The Man Who Understood Women and Other Stories/The Woman Who Wished to Die
THE WOMAN WHO WISHED TO DIE
My meeting with Mr. Peters was so momentous that I can't resist mentioning it was due to someone I had never seen—to a trifle; I can't resist referring to my own affairs for a moment. I was supposed to be at work on a novel, and I had a mind as fertile as mashed potato. One day in August I tumbled a receipt out of a desk, and saw that the lady to whom I sent my stories to be typewritten had had nothing from me to typewrite for two months. The discovery dismayed me. I was ashamed to realise how slowly I was getting on, and resolved to try a change of surroundings. My trip altered the course of lives—and I shouldn't have made it but for the reproach of a stranger's receipt.
I decided upon Ostend, by way of Antwerp, where I wanted to see the pictures; also I meant to visit Brussels, where I wanted to see my prettiest cousin. And in Antwerp—behold Mr. Peters! As I was wandering through the gallery, an American asked me if I could tell him in which of the rooms he would find "The Last Communion of St. Francis of Assisi." Having just been directed to it myself—just been startled by the faultless fluency of an official's English—I had the information pat, and the American and I proceeded to the room together.
I remember feeling it incumbent on me to be pained by the first words he spoke in front of the picture.
"I am told," he remarked, "that Rubens sold this work for sixty pounds, English money, and that forty thousand pounds were subsequently paid for it. Rough on Rubens!"
I affected the tone of the Superior Person. "You would see it better if you stood further away," I said; "what do you think of the painting?"
"Of the painting," he answered, "I am no judge, but the way the value of that property has risen just astonishes me."
I did not think I should like him, but I began to like him surprisingly soon. He was a sad-faced, middle-aged man, with a simple manner that was wonderfully winning. In less than five minutes I was humiliated that I had sneered at him in front of "St. Francis of Assisi." By what right, how much did I understand of it myself? My attitude had been nine-tenths pose. This man was genuine; he spoke of what he found interesting. And he proved anything but a fool.
We went down the steps of the Musée des Beaux Arts side by side, and strolled through the hot streets, among the swarm of ragged Flemish children—there are more ragged children to the square yard in Antwerp than in Westbourne Park—to the quarter of the hotels. It turned out that we were staying at the same one, he on the first floor and I on the fifth, and after dinner we drifted together to the place Verte, and talked there under the trees while the band played.
He told me that he had not been to Europe before, and I discerned that he was a lonely man persevering with the effort to enjoy himself.
"The fact is," he said, handing me his cigar-case, "I ought to have made the trip some years ago.—Won't you try a cigar, sir?—There's nothing the matter with Europe, but I guess I'm not quite so keen on sight-seeing as I was. When I was a lad I was dead-stuck on coming over, but I hadn't the dollars then. I promised myself to have a good time when I was thirty, and I hustled. When I was thirty I had made a few dollars, but I saw no chance of the good time—I was still hustling. One afternoon it occurred to me that I was forty. It displeased me some; seemed to me that good time was never coming. At the start I had aimed to be the boss of a business, but now the business had got so big it was bossing me. 'Well,' I said, 'you have made your pile, and you have nobody to spend it on but yourself; next year you shall quit, and have that good time you have been working for so long.' But it didn't come off. The business went on swelling, and I went on saying, 'Next year.' And before I knew where I was I was fifty, and"—his voice dropped a little—"and I have never had the good time yet."
He was leaving for Ostend the next morning, and, when we parted, I was sorry he wasn't to remain in Antwerp till the end of the week like myself. However, at Ostend I expected we should meet again, for I did not mean to stay long in Brussels. It is a beautiful city, and many of us would admire it much more if it did not set us yearning for Paris. The resemblance is striking, but the fascination is absent. To go to Brussels is like calling on the sister of the woman one is in love with. Brussels is Paris provincialised; one realises it before one has sat outside a café for an hour and watched the types go by. Literally it is provincialised in August, when most of the theatres are closed, and the streets are peopled by excursionists. I had intended to stay three of four days at most, but duty to my relatives kept me with them for ten or twelve, and at last when I did reach Ostend I had almost forgotten Mr. Peters.
The thought of him recurred to me as I made my way towards the Kursaal on the first evening, and I wondered if he was still here. It was eight o'clock, and now that the glare of sun upon the blistered Digue had faded, and the radiance of electricity had risen in its stead, the town was looking its best. Ostend was still dining. The long continuous line of hotel windows fronting the sea was brilliant. Window after window, wide, curtainless, and open to the view. A frontage of gleaming tables and coloured candle-shades—a dazzling frontage of flowers, and faces, and women's jewelled necks and arms.
In the Kursaal the orchestra was playing "L'Amico Fritz." I had listened to the music for perhaps half an hour when I saw Mr. Peters. He was with a friend, and he passed without observing me. They sat down a short distance off and I noticed that he was talking with much animation to her, with much more animation than he had shown with me. Indeed, I think that was what I noticed first of all—the unexpected animation of Mr. Peters.
