Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

It still struck him as odd that he had made so little effort to keep in touch with her. Of course, he had fallen in love with Daisy, and then he had moved away—but even so, it had shown little foresight, and little knowledge of human nature or of himself. He might have known that he would eventually want to see her again—even if he couldn’t have known that he was more than half in love with her. That was almost the strangest part of it: that he could have lived with her for three years without realizing the depth and beauty of their feeling for each other. Somehow, the affair had just seemed gay, and good; its note had been one of light-heartedness; the evenings had come and gone as so much mere amusement. It seemed to him that they had always been laughing—yes, from the very beginning, from the first moment of their meeting, when, in the Park Street Subway, reaching hastily for a strap, he had by accident taken her hand firmly and completely in his own. That had made her laugh—he had heard her laugh before he had heard her speak. She hadn’t moved her hand from the strap, which she had held before him—she had merely turned and laughed, looking up at him with astonished amusement. And then, before he had been able to pull himself together, she had said, “My goodness—! You surprised me.” He remembered vividly, still, how she had blushed, and with what enormous courage he had left his hand where it was.… And after that they had gone—where was it?—to a dirty Chinese restaurant, for tea. And then had had dinner together, at the Avery. She had explained how it happened—she would never have done such a thing if she hadn’t had three cocktails at lunch. Never. And they mustn’t, of course, meet again—she would walk with him along the Esplanade, he could see her to her door in Newbury Street, where she lived in a nurses’ home, and that would be the end. The end! It had been the beginning of the happiest three years of his life, and perhaps of hers. They had dawdled and argued along the Esplanade—it was a fragrant night in June—sat on one bench after another, as he persuaded her to delay, and hadn’t reached her door till midnight. What a torrent of farcical nonsense they had talked! And now he couldn’t recall a single word of it—not a single word. Nothing but the sound of her voice, the sound of her laugh.

But the next afternoon—ah, that was another matter. In that absurd little bow-windowed room at the nurses’ home, sitting side by side on the stiff cretonned sofa, while outside the open window the gardener was clipping the ivy. That gardener had been their best friend. His persistent presence there at the windows—moving from one window to another, slowly adjusting his ladder to a new position, solemnly climbing, solemnly clipping, and now and then of course glancing into the room—this had acted as a terrific restraint upon them both. Just at the moment when they most wanted to talk, to explore each other’s minds, they had been compelled to be shy, and to speak in monosyllables, and to gaze. And, good Lord, how they had gazed! They had gazed and smiled, and smiled and gazed, and waited—and the waiting had made it all the more inevitable. How soon would the gardener be finished? How soon? When he wasn’t looking, they had grimaced at him; but he must have stayed for a solid hour. It was getting on for sunset—the light was low and level and rich; and he remembered how it had shown him for the first time the beauty of her hair, a deep chestnut with an underglow of copper. But when the gardener had actually gone, and the clippers were quiet, and it was at last possible for them to talk-why then, strangely enough, they hadn’t wanted to talk at all—they had merely wanted to kiss. And so they had kissed. And at once Boston had put on a rainbow, and the world was changed.

But now, when he tried to summon up particular moments—days—hours—weeks—it was astonishing how hard it was to get hold of anything specific, any speech, or gesture, or event. They had dined together so often, during that first phase, at the same hotels, that all those delicious dinners now seemed exactly alike, with the same bands, the same Benedictines and coffee (she had claimed that Benedictine made one passionate, and having confessed this had giggled) the same gaudy girls singing “M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i.” Their meetings in the lobby seemed always to have been the same, at the same hour, by the same palm tree or brass spittoon. Gradually this new adventure had changed from the unknown to the known, had become a delicious ritual, a new and rich complex of habits. He had spent fewer and fewer evenings with Mike and Bill, had got out of the habit of going to ball-games and prize-fights, and instead had allowed his life to be wholly absorbed in his preoccupation with Eunice. The first three months had had a special charm—before they had begun to live together, and while there had still been an element of mystery. That odd nurses’ home, for example—the pathetic little old bundle who was matron of it, Mrs. Burgess, from New Bedford—and the nurses, Miss McKittrick, Miss Lamb, and Eunice’s roommate Miss Orr—what a singular adventure it had seemed to him, all at once, to be plunged into an environment so strange to him, but so complete in itself! And slowly, as night after night they had dined together and then returned to the little bow-windowed sitting room, always with a formal greeting to Mrs. Burgess, he had possessed himself of that quiet and organized life which was as peaceful as the life of a nunnery, but by no means always as virtuous. Eunice had loved to gossip about her sister nurses. There was always some new little breeze of scandal coming up, and he smiled as he remembered the look of delighted mischievousness with which she would preface the telling of it. She would put her handkerchief to her mouth, and hold it there as if to repress the quite irrepressible little laugh, and then blush. And out the story would come. There had been, for instance, the nocturnal invasion of the “Tech” boys from next door—the adjacent building had been a private dormitory for Technology undergraduates. The two buildings were exactly alike, and from the back of each, at the third story, extended a flat roof on which it was pleasant to sit and smoke on summer evenings: one simply stepped out of the window of Miss McKittrick’s room. The two roofs were divided by a low brick wall, only, and it was while Miss McKittrick and Miss Lamb were sitting there on cushions one night, in their “kims,” that suddenly two impudent young faces had appeared over the wall. This had led to a series of gin-parties, now on one side of the wall and now on the other, which poor Mrs. Burgess had somehow never discovered. In fact, the two boys had once come into the bedroom, and Miss McKittrick had only just managed to shoo them out before the Doctor came.…

The Doctor was Miss McKittrick’s fiancé—or so she had said. She had begun by being his “special”—he always called her in on special cases. Then they had taken a motor trip together, and another, and the nurses had understood quite well what was going on, and had envied her. He gave her a sealskin coat, and a Pierce-Arrow. It had gone on like this for two years, and then she learned that he was to be married to someone else, and had a nervous breakdown. She threatened him with a breach-of-promise suit, but was persuaded not to proceed with it; instead, she accepted from him Liberty Bonds to the value of $10,000, an action of which Eunice tartly disapproved. She, like the others, had always admired the Doctor, who was considered one of the best surgeons in Boston. And they had all thought him very generous.

Then there had been Miss Orr, Eunice’s queer solitary roommate, who read Keats and Shelley, but who also periodically developed a passion for “smut” books—at which times, for three or four days, she would do nothing but drink gin, and read all night; Eunice once or twice had to take her cases for her. As for Eunice herself, he hadn’t been able, at first, to make out just how seriously she took her profession. She had a small income of her own, it appeared, and she took cases only often enough to keep from being bored, and then, if possible, only by the day; though now and then there had been exceptions. She had once or twice acted as nurse-companion to a rich old bird of sixty-five who took her with him to Hot Springs for a month or two in the winter. She claimed to have known him for a long while. Perhaps she had—for certainly Eunice was the most honest woman he had ever met; but at the time this had made him a little jealous, and a little suspicious. Was it possible—? No, it wasn’t possible. She had liked the old fellow, liked his sister, too, he had paid her well, and it had of course given her a change.