Conrad Aiken - King Coffin

— Mr. Jones?

— Yes?

— My partner thinks that perhaps the best procedure would be for me to have a talk with you in person. Now as it happens, I’m usually not very free during the day, and I wondered whether it would be possible for me to come and see you this evening somewhere. Would it be convenient for me to call on you at your home, for instance? Or have you a telephone there?

— Why, yes, I guess so—

— I mean, do you live in Boston?

— No, I live in Cambridge. 85 Reservoir Street.

— Reservoir Street. Let’s see, just where is that?

— If you take a Huron Avenue car, it’s only a couple of minutes from the car. I’ll be there all evening, and I’ll be very glad to have a talk with you. I’m sure you’ll find we can give you satisfactory service, and our prices are very reasonable.

— I might come in about nine. Or if not, I’ll perhaps give you a ring in a day or two.

— The Cambridge number is in the book, if you should want to call me there — K. N. Jones.

— I see. K. N. Jones.

— And as I say, I hope we can be of service to you. We’re not a large firm, but I think we know our business as well as most!

Allowing the little boast to hang unanswered and plaintive on the wire for a few seconds, as if for the full savor of its eagerness, and for the completion of the picture, Ammen merely said “Very well,” and hung up the receiver without waiting for any further reply.

In the ensuing silence, it was curiously as if some one had left the room. He replaced the telephone on the table, then began once more to examine Gerta’s odd picture — but as he gazed at that surface of honeycombed silver it was not a lunar volcano, nor Gerta, he was looking at, or looking into, so prolongedly and earnestly, but the identity of K. N. Jones: the little man with the clipped mustache, the tweed hat, the fur-collared coat; the little man with the suave and deliberately ingratiating voice. It was as if he were sitting there, the one who wanted to be killed, in the depths of a mirror, his hands relaxed on the edge of the desk, towards which his curious inward-looking eyes were directed downward. The expression, and the attitude, were those of despair.

What was it, exactly, that had created this impression — which, though faint, was so definite?

And was the situation in any way altered by this?

But why should it be?

Opening Gerta’s little writing bureau, he sat down and looked through the recent letters in the pigeonhole at the right. One from her mother in New York, with details of an attack of sciatica and iodine treatment; a card signed Petra from Washington, with a photograph of the Adams Memorial by Saint Gaudens; his own postcard of two days ago inscribed “Dislocation Number One.” But nothing from Sandbach. Perhaps in the wastebasket? No. And after all, there was no reason why he should have written — yet. Quite likely they had arranged a meeting for today by telephone: to discuss the latest phase of the Ammen situation. And when they did, Sandbach would get a surprise: he would find himself perched on the top of a towering scaffold which had, as it were, grown up under him during the night. A nightmare.

85 Reservoir Street. 85 Reservoir Street!

The day opened swiftly to left and right, like an immense stage from which the scenery was being slid into the wings, the prospect widened, and far off he saw the godlike arm and hand thrust violently downward from the hurrying clouds, the index finger pointing silently at a single house, then gone like a whirlwind. The arm and hand were his own, the house would soon be his, all that was in it would soon be known. A map of Cambridge bought at Amee’s, a taxi from Harvard Square, and before nightfall a new and terrible circle would have been drawn. At the center of it, Jones was beginning to be immortal, beginning to be still.

The insomnia was not real, was not actual, since there was no real desire to sleep; it was merely the removal, in one dark strip after another, of insulation; the progressive laying bare of the bright nerves of perception; the painless flaying of the dark integument of consciousness. With the turning over, with the listening, now to the murmur of nocturnal water in the pipes, again to the faint tyang of the grandfather clock in the professor’s apartment next door, or again to the intermittent snicker of the little motor in the electric refrigerator; with the lifting of his hand from beneath his head on the pillow, or the sliding of his fingers along the edge of the half-cool sheet; with each separate action of the restlessness which divided, into marked and conscious sections, the time-chasm which would ordinarily have been void and unconscious, it was as if he stepped closer to his own true being and purpose. On the hours, which came softly on soft air from the dark campanile of Saint Paul’s, — the twelve, the one, the two — came also an incandescent indifference to sleep. To these and other sounds he could be as inaccessible as he wished, as little touched as by the diagonal of cold lamp light, from Massachusetts Avenue, which made a pale remoteness of the ceiling and threw into humble relief the little Buddha on its shelf. These immediate things, his room, his window, his bed, the soft sucking sound made by the curtains in the study against the wire screens, the creaking of a ventilator on the roof of the A. D. Club across the street, were in fact as remote as they could be: they stood at an infinite distance; to cross time and space to them would be like crossing the Milky Way. Their remoteness, of course, lay in their comparative unreality. They belonged now to another and dimmer time-space, they seemed so distant and so silent, measured by the nearness and loudness of his own heart, as to be without meaning and without motion.

And not heart so much as vision.

The vision was this little man, who now so obsessed him: this little man, his house, his clothes, his name, his daily orbit. He was here, in this room: walked like a fly across the ceiling, as if the ceiling were the large white map — (now pinned to the wall over the table in the next room) — of Cambridge: on that map, with its concentric circles which marked the distance, in quarter miles, from the City Hall, a whole week of the life of Jones was now over and over again enacted. He opened his door in Reservoir Street, stooped to pick up The Herald , went in again. He opened the door later, and came out. From the little copper letter box — first unlocking it with a key — he extracted letters, glanced over them, selected some, replaced others. He walked to Huron Avenue, crossed it, and proceeded west to a block of one-story dingy shops between Fayerweather Street and Gurney Street; entered a grocer’s and left an order; then came out to wait for a streetcar. At half past five in the afternoon, he reappeared, carrying an evening paper; looked again in the letter box; unlocked the green door. The upper part of the door was of glass, and from across the street he could be seen going up a flight of stairs which turned to the left.…

His life went by the clock. He came out, to go in again; he went in, to come out again. The streets in which he walked were always the same. Perhaps that was why he so seldom lifted his odd, amused eyes or bothered to look left or right. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — on Friday he had left early, at a few minutes after eight, and come back at four. And at the other end of his life, the School Street end, his goings and comings were just as precise, just as methodical. Always the same route, the same apparently meaningless circuit round Pemberton Square, the pause for the reflective cup of coffee, then the accelerated descent of Beacon Street to the office. And at half past twelve, three-quarters of an hour for lunch, sometimes at a sandwich shop in Province Court, sometimes at the Waldorf in Bromfield Street.