The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

NO, NO, GO NOT TO LETHE

I.

This literary fellow, who was, as a matter of fact, only half literary—his real occupation being that of a teacher of English composition at the college—was named Samuel Pierce Babcock; but he always signed his name S. Pierce Babcock, and managed to have his friends call him Pierce. He disliked the name Samuel, which always seemed to him effeminate, and which in addition had been the name of his father’s brother, whom he had detested. Besides, if one had to have a trade name, for literary purposes (and he was perpetually sending out poems, articles, and stories to the magazines), he thought S. Pierce Babcock was much more distinguished than (say) Samuel Babcock. And he rather liked the “social” air of S. Pierce Babcock. He had even thought of dropping the Samuel altogether; but to tell the truth he was prevented by the thought of the formalities he might have to undergo in order to change his signature at the bank.

He lived in a boarding-house in the charming little country town, in Massachusetts, which contained the aforesaid college (the name of which we had better not mention); he had no living relatives; he was a bachelor, aged thirty-two; he knew himself to be rather charming—one of those fortunate young men who unite the virtues of athlete and philosopher; and he prided himself on his complete independence, both socially and intellectually. He picked his acquaintances carefully, kept them carefully at a distance, used them, pumped them, gave himself to them quite liberally up to a certain point, but when that point had been reached became as inscrutable as the Sphinx. He had never yet encountered a human being who was worthy of his ultimate confidence; to no one had he, as yet, ever made full confession, poured from the heart. He had, moreover, an idea that to confess oneself too readily, or too freely, was, ipso facto, to weaken oneself. Not only was it a shameful kind of self-indulgence, unworthy of a mature being; it was also a definite and horrible draining of one’s spiritual excellence, one’s virtue. And by virtue he meant a sort of magic.

For this reason, therefore, and because he wanted to maintain this excellence intact for his literary purposes (and likewise for his nocturnal explorations of the truth—a very serious occupation with him) he kept his personal relationships at a decent minimum. His contacts at the college he managed very skillfully. He was tactful, friendly, on occasion he could be quite sufficiently convivial; he prided himself somewhat on his ability (a real one) to be all things to all men; and at the end of his second year of teaching he was, if not exactly popular, at any rate well liked. He could spend an evening with cheerful cocktail drinkers and get slightly tight; he could dine with a pair of middle-aged professors and discuss Grimm’s law; or play a game of billiards with the manager and quarterback of the football team; or even, if necessary, attend a tea at the president’s house, where he made himself agreeable to the president’s wife. But if he did all these things easily, he did not do them often; and he never encouraged these acquaintances to seek him out. He became known by degrees as something of a mystery. He was respected, looked up to, and he was well aware of this; he knew that people pointed him out as that “brilliant young Babcock”; but he was determined to allow no liberties to be taken. His life—his precious and secret life—was to remain inviolably and wonderfully his own.

Just what he wanted to do with this, or make of it, he could not precisely have said. It was something as yet unformulable: it changed its shape from day to day and night to night like a cloud; at times it seemed extraordinarily near and immediate, as close and intimate as the sparrow on the window-sill; as definite as a yellow willow twig, which the rain had darkened; but at other times it was as elusive as one of those chance fragrances which awaken in one’s memory, for a flash, some poignant forgotten scene of which the poignance is all that one can recall. Nevertheless, the seeking of this thing was his business. He went deep into his soul for it, as if it were a cavern or mine and himself a miner. Whenever he picked up in his reading, or in his daily life, any sort of clue to the mystery, no matter how slight, he was at once eager to try it out; and down at once he would go into himself with this little lantern in his hand; and up again, after awhile, he would come, defeated, but none the less refreshed and none the less convinced that some day, at last, he would discover the real thing. He was developing, in fact, a keen and insatiable curiosity about every minutest facet of life. Nothing escaped him. His pleasure in merely standing at his window and looking along the street of the country town, and watching (himself unobserved) the comings and goings of his acquaintances, their little absurd manipulations of each other, and the effect of wind or weather on them, the rain on their hats, the wind blowing their skirts, the scarf that had to be removed from the cheek—all these things gave him an astonishing sense of wonder. In such things as these the secret was not far off: in these, and in the fact that he understood them. When he saw the professor of biochemistry making exactly the gesture, with his elbow, which he had foreseen, he experienced a definite intimation of immortality, and permitted himself (standing in his window) a self-conscious crow of pleasure. And this, too, he immediately understood, and did not despise. For there was nothing despicable.

