For months he didn’t know where she had gone. She wrote to him loyally
and sent him money, but she had the letters posted in New York, and he
could imagine no way of tracing her. With the money she sent him and
what he earned, he managed to keep alive, and he stayed on in the
miserable little house, as she had told him. He was so sunk in
wretchedness that he no longer suffered. He sometimes had a violent
longing for the sound of Minnie’s pleasant voice, or to see her
solicitous, kindly face, but his chief thought, his chief concern was
his own health. He was ill; he knew it; he had that mysterious certainty
of imminent danger which has nothing to do with symptoms.
Creditors hounded him, until he grew desperate. They wouldn’t wait; he
couldn’t expect them to; he couldn’t very well expect them to have
implicit faith in Minnie’s vague promise that everything would soon be
all right. And that was all he could offer. The house was a pig-sty, an
offense, and he didn’t care. For days at a time he didn’t even shave. He
used to look at himself in the mirror and laugh at the blue stubble on
his haggard face, his uncut hair, his frayed necktie and dirty collar.
“Anyway I can’t go any lower,” he would tell himself, “I’m at the
bottom!”
He recalled stories he had read of beach-combers, all sorts of derelicts
drifting through strange countries, and it occurred to him that they
were probably people like himself, who had loved fine living, who had
been fastidious, who couldn’t adjust themselves to what was poor and
ugly. And they were, he reflected, always saved in the end by some
woman. Never by a woman in the least like Minnie; always by some
splendid, handsome creature. Like Frances.
He put that thought away from him, and that image.
He was literally driven out of the house. The gas was cut off, the
telephone, and at last the water. He groped about in the dark for a day
or two, even went to his work unwashed after the taps were empty, but he
couldn’t endure thirst. He wanted water to drink, lots of it.
He left the house; simply walked out of it and closed the door after
him. He went to a cheap lodging house for men in the city, directed his
mail forwarded there, and waited on and on.
He grew very sullen and angry. He wanted to write to Minnie, to tell her
things, to complain: he cursed her infernal secretiveness, and
muddle-headedness. Where in God’s name was she and what was she trying
to do?
At last, after six months, she wrote that she had a good position as
housekeeper in Brownsville Landing, but that he’d better write her in
care of the post-office at Sanasset, the next village, for she had
“thought best” to call herself a widow.
He answered sharply that he wished to see her, and she’d have to arrange
it. A bitter and resentful letter.
She answered with propitiating quickness, and proposed a meeting in the
little wood. She brought him a package of sandwiches and some money,
kissed him and consoled him and sent him back to New York like a baby
pacified with a sugar plum. After that, he came out regularly every
Saturday afternoon, and as regularly complained bitterly at the secrecy
which appeared to him so unnecessary. But Minnie assured him that it was
not, and entreated him to be patient until she had enough money saved to
start a new home.
He grew more and more ill; at last she advised him to give up his work.
“I’ll find you a place to board somewhere near,” she said, “and you can
rest for a few weeks.”
Under the circumstances, it was extraordinarily difficult to find a
place for him where there was no possibility of his hearing of Mr.
Petersen and Mr. Petersen’s household. She had to be satisfied with a
room in a family of Hungarians who spoke very little English and knew no
one outside of their own colony. They lived three miles away, in
Sanasset.
The poor fellow was glad enough to rest, glad, too, to get away from the
dreadful men’s lodging house in the city. Minnie met him every day and
brought him things to eat, which he took back to his clean, lonely
little room and consumed with relish. Minnie explained to him that the
family where she was housekeeper was very wasteful, very capricious.
“You might just as well have this,” she would say, “Otherwise it would
only be thrown away.”
Naturally he was not altogether happy in such an existence, living on
his wife’s earnings, taking money from her even for his cigarettes, fed
with the munificent scraps from her employer’s table. He had nothing to
do, no living soul to speak to, he was ill and growing no better. But he
wasn’t anything like so miserable as one might imagine. His feelings
were all dull, torpid; he really didn’t think at all. He was
forced--literally forced by nature to lie quiescent, to rest.
He was, in a way, beginning to be healed of his terrible moral wounds in
this solitude and idleness he so needed. He was not under the influence
of anyone now; he was little by little going back to his old traditions.
And then came Minnie’s note; exactly what the familiar phrase calls a
“bolt from the blue,” a dazzling and awful blow.
“Dearest Lionel: For reasons which I will explain when I see you, I have
thought best to call myself Mr. Petersen’s wife. I want you to come back
with him and I will explain _everything_. He thinks you are my brother,
named Alec. Don’t say anything to him, but wait until you have seen me.
I am very ill. I cannot write any more.