The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

I LOVE YOU VERY DEARLY

My darling, you’ll be surprised to hear from me, to see an envelope addressed to you in your father’s indecipherable, rheumatic handwriting—and perhaps it will surprise you to see that it comes from Paris. You probably thought you were at last through with Pauper after that revolting scene last year. But you know the old saying about the bad penny. You can’t keep a bad man down. The truth is that I love you far too much to let you go out of my life like that, for no good reason at all. Even if we did quarrel, and even if it became obvious that we couldn’t get on, you and Jim and I, and even if I am a Chinese egg (you know, the Chinese bury the eggs to let them ripen), that doesn’t, I hope, prevent me from taking a deep and lasting interest in you and yours. I know only too well my faults; I never was any sort of a person to live with. Your poor mother found that out before we had been married two years—she always used to say that I was the kind that never ought to have married at all. The truth is, I belong to that unhappy and ridiculous type of human being that has an artistic temperament without having any talent. I am as selfish as a guinea pig and as immoral; there’s no use denying it; I guess there isn’t a worse father in the world. I made all your lives a perpetual torment, with my eternal fussiness about meals and food and neatness, and my irascible outbursts about nothing at all. There is a sort of cruelty in me that I never was able to control. If there was a horrible smell of frying fish in the house, I simply had to break out with some violent profane remark about it. I even felt that you used to have smelts just to provoke the usual reaction—though I knew perfectly well that you did it for the sake of economy. That was how that last scene started. I was sure, somehow (with the obsessive fear of the maniac), that you had invited Warren to the house just because you knew how I hated and loathed and despised him. I argued with myself about it all that night, for I couldn’t sleep a wink, and though I could see perfectly clearly the other side of the question—I mean, that he was a friend of yours, that you liked him, and that you had a perfect right, in your own house, to invite him to dinner—nevertheless I was somehow secretly sure that you were simply doing it to annoy me, and perhaps to drive me out. I tried to smother this idea, and to behave myself, but it was no good. If I didn’t burst out about it in my usual manner, with a “Jesus Christ!” or two, then I knew that I would revenge myself on you and Jim in subtler ways and more prolongedly; so I decided to burst out. I knew I was wrong, and yet I did it. And when I had done it, nothing on earth would have made me admit that I was wrong.

Oh, well, I suppose there’s no use in digging all this up. I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to apologize with the idea of having you invite me to come back. I know as well as you do that it wouldn’t work. I just want you to realize that I blame myself for it, not you. I also realize that we were fools ever to think that we could live together, the three of us. When the children are grown up and married, it’s time for the parents to fade out of the picture—good old platitude. I thought when I went away that I could never be happy again—it seemed to me there was nothing left for me but to crawl off to a dark corner and rot. It’s no joke, beginning your life over again when you’re sixty! I felt beaten, there was nowhere I wanted to go, nothing I wanted to do. I don’t know how it was I got the idea of coming abroad; but it was the thing that saved me. The little income I have (from the block of Union Pacific which I kept) just suffices to keep me going, provided I live modestly. I have got a flat here, in a slummy corner of the city, and—this will surprise you—taken to painting! I found that I had to have something to do. When I was just out of college, before you were born or thought of, I used to have vague ambitions of that kind. Well, I bought myself a full equipment of brushes, palettes, canvases, tubes of paint, and started in. And I’m enjoying myself hugely. I know perfectly well I’m mediocre; but I’ve discovered that I can, after a fashion, paint. So now I spend my days, when it isn’t too dark, with a gaudy palette on my thumb, approved style, painting my little German model, Gretchen, or still-lives à la Van Gogh. I haven’t yet imitated his pair of deserted and disastrous boots, or his famous yellow chair, but I don’t doubt I will, before I get through. I know all the galleries like a connoisseur, go sometimes, when I’m flush, to the Opera, or to the Comique. In fact, I’m deliberately turning myself into one of those resigned and eccentric old failures, who wear shabby coats but pride themselves on their neat gloves and brilliant sticks, who haunt all the second-rate pensions of Europe, and who follow the seasons back and forth from Cairo to Scheveningen, arriving everywhere punctually with the blossoming of the cherry. As if one were a migratory bird—a swallow or a cuckoo. And I can truly say that I’m happier than I’ve ever been in all my life.

