“And have you any plans?”
“None; except to leave this place immediately. I shall see what happens. It was through seeing what happened that I came here. At any rate, I’m not going to take on any of the underpaid work leading to nothing of which women seem to be so fond.”
“I don’t quite like this,” he said. “I rather wish you’d go and talk things over with my wife. But you won’t, and after all, I don’t know that it would do much good. You’re playing a lone hand and you rather like it, and you can take care of yourself.”
I talked to him a little longer and then my cab came. As I drove away I saw Mr. Gould approaching the house. He was not helpless, but he was a little more than half drunk. I wondered for what act he had been trying to find the courage.
III
THE MAN OF MEANS
My principal feeling on leaving Mr. Gould’s house was one of extreme weariness. The emotions wear one out more than work does. I had been living idly and even luxuriously, but I was more tired than I used to be in the days when I lived with my father and during some financial or domestic crisis the whole of the housework fell to my lot. I had Mr. Gould’s five-pound notes in my pocket, and I drove to a good hotel. I stopped there for three days, and I think I spent most of my time in bed and asleep. Then I said to myself, “Wilhelmina, this will not do. You are spending too much, and you are earning nothing, and you are not even looking about you.” So I left my good hotel and went to a cheap boarding-house. And on the second night that I was there a young Hindoo proposed marriage to me. Also the cooking was very bad. So I left.
While I was there I had calculated that I had enough money to furnish a very small flat and to live for very nearly a year. I found my flat in a Brompton back street. It was not one of the mansions with lifts and liveried porters and electric light and lots of white paint. It was a little thirty-pound house which had been ingeniously converted into three flats. One was in the basement, and you entered it down the area steps, and paid seven shillings a week when you got there. The ground-floor flat was eight shillings, and the upstairs flat seven-and-six. I went in for luxury and eight shillings. I had a separate entrance, and when I shut my front door I was alone in my own little world. The world contained a sitting-room, bedroom and kitchen, and was extremely dirty and horrible until I set to work on it. I need not say that I spent more money than I had intended on cleaning, furnishing and decorating. Everybody does that. As an economy and a punishment I did everything for myself. The flat above me was occupied by a horse-keeper from one of the ’bus-yards and his wife. The wife did a little intermittent cheap dressmaking. They both drank, used improper language, and occasionally flung paraffin lamps at one another. The flat below had been occupied by an old man who lived alone, and had got tired of it and died. I met his dead body coming up those area steps as I moved in. After that the flat remained untenanted. Every Saturday a knowing-looking young man with a pencil behind his ear, and an account book and a black bag, called for the eight shillings. And as long as you paid that, nobody cared who you were, or what you did, or why you did it. I rather liked that.
When I was comfortably installed I began to think things out. I decided at first to go in for the gratitude of the aged. You know the kind of thing. You render the old gentleman or old lady some slight service in a ’bus or railway carriage, and a month later they die and leave you all their money. I think I was right in believing in the gratitude of the aged. Compared with the young they are very grateful. But I fancy they have a great tendency to have wives and children or other near relations, and to abstain from leaving their money to the entire stranger who has opened the carriage door for them. One day, in Chancery Lane, a horse in a hansom cab came down rather excessively, and a very aged solicitor shot out in a miscellaneous heap into the middle of the road. I helped him up, saved his hat from the very jaws of an omnibus, so to speak, and said I was sorry for him. He did not even ask for my name and address, and at the moment of going to press I have heard nothing further from him. The other old people to whom I was able to offer some slight service seemed to think that a few words of warm thanks would be all I required. I began to disbelieve in the familiar stories of the wills of the wealthy.
And then I embarked on a business which I am afraid must prove conclusively that I was a daughter of my father, for it was just the mad, wild-cat kind of thing that he would certainly have embarked on himself, if he had ever thought of it. Briefly, I put an advertisement in one of the most popular of the Sunday papers, and also in the Morning Post, addressed to all who were unhappy in love. “I know the heart, and I know the world,” was the way I began. I pointed out cunningly that however much one might need advice in these matters, there was always a feeling of embarrassment in consulting anyone who knew you. The only person in whom one could confide was the entire stranger. I pointed out, moreover, that real names and addresses need never be given to me. I only required to know the facts, and I would send a letter of advice specially written for each case for the sum of half a crown. Their letters were to be directed to “Irma.” And I gave the address of a little newsagent, who took in letters for me.