MORE EXPERIENCES
January and February passed, and Eve’s capital dwindled steadily, with
no very obvious prospect of her being able to replenish it. She sold
three more small pictures, and had one or two dress designs accepted by
a woman’s journal, but these fragments of good fortune were more than
counterbalanced by a piece of knavish luck. One wet day, just as it was
getting dusk, she had her vanity-bag snatched from her. It contained
five pounds that she had drawn from the bank about half an hour before.
She never had another glimpse of the bag or of the thief. Her balance
had been reduced now to sixteen pounds, and all that she had foreseen in
her panic moods seemed likely to be fulfilled.
Her diet became a diet of milk and buns, tea, stale eggs, and bread and
butter. She spent nothing on dress, and wore her shoes long after they
should have gone to the cobbler. She planned to do most of her own
washing at home, drying it in front of her sitting-room fire, and
putting up with the moist, steamy smell and her landlady’s contemptuous
face. Mrs. Buss’s affability was beginning to wear very thin, for it was
a surface virtue at its best. Poverty does not always inspire that human
pity that we read of in sentimental stories. Primitive peoples have a
horror of sickness and death, and civilisation has developed in many of
us a similar horror of tragic poverty. It is to be found both in people
who have struggled, and in those who have never had to struggle, and
Mrs. Buss belonged to the former class. To her, poverty was a sour smell
that associated itself with early and bitter memories. It brought back
old qualms of mean dread and envy. She had learnt to look on poverty as
a pest, and anyone who was contaminated with it became a source of
offence. She recognised all the symptoms in Eve’s pathetic little
economies, and straightway she began to wish her out of the house.
Eve noticed that Mrs. Buss’s voice became a grumbling murmur when she
heard her talking to her son. Intuition attached a personal meaning to
these discontented reverberations, and intuition was not at fault.
“I haven’t slaved all my life to let rooms to people who can’t pay! I
know how the wind blows! She’s getting that mean, meat once a week, and
a scuttle of coal made to last two days! Next thing’ll be that she’ll be
getting ill.”
Albert was not interested, and his mother’s grumblings bored him.
“Why don’t you turn her out?”
“I shall have to wait till she’s short with her week’s money. And then,
you may have to wait a month or two before you can get another let. It’s
a noosance and a shame.”
Eve began to answer the advertisements in one or two daily papers, and
to spend a few shillings in advertising on her own account. The results
were not encouraging. It seemed to be a meaner world than she had
imagined it to be, for people wanted to buy her body and soul for less
than was paid to an ordinary cook. In fact, a servant girl was an
autocrat, a gentlewoman a slave. She rebelled. She refused to be
sweated—refused it with passion.
She advertised herself as willing to give painting lessons, but nothing
came of it, save that one of her advertisements happened to catch Mr.
Parfit’s eyes. Sister Jane had called, and her brother had taken Eve
twice to a theatre, and once to a concert. He dared to question her
solicitously about the ways and means of life.
“How are you getting along, you know? Don’t mind me, I’m only
everybody’s uncle.”
She did not tell him the worst.
“I can’t quite get the thing I want.”
“How many people are doing what they want to?”
“Not many.”
“One in a hundred. I wanted to be a farmer, and I’m stuck on a stool. We
grumble and grouse, but we have to put on the harness. Life’s like
that!”
She was looking thin and ill, and he had noticed it.
“Wait a bit. Seems to me I shall have to play the inquiring father.
You’re not playing the milk and bun game, are you?”
“Sometimes.”
He looked indignant, yet sympathetic.
“That’s just what you women do, mess up your digestions with jam and tea
and cake. A doctor told me once that he had seen dozens of girls on the
edge of scurvy. You must feed properly.”
“I get all I want.”
His kindly, emotional nature burst into flame.
“Now, Miss Carfax, you’ve just got to tell me if you’re wanting any
sympathy, sympathy of the solid sort, I mean. Don’t stand on ceremony.
I’m a man before I’m a ceremony.”
She found herself flushing.
“Thank you so much. I understand. I will tell you if I ever want to be
helped.”
“Promise.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a dear, good girl.”
Mrs. Buss’s prophetic pessimism was justified by the event. Raw weather,
leaky shoes and poor food may have helped in the overthrow, but early in
March Eve caught influenzal pneumonia. The whole house was overturned. A
trained nurse followed the doctor, and the nurse had to be provided with
a bed, Mr. Albert Buss being reduced to sleeping on a sitting-room sofa.
His mother’s grumbling now found a more ready echo in him. What was the
use of making oneself uncomfortable for the benefit of a nurse who was
plain and past thirty, and not worth meeting on the stairs?
