In the next six months he had just seven patients. Summer was coming on
again, and they hadn’t a penny. He himself was shabby and cowed, the
little girl was so ragged that the neighbours’ children were told to
avoid her. Minnie was reduced to big aprons. They were hungry and
wretched, hounded by creditors, suffering from the intolerable
restraints of poverty. Lionel hadn’t even cigarettes. He pulled down the
sign and went about looking for work again. Without success. He was the
least desirable sort of worker there was. He had little physical
strength, no manual ability, a faulty and useless education, and an
unconsciously haughty and repellent manner. He went about exuding
failure; he was shabby, gloomy and resentful. He knew he wasn’t any
good.
At the very end, on the brink of ruin, he did get a job, addressing
envelopes for a big directory. There he sat, hour after hour, writing
away, surrounded by a heart-breaking collection of human wrecks, men who
terrified him by their sinister incarnation of his own future. Old men,
with broken shoes and no overcoats, with fawning smiles and
drink-reddened noses, middle-aged men who had finished with life, still
genteel, but fatally resigned.
He dallied with the thought of suicide. He couldn’t endure life. In his
heart he didn’t care what happened to Minnie or to his child. They would
be no worse off without him. He hated to see them. When he got home at
night, he would not speak to them. He couldn’t eat the coarse and
ill-cooked food Minnie put before him. He couldn’t sleep. He dreamed
with sick longing of old days, of big, airy rooms, gay little suppers,
he remembered his chest of drawers, with piles of clean linen and silk
socks, his neckties, his boots. This unhappy slattern, this pale bit of
a child, what had they to do with his dreams? They were unreal, didn’t
belong to him.
He lived in a ghastly solitude; he confided in no one, was in touch with
no one. He believed that the human being did not live who could
comprehend his anguish.
Spring came again, and he had become what he so feared, a man with
broken boots and the air of having once been a gentleman. He was ashamed
to ride on the train, ashamed to enter the lift in the office building,
ashamed to sit at a lunch counter. He had really made up his mind to
die, quickly, before he got ill and helpless, and had to be sent to a
charity hospital.
He came home one evening as usual, striding down the street past all the
neighbours with a scowl on his face. He went up the steps of his little
house with a familiar feeling of disgust and fatigue. Minnie was nowhere
about; he sat down, still with his hat on, and stared out of the window
at the placid sky which the sun had so lately deserted, a clear and
faintly luminous expanse, without clouds.
It occurred to him that the house was very still. No sound from the
kitchen or overhead. He didn’t care, though. He didn’t stir until it was
quite dark; then he got up to find a match for his wretched cigar. It
was odd, after all,--no one about, no lights anywhere. His indifference
was mere bravado now; he wouldn’t let himself call out....
When at last he did go upstairs he found an envelope addressed to
himself on his bureau.
“My own dearest Lionel: I have gone away for just a little while,
because I have a plan to help us all. Stay where you are, and I shall be
able to send you some money very soon. Don’t worry; everything will soon
be all right, and we shall be all together again. Take care of yourself,
dearest. Your loving, loving wife, Minnie. P.S.--There is a delicious
meat pie for you in the ice box.”
He read it again, and still it didn’t stir his indifference. He ate the
meat pie, an unusually pretentious dish which must have cost Minnie much
time and trouble; he sat on the porch for a while and at last went to
bed, to fall asleep easily. Minnie and Sandra gone? Very well; they
couldn’t be any worse off anywhere else.
He waked up just before dawn, with a shock of realisation. Minnie lost
too! Everything gone! He began to think of what the poor little woman
had suffered and endured, of her patience, her loyalty to him. He
remembered her, working so anxiously, so blindly, not questioning, not
complaining, trying her poor best to give him what comfort she could.
And _she_ had had nothing. He wondered how in Heaven’s name she had
lived. He thought of the long days she had spent with her poor little
child, the child she so loved, and whom she had had to see hungry and
ragged. Her utter loneliness, her pitiful faith in him, her hope of
finding in him all of life and happiness.