Conrad Aiken: King Coffin

But why should it be painful? Why should he want both to think of it and not think of it?

You’ll have to excuse me, I can’t talk to you now, you see everything is upset, we’ve had an accident —

An accident! The word looked a mile long, he was walking slowly from end to end of it, sparrows were chirping on the window ledge above Plympton Street, he must have slept. It was a quarter to eight, and still lightly raining. There was no time to lose, for Jones would probably go to Mount Auburn early — it wasn’t the sort of thing one dawdled about. And to make the necessary inquiries, one would have to get there first.

The impulse was absurd, but he obeyed it, obeyed it with a kind of angry arrogance, he turned away from the Merle, deciding not to have any breakfast at all, and walked quite deliberately in the wrong direction, his back to Mount Auburn. At this point, when the pattern of one’s life was all speed and no detail, it was idle to ask oneself the reason for one’s decisions: one simply followed one’s feet. He followed his feet in the drizzle, the gray light, down Bow Street to Saint Paul’s Church, looked up at the Siennese tower — or was it Verona? — to observe through a light cloud of rain that the clock was on the stroke of eight, and that he would be in time for the Angelus. And as he entered, and stood at the back of the ornate and hushed interior, watching the priest and the mass-servers begin the service for three or four women and himself, and hearing the bell strike its first faint triad of notes far up in the steeple, he became aware that he had really been intending to do this for a long time. It was only the other day, in fact, that he had almost done so—

— Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae .

— Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto .

— Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum; benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, mater dei, ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen .

Blessed Mary, God’s mother, pray for us, now and in the hour of our death.

He tried to remember, while the priest and the mass-servers intoned the responses, and the soft bell again sounded its remote three overhead, just when this had been, and what had made him think of it. Et verbum caro factum est. Et habitavit in nobis … Ave Maria . The Latin phrases echoed with silver purity in the hollow church, as always the Catholic service seemed curiously hurried and casual, almost undignified, and yet from this very appearance of carelessness, even in the shambling movements of the surpliced priest and mass-servers, came all the more a sense of power and certainty: they themselves might cough or stumble, be graceless or inaudible, but the mystery sustained them. He watched them, frowning — half listened to the final sentences; suddenly the thing was unceremoniously finished; and it was then, as he turned again toward the door, that he remembered. It had been the very morning—

The thing shocked him, he walked quickly along the wet brick sidewalks of Mount Auburn Street.

It had been the very morning of his first discovery of Jones. And his purpose in the notion of going there, of course, had been simply to see if actually, in the church, he might not find his victim: some member of the congregation might turn out to be the supposititious Jones. He remembered it now quite clearly; he had thought of it while he was taking his shower, hearing the bells of the Angelus through the little window — the window from which he had then watched Mrs. Finden drying her hands and arms, putting on her rings. Yes. It seemed very remote, a long time ago, very remote, and oddly bright and innocent: it had been spring; and although it was still spring, somehow now it seemed as if he were looking back to it from another season, another year. The plan had then been formless, of course, and this had given it the charm and vagueness of all new things, new undertakings — the stranger had not yet been discovered or his strangeness identified — the whole problem still remained metaphysical — a mere formula — and it was now possible to recognize that at that stage there had been an unmistakable sense of freedom which had at once, with the actual selection of Jones, disappeared. But more curious still was the fact that today, of all days, he should again have the impulse to go there. This was very peculiar, it had about it the air as of a compulsory completion of some obscure sort, like a forced move in chess. The idea had occurred to him casually, no doubt, but could he be sure that it had occurred without some deep reason? Its queer appropriateness — the appropriateness of the whole thing, the scene, the service, the words themselves — suggested a kind of rootedness in the pattern which it would be painful to investigate.

But it hardly mattered.

With the fine rain cool against his face and hands, like an added sensitiveness, he walked quickly, his raincoat half unbuttoned, and at the corner of Boylston Street, by the Square, found that his car had already been brought out for him; the man was waiting in it with the door open, stepped out as soon as he saw him. For a moment after entering, he sat still, stared ahead through the delicately misted windshield, looking at nothing, thinking of nothing. He could drive straight to the cemetery. Or he could go first to the house in Reservoir Street, wait till Jones came out, and then precede him to Mount Auburn — which would of course be easy. But he felt indifferent; it was perhaps unnecessary to take so much trouble; there was little, after all, to be gained in seeing Jones emerge from the house to the undertaker’s car, or in knowing whether it would be Jones or the undertaker who would carry the coffin. What did it matter? The thing was nearly finished. It would be enough to get a glimpse of Jones at the cemetery, a final glimpse — and if he went at once there would be plenty of time for the asking of questions and the taking up of a good position.

He drove slowly up Brattle Street against the traffic, switched off the windshield wiper when he noticed that the rain had almost stopped, and for the first time, listening to the loud irregular patter on the car roof, the large drops from trees, began to feel tired. His eyes were heavy and wanted to close, the whole length of his body felt relaxed and remote, his hands lay lightly and reluctantly on the wheel. The thing was dreamlike — everything had a dreamlike sharpness, the heavy immediateness and separateness of objects seen in a fever: the pale hands on the ebony wheel looked more real than his own; and the stopped sound of the windshield wiper was so palpable as to seem audible. The wet houses and fences, the dark rain-soaked trunks of elms, the blackened stems of bushes, went past him with an extraordinarily dense and meaningful solidity, each shape making a sound of its own— whish-whish-whish-whish ; and from the total complex of noise made by the car itself each particular item was distinct: the faintly burred hum of the motor, the grazing clink of the key ring against the dash, the click-cluck of the clock, the delicate ticking of the watch on his wrist, the snicker of the wet tires on the slippery road. It was time made intensely audible, time made visible, time solidified in a concrete series of individual shapes — a slow-motion of time, almost in fact a “still.” As if, at a given moment, one could take a cross section of the universe, or slow down life itself to the point at which it was only once removed from death.… Was it that?

He had already decided to leave the car on the opposite side of the street from the entrance, he got out and walked deliberately across the car tracks toward the massive Egyptian gates of gray granite. In the office which adjoined the squat little chapel he leaned against the counter and said: