The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

SMITH AND JONES

Smith and Jones, as far as one could tell in the darkness, looked almost exactly alike. Their names might have been interchangeable. So might their clothes, which were apparently rather shabby, though, as they walked quickly and the night was cloudy, it was difficult to be sure. Both of them were extraordinarily articulate. They were walking along the muddy road that led away from a large city and they talked as they went.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Smith, “it’s all over. No more women for me. There’s nothing in it. It’s a damned swindle. Walk right up, gentlemen, and make your bets! The hand is quicker than the eye. Where is the elusive little pea? Ha ha! Both ends against the middle.”

He struck a match and lit his pipe; his large pale unshaven face started out of the night.

Jones grumbled to himself. Then turning his head slightly toward Smith, in a somewhat aggressive way, as if he were showing a fang, he began to laugh in a peculiar soft insolent manner.

“Jesus! One would think you were an adolescent. No more women! If there aren’t it’ll be because you’re dead. You were born to be made a fool of by women. You’ll buzz round the honey-pot all your days. You have no sense in these matters, you’ve never had the courage or the intelligence once and for all to realize a woman. Look! here’s a parable for you. There are an infinite number of little white clouds stretching one after another across blue space, just like sweet little stepping stones. To each of them is tethered a different-colored child’s balloon—I know that would rather badly fracture the spectrum, but never mind. And behold, our angel-child, beautiful and trustful, flies to the first little cloud-island, and seizes the first balloon, enraptured. It’s pink. But then he sees the next island, and the next balloon, which is orange. So he lets the first one go, which sails away, and flies vigorously to the next little island. From there he catches sight of a different shade of pink—sublime! intoxicating! and again dashes across an abyss.… This lovely process goes on forever. It will never stop.”

Smith splashed into a puddle and swore.

“Don’t be so damned patronizing, with your little angel-child and toy balloons. I know what I’m talking about. Adolescent? Of course I am—who isn’t? The point is, exactly, that I have at last realized a woman. That’s more, I’ll bet, than you’ve done—you, with your damned negativism!”

“Negativism!—how? But never mind that. Tell me about your woman.”

“It must be experienced to be understood.”

“Of course—so must death.”

“What can I tell you then? You, who have always made it a principle to experience as little as possible! Your language doesn’t, therefore, extend to the present subject. You are still crawling on your hands and knees, bumping into chairs, and mistaking your feet for a part of the floor, or your hands for a part of the ceiling. Stand up! Be a man! It’s glorious.”

“Was she blonde or brunette?”

“If you insist, she was a Negress tattooed with gold and silver. Instead of earrings, she wore brass alarm clocks in her ears, and for some unexplained reason she had an ivory thimble in her left nostril.”

Jones laughed; there was a shade of annoyance in his laughter.

“I see.… I forgot to mention, by the way, that when the angel-child flew so vigorously from cloud to cloud his wings made a kind of whimpering sound.… But go on.”

“No, she was neither blonde nor brunette, but, as you suggested, imaginary. She didn’t really exist. I thought she did, of course—I had seen her several times quite clearly. She had a voice, hands, eyes, feet—in short, the usual equipment. In point of size she was colossal; in point of speed, totally incommensurable. She walked, like Fama, with her head knocking about among the stars. She stepped casually, with one step, from town to town, making with the swish of her skirts so violent a whirlwind that men everywhere were sucked out of houses.”

“I recognize the lady. It was Helen of Troy.”

“Not at all. Her name, as it happened, was Gleason.”

Jones sighed. The two men walked rapidly for some time in silence. The moon, like a pale crab, pulled clouds over itself, buried itself in clouds with a sort of awkward precision, and a few drops of rain fell.

“Rain!” said Jones, putting up one hand.

“To put out the fires of conscience.”

“Gleason? She must be—if your description is accurate—in the theatrical profession? A lady acrobat, a trapeze artist, or a Pullman portress?”

“Wrong again, Jones—if error were, as it ought to be, punishable by death, you’d be a corpse.… Suffice it to say that Gleason loved me. It was like being loved by a planet.”

“Venus?”

“Mars. She crushed me, consumed me. Her love was a profounder and more fiery abyss than the inferno which Dante, in the same sense, explored. It took me days of circuitous descent, to get even within sight of the bottom; and then, as there were no ladders provided, I plunged headlong. I was at once ignited, and became a tiny luminous spark, which, on being cast forth to the upper world again on a fiery exhalation, became an undistinguished cinder.”

“To think a person named Gleason could do all that!”

“Yes, it’s a good deal, certainly. I feel disinclined for further explorations of the sort.”

“Temporarily, you mean.… You disliked the adventure?”