And on the plane of personal relationships this business of exploration was perfectly inexhaustible. Here, indeed, was the real world: a vista of miracles as vast and interminable as the steppes and tundras of Asia, the prolific human jungles of India and China; a universe of star-fields; a soundable space which was all depth and height and fecundity. Each human creature with whom he came into contact, no matter how grazingly, was a marvel to be apprehended. He flattered himself that his tactilism was becoming an instrument of surpassing delicacy and divination: frequently, with one look, he penetrated to secrets of a personality which that personality itself might spend a lifetime in misunderstanding. And when opportunity afforded for a longer and more careful scrutiny, as with his pupils and his colleagues, he cherished with the nicest care his gradual peeling of layer after layer from the unsuspecting soul. It gave him a special ecstasy, in such cases, if, while thus reaching to the very ore-seams of another’s soul, he could maintain his own soul’s silence unbroken. An overwhelming sense of power came over him when he saw that soul’s defenses going down, one by one, under the minute blows of his searching and surgical curiosity. Gradually, day after day, he moved closer to the frightened center of that being; he drove it in, as mowers in a field, moving always nearer to the field’s middle, drive in the rabbit or the fox; until at length came the instant when the poor creature bolted; and for him, the onlooker, this was the moment of the miracle.

II.

As might be imagined, his boarding-house was an admirable source of entertainment for him, and within a year of his arrival he had discovered everything transacted within it which was of the smallest interest. In this, of course, he had to exercise a fine discretion; it would never do to permit to any of these people the seeking of an intimacy. But as a matter of fact there had been no great difficulty about this. There was something in him—it was probably the keenness of his mind, his unsleeping critical faculty—which could always be counted on to keep these simpler folk at a comfortable distance. Mrs. Holt, his landlady, was unobtrusive and businesslike; Mandell, an instructor in history, and rather a pedagogue, who at first had been somewhat inclined (being lonely) to drop in of an evening for a smoke, had been tactfully impressed with the fact that the evening was sacred to the Muse; Wright, a terrible bore, with large teeth and large ears, who worked in the local bank, had given him up on discovering in him faint traces of socialism and pacifism; and the old couple who had the room opposite his own, the Brownlees, were decently self-absorbed. What there was to know about these good people he knew. Together they constituted for him, as time went on, a kind of unified organism: he always thought of them as belonging to each other and to him and to the house. Their toothbrushes hung in the bathroom, he knew their slippers, their bathrobes, their neckties, their breakfast habits, the names of their correspondents, their views on life. Now and then there was a minor altercation, as when one or another of them used the bath too indecently long; or a breeze of jealousy or competition would momentarily set them a-shaking; and these outcroppings and cross-currents he noted with delight. But for the most part they were miracles of expectedness: they seldom any longer surprised him; and the sense of joy he extracted from living with them, which was still very real, was largely derived from the queer feeling he had of being, in a sense, the house’s consciousness. He carried the whole thing in his mind. When he lay in his bed, of a spring evening, looking out of his window at the locust tree, he felt, between the house full of human beings and himself, an almost physical identity. He could hear Mrs. Brownlee coughing, as usual, and old Brownlee thumping his shoes off, and Wright singing in the bathroom, and Mrs. Holt talking, at the back door, to the cat. Mandell was inaudible: he would be sitting, of course, at his hideous golden-oak roll-top desk, with a green visor on his noble brow, his shirtsleeves rolled up, a very masculine array of pipes scattered around him (he was one of those pedagogues who affect the minor masculine characteristics, just to prove to themselves that they are men) and a drop-lamp focused glaringly on an opened book. His room was stuffy, and always smelt a little of sweat.… And the back door was shut, Mrs. Holt’s footsteps mounted the carpeted stairs, she said a good-night to Wright, whom she encountered, the Brownlees got laboriously into bed, or Brownlee put his head out of the window and said it was a fine night, and the house came to rest; coming to rest, to all intents and purposes, in the brain of S. Pierce Babcock.

