Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Perhaps we had better not go into that,” she said.

“Good Lord—you don’t believe me!”

“I’ll get the lawyer—though I don’t know where the fees are to come from. Our bank account is down to seventy-seven dollars. The rent is due a week from today. You’ve got some salary coming, of course, but I don’t want to touch my own savings, naturally, because the children and I may need them.”

To be sure. Perfectly just. Women and children first. Michael thought these things bitterly, but refrained from saying them. He gazed at this queer cold little female with intense curiosity. It was simply extraordinary—simply astonishing. Here she was, seven years his wife, he thought he knew her inside and out, every quirk of her handwriting, inflection of voice; her passion for strawberries, her ridiculous way of singing; the brown moles on her shoulder, the extreme smallness of her feet and toes, her dislike of silk underwear. Her special voice at the telephone, too—that rather chilly abruptness, which had always surprised him, as if she might be a much harder woman than he thought her to be. And the queer sinuous cat-like rhythm with which she always combed her hair before the mirror at night, before going to bed—with her head tossing to one side, and one knee advanced to touch the chest of drawers. He knew all these things, which nobody else knew, and nevertheless, now, they amounted to nothing. The woman herself stood before him as opaque as a wall.

“Of course,” he said, “you’d better keep your own savings.” His voice was dull. “And you’ll, of course, look up Hurwitz and the others? They’ll appear, I’m sure, and it will be the most important evidence. In fact, the evidence.”

“I’ll ring them up, Michael,” was all she said, and with that she turned quickly on her heel and went away.…

Michael felt doom closing in upon him; his wits went round in circles; he was in a constant sweat. It wasn’t possible that he was going to be betrayed? It wasn’t possible! He assured himself of this. He walked back and forth, rubbing his hands together, he kept pulling out his watch to see what time it was. Five minutes gone. Another five minutes gone. Damnation, if this lasted too long, this confounded business, he’d lose his job. If it got into the papers, he might lose it anyway. And suppose it was true that Hurwitz and Bryant had said what they said—maybe they were afraid of losing their jobs too. Maybe that was it! Good God.…

This suspicion was confirmed, when, hours later, the lawyer came to see him. He reported that Hurwitz, Bryant and Smith had all three refused flatly to be mixed up in the business. They were all afraid of the effects of the publicity. If subpenaed, they said, they would state that they had known Lowes only a short time, had thought him a little eccentric, and knew him to be hard up. Obviously—and the little lawyer picked his teeth with the point of his pencil—they could not be summoned. It would be fatal.

The Judge, not unnaturally perhaps, decided that there was a perfectly clear case. There couldn’t be the shadow of a doubt that this man had deliberately stolen an article from the counter of So-and-so’s drugstore. The prisoner had stubbornly maintained that it was the result of a kind of bet with some friends, but these friends had refused to give testimony in his behalf. Even his wife’s testimony—that he had never done such a thing before—had seemed rather half-hearted; and she had admitted, moreover, that Lowes was unsteady, and that they were always living in a state of something like poverty. Prisoner, further, had once or twice jumped his rent and had left behind him in Somerville unpaid debts of considerable size. He was a college man, a man of exceptional education and origin, and ought to have known better. His general character might be good enough, but as against all this, here was a perfectly clear case of theft, and a perfectly clear motive. The prisoner was sentenced to three months in the house of correction.

By this time, Michael was in a state of complete stupor. He sat in the box and stared blankly at Dora who sat very quietly in the second row, as if she were a stranger. She was looking back at him, with her white face turned a little to one side, as if she too had never seen him before, and were wondering what sort of people criminals might be. Human? Sub-human? She lowered her eyes after a moment, and before she had looked up again, Michael had been touched on the arm and led stumbling out of the courtroom. He thought she would of course come to say goodbye to him, but even in this he was mistaken; she left without a word.

And when he did finally hear from her, after a week, it was in a very brief note.

