyes dilated, he felt himself begin to “grin,” the staggering load of business detail, under which he had struggled all day in the office, was instantly forgotten. He read rapidly, devoured with rapacious eyes column after column—New York, London, Paris, Lisbon—wars, revolutions, bargains in umbrellas, exhibitions of water-colors. This consumed three-quarters of the journey. After that he watched the procession of houses, walls, trees, reeling past in the mellow slant light, and began already to feel his garden about him. He observed the flight of the train unconsciously, and it was almost automatically, at the unrealized sight of a certain group of trees, oddly leaning away from each other, like a group of ballet dancers expressing an extravagance of horror, that he rose and approached the door.

The sense of escape was instant. Sky and earth generously took him, the train fled shrieking into the vague bright infinity of afternoon. The last faint wail of it, as it plunged into a tunnel, always seemed to him to curl about his head like a white tentacle, too weak to be taken seriously. Then, in the abrupt silence, he began climbing the long hill that led to his house. He walked swiftly, blowing tattered blue clouds of smoke over his shoulders, revolving in his mind the items of news amusing enough to be reported to Hilda; such as that Miss Green, the stenographer, who had for some time been manifesting a disposition to flirt with him, today, just after closing, when everybody else had gone out, had come to him, blushing, and asked him to fasten the sleeve of her dress. A delicious scene! He smiled about the stem of his pipe, but exchanged his smile for a laugh when, looking in through a gap in his neighbor’s hedge, he found himself staring into the depraved eyes of a goat. This would add itself to the episode of Miss Green, for these eyes were precisely hers. He turned the corner and saw his house before him, riding on the hill like a small ship on a long green wave. The three children were playing a wild game of croquet, shrieking. Louder sounds arose at his appearance, and as he strode across the lawn they danced about him chattering and quarreling.

“Daddy, Martha won’t play in her turn, and I say—”

“Marjorie takes the heavy mallet—”

The chorus rose shrill about him, but he laughed and went into the house, shouting only:

“Out of the way! I’m in a hurry! The beans are dying, the tomatoes are clamoring for me, the peas are holding out their hands!”

“Daddy says the beans are dying. Isn’t he silly!”

“Let’s get to the garden before daddy does.”

As he closed the door he heard the shrieks trailing off round the corner of the house, diminuendo. He hung up coat and hat with a rapid gesture and hurried to the kitchen. Hilda, stirring the cocoa with a long spoon, looked round at him laconically.

“Chocolate!” he shouted, and pulled a cake of chocolate out of his pocket. He was astonished, he rolled his eyes, for it appeared to have been sat upon—“in the train.” Hilda shrieked with laughter. He thrust it into her apron pocket and fled up the stairs to change.

He could not find his old flannel trousers. Not in the cupboard—not in the bureau. He surrendered to an impulse to comic rage. “Not under the bed!” he cried. He thrust his head out of the window that overlooked the garden and addressed his children.

“Martha! bring my trousers here this instant!”

He drew in his head again from the shower of replies that flew up at him like missiles and going to the door roared down to his wife.

“I’ve lost my trousers!”

Then he found them in the closet behind the door, and, laughing, put them on.

II.

He ran out of the side door, under the wisteria-covered trellis, and down the slippery stone steps to the vegetable garden.

“Here comes daddy, now,” shrilled to him from Martha.

He lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and stood in profound meditation before the orderly, dignified, and extraordinarily vigorous rows of beans. They were in blossom—bees were tumbling the delicate lilac-pink little hoods. Clouds of fragrance came up from them. The crickets were begining to tune up for the evening. The sun was poised above the black water tower on the far hill.