III.

In May, the Brownlees went away to California, with every intention of staying there till one or both of them died. Their departure was as casual as their arrival had been: no fuss was made about it. They had their breakfast as usual, without the slightest deviation of habit, said their goodbyes unexcitedly, and at lunch were gone. Mrs. Holt took the occasion to give the room a thorough housecleaning, and Babcock in turn took the occasion to inspect it: he had thought it might be preferable to his own. He walked in after dinner on the same evening, lighted the gas, and examined it. It had two windows, being a corner room; that was its chief advantage; but in other respects he didn’t especially like it. The wallpaper was an affair of roses on trellises, the chest of drawers was painted a bright blue, and over the large old-fashioned wooden bed hung a steel engraving of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.”

Babcock’s motive for making this careful inspection was, in truth, a double one. His intention of transferring to this room was not very serious; but it had occurred to him that here, for his study of the next occupant, was material which he could not afford to ignore. Not that there was anything of importance about the room itself, or anything remarkable in it: but simply because, such at it was, it was destined in the nature of things to be the outer shell of whatever queer individual should next occupy it. This was a fact which was important; and in making the room’s acquaintance he felt that he was already, in advance, stealing under the barriers of that unknown individual. Here was the vast varnished bed he would sleep in: he would look out of the front window at the locust tree: he would place his hair-brushes on this blue chest of drawers: his neckties would hang from this mirror, his handkerchiefs would make themselves at home in this top drawer (from which Mrs. Holt had not removed the traces of talcum powder): and every morning on waking he would see Venus standing above him on her scallop shell. Babcock smiled a kind of cerebral smile of satisfaction as he foresaw all this. He felt like an inspired interloper. When he returned to his own room, and his table littered with papers, he was several steps nearer to the Thing-in-itself.

He had not foreseen, however, the delicious extra turn of the screw which fortune was to give to his pleasure. This was the arrival and installation, in the prepared room, of a rather charming young woman, Miss Mary Anthony, who came from Burlington, Vermont. She appeared one day at lunch, was introduced, and gave every promise (Babcock thought) of becoming an unusually interesting member of the community. She was about twenty-four; rather pale and intellectual in appearance; with a fine forehead, very white, and fine gray eyes—of which the pupils were remarkably large and dark, and, in a curious way, frightened; she was shy, but smiled easily; tall and graceful; and she had not bobbed her hair. She had taken a secretarial position in the bursar’s office, and she was, it soon appeared, a college woman herself.

Babcock was surprisingly excited by all this. This was indeed a find, a prize specimen. He was not above a normal interest in the opposite sex—far from it. He was quite willing to expose himself unscathed, his independence unimpaired. He had never had a love affair, and for some peculiar reason did not especially desire one; but his relations with women were easy and pleasant, and always aroused his curiosity to an unusual degree. He wanted extremely to know what they felt, how they lived, what they thought, what sort of clothes they wore. And no such first-rate opportunity as this had ever presented itself to him. This charming young creature was simply delivered into his hands; and her shyness, her apparent fugitiveness—something a little suggestive in her of one doomed by some sort of tension to celibacy—particularly sharpened the prospect of his pleasure.

Not only this, but also he could not help noticing at once that he had, in the present situation, an extraordinary advantage. This was the fact that he alone, of the boarding-house community, was capable of arousing in Miss Anthony a reciprocal interest. Wright bored her immediately; and poor Mandell, who was as unimaginative and humorless as he was sexless, simply did not exist for her. She was nice to him, as indeed she was to everyone, but that was all.

It was for Babcock that she reserved what vibrance of response she was capable of: if, in the first few days of her stay, he had suspected this—during that period in which he was making the preliminary explorations—he was soon to become convinced of it. He could talk to her (if he chose) of the things that interested her: of Verlaine and Rimbaud and Gauguin: of James and Dostoevsky and Havelock Ellis. In fact, her interests were if anything too perilously like his own, and he discovered in this at the outset a sense of power over her of which he would have to be sparing, lest she tend to become something of a nuisance to him. It would never do to rush it. The thing must be managed with care and precision, she must be alternately stimulated and repressed; and if she showed signs of coming forward too much, or of desiring to make, of the acquaintance, more than he himself wanted to make of it, he would have to be coldly indifferent to her.

