Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“I’ve just dropped in to say goodbye,” he said, putting his hand against one side of the doorway.

Katy saw how it was, and said she had to go out for a minute, leaving them alone. Mr. Camp stepped in then, and shut the door behind him. He put out his hand and she took it, and they shook hands for a minute, feeling embarrassed.

“Goodbye, Margaret,” he said.

“Goodbye, Mr. Camp.”

“I’ve been hunting for you all day,” he said. “Why did you hide yourself from me?”

“I thought it was better,” she said.

She felt the tears coming into her eyes and was ashamed. He suddenly put his arms around her and kissed her. She tried to turn her face away from him, and he just kissed her cheek two or three times, lightly. His arms were holding her very hard. Then he kissed her once on the mouth.

“You musn’t,” she said. “You’re a married man.”

They looked at each other for what seemed like a long while, and then they heard someone coming to the door and he let her go. Katy and the steward were there. It was time to go. Mr. Diehl came running up too, and she hurriedly put on her hat and coat. Mr. Diehl took Katy’s bag from the steward, and Mr. Camp picked up hers from the camp-chair.

They followed the other passengers and stewards with bags along the corridor, went through the first-cabin dining saloon, and then came out on to a deck where an iron door had been swung open and the gangway made fast. There was a great crowd there, and two officers standing at the top of the gangway taking the landing cards. Mr. Diehl gave Katy her handbag and tried to kiss her, right there before everybody, and she gave a screech and tried to run, but he caught her and kissed her. Then she started down the steep gangway under the bright lights. Mr. Camp handed Margaret her bag and shook hands with her again.

“Here’s my address,” he said. “Write me a letter some time, if you feel like it.”

He gave her a slip of paper, and she tucked it under her glove.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye.”

She turned and went gingerly down the gangway, taking short steps. When she got to the deck of the tender she didn’t look for Katy, but walked right to the stern of the boat, where there was a semicircular bench, and put down her bag, and then stood and looked up at the ship. It seemed enormous, and at first she couldn’t make out where the second-cabin decks were at all. The band was playing somewhere above her, in the night, and the decks were lined with people waving handkerchiefs. They were shouting, too. She ran her eyes to and fro over the crowds, looking for Mr. Camp, but she couldn’t find him, anywhere. Maybe he wouldn’t come. Then the gangway was hauled down, the bells rang, and the tender began chugging.

Just at that minute she finally saw him. He had got a little open space of railing all to himself, and was leaning way out, waving his arm. She felt as if her heart was going to break, and threw him three long kisses, and he threw three long kisses back. The steamship whistle began blowing, the tender drew away very fast, but she could still see him waving his arm. Then she couldn’t see any more, because the tears came into her eyes, and she sat down and waited for Katy to come, and turned her head away from the ship and wished she were dead.

I.

A couple of years ago I saw in the “agony column” of The Times a very curious advertisement. There are always curious things in that column—I have always been fascinated by that odd little company of forlorn people who so desperately and publicly wear their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Some of them appear there over and over again—the person who signs himself, or herself, “C.,” for example: who regularly every three months or so inserts the message “Tout passe, l’amitié reste.” What singular and heartbreaking devotion does that brief legend convey? Does it ever reach the adored being for whom it is intended, I wonder? Does he ever see it, does he ever reply? Has he simply abandoned her? Were they sundered by some devastating tragedy which can never be healed? And will she go on till she dies, loosing these lovely flame-colored arrows into an utterly unresponsive void?…

I never tire of reflecting on these things; but the advertisement of which I have just spoken was of a different sort altogether. This was signed “Journalist,” and merely said: “Your obituary? Well written, reviewed by yourself, and satisfaction thus insured.” My first response to this oddity was mere amusement. How extraordinarily ingenious of this journalist! It seemed to me that he had perhaps found a gold-mine—I could well imagine that he would be inundated with orders for glowing eulogies. And what an astonishing method of making a living—by arranging flowers, as it were, for the about-to-be-dead! That again was fascinating—for it made me wonder what sort of bird this journalist might be. Something wrong wih him, no doubt—a kind of sadist, a gloomy creature who perhaps reveled rather unhealthily in the mortuary; even, perhaps, a necrophile. Or was he, on the other hand, perfectly indifferent and detached about it, a mere hack-writer who had, by elimination, arrived at a rather clever idea?… But from these speculations I went on to others, and among them the question—to me a highly interesting one—of what, exactly, one would want put into one’s own obituary. What would this be? Would one want just the usual sort of thing—the “he was born,” “he lived in Rome,” “he was a well-known connoisseur of the arts, and a patron of painting,” “conspicuous in the diplomatic society of three countries,” “a brilliant amateur archaeologist,” “died intestate” sort of thing?… Or would one prefer to have one’s personal qualities touched on—with perhaps a kindly reference to one’s unfailing generosity, one’s warmth of heart, and one’s extraordinary equableness of disposition?…

By neither alternative did it seem to me that my “satisfaction could be insured.” Neither for those who knew me, nor for those who did not, could any such perfunctory eulogium be in the least evocative. In what respect would these be any better than the barest of tombstone engravings, with its “born” and “died” and “he was a devoted father”? Mr. X. or Mr. Z., reading of me that I was an amateur archæologist and a kind old fellow, a retired diplomatic secretary, would form no picture of me, receive from such bare bones of statement not the faintest impression of what I might call the “essence” of my life; not the faintest. But if not these, what then? And it occurred to me suddenly that the best, and perhaps the only, way of leaving behind one a record of one’s life which might be, for a world of strangers, revelatory, was that of relating some single episode of one’s history; some single, and if possible central, episode in whose small prism all the colors and lights of one’s soul might be seen. Seen just for a flash, and then gone. Apprehended, vividly, and then forgotten—if one ever does forget such things. And from this, I proceeded to a speculation as to just which one, of all the innumerable events of a well-filled life, I would choose as revelatory. My meeting with my wife at a ball in Calcutta, for example? Some incident of our unhappy life together—perhaps our quarrel in Venice, at the Lido? The effect of her suicide upon me, her drowning in the Mediterranean—the news of which came to me, while I was dining at the Reform Club, from the P. & O. Company?… I considered all of these, only to reject them. Possibly I rejected them—to some extent, anyway—simply because they were essentially painful. I don’t know. Anyway, whatever the reasons, I did reject them, and at last found myself contemplating my odd little adventure with Reine Wilson, the novelist. Just why I fastened upon this, it would be hard to say. It was not an adventure at all; it was hardly even an episode. It was really nothing but the barest of encounters, as I see it now, or as any third person would see it. If I compare it with my protracted love affair with Mrs. M., for example, or even with my very brief infatuation with Hilda K., it appears to be a mere nothing, a mere fragrance.