Conrad Aiken: King Coffin

On the floor above, a shaft of soft light across the stair rail told him that Gerta’s door was also open, she was standing between the two candles by the fireplace, her elbows on the mantel behind her, wearing her blue painter’s smock, she had let down her hair, which had fallen in dark ringlets on her shoulders. Her sleeves were rolled up, her arms were bare. The effect was calculated and she looked at him gravely. Keeping his hat on, he said:

— Don’t you ever get tired of your esthetic candles?

— I think they’re very restful. I notice you use them yourself.

— I have them, it’s a concession, but I don’t use them. I suppose you had a reason for lighting one of them?

— Simply to light up your lovely death mask.

— That’s very apropos.

— What?

— Nothing.

— I’ll put them out if you like.

— Don’t bother.

He went to the window and looked out at the Charles River Basin, the rows of lights along the Esplanade reminded him once again of the Steinlen lithograph, Ballade d’Hiver , it was as if winter had returned, the snow was falling.

— Why have you been avoiding me, Jasper.

— Have I been avoiding you?

— Of course. But I don’t think we need to be quite so dramatic with each other.

— I wasn’t aware of any drama?

— Then what about your postcard. Postcards. Dislocation number one and number two.

He turned around, looked down at her somber face, white and calm between its dark parentheses of hair, and smiled. He had her in the palm of his hand.

— I’m afraid I move too quickly for you, don’t I?

— Why can’t you be simpler? The whole thing is quite simple.

— I didn’t say it wasn’t. You merely mistake my insistence on clearness for drama. That’s why I say I move too quickly for you: you don’t follow me: neither you nor Sandbach. You and Sandbach.

She was in the act of seating herself, crossing her knees, she looked upward at him with baffled affection, deliberate affection, and he returned the gaze downward with a conscious narrowing of his eyes, but amiably. She stroked her silk-stockinged knee with a fingertip, ruffling the smock’s edge to do so.

— Me and Sandbach: you put us together invidiously, don’t you.

He took off his hat and bowed.

— Again too quick, but not drama. Perhaps in due course I’ll tell you all about it. My postcards were a mere statement. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to give you a signal.

— I don’t say you owed me anything, but we’ve been good friends, we might even have been better—

— You mean we might have been lovers.

— Well, yes, why not?

— Because I don’t want it and never did. There’s nothing invidious in it.

— There’s something really wrong with you, Jasper — what is it?

— Only this: I won’t be contaminated any longer, by you or any one else. That’s something the exceptional man must learn sooner or later, and I’ve learned it. Nietzsche speaks of it in Beyond Good and Evil . The exceptional man is subject to one great temptation — a sort of desperateness — a sudden weak-kneed longing for the society of the commonplace and orderly, the good little parasites. He thinks he gets a kind of healing from it. It’s a flight from himself, from his loneliness. The same with sex. Nietzsche speaks of the fear of the eternal misunderstanding, and of the good genius that prevents people of opposite sexes from hasty and degrading attachments.

— Good Lord. So it’s that , is it. You’re afraid I’ll contaminate you, so you prefer to have me contaminate Sandbach, or to be contaminated by him. You prefer to get your contamination at one remove, and to experiment with us as if we were guinea pigs!

— Why not?

— My dear, do sit down, you make me uneasy when you pace about like that.

That was characteristic of Gerta, her levelness, her calm, it was what he most liked in her, and he sat down, stretching his long legs before him. In the silence, he could hear the dishes being washed in the Women’s Club next door. Sandbach had lectured there, it was there that Gerta had met him, it was after that lecture, two years ago, that she had first told him of Sandbach’s curious oriental detachment and humor.

— You’re pretty insufferable, you know. Not many women would stand it!

— I don’t ask them to.

— Neither do I make any claims. I simply wanted to help you: that’s why I wanted to see you today, and to explain—

— Oh, don’t bother! I know all about it—

— that it needn’t make any difference. It will simply be quite separate. But I wish you could talk about it, aren’t you being a little too tense, this dislocation business and all that. It seems to me you’re getting too deeply into yourself, it might be dangerous.

— Oh, of course I need a job to take my mind off it! Christ.

— You are changing. Something is happening to you.

— My assumption of power? It’s only the beginning.

— It’s very attractive, but isn’t it a little unbalanced?

— Not at all, and you know it. You agree with me. The strong individual makes his own laws, you make yours and I make mine, at this point we agree that you shall go to Sandbach so as to leave us free from this sex thing and free to co-operate in something new . Dislocation number three. These two dirty years have got to be wiped out. I gave Sandbach his congée at the meeting, dismissed them brutally. I now propose to exist outside society. And I’m beginning to have a very beautiful plan. But I don’t know whether I can trust you. Will you really be able to remain separate in this regard from S?

She put her fingertips together and thought, turning her head sideways, he admired the soft candlelight on her smooth arms, her artist’s hands, he liked the gentle and unhurried grace with which she just perceptibly swung her knee. The door creaked slightly open in a draft, he rose to shut it, shutting out the renewed sound of the radio from downstairs, and returned then to a suddenly sharpened sense of the fact that something really extraordinary was impending. The shape of it hung beautiful and ominous. A new relationship, a new dimension, the dreadful taste of eternity in a new horror, the sense of sharing , himself and this woman, in a deeper and darker world of which a pure terribleness would be the principle. He was seducing her — his genius was in the very act of seducing her — her entire attitude, at this moment, was precisely that of a woman to whom an adultery has been proposed. She was fascinated, she was frightened, her balance half lost she was half consciously debating with herself whether to lose the rest, she knew that if she looked at him she would be destroyed. What fascinated her was the dimly guessed thing , the new and astonishing pattern into which she would be drawn with him. Perhaps even now she was a little impure — perhaps she thought that their co-operation in the “thing” would lead inevitably, or possibly, to an “affair”—or perhaps it was this very violence to her instincts that enticed her forward. Could she share all the way, all the way to its logical culmination, his hatred and contempt for mankind? And could she, at the same time, deliver herself voluntarily to its evil, in the shape of little Sandbach, and at his own bidding, for the sake of the completeness? And could she see how important it was that they were alone , together, that they must be alone in the world, as now they were alone in this room? Or at any rate that she should revolve around his aloneness?

— It’s very queer, isn’t it.

She spoke very quietly, with the characteristic combination of frown and smile. Then, the smile fading, the frown continuing, she added: