Conrad Aiken - Blue Voyage

“Πᾶσα θάλασσα θάλασσα,” said Smith absent-mindedly. “‘Rich happiness, that such a son is drowned.’”

“Well!” cried Cynthia into the sea-darkness. “Why not? We must all, in that sense, drown someday. Is Silberstein’s drowning at twelve any worse than ours at twenty?”

“I like it,” said Faubion. “Isn’t it really better, a good deal, than all the refined hypocrisy of the honeymoon?… Always supposing that the honeymoon is the first!”

“Was it — with you?” Smith’s voice had a chuckle in it.

“Of course not! I didn’t live in a village for nothing …”

Her voice trailed away like the dying sound of a wave. A sea gull, floating astern, and crying, with turning head, Klio . Where do the sea gulls go at night? The sea gulls in mid-Atlantic? Do they sit on the waters?… Klio klio . The five blue corposants preened their blue phosphor-feathers. Demarest, leaving lifeboat No. 14, walked aft again, sucking at his cold pipe. The five people moving eastward with the ship. Five corposants. Five sea gulls. Klio, klio . Interchangeable. If one thinks in terms of quality-complexes, then a very slight dislocation of affects will give one a world in which no identities are permanent. An alarm clock rises in the east. A sky swarming with stars, at two in the morning, is merely the sensation of formication —ants crawling, as when one’s foot is asleep. Faubion, uttering a short word quickly, with averted head, is a sea gull going downwind, crying, with turning head, klio … The corposants are five celestial voices, singing in the tops of the trees. They ululate softly in chorus, while the treetops thresh in the wind, as the mad nymphs ululated when Dido and Aeneas fled into the cave from the thunder. Angels follow her — gravely, slowly — with silver and vermilion and rainbow wings — One, more luminous: lost in his own light: sits on a cherry-tree bough, and sings — Blest be the marriage of earth and heaven! Now, in the round blue room of space, The mortal son and the daughter immortal … make of the world their resting-place … The marriage hymn, prothalamium, for my wedding with Cynthia, the stained-glass widow. Stained-glass window.

“Poor Demarest!” Cynthia was laughing, in the darkness. “Poor darling Demarest!”

“Am I so much to be pitied?”

“Is he so much to be pitied?”

“Much to be pitied?”

“Pitied? Pitied?”

“Pitied?”

The bird voices echoed one another, klio klio, wheeling and screaming. The sea claws and sea beaks pitied him, and the waves, too, coming louder from the southeast, their surfy voices the voices of destroyed universes of bubbles, sea-froth, evanescent as human pity.

“Of course he is to be pitied. And loved, too, in his fashion — as Silberstein said we love the hurrying moon and the angelic corposant. Loved, therefore, and pitied, as we love and pity ourselves. Who is this William Demarest? this forked radish? this carrier of germs and digester of food? momentary host of the dying seed of man?… He came to me to play chess, a copy of The Spoils of Poynton under his shiny coat sleeve.”

“Ha ha. Demarest, the goldfish chess player.”

“Fool’s mate. Watchman, what of the knight? The psychiatrist beat him in ten moves. The mandolin player gave him his queen, and then drew the game. Nevertheless, he considers himself a very talented chess player. Poor Demarest.”

“Treasure him, nevertheless, for he is a mirror of the world.”

“We cherish him as we cherish ourselves. Is he not an epitome of universal history? Here he stands, on the deck of a dark ship, which is moving eastward at fifteen knots an hour. The steersman shifts the wheel, his eyes on the bright binnacle. The stokers stoke. The second engineer carries a long-beaked oil can up a clammy iron ladder. The first engineer lies in his stuffy bunk, reading His Wife’s Secret . Under the ship are two miles of sea, and under the sea the half-cold planet, which rushes through freezing space to destruction, carrying with it continents of worthless history, the sea, this ship, Demarest … Who is this little, this pathetic, this ridiculous Demarest? We laugh at him, and also we weep for him; for he is ourselves, he is humanity, he is God. He makes mistakes. He is an egoist. He is imperfect — physically, morally, and mentally. Coffee disagrees with him; angostura causes him anguish; borborigmi interrupts his sleep, causing in his dreams falls of cliffs and the all-dreaded thunderstone; his ears ache; his nostrils, edematous; frontal headaches … Nevertheless, like ourselves, whose disabilities differ from his only in details, he struggles — why? to avoid the making of mistakes, to escape the tyrant solipsism, and to know himself; like us, he endeavors to return to God. Let him cry out as he will, let him protest his skepticism ever so loudly, he is at heart, like every other, a believer in perfection!..”

Klio klio ! Cynthia’s was the harsh melancholy voice of the sea gulls. The five sea gulls wheeled and screamed over the brown mud flat, at the edge of the eelgrass, where the obscene fiddler crabs scuttled in and out of oozy holes. Brown viscous froth, left by the receding tide. Cape Cod. What is that dark object that attracts them? A dead man. The corpse of Charlie Riehl, the hardware man, the suicide. The bluefish have picked at his head and hands these six days, since he jumped from the bridge; and now the sea gulls flap over him, crying, and the fiddler crabs advance with buzzing fiddles, crepitant army of mandibles.

“A believer in perfection.”

“A believer.”

“Perfection.”

“Rich happiness, that such a son is drowned.”

The five people crossed the meadow, stepping carefully among the fishing nets which Mr. Riley had spread out to dry. The hot sun drew a salt smell out of them, marshy and rich, fish-scaly. Passing under the arrowy-leaved ailanthus tree, and then rounding the sand-banked corner opposite Mr. Black’s forge (Mr. Black was shoeing a horse) they stepped upon the wooden bridge, tripartite, the first and third sections of which crossed the two branches of the forked river, the intermediate section being merely a built-up road-bed on the tongue of marsh. The telegraph wires were singing multitudinously in the wind, a threnody. A metal windmill clanked. They crossed the first section of bridge, looking into the deep and rapid water, and seeing the red sponges that wavered deep-down on the pediments of barnacled stone; and then paused on the squeaking path of trodden and splintered scallop shells, which was bordered with starry St. John’s Wort, coarse sappy honeysweet goldenrod, and scarlet-blistered poison ivy. Leaning then on the red wooden railing, they watched the two Rileys and Mr. Ezra Pope, the town constable, rowing the dirty dory toward a point at the farther end of the marsh. Low water. Sea gulls rose in a screaming cloud as they approached. The younger Riley, in red rubber boots, jumped out and pulled the dory up into the eelgrass. The two others got out, and all three moved slowly into the marsh, lifting high their knees. They were stooping over. Then they rose again, carrying something. It was Charlie Riehl, who had drowned himself rather than appear as a witness at the trial. Klio klio ! At five in the morning it was: there among those red sponges. Feet first; with his pockets full of lead. Klio !

“Those are holes that were his eyes,” murmured Smith. “Nothing of him but hath fed—”

“Narcissus! He sees himself drowned, like this Charlie Riehl. And pities himself. Well, why not? That’s normal enough …”

Faubion held up her hands, on which the blue corposants were beginning to fade.