This he managed with great skill for the first three months of her stay. Clearly he had baffled her. She did not know what to make of him. He was so charming to her at breakfast, or lunch, or dinner; now and then he would really let himself go, and talk to her freely (or so it seemed); and then again, of a sudden, he would become exceedingly remote, reply to her in amiable monosyllables, allow her questions to fall unanswered, or even, on occasion, avoid her altogether by absenting himself from the boarding-house table for days at a time. If he encountered her in the street he did not, as she obviously expected, pause to say something to her, but gave her merely the stiffest of bows. He could see, at such times, how puzzled, or even hurt, she was, and how she would hurry past him more fugitive than ever. She would lower her head and check her delicious smile and try to pretend that she had not meant to be quite so friendly. But it was apparent enough that she was deeply hurt and chagrined.

IV.

In August he went to the White Mountains for a month. He had made his plans for this some time before. Even if he had not planned the expedition, however, he would now have decided on such a move: for he could see, or, to be more precise, he could feel that his affair (to give it the name) with Miss Mary Anthony was reaching an acute stage. She was clearly fascinated by him. He could not be mistaken about this: his whole consciousness had, by degrees, devoted itself to this one problem. It was the most interesting thing that was happening to him at the moment—literature and philosophy had gone by the board. Gently, slowly, delicately, insidiously, he had wormed his way through her guard; his awareness had surrounded her completely; he saw himself as a kind of psychological octopus; a vampire; taking no personal interest in her, never for a moment allowing an atom of his own feelings to become involved, he had nevertheless attached himself to her with an exhausting completeness, and had, for her, assumed an exhausting importance. He had made not the slightest move toward the putting of the acquaintance on a basis of friendship. He had never once invited her to take a walk with him, or to go to the local movie with him—he had never given her an opportunity to see him except, casually, at the table. Lunch or breakfast or dinner over, he always rose immediately and withdrew. To her tentative smiles, in the hallway or on the stairs, he replied with a smile as formal and elusive as he could make it.…

Just the same, he had made himself indispensable to her. He had only to come and seat himself opposite her at the table to feel the slight shock that went through her whole being. She became alert, she stiffened, her shyness was magnified, even the little gestures with which she ate her food became self-conscious. Studiously, she would attempt to make her conversation as general as possible, avoiding (when she could) any appearance whatever of talking rather to him than to the others. But of course she did not for a moment deceive him. He knew that she was living for him alone, and living exorbitantly for him. Not only this: he also knew that she knew that he knew this. And by degrees, thus, a very queer relationship had sprung up between them. Wright and Mrs. Holt and Mandell and old Miss Fairfield (who had recently moved into the attic room) saw nothing of this. They all accepted the acquaintance between them as of the ordinary boarding-house kind—polite, amiable, uninsistent; an affair of the table and nothing more; and if they perhaps now and then resented a shade the fact that Miss Anthony and himself occasionally took the conversation into intellectual fields, or Parnassian pastures, where they themselves could not comfortably follow, they nevertheless attached no importance to this.

Babcock, however, did. The pressure, he felt, was becoming acute. Miss Anthony had made no overt move, but he had from time to time an uneasy feeling that at any moment she might do so: she had waited, hopefully, not to say expectantly, for him to make some such move—and as he had not given a single sign of the required sort, he was increasingly certain that she contemplated some such sign herself. What form would this take? He was not sure: but he greatly enjoyed thinking about it; at the same time fearing that it might be a nuisance.

For this reason he decided that his month’s absence would be a good thing. He went off to Jackson and forgot her. Not wholly: there were days when (to tell the truth) he could not effectively banish her from his mind. She was there, like a color or stain on his consciousness, and he was forcibly reminded of the important part she was playing in his emotional life. Toward the end of his stay in the mountains this became increasingly insistent, and his energetic expeditions to Crawford Notch and Franconia, and his three ascents of Mount Washington, followed by a night in the Madison hut, did little to mitigate his odd feeling as of being in a hurry. Why should he be in a hurry? No reason at all. She meant nothing to him, nothing whatever. Or rather, she was of interest to him only as the experiment is of interest to the chemist. He was curious to see what was going to happen, and that was all. Why not admit this? He admitted it and breathed a sigh of relief, and decided to take the afternoon train back to Massachusetts.

