“One night I went down to the Battery and sat on the sea wall there for hours looking at the water smashing away at the rocks. It was moonlight and almost bright enough to read a paper. I had enough to think of while I was sitting there and I thought it, too. I know what it is to have a whirring sound in your brain, for I had it then. I was trying to get up enough courage to throw myself overboard, for I really wanted to die. I had seen all of life and of men that I wanted and had enough. I had been driven by a man from the place where I lived to the jumping-off spot as coldly, and calmly, and deliberately as a drover would direct the course of a steer to the abattoir. He had made living impossible for me.
“Those noises in my head had reached that stage where they were like the sound of the L road trains going past your windows at night when you’re trying to sleep, but the stronger they grew the less they annoyed me, and the idea came to me that if I wished hard enough death would come very easy.
“You know that old act of mine where I used to imitate a woman who had gone insane from grief at being abandoned by her lover? You know what a hit it always made. Well, it’s nothing like the real thing. Heart-breaking grief in its highest form is quiet. It doesn’t want the limelight or stage center, but a dark corner and seclusion. It wants to be left alone.
“The next thing I remember was someone saying to me ‘Come out of here; what are you trying to do—drown yourself?’
“And there I was in the water up to my waist with a policeman holding me by the arm. He turned me around so that I faced the wall again and we walked back to where he helped me up. Then he took me, all dripping and so cold that I had no feeling at all, to the station house, where I was charged, under a most absurd law, with attempted suicide. They were humane enough to send for an ambulance and I was taken to the hospital and fixed up so I could appear in court the next morning. The man was there—the man with his sneering smile and his air of well-fed comfort. He had come down to look me over. He probably wanted to see the girl who had refused nearly everything that money could get, simply because she was not for sale and couldn’t be bought like a new scarf or a hat of the latest mode. He also wanted to parade his prosperity before my misery, probably that before anything else. Even he must have pitied me because of my position, and he edged over to where I was and whispered:
“‘It isn’t too late yet, and I want to help you.’
“‘You mean that you want to get me out of here?’ I asked.
“‘Yes,’ he said eagerly, ‘I want to get you out.’
“‘Well, if I were you,’ I told him, ‘I wouldn’t take any chances because if I get out of here and you ever speak to me again I will do the very best I can to kill you.’
“He shrank back as if he had been stung, and so great was his terror that I almost laughed at him. Then he turned and walked away.