The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

O HOW SHE LAUGHED!

It was a minor episode in my life—happened when I was taking my examinations for college—and I will tell it briefly.

My family—which consisted of my father, my mother, and my brother Phil—had just moved to a rather shabby little boarding-house in Oxford Street. It was one of our recurring periods of poverty: the “old man” was always impractical; just as we had really got our heads once more above water he would buy a lot of worthless securities, and down we would go again, from a house to a flat, from a flat to a boarding-house. Phil and I never understood these remarkable alternations of fortune: but I suppose my mother did—poor thing—well enough. Anyway, when my father died, a few years ago, we found that he had accumulated, during his life, a good-sized trunkful of beautifully engraved and embossed securities which weren’t worth a penny. There were enough of them to paper the walls of a house, and they would have looked very well.

Neither my father nor mother were particularly “social,” and it was therefore all the more surprising that, in the Oxford Street lodgings, they should so suddenly have made friends of the Lyntons. We all sat at one long table, of course, like a Last Supper—and some sort of acquaintance with the other boarders was inevitable; but we had survived many such exposures, before, without making any friends. The Lyntons, however, seemed from the outset to amuse my father (who was rather a shy man) inordinately. I think my mother was not so convinced—for she was a queer, bitter sort of frustrated “highbrow,” and very critical—but even she, for once, unbent a little. In a very short time, an extraordinary intimacy had sprung up between the Lyntons and the Beebes which, if it involved my mother and father more than Phil and myself, nevertheless involved us too.

In fact, almost the first thing I remember about the life at Oxford Street was going to a circus with the Lyntons—a party so incredibly gay and frivolous that Phil and I, who were more accustomed to seeing the old people play cribbage, or now and then, in a wild moment, poker (the chips being broken matches, the stakes nil), were absolutely staggered. And Mrs. Lynton was the life of the party. Mr. Lynton was a good laugher—a very good laugher. His foxy eyes would close themselves up into watery slits, his beautifully pointed Vandyke beard would prod at his necktie, he would wriggle to and fro and emit far-off falsetto cries, and become quite helpless—especially when it was Mrs. Lynton who had provided the cause.

But Mrs. Lynton was better still. O how she laughed! She laughed at the elephants, she laughed at the kangaroos, she laughed at the monkeys, at the clowns—she had only to roll her brown horse-chestnut eyes at Mr. Lynton, and he too collapsed almost into the sawdust—even my father succumbed, and my staid intellectual mother. It was only Phil and myself who got rather tired of this surprising and sudden and motiveless gayety. Eventually we struck rather a false note in the party by adopting (in taciturn unison) a stubborn silence.… The older people thought we were prigs.

And that circus lasted us for days. No meal passed without three or four hilarious passages devoted to it. A mere word sufficed to set them off.

“And do you remember that little monkey with the pink behind?” Mrs. Lynton would say, and it would all begin over again.

“And the kangaroo skipping softly in and out under that little door!”

“And the smells! the smells! the smells!”

“And the way that clown would spit into the bottle!”

Whereupon Mr. Lynton would shut up his eyes and bury his little brown beard in his chest, and Mrs. Lynton would become extraordinarily girlish, and my poor father would become positively foolish. And Phil and I, exchanging covert sorrows, would decide to be glum, if only for the preservation of decency.

Apparently, the Lyntons were as poor as we were. Mr. Lynton was an architect, with an office of his own, but no business. Mrs. Lynton was an artist, with a little studio in Joy Street, to which she went every day, always bringing back with her a new sunset or landscape. I thought her pictures were terrible, and never was in the least surprised that she couldn’t sell them. So far as I know, she never did sell them—not one. But every night when she returned to Oxford Street, there would be a new canvas under her arm; and every night, just before dinner, we all had to file into the Lyntons’ room, where the new masterpiece would be tilted on a chair, or on the carefully propped pillows of the bed, and with an air of mystery and secrecy we would have to put our heads on one side and say, “Wonderful! Marvelous! That effect of shadow among the trees! The delicious sense of distance!… Was it an actual scene somewhere? Oh, done from a note? from memory? It’s beautiful!” And I could feel my father uneasily wondering whether the Lyntons expected him to buy it, and how much it would cost, and groping for phrases about painting (of which he didn’t know a thing), and then we would have a cup of fruit punch, and go down to dinner.

Both my father and mother thought Mrs. Lynton was captivating—simply captivating! My father perhaps a little more than my mother. Now and then it seemed to me I detected a note of faint scepticism on the part of my mother. “Isn’t she charming? ridiculous?” my father would say, “she’s like a child. She’s never grown up.…”

Which was perfectly true. She was nothing if not playful. Playful was her middle name. She had more facial tricks than I ever remember to have seen in a single creature. She rolled those great conscious eyes to every point in the compass—arched her careful eyebrows singly or together, blushed at will—to give a touch of girlish modesty to some outrageous statement—pouted, frowned, or looked hurt like a spanked baby—and all with an air of entire assurance. She assumed that she was the best be-all and end-all of existence. Not that she wasn’t pretty!—she was. Her small face was really quite charming. But that she should so perpetually consider it necessary to behave like a girl of ten, and take it for granted that everyone would be enslaved to her, as her husband was—this increasingly infuriated both Phil and myself. It was evident that she thought herself a great artist, and that her husband thought so, too.

But did he?

One night after dinner Phil burst into my room, where I was pegging away at a problem in specific gravity, and said, with a scared face—

“Come upstairs, boy. Say, they’re having the hell of a row!”

“Who?”

“The laughing hyenas.”