My dear Winky—my motive for writing you is a double one. In the first place, I wanted to let you know where I was, and what I was doing, and that I was alive; I wanted to make amends, if I could, for the abrupt and mannerless way in which I disappeared from Philadelphia without letting you hear a word of where I was going. For all you knew, I might have drowned myself in the Wissahickon. After I had told you at lunch that you were barbarians, and that it was impossible for a civilized being to live with you, and you had burst into tears, and when Muffet came in and saw this extraordinary scene going on, I went out, at first with the idea that I would of course come back. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was impossible. I was ashamed to face you, and at the same time I was angry. So I telephoned Margaret to pack up my things and send them to the station for me; and I asked her to say nothing about it, assuring her that I was attending to that myself. I waited at the station, and as soon as my trunk and bags came, I started off to New York. That was horrible of me—but it’s probably the kind of thing you have by this time learned to expect of your father. When you were little, I used to be cross with you for no reason, sometimes I slapped you or was harsh with you over some absurd trifle which you wouldn’t at all understand. I would be nice to you one day, go for a walk with you, and tell you fairy stories by the hour, and the next day I would be morose and avoid you as if you were a little nuisance. You learnt to regard me as the most undependable being in the whole world, one who obeyed only one law, the law of his own egoistic nature. Like your brother and your mother, you learnt that if affairs went badly with me at the insurance office, you would be punished for it; and that if I had a headache, or hadn’t slept well, the day would be ruined for the entire family. So in all likelihood you merely thought, when I vanished so unceremoniously, and without a word, that it was just the sort of thing the old crab would do. All the same, I want to tell you and Jim how sorry I am about it. In fact, I want to make a sort of final confession and apology. I regret almost everything in my whole career. I am ashamed of myself, most of all ashamed of the way in which I treated your mother. God knows I made a hash of her life.

Perhaps you’ll think all this is maudlin nonsense, and in bad taste, or that I’ve been drinking. As a matter of fact, I have—Gretchen brought in a bottle of wine for our supper, and before that I had visited the estaminet at the corner; but I assure you this makes no difference, or only to this extent, that I can speak freely what it has long been on my mind to say. I’ve wanted to get all this off my chest, to square accounts with you. The chances are a hundred to one we’ll never see each other again; I don’t expect ever to come back to America; and I don’t think you will want to see me if you should ever come to Europe. I think, in fact, that it will be better all around if we don’t meet. There would be no use in it. For this reason, I want to take my leave of you with a kind of admission of my shortcomings; at least, I want you to know that I completely realize them. My life as a husband and father was a horrible failure, and the best thing for all concerned is that I should simply drop out of your lives. I am starting over again, on a humbler scale. I am starting off, I mean, with a frank admission that I’m a misfit, a second-rater, and one whose only excuse for living—well, I thought when I began that sentence that there was some excuse, but upon my soul I can’t think of any! Is the fact that Gretchen loves me an excuse? God knows; perhaps. It is at any rate a reason why you will not want to come and see me if you ever do come to Paris. That is what I mean when I say that I am starting life over again on a different plane. Not that I mean to end my days in the gutter. But you will gather that my way of life is not that of Germantown.

My other motive for writing, darling Pops, is harder for me to speak of. It’s partly because of it that I begin as I do, with this kind of degrading and dismal confession. I want you to know that I am not preaching to you as if I were myself any sort of angel. For once, I don’t want you to think of me as a scolding father, or one who denies you the things you want, but as a good friend, who can advise you dispassionately. I am talking, you see, about this Warren affair. At the time of our quarrel, when I left, I didn’t know in the least the real significance of it; I don’t want you to think that. It is only in the last few months that I have heard what it was all about. I needn’t tell you from whom I heard it, except that it wasn’t Jim. Jim hasn’t said a word to me, hasn’t written me a line. It was someone else who wrote me, and who simply said that she thought that I, as your nearest relative, ought to know about it.

