The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

SPIDER, SPIDER

Just as he allowed himself to sink gloomily into the deep brown leather chair by the fireplace, reflecting, “Here I am again, confound it—why do I come here?”—she came swishing into the room, rising, as she always did, curiously high on her toes. She was smiling delightedly, almost voraciously; the silver scarf suited enchantingly her pale Botticelli face.

“How nice of you to come, Harry!” she said.

“How nice of you to ask me, Gertrude!”

“Nice of me?… Not a bit of it. Self-indulgent.”

“Well—!”

“Well.”

She sat down, crossing her knees self-consciously; self-consciously she allowed the scarf to slip halfway down her arms. It was curious, the way she had of looking at him: as if she would like to eat him—curious and disturbing. She reminded him of the wolf grandmother in “Little Red Riding Hood.” She was always smiling at him in this odd, greedy manner—showing her sharp, faultless teeth, her eyes incredibly and hungrily bright. It was her way—wasn’t it?—of letting him know that she took an interest, a deep interest, in him. And why on earth shouldn’t she, as the widow of his best friend?

“Well,” she again repeated, “and have you seen May lately?” She gave him this time a slower smile, a smile just a little restrained; a smile, as it were, of friendly inquisition. As he hesitated, in the face of this abrupt attack (an attack which was familiar between them, and which she had expected and desired), she added, with obvious insincerity, an insincerity which was candidly conscious: “Not that I want to pry into your personal affairs!”

“Oh, not in the least.… I saw her last night.”

“Where? At her apartment?”

“How sly you are!… Yes, after dinner. We dined at the Raleigh, and had a dance or two. Good Lord, how I hate these fox-trots!… Then went back and played the phonograph. She had some new Beethoven.… Lovely stuff.”

“Was it?”

She lowered her lids at him—it was her basilisk expression. As he met it, tentatively smiling, he experienced a glow of pleasure. What a relief it was to sink comfortably into this intimacy! to submit to this searching, and yet somehow so reassuring, invasion! He knew this was only the beginning, and that she would go on. She would spare nothing. She was determined to get at the bottom of things. She would drag out every detail. And this was precisely what he wanted her to do—it was precisely for this that he felt a delighted apprehension.

“And I suppose,” she continued, “she told you about our lunch together? For of course she tells you everything.”

“Not everything, no. But she did mention it.… As a matter of fact, she was rather guarded about it. You didn’t hurt her feelings in some way—did you?”

There was a pause. The fire gave a muffled sap-explosion, a soft explosion muffled in ashes; and they looked at each other for rather a long time with eyes fixedly and unwaveringly friendly. She smiled again, she smiled still, and began drawing the sheer bright scarf to and fro across her shoulders, slowly and luxuriatingly. She was devilish attractive; but decidedly less attractive than devilish. Or was this to do her an injustice? For she was honest—oh, yes, she was appallingly honest; always so brutally outspoken, and so keenly interested in his welfare.

“If I did, I didn’t mean to,” she murmured, letting her eyes drop. “Or did I mean to?… Perhaps I did, Harry.”

“I thought perhaps you did.… Why did you want to?”

“Why?… I don’t know. Women do these things, you know.”

“You don’t like her.”

Hesitating, she threw back her fair head against her clasped hands.

“I like her,” she said slowly, and with an air of deliberation, “but I find it so hard to make out who she is, Harry. I wish she weren’t so reserved with me. She never tells me anything. Not a blessed thing. Heaven knows I’ve tried hard enough to make a friend of her—haven’t I?—but I always feel that she’s keeping me at a distance, playing a sort of game with me. I never feel that she’s natural with me. Never.”

He took out a cigarette, smoothed it between his fingers, and lit it.

“I see,” he said. “And what was it you said that could have hurt her?”

“What was it?… Oh, I don’t know, I suppose it was what I said about her way of laughing. I said I thought it was too controlled—that if she weren’t just playing the part of a polite and innocent young lady she would let herself go. You know it’s not natural, Harry. And she seemed to think that was my insidious way of accusing her of hypocrisy.”

“Which it was.”

“Well—was it?… Perhaps it was.”

“Of course it was.… Confound it, Gertrude—what did you want to do that for? You know she’s horribly sensitive. And I don’t see how you think that kind of thing will make her like you!”

