Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Of course!” she cried. “Of course you would!…”

She sank down on the couch, facing me. And then she went on:

“You’ve given me back something I had forgotten.… It must have been when I was eleven or twelve. It was raining very hard—it was pouring—and when I went down to the library to practice at the piano the room was dark, with that kind of morning darkness that engulfs one. The French windows were open on to the garden, but the curtains hung perfectly still, for there was no wind, no current of air. One of those heavy, straight rains, on a quiet day—a rain as solid and serried as rain in a Japanese print.… I went into the room and closed the door behind me—and it seemed to me, so massive and insistent was the sound of the rain from the garden, with all its multitudinous patter and spatter, that the room itself was full of rain. The sounds were the sound of water, the light was the light of water—it was as if I were a fish in a darkened aquarium. I stood still for a long while, just drinking it in and staring out at the drenched garden, where all the trees and shrubs were bowed down under the unrelenting downpour. Not long before, I had seen somewhere some photographs greatly enlarged, of raindrops falling into the water; and now, as I went to the open French windows, I watched the large bright eave-drops splashing into the puddles on the brick terrace, and I was enchanted to see that my drops were exactly like those. They made the most exquisite little silvery waterspouts and umbrellas and toadstools, and all with such a heavenly clucking and chuckling and chirruping. The bubbles winked and were gone—is there anything so evanescent as a rain-bubble?—and other bubbles came, sliding a fraction of an inch to right or left before they burst.… I had a strange feeling, then, as I turned to go to the piano—I felt as if I belonged to the rain, or as if I were the rain itself. I had a sensation in my throat that was like sadness, but was also ecstatic—something like your desire to sing. I looked at the glossy black grand piano—and that too had a watery look, like a dark pool gleaming under a heavy overhang of foliage. And when I sat down on the cool piano-stool, and touched timidly my fingers to the keys, the keys too were cold, and it was as if I were dipping my hands into the clearest of rain-water.… Is it any wonder that the music sounded to me like the drops pattering and spattering in the garden? I was delighted to the point of obsession with this idea. I played a little sonata through three times, luxuriating in its arpeggios and runs, which I took pianissimo, and feeling as if I were helping the rain to rain.… Good heavens! If I had only known the Handel Water-Music Suite! The illusion would have been perfect.…”

“It’s so perfect for me,” I said, “that I am tempted to look at your hands to see if they are still wet.”

We smiled at each other, then, our eyes meeting with a shyness that was not altogether a shyness; and after a moment, by a common impulse, turned to look out at the red-blossomed tree, from which arose a soft irregular patter. We were silent for a long while. In fact, I think we sat there in complete silence till the nurse-companion came back again for the tea-things; and I remember noticing everything, every minutest detail, in the small brick-walled garden. A laburnum tree at the farther end with long pendulous blossoms, of so bright a yellow that it gave one the illusion of sunlight against the dark wall. And a row of lupins along a flagged path, with a bright eye of water in every one of the dark hand-shaped leaves.… These things are still vivid in my memory. But what we said to each other after that I cannot recall. I don’t think we said very much. We felt, I think, that we had already said all that was essential. I do remember Reine’s saying that “Wilson” had gone off somewhere to play cricket; and also she said something about a dismal female tea-party to which she had gone in Earl’s Court the day before. But that, I think, was all; and not long afterward I rose and came away.

IV.

I never saw her again. In the first place, I funked it—I was afraid that I couldn’t keep it up. The thing was so exquisite as it stood, so perfect—and besides, what could I do? It seemed to me that almost anything, after that, would be an anticlimax. If I were to go again, there might be someone else there—we should have to be stiff and distant with each other—or we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other at all. Wilson might be there, with his loud fake enthusiasms and his horrible Oxford manner and his sprawling tweed legs.…

At bottom, however, it was a kind of terror that kept me away. I was in love with her, and I had more than a hope that she was very nearly in love with me. But hadn’t we already had the finest of it? The thing, as it stood, was all bloom and fragrance; and mightn’t it be only too appallingly easy, by some unguarded shaking of the tree, to destroy the whole rare miracle?… Wouldn’t I—to use a less poetic image—let the cat out of the bag, if I were to go again? And then there was her bad heart, and the fact that we were both, alas, married. The complications and miseries, if we did allow the meeting to go further, might well be fatal to both of us.

Even so, I am not sure that I wouldn’t have gone, had not fate in the guise of the Foreign Office intervened. I was sent, only a few weeks later, to Rome, where my duties kept me for a year and a half. It was while I was there that “Scherzo” came out in book-form. Estlin sent me a copy—and I at once sat down and wrote a letter to Reine, a brief one, telling her again of the incomparable delight it gave me. It was a month or more before I heard from her—and then came a short note from Seville. It was rather cool, rather cryptic, distinctly guarded. She thanked me formally, she was glad I liked the dream so much, she felt, as I did, that the ending was perhaps a shade “tricky,” of a “surprise” sort which didn’t quite “go” with the tone of the rest. That was all. But there was also a postscript at the bottom of the page which seemed to me to be in a handwriting a little less controlled—as if she had hesitated about adding it, and had then, impulsively, dashed it in at the last minute. This was simply: “I always think of you as the man who loves rain.”… That was all.

It was only a few weeks after this, when, opening The Times in a small café in the Via Tritoni, I was shocked to see her name in the column of death announcements. “Suddenly, at Paris, on the 18th of March.”… Suddenly, at Paris, on the 18th of March!… I sat and stared stupidly at the announcement, leaving untouched on the little table before me my granita di cafe con pana .… Reine Wilson was dead—Reine was dead. That little girl who had stood in the dark room by the French windows, her sleeve brushing the stirless curtains, watching the rain—who had dipped her hands through the clearest rain-water to the white piano keys—and seen the little umbrellas of silver—was dead. I got up and walked out blindly into the bright street. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself presently in the Borghese Gardens. There was a little pond, in which a great number of ducks were sailing to and fro, gabbling and quacking, and children were throwing bread into the water. I sat down on a bench under a Judas-tree—it was in blossom, and the path under it was littered with purple. An Italian mother slapped the hand of her small boy who was crying, and said harshly, “Piangi! … Piangi!…” Cry! Cry!… And I too felt like weeping, but I shed no tears. Reine Wilson the novelist was still alive; but Reine Wilson the dark-haired little girl with whom I had fallen in love was dead, and it seemed to me that I too was dead.