Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel Read online

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  Conversation; or, Pilgrim’s Progress

  A Novel

  Conrad Aiken

  I

  “… and after many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by God’s providence, upon the 9th November following, by break of the day we espied land, which we deemed to be Cape Cod; and so afterward it proved. And the appearance of it much comforted us, especially seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea; it caused us to rejoice together, and praise God that had given us once again to see land. And thus we made our course S.S.W., purposing to go to a river ten leagues to the south of the Cape; but at night, the wind being contrary, we put round again for the bay of Cape Cod; and upon the 11th November we came to an anchor in the bay, which is a good harbour and pleasant bay, circled round, except in the entrance, which is about four miles over from land to land, compassed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras, and other sweet wood.… There was the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw.…”

  —JOURNAL OF THE PILGRIMS

  “Tirra-lirra, tirra-loo, tirra-lirra, tirra-lee—”

  “That doesn’t make sense, daddy.”

  “Neither it does. But what does it matter? What’s the difference between a loo and a lee? And now then, young woman, how about getting out of that there bath. It’s late! Look how late it is! It’s autumn! The leaves are falling off the trees! It’s going to be cold, you’ll catch your death of cold!”

  “Oh, but it’s so nice in here. Can I do just one handsquirt, just one?”

  “Just one. And the leaves came tumbling down—”

  “Why do the leaves come off the trees, daddy?”

  “Now out you get. Up—!”

  He loved to feel the firm small wet body, the compact little chest, between his hands, the legs wriggling and thrusting for the bathmat as he put her down: it was as good as eating, as good as drinking. As good as singing, as good as autumn. The round face, the blue eyes, emerged from the rapid towel to say:

  “But why do the leaves tumble off the trees!”

  “Listen to them scuttling like mice in the pathway, listen to them blowing!”

  “But why, but why!”

  “I’ll tell you what it is, Buzzer, it’s a mystery.”

  “A mystery!”

  They gazed together, turning, out of the little groundfloor window of the bathroom, watched the poplar leaves floating down, streaming on air, wafts and drifts and chains of them, golden and endless—like a kind of music, he thought, as inexhaustible and without origin as music.

  “But of course you wouldn’t know what a mystery is, would you?”

  “A mystery, a mystery, a mystery—”

  “It’s a nice word, and a very important one. It’s one of those words as big as a barn door, as big as a circus tent, as big as a railway station, as big as a hollowed-out mountain, so that you can drive anything you like into it—herds of sheep, flocks of cattle, horses, trucks, armies, wagons, cannons, ideas, stars, worlds, moons—in fact, anything you like. See?”

  “Now my hands!”

  “Did I forget those hands—? Foo! But you see, my pet, it’s like this. Once a year the trees all get very tired, and very sleepy, and they want to go to bed.”

  “To bed! Ho ho, how silly, as if a tree could go to bed! Ho ho!”

  “Yes, sir, to bed. They want to go to sleep, and so what do they do? They do just exactly what you do, they take off their clothes.”

  “And the leaves are their clothes! But we don’t have leaves for clothes, daddy!”

  “Ah, that’s just where you’re wrong. Didn’t you ever hear tell of Mother Eve?”

  “Of course! Eve and Adam were the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. Anybody knows that. Now my toes!”

  She lifted one foot, waggled the toes at him.

  “Quite right. And you see, Eve wore a fig leaf, that’s what she did—”

  “And took it off in the autumn, when she wanted to go to sleep?”

  “Well, I daresay. Anyway, that’s what they say she wore—you’d think it must have been a little bit chilly, wouldn’t you! Tirra-lirra, tirra-loo—”

  “And then do the trees go to sleep?”

  She put her hands on the window sill, to look again at the falling of the leaves, automatically raised them as he lowered the little nightgown over the curled head, and worked them skilfully through the sleeves, the face with primmed mouth once more emerging in triumph, like a seal from a wave.

