Conversation; or, Pilgrims' Progress: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  “Is that fair? You asked for my opinion and I gave it—”

  “The first law of life is self-preservation!”

  “I see. So you’re going to separate yourself even more from me, as if you hadn’t already separated yourself quite enough, with this arrangement of living in the country and working in town. And that’s all right for your precious career, but what about mine?”

  “Yours!”

  “Yes, mine. That surprises you, doesn’t it? To think that I should expect a career? And that’s funny, too. Women don’t really exist, do they? Not for you, they don’t! It never occurs to you that nature intended us for something, and something beyond just being your slaves.”

  “Slaves. Don’t be an ass!”

  “Aren’t you being rather an ass yourself? I hate you when you talk like that.”

  “You can hate all you like, but I won’t listen to such damned silly nonsense.”

  “Why not? Are you afraid of it? That’s it, poor Timothy, you’re afraid of it, aren’t you? You can’t really face a woman, can you? You can’t face or understand her necessities, and so therefore you simply deny them. Absurdly simple for you, isn’t it? Much too simple. And it won’t work. I’ve got to live, too—whether with or without you—and there’s a minimum of love and happiness and well-being without which it’s impossible. I’m a woman, I was made for those things, I need them—oh, it’s no use your laughing—it may sound like platitudes, but it’s true. And I want more children while I’m young, I want and need babies, I want them, but I’m not allowed to have them because of your wonderful career, and the necessity of living economically for it, and without servants—”

  “May I remind you that we agreed about that—”

  “Oh, we agreed about it, all right.”

  “Then I fail to see what you’re kicking about?”

  “But I was a fool to agree, I was signing my own death warrant, I ought to have known better than to do it—I did it only because I loved you, and wanted to give you a chance—and anyway I thought it might somehow work, and that if you were happy you would be more generous—”

  “More generous! What more could I possibly have given you!”

  “Oh, I don’t mean only money, and servants, and the obvious things, like that—I mean the intangibles, too, I mean affection, I mean companionship—being talked to, for instance, you never talk to me any more—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is true. It’s been true almost ever since Buzzer was born. You’ve increasingly left me alone by myself, it never even occurs to you to have a conversation with me, in the evening, unless other people are present, or to take me for a walk, as you do Buzzer.”

  “Why, I never heard anything so ridiculous and untrue in my life! What on earth are you talking about—a conversation!”

  “Oh, it’s true. You stop and think about it. From the time Buzzer was born, and the next six months, when I was so tied down, and couldn’t do things with you as much—that was the beginning, and it’s got steadily worse ever since. When do you ever talk to me? What do you ever discuss with me? Oh, no, it’s your old superiority complex, I suppose, your feeling that the female isn’t your intellectual equal—”

  “What absolute nonsense—you simply don’t know what you’re saying! Good lord, what do you think marriage is? Do you think two people can go on indefinitely, day after day, year after year, holding set-piece conversations, polite little discussions, with each other—is that your idea? Heaven forbid—it would drive me mad. You can’t do things like that. Life isn’t like that. We may not have any beautiful highbrow Platonic dialogues at breakfast, or while we do the dishes, but to say that we don’t have any talk at all is simply an outrageous and thumping lie. We talk all the time—morning, noon, and night—it may be casual and fragmentary—of course, it is—but when two people are as intimate as we are that’s what talk naturally becomes. Good god, Enid, you really are becoming impossible. What’s the use of discussing anything with you if you’re going to misconceive and misconstrue every mortal thing like this?”

  “You’re very glib—you can always defend yourself, can’t you? By turning your back on the facts. You know what I’m saying is true. And it’s deeper than that, it’s more than that—it isn’t only your not talking with me, it’s everything of that kind. It’s your never thinking of taking me anywhere, or planning anything with me, any more. I don’t mean anything important, I mean just little things. How many shared pleasures do we have any more? Precious few, and you know it. And it’s because you’ve turned away your affection, and companionship, partly because you’ve turned them on to Buzzer (and you needn’t stare at me like that, it’s true, and it’s perfectly natural! I felt it at the time, and I’ve felt it ever since)—you’ve more and more separated yourself, withdrawn yourself—but where is it going to lead us? We can’t go on like this, I can’t go on, it’s drying me up, it’s making me mean and hard and selfish—”

  “I see. It’s all going to be fathered on me, is it? No, Enid, that won’t work. I’m not going to swallow that, not by a damned sight. You get this into your head and keep it in your head, that the real trouble has been your constant and increasing interference with everything connected with my work and career. From the moment Buzzer was born, you’ve ceased to co-operate with me—from that very moment. That was the signal for the beginning of the pressure, and you’ve never relaxed it for a second. Oh, no! You evidently made up your mind that a possible artist was all very well, but that a breadwinner was much more important—so you went to work in every conceivable way, trying to wean me from my friends, or to give me new and ‘better’ ones, and to change subtly the whole mode of our life in a direction you thought more suitable. And with mother’s help, too—that was clear enough, that heavy and priggish hand from New Bedford! We had to live in the right street, and know the right people, and do the right things—and so, of course, more money was needed—and so the vicious circle had rounded on itself. And then it began to be suggested that perhaps my work had better be changed—or perhaps I could do something else, like society portraits. Pretty damned cunning! And the whole of my original idea, my ambition, my career—good god, it just makes me rage to think of it—was to be scrapped, and for what? For financial security and social ambition. And that being so, what it comes down to is this: that you married me under false pretences. You were keen enough on my being a painter beforehand, weren’t you? And you swore you would help me in every possible way. Well—now look at it. If it’s blown up, it’s your own silly fault. And I’ll tell you this right now—that I’m not going to be driven a single step farther. My surrender today about Jim is the last I’m going to make. From now on I’m going to stick to my own notion of how to run my career, and I don’t want any interference from any one—you or your mother either!”