“Oh, no—not altogether! Does one dislike life altogether? Do we hate this walk, this road, the rain, ourselves, the current of blood which, as we walk and talk, our hearts keep pumping and pumping? We like and dislike at the same time. It’s like an organism with a malignant fetid cancer growing in it. Cut out the cancer, which has interlaced its treacherous fibers throughout every part, and you extinguish life. What’s to be done? In birth, love, and death, in all acts of violence, all abrupt beginnings and abrupt cessations, one can detect the very essence of the business—there one sees, in all its ambiguous nakedness, the beautiful obscene.”

Jones reflected; one could make out that his head was bowed. Smith walked beside him with happy alacrity. It began to rain harder, the trees dripped loudly, but the two men paid no attention.

“The beautiful obscene!” said Jones, suddenly lifting his head. “Certainly that’s something to have learned chez Gleason!… It suggests a good deal. It’s like this road—it’s dark, but it certainly leads somewhere.”

“Where?”

“That’s what we’ll discover. Is it centrifugal or centripetal? The road is the former, of course. It leads, as we know, away from civilization into the wilderness, the unknown. But that’s no reason for supposing the same to be true of your diagnosis—is it? And yet I wonder.”

He wondered visibly, holding his coat-collar about his throat with one hand, and showed a disposition to slacken his pace. But Smith goaded him.

“Look here, we’ve got to keep moving, you know.”

“Yes, we’ve got to keep moving.”

They walked for a mile in complete silence. The rain kept up a steady murmur among the leaves of trees, the vague heaving shoulders of which they could see at right and left, and they heard the tinkling of water in a ditch. Their shoes bubbled and squelched, but they seemed to be indifferent to matters so unimportant. However, from time to time they inclined their heads forward and allowed small reservoirs of rain to slide heavily off their felt hats. It was Jones, finally, who began talking again. After a preliminary mutter or two, and a hostile covert glance at his companion, he said:

“Like all very great discoveries, this discovery of yours affords opportunities for a new principle of behavior. You are not a particularly intelligent man, as I’ve often told you, and as you yourself admit; so you probably don’t at all see the implications of your casual observation. As often occurs to you, in the course of your foolish, violent, undirected activity, you have accidentally bumped your head and seen a star. You would never think, however, of hitching your wagon to such a star—which is what I propose to do.”

Smith glanced sharply at his companion, and then began laughing on a low meditative note which gradually became shrill and derisive; he even lifted one knee and slapped it. It was obviously a tremendous joke.

“Just like you, Jones! You’re all brain to the soles of your feet. What do you propose to do?”

“Don’t be a simpleton, or I’ll begin by murdering you—instead of ending by doing so.”

This peculiar remark was delivered, and received, with the utmost sobriety.

“Of course,” said Smith. “You needn’t dwell on that, as it’s an unpleasant necessity which is fully recognized between us. It doesn’t in the least matter whether the event is early or late, does it?”

“What I mean is, that if you are right, and the beautiful obscene is the essence of the business, then obviously one should pursue that course of life which would give one the maximum number of—what shall I say?—perfumed baths of that description.… You say that this essence is most clearly to be detected in the simpler violences. In love, birth, death, all abrupt cessations and beginnings. Very good. Then if one is to live completely, to realize life in the last shred of one’s consciousness, to become properly incandescent, or identical with life, one must put oneself in contact with the strongest currents. One should love savagely, kill frequently, eat the raw, and even, I suppose, be born as often as possible.”

“A good idea!”

“I propose to do all these things. It has long been tacitly understood that sooner or later I will murder you, so, as you tactfully suggest, I won’t dwell on that. But I shall be glad to have Gleason’s address … beforehand.”

“Certainly; whenever you like. Telephone Main 220-W (I always liked that W) and ask for Mary.”

“The question is: what’s to be done about thought?… You see, this road of reflection is, after all, centripetal. It involves, inevitably a return to the center, an identification of one’s self with the All, with the unconscious primum mobile. But thought, in its very nature, involves a separation of one’s self from the—from the—”

“Unconscious?”

“From the unconscious.… We must be careful not to go astray at this point. One shouldn’t begin by trying to be unconscious—not at all! One might as well be dead. What one should try to get rid of is consciousness of self. Isn’t that it?”

Smith gave a short laugh, at the same time tilting his head to let the rain run off onto his feet. “Anything you say, professor. I trust you blindly. Anyway, I know that my pleasantest moments with Gleason were those in which I most completely lost my awareness of personality, of personal identity. Yes, it’s beautiful and horrible, the way one loses, at such moments, everything but a feeling of animal force.… Analogously, one should never permit conversation at meals. And it was decidedly decadent of Cyrano to carry on an elaborate monologue in couplets while committing a murder—oh, decidedly. Quite the wrong thing! One’s awareness, on such occasions, should be of nothing, nothing but murder—there should be no overlapping fringe which could busy itself with such boyisms as poetry or epigram. One should, in short, be a murder.… Do I interpret you correctly?”