We sprinted up the stairs and listened. Phil’s room adjoined the Lyntons’. Sure enough, I could hear Mrs. Lynton—not laughing, for once—but actually crying. I was astounded. I was embarrassed. She was crying hysterically, and trying to talk at the same time, her voice rising and falling with extraordinary fluctuations and breaks and changes.

“No—no—no—no—” she said, “go away from me, don’t touch me! you’ve broken my spirit! I’ll never paint again! I hate you, go away, go away!” And then more sobs, and unintelligible murmurs, and then Mr. Lynton’s voice, quite surprisingly harsh and loud—as if he suddenly turned, as it were, “at bay”—

“Shut up!… I’m tired of having to treat you like a child! Why in God’s name don’t you grow up? Stop being a damned kitten!”

“I’m not a kitten. You know it’s just my nature!”

“Nature? it isn’t human nature!”

We could hear Mr. Lynton’s footsteps pacing the floor, to and fro, to and fro, and it was as if we could actually see him, with his hands in his pockets, and his beard pressed firmly down on his necktie.

“Why are you so cruel to me? You know I only try to be happy!”

“Idiot!… You’re driving me mad. Your happiness is just plain selfishness, that’s what it is! What in hell do you ever think of but yourself? Not me certainly. All I exist for is to appreciate you. I have to be amused by you. Good God, I’ve had to flirt with you publicly for fifteen years, and I’m sick of it. Your whole life has just been one long promiscuous flirtation with the whole damned Western Hemisphere!… What kind of a life is that for me?”

“You’re a brute, that’s what you are; you’re a sadist! You don’t love me any more, that’s what it is! And you want to stop me from painting! And you want to get rid of me!”

There was a silence, as if both of them were standing still. Then abruptly the door slammed, and we heard steps rushing down the stairs. In a moment Mrs. Lynton began to sob, more loudly than ever; and Phil and I crept back to my room to discuss this amazing turn of events. Words failed us. The event stupefied us. We decided that all was not well in Denmark, and let it go at that.

And the very next night—as if nothing at all had happened—we were all invited to go to Mrs. Lynton’s studio in Joy Street for a Patriot’s Day party.

At dinner, the Lyntons were as hilarious as ever. Mrs. Lynton was bubbling over with her comic misadventures in the preparations for the celebration—Chinese lanterns had caught fire, a beer bottle had exploded frothily over the fireplace, two of the eggs had been bad, and had smelled like Roman catacombs, mice had eaten half the sardines, and so on, and so on. She rolled her brown eyes, grimaced, was arch and moody by turns, became almost tearful as she told us of the sardines—poor little things—and my father and Mr. Lynton fairly crowed with delight. Phil and I looked at her with renewed wonder.

And the whole party went off in that fashion. Never was a studio so consciously arty. There were no chairs at all—only black cusions on a scarlet floor—and we had to squat round the hearth and toast marshmallows at the wood-fire (though it was a very warm night) and another lantern blazed up, and the sardines (what remained of them) were rancid—but everything was made into one huge, uproarious, continuous joke. Paintings were stacked everywhere; and it seemed to me that a little—perhaps commercial?—pressure was being put upon my poor ignorant father to look at every one of them. In fact, we all had to look at them. They were stood for us in every conceivable light: autumn trees, violet sunsets, marshes in moonlight, haystacks on Cape Cod, cranberry bogs, wharfs, dories hauling up nets—water-colors, oils, crayons, every damned kind of picture that I ever heard of. And all of them atrocious. We went through the vocabulary of praise till it was worn to a fiber. “Wonderful! Marvelous!… Did you do this one recently?… It seems to me your sense of color has deepened.… And that aerial perspective, that effect of fog!” Though I myself ventured only a few scared words, my throat began to feel as parched as if I’d been ten days on a desert. And all the while Mrs. Lynton was coquettish and playful, laughed girlishly, wrung her hands, was so pleased with everything—wasn’t it a sweet little studio? A sweet view over the river and the bridge? And what a lark to have to sit on the floor like Indians! And to eat rotten little fishes!…

It was then that the shock, the terrible shock, of pure hard reality occurred, and from the most unexpected quarter.

My mother was looking at a painting of a sandy beach, with grass-covered dunes and lobster-pots, all done in a purple light that never was, thank God, on land or sea.

“But isn’t that a little gem?” said Mr. Lynton. “Isn’t it a marvel?”

“I particularly like the sand,” crowed Mrs. Lynton. “And do you know why it’s so good, so sandlike?”

“Just feel it, Mrs. Beebe,” said Mr. Lynton, positively purring through his beard, “it even feels like sand!”

My mother felt of the beach, sceptically.

“Now, doesn’t it?” cried Mrs. Lynton. “And do you know why?”

“No,” said my mother, a little coldly, and drawing back from the easel. “Why?” Her voice was curiously flat.

“Because I mixed sand with the paint!”

This was a dramatic moment: we were expected to be impressed. It was, as it were, the very last word an æstheticism. The Lyntons glowed at us. They waited with delighted eagerness for our praise, our astonishment. But instead my mother became all at once quite acid.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “I think that’s just sentimental nonsense. Do you want to scratch matches on it?”

It was as if a torpedo had been exploded in the room. Mr. Lynton walked toward the window and blew his nose. My father looked sheepish. And in an instant the whole party had obviously come to an end—the gayety seemed false, the studio looked tawdry, we all felt poor and miserable, there was nothing to say. We drank the bad coffee, which Mrs. Lynton presently brought us, vainly endeavored to make her talk or laugh again, and then, a little later, went home.

That was the end of the curious intimacy between the Lyntons and the Beebes. A week later, the Lyntons moved away from Oxford Street. And six months later, we learned from the Herald one morning that Mrs. Lynton had died of pneumonia. I believe a note of condolence was written, and was never answered—and we never saw Mr. Lynton again.