“For a long time I have felt keenly your coldness and indifference, but I have suffered it because I thought it was due to the difference of race between us. Now that I know you do not love me, I can remain no longer. I do not think you will ever make any one happy. You are too selfish. Your work is like a vampire. It sucks away all your emotions, and leaves you with no feeling for those who love you.
“I have tried to please you, to make you care for me, and I have failed. I can try no more. You will never see me again, for I am going away. I feel I cannot make you happy, and I do not want to be a drag on you. You must not fear for me. I can work for a living, as I did before. Do not try to seek me out. I am leaving Paris. You can get a divorce very easily, then you can marry some one more worthy of you. I will always love you, and bless you and bless you. For the last time,
“Your heart-broken Wife.”
I sat down and tried to collect my thoughts, I turned to the letter and read it again. No; there it was, pitilessly plain. I was paralysed, crushed by an immense self-pity. In fiction I would have made the deserted husband tear his hair, and cry, “Curse her; oh, curse her!” Then tear her picture down from the wall, and fall sobbing over it. If there had been a child to cling to him it would have been all the more effective. But this was reality. I did none of these things, I lit a cigarette.
“Well, if that’s not the limit!” I cried. “Who’d have thought she’d have so much spirit. But she’ll come back. Of course she’ll come back.”
So I sat down to await her homecoming, but oh! the house was very sad and still and lonely! Never before had I realised how much her presence in it had meant to me. I made some tea and ate some bread and butter, and that night I went to bed very early and did not sleep at all. Next morning I made some more tea and ate some more bread and butter, but I did not wash any dishes. I was too sad to do that.
The next day crawled past in the same lugubrious way. I went to the police and reported her disappearance, and they began to search for her. I approached the Morgue to make daily inquiries with fear and trembling. I spent my days in looking for her. Every one sympathised with me, as, wan and woebegone, I wandered round the Quarter. I did not speak of my trouble but the whole world seemed to know, and the general opinion seemed to be that she had gone off with some other man. They hinted at this, and advised me to forget her.
“I can’t forget her,” I cried to myself. “I never dreamed she meant so much to me. Over and over again I live the time we spent together. Looking back now, it seems so happy, the happiest time in my life. And to be separated all through a wretched misunderstanding!”
And every night I would sit all alone in the apartment, brooding miserably, and hoping every moment to hear a knock at the door, and to find that she had come back to me. But as time went on this hope faded. Once, when I saw them fishing a drowned girl out of the Seine, I had a moment of terrible fear. There in the boat it lay, a dripping, carrion thing, and with a thousand others I pressed to peer. With relief, I saw that the cadaver had fair hair.
I began to write again, but the old, gay, whimsical spirit had gone out of me, and in its place was one of bitterness. Yet I was prospering amazingly. Tom, Dick and Harry was selling among the popular books in the American market, and it looked as if the new book was going to be equally successful. Already had I received a royalty cheque for three thousand dollars, and I had spent most of it in hiring private detectives to search for Anastasia. For six months I believed I looked the most wretched man in Paris. You see, I was playing the part of the Deserted Husband as splendidly as I had played all my other parts. Yet never did I fail to minutely analyse and record my feelings, and even in my blackest woe I seemed to find a somewhat Byronic satisfaction. Never did I cease to be the egotistic artist.