He felt himself frowning as he looked at her. She was swinging her crossed knee. She was looking back at him honestly—oh, so very honestly—her long green eyes so wide open with candor—and yet, as he always did, he couldn’t help feeling that she was very deep. She was kind to him, she was forever thinking of his interests, first and foremost; and yet, just the same—

“It was just a moment of exasperation, that was all.… Hang it, Harry! It infuriates me to think that she’s playing that sort of game with you. You’re too nice, and too guileless, to have that sort of thing done to you.”

Smiling—smiling—smiling. That serpentine Botticelli smile, which had something timid in it, and something wistful, but also something intensely cruel.

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“But I do worry about you! Why shouldn’t I worry about you?… Good Lord! If I didn’t, who would?… I’m perfectly sure May doesn’t.”

She emphasized this bitter remark by getting up; moving, with that funny long stride of hers (which was somehow so much too long for her length of leg), to the fireplace. She took a cigarette from the filigree silver box on the mantelpiece and lifted it to her mouth. But then she changed her mind and flung the cigarette violently into the fire.

“Hang it,” she said, “what do I want a cigarette for?… I don’t want a cigarette.”

She stood with one slipper on the fender, staring downward into the flames. It was odd, the effect she produced upon him: a tangle of obscure feelings in conflict. There were moments, he was sure, when he thoroughly detested her. She had the restlessness of a caged animal—feline, and voluptuous, and merciless. She wanted to protect him, did she, from that “designing” May? But she also, patently, wanted to devour him. Designing May! Good heavens! Think of considering poor May, poor ingenuous May, designing! Could anything be more utterly fantastic? He saw May as he had seen her the night before. She had been angelic—simply angelic. The way she had of looking up at him as if from the very bottom of her soul—while her exquisitely sensitive and gentle face wavered to one side and downward under the earnestness of his own gaze! No, he had never in his life met anyone who loved so simply and deeply and all-surrenderingly, or with so little arrière pensée. She was as transparent as a child, and as helpless. She gave one her heart as innocently as a child might give one a flower. Gertrude could, and would, torture her unrelentingly. Gertrude would riddle her—Gertrude would tear her to pieces—with that special gleaming cruelty which the sophisticated reserve for the unsophisticated. And none the less, as usual, he felt himself to be powerfully and richly attracted and stimulated by Gertrude—by her fierceness, her intensity, the stealthy, wolflike eagerness which animated her every movement. He watched her, and was fascinated. If he gave her the least chance, wouldn’t she simply gobble him up, physically and spiritually? Or was he, perhaps, mistaken—and was all this merely a surface appearance, a manner without meaning?

“No, I can’t make it out,” he said, sighing. He relaxed, with a warm feeling of comfort, and happiness, as if a kind of spell, luxurious and narcotic, were being exerted over him. “She isn’t at all what you think she is—if you really do think she is.… She’s as simple as a—primrose. And in spite of her self-centeredness, she is fundamentally unselfish in her love of me. I’m convinced of that.”

“My dear Harry!… You know nothing about women.”

“Don’t I?”

“A primrose!…”

She laughed gently, insinuatingly, lingeringly, derisively, as she looked downward at him from the mantelpiece. She was delighted, and her frank delight charmed him. How she ate up that unfortunate, that highly unfortunate, primrose! She was murderous; but he couldn’t help feeling that she had made something truly exquisite of murder—as instinctive and graceful as a lyric.

“A primrose!” she repeated gaily. “But, of course, I see what you mean. You are sweet, Harry. But your beautiful tenderness deserved something better. She has, I know, an engaging naïveté of appearance and manner. But surely you aren’t so innocent as to suppose that it isn’t practiced? Are you?”

“Yes and no. Of course, what one calls a manner is always, to some extent, practiced. But if you mean she is insincere with me, no. She is perfectly sincere. Good heavens, Gertrude, have I got to tell you again that she’s in love with me—frightfully in love—as I am with her? One can’t fake love, you know. And what on earth would she want to fake it for—assuming that she could?”

“That’s easy enough. She wants your money. She wants your prestige. She wants your social position—such as it is. She’d give her eye-teeth to be married to you, whether she loved you or not.”

