The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

FIELD OF FLOWERS

Humming, he tied his striped black-and-green tie, pulling it from left to right between the flanges of soft white collar. Alack! his favorite tie, and it was beginning—unmistakably—to look worn and creased. He smoothed the firm knot with his thumb and finger, and stepped back from the dusty mirror to survey the effect from a greater distance, in a light not quite so trying. Hm, so-so. A little discolored, too. But then, if he wore his gray scarf rather closely about his throat—perhaps it might yet for a little while escape attention.… He stepped back to the dressing table and took up his brushes. Thank goodness—his hair was just in the right state, as always the day after a shampoo: not too fluffy, and on the other hand not too dull in color. Gwendolyn had commented on it. What lovely lights there are in it, she had cried, passing her small hand over it—my dear Tithonus, what lovely lights! Like copper and gold! Like copper and gold.… Tra-la-la-la—la-la—la-la. The sun was coming out, with a soft watery gleam on the rain-dark house-fronts opposite. It was going to be a nice day, for Gwendolyn’s departure, after all; a gentle spring day in November. The sort of day when crocuses pop out of the ground singing like larks and larks glisten in the heavens like crocuses. The wet earth cracks and steams and the sudden army of grass brandishes its host of green spears. Tra-la-la-la—la-la. And the grackles creak like mad.

But now there was this deep, deep problem of the present for Gwendolyn: a problem (especially in view of his poverty, which Gwendolyn’s unexpected visit had disastrously accelerated) almost insoluble. A book? No. Inadequate. Not sufficiently decorative. Not sumptuous enough. Nor quite the romantic and sentimental thing. But what, then? He descended the boarding-house stairs, humming and self-satisfied: these stairs down which he and Gwendolyn had crept stealthily not six hours ago. No mail this morning—damn. What’s a morning without mail! It takes the bloom off the day—absolutely takes the bloom off it. High time, too, that he heard from the New York Music Company about the “Nocturne in Black and Ivory.” Ah, that arpeggio passage, which Gwendolyn had likened to a fine rain seen through a late beam of golden sunlight! How nice she had been about that! Almost nice enough to make up for her—for her—well, for her general indifference to his music. Strange, that she hadn’t liked his music better. And all these years of separation, too—one might have supposed that that alone would have made her a little more enthusiastic. The effect of nostalgia. Oughtn’t her mere gladness at seeing him, and at being made love to by him, have made her like it a little better? Oughtn’t it?… But then, she was such a self-centered little minx, so absorbed, so terribly absorbed, in her own funny dull little life, her husband, her country club out there in Akron, her funny dull little bridge-playing, horseback-riding friends, and her serious group of little Thinkers.… What else could one expect of a girl like that and a life like that?

“Let’s see: four dollars. And a check in the wallet for ten more. He could afford a grapefruit this morning; with a withered maraschino cherry. And coffee and oatmeal.… Ot-meeel! bellowed the counter-man—that’s two to come.… Good Lord—just to think that those two weekends with Gwendolyn had cost fifty dollars. Fifty! It was really staggering. And she hadn’t made a single suggestion that she might help him out—not a hint; despite the fact that she was rolling, simply rolling, in money. There it was again—yes, there it was again. Funny. Maybe she just had that old-fashioned idea that the man always pays. Maybe she had been afraid—knowing that he was hard up—that an offer to help him might be embarrassing. Embarrassing! Hollow laughter. It was a kind of embarrassment that one could well afford. And there was he, with less than a hundred dollars to his name, trying to entertain her in the manner to which she had been accustomed!… Hell’s delight.

But now this problem of the present. It had to be done; of that there was no question. It had to be done. And it had to be something really nice, something rather æsthetic; if possible, a symbol. But a symbol of what?… Ah! That was the question. Two weeks ago, or even five days ago, the answer might have been different—would have been different. For then—yes, as recently as that—he had thought he was in love with her. Fool! Jackass! Romantic jackanapes! Would he never get over this mad habit of running after will-of-the-wisps?… Yes, five days ago he had thought that a very nice Japanese print might be in order—a really very nice one—one of the sort, for example, with which he himself fell in love. Like the Hiroshige “Fox Fires” or “Monkey Bridge.” Not too expensive—as the “Fox Fires” would be—but on the other hand not cheap. Anyway, a good print, chosen for love.…