  “The trees, bless their hearts, go to sleep. All winter they just dream and rest, exactly, for all the world, as if they were in their beds. After all, you have flower beds, you know!”

  “Ho ho—and who’d like to sleep in a flower bed! Not me!”

  He turned her around, opened the door, smacked her small bottom, guided her toward the hall with a firm finger planted in the middle of her back.

  “Well, off to your own, then, if you like that better. Quick! March!”

  Ahead of him, she scrambled barefoot up the painted stairs, straddling a little to do so, and he followed smiling. Wind-borne and uneven, he heard the church clock striking seven, and listened, as always, for the queer quavering stammer of the final stroke. The Unitarian Church, the village, the main street, the post office, the evening mail—already the loquacious line would be forming in the shabby little post office, the townsfolk would be there for the evening inspection of each other, the evening spying into each other’s affairs. And there might be a letter—his heart began to beat more quickly—he mustn’t think of that. And yet, why not? It ought to seem particularly naughty—just now, just here—with Buzzer reaching up to trip the latch of the dusk-filled bedroom—but it didn’t. No morals in nature, none!

  “Tirra-lee!” he said, “and into bed with you.”

  “Why did you give me my bath? Why didn’t mummy give me my bath?”

  “Because mummy was very tired, see?”

  “Well, then, you must tell me a story.”

  “I’ll tell you a story about John McGlory—”

  “Not that one!”

  “I’ll tell you another about his brother—”

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  “There isn’t time tonight, my pet. The world’s coming to an end any minute now, and daddy must be there to see it. In with you!”

  He threatened her comically, with raised hand, and, pretending alarm, she skipped into the little cot, whipping the pink feet under the blue counterpane, with its embroidered birds.

  “Ho ho,” she said, “you can’t fool me! It isn’t coming to an end! Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He stooped to kiss the still damp cheek; the blue eyes looked abstractedly past him, she was already dismissing him, she had already begun to sing her night-song. Good lord—he thought—how quickly they do it, how quickly they swoop from one world into another! If it was only as easy as that! Patting her knee idly, and straightening up, he looked through the screened window into the little garden, saw Chattahoochee, the cat, in the act of sitting down demurely under the poor bare-armed little plum tree—if ever a tree had committed suicide, that one had—and beyond it, beyond the low white fence, Mrs. Purington moving about in her kitchen next door. A motor boat was chugging in the river, probably Mr. Riley, the fisherman, back from scalloping, the dirty blue boat, foul with fish scales, approaching the Town Landing—maybe it would be a good idea to go and see. On his way to the post office? Afterward?
In case there should be a letter—? He frowned as he turned away and closed the white door behind him, frowned as he hesitated at the top of the stairs. But there was Enid, there was Endor, there was Ee—he could hear her in the kitchen now, the clink of a saucepan on the stove, or the sink—and resentment was unmistakable in the sound, it had been piling up all day. Odd, how one knows—just as one knows a storm is approaching, feels it in the air—the distant mutter even while the sky is still hot and cloudless, the first little sinister breeze turning the silver seams of the poplar trees, a chill draft from the southwest, and then the mounting purple of the clouds, and the Unitarian church steeple turning—suddenly—a livid tombstone white. He took out the watch from the pocket of his khaki trousers—how ridiculous, he knew perfectly well what time it was—and replaced it without looking at it. And now, on top of everything else, this unfortunate business of Jim Connor—

