Conrad Aiken: Blue Voyage

“Oh, dry up, Silberstein,” said Hay-Lawrence, grinning uncomfortably.

“See the guilty look?… That’s the only weakness of these English sharpers. They’re too proud and sensitive. Make personal remarks about them, and they’ll betray themselves every time … Now, Mr. Demarest here has the cold, unmoving New England face, the sacred cod; he conceals his feelings better even than the Englishman, simply because he hasn’t got any, Am I right, Mr. Demarest?”

“Perfectly,” Demarest laughed. “As for you —!”

“Well?”—calmly staring. “What about me?”

“The Sphinx, beside you, has as mobile a face as an ingénue!”

Silberstein played a card, reached his hand (cigar-holding) for the trick, then drew back as if stung.

“Ouch. He fooled me. He saved that up.”

“Yes. I saved it up,” said Demarest, tapping the trick on the edge.

“Now that we’re so well acquainted, Mr. Demarest, I should like to ask you about that young lady — the term may be taken to have some latitude — to whom you were talking just now. I wouldn’t call her a beauty, exactly — but I think it could be said with some justice that her appearance is very remarkable.”

“The Welsh Rarebit?”

“Ha!” cried Silberstein, rolling his large head back and half closing his eyes appreciatively. “Ha! is that what you call her? Welsh Rarebit is good, is very, very good. Welsh Rarebit she is … And what about her, if I may ask without seeming to be too impertinent?”

“Peggy Davis. A widow of one month — so she says. Returning from Providence, where her husband died, to Wales. Her handsome brother — a miner — will meet her at the dock.”

“Yes?… It sounds fairly circumstantial?… It convinces you?”

“The damndest face I ever saw,” said Hay-Lawrence. “It makes me ill to look at her.”

“You mean”—the Major lifted off his pince-nez and endeavored to look fiercely out of gentle brown eyes, under a brow beetling but more academic than military—“the queer-looking girl who sat over there talking with the musician?… She looked to me like hot stuff!.. He he .” He put on his pince-nez, bridling and blushing, looking naughtily from one to the other of the bridge players.

“Go to it, Major,” breathed Silberstein smokily. “We give you a free hand — go as far as you like. Only I feel it’s my duty, as one hideously experienced, to warn you that she will probably see you coming … Ha!” He took a puff at his cigar, shut narrow eyes ecstatically, and then, while the others laughed, gave another “Ha!”

“I’m no chicken myself,” said the Major. “I haven’t spent two years in Constantinople for nothing.”

“Have you got any photos of your harem?” asked Demarest.

The Major quivered with delight at so much attention. “No,” he giggled, “not this year’s.”

“I suppose,” said Silberstein, “you Orientals change the houris in your harems — (By Godfrey doesn’t that run off nicely? — houris in your harems! Have you a little houri in your harem?) — as often as we poor stick-in-the-muds change the goldfish in our finger bowls. What’s a houri more or less? And you must develop a very fine, a very subtle taste in those matters.”

“Smubtle,” suggested Demarest.

“Score two for Mr. Demarest. Yes, you Oriental potentates must be full of smubtleties. Thank you for that word, Mr. Demarest — a permanent addition to my vocabulary … A smubtle allusion! Good.”

“The poker player is mad about something,” said Hay-Lawrence, turning.

“Is it true that glass eyes sometimes explode?” Demarest leaned to look at the angry face. “I’ve heard somewhere that they do. Here’s hoping.”

“This is nothing to what will go on, on the last night, when they’ll propose a no-limit game. That will be the time to get your money back, Duke.”

“For God’s sake, don’t call me Dook .”

Smith’s cherub face appeared at a window, looking in. He waved his cigar, disappeared, and then came in through the door, soft-stepping and sedate.

“Playing bridge, I see,” he said perching temporarily on a chair arm. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Where were you at breakfast?” said Demarest. “It looked bad.”

“Seasick? Oh, no. I’m never seasick. Never … Oh, I see, I see what you mean!.. Ha ha … No — but I’ll tell you something later. Come out and walk when you’ve finished. Beautiful air this morning — beautiful.” He rose absentmindedly, stared wistfully out through the window, which careened against the smooth blue sea, then softly departed. His cherub face passed the port window outside, in profile, evenly gliding.

“He was clever,” murmured Silberstein. “He knew we were playing bridge.”

“A nice old bird,” said Demarest. “Spent his life — thirty years of it — selling sheet music and opera tickets in New Orleans. Knows every nigger song and jazz tune from the time of the flood. He’ll make life miserable for the ship’s orchestra.”

“Made a large fortune at it, I don’t doubt!”

