Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

The English lecturer, when he visited New Haven, Connecticut, was put up for the night at a certain club, the name of which need not be mentioned. After his lecture he managed to escape from several putative hosts, excusing himself on the ground of fatigue, and crept back to the club. He was tired of lecturing and tired of travel and tired of seeing new people and of trying to be polite to fools. He looked forward with an almost insane joy to the prospect of a night of rest. He had never been so sleepy in his life. Those American sleeping-cars!… Good Lord.

Unfortunately, his room communicated with the adjoining room by a door—locked, of course, and with a small table pushed against it—and no sooner had he crawled into bed than he discovered that sounds, through this door, were distressingly audible. There was first a shuffling of feet in the corridor outside, and then the voices began. There were two of them.

“Well now —if you’ll look on the shelf in that closet, I think you’ll find another glass.”

“So there is.”

“This is the best whisky I ever drank, but it might be worse. Old Royal. Ever hear of it on the other side?”

“Never.”

“It’s evidently been in the water. Soaked. They say they drop them off, you know, with buoys to mark them. The label looks all right. But what makes me suspicious is the cork. Just look at that! No self-respecting cork ought to come out like that. Perfectly good cork—stamped with the name—”

“Oh, I guess they tamper with them all right. Probably carry along an extra supply of corks, and put them in again after they mix it with water.”

“Very likely. Here’s looking at you.”

“How.”

A pause, and the Englishman tried to bury both his ears in the pillow.

“Damned good, all the same. Has the real smoky flavor. Usquebaugh. The real peat-bog flavor.”

“It might be worse—it might be worse.”

“And no smell of wood-alcohol, either.”

“You know, I find the bottles are a great problem. Of course, everybody drinks—but I don’t quite like to leave the empty bottles round for the servants to carry off.”

“Like the problem of razor blades. What do you do with your used blades? My friend Edgett, in London, saves his up for a year, and then makes a neat package of them, takes them down to the middle of Waterloo Bridge, and drops them into the Thames.”

“Ha, ha. I do better than that. I save mine and drop them off an Atlantic liner. But unfortunately, lately, I don’t go abroad often enough.”

“You might make a special trip, periodically.”

“A little bit expensive.”

“Phew! It’s damned hot in here—must be eighty.”

A pause, while a window was opened. The bells of a church, or the college, were heard striking the quarter-hour: ding dong dang doom . And a self-starter began its rhythmic skirling, like a dinosaur trying to be sick. Ngu-ngu-ngu-ngu-ngu —

“You know, to go back to that business—if the college gets wind of it, it might lose you your job.”

“Good Lord. Do you think so?”

“Of course I do. They’re pretty shy about that sort of thing. You ought to be more careful about being seen with her. Anyway, till the divorce is granted.”

“Well, you do astonish me. What’s wrong with her? She looks perfectly respectable.”

“Oh, she may look perfectly respectable.”

“Damn it, she is perfectly respectable.”

“Hm, I’m not so sure, I’m not so sure.”

“Why, of course she is! What’s eating you?”

“Well, from what T. J. said to me over the telephone the other day, I’m not so sure. He didn’t seem to think so.”

“T. J. can eat my shirt. He makes me sick. That’s all he knows about it. You know, he was pretty keenly interested in her himself, last year.”

“That may be. But he found out quite a lot about her. And from what he said over the telephone, that’s why he dropped her.”

“She dropped him . That what’s happened. And he’s sore.”

“Well—”

A pause, and the Englishman tried covering his head with the sheet, was stifled, and uncovered himself again.

“He’s jealous. And he needn’t try to pretend that he’s just trying to protect me from a viper. Damn him and his hypocrisy and his paltry little Fine Arts anyway.”

“He admitted to me that he’s been engaged to her.”

“Oh, he did!”

“Yes, he did. They were engaged for three months. Did she tell you that?”

“Well, she said they were pretty intimate.”

“Oh … And he said that as he knew we were cousins, and didn’t exactly like to approach you about it, he felt that he ought to talk to me about it. You know, he put detectives on her.”

“The devil he did!”

“Yes. And right off, he discovered that while she was playing with him, and ostensibly in love with him, she was also playing with three or four other men. It might have been harmlessly—but just the same she was pretty intimate with them. Going off on long rides with them to joy-houses in the country, going to dances, expensive parties, and so forth. And she never told him a word about them. Pretended she was doing some important work for Morrison. He met her twice with that chap—what’s his name?—the newspaper man Read. He asked her point-blank about that, and she said: ‘Oh, he was just an old friend.’ She insisted there was nothing in it, but just the same he was treating her to thirty-dollar dinners and that sort of thing. She admitted that, and also going off, two years ago, on a tour in his Packard, with him and some other people. She said that there was a female cousin of his along. Also she said that he wasn’t at all interested in women—not that way. That may sound all right to you, but it sounds fishy to me.”

“T. J. is a jealous fool, and that’s one of the reasons she dropped him. If he couldn’t trust her any better than that, he got what was coming to him.… Good God, getting detectives! The dirty spy!”

“Not at all. He said he hadn’t been engaged to her a week before he caught her in a lie.”

“ All women lie.”

“No—they don’t. And here you are. Did she tell you she’d been engaged to T. J.? I don’t believe she’s trustworthy. There can’t be so much smoke without fire. And as for Read, you know as well as I do that no man hangs around a woman for years and spends a lot of money on her if he isn’t interested in that way, as she so tactfully put it. There ain’t no such animals.”

“Well, I’ll admit that sort of thing does disquiet me a little about her.”

“By gosh, it ought to!”

“All the same, I prefer to put another interpretation on it. She just likes a good time, that’s all.—Good Lord, there’s no harm in that.”

“None at all, if that was the whole story.”

“She’s modern, that’s all. You can’t expect a self-supporting woman, in this day and age, to cloister herself like a nun.”

“Certainly not. There’s no question of that. But T. J. says she’s been really promiscuous. And this pose of inexperience on her part is all a fake. When T. J. got engaged to her, he thought he was the first man she had ever kissed. But he discovered his mistake soon enough!”

“He’s more of a fool than I thought he was.…”

“May be, may be. He said he got a shock when he discovered, under all that screen of innocence, how damned proficient she was. It began leaking out in lots of little ways.”

“Such as? You mean to say he told you all this over the telephone ?”