IV
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.