The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

A MAN ALONE AT LUNCH

Four-tined the silver-plated fork, and the glass-covered table, and the folded paper napkin, crinkled and fresh and flimsy, and a small saucer containing seven prunes of doubtful purple, and the small paper cup, with fluted sides and flanged edge, heavy with its little burden of water, and already beginning to be soggy and sodden like a little bladder; and then the larger dish, oval in shape, of heavy lusterless ware, with its remnant of four slivers of dull-fried potato.… Trays clanged, trays clashed, a butter dish chirruped falling to the mosaic floor of imitation marble, and at the counter, where the listless crowd waited, the ritual of repeated orders punctuated his thought: spaghetti special, and then farther off, spaghetti special; fried scallops medium, and then again fried scallops medium; ham and, and then again, ham and.… The lunch would be forty cents. Breakfast had been twenty. Dinner would be about sixty. A dollar and twenty cents a day; eight dollars and forty cents a week. Hell to be poor. And this week, the electric-light bill to pay; not very much, probably not more than half a dollar. Laundry, a dollar and five cents; he hadn’t sent any pajamas. Ready tomorrow. And his shoes, resoled, ready on Friday. That would be an unexpected three dollars; but it wouldn’t happen often. God. And then the doctor’s bill, which was imminent. If only he had had the courage to say he was hard up, or to ask for a delay. Damn. Hard to do, though. Osgood would have been surprised, maybe a little incredulous. For there had never been any hint of poverty before.… “Would you mind if I take a few months in paying your bill, Doctor Osgood? I’m a little hard up.…” While he was lying on the examination table, belly downward, he had thought of saying it; with his chin on his folded arms. But instead he had just looked out of the window at the sunlit house-front opposite. An old lady was putting a pot of ferns in a window; probably had been watering them. Almost all the houses in that neighborhood were inhabited by doctors.… “Now if you’ll just push downward, Mr. Metcalf—and then relax—” Pleasantly embarrassing to have the girl assistant there.… “Take a look at this, Miss Paul—you see there’s a little discharge there? Very slight. The kind of thing that might easily, for a long time, escape attention.…” Spaghetti special—that’s three to come. Spaghetti special—three on.… And now an operation. Good God. How was it to be managed? Borrow from Bill. No. From Harry. From Cousin Lucy. No. Too humiliating. And just at this time, too, when Elizabeth was—

He shifted in his chair, to ease the pain, and then leaned forward on his elbows. Prune pits contained prussic acid, did they? like peach pits and apricots? Bitter. If only one could buy prussic acid. Instantaneous. That story of the dog, head and tail guillotined simultaneously, and traces of the acid discovered in the tip of the tail. Just a spasm, a single thrash, and it was all over. Or gas—but nowadays gas was hard to find. What was the use of living, when one had begun to reach the age of incipient decrepitude, when the machine was beginning to break down? In innumerable ways, too. Eyesight failing. Teeth decaying. One long unceasing warfare against this slow, remorseless encroachment of piecemeal death. No energy for the facing of all the problems. Tired even in the morning; having to lean against the washbowl while he shaved. And only a spurious and temporary feeling of well-being after the cold bath. God. How did people do it? What made them want to go on? Success, perhaps; if one were successful, made lots of money, had a car, could go to all the shows, live comfortably, happily, travel about the world whenever one liked—marry the girl one loved—make her happy—live over again in the lives of one’s children.… Sunlight and beds of tulips in the spring. Gay voices, or voices that were just assured. The even tenor of their ways. Or like the other night at the Rankins’, when he had helped Jim carry the radio across the lawn in the moonlight, and Sibyl had danced in the moonlight beside them, while the absurd machine went on pouring out music. Uncanny. And the deep masculine voice suddenly coming out of it; as if it were a coffin, and the corpse had suddenly come to life and sat up between them, speaking. It was like that. What had Sibyl and Jim done to deserve happiness? Nothing. And there they were, with everything they wanted. Two charming children, and a lovely house, and maids, and a car, lots of friends, music every night; opera cloaks and evening dress; and Taormina as familiar as Yonkers. Lucky devils—he had felt a deep deep pang of misery. A poor acquaintance, shabby, haunting the fringe of their life, apologetic for his presence; and having always to be considered. They didn’t ask him to come along on their motor trips because they knew he couldn’t afford it. God. And he was always so tired when he went there, in the evening, that he was dull. They were beginning to feel it. He couldn’t go so often; they were insensibly and inevitably drifting apart. Sibyl looked at him pityingly. As if to say, “Poor Jerry—what’s the use? why don’t you give it up?…” He would have to, sooner or later. Sink to a lower level, haunt the byways, keep himself out of sight. Hell to be poor. The cuffs of his trousers were worn out, he had dreamed about them, his collars were all beginning to look shabby, his neckties were all old and stained, the Chinese laundry had lost one of his handkerchiefs. And now Jenkins was giving him less work to do, just when he needed it most, just when Elizabeth—

