The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

BY MY TROTH, NERISSA!

Five o’clock. He looked at his watch, hoping that it was later—late enough for dinner. That was characteristic. He was always hoping that it was later than it really was, hoping that an hour had gone, a day had gone. Other people were anxious about being too late—he was anxious about being too early. Supreme, everlasting, devastating boredom. His watch was a symbol of that, and now as he put it back in his pocket, cherishing its warm smoothness, he cursed the hour and a half that yawned like a chasm before his next “action.” He walked wearily along the gravel path. Piles of leaves were burning, and the smoke came heavily over his face. Wet leaves; there had been a shower. He was irritatingly conscious of his stick, which kept entangling itself with his coat, and which was so light that it would not properly thrust against the gusty wind. Besides, it was too long, struck the ground too sharply, and was particularly annoying in a deserted street, where its rhythmic clack on the stones made him feel like screaming. In a moonlit street it became positively portentous, and it seemed to him that he was trying to balance a telegraph pole. It scraped now against an unforeseen rise in the path, and he drew it up under his arm, regaining a little of his composure. Then he stepped off the path onto the grass, swung the stick triumphantly, and thrust it into the ground, at every step, with delight. He impaled an empty match-box. He impaled a yellow leaf. He aimed it as if it were a gun at a robin, who took no notice, but, with suddenly lowered head, performed a little mechanical run and then stood still, listening for a worm. “Fly away south, old man! No worms here, unless you listen to my head.” His face did not change expression—he was conscious that it didn’t—but in imagination he heard himself laughing loudly.

That was exactly the problem, the problem that kept him awake late at night, that woke him up early, and that nevertheless made him long for sleep as he longed for nothing else—profound, profound nothingness and annihilation of sleep, complete and harmonious escape. Yes, that was the problem: to find and name this worm that gnawed at his brain. What on earth was this new obsession for—this horror of shaving? He had had it now for three days and three nights, and his nights it had made hideous; for his thoughts kept reverting to the new razor, and whenever he saw it, in his mind’s eye, lying there on the shelf in all its bright sheerness, he felt a spastic contraction of the chest. He had lain awake for two hours, the first morning, wondering whether he would dare to shave with it. In a sinister way it had seemed to be connected, as with steel wires, to his jangled nerves, and gradually he had become convinced that as soon as he touched it some obscure impulse would turn the blade against his flesh. He had conquered his terror—had managed to shave, trembling a little, and noting with astonishment the pallor of his face, and the narrow intensity of his pupils.… Well, obviously, it was too late in the day for any mere timidity about shaving to develop! It was something deeper than that. Whatever the worm was, it had bored into the very center, and his brain was honey-combed with galleries—hollow enough to float—its specific gravity markedly impaired.

He sat down on a wet bench, and as he did so the sun came out and made a pale sparkling brightness of the grass. This was refreshing; it gave a change of scene. He was not exactly sure where it put him. He was barefooted, that was clear, and he was exquisitely conscious of the cool, dispersed wetness of the grass under his sensitive feet, and of the sharpness of twigs. Coarse, thick, ropy spider’s webs glistened on the dingy box-hedge, and at the bottom of every silken funnel he could see a vigorous spider with curved claws. The smell of wet leaves was like early morning. Then there was some question of nasturtiums, matted snakily together by a heavy rain in the night—acrid; he liked the yellow ones best.… The warm smell of burning leaves came again over him, and the thought of the razor, with its sinister bracketing of edge and flesh. He began to compose a letter to Sara. Should he address her by her “pet” name—Sahara—the name originally suggested by the fact that she pronounced her name to rhyme with the desert? Too flippant at this crisis.