But the next instant I was engrossed by his companion. She was not youthful; I didn't consider her pretty; her dress, rich as it was, appeared to me a dowdy sort of thing among the elaborate toilettes around us. Then what engrossed me? Well, it was the expression that she wore. I am trying to find the word. "Pleasure," of course—but that says nothing. As nearly as I can explain, it was the wonder in her look. The "wonder," that is it! There were crow's-feet about her eyes, and her gaze shone with a young girl's wonder.
Evidently the interest in the conversation was mutual, and I assumed that they had known each other in the States. Then a second time they passed me, and I heard her speak, and she had no trace of the American accent. It began to seem to me that Mr. Peters had been losing no time at Ostend.
I saw him with her again on the morrow, and on the next day, but two or three days went by before I saw him alone. When we did have a chat, I couldn't withstand the temptation to allude to her.
"You're in better spirits," I said; "have you come across anybody from the 'other side' to cheer you up?"
A suspicion of a smile flickered across his thin, shrewd lips.
"No," he drawled; "no, I have met no acquaintances in Europe yet, but" He handed his cigar-case to me: "Won't you try a cigar, sir?—but I am getting along."
I used to wish he would present me to her, but he never did. Constantly those two figures sat together in the Kursaal. In the concert-room, or on the terrace, if I found the little woman I found Mr. Peters. Never to my knowledge did she speak to anybody else. And always the girlishness of her gaze held and mystified me—always, that is to say, until the end was approaching.
Of course, I didn't know that it threatened the end then, but I couldn't fail to preceive the difference. The curiosity she had inspired in me was so strong, I had watched her so intently for nearly a fortnight—oh, it may sound vulgar; I don't defend myself—that the first time I glanced across at her face and saw trouble there I was sensible of a distinct shock. And in the next few days I said it was heavy trouble. It was as if the blaze within her were dwindling, as if it were dying out, and leaving her cold and grey. I said—it is a great word, but once I said the look on her face was "terror."
I did not attach any importance to the fact that Mr. Peters was sitting alone on the terrace when I went to the Kursaal one evening, because I supposed that he was waiting there for her to come in; it was when I found him alone in the same place much later that I was surprised. You know how you understand sometimes, without a gesture, that a man wants you to sit down by him, but doesn't want you to speak; I knew that Mr. Peters wanted me to sit down by him, and didn't want me to speak. I think we must have sat looking at the track of moonlight on the sea for a quarter of an hour before either of us said a word.
Then he remarked drily, "My friend has gone."
"You must miss her," I responded.
He mused again, and handed his cigar-case to me with his usual question. I said I would have a cigarette.
"You found me dumfounded," he resumed, puffing his cigar deliberately, "by the most singular occurrence I have heard of in my life; I am beginning to get my breath back. You may have noticed the lady?"
I said that I had.
"I guess that you assume her to be a wealthy woman?"
I said that I did.
"Well, sir, she is about as poor as they make them. I have lived too long to be extravagant with emotions, but that little lady's history has just broken me up. As a writer you may find it worth your attention. It was because she had always been solitary; that was what started the trouble—her loneliness. It's an awful thing to conjecture how many poor little women in London are breaking their hearts with loneliness. Never a companion she had, never a pleasure. Mornings she walked to her employment; evenings she walked back to where she lodged. She was a girl of eighteen then, and she walked cheerfully. And she was cheerful when she was twenty, and twenty-five, and thirty—always keeping her pluck up with the thought of something brighter ahead, you know; always hoping, like me, for that 'good time.’"
"Go on," I said.
"When she had been clerking years, and doing home work in her leisure, she had put a small sum by. But she was frightened to touch it—there was the growing fear of the lonely woman that one day she might take sick and need that money. And the 'good time' didn't come. And her youth went out of her, and lines began to creep about her eyes and mouth—she looked in the glass and saw them—and she didn't walk to and from quite so bravely now. Twenty years odd she had had of drudgery, and the hopefulness was dying in her. She was just faint with longing, sir. She wanted to put on pretty things before she was old—she was starving for a taste of the sweets that she was meant for."
He blew a circlet of smoke into the air, and watched it.