How lovely, lovely she had looked, as she came toward him through the falling snow under her red umbrella, with the pale rosy light over her half-veiled face! “Shame on you, Jerry!” she had said—“Where are your galoshes?” He was ashamed to tell her that they were worn out and that he couldn’t afford a new pair. How lovely she had looked! He would always remember that. Everything had gone just right that morning. It all went to show how much luck there was in such things, how much a mere series of tiny accidents can mold one’s destiny. A rainy day, after a long unbroken chain of days of sunshine, and everything has a new quality; a new background is provided, and one’s beloved has a new beauty. Or you misread comically a sign in a drugstore window, as you walk to meet her, and that’s something delicious to tell her about. “Endearments” for “Enlargements”! And there had been Basil’s letter to tell her about, and the meeting with the old perpetual-motion crank in the waiting station, and the funny dream about the cats. All these things were accidents—they might not have happened at all—and their love would have been just so much the poorer. Might not love fade away entirely, but for just such surprises provided by destiny? Best of all had been the miracle of the snow, and her astonishing newness under the red umbrella. Good Lord, how lovely she had looked: the red umbrella under the softly falling windless snow, her soundless approach through the deep virginal whiteness of it on the sidewalk, and the rosy light on her enchanting face, her face which, he had felt, must be cool to the touch! Ecstasy. The whole thing had deepened at a breath, the wonder had become more wonderful, the exquisite silence about them had become infinitely suggestive. How was it possible to see such happiness before one, and yet be balked in one’s effort to grasp it?… Drop two on, sang the voice at the counter; then another voice, farther off, intoned it again, drop two on. And now just when Schmidt reappeared, with that hypocritical dark power of his, that curious half-hypnotic power of his over her soul, which so enslaved and weakened her—just when she needed him most, when he would have to fight for her as he had never fought before, to liberate her from this sinister and horrible shadow in her past life—just now, to have all this.… God. He was a weakling. He was a failure, unable to make money, unable to pay off that debt of hers, unable to open vistas for her of the alluring kind that Schmidt could open, unable even to come forward as a healthy man, ready at least to make a fight of it. She would slip back, slip away from him, succumb once again to Schmidt’s cheap melodramatics and hypocritical violences, his passionate energy, his wealth. The whole terrible thing would happen over again. What was it that had given the thing so frightful a hold upon her? The sense of guilt, the fact that they had both of them been conscience-torn—if one could really believe that Schmidt had had any conscience about it? The fact that the whole dark passion had been so shot with agonies—with violent separations, wrenchings apart, when their religious scruples had come uppermost—and with reunions, when the separations had become unbearable, no less violent? Was it the sense of sin that made the thing so ineradicably and appallingly moving for her? Was it truly possible for her ever to love again, to love innocently, with anything like such a complete and terrible surrender of her soul?… Schmidt. Schmidt. Schmidt. Schmidt.… Her whole consciousness was inundated with him. She dreamed about him nightly. She was afraid of him—deeply afraid of him. She hated him—she said she hated him—but wasn’t this hate merely a temporarily dislocated passion for him, a passion from which she could never escape? That monstrous hypocritical image was stamped, burned, scorched into her soul. She was Schmidt; she was his creation. He had taken sovereign command of her; soul and body. She spoke with his accent, she thought as he had taught her to think, she still wore the clothes which he had selected for her—his watch, his ring, his earrings. It was impossible for her to loose herself from him; everything about her, every visible trace of her conscious life, even this environment, was associated with him. The hotels where they had gone for week-ends. The restaurants where they had dined together. Thursdays, when he had always driven in to town to meet her. Thursday would always be a clandestine day for her; it would always, world without end, seem sinister and passionate to her. And that street, and that boarding house, where she had lived for two years, and where for two years he had come secretly to see her … that too was perpetually in her consciousness, with everything that had happened there, all the endearments, the caresses, the terrible intimacies which were both guilty and divine. All this was in her mind, scarcely as yet overlaid at all; and when she kissed him, Jerry, it poisoned the kiss for both of them, engulfed them both in its dreadful hypnotic shadow, sundering them with a feeling of hopelessness and impotence, as if they could never, through that shadow, touch one another’s hands and hearts. God. And now, just as they were beginning to be happy, to find some sort of gaiety of approach, here was Schmidt come back again, and here was this operation to be gone through, and his job slipping away from him.… God. God. God. God.