“My dear Sara: Why is it that you are made of flesh—why, indeed, if God, as it is reported, created you in His image, did He not dispense for once with the common straw and clay and dip His hands into the clear brightness of the ether? I cannot, no, I have made up my mind on the point, reconcile myself to the fact that your mouth, which I once in a vision saw as a flower without function, exists really for the taking in of food and of men; that you have an alimentary canal, liable at the most inopportune moments to utter its obscene borborygmi—or as Jake coarsely puts it, its bubbling of the gut—amid harmonies seemingly more ethereal; that you have kidneys, and liver, and ductless glands, all plying at all times their little secret juicy trades. It is no good retorting, as I hear you angrily retort (between mouthfuls of the best beef), that all this holds just as well of me. Of course. To be sure. Certainly. That’s precisely why I should like to find in some hallowed corner of this dingy universe a creature of a beauty and texture more translucent—compounded, let us say, of air and fire. You will say that this is an unreasonable demand. But if it is really unreasonable why does it occur to me—is it only a disease of the flesh that enables flesh to conceive the finer-than-flesh?… At all events, my dear Sahara Desert, what I passionately want you to understand at this crisis in our lives, is that if I now take flight from you and recede rapidly into the blue obscure, weaving about myself a fine shroud of stellar air, it is not the individual but the generic you that I flee from, finding horrible. For this horror is ubiquitous—its yellow tooth is everywhere, in all women, in all men. I have fought against it for years. Yes, I recall its fangs in even my very first love affair, when years ago walking in a dark London square with a woman whose affection for me was a little too public and unrestrained (she suddenly tried to embrace me, murmuring, no, shouting, passionate phrases!) I observed a sign, happily emblazoned against the palings of a fence, ‘Organs and street cries prohibited near here,’ and read it aloud to her, with the fortunate result that she was dissolved into shrieks of laughter.… I do not know in the least why I should want to recite to you this oblique episode of my past. Perhaps only because it gives you a little of my background. But background is so important and so complicated! What use to give you a mere fragment like this? Isn’t it equally important that I should tell you that I dislike intensely the odor of female perspiration; that I have an obscure passion for jungles, snake-infested thickets, and the sound of horns; that a dull pencil makes me miserable and inert, as if paralyzed, and that I find intolerable any business dealing with a stranger?… Even so, I make hardly the slightest of beginnings. I’m a sort of nexus of loathings. As I sit here in the park, with the sun just dipping his chin into a swift cloud and a few drops of rain beginning to fall among moist pebbles and dead leaves, it seems to me that I am really a vast net of unpleasant sensation, a net of boredom which enmeshes everything, and down the slack nerves of which run tremors of feeble disgust from the uttermost stars. What a paltry attempt at the poetic that is! I am ashamed of myself. What I mean, of course, is merely that my own nervous system is degraded—perhaps by too much sensation, and sensation too precise.

“Ah, Sahara, those precise sensations! Did you know that there has always been something peculiarly offensive to me in the line of the gums above your upper teeth? On chilly days, too, I have noticed that the part of the chest which shows above your blouse is very apt to be of a bluish hue which I find extraordinarily repulsive. And then, to pass from the physiological to the psychological, how singularly you have misjudged, from the very outset, the sort of stimulus with which to play upon me! If only you had known how to be proud instead of humble, reserved instead of placatory, mysterious instead of dumb!… These are extraordinary things to be saying to a woman at the very outset of ‘love’; no doubt, you will be simply dumfounded. ‘How is it possible?’ I hear you asking. ‘Did you not kiss me last night? Surely there was no sham about that? You loved me then—is it possible that love should evaporate so soon?’… Yes, I loved you last night, that is true. When I left my own lodgings and started off in the evening to see you I will not deny that I did so with tremendous excitement, that I had taken the very last care with my appearance, and that all the way, in the car, my imagination, like an expert contrapuntalist, performed the most amazing feats of virtuosity with the simple theme of ‘you.’ I saw you burning like a creature of light, alternately fusing and paling with the pulse of fire. I trembled when I thought of you. I could feel waves of psychic blindness go over me periodically, and when at last I climbed the steps to your house I felt as if my head and my body had been somehow separated.… But then, when I saw you, these feelings began rapidly to change! I saw something a little coarse in you; I found you to be stupid; the curve of your jaw seemed to me to be too heavy. You manifested also a disposition to abuse those gestures which I had at first found charming. How sick I became of your trick of looking up at me from your pillow with silly admiration, just allowing me a glimpse of your small blue eyes between the fingers of your hand! How I loathed you for the arch way in which you kept turning your back. I responded to these things as you expected, but you did not guess with what weariness and anger.

