Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“That’s a nice way to treat a neighbor who gives you a present!… You are an ungrateful creature.”

Hilda was languid.

“Well, I didn’t ask her for them.”

Her eyes gleamed with a slow provocative amusement.

“They’re beany,” said Mary.

He rolled his eyes at Mary:

“Our kids are too much with us. Bib and spoon,

Feeding and spanking, we lay waste our powers!”

They all pushed back their chairs, laughing, and a moment later, as he lighted his cigar, he heard from the music room Hilda’s violin begin with tremulous thin notes, oddly analogous to the sound of her voice when she sang, playing Bach to a methodical loud piano accompaniment by Martha. Melancholy came like a blue wave out of the dusk, lifted him, and broke slowly and deliciously over him. He stood for a moment, made motionless by the exquisite, intricate melody, stared, as if seeking with his eyes for the meaning of the silvery algebra of sound, and then went out.

The sun had set, darkness was at hand. He walked to the top of the stone steps and looked across the shallow valley toward the fading hill and the black water tower. The trees on the crest, sharply silhouetted against a last band of pale light, looked like marching men. Lights winked at the base of the hill. And now, as hill and water tower and trees became obscure, he began to see once more the dim phantasmal outlines of the dark city, the city submerged under the infinite sea, the city not inhabited by mortals. Immense, sinister, and black, old and cold as the moon, were the walls that surrounded it. No gate gave entrance to it. Of a paler stone were the houses upon houses, tiers upon tiers of shadowy towers, which surmounted the walls. Not a light was to be seen in it, not a motion; it was still. He stared and stared at it, following with strained eyes the faint lines which might indicate its unlighted streets, seeking in vain, as always, to discover in the walls of it any sign of any window. It grew darker, it faded, a profound and vast secret, an inscrutable mystery.

“She is older than the rocks,” he murmured.

He turned away and walked over the lawn in the darkness, listening to the hylas, who seemed now to be saturating the hushed night with sound. “Peace—peace—peace—” they sang. Pax vobiscum . He gathered the croquet mallets and leaned them against the elm tree, swearing when he tripped over an unseen wicket. This done, he walked down the pale road, blowing clouds of smoke above him with uplifted face, and luxuriated in the sight of the dark tops of trees motionless against the stars. A soft skipping sound in the leaves at the road’s edge made him jump. He laughed to himself.… “He had no watch, and his trousers grew like grass.…” He took out his watch and peered closely at it. The children were in bed, and Hilda was waiting for a game of chess. He walked back with his hands deep in his pockets. Pawn to King-four.

“Hilda! wake up!”

Hilda opened her candid eyes without astonishment and sat up over the chessboard, on which the tiny men were already arranged.

“Goodness! how you scared me. What took you so long? I’ve been dreaming about Bluebeard.”

“Bluebeard! Good heavens. I hope he didn’t look like me.”

“He did—remarkably!”

“A nice thing to say to your husband.… Move! Hurry up!… I’m going to capture your King. Queens die young and fair.”

He smoked his pipe. Hilda played morosely. Delicious she was when she was half asleep like this! She leaned her head on one hand, her elbow on the table.… When she had been checkmated, at the end of half an hour, she sank back wearily in her chair. She looked at him intently for a moment and began to smile.

“And how about the dark city tonight?” she asked. He took slow puffs at his pipe and stared meditatively at the ceiling.