Jones, at this, looked at Smith with a quick uneasiness. Smith appeared to be unconscious of this regard, and was as usual walking with jaunty alacrity. The way he threw out his feet was extremely provocative—the angle of his elbows was offensive. His whole bearing was a deliberate, a calculated insult.

“Quite correctly,” said Jones sharply, keeping his eye on Smith.

“Here’s a haystack,” replied the latter, equably, but also a little sneeringly. “Shall we begin with arson? We can go on, by degrees, to murder.”

“By all means.”

The two men could be seen jumping the ditch, and laboriously climbing over a slippery stone wall. Several matches sputtered and went out, and then a little blaze lighted the outstretched hands and solemn intent faces of Jones and Smith. They drew out and spread the dry hay over the blaze, the flames fed eagerly, and the stone wall and the black trunk of an elm tree appeared to stagger toward them out of the darkness.

“I think that will do,” observed Smith cheerfully.

They climbed back over the wall and resumed their walk. The rain had become a drizzle, and the moon, in a crack between the clouds, showed for a second the white of an eye. Behind them, the fire began to spout, and they observed that they were preceded, on the puddled road, by oblique drunken shadows. They walked rapidly.

“A mere bagatelle,” Smith went on, after a time. “But there’s a farm at the top of the hill, so we can, as it were, build more stately mansions.… Were you aware, at the moment of ignition, of a kind of co-awareness with the infinite?”

“Don’t be frivolous.”

“Personally, I found it a little disappointing.… I don’t like these deliberate actions. Give me the spontaneous, every time. That’s one thing I particularly like about Gleason. The dear thing hasn’t the least idea what she’s doing, or what she’s going to do next. If she decided to kill you, you’d never know it, because you’d be dead.… Not at all like you, Jones. You’ve got a devil of a lot to unlearn!”

Jones reflected. He took off his hat and shook it. His air was profoundly philosophical.

“True. I have. I’ll put off a decision about the farm till we get to it. I suppose, by the same token, you’d like me to give up my habit of strict meditation on the subject of your death?”

“Oh, just as you like about that!”… Smith laughed pleasantly. “I assure you it’s not of the smallest consequence.… It occurs to me, by the way, somewhat irrelevantly, that in your philosophy of incandescent sensation one must allow a place for the merely horrible. I never, I swear, felt more brilliantly alive than when I saw, once, a Negro sitting in a cab with his throat cut. He unwound a bloody towel for the doctor, and I saw, in the chocolate color, three parallel red smiles—no, gills. It was amazing.”

“A domestic scene?… Crime passionnelle?”

“No—a trifling misunderstanding in a barber shop. This chap started to take out a handkerchief; the other chap thought it was a revolver; and the razor was quicker than the handkerchief.… The safety razor ought to be abolished, don’t you think?”

Jones, without answer, jumped the ditch and disappeared in the direction of the farm. Smith leaned against the wall, laughing softly to himself. After a while there were six little spurts of light one after another in the darkness, hinting each time at a nose and fingers, and then four more. Nothing further happened. The darkness remained self-possessed, and presently Jones reappeared, muttering.

“No use! It’s too wet, and I couldn’t find any kindling.”

“Don’t let that balk you, my dear Jones! Ring the doorbell and ask for a little kerosene. Why not kill the old man, ravish his daughter, and then burn up the lot? It would be a good night’s work.”

“Damn you! You’ve done enough harm already.”

There was something a little menacing in this, but Smith was unperturbed.

“What the devil do you mean?” he answered. “Intellectually I’m a child by comparison with you. I’m an adolescent.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean—all this,” and Jones gave a short ugly sweep of his arm toward the blazing haystack and, beyond that, the city. The moon came out, resting her perfect chin on a tawny cloud. The two men regarded each other strangely.

“Nonsense!” Smith then exclaimed. “Besides you’ll have the satisfaction of killing me. That ought to compensate. And Gleason! think of Gleason! She’ll be glad to see you. She’ll revel in the details of my death.”

“Will she?”

“Of course, she will.… She’s a kind of sadist, or something of the sort.… How, by the way, do you propose to do it? We’ve never—come to think of it—had an understanding on that point. Would you mind telling me, or do you regard it as a sort of trade secret?… Just as you like!”

Jones seemed to be breathing a little quickly.

“No trouble at all—but I don’t know! I shall simply, as you suggest, wait for an inspiration.”

“How damned disquieting! Also, Jones, it’s wholly out of character, and you’ll have to forgive me if, for once, I refuse to believe you. What the deuce is this walk for, if not for your opportunity? You’re bound to admit that I was most compliant. I accepted your suggestion without so much as a twitter—didn’t I? Very unselfish of me, I think!… But, of course, it had to come.”