He arrived, as it happened, too late for dinner, and accordingly his first meeting with her had to be postponed till the day following. He could see that she was in her room: there was a light there, and the light was visible in the crack beneath the door. Moreover, he knew that she had heard his arrival. He shut the door (opposite hers) rather loudly, when he came in; and not very long after this he heard her door cautiously but squeakingly open and then shut again. And fifteen minutes later this performance was repeated, and the door this time was left open. He approached his own door quietly and listened; but there wasn’t a sound.

Her little maneuver was, of course, quite obvious. He smiled to himself, fingering his lips, and began to luxuriate in the thing. There she was—he knew—sitting in the wicker rocking-chair, or perhaps standing at the blue chest of drawers pretending to tidy her hair; and she was waiting, desperately waiting, to see what he would do. She was deliberately exposing herself, deliberately inviting him to make—not the first move, since she herself had already made this—but the second. The door, he imagined, was half-open: she would not be quite so overt, or bold, as to open it wide; partly, no doubt, for fear Mrs. Holt might see it, or Mandell. Her heart was beating violently. In all probability, she hardly knew, in her confusion of emotions, what she was doing. If she was standing she would sit down and pretend to read a book.… And as he went over in his mind all these delicious possibilities, or probabilities, he began to wonder, amusedly, what might be the best step for him to take. Should he ignore the affair entirely? Perhaps that would be too cruel? It would be painful for her, it might even make her angry; which would have unpleasant consequences for him at breakfast. Besides, it would in a sense be an avoidance of a modus operandi more definitely and courageously creative. And again, he recognized quite clearly in himself a genuine desire to see her and be seen by her. But how best could this be done?…

He walked to his window and looked out at the summer evening. It was just growing dark: the street-lights were lit: a star or two was visible in the sky. It would be pleasant, for example, to go for a short walk: out to the bridge and back: which would involve an interval of twenty minutes, or less: so that presumably she would remain, for the interval, as she was, with the door open; making an excuse of the fact that the evening was warm, and that she desired through her room a current of air. But if he were to undertake this, then the second question became urgent and subtle; should he, or should he not, pause, as he went out, to speak to her?… This demanded a careful calculation. The meeting must be as casual as possible. And in view of her terrific state of tension—which he could positively feel, like a vibration in the air—it might be exceedingly difficult to manage it. Would she, for example—as seemed more than likely—presume, after the month’s interval, that the tone of their encounter should be cordial, or even intimate? It might well be that she would instinctively try to press this advantage, and shift the balance between them, well, sharply toward a confessed state (on her part, at least) of “being in love.” Could he trust himself to handle such a situation as this? With just the right mixture of friendliness and aloofness?

He decided that he could; and accordingly, taking his hat from the peg, he stood again beside the door for an instant and listened. There was still not a sound. Evidently she was not moving about—she must, as he had surmised, be reading or pretending to read; and in this case she would not immediately see him when he opened his door. He opened it quickly and stepped out.

What he saw astonished him, and took him completely off his guard. For she too was standing in her doorway—like him, with her hand on the knob—and with an unmistakable air of having stood there, in a kind of paralysis, for many minutes. Not only had she been waiting for him: she had actually, he realized, been on the point of coming to see him. Her whole attitude was alert and intense, as if she too had been listening; and when she saw him she started and was horribly embarrassed, as he was himself.

“Oh—” he said, going quickly toward her—“how do you do!”

“How do you do!”

She relinquished the doorknob and held out her hand, which was cold. At the same time she gave a curious little laugh and a shy nod of her head, looking a little to one side and downward. The gesture was oddly attractive, and suddenly made him sorry for her.

“You’re still here, I see.”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“And as for me, I’ve come back, like the prodigal son, or the bad penny.”

“Did you enjoy the mountains?…”

“Very much.”

He smiled at her, and she smiled back, biting her lip. With her hand, which she had at first dropped a little awkwardly to her side, she again grasped the doorknob, turning it slightly to and fro.

“I heard you come in,” she said, twisting sideways toward her room, as if in sudden access of shyness, “and I was wondering whether to come and say hello.”