How sharply she pronounced the word “teeth,” and with what a brightening and widening of her incomparable eyes! Really, she ought to be in a zoo. She reminded him of that leopard he had seen the other day, when he had gone with his two little nieces to the Bronx. He had sat there, in his cage, so immobile, so powerful, so still, so burning with energy in his spotted brightness; and then, without the smallest change of expression, he had uttered that indescribably far-away and ethereal little cry of nostalgic yearning, his slit eyes fixed mournfully on Alison. Good heavens—it had curdled his blood! For all its smallness and faintness and gentleness, it had been a sound of magnificent power, a prayer of supernal depth and force. Wasn’t Gertrude’s magic of exactly the same sort? It was in everything she did. She was not beautiful, precisely—she was too abrupt, too forceful, too sharp, for that. Despite her grace, and the undeniable witch-charm of her face, her intensity gave her whole bearing an odd angularity and feverishness. He even felt, occasionally, that she might some day, all of a sudden, go quite mad. Stiff, stark, staring mad. Lycanthropy? For certainly it wouldn’t surprise one to hear her howl like a wolf. And this animal madness in her spirit was a part of, if not the very base of, her extraordinary power to fascinate. One followed her queer evolutions as if hypnotized. If she entered a room, one looked at no one else. If she left a room, one felt as if one’s reason for being there had gone.

“I wish I could make you see her properly,” he mourned, stretching out his legs toward the fire.

“Go ahead!… Try.”

“But what’s the use? You seem determined—for whatever reason—not to see her.”

“Not in the least. I’d like to believe you—I’d like nothing better.”

“Women will never, never, never do justice to those members of their own sex who attract men in the perfectly natural way that May does. Of course she attracts men—and of course she knows it. How could she help it? Can the crocus help it if the sparrow wants to tear her to pieces? It’s not a trick or a falsity in her. She’s as naturally affectionate, and as guileless in her affections, and as undiscriminating, I might add, as a child of six. And one can see, with a little divination, that she has been painfully hurt, over and over again, by this habit of hers of wearing her heart on her sleeve. She gives her soul away forty times a day, just out of sheer generosity, just because she has such a capacity for love; and she is rewarded by a suspicious world with jeers and mud. That’s always the way it is. The counterfeit makes its way. And the genuine is spat upon.”

“How tactful you are to me!”

“Aren’t I!”

“I distrust, profoundly, that madonna type. Really, my dear Harry, it’s too easy.”

“You couldn’t do it!”

“No, thank God, and I don’t want to. I’d rather be honest.”

They were silent, and in the pause the black marble clock on the mantel struck the half-hour. Gertrude’s face had become smooth and enigmatic. Abstractedly, she gazed down at her gray-slippered foot, turning it this way and that to make the diamonded buckle sparkle in the firelight. What was she thinking about? What was she feeling? What waxen puppets was she melting in the powerful heat of her imagination? He waited for her next move with an anticipation which was as pleased as it was blind. One never knew where Gertrude would come up next. But one always felt sure that when she came up she would come up with the sharp knife in her mouth and the fresh pearl in her hand.

“I have the feeling that she wouldn’t even be above blackmail. Or a breach-of-promise suit. I hope you don’t write her incriminating letters!”

“Oh, damn!”

“But go ahead with your charming portrait, your pretty Greuze portrait. I’ll really do my best to be credulous.”

“My dear Gertrude, if you could have seen her in that wood, last week, looking for Mayflowers under the dead leaves!…”

It was hopeless, perfectly hopeless, in the light of that baleful smile! He wanted to shut his eyes. It was like trying to sleep under a spotlight. Was there no refuge for poor May?… For it had been enchanting—enchanting. He had never expected again, in this life, to encounter a human spirit of such simplicity and gaiety and radiant innocence. That moment, now forever immortal in his memory, when he had found a nest of blossom among the brown pine-needles, and she had come galloping—positively galloping—toward him, with a dead oak branch in her hand! And the pure ecstasy of her young delight as she stared at the flowers, bending over and putting one hand lightly on his arm!

Gertrude collapsed into her chair, helpless with amusement; giving herself up to her laughter, she made him feel suddenly ashamed of that remembered delight.

“Oh—oh—oh—oh!” she cried.

“Well!”

“The shy arbutus!… Forgive me, Harry, but that’s too funny. How old are you?”

He flung his cigarette at the back-log and grinned.

“I knew it was no use,” he grumbled amiably. “I can’t make you see her, and it’s no use trying.”

“Well—I can see this much. You are in love with her. Or you couldn’t possibly be such a fool. But it’s precisely when you’re in love that you need to keep your wits about you. Or the wits of your friends.… You mustn’t marry her, Harry.”

“Well—I don’t know.”

“No!… It would be ruinous.”

“Would it? How can you be so sure?”