  He rattled down the steps, to let Enid know that he was coming—and coming cheerfully—paused at the entrance to the cluttered little studio living room, looked in. The last of the autumn sunlight slanted across the unfinished picture which stood on the easel—the colors jumped out awry, glowed, he felt himself flowing into that shape of ruin, that shape of an old barn on a tangled hill, amongst wild grass, wild lilacs, wild apple trees—but at once the current reversed itself, flowed back on itself, for once more it was unmistakably a failure—a dud, a flop. Impotence, impotence—the hand powerless to shape the actual, the vision powerless to purify its own shafts of light—what was the trouble, what the devil was it? Deep and perhaps inoperable as a cancer, the fine roots untraceably spread and wound in the unconscious, in his whole life—it was perhaps the life itself which was all wrong, wrongly rooted—what was needed was a giant sponge, a new start. But where? Not here. Not with this hall stove which must soon be laid and lit, the coals fetched in from the woodshed in the garden, the ashes dumped on the rain-gutted road that led down to the Town Landing—and yet, why not? Why not indeed! This was rich, real, rank—as rank as the snarled nasturtiums on the river wall at the foot of the garden, as rank as marsh and seaweed, the crawling mudflats at low tide, or the winter, which would presently howl its snows and bitter stars about the small wooden houses of the village, freezing the pipes, sending icy drafts up through the cracks between bare floorboards, chilling the rooms with white light through frosted windows. Real enough, Christ, yes! And as real too as the sound of running water which now came from the kitchen sink.

  In the dining room, two silver candlesticks on the table, which had not been set, and Buzzer’s porringer on her own little white table under the window—he picked it up, for it would be an ambassador for him, and went down the two steps into the kitchen lean-to.

  “Here’s these,” he said.

  “Well, put them down!”

  Dark curls turning on the pink smock, the small stubborn head half turning, the liquid green eyes—lovely!—flashing toward and past him, but on a level lower than his own, not meeting his, lowering again to the bright collander in which she was shaking potatoes. The potatoes were very important; she was humming to herself, preoccupied, a cloud of steam rose softly from the kettle on the stove.

  “All bathed and abed,” he said, “and went like a lamb.”

  “Did you give her a quilt? It’s going to be cold.”

  “No, I didn’t think of it.”

  “Never mind, then, I’ll do it myself.”

  “I thought I’d go for the mail.”

  “It couldn’t possibly wait till after supper, I suppose.”

  “My dear Ee, you know it would be closed.”

  “And is there any such important mail that it can’t wait till morning?”

  “Just the same, I think I’ll go, if you don’t mind.…”

  She made no answer as he let himself out through the garden door. The screen clacked behind him, he walked slowly around the back of the house, and looked down over the sloping lawn towards the river and the Town Landing. Mr. Riley, on the cabin roof of the blue motorboat, was in the act of stepping across, rubber-booted, to the rotten piles of the wharf—tomorrow there would be scallops—and a car could be heard kicking up the loose boards of the bridge, rumbling and rattling as it came, then accelerating swiftly as it shot up the sandy road past the Bank, scattering dead leaves lavishly to left and right.

  Leaves everywhere—the road that led to the Town Landing was ankle-deep with them, they lay in loose golden drifts on the field where Mr. Riley’s nets were spread out to dry, from the tall poplars even now they floated down in lazy parallel chains and curves, they clung about the fading stalks of the chicory, whose last blue flowers glowed like pale stars. Another night, another frost, and the trees would be bare—summer was over. Tirra-loo-tirra-lee! “Shadows rising on you and me”—shadows rising was good, one could imagine the shadows rising like water, like a tide, like these full-moon tides. Coming up about one’s feet, climbing, deepening—but it was no joke, it was all too true! No letter from Nora, not a word in two weeks, and this on top of her refusal—unwillingness? inability?—to see him last time, and the time before that the unfortunate meeting at the hotel in Boston, and now, as if that wasn’t enough, this damned Jim Connor business, and Enid—

  Mr. Murphy, getting out of his Ford, just back from the evening train with the mails, waved from his yard, and on the piazza of the Murphy boarding house the old loony was sitting, Miss Schermerhorn, rocking herself intently in a rocking chair, her eyes fixed brightly on the road. She beckoned to him, leaned forward, said mysteriously:

  “Did you hear anything, mister?”

  “No?”