“Oh.” Babcock swung his hat, meaninglessly. “As a matter of fact, I was just wondering the same thing—I mean, whether I would come and say hello.”

“Were you?”

She said this without any particular emphasis: though for a fraction of a second he wondered whether her intention might be ironic.

“Yes.… I was just going out for a little stroll.”

“I see.… You won’t come in?”

“Well”—he hesitated smiling—“wouldn’t you like to come out for a little?” He hadn’t wanted to say this; it sounded a shade unconvincing; so he hastened to add—“After that ghastly train ride, I’d like to stretch my legs!…”

“Yes, I’d like to. I’ll get my hat.”

“Good. I’ll be waiting downstairs.”

He went down the stairs, suddenly feeling rather frightened. The whole thing had gone wrong, appallingly wrong. What was going to happen now? Anything might happen. He walked nervously to and fro in the hallway, put on his hat and took it off again, stared at the Landseer stag over the hatrack, looked with unseeing eyes at the pile of dusty letters on the table. He could hear her moving quickly in her room—gayly, joyfully. Somehow, she had been too much for him. Was it that she had outwitted him—or was it simply that life itself was outwitting him, for once proving too subtly incalculable? Was she aware of what she was doing? No, he didn’t think so. It was simply that all of a sudden this business had fallen upon him with a stupendous force which he had not in the least foreseen. Good God—the thing might really be dangerous. It would have to be controlled at once. They would have to get back to the casual note and immediately: there wasn’t a minute to lose. But could it be done? And here was this walk, a thing he had never done before! How could he possibly counteract the effect, the obvious implications, of that? The step was already taken: there was no undoing it. And it was utterly impossible, now, to be rude about it, to treat her coldly—wasn’t it? The break in the logic would be too extreme. And impossible, also, to be explicit about it—to say, abruptly, “Look here—I don’t want you to misunderstand my motives in this … I’m not falling in love with you. Not in the least. And you had better not think so.…” No, this couldn’t be done. It was out of the question. And the more hurriedly he thought, or tried to think, of expedients, the more genuinely terrified and confused he became.…

V.

He noticed that she was flushed, when she came down the stairs toward him; and this did nothing to mitigate his uneasiness. She was excited, tremulous, and her excitement at once transmitted itself to him. He opened the screen door for her with an unexpectedly awkward gesture, a little strained—a confession of embarrassment which was very unusual with him, and which it gave him no pleasure to recognize.

“I thought—” he said, in a tone which he endeavored to make as light as possible, and at the same time somewhat cool—“we might go to the old bridge. I haven’t seen it for a whole month!”

“Five weeks, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yes—I believe it is.”

For a few minutes they walked in silence. He stole a glance at her as they passed under a street-light, and saw that she was frowning.

“I suppose,” he said, “it’s been pretty quiet here. Did you get away at all?”

“Quiet!” She lifted her face and gave a charming little laugh, quite without bitterness. “It’s been like a tomb. Literally like a tomb. Or a mausoleum—which sounds even deader. No, I didn’t get away. My people are all abroad.… And, really, there were times—”

She broke off and made a shy, quick gesture with one hand, as if the thing transcended speech.

He saw what answer was expected of him; but also saw that there was no way of avoiding it.

“Times when what—” he said somewhat brusquely.

She paused, as if getting her breath, and then said:

“When I really thought I’d go melancholy mad. Have you ever been lonely?”

“Lonely! I should say so. But to tell the truth I rather like it.”

“Then I don’t believe you know what it is.”

“Don’t I! As a matter of fact, I’ve practiced loneliness all my life. I believe in it.”

“Oh!”

An uneasiness had come between them—as if, psychologically speaking, they had fallen out of step. He had deliberately failed to follow her lead, or to allow her to follow it; and they were both aware of this. Babcock felt a kind of momentary relief. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t going to be so bad—he was keeping her at a distance. At the same time, he felt horribly conscience-stricken. He stole another glance at her—it was just as they turned the corner of the road into Langham Street, which led to the bridge—and saw that she was definitely unhappy. She had again lowered her chin into the orange scarf at her throat, and with her left hand was lifting a part of the scarf against her cheek. There was something extraordinarily pathetic about the gesture.