Mrs. Buss grumbled at the extra housework and the additional cooking.
“Just my luck. Didn’t I say she’d get ill? She’ll have to pay me more a
week for doing for the nurse and having my house turned upside down.”
But for the time being Eve was beyond the world of worries, lost in the
phantasies of fever, dazed by day, and delirious at night. She was bad,
very bad, and even the bored and harassed middle-class doctor allowed
that she was in danger, and might need a second nurse. But at the end of
the second week the disease died out of her, and she became sane and
cool once more, content to lie there in a state of infinite languor, to
think of nothing, and do nothing but breathe and eat and sleep.
She found flowers on the table beside her bed. John Parfit had sent
them. He had discovered that she was seriously ill, and he had been
calling twice a day to inquire. Every evening a bunch of flowers, roses,
violets, or carnations, was brought up to her, John Parfit leaving them
at Bosnia Road on his way home from the City.
Eve would lie and look at the flowers without realising all that they
implied. Illness is often very merciful to those who have cares and
worries. It dulls the consciousness, and brooking no rival, absorbs the
sufferer into a daze of drowsiness and dreams. The body, in its feverish
reaction to neutralise the poison of disease, is busy within itself, and
the mind is drugged and left to sleep.
As her normal self returned to her, Eve began to cast her eyes upon the
life that had been broken off so abruptly, and she discovered, to her
surprise, that the things that had worried her no longer seemed to
matter. She felt numb, lethargic, too tired to react to worries. She
knew now that she had not been far from death, and the great shadow
still lay near to her, blotting out all the lesser shadows, so that they
were lost in it.
All the additional expense that she was incurring, the presence of the
nurse, John Parfit’s flowers, Mrs. Buss’s grumbling voice, all these
phenomena seemed outside the circle of reality. She recognised them,
without reacting to them. So benumbed was she that the idea of spending
so much money did not frighten her.
She managed to write a cheque, and the nurse cashed it for her when she
went for her daily walk.
Mrs. Buss’s accounts were asked for and sent up, and Eve did not feel
one qualm of distress when she glanced at the figures and understood
that her landlady was penalising her mercilessly for being ill. She paid
Mrs. Buss, and turned her attention to the doctor.
“You won’t mind my mentioning it, but I shall be very grateful if you
will let me know what I owe you.”
He was a thin man, with a head like an ostrich’s, and a jerky, harassed
manner. Struggle was written deep all over his face and person. His wife
inked out the shiny places on his black coat, and he walked everywhere,
and did not keep a carriage.
“That’s all right, that’s all right!”
“But I am serious. You see, with a limited income, one likes to meet
things as they come.”
“Oh, well, if it will please you. But I haven’t quite finished with you
yet.”
“I know. But you won’t forget?”
Poor devil! He was not in a position to forget anyone who owed him
money.
The nurse went, having swallowed up six guineas. The doctor’s bill came
in soon after Eve had moved downstairs to her sitting-room. It amounted
to about three pounds, and Eve paid it by cheque. Another weekly bill
from Mrs. Buss confronted her, running the doctor’s account to a close
finish. Eve realised, after scribbling a few figures, that she was left
with about four pounds to her credit.
She was astonished at her own apathy. This horror that would have sent a
chill through her a month ago, now filled her with a kind of languid and
cynical amusement. The inertia of her illness was still upon her,
dulling the more sensitive edge of her consciousness.
A week after she had come downstairs she went out for her first walk. It
was not altogether a wise proceeding, especially when its psychological
effects showed themselves. She walked as far as Highbury Corner, felt
the outermost ripples of the London mill-pond, and promptly awoke.
That night she had a relapse and was feverish, but it was no longer a
restful, drowsy fever, but a burning and anxious torment. Life, the
struggling, fitful, mean, contriving life was back in her blood, with
all its dreads intensified and exaggerated. She felt the need of
desperate endeavour, and was unable to stir in her own cause. It was
like a dream in which some horror approaches, and one is unable to run
away.
She was another week in bed, but she did not send for the doctor. And at
the end of the week she met Mrs. Buss’s last bill. It left her with
three shillings and fourpence in cash.
In seven days she would be in debt to her landlady, to the red-faced,
grumbling woman whose insolent dissatisfaction was already showing
itself.
Well, how was she to get the money? What was she to do?
There was the sign of the Three Balls. She had a few rings and trinkets
and her mother’s jewellery, such as it was. Also, she could dispose of
the studio.
Lastly, there was John Parfit—John Parfit, who was still sending her
flowers. She had had a note from him. He wanted to be allowed to come
and see her.
* * * * *