Conrad Aiken: The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

Mr. Arcularis took his hand and pressed it hard, and once more felt like crying. Absurd! Had he become a child again?

“Goodbye,” he said.

He sat down in the little wicker chair, with his overcoat still on, closed his eyes, and listened to the humming of the air in the ventilator. Hurried footsteps ran up and down the corridor. The chair was not too comfortable, and his pain began to bother him again, so he moved, with his coat still on, to the narrow berth and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was dark, and the porthole had been partly opened. He groped for the switch and turned on the light. Then he rang for the steward.

“It’s cold in here,” he said. “Would you mind closing the port?”

The girl who sat opposite him at dinner was charming. Who was it she reminded him of? Why, of course, the girl at the hospital, the girl with the freckles. Her hair was beautiful, not quite red, not quite gold, nor had it been bobbed; arranged with a sort of graceful untidiness, it made him think of a Melozzo da Forli angel. Her face was freckled, she had a mouth which was both humorous and voluptuous. And she seemed to be alone.

He frowned at the bill of fare and ordered the thick soup.

“No hors d’oeuvres?” asked the steward.

“I think not,” said Mr. Arcularis. “They might kill me.”

The steward permitted himself to be amused and deposited the menu card on the table against the water bottle. His eyebrows were lifted. As he moved away, the girl followed him with her eyes and smiled.

“I’m afraid you shocked him,” she said.

“Impossible,” said Mr. Arcularis. “These stewards, they’re dead souls. How could they be stewards otherwise? And they think they’ve seen and known everything. They suffer terribly from the déjà vu . Personally, I don’t blame them.”

“It must be a dreadful sort of life.”

“It’s because they’re dead that they accept it.”

“Do you think so?”

“I’m sure of it. I’m enough of a dead soul myself to know the signs!”

“Well, I don’t know what you mean by that!”

“But nothing mysterious! I’m just out of hospital, after an operation. I was given up for dead. For six months I had given myself up for dead. If you’ve ever been seriously ill you know the feeling. You have a posthumous feeling—a mild, cynical tolerance for everything and everyone. What is there you haven’t seen or done or understood? Nothing.”

Mr. Arcularis waved his hands and smiled.

“I wish I could understand you,” said the girl, “but I’ve never been ill in my life.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Good God!”

The torrent of the unexpressed and inexpressible paralyzed him and rendered him speechless. He stared at the girl, wondering who she was and then, realizing that he had perhaps stared too fixedly, averted his gaze, gave a little laugh, rolled a pill of bread between his fingers. After a second or two he allowed himself to look at her again and found her smiling.

“Never pay any attention to invalids,” he said, “or they’ll drag you to the hospital.”

She examined him critically, with her head tilted a little to one side, but with friendliness.

“You don’t look like an invalid,” she said.

Mr. Arcularis thought her charming. His pain ceased to bother him, the disagreeable humming disappeared, or rather, it was dissociated from himself and became merely, as it should be, the sound of the ship’s engines, and he began to think the voyage was going to be really delightful. The parson on his right passed him the salt.

“I fear you will need this in your soup,” he said.

“Thank you. Is it as bad as that?”

The steward, overhearing, was immediately apologetic and solicitous. He explained that on the first day everything was at sixes and sevens. The girl looked up at him and asked him a question.

“Do you think we’ll have a good voyage?” she said.

He was passing the hot rolls to the parson, removing the napkins from them with a deprecatory finger.

“Well, madam, I don’t like to be a Jeremiah, but—”

“Oh, come,” said the parson, “I hope we have no Jeremiahs.”

“What do you mean?” said the girl.

Mr. Arcularis ate his soup with gusto—it was nice and hot.

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it, but there’s a corpse on board, going to Ireland; and I never yet knew a voyage with a corpse on board that we didn’t have bad weather.”

“Why, steward, you’re just superstitious! What nonsense!”

“That’s a very ancient superstition,” said Mr. Arcularis. “I’ve heard it many times. Maybe it’s true. Maybe we’ll be wrecked. And what does it matter, after all?” He was very bland.

“Then let’s be wrecked,” said the parson coldly.