“Yes, you may not believe it, but I like it.”

“I don’t,” she said; and then on a lower tone, as if half to herself, she added: “Perhaps I’ve had too much of it.… Here, for example, in this funny little town—!… I don’t know what I would have done, without you.”

“Me!” Babcock’s laugh was somewhat hollow.

“Yes. Those dreadful people at the boarding-house! They’d have driven me mad.”

They had come to the bridge: at the middle of it they stopped, by tacit agreement, and rested their elbows on the hand-rail looking down at the black water. Everything was extraordinarily still. The water itself made scarcely a chuckle, the willow leaves which trailed in it were stirless, a faraway train whistle, with its mournful cry, only deepened the nocturnal peace. And suddenly it seemed to Babcock that all these things—the bridge, the river, the night, the willow trees, the profound silence—were in a subtle and terrifying way driving himself and this girl together. With a start he realized that his elbow was touching hers: and instantly he moved his arm.

“But those dreadful people—” he said deliberately and coolly—“as a matter of fact have been my chief source of entertainment. I have a passion for studying the human being at close range—it’s a habit worth cultivating. If you can do it without allowing them to infringe on you—”

She turned her head and looked at him rather intently.

“You mean to say—!”

“What?”

She averted her face from him quickly, almost angrily.

“Are you as heartless as all that? Heaven knows I don’t like them! But I don’t think I could do that.… Just what do you mean?”

“Just exactly that.… I like to surround them, so to speak, with my awareness. I like to know just what they’re doing and thinking, every minute of the day. And usually, after they’ve been there for a month or two, I flatter myself that I do …”

“I see.”

“Will you smoke?”

“No, thank you.”

Babcock struck a match. The bright flame danced before his face, and he was aware that the girl took the opportunity to look at him rather sharply.

“Well, then,” she said, “I suppose you’ve made no exception of me.”

“No.”

“How funny! How very funny! And I suppose you know all about me?”

“Well—I dare say I know a good deal.… I’ve enjoyed thinking about you—”

“Thank you—!”

“Wondering what you were up to—what you thought when you woke in the morning and looked up at the Botticelli ‘Venus,’ for example—or your blue chest of drawers—oh, all those little odds and ends that make up our lives—so many of them too complex for explicit expression. A kind of divination.”

“And all, I suppose, without the slightest feeling for me.”

“Well—why should I have?”

“And I, meanwhile, have been—in love with you! Isn’t it absurd?”

She turned and gave him a queer smile.

“I knew you were,” he said quietly. “That was one of the things that most interested me.… To tell the truth, I was deliberately experimenting with you. Why shouldn’t I be frank with you?”

“Why, indeed, since I’ve been so frank with you!”

“Exactly.”

Leaning over the hand-rail he tapped his cigarette, and the hot ash fell with a faint psst into the dark water. He smiled secretly thinking of the really unparalleled uniqueness of the situation: smiling also because he now at least felt that he had it perfectly under control. His self-consciousness was leaving him. He turned toward her more easily, urbanely. But just as he was about to speak, the girl began laughing—and laughing with such a queer recklessness that for a moment he feared she might be becoming hysterical. She stopped, however, as abruptly as she had begun.

“That really is very funny,” she said. “To think of your pacing to and fro in your little room, meditating on the comings and goings of so utterly unimportant a person as me! Did you really wonder what I thought about in the morning, when I looked up at the Botticelli ‘Venus’? or in just which one of my drawers I kept my knickers? or how often I indulged in delicious thoughts of Mr. S. Pierce Babcock?”

“I really did!”

Babcock tried to give to this statement an air of scientific detachment; but he was aware that it hadn’t quite come off.

“Well, go on and tell me some more. This simply fascinates me. Just how, for example, did you think this experiment would end?”

“You’d really like to know?”

“Of course.… You see, I’m not quite the sensitive plant you thought I was.”

A tremor in her voice just faintly belied this assertion: or was it simply that she was angry? But Babcock decided to be ruthless, and to end the thing once and for all.

