Conrad Aiken - King Coffin

He walked on the ceiling like a fly: it was easy to see him there: easy to meet him, at the bottom of those awful little streets: he came quite suddenly around the corner of Vassal Lane, for example, so suddenly that Ammen jumped, and laughed, for a moment forgetting that Jones did not know him by sight. To turn and saunter away, obliquely across the street, with averted face, and taking cover behind a coal truck, had been very simple. Vassal Lane. That had been an exception, too, in the routine, for Jones had gone there, to the house at the corner of Alpine Street, the first thing in the morning, directly after breakfast. Moreover, he had gone there as if with hesitation: to begin with he had passed it, merely pausing to look rather earnestly at the door; and he had then sauntered, rather slowly, all the way to Fresh Pond Avenue. There, standing across the street from the Pumping station, he had waited for fully five minutes, alternately staring at the pond and the row of half-fledged willows by the station. A dark day, with now and then a little spatter of rain. On the way back, he went into the house — a two-family house like his own — and stayed there about five minutes. It was the sudden meeting with him, at the corner of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street — (he hadn’t thought Jones would have had time to get so far) — that had first suggested the advisability of hiring a drive-yourself car. Sitting in the closed Buick, parked now at one place and now at another, but usually on the south side of Huron Avenue, it had been easy to see without being seen. For the observation of the area immediately round the house, it was in fact ideal: but of course no good for following. For that , it had been necessary either to board Jones’s streetcar at Appleton Street, having seen him get on, or to lie in wait for him at the top of the ramp in Harvard Square.… Thanks to the little man’s regularity, both had been quite simple.

The neighborhood was detestable — it ought to be burned down. With all its inhabitants. A typical suburban swarm of wooden two-family houses, all exactly alike, brown shingles, dirty white-railed porches and balconies, one or two with projecting flagpoles. Here and there an attempt had been made at a clipped privet hedge: but for the most part the little front yards were bare, except for a forsythia bush or two. At exact intervals, for miles, the cement walk branched in toward a porch, from which opened two doors, one for the lower part of the house, one for the upper. On the right of each house another narrower cement path led to the cellar doors, at the rear. It was along this — on Monday evening — that he had seen Jones, with bare pink hands, bareheaded and wearing an old black sweater, trying to roll a heavy ash can on its rim. It was too much for him — it kept sitting down, wrenching itself away from his fingers. But after a deep breath or two, the hands still resting on the rims, the head bowed, he managed to heave it up again and to roll it a little farther toward the street, — toward the grimy border of ringed earth at the curbstone where week after week it waited for the ash man. The entire street was marked in this fashion. In front of each shabby little house was the deep pair of rings, grooved in the earth, where ash can and garbage can rested. And the inevitable residue of onionskin and eggshell and orange peel.… Sickening.

The clock in the professor’s room sounded, through the thin walls, its tyang —half past two.

He thought of the map, with its concentric circles, — Reservoir Street, one and three-quarter miles from City Hall, at its south end, where it joined Highland Street; but where Jones lived, a little farther. By Yellow Taxi, a fifty-cent fare from the Square.

K. N. Jones. 85 Reservoir Street.…

It had turned out to be Karl — not Kenneth, as he had guessed.

But who was the woman who was seen now and then passing the windows, with a white cloth bound over her hair? It had been impossible to make out whether she was old or young, or what she looked like. Once she had come down the outside stairs at the back, to the cement path, but before he could get a good look at her she had rapped her dustpan twice, sharply, on the edge of the ash can, and gone in again. It might be either his wife or his mother. It might be his sister. It was even possible that there were two women, not one; for occasionally she had seemed taller than he expected. But of this it was difficult to judge. Whoever it was, or whoever they were, thus far they had never come out of the house while he was watching. Probably his wife.

The curious thing was the repugnance which the actual scene had aroused in him from the beginning — from the very beginning. There was something really loathsome in it. The paltry houses, the ill-paved street, the ash cans, the litter, the air of furtiveness and meanness and defeat which overhung the whole neighborhood — there had been something in this which seemed a little outside his calculations. Of course, the unexpected was to be expected. Jones, Karl Jones, was not the sort of fellow who would be found living in a huge and grand apartment house — far from it.

The cheap fur collar had not meant that.

Nor the tweed hat.

But to find just this kind of meanness and sordidness, the sight of Jones wheeling an ash can with bare hands, then dusting, with dusty hands, the ash from the knees of worn trousers—

And all with such an air of good cheer and confidence. The cock-sparrowlike sideways tilt of the head, the ridiculous little strut of accomplishment with which he returned along the cement path! This was something to tighten the muscles in one’s arms, to contract the fingers, to narrow the eyes. But just the same—

No, the objection was not real, could not be real, all this was a natural part of the strangeness , it was inevitable; and in its way, also, it was a fine enough sharpening of the whole point that in its discovery it should bring with it a pullulating ant heap of new and all-too-human experience: to have blundered thus into such an unforeseeable quagmire of the deformed and spiritually unvirtuous — horrible though it might be — was of the very essence of the chosen adventure. To think, for instance, only of the names of those streets, as contrasted with their actual nature — Vassal Lane, Alpine Street, Fayerweather, Fresh Pond Avenue — Alpine, of all things, in a district as flat as a dried river bed, and as noisome! And all the shabby purlieus, moreover, of filled-in clay pits and mudholes, acres of festering tomato tins and sardine tins, rusted fragments of cars, old bedsprings, blown paper, greasy rags. When the wind came from the northwest, one smelt a sour and acrid smell of slow burning, the animal odor of smoldering human refuse, worse than the ghats of India: it drifted day-long from the reclaimed quarries by Fresh Pond, covering the entire forlorn suburb of wretched houses in its bitter miasma. To think, in the morning, of opening one’s windows to that! In the evening, if one walked forth toward the pond, in search of the picturesque, perhaps a sunset over Belmont to lift one’s eyes to, one saw also the shadowy and sinister figures which poked, like hobgoblins, at a score of sickly little flames in that waste land, prodding with sticks to see if here or there some object might be salvaged from the heaps of refuse. Only the trees, in that district, had any dignity, the willow-trees;—and especially the one, an old one, with a trunk as massive as an oak, which stood at the junction of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street. And this had been useful. Its great girth gave excellent cover.

Of course Jones was poor — no one would live in a neighborhood like that if he could help it. If the Acme Advertising Agency did any business at all, it must be infinitesimal. No further proof of this was needed than that he had himself, twice, spent part of a morning in the bare hall outside the office — not a soul had come or gone in the whole time. And of course Mister T. Farrow must be a thing of the past — if he existed, he had at any rate never been seen. Perhaps Jones had just bought the name and good will. Anyway, apparently, Jones just sat there — three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon — without doing a thing. Once or twice, the telephone had rung, but it had been impossible to overhear what Jones was saying — it might even have been his wife.