Nevertheless, Mr. Arcularis felt a shudder go through him on hearing the steward’s remark. A corpse in the hold—a coffin? Perhaps it was true. Perhaps some disaster would befall them. There might be fogs. There might be icebergs. He thought of all the wrecks of which he had read. There was the Titanic , which he had read about in the warm newspaper room at the Harvard Club—it had seemed dreadfully real, even there. That band, playing “Nearer My God to Thee” on the after-deck while the ship sank! It was one of the darkest of his memories. And the Empress of Ireland —all those poor people trapped in the smoking room, with only one door between them and life, and that door locked for the night by the deck steward, and the deck steward nowhere to be found! He shivered, feeling a draft, and turned to the parson.

“How do these strange delusions arise?” he said.

The parson looked at him searchingly, appraisingly—from chin to forehead, from forehead to chin—and Mr. Arcularis, feeling uncomfortable, straightened his tie.

“From nothing but fear,” said the parson. “Nothing on earth but fear.”

“How strange!” said the girl.

Mr. Arcularis again looked at her—she had lowered her face—and again tried to think of whom she reminded him. It wasn’t only the little freckle-faced girl at the hospital—both of them had reminded him of someone else. Someone far back in his life: remote, beautiful, lovely. But he couldn’t think. The meal came to an end, they all rose, the ship’s orchestra played a feeble foxtrot, and Mr. Arcularis, once more alone, went to the bar to have his whisky. The room was stuffy, and the ship’s engines were both audible and palpable. The humming and throbbing oppressed him, the rhythm seemed to be the rhythm of his own pain, and after a short time he found his way, with slow steps, holding on to the walls in his moments of weakness and dizziness, to his forlorn and white little room. The port had been—thank God!—closed for the night; it was cold enough anyway. The white and blue ribbons fluttered from the ventilator, the bottle and glasses clicked and clucked as the ship swayed gently to the long, slow motion of the sea. It was all very peculiar—it was all like something he had experienced somewhere before. What was it? Where was it?… He untied his tie, looking at his face in the glass, and wondered, and from time to time put his hand to his side to hold in the pain. It wasn’t at Portsmouth, in his childhood, nor at Salem, nor in the rose garden at his Aunt Julia’s, nor in the schoolroom at Cambridge. It was something very queer, very intimate, very precious. The jackstones, the Sunday-school cards which he had loved when he was a child.… He fell asleep.

The sense of time was already hopelessly confused. One hour was like another, the sea looked always the same, morning was indistinguishable from afternoon—and was it Tuesday or Wednesday? Mr. Arcularis was sitting in the smoking room, in his favorite corner, watching the parson teach Miss Dean to play chess. On the deck outside he could see the people passing and repassing in their restless round of the ship. The red jacket went by, then the black hat with the white feather, then the purple scarf, the brown tweed coat, the Bulgarian mustache, the monocle, the Scotch cap with fluttering ribbons, and in no time at all the red jacket again, dipping past the windows with its own peculiar rhythm, followed once more by the black hat and the purple scarf. How odd to reflect on the fixed little orbits of these things—as definite and profound, perhaps, as the orbits of the stars, and as important to God or the Absolute. There was a kind of tyranny in this fixedness, too—to think of it too much made one uncomfortable. He closed his eyes for a moment, to avoid seeing for the fortieth time the Bulgarian mustache and the pursuing monocle. The parson was explaining the movements of knights. Two forward and one to the side. Eight possible moves, always to the opposite color from that on which the piece stands. Two forward and one to the side: Miss Dean repeated the words several times with reflective emphasis. Here, too, was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at last must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that—the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death.… Was it merely the sea which made these abstractions so insistent, so intrusive? The mere notion of orbit had somehow become extraordinarily naked; and to rid himself of the discomfort and also to forget a little the pain which bothered his side whenever he sat down, he walked slowly and carefully into the writing room, and examined a pile of superannuated magazines and catalogues of travel. The bright colors amused him, the photographs of remote islands and mountains, savages in sampans or sarongs or both—it was all very far off and delightful, like something in a dream or a fever. But he found that he was too tired to read and was incapable of concentration. Dreams! Yes, that reminded him. That rather alarming business—sleep-walking!