But now?… He rose, extracted a paper drinking-cup from the tall glass tube of drinking-cups, filled it, and drank the cold waxy-tasting water. He replenished it and drank again. Something nice, and sanitary, about waxy-tasting water.… Now?… It was true—it might as well be admitted—that his feelings were obscure. Decidedly obscure. He buffeted through the swinging doors and out into the morning sunlight, his eyes a little dazzled by the brightness of the loud street. Tra-la-la-la—la-la. A heavenly day; he would walk across the Common, and perhaps for fifteen minutes sit on a bench and watch the people and the pigeons and the sparrows and the gray squirrels. Well, it was still sufficiently true that she charmed him; true enough to make the present genuine. It was still—wasn’t it—a perfectly spontaneous impulse. He still wanted to give her something beautiful, and to give it to her tenderly. “I’ve brought a present for you”—he would say, with a slight smile, a smile quizzically tender, handing it to her—“I hope you’ll like it.” Silence: they would look at each other with a long and delicious look, half humorous and half loverlike; and she would then perhaps bite her lip and look away—in that charming way she had—as if she wanted him to see her profile. Her lovely profile.… That was what he had planned; but now, all of a sudden—

He sank down upon the bench, which was slightly damp, and beneath which (how filthy America is!) was a litter of peanut shells. Nine o’clock: he had a full hour in which to get the present and meet her at the station for the farewell. Plenty of time. And the print shop was on the way to the station, too. A diller a dollar a ten o’clock scholar.… If only the thing had—if only it hadn’t—if only—! He found a loose cigarette in his side pocket, limp, with half its tobacco gone, and lighted it. The cloud of gray smoke—delicious—undulated away from him in a swooping belt on the sunshine, darted in swirls toward the gravel path, and was lost. At the outset it had been perfectly heavenly. That charming letter, in which she had accepted his invitation to elope on a swan-boat on the pond in the Public Gardens! “Dear Lohengrin”—she had said—“have your swans ready … at six in the evening.…” And she had signed herself “Elsa.” How awfully nice of her, and how exactly in the right, the only, key! And then, when she had surprised him on the little bridge, and had moaned at the discovery that there were no longer any swan-boats, resting her two small hands in comic despair on the bridge railing—how exquisite that had been, and how young, how young she had looked, despite those six enormous years. He had felt his old heart—his heart precociously old—positively blossoming inside him, positively breaking open like a flame-colored tulip. Gwendolyn again! The very same Gwendolyn, unaltered, no older, as buoyant as ever, still carrying her proud little head as gracefully as a flower.… Life could offer few such moments as that. It had seemed the consummation of everything: the final and true crystallization of all that had gone before; the six years of separation, and her marriage, had simply vanished; and they had, as it were, resumed their walk across the Common, taking up the conversation precisely where it had been dropped. Ah—ah—ah—ah—he shook his head in a funny kind of misery, which was not exactly misery and nevertheless was not exactly anything else. Why could it not all have been like that? Why? She was as beautiful as ever, and she had strolled again into his heart as casually as she had strolled out of it, taking possession of it more completely than ever before; their delight with each other had been so instant and so frank; her wood-brown eyes had looked at him so warmly and kindly while she made comically disparaging remarks about her husband—“poor Mont”; and yet, and yet—

He flung the cigarette bitterly to the ground, and scraped it flat under the sole of his shoe. There were too many yets and buts in life; far too many. He had been prepared to fall in love—of course; but hadn’t she, too? Was it fair to blame it all on Gwendolyn? And anyway, wasn’t it better, after all, considering all the circumstances, that they hadn’t?… Much better; much better. It was only one’s disappointment that after a prelude so divinely seductive, so ethereal, celestially perfect, there should have been such a lamentable—well, drop. The first evening had been all that heart could have desired. It had been really beautiful. Sitting there, so far apart, so polite and even distant with each other, and nevertheless in so delicious a state of tension—just talking, talking, circumspectly maneuvering the conversation toward the forbidden topic; smoking innumerable cigarettes; and at last beginning, somewhat shyly and agitatedly, to enter upon the forbidden ground.… Ah—ah—ah—ah—he shook his head sadly again as he thought of that—it had been so very nice, so very nice. And then, when she had said that she must go, and he had summoned all his courage and kissed her—heavens, how marvelous that had been! She had been surprised—and yet not surprised, either; had drawn back for just the fraction of a minute; had drooped her small head for a second, as if a little saddened and at the same time startled into a sense of delighted wonder; and had then said, turning her face away from him, and shutting her eyes, simply, “To think that it should be you!”.…

