Conrad Aiken: Blue Voyage

“Ah, there you are!.. I was just wondering, because I saw that slimy Jew go up the stairs … Jews! deliver me. I don’t like them. What you want to play with him for?”

“Ah, he’s harmless. As a matter of fact, he’s an extremely interesting fellow.”

“Maybe, maybe … Come down to my room. I’ll show you something. Something that’ll make your hair stand on end. Yes, siree! It’ll make your hair stand on end.” Smith revolved his cigar softly between thumb and finger, his brown eyes solemn and comic under the arched gray eyebrows.

“Lead on, father!”

“Don’t call me father. Brr . Makes me shiver. I feel my coffin … Look! There she goes now!”

He nudged Demarest violently. Mrs. Faubion came running up the companionway from the steerage deck — sea-blown, wild-haired, impetuous, — and flashed saucily round the corner and out of sight. Daisy Dacey, grinning fatuously, and picking her pink muslin skirt up a little too high (consciously) came after her. She too disappeared.

“Come along,” said Smith. He walked rapidly after the two girls, turned the corner, entered the main door aft, and descended the red plush stairs, Demarest following him a little embarrassed. No sign of them in the dining room. The rows of white tables were set for dinner. Stewards went to and fro with napkins, turned the revolving chairs into position, put down forks or linen-covered dishes of bread. Smith passed into the corridor beyond the kitchen, the same corridor off which Demarest lived; but went to the alley beyond. Down this he turned and proceeded to the end, his room being at the left. The door opposite his, which had been ajar, was shut sharply just before they reached it. Smith, beaming, tapped it with white knuckles. “Coo hoo!” he cried.

“Who is it?” The voice was Pauline Faubion’s, stridently challenging.

“The dressmaker. Any orders for lunch?”

“No. Go away! Don’t be silly!” A trilled giggle from Daisy Dacey.

“Oh, very well, very well.” He winked at Demarest, opening his own door. “Look!” he said, dramatically waving his cigar at the back of the door, which he had shut. Half a dozen dresses hung on it, suspended on hangers — black, scarlet, white, green, and two flowered muslins.

“What’s the idea?” said Demarest.

“Dresses.” Smith goggled mournfully.

“So I see! I know a dress when I see it … I didn’t know you were traveling in dresses, as the saying is!”

“I don’t as a rule. But I’m always willing to oblige.” He smiled mysteriously, cunningly.

“Well, what’s the idea?”

“Ha! I wish I knew … She knocked at the door this morning when I was shaving. She had on one of those pink things that you can’t quite see through. Good morning darling, says I! — Good morning grandpa, says she! — What can I do for you darling, says I? — Have you got room for some dresses, says she? — Sure, says I! — Well, here they are, says she! — And she give me an armful of them, and helped me to hang them up. Not hooks enough in their cabins, and they were afraid the dresses would get wrinkled staying in the trunk … What do you think of it?”

“Think of it!”

“Mm … Funny idea.” The old man gleamed cherubically. “You’ve got to hand it to father. I guess I made a good impression. What do you think?”

“Looks like it. Or maybe they think they can trust you!”

“Ha!.. Maybe — maybe!.. Nice dresses anyway.” He ran his fingers down a fold of scarlet satin. “Look at the beads on this … Cost a lot of money, that dress, I’ll bet … A party dress — cut kind of low. Soft, eh? Feel it. And there are the little straps that go over the shoulders.” He took the frock down on its hanger, and turned it slowly, appreciatively about. “Velvet, too. Must feel nice to have velvet next to the skin.”

“I wonder if she’s been on the stage,” said Demarest. “They almost look like stage frocks.”

“Don’t think so. She got married to this chap when he was stationed in Dover during the war. After the war she went out West with him …” He hung the scarlet satin up again, then lifted a fold of flowered blue muslin against his face.

“Mm!” he bumbled. “Smells nice … Heliotrope … Smell it!”

Demarest, agitated and embarrassed, pleasantly shocked by the old man’s candor, lifted the blue muslin.

