Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“No, of course not!”

The man was walking toward the rear of the store, and was pulling Michael along with him, keeping a paralyzingly tight grip on his elbow. Michael was beginning to be angry, but also to be horrified. He thought of wrenching his arm free, but feared it would make a scene. Better not. He permitted himself to be urged ignominiously along the shop, through a gate in the rear counter, and into a small room at the back, where a clerk was measuring a yellow liquid into a bottle.

“Will you be so kind as to explain to me what this is all about?” he then said, with what frigidity of manner he could muster. But his voice shook a little. The man in the slouch hat paid no attention. He addressed the clerk instead, giving his head a quick backward jerk as he spoke.

“Get the manager in here,” he said.

He smiled at Michael, with narrowed eyes, and Michael, hating him, but panic-stricken, smiled foolishly back at him.

“Now, look here—” he said.

But the manager had appeared, and the clerk; and events then happened with revolting and nauseating speed. Michael’s hand was yanked violently from his pocket, the fatal snakeskin box was pulled out by the detective, and identified by the manager and the clerk. They both looked at Michael with a queer expression, in which astonishment, shame, and contempt were mixed with vague curiosity.

“Sure that’s ours,” said the manager, looking slowly at Michael.

“I saw him pinch it,” said the detective. “What about it?” He again smiled offensively at Michael. “Anything to say?”

“It was all a joke,” said Michael, his face feeling very hot and flushed. “I made a kind of bet with some friends.… I can prove it. I can call them up for you.”

The three men looked at him in silence, all three of them just faintly smiling, as if incredulously.

“Sure you can,” said the detective, urbanely. “You can prove it in court.… Now come along with me, mister.”

Michael was astounded at this appalling turn of events, but his brain still worked. Perhaps if he were to put it to this fellow as man to man, when they got outside? As he was thinking this, he was firmly conducted through a back door into a dark alley at the rear of the store. It had stopped snowing. A cold wind was blowing. But the world, which had looked so beautiful fifteen minutes before, had now lost its charm. They walked together down the alley in six inches of powdery snow, the detective holding Michael’s arm with affectionate firmness.

“No use calling the wagon,” he said. “We’ll walk. It ain’t far.”

They walked along Tremont Street. And Michael couldn’t help, even then, thinking what an extraordinary thing this was! Here were all these good people passing them, and little knowing that he, Michael Lowes, was a thief, a thief by accident, on his way to jail. It seemed so absurd as hardly to be worth speaking of! And suppose they shouldn’t believe him? This notion made him shiver. But it wasn’t possible—no, it wasn’t possible. As soon as he had told his story, and called up Hurwitz and Bryant and Smith, it would all be laughed off. Yes, laughed off.

He began telling the detective about it: how they had discussed such impulses over a game of bridge. Just a friendly game, and they had joked about it and then, just to see what would happen, he had done it. What was it that made his voice sound so insincere, so hollow? The detective neither slackened his pace nor turned his head. His business-like grimness was alarming. Michael felt that he was paying no attention at all; and, moreover, it occurred to him that this kind of lowbrow official might not even understand such a thing.… He decided to try the sentimental.

“And good Lord, man, there’s my wife waiting for me—!”

“Oh, sure, and the kids too.”

“Yes, and the kids!”

The detective gave a quick leer over the collar of his dirty raincoat.

“And no Santy Claus this year,” he said.

Michael saw that it was hopeless. He was wasting his time.

“I can see it’s no use talking to you,” he said stiffly. “You’re so used to dealing with criminals that you think all mankind is criminal, ex post facto .”

“Sure.”

Arrived at the station, and presented without decorum to the lieutenant at the desk, Michael tried again. Something in the faces of the lieutenant and the sergeant, as he told his story, made it at once apparent that there was going to be trouble. They obviously didn’t believe him—not for a moment. But after consultation, they agreed to call up Bryant and Hurwitz and Smith, and to make inquiries. The sergeant went off to do this, while Michael sat on a wooden bench. Fifteen minutes passed, during which the clock ticked and the lieutenant wrote slowly in a book, using a blotter very frequently. A clerk had been dispatched, also, to look up Michael’s record, if any. This gentleman came back first, and reported that there was nothing. The lieutenant scarcely looked up from his book, and went on writing. The first serious blow then fell. The sergeant, reporting, said that he hadn’t been able to get Smith (of course—Michael thought—he’s off somewhere with Squiggles) but had got Hurwitz and Bryant. Both of them denied that there had been any bet. They both seemed nervous, as far as he could make out over the phone. They said they didn’t know Lowes well, were acquaintances of his, and made it clear that they didn’t want to be mixed up in anything. Hurwitz had added that he knew Lowes was hard up.

At this, Michael jumped to his feet, feeling as if the blood would burst out of his face.

“The damned liars!” he shouted. “The bloody liars! By God—!”

“Take him away,” said the lieutenant, lifting his eyebrows, and making a motion with his pen.

Michael lay awake all night in his cell, after talking for five minutes with Dora on the telephone. Something in Dora’s cool voice had frightened him more than anything else.

And when Dora came to talk to him the next morning at nine o’clock, his alarm proved to be well-founded. Dora was cold, detached, deliberate. She was not at all what he had hoped she might be—sympathetic and helpful. She didn’t volunteer to get a lawyer, or in fact to do anything—and when she listened quietly to his story, it seemed to him that she had the appearance of a person listening to a very improbable lie. Again, as he narrated the perfectly simple episode—the discussion of “impulse” at the bridge game, the drinks, and the absurd tipsy desire to try a harmless little experiment—again, as when he talked to the store detective, he heard his own voice becoming hollow and insincere. It was exactly as if he knew himself to be guilty. His throat grew dry, he began to falter, to lose his thread, to use the wrong words. When he stopped speaking, finally, Dora was silent.

“Well, say something!” he said angrily, after a moment. “Don’t just stare at me! I’m not a criminal!”

“I’ll get a lawyer for you,” she answered, “but that’s all I can do.”

“Look here, Dora—you don’t mean you—”

He looked at her incredulously. It wasn’t possible that she really thought him a thief? And suddenly, as he looked at her, he realized how long it was since he had really known this woman. They had drifted apart. She was embittered, that was it—embittered by his non-success. All this time she had slowly been laying up a reserve of resentment. She had resented his inability to make money for the children, the little dishonesties they had had to commit in the matter of unpaid bills, the humiliations of duns, the too-frequent removals from town to town—she had more than once said to him, it was true, that because of all this she had never had any friends—and she had resented, he knew, his gay little parties with Hurwitz and Bryant and Smith, implying a little that they were an extravagance which was to say the least inconsiderate. Perhaps they had been. But was a man to have no indulgences?…