Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

Martha and Marjorie began giggling mysteriously behind the lilacs.

“My hoe!” he wailed.

The hoe was thrust out from behind the lilacs.

“If anybody should drive up in a scarlet taxi,” he said to Martha, accepting the hoe, “and inform you that your soul is free, don’t believe him. Tell him he’s a liar. Point me out to him as a symbol of the abject slavery that all life is. Say that I’m a miserable thrall to wife, children, and beans—particularly beans. I spend my days on my knees before my beans.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Martha.

He held his hoe under his arm and walked solemnly among the beans. The two girls followed him.

“Here’s a caterpillar, daddy!”

“Kill him!”

“Here’s another—a funny green one with red sparkles on his back. Oh, look at him!”

“Don’t look at him! Kill him.”

“He squirts out like green toothpaste.”

“Don’t, Martha!” he cried, pained. “Don’t say such things! Spare your neurotic father.”

He shrank visibly and strode off to the corner where his peas were planted and started methodically hoeing the rows, turning the rich loam up about the pale stalks. Now and again a pebble clinked, he stooped and threw it off into the meadow. Mary, the youngest, came to the top of the steps and cried. Martha and Marjorie went to her, and he forgot them. The rising and falling of the hoe-blade, shiny with much polishing in the brown soil, hypnotized him, and his thoughts fell into a sort of rhythm, came and went without his interference. “Ridiculous!” he thought, “that this solemn singular biped, whom other bipeds for convenience call Andrew, should stand here with a stick and scratch the skin of this aged planet. What does he expect to get for it? It pleases the aged planet. She stretches herself in the twilight, purrs like an old cat, and expresses her pleasure in the odd and useful effluvium we call peas. And this biped wears clothes. Think of it! He wears clothes; things made out of plant-fiber and sheep’s wool, cunningly and hideously made to fit his arms and legs. He has in his pocket—a small pouch made in these singular garments—a watch, a small, shiny round object in which he has reduced to feeble but regular iambics the majestic motions of the sun, earth, and stars. He takes it out and looks at it with an air of comprehension and puts it back again. Why doesn’t he laugh at himself?”… He chuckled.… “This object tells him that he has time for two more rows before dinner. Clink, clink. Damn these pebbles. My antediluvian anthropoid ape of an ancestor had to walk round them, they were so huge. He sat on them, cracked nuts against them, chattered with his family. He had no watch, and his trousers grew like grass.… Thank the lord, they’ve become pebbles.”

He sighed, and for a moment rested his chin on the hoe-handle, peering out toward the tree-encircled swamp. The hylas were beginning to jingle their elfin bells. A red-winged blackbird sailed in the last sunlight from one apple tree to another.

“All a vicious circle—and all fascinating. Utterly preposterous and futile, but fascinating.”

He dropped the hoe and trundled the wheelbarrow to the edge of the strawberry bed.

“Why can’t you stay where you’re put?” he said. “Why do you grow all over the place like this?”

With a trowel he began digging up the runners and placing them on the wheelbarrow. It delighted him to part the soft cool soil with his fingers, to thrust them sensitively among the finely filamented roots. The delicate snap, subterranean, of rootlets gave him a delicious pang. “Blood flows—but it’s all for the best; in the best of all possible worlds. Yield to me, strawberries, and you shall bear. I am the resurrection and the life.” When he had a sufficient pile of plants, he trundled the wheelbarrow to the new bed, exquisitely prepared, rich, warm, inviting. With the hoe he made a series of holes, and then, stooping, thrust the hairy roots back into the earth, pressing the soil tenderly about them. Then he rose, stretched his back, and lighted his pipe, shutting his left eye, and enshrining the flame, which danced, in the hollow of his stained hands. The cloud of smoke went up like incense.

“Water!” he cried. “Water! Water!”

Martha appeared, after a moment, bringing the watering pot. She held it in front of her with both hands.

“Quick, Martha, before they die. Their tongues are turning black.”

“Silly!” Martha replied.

The earth about each plant was darkened with the tilted water, and the soiled leaves and stems were brightened.

“Listen, daddy! they’re smacking their lips.”

“They are pale, they have their eyes shut, they are reaching desperately down into the darkness for something to hold on to. They grope and tickle at atoms of soil, they shrink away from pebbles, they sigh and relax.”

“When the dew falls, they’ll sing.”

“Ha, ha! What fools we are.”

He flung the hoe across the wheelbarrow and started wheeling it toward the toolhouse.

“Bring the watering pot!”

Martha ran after him and put it in the wheelbarrow.

“That’s right—add to my burden—never do anything that you can make somebody else do.”

Martha giggled, in response, and skipped toward the house. When she reached the stone steps she put her feet close together and with dark seriousness hopped up step after step in that manner. He watched her and smiled.

“O Lord, Lord,” he said, “what a circus we are.”

He trundled the bumping wheelbarrow and whistled. The red sun, enormous in the slight haze, was gashing itself cruelly on a black pine tree. The hylas, by now, had burst into full shrill-sweet chorus in the swamp, and of the birds all but a few scraping grackles were still. “Peace—peace—peace,” sang the hylas, a thousand at once. Silver bells, frailer than thimbles, ringing under a still and infinite sea of ether.… “Peace—peace,” he murmured. Then he dropped the wheelbarrow in horror, and put his hands to his ears. “The enemy!” he cried. “Martha! hurry! Martha!” This time Martha seemed to be out of earshot, so he was obliged to circumvent the enemy with great caution. The enemy was a toad who sat, by preference, near the toolhouse door: obese, sage, and wrinkled like a Chinese god. “Toad that under cold stone.” Marvelous compulsion of rhythm!… He thrust the wheelbarrow into the cool pleasant-smelling darkness of the toolhouse, and walked toward the kitchen door, which just at that moment Hilda opened.

“Hurry up,” she said. Her voice had a delicious mildness in the still air and added curiously to his already overwhelming sense of luxury. He had, for a moment, an extraordinarily satisfying sense of space.

III.

He lifted his eyes from the pudding to the Hokusai print over the mantel.

“Think of it with shame! We sit here again grossly feeding our insatiable bellies, while Fujiyama, there, thrusts his copper-colored cone into a cobalt sky among whipped-cream clouds! Pilgrims, in the dusk, toil up his sides with staves. Pilgrims like ants. They struggle upwards in the darkness for pure love of beauty.”

“I don’t like bread pudding,” ejaculated Mary solemnly. “It’s beany.”

Martha and Marjorie joined in a silvery cascade of giggles.

“Where did she get that awful word!” said Hilda.

“Tom says it, mother.”

“Well, for goodness’ sake, forget it.”

Mary stared gravely about the table, spoon in mouth, and then, removing the spoon, repeated, “It’s beany.”

He groaned, folding his napkin.

“What an awful affliction a family is. Why did we marry, Hilda? Life is a trap.”

“Mrs. Ferguson called this afternoon and presented me with a basket of green strawberries. I’m afraid she thought I wasn’t very appreciative. I hate to be interrupted when I’m sewing. Why under the sun does she pick them before they’re ripe?”