“You think, I suppose, that life would be insupportable without her.”

“An agony that I can’t bear to think of. And to think that some other man—!”

“I know the feeling. I’ve been in love myself.”

“It’s pretty bad.”

“Of course it is. Ever time. But that doesn’t prove anything. Not a single thing. That sort of agony is largely imagination.… Do you really think you’ll marry her?”

“Well—I haven’t exactly asked her to. But I shouldn’t wonder if I would.”

It was queer—he felt, and quite definitely, that he had said this to her as if challengingly, as if to see how she would react to it—as if, almost, he hoped to force her to some spectacular action. He smiled lazily to himself, his eyes glazed by the firelight.

She jumped up again, electric, her scarf slipping to the floor.

“Let’s have some sherry!” she said. “Would you like to get it?—in the dining room. You know where it is.”

“Good idea.”

He stopped to pick up her scarf, accidentally touching her silken instep as he did so. She stood unmoving. Funny—he had the impression that she was shivering. Cold?… Excitement?… He wondered, idly, as he crossed the library to fetch the sherry decanter; and he came back with the tray, still wondering, but wondering with a pleasant confusedness. He began humming a theme from Opus 115.

“You know, those late Beethoven things are wonderful—wonderful.” He put down the tray and removed the stopper from the decanter. “The purity of the absolute. For pure and continuous ecstasy—”

“Purity!… You seem to have purity on the brain.… Thanks, Harry.”

“Here’s looking at you.… Old times.”

“Old times.”

They sipped at the lightly held glasses and smiled.

“I wish,” she then said, in a tone that struck him as new and a little forced—as if, in fact, she were nerving herself to something—“that you’d do me a favor.”

“You bet.”

“If I thought there was any way in which I could save you, Harry—any way at all—I’d do it. Anything. And if ever you feel yourself on the brink of proposing to her—or if anything goes wrong—I mean, if she should let you down in any way, or not turn out what you thought—well, then, I wish you’d propose to me. Propose to me first.… Come to Bermuda with me. That’s what I mean.”

She drew her feet beneath her, in the chair, and smiled at him brightly but nervously.

“Heavens, Gertrude, how you do astonish me!”

“Do I?… I’ve always, in a funny sort of way, been in love with you, you know.”

“Well—since you mention it—I’ve had my moments with you.”

“Was one of them two years ago in Portsmouth?…”

“How did you know?”

“Do you think a woman doesn’t guess these things?… I not only knew but I also knew that you knew that I knew.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

He sighed, he smiled foolishly, and for the moment he felt that he didn’t quite dare to meet her eyes. He remembered that ride in Tommy’s old Packard, and how she had so obviously leaned her shoulder against him; and afterwards, when they were looking at the etchings in the Palfrey House, how she had kept detaching him from the others, calling to him to come and look at this or that picture, and standing, as he did so, so very close to him. The temptation had been very sharp, very exciting; but nevertheless he had run away from it, precipitately, the next day.

“You do alarm me,” he added weakly. “And, in this age of withering candor, I don’t see why I shouldn’t admit that the idea is frightfully nice. But it hardly seems quite fair to May.”

“Oh, bother May!… May can perfectly well look after herself—don’t you worry about May.… What I’m thinking of is what is fair to you.”

“How angelic of you!”

“Not a bit. It’s selfish of me. Deeply. Why not be perfectly frank about these things? I don’t believe in muddling along with a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions.… It’s unfair to May; but what I feel is that it’s only by that kind of treachery to May that you can ever escape from her. I don’t say you would escape from her—but you might. And for your own sake you should.… Quite incidentally, of course, you’d make me very happy.”

“If it weren’t for May, it would make me very happy too. But you won’t mind my saying that this May thing is very different. I’m in love with her in an extraordinary way—a way that I can’t find any adequate symbol for.… Call it the shy arbutus, if you like.”

“Oh, damn you and your shy arbutus!”