“Heliotrope … Yes!.. I congratulate you.” He solemnly shook Smith’s hand. Smith smiled, but with something mournful and questioning in his puzzled brown eyes.

“Seriously,” he said, pausing to fling his chewed cigar through the open port, “what do you make of them?”

“Make of them? How do you mean?”

Meditative but twinkling, they looked deep into each other’s eyes. Why was it that Demarest felt an obscure impulse to discourage the old man?… Jealousy?… Pauline was, of course, attractive to him: and he resented the fact that her frocks hung here in the old man’s cabin. But this was superficial. Wasn’t it, more profoundly, that he enormously liked old Smith, and wanted to keep him out of trouble? Wasn’t it also that he resented, savagely resented, this evidence of the unwaning magic of sex? He pitied him. The old ox being led to the slaughter. Did he also, pitying poor old Smith, pity himself — foreseeing, with dreadful certainty, himself grown old to no greater wisdom?…

“I mean,” said Smith, rocking gently backward with the ship, “do you think they’re straight?”

“Straight!..” Demarest gave a short laugh. “God knows … My guess would be that they are. Faubion is, I should think anyway — I’m not so sure about Dacey … I saw her flirting with the Chief Steward last night.”

“Oh! You think Faubion’s straight?… I wonder!..” He ruminated sadly. He sat down on the edge of his bunk, drawing himself up like a jackknife so as not to bump his tweed hat, still ruminating. He tucked his plump hairless hands under his knees. “What makes you think so? Sit down. We’ve got a few minutes before dinner … Nice sound the sea makes through a porthole — wish they wouldn’t clamp it shut at night.”

“I wish I had a porthole at all … I don’t know, she strikes me as straight — that’s all. Straight but fidgety.”

“Straight but fidgety! No siree, Bob. I’m an old fool, and never knew a woman, if that girl isn’t—!” He lifted a twinkle, sidelong, toward Demarest. Demarest sat down on the red plush divan. A sour smell came up from it; and the clicking of the water bottle in its wooden socket, and then the loosely delayed return click, hollow and slack, made him slightly giddy. He lifted his nose toward the pure stream of air from the port. Porpoises. Flying fish. Icebergs. Cobalt and snow … A slice of porpoise, Mr. Smith? Thank you no, Mr. Demarest … Wing of Faubion, Mr. Smith? A little off the breast, please, Mr. Demarest … Faubion gazed at him, morose and somber, reserved but yielding, implacable but affectionate. Poising the bread knife, with waved edge damascene, he prepared to make Faubion an Amazon. One-breasted. Tell me when it hurts, Faubion. Does it hurt?… A-a-ah-mmm — you’re hurting— now!.. Still hurting?… Phhh —not so — much.… She turned her head far to one side, closing her eyes … This was the moment — this was always the moment; that delicious moment of utter anguished surrender: the flushed face turned extravagantly aside, eyelids shut, mouth relaxed with pleasure but curved with apprehension and rigid with pain … The dew on the forehead … Singular, that we should so desire this of all possible moments, a moment the essentially fleetingest of moments, that one must dedicate one’s life to its pursuit. A half dozen such moments in a lifetime — moments which yield the full goblet, the nymph-cry in the blood, the whizzing off into space of the body … Helen Shafter, lying face downward on the beach, crying, while it began slowly to rain … Eunice, suddenly letting her arm fall over the frayed edge of the couch, nerveless and abandoned, while with her other hand she covered her eyes, murmuring … Mary, on the hill near Banstead, looking at him through her fingers, frightened, while a little way off they heard the mowing machine clattering and slaughtering among tall grass and poppies … What is man that thou art mindful of him? Melancholy. Men, in a smoking room, recounting their conquests to one another. Was it, as always assumed, a mere boastfulness, a mere rooster crow from the dunghill? No … It was the passionate desire to recreate, to live over again those inestimable instants of life, so tragically few, so irrecoverably lost. “ That reminds me of one time when I was staying —” Yes, you can see the wretched man trying to summon them back, those few paltry episodes, and make of them, for his solace, a tiny immortal bouquet.