She was in the next room to yours at the Imperial, in Atlantic City, when you went there with Warren. She saw you first walking along the boardwalk—you and Warren—but luckily, as it turned out, neither of you saw her. At this time she naturally wasn’t suspecting anything, and assumed of course that Jim was with you, too. Then the same evening she opened her bedroom door to go down to dinner, and saw you and Warren just coming out of the next room. The poor lady didn’t know what to do then—she was afraid of embarrassing you—(and herself)—if she went down to the dining room; so finally she ordered her dinner sent up. And early the next morning she moved to another hotel. You see, these things can’t be concealed. It’s absolutely no use. I’ve found that out many times. Somebody will always see you; it may be a good friend who won’t gossip (like this lady, who hasn’t told a soul except myself) or it may be, and more likely, one of those good upright souls who believe in virtue, but who practice it in the singular way of inflicting the ultimate social cruelty on those who are too strong or too weak to be enslaved by the conventions. These people make me sick—they are hypocrites—at the bottom of their souls they would love to be wicked themselves—they are frequently the ones who adore telling smutty stories in mixed company, while at the same time they disapprove of any work of art which is frank in the least—and they get a kind of upside-down sexual pleasure in trampling, socially, on anyone who actually lives his unorthodoxy.… They are worms, despicable, but unfortunately you can’t leave them out of account. If X, this lady, saw you, it’s possible that some snooping Y did also, and will lose no time in spreading the exciting and delightful news in Germantown and Philadelphia.…

My dear child—I was terribly sorry to hear all this. You know there is nothing Victorian about me, and that if I urge you to take one course of action rather than another, it will not be because of conventional morals or scruples. The course of my own life is sufficient comment on that! My advice to you is, of course, to give this thing up, at once and completely; not, however, because there is anything wrong in it, but simply because it’s inexpedient. It’s the long run that counts, and in the long run it cannot possibly turn out happily. We may as well face the fact that the human animal is fickle, faithless, has a roving appetite (as regards love) and when he is tied down by marriage is always wanting to break out of the cage and go exploring. As far as the male is concerned, that is obvious enough. But I don’t think it is sufficiently realized that the female is just as subject to these wandering appetites, these desires that are, so to speak, merely of the moment, or of the season. She has them, just as much as he has. She sees a man and is attracted to him—he has certain qualities which her husband lacks, and she is prone to leap to the hasty conclusion that this is, after all, the man she was all the while looking for. Well, maybe he is, but more likely he’s not. Suppose she gives up her husband, her home, her place in society, her children (I won’t sentimentally stress this point, but I can speak from experience when I say that to lose the regard of one’s children is the worst thing that can befall one) and goes flying after this exquisite Lothario. What will happen then? The chances are at least even that before the year is out she will discover that it was just one of these momentary cravings, a whim, or even—at most—a passion; and that she will wish she had never given way to it. She will also find that other such desires will occur from time to time. Will she give way to these, too? No, my dearest little Winky, this won’t do. Stability, as she will find too late, is the only basis on which a woman can be happy. She is not fitted by nature for a wandering life. You may just now believe passionately that life without Warren is inconceivable. But don’t allow that belief to run off with you. Your real future, your only happy future, is the certain one, the one you have already launched yourself on. Make up your mind about this. Try to accept this as a kind of law, and make up your mind that these wandering appetites are going to occur to you from time to time, that they will make you momentarily unhappy, but that they can be overcome or forgotten, or temporized with, and that above all the thing for you to hang on to is your delightful home with Jim and dear little Muffet. These are the substantial things of your life—your capital, so to speak. Jim is a good fellow. I know you have had your troubles with him—there’s no marriage worth the name that hasn’t troubles. Of course, after one has been married seven years, one is no longer in love as one was at the outset. That isn’t human nature. The first ecstasy dwindles off in a year, or even in a few months. And then the arrival of the first child changes and flattens the tone of the whole business. After that, you’re married. It’s no longer a mere love affair, and it’s folly to try, as some people do, to pretend that it is. You just settle down to a mutual give-and-take, a deliberate tolerance and understanding. It’s my idea that if it were possible, each of the partners ought then to be free to have a little passade or two, if that should seem advisable. I can easily imagine two people so deeply fond of each other, so used to each other, so desirous of each other’s happiness, that they would say, ‘Now, look here—I know you’re a little bit in love with X or Y—go ahead, but be careful, don’t allow gossip to start about you. Get this thing off your mind, or heart, and don’t worry. I’ll be just as fond of you when it’s over, and I hope you’ll tell me as much about it as you feel like telling.’ Why not? There doesn’t seem to me to be anything ridiculous or impossible in that. Human nature seems to me to be capable of it; it’s only that we’ve been brought up with fantastic ideas about the nature of loyalty and its purpose. Loyalty isn’t just a matter of keeping one’s physical appetites for one person alone; it isn’t even a matter of keeping one’s emotional appetites for one person alone; it’s a deeper and simpler thing than that. It’s a desire to keep the marriage going simply as the only makeshift arrangement that will most probably promote the eventual and permanent happiness of all concerned.

