It was the tragedy of Lionel’s life that he so genuinely admired what was honourable, and so persistently did what was dishonourable. From good and admirable motives always. He was really unselfish; he considered the interests of Minnie and Sandra first and foremost, and tried, in his imbecile way, to further them.
So that Minnie was able, in the course of time, to make him a student of Tonico-Therapy. He had to mortgage his little income for years to come in order to pay his tuition fees and to keep them all alive while he was preparing. He loathed himself for it, but he couldn’t see any other course open to him.
He went to the Manhattan Institute one morning. It was on the fifteenth floor of an office building on upper Broadway, a building of dubious repute. He opened a door which was marked “Office,” and was brightly greeted by a pretty young woman. He said he had come only for information.
“You’d like to see our place,” she said. “I’ll call one of the doctors.”
She pressed a button, and presently in came a man whom she addressed as Doctor Peters. He was preposterously like a doctor, too, tall, grave, black-bearded, with a quite charming manner. He willingly led Lionel about, through the four rooms which constituted the “Institute.” There was the “laboratory” where one learned to compound the “antidotes”; there were two class-rooms, on the walls of which were blackboards and charts, and there was a snug little carpeted room which was the “office of the Dean and Examining Room.” There were pamphlets from which the pupils studied, but they were not to be removed from the premises. Upon completing the course, the student was given the “Twenty Famous Key-Prescriptions,” by means of which every ill could be remedied.
Poor Lionel was impressed. He stealthily scrutinised the students already engaged in the course; they were well-dressed, quiet fellows, six in all. Doctor Peters gave him information regarding them. Two of them had been hospital nurses, one was a qualified M. D., one a dentist, the other two former “business men.” “A good class of men,” the doctor said, “we don’t encourage any others.”
It was all so neat, so bright, so open to inspection. And Doctor Peters had nothing of the charlatan in looks or manners. He was courteous and very restrained; he did not in any way extol the facilities of the Institute to Lionel; he treated him as an intelligent layman anxious to be informed. If he wished to avail himself of these extraordinary advantages, very well. He could see for himself what was offered.
There was in Lionel’s mind nothing inquisitive, nothing critical. His rules of conduct had been supplied to him by persons of authority—persons not unlike Doctor Peters. He began to feel that there might be something in this thing, after all.
And he never quite lost that idea. Indeed, he developed a faith in Tonico-Therapy which no one—not even Minnie or Doctor Peters, suspected. He studied the course diligently, trying his utmost to understand and assimilate the farrago of nonsense in the pamphlets. He was too ignorant of physiology and chemistry to detect some of the grossest blunders, and he really fancied he was mastering a sort of profession.
At the end of the ten weeks he received a diploma and a great deal of congratulation and good advice from the “Dean,” a white-haired old reprobate with a perpetual grin; and went home to Minnie, a full-fledged “Professor of Tonico-Therapy.” The “Dean” had suggested that he use “Professor” instead of “Doctor.”
Minnie was wild with delight; she considered their fortune made. She had had a sign printed for him “Lionel Naylor—Professor of Tonico-Therapy,” and it was displayed prominently in the sitting-room window. She also insisted upon an advertisement in one of the local papers, an advertisement modelled upon others she had read and no doubt admired, and which shocked Lionel, yet to which he could offer no reasonable objection. “If doctors have not helped you,” it ran, “why not try the Newer Way—Tonico-Therapy? Professor Lionel Naylor will see clients between 10 and 12 and between 3 and 5. Also by appointment.”
It would be difficult to find words for Lionel’s terror and distress. He showed nothing of it, except that he was quite unable to eat, but he sat, professionally concealed within the house, sick with dread at the idea of a patient’s coming. Minnie had arranged the room to look as office-like as she could; she had put a big table in the centre of it, with a big chair for the professor and other chairs ranged about the walls; there was a book-case containing second-hand medical books—imposing though not at all consistent with the theory Lionel was to maintain; even books on surgery, which was so bitterly denounced in the Tonico-Therapy pamphlets under the name of “going under the knife.”
He was devoutly thankful that his “system” required practically no examining; he had simply to record and classify the symptoms as told him, and then retire somewhere to consult his hand-book of Tonico-Therapy, which would tell him what the disease was and what the remedy. He hoped—he even went so far as to pray—that the patients would all be men.
On the day after the advertisement appeared, his first patient came. From the window he saw her mounting the steps, and he had a sort of paroxysm of fright. He wanted to hide. But Minnie had let her in, and there she was knocking at the door. She was a stout woman of forty or so, terribly in earnest. She sat down heavily, with a sigh, and began to describe, with great wealth of detail, the “torments” she endured with a “sick stomach.” Her symptoms were extraordinarily complicated and diverse; she enumerated all the articles she “dassen’t touch,” and gave another list of dubious ones, which sometimes were harmless and again would be “rank poison.”
“Like lead, those last sweet potatoes lay,” she told him mournfully, “right here. Not a wink of sleep did I get that night. Just groaning and moaning.”