To get away.… To get away.… To run, to fly, to take a fast train, to be whirled off with the speed of thought, farther than the Horn, farther than dream could compass. To be a dead leaf, dashed out into space, among the constellations—beyond the Pole Star and the Bear, beyond the uttermost sun, into the freezing Nothing of Nescience. Our Father, Which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy … In Ronda, for example. If they could only get to Ronda, the two of them, with enough money to live there. Far, far away. In that little blue-plastered villa on the mountain slope below the town, surrounded by olive orchards and orchards of peaches and almond orchards and the white-blossoming cherries. And the river winding across the vega, dashing down among boulders toward the chasm, the sonorous deep gorge of virgin rock, with its caves and cold springs, and the kestrels sailing, brown-winged, from ledge to ledge, and the wild pigeons nesting among the prickly pear. In that blue-walled villa, with the red pan-tiled roof, and the tall grass coming to the door, and dwarf poppies among the olive trees, and quicksilver lizards darting in and out of the tangles of vetch. Elizabeth and himself sitting in the sparse shade of an olive tree, reading together, talking, or simply musing—all these anguishes forgotten, all of it engulfed soundlessly and tracelessly in the past.… Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done … And the goats with bells, going up the rocky slope toward the walled cemetery, and the donkeys with bells filing down the rubble path to the mill in the gorge, their baskets heavy with wheat, the small boy running after them with an olive switch, shouting bur-r-r-r-r-o, and flinging a fragment of Moorish masonry to turn the leader from left to right.… As it is in Heaven. Give us, this day … Everywhere, on every side, that inviolable and infinite stillness, the mountain stillness, desolate stillness of water and living rock, stillness in which bells could be heard for miles, across the valley, and the harsh caterwauling of the peacocks from the pine-hidden hill beyond the river, and the cry of the pair of great eagles that circled at evening from edge to edge of the gaunt amphitheater of the stony valley. In this stillness they would find peace; among the sharp aromatic smells of the mountain herbs they would find comfort; strolling up the rocky slope at dusk to enter the little town and walk in the idle crowds that filled the white-walled streets. And then a café, the marble-topped table, coffee and aguardiente, the little liqueur glasses standing in puddled saucers, the tasseled bottles, the enameled mirrors with their absurd pictures of the gypsy Cordobesita.… And the lottery-ticket sellers, the patient old women with charming smiles, holding out their strips of lottery tickets.… For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen.…

Spanish omelette, sang the voice at the counter, and farther off the other voice intoned a fainter Spanish omelette, and the busboy flung the coarse dishes harshly upon a tray. Forty cents. Ten cents for carfare, and ten for a new pair of shoelaces. He must arrange to have his mail forwarded to the hospital. Telephone Elizabeth.… And find out, by means of a guarded question, whether she had yet seen Schmidt.