  “It’s the water running, the water running in the cellar, they forgot to turn it off!”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes, they’d ought to be told, they went away and left it running!”

  “Very well, I’ll tell them.”

  She looked unconvinced, but also as if it didn’t much matter, and resumed her rocking. What a village! Every other person cracked or feeble-minded—gone to seed. Dear old Mrs. Chandler, the seamstress, stopping everybody in the streets—of course, it was the only trace of anything wrong with her, otherwise she was perfectly normal—to talk about underclothes, and apropos of absolutely nothing. The weather, the news, the children, the yacht races, the taxes, the church supper—and then suddenly the vital, the burning, question, toward which she had been cunningly working all the time, the dark and precious secret. Yes, I like silk, I like silk, but then don’t you think there is something really nicer, really cleaner, about linen? I change sometimes nine or ten times a day! And Mrs. Kimpton, the washerwoman, with her obscure passion for corsets! Always poking about in the town dump for new specimens—no matter in what state of dilapidation—going there day after day—and then putting them up all round her living-room, as one might put flowers, or pictures! What the devil was that all about? A mystery, as Buzzer had said, a mystery, a mystery! But no stranger, perhaps, than wanting to paint.

  Two men were standing outside the post-office door, talking, and when he went into the post office, now empty, and peered into Box 67 in the slant light, that too was empty. Nothing. Not a word, not a scrap—nothing. He turned, walked out slowly, paused on the little triangular corner of gravel outside, looked unseeing to left and right.

  “When was that, that it became that amount?”

  “Just before I went into the hospital.”

  “And what did you do, did you tell her about it before you went into the hospital?”

  “Sure I did. What do you take me for!”

  “Well, I don’t understand it, and that’s a fact.”

  He crossed the street, took the long way around the block, scuffed the dead leaves with dusty shoes. Empty again. Empty! But it was himself who felt empty: a slow and hollow pang, a queer mixture of guilt and suffering. But why feel guilty now, if—as it appeared—she had decided to end the affair, to drop him? It didn’t make sense. Understandable enough that he should feel a
shamed when he got a letter, to read it and carry it about in secret, or burn it slyly in the fireplace—but why now, when perhaps the whole delicious exciting thing might be over, and his integrity (willy-nilly) restored? Of course, he had seen it coming—it had begun when he moved to the country, and couldn’t see her so often, or thought he couldn’t. She hadn’t reproached him, but just the same you couldn’t blame her! Thought he couldn’t! Ah! of course! The truth was that he could have seen her, and even oftener, if he had then really wanted to; but that he himself had definitely not felt like it. Yes. He had been a little bored, a little depressed, by the continuous necessity for secrecy and furtiveness, had simply wanted a rest. And Nora had seen through it.

  Oh, well, maybe it was all for the best. It would certainly simplify things, makes things easier with Enid?… The slow pang hollowed itself out in his breast again—dear delightful humorous Nora!—but he quenched it, looked away from it, looked down through the Puringtons’ garden at the river and the dismasted hulks which lay on their sides on the farther shore—rotting, like so many other things in this sleepy little town—and then, with quicker steps, and a clear sense of relief—or no, not quite that, not quite, but at any rate a sharper sense of detachment and singleness with which to face Enid—he entered his own garden. He walked past the house, toward the back. Terence’s blue wagon stood there, looking very large in the twilight, the horse pawing at the grass, and Enid and Terence were talking at the kitchen door.

  “It’s the lilacs,” Enid said. Her arms were folded across her breast, across the pink smock, and she addressed the remark rather to the wagon than to himself.

  “Guess you got plenty of ’em, too, Mr. Kane, judging by the looks of those boxes!” Terence took out his clay pipe, grinned, spat.

  “A hundred, Terence—ninety-seven plain, and three fancy! What are we going to do with them?”

  Enid turned and opened the kitchen door.

  “And when you’ve finished—” she looked down toward the river—“there’s some one in the sitting room, the studio, waiting to see you.”