“All right, I will.… Do you know the story about Dostoevsky, and the girl he had been in love with, who lived in the room next to his? He was tired of her; he began to hate her; he ignored her, let her starve; he knew, by a sort of divination—the sort I was just now speaking of—that she was in despair, and about to kill herself; and finally, one night, he actually listened to her in the process of hanging herself. He heard the chair drag across the bare floor to the gas-fixture: he heard a silence and then the sound of the chair falling over: and he stood perfectly still, giving her plenty of time to die.… A very pretty story.… Well, I wasn’t quite so ambitious! But I wanted to see just what you would do. I knew you wouldn’t kill yourself—as somebody remarked in ‘Hedda Gabler,’ ‘people don’t do such things.’ But I wondered whether my mere presence, combined with my total indifference to you, might not drive you away. And in any case, I wanted to see … That’s all.

There was a pause, during which they both stared down at the moving water. Babcock felt oddly excited: he found that he was breathing a little quickly. Before he had time to wonder why, the girl patted him twice on the shoulder, reassuringly.

“Well, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to drown myself or hang myself—‘No, no, go not to Lethe!’ To be perfectly frank with you, in my turn, I don’t quite think you’re worth it. Don’t you really think you’re one of the most revolting people you’ve ever met, and one of the unhappiest, and the blindest? But I’m sorry for you.”

“Thank you!”

“And now I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to my Botticelli ‘Venus’ and my blue chest of drawers: to give you the pleasure of wondering what I think about before I fall asleep—which I assure you I shall do without waste of time.… Good night!”

Before Babcock could say a word in answer, she had gone: the night had swallowed her up. He stared into the darkness, feeling very foolish. Good Lord—what an extraordinary thing! To run after her would be absurd—he would have to give her a sufficient start. He waited, therefore, flung his cigarette into the river, walked to the other side of the bridge and back, listened to a freight train in the distance, panting rhythmically as it tried to get under way, then lighted another cigarette and began slowly to take his way homeward. And what would happen now? She had admitted that she loved him. Had her love suddenly turned to hate? Would she cry herself to sleep? No, it was most unlikely. She was probably smiling ironically. She was despising him. Perhaps even she was planning—

The thought made him stop dead: his heart began to beat violently: he felt himself beginning to perspire. Good God—suppose, now, she was to reverse the roles—and make a remorseless study of him? She already had the whip hand, for he had told her everything. He was at her mercy—absolutely at her mercy. If now she were to keep him at a distance—make him the corpus vile of a prolonged experiment—watch his comings and goings—freeze him and scrutinize him—could he endure it? Would he have to go?…

He let himself in through the screen door, went softly up the stairs—resisting, with a queer pang, the impulse to listen, to see if she might be crying—and crawled into bed. For a long while he was unable to sleep.

VI.

The next morning he went to Boston—for no particular reason, except that he wanted time in which to collect himself, to try to analyze the extraordinary emotional confusion which had suddenly beset him. He did not see her before he left. He merely informed Mrs. Holt that he would be gone for a week, on business. In a sense, this was tantamount to an admission of defeat; but, also, he thought, it might conceivably be a good tactical move.

But Boston, he found, did little to help him. He could take no interest in his favorite pictures at the Art Museum; the movies bored him; his friends were out of town; it was hot and dusty, and his hotel room was not too comfortable. He was troubled with insomnia, also, and even began to wonder whether he might be ill. When Friday came he was glad, not to say eager, to pack his suitcase and go home.

A surprise awaited him: Miss Anthony had gone. Her room was empty—the door was open, and he saw at a glance that all her things had been removed. The Botticelli Venus smiled down at a bed which had been stripped: one of the drawers in the blue chest was half open, and on entering he saw that it was empty. A broken match-box lay on the table, and on it a crumpled cigarette stub.

At once an appalling feeling of desolation came over him. His heart contracted. He knocked at Mrs. Holt’s door and asked whether Miss Anthony had gone away for a holiday, trying to disguise his agitation.

“A holiday? No, Mr. Babcock, she’s gone abroad. She gave up her position suddenly, and went to join her family.”

“Did she say for how long? or leave an address?”

“I think it was to be for a year at least. She didn’t leave any address—I think she left it maybe at the post office.”

“I see …”

That night, Babcock wrote to her and told her that he loved her. And two months later he received a picture post-card—of a particularly fiendish gargoyle on the cathedral at Amiens—which bore the words: “No, no, go not to Lethe.”