Conrad Aiken - Blue Voyage

“You fell,” said Smith.

“We fell.”

“I wish things like that would happen to me. Yes, siree. But they don’t. And never did.”

“It’s luck simply. A friend of mine in a train, once—”

They again faced the three tall women, drawing modestly aside to let them pass. They had the light at their backs, and their faces were in darkness. The outermost girl was wearing a knitted jersey — remarkably like — he turned to look, his heart beating in his throat. — But the gloom had swallowed them up. Impossible! Impossible! Impossible!

“—was practically proposed to by a young woman who sat beside him … Total stranger … She gave him, as the saying is, the glad knee. He was getting off at Philadelphia — she was going to — I forget where — Atlanta. She implored him to come along with her — absolutely implored him. Offered to pay his fare and all his expenses for a week’s trip …”

He felt out of breath — excitement. Dyspnea. His voice had shaken absurdly (and a little high) on the second “absolutely.” He cleared his throat. He must time the approach, so as to meet them under a light.

“Good God,” said Smith. “And did he?”

“No. He was on his way to visit his fiancée … Poor devil!”

“Oh, don’t spoil the story! My God … He just let her go like that? What sort of woman was she?”

“Beautiful, he said — about twenty-six. A buyer for one of the big stores — Gimbels or Wanamaker’s.”

Smith groaned. He took half a dozen quick puffs at his short cigar, holding it between thumb and finger, then flung it over the railing. The red spark described a swift parabola in the dark, and Demarest imagined — in the midst of all that thresh and welter — its infinitesimal hiss. Suppose they shouldn’t come round again?…

“To think,” said Smith, “of losing a chance like that!.. Oh, boy !”

“She gave him her name and address — and he lost it.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Yes — and all he remembered about her name was that it was Mabel Tupper something …”

“He ought to be shot at sunrise,” said Smith. “Yes, sir, he ought to be shot down like a dog. And she made love to him, did she?”

Smith turned an eager round eye under the tweed rim. An eye like a well.

“ Did she! He said he was embarrassed to death — and afraid somebody he knew might see him. She simply wrapped herself round him — stem to stern. He put his overcoat across his lap so that the confusion of legs wouldn’t be too obvious.”

There they came, around the corner. He paused, feeling his pockets.

“Damn,” he said. “I forgot my pipe … No matter.” He continued feeling his pockets.

The jersey — yes. Tall, too. Being on the outside, her face was in shadow. No. Too slender, too girlish. Something queer!

“Don’t tell me any more stories like that,” said Smith. “Makes me too sad.”

She came swiftly, gracefully — touched a palm on the rail, turning her face down toward the black water. Light fell on her lifting face — it was she. She looked, for some reason, slighter and younger — his recollection of her had not been exact … She had not seen him yet — they came nearer. Her mother — the one in the middle. She looked at him, but unrecognizing — no — yes … Suddenly her eyes took fire and she smiled, stopping. He moved toward her, slowly, putting out his hand, his awkward hand. The two other women, turning their heads, walked on. Smith drifted gloomily toward the companionway.

“How simply extraordinary!” said Demarest. He was aware that the speech was resonant with too much feeling, too many references.

“Isn’t it?… I’ve been in America again!” The exquisite light voice was breaking through him: oddly childish, subtly simple.

They drifted slowly, and leaned against the railing, under a light; as they had leaned the year before; as it seemed natural for them to lean.

“In New York?” said Demarest.

“Yes … And Philadelphia!”

“For long?”

“Three months … I’m glad to go back.”

She had been in New York and Philadelphia — without letting him know! Good God. At any time during the last three months he might have — She hadn’t let him know.

“I’m going to be married!” she then gaily added. She laughed delightedly, girlishly, leaning backward on the rail with lifted elbows — the striped and diamonded jersey of richly mingled Hindu colors.

“ Really !” he cried. “How delightful!.. May I ask—”

“And have you made up your mind,” she interrupted, “where to live?”

“It’s been made up for me, for the moment … I’m having — possibly — a show in London. So I shall stay a year or two — perhaps settle.” He frowned, confused. Things were confused, distressing, ecstatic.

“Oh!.. My mother always says it’s a mistake for Americans to expatriate themselves.”

“Yes … I remember she said so to me, last year … I’m not so sure!.. It’s an awful problem! Simply awful. If, when one’s young enough, one develops a taste for Europe — I’m afraid it’s incurable.”

“I think I’d stay in New York if I were you — you have there such a priceless sense of freedom—”

She turned, somber, and looked down at the black and white of water. She had used that phrase in a letter.

“I hate it,” Demarest said with surprising bitterness.

“Do you?”

Cynthia smiled at him amusedly. He must, somehow, mention that he was not in the first cabin — that he was a sneaking interloper; just what he had always been afraid of seeming! It was a perfect nemesis; caught red-handed. How surprisingly tall she was: how transparently young and beautiful. He remembered Wetherall’s remark, “too innocent.” Also Wetherall’s comment on the ugly way her skirt hung, creased, at the back: that brown tweed skirt, with a small rip in the hem at one side. Blue woolen stockings. The rip stretching against her knee as she sat opposite him — sitting on the deck itself — playing chess, one hand supporting her (the long arched fingers crossing a tarred seam), the other touching her cheek. Sea gulls. And now, everything so complicated and difficult — her mother with her (who had disliked him) — and someone else.

“Yes, I really like London much better.”

“It is lovely, isn’t it! I can hardly wait for London in the winter!”

As usual, when they talked, he had the sense of their partaking of a secret communion, exquisite and profound: a communion in which their idle talk, fragmentary and superficial, and even their physical identities, had the remoteness and smallness of the trivial and accidental. It seemed merely to be necessary that they should be together: that they should stand together for a moment, saying nothing, looking at the same falling wave or the same white sea gull; or talk a little, lightly; or loiter a little, with lazy bodies. This had been true from the beginning — it was still true. And yet — was it? There was this other man. The communion could hardly, therefore, be as perfect as he supposed. And indeed, had it ever been? Was it conceivable that already, when he had met her a year ago, she had been in love? Was it possible that her luminousness, her lightness of heart and body, her delightful, delighted swiftness in meeting him, had been simply the euphoria consequent upon that — and might it not have been precisely her love (for this other man) that he had fallen in love with?… On the other hand, there had been something — well, just lightly destructive, the loosing of a gay arrow, explanatory but not apologetic, in the quick laughing announcement “ I’m going to be married !” This seemed to refer to a marked consciousness of former communion: to refer to it and to end it. As if she said, “I liked you — but how much better I like him !”