“Ah—the dark city, Hilda! the city submerged under an infinite sea, the city not inhabited by mortals!… It was there again—would you believe it?… It was there.… I went out to the stone steps, smoking my cigar, while you played Bach. I hardly dared to look—I watched the hill out of the corner of my eyes, and pretended to be listening to the music.… And suddenly, at the right moment of dusk, just after the street-lamps had winked along the base of the hill, I saw it. The hill that we see there in the daylight with its water tower and marching trees, its green sloping fields and brook that flashes in the sun, is unreal, an illusion, the thinnest of disguises—a cloak of green velvet which the dark city throws over itself at the coming of the first ray of light.… I saw it distinctly. Immense, smooth, and black, old and cold as the moon, are the walls that surround it. No gate gives entrance to it. Of a paler stone are the houses, tiers upon tiers of shadowy towers that surmount those sepulchral walls. No motion was perceptible there—no light gleamed there—no sound, no whisper rose from it. I thought: perhaps it is a city of the dead. The walls of it have no windows, and its inhabitants must be blind.… And then I seemed to see it more closely, in a twilight which appeared to be its own, and this closer perception gave way, in turn, to a vision. For first I saw that all the walls of it are moist, dripping, slippery, as if it were bathed in a deathlike dew; and then I saw its people. Its people are maggots—maggots of perhaps the size of human children; their heads are small and wedge-shaped, and glow with a faint bluish light. Masses of them swarm within those walls. Masses of them pour through the streets, glisten on the buttresses and parapets. They are intelligent. What horrible feast is it that nightly they celebrate there in silence? On what carrion do they feed? It is the universe that they devour; and they build above it, as they devour it, their dark city like a hollow tomb.… Extraordinary that this city, which seen from here at dusk has so supernatural a beauty, should hide at the core so vile a secret.…”

Hilda stared at him.

“Really, Andrew, I think you’re going mad.”

“Going? I’m gone! My brain is maggoty.”

They laughed, and rattled the chessmen into their wooden box. Then they began locking the doors and windows for the night.

I.

The short-story writer had run out of ideas; he had used them all; he was feeling as empty as a bathtub and as blue as an oyster. He stirred his coffee without gusto and looked at his newspaper without reading it, only noting (but with a lackluster eye) that Prohibition was finally dead. He was having his breakfast at one of those white-tiled restaurants which are so symbolic of America—with an air of carbolic purity at the entrance, but steamy purlieus at the rear which imagination trembles to investigate. His breakfast was always the same: two two-minute eggs, a little glass of chilled tomato juice, dry toast, and coffee. The only change, this morning, lay in the fact that he was having these simple things in a new place—it was a somewhat humbler restaurant than the one he usually entered at eight-thirty. He had looked in through the window appraisingly, and had a little hesitantly entered. But the ritual turned out to be exactly the same as at the others—a ticket at the entrance, where the cashier sat behind a glass case which was filled with cigarettes, chewing gum, and silver-papered cakes of chocolate; a tray at the counter; the precise intonation of “Two twos, with.” The only difference, in fact, was that the china was of a pale smoke-blue, a soft and dim blue which, had it been green, would have been pistachio. This gave his coffee a new appearance.

He sat at the marble-topped table near the window, and looked out at the crowded square. A light soft drizzle was falling on the morning rush of cars, wagons, pedestrians, newsboys; before the window bobbed a continuous procession of men and women; and he watched them over the half-seen headlines of his newspaper. A middle-aged woman, walking quickly, her umbrella pulled low over her head, so that the whiteness of her profile was sharp and immediate against the purple shadow. She vanished past the range of his vision before he had had time to see her properly—and for a moment after she had gone he went on thinking about her. She might do for the physical model of his story; but she wasn’t fat enough, nor was she blonde, and for some obscure reason he had decided that the heroine must be fat and blonde. Just the same, she was real, she had come from somewhere and was going somewhere, and she was doing it with obvious concentration and energy. The rhythm of her gait was unusually pronounced, each shoulder swayed slightly but emphatically sideways, as if in a series of quick and aggressive but cheerful greetings—the effect, if not quite graceful, was individual and charming. He stopped thinking about her, and recovered his powers of observation, just in time to see a gray Irish face, middle-aged, hook-nosed, under a dirty felt hat, a hand quickly removing the pipe from the mouth, and the lips pouting to eject a long bright arc of spit, which fell heavily out of sight, the pipe then replaced. Such a quantity of spit he could not have imagined—his mouth felt dry at the mere thought of it. Where had it been stored and for how long? and with increasing pleasure, or increasing annoyance? The act itself had been unmistakably a pleasure, and had probably had its origins in pride; one could imagine him having competed, as a boy, in spitting through a knot-hole in a fence. He had trained himself, all his life, in the power of retention; his mouth had become a kind of reservoir.