Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

I was still in a fever of excitement about this when I was shown into Reine Wilson’s sitting room by a young woman who seemed to combine the functions of housekeeper and trained nurse. Reine rose to greet me, rose slowly and weakly and with conscious effort, and then, having given me her hand, was assisted by the young woman to her chair by the tea-table. The young woman brought in the teapot and the hot scones, and then withdrew. I had seated myself on a couch by the open window. A double-red thorn tree was in blossom in the small garden, and its fragrance filled the room.

“I’ve just been reading”—I said—in a voice that I am afraid shook a little—“your new installment of ‘Scherzo.’ I think it’s perfectly entrancing.”

Reine looked at me, I thought, with a trace of hostility—I was certain that my approach had been too blunt.

“Oh, do you?” she said. And then immediately added, with a kind of careful lightness: “One lump or two, Mr. Grant?… Is this too weak for you?”

I stood up and moved to the tea-table for my cup of tea, and for the hot scone which she offered me; and suddenly I felt horribly shy. I had ruined myself at the outset—I had rushed in too fast and too far. I ought to have known her better. I ought to have known that I must leave the lead to her, and follow up the controlled reticence of manner with which I had made such a success at the luncheon party. A violent outbreak like that—! With a creature so exquisitely sensitive!—I felt clumsy and coarse and miserably ashamed. And I sank on to the couch again very much humiliated and very conscious of my hands and feet.

But Reine to my astonishment had mercy on me.

“I’m so glad you liked it!” she said. And she said it with such an air of relief, and with a voice so rich in delight, that I felt a shock of returning confidence as vivid and intense as, a moment since, its departure had been. And I had an instant and heavenly conviction that I could now throw all caution to the winds. She looked at me with wide-open eyes—it was almost as if she looked at me with wide-open soul. We had, abruptly, “met” again; and we had met more intimately than before. It was strange, at that moment, how everything seemed to be conspiring to make this mutual recognition complete; the long room lined with bookcases; the high mantel of cream-colored wood and the pale Dutch tiles which surrounded the fireplace; the worn Khelim rug which stretched between us, and the open window, which it seemed not improbable that the thorn tree itself had opened, in order that its fragrance and the London spring might come in to us—all these details were vividly and conspiratorially present to me, as if they were indeed a part of the exquisite mingling of our personalities at that poised instant of time. Was not I myself this room, this rug, that mantel, the tea-table spread with tea-things, and the inquisitive thorn tree? Was not I myself Reine Wilson, entertaining a strange young man in whom I felt a subtle and bewildering and intoxicating attraction? Destiny was in this—æons of patient evolution and change, wars and disasters and ages of darkness, the sand-like siftings of laws and stars, had all worked for the fulfillment of this ultimate minute, this perfect flowering of two meeting minds. I could not be mistaken in my belief that it was the same for her as for me. With the deep tremor in my own soul, I could feel the tremor in hers. If it were not true, she could not possibly be holding her teacup as she did, or frowning slightly as she did, or withholding, as she deliciously did, the smile of delighted confession which I knew she was near to giving me.

“You know”—I then added—“I think that dream is marvelous—simply marvelous.”

“ Do you!” she cried. “But how lovely! You really liked it? You didn’t think there was too much of it?…”

She leaned toward me with the eagerness of a schoolgirl, her eyes wide with intensity.

“Too much of it! Heavens, no. I was never so enthralled by anything in my life.”

“But do you mean it?… Why, you know, Wilson wanted me to ‘cut’ it. He said it was far, far too long. And everybody on The Banner has said so.… But you think it’s all right?…”

“It’s much more than all right. It couldn’t possibly be anything but what it is. It seems to me to be the very soul of the thing—the center and source of light. It had to be that, hadn’t it?… I mean, a glowing symbol for the whole thing. For Underhill’s Gethsemane.…”

She looked at me, after this, for a long moment, and then she drew in her breath very slowly and deeply, subtly relaxing.

“Heavens!” she said—“you are a miracle.”

“Am I?”

“You know you are. I hadn’t dared to suppose that anyone would see what I intended by that. Or would like it, even if they did.… Isn’t it extraordinary!”

She gave an odd light little laugh, not without a trace of bitterness, and then, with a smile still charmingly lighting her small face, gazed downward abstractedly at the Khelim rug. I knew what she meant by “extraordinary”—she meant that it was extraordinary that two minds should find each other as swiftly and easily as ours did. I knew also that she would not want the strangeness of this, and its beauty, too explicitly noted. For that would be to spoil it.

“Yes,” I sighed, “it is.… Can I steal another scone?”

“Do!… Have one of the underneath ones—they’re hotter!”

I took one, and returned to the couch. The room had suddenly darkened—it had clouded up—and a momentary patter of drops on the leaves of the thorn tree sounded in the silence, as if it were inside the room.

“Rain!” I said.… “I love it! Don’t you?”

“You mean the sound of it?…”

“No—everything. The sound, yes, but also the light—rain has always had for me, ever since I can remember, a special sort of magic . On rainy days I experience a special kind of delicious melancholy—a melancholy that is happy, if that means anything to you. I brood, my imagination is set free, I am restless and depressed, and yet at the same time it is as if something inside me wanted to sing.… Don’t I sound like a sentimental idiot?”

“Oh!” she said, “how nice of you!”

She rose, very gingerly, and coming to the end of the couch rested her two hands on the blue-canvas arm, one hand on top of the other. As she looked out through the window at the thorn tree, watching the small leaves curtsey and genuflect to the raindrops, and then spring up again released, I felt as if I were going to tremble. I found myself thinking about her heart again—she looked so astonishingly frail. How could so frail a body, a body so ethereally and transparently slight, contain a spirit so vivid? One felt that with the slightest flutter the bright bird might escape and be gone.

“Yes,” she said, in almost a whisper, as if to herself, “it is beautiful … beautiful. It does make one want to sing. And how the thrushes adore it!”

“I remember”—I said—“how once, when I was a small boy, I went bathing in the sea on a darkish day. While I was swimming, it began to rain. I was at first astonished—almost frightened. The water was smooth—there was no sound of waves—and all about me arose a delicate and delicious seething , the low sound of raindrops on the sea. It was a ghostly and whispering sound—there was something sinister in it, and also something divinely soothing. I lay on my back and floated, letting the drops fall on my face while I looked up at the clouds—and then I swam very softly, so as to be able to listen. I don’t believe I was ever happier in my life. It was as if I had gone into another world.… And then, when I went ashore, I remember how I ran to the bathing hut, for fear of getting wet!…”