Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

A mere fragrance!… Yes, it was that; and it is for that reason, I see now, that it is so precious to me. Volatile and swift as it was, it somehow caught into itself all the scanty poetry of my life. If I may be pardoned for appearing a little bit “romantic” about myself, I might say that it was as if I were a tree, and had, in this one instance, put forth a single blossom, a blossom of unique beauty, perhaps a sort of “sport,” which, unlike my other blossoms, bore no fruit, but excelled all the others in beauty and sweetness. That sounds, in the prosaic statement, rather affected, I am afraid; but it is as nearly a literal statement of the truth as I can find.

It happened when I was a young man, about four years after I had married. I was already unhappy and restless. I wasn’t wholly aware of this—I had, at all events, no conscious desire, as yet, to go in search of adventure. All the same, it is obvious to me now that I was, unconsciously , in search of some sort of escape or excitement. I went about a good deal—and I went about alone. My own tastes being mildly literary, and my wife’s not, I made rather a specialty of literary teas and “squashes,” and had soon made a considerable number of acquaintances among the younger writers who lived in London at that time. Among these was a group of young folk who ran a small monthly magazine called The Banner —a magazine which, like many other such things, ran a brilliant but sporadic course for a year or two and then went bankrupt. My friend Estlin first told me about this, and called my attention to the work of Reine Wilson, whose first novel was coming out serially in The Banner , and whose husband was assistant editor of it. I read the first two chapters of “Scherzo,” and I was simply transported by it. It seemed to me the most exquisite prose I had ever read—extraordinarily alive, extraordinarily poetic, and exquisitely feminine. It was the prose of a woman who was, as it were, all sensibility—of a soul that was all a tremulous awareness. Could one have—I asked Estlin—so ethereally delicate a consciousness, a consciousness so easily wounded, and live? And he horrified me by replying “No,” and by telling me that Reine Wilson was—to all intents—dying. She had a bad heart, and had been definitely “given up.” She might die at any minute. And she ought, by rights, to be dead already.

This shocked me, and also made me very curious; and when Estlin asked me, one day, to come to lunch with himself and the Wilsons, I needed no urging. We were to meet them at a little French place in Wardour Street—long since gone, I regret to say—and on our way thither we stopped at a pub for a glass of sherry. It was there that, by way of preface to the encounter, Estlin told me that there was something “queer” in the Wilson situation.

“Queer?” I said.

“Yes, queer. Nobody can make it out. You see, they lived together before they married—when they were both writing for The Times . For about three years. But then, all of a sudden, they married; and the minute they were properly married—presto!—they separated. She took a flat in Hampstead—and he took one in Bloomsbury. Once a week, they held a reception together at her flat—and they still do. But so far as anyone knows, they’ve never lived together from that day to this. He doesn’t seem to be in love with anyone else—and neither does she. They are perfectly friendly—even affectionate. But they live apart. And she always refers to him simply as ‘Wilson.’ She even calls him Wilson. Damned funny.”

I agreed with him, and I pondered. Was it—I asked—because she had a bad heart? too much of a strain for her?… Estlin thought not; though he wasn’t sure. He even thought that the bad heart had developed after the separation. He shook his head over it, and said, “Rum!” and we went to meet them. He added, inconsequentially, that he thought she would like me.

She did like me—and I liked her. At first sight. I find it difficult to describe the impression she made upon me—I think I was first struck by the astonishing frailty of her appearance, an other-world fragility, almost a transparent spiritual quality, as if she were already a disembodied soul. She was seated at a small table, behind a pot of ferns, which half concealed her face. Her brown eyes, under a straight bang of black hair, were round as a doll’s, and as intense.

“Isn’t it like meeting in a jungle ?” she said. She made the tiniest of gestures toward the fern; and I was struck by the restraint with which she did this, and by the odd way in which her voice, though pitched very low, and very carefully controlled, nevertheless contrived to reveal a burning intensity of spirit such as I have never elsewhere encountered. There was something gingerly about her self-control; and also something profoundly terrifying. It seemed to me that I had never met anyone whose hold on life was so terribly conscious . It was as if she held it—this small, burning jewel—quite literally in her hands; as if she felt that at any instant it might escape her; or as if she felt that, if it didn’t escape, it might, if not firmly held, simply burn itself away in its own sheer aliveness. And to sit with her, to watch the intense restraint of all her gestures and expressions, and above all to listen to the feverish controlledness with which she spoke, was at once to share in this curious attitude toward life. Insensibly, one became an invalid. One felt that the flame of life was burning low—and burning low for everyone —but burning with all the more beauty and pure excellence for that; and one entered into a strange and secret conspiracy to guard that precious flame with all one’s power.

II.

I had little opportunity, during that luncheon-party, for any “private” talk with Reine; the conversation was general. Not only that, but it was, as was to be expected, pretty literary, and I, perforce, took an inconspicuous part in it. Wilson struck me as a rather opinionated person, rather loud-voiced, rather sprawling, and I felt myself somewhat affronted by the excessiveness of his “Oxford manner.” In fact, I disliked him, and thought him rather a fool. How on earth—I wondered—had he managed to attract so exquisite a creature as his wife? What on earth had she seen in him?… For there was something coarse in him, and also, I felt sure, something dishonest. He seemed to me hypocritical. He seemed to me to be merely posing as a literary man. And I thought that his loud enthusiasms were the effort of the insincere to make an impression, to carry conviction. Was it possible that Reine didn’t see through this? Or was it possible—and this idea really excited me—that she did see through him, and that it was for this reason that they had separated?…

I found myself setting myself in a kind of opposition to him: not by anything so obvious as contradiction, but, simply, by being very quiet. I quite definitely exaggerated my usual quietness and restraint of speech, endeavoring at the same time to make it very pungent and concise; simply because I felt that this was what she wanted and needed. And she rewarded me by being, in our few interchanges, extraordinarily nice to me. I remember, when Wilson had been declaiming against the enormous emptiness of Henry James, and his total lack of human significance, that I waited for a pause and then said, very gently, that I could not agree: that James seemed to me the most consummate analyst of the influence of character upon character, particularly in situations of a profound moral obliquity, that there had ever been. Reine looked at me, on this, as if I had been a kind of revelation to her; her eyes positively brimmed with light and joy.