  “I see—and you complain about lack of co-operation! You intend simply to dictate, is that it?”

  “In matters vital to me, I certainly do. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “And what about me? What about the things that are vital to me?”

  “Well—what, for instance?”

  “Well—love, for instance.”

  “Love! What do you know about love!”

  “And what exactly do you mean by that?”

  “It was a flat enough question, wasn’t it? What do you know about love? Can you love? Have you ever really loved me for a minute? I very much doubt it. If you had, how could you possibly have done all these things to me!”

  “So you think I don’t love you.”

  “Well—do you?”

  “I think I’ll leave that to you. You seem to know everything, don’t you? So perhaps you’ll tell me.”

  “Well, I think I will. I think perhaps for once I will.”

  “Do.”

  “And it goes for all of you—the whole New Bedford and Boston lot of you—the whole cold-smoked egotistical lot of you. There’s really something wrong with you, you N
ew England women—something esthetically wrong with you, something wrong with the pulse, you’re not quite human. And it was summed up, I think, quite well, by a Greenwich Village poet who evidently knew what he was talking about. He said: ‘I have eaten apple pie for breakfast in the New England of your sensuality.’”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes. Very pretty, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the cruelest thing—”

  “Cruel—!”

  She spun suddenly on her heels, turning her back, flashing a hand towards her face, but not before he had seen the quick tears starting, the lovely mouth quivering and arched with pain. Her shoulders were trembling, she was biting the back of her hand and trembling, but she hadn’t made a sound—and then (as suddenly as she had turned away) she turned back again, went quickly, blindly, past him into the hall, and across it and into the bathroom. He heard the door close, heard the sound of running water—she had turned the taps on, to drown out the sound of her crying. She was standing there crying—and as he waited irresolute, half wanting to listen and half not—for he had never heard Ee really crying before—it seemed to him that something very queer and profound had happened to him in that instant when she had turned away, with the tears starting on to the back of her hand, on to her rings, and her mouth taking that extraordinary shape of unhappiness. For one thing, her mouth, in that moment, had seemed to him more beautiful than it had ever seemed before—as if, suddenly, it had taken on a new and deeper meaning. All of her, in fact, had changed startlingly in that instant. She had become tragically different, a separate and unknown, an unhappy and perhaps somehow doomed, person—and a person, moreover, who might already have resumed her liberty of action! What would happen to her—what wouldn’t happen to her—what would become of her? Shapes of disaster, misery, death—the feeling of catastrophe again—but now immediate and dreadful: and himself perhaps powerless and exiled. The distance between them had become immense; and yet at the same time it seemed to him that he had never before seen her so clearly. He remembered thinking of her as a ship’s figurehead, borne backward away from him by her own will—but that had been nothing, that had been a mere pretense—this was real. It was as if she had gone.

  But had she resumed her liberty of action?

  Was that what it meant?

  Had he at last hurt her too much? Hurt her so much that now there would be no going back—no bridging of the gulf that had fallen between them?

  He stood still and listened. He stepped softly into the hall and listened. He could hear nothing—nothing but the sound of the running water in the basin. That and the rain—and then a car rumbling over the loose boards of the bridge, coming nearer, its Klaxon skirling angrily as it shot up the road into the village. And then the silence again, for the gentle persistent sound of the rain, the sound of running water.

  He went back into the studio, walked twice round it, circling the wicker chair, avoiding the tripod legs of the easel—paused to press back the front log in the fire with his shoe—then pulled one of the window curtains aside and looked out at the street. Nobody—nothing—it was deserted: nothing but the sad autumnal rain, the rain which would probably last all night and all day. The Rileys’ house was dark—but, of course, Mr. Riley had turned in early, tomorrow was a fishing day, he would be down at the Town Landing, with his bait boxes, at four in the morning. Going down the river in the rain, the dirty blue boat stuttering loudly past the sleeping houses, past the moored yachts at the lower village; and then down the channel, past the breakwater and the bell buoy, to the Sound, the open sea, a mile of lobster pots along the sandy shore. How simple, how good, how solid—how reassuring, if life were always as well arranged as that! Yet he had been a friend, hadn’t he, of Miss Twitchell—Miss Twitchell had often called there with her basket of flowers, standing there on the porch, Mrs. Riley’s white, sharp, New England face peering around the half-opened door, the door which she always held tightly clutched in her hands—he and his wife had been her friends, but what good had that done her? She had lain for two days in Indian Pond without their even knowing it.…