She sprang up, flung her scarf angrily into the chair, and went swiftly across the room to the desk. She put down her sherry glass beside the brass candlestick (made in the likeness of a griffin), revolved it once or twice between thumb and finger, and then picked it up again, turning back toward the fireplace. He twisted himself about in his chair so as to watch her. She stood looking at him, with her fair head flung back and the glass held before her. She was looking at him in an extraordinary manner—as if, in some remote, chemical way, she were assaying him, wondering which catalyzer to try next. Melodrama? Tenderness? Persuasion? Aloofness?… She hesitated. He felt sure, for an instant, that she was going to come and perch herself on the arm of his chair, and perhaps even put her arm round his neck. And he wasn’t sure that he would so very much mind it. Mightn’t it—even—be the beginning of the end? The notion both horrified and pleased him. Perhaps this was exactly what he had hoped for? It would be very easy—in these circumstances—to forget May. It was positively as if she were being drawn away from him. Gertrude would kiss him; and the kiss would be a spider’s kiss; it would numb him into forgetfulness. She would wrap him up in the soft silk of oblivion, paralyze him with the narcotic, insidious poison of her love. And May—what would May be to him then? Nothing. The faintest and farthest off of recollected whispers; a sigh, or the bursting of a bubble, worlds away. Once he had betrayed her, he would be free of her. Good Lord—how horrible!… The whole thing became suddenly, with a profound shock, a reality again.

She came back toward him, tentatively, with slow steps, slow and long and lagging, as if, catlike, she were feeling the rug with her claws. She held her head a little on one side and her eyes were narrowed with a kind of doubting affection. When she stood close to his chair she thrust the fingers of her right hand quickly into his hair, gave it a gentle pull, and then, as quickly withdrawing, went to the fender. He smiled at her during this action, but she gave him no smile in answer.

“Shall we turn on the radio”—she said lightly—“and have a little jazz?”

“If you like.… No—let’s not. This is too interesting.”

“Interesting!… Ho, ho!”

“Well, it is, Gertrude.”

“So, I dare say, is—hell.”

“Oh, come now—it isn’t as bad as that.”

“But what further is there to say? It’s finished.”

“But is it?”

“That, my dear, dear Harry, is for you to say; and you’ve as good as said so, haven’t you? You’ve been awfully nice about it.”

He felt a little awkward—he felt that in a way she was taking an unfair advantage of him. And yet he couldn’t see exactly how. He sat up straight in his chair, with his hands on his knees, frowning and smiling.

“If you could only like May!” he murmured. “If you could only see in her what I see in her—her amazing spiritual beauty! Then, I’m sure—”

“Give me some more sherry, Harry—I’m cold. And my scarf.”

“Why, you’re shivering!”

“Yes, I’m shivering. And my aged teeth are chattering. And my pulse is both high and erratic. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

She smiled at him bitterly and coldly as he picked up the silver scarf from the chair; but the smile became really challenging as he held up the scarf for her turning shoulder. It became brilliant. It became beautiful. He allowed his hands to rest on her shoulders and looked at her intently, feeling for her a sudden wave of tenderness and pity, and of something else as well.

“The sherry!” she said, mocking.

“All right—I’ll get it.”

“Well—get it.”

He inclined his face and gave her a quick kiss—and then another—at which she made no protest and no retreat; and then turned away, dropping his hands.

“And now let’s have some jazz,” she cried, as he filled her glass from the decanter. “I feel like dancing.…”

“The devil you do!” he said.

She emptied her glass, and turned her back to put it on the mantelpiece. She did this quite simply, without any sort of self-consciousness; there was nothing histrionic in the gesture; it was the entire naturalness of the action that made it, somehow, heart-breaking. And instantly he moved to her and touched her arm, just above the elbow, with his hand. She began trembling when she felt his touch, but she did not turn. And as he felt her trembling it was as if, also, he felt in himself the tiny beginning tremor of a great disaster. He was going to embrace her—he was going to give himself up. And May, stooping for arbutus in the wood, became remote, was swept off into the ultimate, into the infinite, into the forgotten. May was at last definitely lost—May was dead. He experienced a pang, as of some small spring broken in his heart, painful but obscure; the dropping of a single white petal; and that—for the moment—was all.

For the moment!… He hesitated, looking down at the copper-gold convolutions of Gertrude’s hair, and at the fair round neck still so beautifully young. He had the queer feeling that this hair and this neck were expectant. They were waiting, waiting consciously, to be touched. They were waiting for him to perform this act of treachery, they were offering to reward him for it, to reward him with oblivion. But was that oblivion going to be perfect? Would May be forgotten? Could May be forgotten?… Good God—how horrible! He closed his eyes to the chaos and terror of the future; to the spiritual deaths of himself and May; the betrayal and the agony.… And then he felt himself beginning to smile; while with his finger and thumb, he gently tweaked a tiny golden watch-spring of hair which curled against the nape of the white neck.