"That stage passed. Seemed to the woman, as time dragged on, that she hadn't the energy left to long for anything. She was tired. When she lay down to sleep she wasn't particularly keen on waking up any more. As I see the matter, it was by no means the work that had done the damage—it was the dullness. It was the emptiness of her life, the forlornness of it. By-and-by she had to go to a doctor, and he talked about 'depression' and 'melancholia.' He said what she ought to do was to live with friends—she was about as friendless as Robinson Crusoe before Friday turned up—he recommended her to seek 'gay society'! She said she was 'much obliged,' and went back to her lodging, and sat staring from the window at the strangers passing in the twilight. I don't know whether you have struck a case of melancholia? A man I was fond of was taken that way in Buffalo. Out of business he would sit brooding by the hour, with his eyes wide, and never saying a word. I stayed talking to him once half the night, persuading him to put a change of linen in his grip and start for Europe in the morning; I told him it would do him good to hustle round the stores, buying most things he needed to put on, after he arrived. I guess my arguments weren't so excellent as my intentions—when I went down town after breakfast I heard he had shot himself. Melancholia's likely to be serious. … No, the doctor's advice wasn't much use to the little woman. Her walk to the office lay across some bridge. One evening, as she was crossing it, the thought came that it would be sweet if she were lying in the river and heard the water singing in her ears. Then she tore herself away because she had turned giddy. Every morning and evening she had to cross that bridge, you understand me. Every morning and evening that thought pulled at her, and she stopped by the parapet and looked down."
In the pause he made, the music from the concert-room was painfully distinct. They were playing the "Invitation to the Valse."
"Well, just as with the friend I lost in Buffalo," he went on quietly, "while she did her work like a machine all day, she was proposing to die. She had grown so woeful tired that it was a relief to her to think of dying. … You will smile at what I am going to say. One afternoon she saw an ordinary picture advertisement stuck on a wall—a picture of a Continental resort, with fashionable ladies parading on the Digue. She told me that—with the thought of death great in her mind—she stood right there in the London street, looking at it; and, sir, her regret was that she was going out of the world without once having worn a pretty frock, or bought a handful of roses in December! You may laugh at the idea of a commonplace poster influencing a woman at such a time?"
"I am not laughing," I said.
"She harped on that grievance of hers till some of the interests of her girlhood stirred in her again. The enthusiasm had gone, but she was wistful. And she'd sit thinking. She'd sit looking at her savings-book—all she had to show for her life. She figured out that she might break away from her employment and have luxury for a month. When the month was up she'd be destitute, but that didn't matter because, you see, she was quite prepared to go to sleep in the Thames. That little drudge, in that little stuffy lodging, took a notion to escape for once into the sunshine; she asked herself why she shouldn't live for a month—before she died! …
"She was timid when she went to buy the showy frocks; she touched the daintiest of them lovingly, but she was shy to choose them for herself. She felt that she had entered the store too late to wear the things she had hankered for so long. She came here the day after I arrived. She appeared a sad little body, sitting next to me at table; perhaps that was why I took to her so; but now it just amazes me to think of the way she livened up when we had grown friends. I have heard her laugh, sir! I have heard her laugh quite happily, though her cash was melting like an ice-cream in an oven; though she had come to tremble each time she changed a gold piece; though she had come to shudder at each sunset that brought her nearer to the End. It was only this afternoon that she told me the circumstances! I had seen she had anxiety, and I—asked questions. I looked to meet her again this evening, but I got a letter instead to say I should never meet her any more. When they handed me her letter she had—gone."
"You don't mean she—she's dead?" I whispered.
"Not yet," he said. "She wrote that our friendship had helped her some; she wrote that she was going back to her old lodging, and would struggle on. But she resigned her position, and she has changed her last bank-note—how long do you surmise that she will have the heart to struggle?"
He lit another cigar; and among the jewelled, exotic crowd we stared absently over the rail at the humble flock of weary trippers who lacked the shillings to come in. One may do worse than cross to Ostend merely to stand by that slender rail and watch the two worlds that it divides.
At last I said: "She must have liked you very much: her feelings for you made her want to live—and then, to remain here with you, she squandered the money that she needed to keep her alive!"
"It makes me feel good to hear you say so," he returned. "It is not encouraging that she has disappeared, knowing that she had never mentioned even the quarter where she lodged; but it would be the proudest moment of my life if that little lady would consent to marry me. When we get up we shall say 'Good-bye'—I am starting for London right away."
"Without a clue to her address?"
"Yes, sir without a notion. I don't know where she lodged, and I don't know where she worked, and London's a mighty big city; but I estimate there are about two sovereigns between that woman and the river, and I have to find her before they're gone."
In his glance I saw the grit that had built his fortune. I tried to be hopeful.
"If she's hunting for a situation she'll look at the newspapers," I said.
"She will look at the columns that interest her," he answered, "but I mayn't advertise on every page."
"You can pay for inquiries."
"You may bet I'll pay; all that worries me is that inquiries go slow."
"I suppose you don't know which bridge it is she crosses every day?"
"We can build no hopes on the bridge," he replied; "I did not interrogate her—I did not suspect it was to be our last meeting."
"She may struggle longer than you think; she may be brave."
"You mean it kindly," he said, "but you have heard her history! I opine that I've got to discover that address within a week—I am racing against time. There's just this in my favour, she has a name to be noticed. She's called 'Joanna Faed,' and I guess there can't be many women called that, even in a city the size of London."
"What an extraordinary thing!" I faltered. "I can give you 'Joanna Faed's' address on half a hundred receipts. Why, she must be the lady who typewrites my stories for me!"