“Enough to go back to England on. It’s really rather pathetic … He’s going back to see his childhood place, where he hasn’t got a living relative and won’t know a soul … Why does he do it?”

“Nostalgia,” blew Silberstein. “He’s looking for his mother. He wants to die, and doesn’t know it.”

“Good God,” cried Hay-Lawrence. “I believe that’s what’s wrong with me.

“And me!” said Demarest.

The whistle blew, vibrating the table. “Twelve o’clock,” said the Major and they all set their watches. Ten minutes later, the Third Officer came in, swiftly stepping over the brass door sill, a notice in his hand. He affixed this to the green baize bulletin board. The day’s run. Three hundred and one miles, fine light WSW breeze, smooth sea … “One day gone, gentlemen,” said Silberstein. “The game is adjourned till later … Some time this afternoon?” … Demarest, loitering a moment to look at the chart, saw the glass-eyed poker player slam down his cards, face upward. “ Jesus Christ ! I never saw such a lot of pikers!.. What’s the matter, you afraid to bet? That’s what I’ve got — a pair of deuces!” He drew the piled chips toward him. “Come on, ante. And put some ginger into it.” He turned dissociated eyes arrogantly about the room, seeking approval.

Released from church, the passengers were pacing the deck briskly, in couples, or composing themselves complicatedly in chairs, entangled with rugs, cushions, muffllers and gaudy magazines. Smith, at the forward end of the second-class deck, leaned on a stanchion, watching a sailor chalk on the polished deck the squares for shovelboard. Demarest, his back against the broad railing, hearing behind him and below him the laughter of steerage passengers and the whine of a concertina, watched the figure of Smith, small, immaculate and pathetic, cigar in hand, rising slowly against the wide arc of sea and sky, and again as slowly, with a slight swerve, descending. He stood there immovable, heroic and tragic, describing unconscious patterns against the infinite, watching the stooped sailor. Was it only the imminence of sea and sky, the immense solitude, that gave poor Smith a sort of grandeur? No. These factors did not so much confer as reveal it. Selling sheet music in New Orleans (“Cuddle up a Little Closer,” or “Every Little Movement has a Meaning All Its Own”) or speculating in opera tickets during the opera’s annual visit, or swinging like a tiny pendulum here between water and space — Smith was equally portentous. He epitomized superbly the tragic helplessness of the human … Better than himself for example — or Hay-Lawrence, or Silberstein? Yes, somehow better — better perhaps because he was less conscious of hostile destiny than these, and therefore gave the effect of being more impotent. He had also the air, somehow, of being extraordinarily complete. There were no loose ends … An ant in the grass, crawling up a dry twig, waving stupid antennas at the void; descending patiently again; exploring an enormous pebble all the way to its barren top — descending once more; and so on, and so on, one vast obstacle after another patiently and stubbornly encountered; an oak tree climbed, right out into the infinite, suspended in the blue; a stone wall, vast labyrinth of monoliths, stoutheartedly and minutely overcome. Smith !.. Who the devil was Smith?… Demarest watched him rising and falling there against the ultramarine abyss; unconscious and infinitesimal; smoking the “expensive” cigar which Mr. Charlton had given him. His whole career was poised there — hung in the blue — twinkled — and disappeared. There he was, to begin with, in the stationer’s shop in Bideford, rosy-cheeked and amiable, handing down boxes of blue envelopes for a customer, checking off returned books of fiction in the Circulating Library (two hundred volumes) and reading them all himself, particularly the works of Thackeray; on Sunday afternoons, trudging in the rain over the red fields to Hartland Point. Then the scar on his upper lip — some sort of row — over a girl perhaps? Disgrace, discouragement, love of adventure? Adventure! Straight from the stationer’s shop in Bideford, to a music shop in New Orleans, there piling and turning music for thirty years! The opera tickets. He got a corner in them once — and sold them for five dollars each. Even to angry old Mrs. Schneider! (whoever she was). That was adventure. And now his second great adventure — the return! No doubt Silberstein was right — it was an unconscious desire for death, for the mother … The sailor was pointing at the shovelboard pattern. Smith leaned, goggling, and suddenly took a couple of quick unpremeditated tripping steps, irresistibly suggested by the sea. Recovering, he pointed along the deck, nodding his head. Then gave the sailor a cigar … Yes, one saw the whole of Smith’s career transacted there on the swaying deck in sunlight, poised between sea and sky. It was amusing to run it off, like a movie film, at terrific speed, so that the whole life story unfolded itself like one of those flowers which the movie permits one to see in the act of blooming: the calyx breaking, the pointed petals whitely springing apart and curling back, and then in a little while the rapid shriveling … The sailor climbed the companion way; and Smith, turning, stared exophthalmically at the sea.