Of course, I may be talking through my hat. Nobody can know better than I do how impossible it is to judge a situation like this from the outside. The intangibles, in a marital relationship, are as shadowy as they are numberless. I know only too well how, just by a step-by-step process, two excellent people can gradually reach a point where life together seems to them insupportable, and for extraordinarily little reason. They may find, one day, all of a sudden, that as a result of these tiny accretions, they hate each other. Perhaps you and Jim have reached such a point; though I must say that when I lived with you I saw no sign of it. You always seemed cheerful enough; and if you didn’t seem to have a lot to say to each other, that didn’t necessarily mean much. After all, you can’t go on talking to the same person for a lifetime with the same gusto that you shared during your courtship! But I don’t think too much importance should be attached to this. Go about a little more, take a few holidays separately, and the chances are it will take care of itself.… On the other hand, if you have got to a point where you really hate each other, or where you really hate Jim (for I gather that Jim doesn’t want you to go), then my urgent notice to you, Blinks, is to go slow, take lots of time, and think it over for at least a year before you do anything revolutionary. Whatever you do, don’t be headlong. You may regret it all your life.

This sounds pretty preacherish. It’s like those times when you used to argue with me about the use of going to school, of learning this and that and the other, and I used to take you by the hand and walk you along the river with me and scold and cajole you out of your sulks. I can remember one of those walks vividly. You were about sixteen, and you were all of a sudden terribly bored with everything—school, your home, your friends, Germantown. You wanted to be allowed to go to New York and go to work. Do you remember? Some friend of yours—Alice Whipple, I believe—had just gone there and wrote you what a fine time she was having, being perfectly independent. You were sick of restraint, you wanted to break out and start a life of your own. I can remember sitting by the water with you, somewhere, and arguing, and how by degrees we found that we had stopped arguing and instead were having a silly game of throwing pebbles into the water; and then both of us suddenly realized what a good time we were having, and how much we cared for each other. You got up and flung your arms around me and began kissing me as if it were the first time, almost as if we were lovers. I felt for you suddenly as I used to feel when you were three or four, when you used to call yourself my ‘lap-bird’ because you were so fond of sitting on my lap. My dear Winky—

That’s all I’m going to say. I want you to be happy; and all this nonsense, and this blather of confession of my own worthlessness, will be excused maybe if it helps you out.

I’m staying here for another month, and then G. and I will go to Bruges for the summer. G. hasn’t been well, and the change will do her good. She has an old friend there whom she is anxious to see—a former schoolteacher. G. will stay with her, and I shall put up at a pension. Then, at the end of the summer, we’ll come back here, d.v., and struggle through another Parisian winter, floods and all.…

Give Muffet a “scratchy” kiss from me, and my best to Jim. Goodbye, and drop a line, sometime, to your dilapidated father,

HOWARD BOND.

I love you very dearly.