“Michael,” it said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t bring up the children with a criminal for a father, so I’m taking proceedings for a divorce. This is the last straw. It was bad enough to have you always out of work and to have to slave night and day to keep bread in the children’s mouths. But this is too much, to have disgrace into the bargain. As it is, we’ll have to move right away, for the schoolchildren have sent Dolly and Mary home crying three times already. I’m sorry, and you know how fond I was of you at the beginning, but you’ve had your chance. You won’t hear from me again. You’ve always been a good sport, and generous, and I hope you’ll make this occasion no exception, and refrain from contesting the divorce. Goodbye—Dora.”

Michael held the letter in his hands, unseeing, and tears came into his eyes. He dropped his face against the sheet of note-paper, and rubbed his forehead to and fro across it … Little Dolly!… Little Mary!… Of course. This was what life was. It was just as meaningless and ridiculous as this; a monstrous joke; a huge injustice. You couldn’t trust anybody, not even your wife, not even your best friends. You went on a little lark, and they sent you to prison for it, and your friends lied about you, and your wife left you.…

Contest it? Should he contest the divorce? What was the use? There was the plain fact: that he had been convicted for stealing. No one had believed his story of doing it in fun, after a few drinks; the divorce court would be no exception. He dropped the letter to the floor and turned his heel on it, slowly and bitterly. Good riddance—good riddance! Let them all go to hell. He would show them. He would go west, when he came out—get rich, clear his name somehow.… But how?

He sat down on the edge of his bed and thought of Chicago. He thought of his childhood there, the Lake Shore Drive, Winnetka, the trip to Niagara Falls with his mother. He could hear the Falls now. He remembered the Fourth of July on the boat; the crowded examination room at college; the time he had broken his leg in baseball, when he was fourteen; and the stamp collection which he had lost at school. He remembered his mother always saying, “Michael, you must learn to be orderly”; and the little boy who had died of scarlet fever next door; and the pink conch-shell smashed in the back yard. His whole life seemed to be composed of such trivial and infinitely charming little episodes as these; and as he thought of them, affectionately and with wonder, he assured himself once more that he had really been a good man. And now, had it all come to an end? It had all come foolishly to an end.

Ciharles Cleghorn and his friend Jackson were playing billiards in the smoky billiard room in the basement of their club. They were both middle-aged, both bald, and neither of them played well. They walked a little heavily round the table, chalked their cues with unnecessary frequency, laughed a good deal at shots fantastically bad, and occasionally paused for passages of laconic conversation. It was Cleghorn who had suggested the game of billiards. He was fond of Jackson (a doctor) but knew from long experience that a whole evening in Jackson’s company became fatiguing unless they “did something.” Usually, when they arranged to dine together, they went afterwards to the Casino, which could always be relied upon for a vivid burlesque show. They both enjoyed a good burlesque show, one with plenty of legs, laughter, smut, and “snappy music,” the sort of show in which the brilliantly blonde heroine comes out to the footlights dressed in the star-spangled banner—and dressed, as it turns out at the end of the cheap patriotic song, to which her gilded slippers have been beating time, only in the star-spangled banner. This sort of thing always pleased them; they nudged each other. Cleghorn, fiddling with the end of his grayish mustache, felt that he would like to know a girl like that. He entertained fleeting thoughts of meetings at stage-doors, taxi rides late at night, perhaps a champagne party in a secretly kept flat, or in a shabby hotel. The idea of the expense, however, always frightened him. Taxis, flats, champagne, little suppers at hotels—one couldn’t indulge in these unless one were rich, or unmarried. Also, he had always been very respectable, and he was afraid of being seen. And also, he wasn’t sure that he would know how to go about it. He suspected that Jackson knew a great deal—but Jackson never talked freely of his own adventures with women, had always assumed that Cleghorn was, in this regard, inviolably respectable. This understanding had existed between them for seventeen years, and had become sacred.