  He let the curtain fall back into place, opened the door to the little front hall, with its wooden hat pegs on the white paneling, and there on the floor, as he had foreseen, was the pink cart. A doll, too, squatted against the wall, its china arms upraised, the dead blue eyes half-closed, and a level fringe of brown hair showing under the bonnet’s edge. “Just a little pink cart”—Jim Connor had said: the typical, the eternal, pink cart of childhood, with the yellow tongue, the bands of silvery metal round the wheels, and the crude bright floral design on the hubs. How she would love it—how she would love the doll, too, and take it for rides round the garden—and how good of Jim! How good of him to think of it, and do it, in the middle of his own troubles—to go to a shop and find these things! A Messiah, as Kitty had said? Perhaps not. But there were times when he was very like.

  He picked them up, and carried them slowly through the studio into the hall, where he put them down on the window seat. It was odd—but it seemed to him, for some reason, that he was noticing everything, every detail. As he passed through the studio it was as if he enumerated each thing that he saw. The wood basket, of pale woven wood, and a pine log with silver moss on it; the brass Cape Cod firelighter on the brick hearth, with a splayed red reflection of the lampshade down its side; the black iron rosettes, like black pond lilies, of the firedogs; a wavering comb of flame, fine-toothed and golden, just beginning to play up, and retreat, between the uppermost logs of the fire; and Karl’s little etching in the corner—his first—of a Mexican adobe hut, round-doored, in snow-bright moonlight: he had observed each of these things in turn, and subtly as if out of some deep necessity or purpose. Or perhaps simply to be reassured, to be given back his confidence?

  But why?

  How ridiculous!

  Just the same—

  In the hall, standing by the stove again—the stove in which perhaps he ought to lay a fire—he listened, swaying slightly in his effort to remain still. He heard nothing, nothing beyond the running of the water—and then it seemed to him wrong to listen, or only to listen—wrong to be there in secret, listening—so he went hesitantly into the dark dining room, and down into the kitchen, and back into the dining room again. He struck a match and relighted the candle on the piano top—for it would be absurd to be found just standing there in the dark, doing nothing—and looked up once more at Famous Place to See Moon; but this time without seeing it.

  —Famous Place to See Moon! Christ!

  He said it aloud, with surprising anger and bitterness, stressing ironically each word in turn; swung about, his hands in his khaki pockets, to stare towards the dark Purington house; and then found himself, without having made any decision about it, knocking at the white bathroom door.

  “Enid,” he said.

  The water was still running—he listened with averted face, breathing rather quickly. Perhaps she couldn’t hear him? He knocked again.

  “Enid, please!”

  There was no answer.

  “Enid!”

  “Will you please go away, Timothy?”

  The voice was muffled and distant—the water seemed to be running louder.

  “No, I won’t go away. Will you please let me in?”

  “I don’t want to see you.”

  “Ee, dear, listen—I’m sorry I said that, terribly sorry—”

  “It doesn’t matter—any more, Timothy.”

  “Of course it matters, darling. Darling, don’t be absurd.”

  “It doesn’t matter; nothing matters. Timothy, will you please go away?”

  “No, Ee. I won’t go away. I’m going to stay right here till you open the door. Now, darling, don’t be silly—”

  The sound of water seemed to have diminished—perhaps one of the taps had been turned off. But there was no answer, no other sound. He listened, his cheek against the door—he tried pressing it, but it was latched. He rattled it again.
>
  “Ee, dear, did you hear what I said? Please!”

  There was again a long pause, and then Enid’s voice, now a little clearer:

  “Yes, I heard you—”

  “Are you all right, darling?”

  “Yes, I’m all right.”

  “Darling, do forgive me. I didn’t mean it, I was just too angry—and let me come in, won’t you, please?”

  “No, Tip—”

  “Please, darling—”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I couldn’t, Tip—not now. I look too dreadful—”

  “As if that mattered—but we can’t leave it like this, darling, it was all so wrong and bad—are you still listening, darling?”

  “Yes, I’m listening—”

  He grinned, privately, at the door, and said:

  “You’re running much too much water, you know!”

  “Oh!”

  “In every sense of the word. And I’m very much ashamed of myself, and I love you very much. And if you don’t come out this minute I’ll break the door down. See?”

  “But I can’t, looking like this—”

  “Oh, yes, you can.”

  “Well—”

  There was a pause, the water was turned off, a little interval of silence; and then he heard her footsteps coming towards him, the obstinate resonant little click of the door hook, and the door swung slowly inward. She was pale, she was trying to smile, there were still tears in her eyes, she was shy—she was as shy as she had been when he had first told her that he was in love with her. Her hands held behind her back, her mouth trembling a little, she looked up at him, the pupils of her eyes very large and dark, very hurt, but very tender, too. The arrogance had gone from her—and in the moment before either of them moved it was as if he heard, high above them somewhere, the swift wingbeats of hatred, flashing past and away—and then he put out his hand and took the green-smocked elbow in it and drew her towards him. She didn’t offer to kiss him—she merely leaned her cheek against his breast.