What, exactly, had she meant by that?… That she had long been hoping for a lover, a real lover, and was now astonished at the unhoped-for goodness of Providence in offering her him? She had always, of course, somewhat assumed him to be a sort of superior being—she was a good deal of an artist-worshiper. It must have been that. That poor child—starved for love all these six years with that absurd well-meaning little husband of hers; starved for love and life. Partly her own fault, to be sure, for she had deliberately married for money. But could one ask so much of any human being? She had been touchingly loyal to her poor Mont—but could one expect that sort of loyalty to go on forever? No—no—no—Impossible. All the poetry in her nature had been stifled—sooner or later it would have had to break out; she would inevitably have escaped from Akron as the butterfly from the cocoon; and it was therefore only natural that she should have thought, when circumstances brought her to Boston, of looking up him.… But why had she thought it necessary to be so disingenuous about that? Why had she then—after the kiss—pretended so elaborately that this turn of affairs had come to her as a total surprise, even as a shock?… Damn. It was precisely then—it was just precisely at that point—just when she evaded his hopeful questioning about that—it was precisely then that he had begun to feel a—well, a something-or-other wrong. Couldn’t she, after all, be trusted? Was she not being honest with him? Had there been—perhaps—others before him?… Curse it—as if, after all, that could particularly matter! Nevertheless, it did matter. Something indefinable, some ethereal and most volatile fragrance, had then and there been irrevocably lost. Not to be able to trust her! And in that sort of affair of subtle emotional adjustment, unfortunately, there was no room for anything but the finest and completest honesty. She ought to have admitted, at once, with wide-open eyes, “Yes, I did think—I did hope—when I wrote to you—that our meeting might take some such heavenly turn as this.…”

But she hadn’t. And at once a subtle barrier was—to him, at least—perceptible between them. She wasn’t, to begin with, quite as—well, quite all that he had always thought she was. Evasive. Baffling. Possibly playing a sort of game with him. Certainly not anxious—as he was—to fall completely and honestly and wholeheartedly in love. No; she kept certain reserves, she turned her profile. And then, when she tried to keep up so long her pretense of loyalty to poor Mont—in the face of her so obviously having laid all her plans for this holiday—it had been impossible for him not to be irritated. He had lost his temper a little—had pointed out to her, somewhat tartly, her hypocrisy in this. Confound it—what a pity! And the whole fairy structure, all its elfin gossamer, had been wrecked; it had begun to appear that all she wanted was to commit an infidelity, to join the cynically laughing ranks of the unfaithful. Her friends had betrayed their husbands—they had told her all about it—why shouldn’t she betray hers? And if she could manage to capture, as her partner, a promising young composer, wasn’t that all the better?… It would make a nice story on the veranda of the country club, between dinner and a game of bridge.…

He rose to his feet, almost unconscious of rising, and stared down at the dust of the path, in which pigeons had left a delicate design of footprints. It was time to be moving. Time to be moving. He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, and began to walk slowly.… Yes—that had reduced the whole thing to a mere—to a mere—passade. From the sublime to the obvious. He had resented it bitterly. Not, of course, that a passade wasn’t enjoyable—especially with anyone so lovely as Gwendolyn. But to find, after all, after all these years, that just that was what Gwendolyn was like! To find that she didn’t really love him at all, wasn’t interested in love, wasn’t even, very much, interested in him! … There it was again—that queer brooding indrawn selfishness of hers. Her unwillingness, or perhaps it was inability, to meet him halfway, psychologically. An air of indifference had hung over her; an air of passivity; of remoteness and detachment. She had remained self-absorbed, her gaze averted during his caresses, as if his particular identity had not mattered to her in the slightest. A mere man; a mere convenience. What he needed, what he desired, were of no importance to her. And when some exclamation of his had given her at last a hint of this, and of the queer schism which had suddenly opened between them, she had been deeply surprised. It had been when they were standing before the snow-screen in the Museum. An appalling gulf had then appeared between them; and they had both felt miserable, helpless, and as if they had better separate. “If that’s the way you feel”—she had said—“don’t you think we had better not meet in the daytime at all—since we only somehow frustrate each other—and just meet at night instead?…” With what an agony they had then looked at each other! With what a bitter searching of eyes, and what passionate desire to cling with hands! Ah—ah—it had seemed almost unbearable. It had been their Gethsemane. And thereafter they had, as she suggested, met only at night.