“However, it was not at all my intention to say things that might injure you—not at all, not at all. What I want intensely, miserably, to make clear to you is that it is not in any real sense you that I thus shamefully betray and abandon, but humanity, the world, and, above all myself. In this particular case, I suppose I might say that the difficulty lies in the fact that when I came to you it was with the last failing spark of my wearied enthusiasm for love affairs. But it is really far more complicated than that—it is not fair to you or to me to let you suppose that I am merely a jaded Don Juan. Not so. My love affairs have been very few, very fugitive; and if now my love for you is as it were, stillborn, it is because at last my faith in beauty seems dead.… If you could realize, Sara, how much I want to love you! how infinitely healing it would be to me! But I am powerless in this, as I am in everything; I have no gusto for life; I am a mass of complex contradictory impulses that leave me in a mammering and at a stay. When I fall asleep at night it is with the hope that I may never wake. When I wake in the morning, it is with passionate resentment. I look ahead through the day in the faint hope that I may find the promise of one event that will be pleasant. If it happens that I am to dine in the evening with X, then I live through the tedium of the day, and all its exasperating trifles, in expectation of that one hour of pleasure—which, under so great a strain, usually turns out to be rather dull.…

“And then, finally, there are my obsessions, which I cannot explain. My latest is a horror of shaving! I cannot think of a razor, of a sharp edge of any sort, without a shudder which touches the very center of my vitality. When I take up my razor in the morning it is almost with a conviction that some obscure impulse will transmit itself to the blade, which will suddenly turn against my weak flesh.… By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world.…”

… What an admirable letter! How profoundly it would stir the chords of pity in Sara’s heart!… But the pace of the rain was beginning to quicken, a continual patter came from the dead leaves, and he rose, buttoning his coat. Ten minutes to six.… If he walked through the park, slowly, and then by the long way through Essex Street, he would reach the station just in time to meet Sara for dinner. He began walking. Leaves blew along the path before him, came down in streams from the blown trees. Incredible melancholy. All that was needed was a dejected faun shivering in a hollow tree and trying to blow a melody from his rain-soaked reed. Everything was gray in the gray light. Large drops from the boughs of trees pattered on the rim of his hat, and the crook of his stick, becoming wet, rubbed irritatingly on the palm of his hand. Sodden leaves; sodden newspapers; sodden world.

To be or not to be: no, that wasn’t the question at all, but whether or not to dine with Sara. To approach her through this silver jungle of rain, with all its bells; to weave himself like a shuttle through this vast and exquisite fabric of mercurial silver, finally coming upon Sara, in a green dress, waiting happily; to see for a flash the clear quality of her face in rain-light, and to hear the first full sound of her voice under an umbrella tense and murmurous with rain; to feel a drop of water on the back of his hand, and to hear her laugh—didn’t all this, after all, offer a sort of beauty?… Yes, no question, it did. But it was only for the first instant. After that came the tedious necessity of finding a restaurant where they would be safe from the eyes of acquaintances, the necessity of talking and talking with Sara, of touching her foot under the table, of spending three desolating hours of the evening with her—she wouldn’t let him off with less. Agonizing complications. Misery a thousand miles deep. If he did go to her, what should he say?… He would greet her wearily. She looked concerned—no, alarmed! “Henry! You’re worried. What’s the matter?” “Well, Sara—don’t be shocked—but to tell the truth I was wondering, all the way here, whether or not to abandon you.”… Would she cry—grow white? No—she looked far away, at nothing, compressed her lips. “I see.”… That’s what she’d say. “You see, Sahara, in a sense you’ve become for me, momentarily, a symbol of life itself. And if I speak of abandoning you, what I really mean is the abandonment of everything.” He couldn’t prevent a touch of vox humana getting into that last phrase—it was a shade too much like a sob, but then, anything was permissible when one was dealing with a woman. “I don’t think I mean suicide”—this was said slowly and ponderingly; the “think” was, indeed, masterly!… But suppose she simply, with a flash of amusement, answered, “Why not?”… Heavens!

He turned the corner, and there was Sara just as he had foreseen, in the green dress, waiting serenely under her tinkling umbrella. She laughed frankly.

“Henry, you do look dejected!”

“Why shouldn’t I? I’m thinking of committing suicide.”

“Do!”

“But first I must have some dinner—I’m starving to death!”

“Very well—I’m hungry myself.”

“And afterwards—I must kiss you.”

“No!”

“Yes. Just behind your left ear.”

“What an idea!”

“We’ll take a taxi and do a whirl about the city among the rain and puddles.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

A sudden fury possessed him. He stood still.

“Don’t be so damned reasonable! Only death is reasonable.”

He saw Sara looking at him with fright, as if she saw something horrible in his face. What did she see? A sharp green-lit vision of him hanging from a gas fixture?… A torrent of grief seemed to be released within him, he felt a quickening sensation in his tear-ducts; and, tightly clasping Sara’s forearm with his hand, he started walking again.