The two men were walking, by tacit agreement, at opposite sides of the road; they had to raise their voices. Still, one would not have said that it was a quarrel.

“Oh yes, it had to come. It was clearly impossible that both of us should live!”

“Quite.… At the same time this affair is so exquisitely complex, and so dislocated, if I may put it so, into the world of the fourth dimension, that I’m bound to admit that while I recognize the necessity I don’t quite grasp the cause.…”

“You’re vulgar, Smith.”

“Am I?… Ah, so that’s it—I’m vulgar, I seize life by the forelock!… I go about fornicating, thieving, card-cheating and murdering, in my persistent, unreflective, low-grade sort of way, and it makes life insupportable for you. Here, now, is Gleason. How that must simply infuriate you! Three days in town, and I have a magnificent planetary love affair like that—burnt to a crisp! Ha ha! And you, all the while, drinking tea and reading Willard Gibbs. I must say it’s damned funny.”

Jones made no reply. His head was thrust forward—he seemed to be brooding. His heavy breathing was quite audible, and Smith, after an amused glance toward him, went on talking.

“Lots of lights suddenly occur to me—lights on this extraordinary, impenetrable subject—take down my words, Jones, this is my death-bed speech!… I spoke, didn’t I, of the beautiful obscene, and of the inextricable manner in which the two qualities are everywhere bound up together? The beautiful and the obscene. The desirable and the disgusting. I also compared this state of things with an organism in which a cancer was growing—which one tries to excise.… Well, Jones, you’re the beautiful and I’m the obscene; you’re the desirable and I’m the disgusting; and in some rotten way we’ve got tangled up together.… You, being the healthy organism, insist on having the cancer removed. But remember: I warned you! If you do so, it’s at your own peril.… However, it’s silly to warn you, for of course you have no more control over the situation than I have, or Gleason has. The bloody conclusion lies there, and we walk soberly toward it.… Are you sorry?”

“No!”

“Well then, neither am I. Let’s move a little faster!… Damn it all, I would like to see Gleason again! You were perfectly right about that.… Do you know what she said to me?”

Smith, at this point, suddenly stopped, as if to enjoy the recollection at leisure. He opened his mouth and stared before him, in the moonlight, with an odd bright fixity. Jones, with the scantiest turn of his head, plodded on, so that Smith had, perforce, to follow.

“She said she’d like to live with me—that she’d support me. By George! What do you think of that?… ‘You’re a dear boy,’ she said, ‘you fascinate me!’ ‘Fascinate!’ That’s the best thing I do. Don’t I fascinate you, Jones? Look at my eyes! Don’t I fascinate you?… Ha, ha!… Yes, I have the morals of a snake. I’m graceful, I’m all curves, there’s nothing straight about me. Gleason got dizzy looking at me, her head swayed from side to side, her eyes were lost in a sort of mist, and then she fell clutching at me like a paralytic, and talking the wildest nonsense. Could you do that, Jones, do you think?… Never! It’s all a joke to think of your going to see Gleason. And if you told her what had happened she’d kill you. Yes, you’d look like St. Sebastian when Gleason got through with you.… Say something! Don’t be so damned glum. Anybody’d suppose it was your funeral.”

“Oh, go on talking! I like the sound of your voice.”

“And then to think of your pitiful attempt to set that barn on fire! Good Lord, with half a dozen matches.… That’s what comes of studying symbolic logic and the rule of phase.… Really, I don’t know what you’ll do without me, Jones! You’re like a child, and when I’m dead, who’s going to show you, as the wit said, how to greet the obscene with a cheer?… However, I wouldn’t bother about that rock if I were you—aren’t you premature?”

This last observation sounded a little sharp.

Jones had certainly appeared to be stooping toward a small loose fragment of rock by the roadside, but he straightened up with smiling alacrity.

“My shoelace,” he said, cynically. “It’s loose. I think I’ll retie it.”

“Pray do! Why not?”

“Very well! If you don’t mind waiting!”

Jones gave a little laugh. He stooped again, fumbled for a second at his shoe, then suddenly shot out a snakelike hand toward the rock. But Smith meanwhile had made a gleaming gesture which seemed to involve Jones’s back.

“Ah!” said Jones, and slid softly forward into a puddle.

“Are you there?”

Smith’s query was almost humorous. As it received no reply, and Jones lay motionless in his puddle, Smith took him by the coat-collar, dragged him to the edge of the ditch, and rolled him in. The moon poured a clear green light on this singular occurrence. It showed Smith examining his hands with care, and then wiping them repeatedly on the wet grass and rank jewelweed. It showed him relighting his pipe—which had gone out during the rain—with infinite leisure. One would have said, at the moment, that he looked like a tramp. And, finally, it showed him turning back in the direction he had come from, and setting off cheerfully toward the city; alone, but with an amazing air, somehow, of having always been alone.