Well! It had been too bad—and in consequence the whole thing had already begun to seem utterly unreal. It was already difficult to believe that they had actually been to Portland together—it was more as if he had gone there alone. What was there to remember about it? Nothing, except her amusing remarks about the frescoes in the dining room—then, for a moment, the scene had become real and exquisite. For the rest, it might never have been; the whole experience had gone over his soul as tracelessly as water. She had come and gone—she was already, to all intents, gone forever. Gone—gone—gone—gone. And in this sense, in view of this, it really seemed a shade anachronistic to be thinking of buying her a present. What for? Wouldn’t it be, in the circumstances, almost ironic? Mightn’t she be—even—offended? What nonsense! Of course not. No woman is ever offended by being given a sentimental present. She would perhaps cling to that trace of sentiment all the more happily because of her sense of the failure in the affair. For of course she did, she did, share with him that sad sense of having dismally failed.

He turned into the little shop, and climbed up the crooked old-fashioned stairs to the print room, and began turning over the big portfolios of Japanese prints. The Utamaros were far too expensive—and so were the Hokusais; but nevertheless he lingered over them for a little. What a lovely thing, this Utamaro of the three fisherwomen, with their pink-and-gray kirtles, and the wicker basket on the pale sand beside a starfish, and the twilight-pale water! Goodness—goodness—goodness. It was to enter into another world, to gaze at this—a world of serenity and perfection, of the lovely and the immortal. But twenty dollars!… He closed the portfolio and opened the next, which contained the Hiroshiges. Bad prints, most of them—the late uprights, and in garish dyes: too much aniline purple and poisonous green. And the occasional good ones—a few of the Tokaido road set—were costly. Fifteen—twenty-five—ten—seven—twelve—all beyond his means. There was one two-dollar print—but it was a rather commonplace and superficial fishing-boat affair, and much too bright. He turned again, and yet again, his eye seeking first the price-mark in the lower right-hand corner of each print; and then suddenly he was arrested by an upright Hiroshige landscape which was marked “one dollar.” Heavens! Was it possible? Could it be possible? It was a print he had never seen before—entitled “Field of Flowers.” And it was exquisite—it was like a poem—it was like a piece of music by Debussy. It was blue, and yet it was not blue—green, and yet not green—opalescent—a field of narcissus and daffodils in the spring, with a gray oak-tree arching over a winding path. Good Lord! Good gracious! His hand positively trembled as he held it. The ethereal evanescence with which that meadow faded into the distance, like a crepuscular sky in which one is only half-conscious of the stars! And those tiny butterfly ladies pausing under the tree for a talk, as if the wind, for just a moment, had let them rest there!… He stared and stared; and then, “I’ll take this,” he said to the waiting salesman.

A find!… A veritable find!… He plunged out into the bright sunshine again, as if leaving behind him that enchanted field of flowers (though in fact he carried it under his arm, tenderly), and blinked at the garish street. What an astonishing thing—a print like that for a dollar—for a single dollar! A Hiroshige that positively sang in his heart, that flung open a gateway to the impossible, the inaccessible, the intangible, the impalpable azure of the soul! It was exactly the miracle he had hoped for. It was exactly the thing that met his needs. It was exactly—precisely—ah! He paused in his step, faltered, inhibited by the bright intensity of his thought. For was it not true? Yes, it was true; it was exactly what the affair with Gwendolyn ought to have been, and hadn’t been.…

He stood still at the curbstone, waiting for the stream of traffic to pass, and as he stood so, preoccupied, he felt a delicious and treacherous decision trembling, in his soul, on the brink of crystallization. To give away this print—to give it to Gwendolyn—wouldn’t that be to give away the very thing, the precious and indefinable thing, the fragrance of his idealism, which Gwendolyn had not deserved? Wasn’t it precisely this, after all, that he was entitled to keep? Wouldn’t it be, in the upshot, the very finest of poetic justices that Gwendolyn should have missed this beauty, have failed to see it, and that he should himself preserve and guard it?… It was still only a quarter to ten. There would be time enough for him to take it back to his room, if then he should hurry to the station in a taxi. To do, or not to do. The stream of traffic came to an end; it was now possible to cross, but he did not cross. He turned back again, with a queer exultation in his heart, and hurried toward his room.