Conrad Aiken - King Coffin

He noticed again, what he had noticed before, but only casually, the ash can which stood by the curb just behind the doctor’s car. Of course, it was Tuesday, Jones would have put it out the night before, had not yet got round to taking it in again. It had been emptied this morning, was waiting, but Jones had been too busy or too anxious to remember it. And if Jones was too busy to attend to it, if they all, up there, were so occupied with whatever it was they were doing—

The idea was perfectly sound, he glanced rapidly north and south along the street to make quite sure that it was still deserted, then more carefully examined the houses behind him and those that adjoined number 85. There were lights in all of them, but in all of them, also, the shades had been drawn, there was no sign of any activity anywhere, no one was watching, or very likely to see him. There would be a certain amount of risk in it, certainly, but not much, — not more, at any rate, than could be easily bluffed out of. Accordingly, he pulled his hat down over his eyes, said softly to himself the words “briefly done,” and walked with careful but quick nonchalance along the cement path which led beside a privet hedge to the back of the house. It was necessary to act as if the action were customary: he must look as if he belonged there, had every right there, and he turned boldly at the corner to survey what he had found. The revolving clothesline lifted bare arms in the half-light from the street beyond, like some queer sort of desert tree, spiny and sterile; and before this, leading down to an open door, were the red brick steps which gave entrance to Jones’s cellar. There was no light below; and thinking to himself that he must show no sign of hesitation, and complementarily also no sign of undue haste, he ran lightly down the steps, feeling the slight grit of ashes beneath his feet, and stooped through the low doorway. Striking a match, he found a switch at the foot of a wooden stairway, turned on the light, saw that the cellar was divided into two sections by a wooden partition — one for each of the tenants — and that while one of these was padlocked the door to the Jones cellar was ajar, and the cellar itself in darkness. To find the swinging electric light bulb, with a help of another match, was quite simple: he turned it on, and discovered that he was standing immediately in front of a furnace. Above, the half-dozen asbestos-jacketed furnace pipes seemed, like an octopus, to be exploring the grimy and cobwebbed rafters of the ceiling: so low that he had to stoop to avoid hitting his head. The furnace itself, of course, was not lighted: the door was open, the interior was dark and cold, and at the edge of the ash door was a neat little pile of clinkers. One cigarette stub lay among them.

He stood still, listened; footsteps were crossing the floor overhead, in the apartment of the other tenants; they crossed the floor and returned again, slowly and without urgency, it was nothing to be alarmed about; some one traversing the room for a paper, or a box of matches. When the steps had ceased, there was no other sound — the silence was profound; and it occurred to him that not impossibly something — from the Jones apartment — might be audible through the pipes. But no. He listened and heard nothing, the upper rooms were of course too far away. What they were doing there remained a secret.

Revolving slowly on his heel where he stood, he looked to all corners of the little cellar, saw the divided coal bins at the front, the shovel leaning against the coal-blackened wall, the wooden soapbox half full of kindling with a short-handled ax laid across the corner, a newspaper on the cement floor, a wooden snow shovel, a pair of worn-out galoshes. Under the little cellar window at the side there was a hole in the cement floor, where the surface had for some reason cracked and crumbled, it had been scratched away and showed the earth beneath it: it occurred quickly to him that if anyone should come — if Jones himself should come — he could say that he was there on behalf of the landlord to examine the floor with a view to repairs. But all this was nothing. It was gratifying enough to step thus closer than ever to the small and secret life of Jones, to know his furnace and his shovels; but for any immediate or practical purpose it came to nothing. The newspaper, when he went nearer, turned out to be a week-old American : the headline simply said CARNEY ORDERS ERA “CHISELER PROBE.” The question was—

Considering it, and noticing also that his heart had begun beating rather rapidly, with the odd effect of giving him a sensation of suffocation in the left side of his throat, he walked slowly back to the door and regarded the wooden stairs which led up — presumably — to the Jones kitchen. The question was, if he should wait here, secret himself here, where all sounds would be muffled, or even completely inaudible , and whence escape would be so easy and so quick—

Why not?…

It would be the simplest thing in the world. No one would hear a thing.…

But how likely was Jones to come down? or to come down soon?

A curious pain was beating in each of his forearms, throbbing down into his hands, which felt swollen; the sudden intensity of his vision seemed in effect to glaze or dull his eyes; and it was only after a moment or two that he noticed the brown wicker wastebasket half way up the stairs. He reached over the railing for it, lifted it down, stooped and spread out the fragments of paper on the floor. Torn envelopes, one of them with the business address of the Acme Advertising Agency in the upper left-hand corner, the receipted bill of a news agent, the crumpled page for the month of April torn from a calendar, a nest of dead matches, a tiny hairpin, a pasteboard milk-bottle top slightly bent, a fluff of hair combings, a few torn fragments of paper which looked like shopping lists. Vegetables, groceries, cheesecloth — the items written in a small backward-leaning hand — but suddenly, from another list, written more boldly and coarsely, he noticed a single item— 1 baby’s folding tub —and rose with it to go nearer the light. There could no longer be any doubt of it. “ 3 papers small safety pins. 3 papers large safety pins. 2 large agate pails with covers. 1 large agate basin. 1 bath thermometer . ¼ pound boric crystals. 4 oz. olive oil. 1 can baby powder. 1 kitchen scales with weights — avoid springs. 1 bathing apron .”

So it was that!..

At this instant, the little Jones was being born upstairs, — with Jones in attendance, and the doctor, and the nurse. The child’s cot, the hamper, the slop-bowl, the hospital chair — the whole thing was only too disgustingly obvious. The nurse, of course, lived in that house at the corner of Alpine Street, had loaned these objects, had been summoned, Jones had gone to the Orpheum not expecting any such immediate development, it was all happening prematurely. The drama of moving shadows on the ceiling in the upstairs bedroom was simply the drama of childbirth, a drama in which these items were the humble properties. He crumpled the paper in his hand, flung it down bitterly amongst the litter besides the overturned basket, ran quickly up the brick stairs to the back yard. That Jones should come down now was clearly inconceivable: the scope of action had abruptly narrowed — perhaps psychologically as much as physically? — and therefore something else must be done, something else must be thought of, the time-problem otherwise dealt with. But what, and how?

He stood for a moment beside the uplifted arms of the clothesline, stared at it, then walked slowly along the path towards Reservoir Street. There was an odd smell — faint, but unmistakable: it was ether, a slight sweet thread of ether on the night air, he paused to make sure, and at the same time heard a cry. It was not a child’s cry — it was a woman’s, a soft downward quaver, something between a sob and a moan, distant and muffled. It was not repeated, he stood listening for two minutes or perhaps three with angrily averted face, his hands clenched in his pockets, again feeling the curious pain in the side of his throat. His position, too, was tense and unnatural. He became slowly aware of the strain in his half-flexed right knee, the pressure of his elbows against his sides. Did he want to hear that sound again, or didn’t he?