Lionel listened in the proper attitude of dignified concern; he really felt sorry for the poor thing. And so afraid he couldn’t help her. Still, he said reassuringly:
“Wait here a moment please, while I go into the laboratory. I’ll prepare something that will relieve you.”
(This is what he had planned to say, in order to give himself a chance to consult his “handbook.”)
Minnie was in the dining-room when he entered.
“Oh, Lionel,” she whispered, excitedly, “does she”
“Keep quiet!” he said, very rudely, and began copying the proper prescription on his little pad.
“I find I’ve run out of one of my drugs,” he told his patient, “but here is a prescription. If you’ll have this made up and take a teaspoonful three times a day, it will....”
“When shall I come again?”
“Oh, er—next week!”
She got up with another sigh, and straightened her hat.
“What’s your fee, doctor?” she asked.
He turned scarlet; the idea of taking money from this poor vulgar, suffering soul disgusted him, shamed him. And suppose he weren’t helping her at all?
“Two dollars,” he muttered.
She laid a limp bill on the table, and went out.
In the next six months he had just seven patients. Summer was coming on again, and they hadn’t a penny. He himself was shabby and cowed, the little girl was so ragged that the neighbours’ children were told to avoid her. Minnie was reduced to big aprons. They were hungry and wretched, hounded by creditors, suffering from the intolerable restraints of poverty. Lionel hadn’t even cigarettes. He pulled down the sign and went about looking for work again. Without success. He was the least desirable sort of worker there was. He had little physical strength, no manual ability, a faulty and useless education, and an unconsciously haughty and repellent manner. He went about exuding failure; he was shabby, gloomy and resentful. He knew he wasn’t any good.
At the very end, on the brink of ruin, he did get a job, addressing envelopes for a big directory. There he sat, hour after hour, writing away, surrounded by a heart-breaking collection of human wrecks, men who terrified him by their sinister incarnation of his own future. Old men, with broken shoes and no overcoats, with fawning smiles and drink-reddened noses, middle-aged men who had finished with life, still genteel, but fatally resigned.
He dallied with the thought of suicide. He couldn’t endure life. In his heart he didn’t care what happened to Minnie or to his child. They would be no worse off without him. He hated to see them. When he got home at night, he would not speak to them. He couldn’t eat the coarse and ill-cooked food Minnie put before him. He couldn’t sleep. He dreamed with sick longing of old days, of big, airy rooms, gay little suppers, he remembered his chest of drawers, with piles of clean linen and silk socks, his neckties, his boots. This unhappy slattern, this pale bit of a child, what had they to do with his dreams? They were unreal, didn’t belong to him.
He lived in a ghastly solitude; he confided in no one, was in touch with no one. He believed that the human being did not live who could comprehend his anguish.
Spring came again, and he had become what he so feared, a man with broken boots and the air of having once been a gentleman. He was ashamed to ride on the train, ashamed to enter the lift in the office building, ashamed to sit at a lunch counter. He had really made up his mind to die, quickly, before he got ill and helpless, and had to be sent to a charity hospital.
He came home one evening as usual, striding down the street past all the neighbours with a scowl on his face. He went up the steps of his little house with a familiar feeling of disgust and fatigue. Minnie was nowhere about; he sat down, still with his hat on, and stared out of the window at the placid sky which the sun had so lately deserted, a clear and faintly luminous expanse, without clouds.
It occurred to him that the house was very still. No sound from the kitchen or overhead. He didn’t care, though. He didn’t stir until it was quite dark; then he got up to find a match for his wretched cigar. It was odd, after all,—no one about, no lights anywhere. His indifference was mere bravado now; he wouldn’t let himself call out....
When at last he did go upstairs he found an envelope addressed to himself on his bureau.
“My own dearest Lionel: I have gone away for just a little while, because I have a plan to help us all. Stay where you are, and I shall be able to send you some money very soon. Don’t worry; everything will soon be all right, and we shall be all together again. Take care of yourself, dearest. Your loving, loving wife, Minnie. P.S.—There is a delicious meat pie for you in the ice box.”
He read it again, and still it didn’t stir his indifference. He ate the meat pie, an unusually pretentious dish which must have cost Minnie much time and trouble; he sat on the porch for a while and at last went to bed, to fall asleep easily. Minnie and Sandra gone? Very well; they couldn’t be any worse off anywhere else.
He waked up just before dawn, with a shock of realisation. Minnie lost too! Everything gone! He began to think of what the poor little woman had suffered and endured, of her patience, her loyalty to him. He remembered her, working so anxiously, so blindly, not questioning, not complaining, trying her poor best to give him what comfort she could.
And she had had nothing. He wondered how in Heaven’s name she had lived. He thought of the long days she had spent with her poor little child, the child she so loved, and whom she had had to see hungry and ragged. Her utter loneliness, her pitiful faith in him, her hope of finding in him all of life and happiness.
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.
He answered sharply that he wished to see her, and she’d have to arrange it. A bitter and resentful letter.
She answered with propitiating quickness, and proposed a meeting in the little wood. She brought him a package of sandwiches and some money, kissed him and consoled him and sent him back to New York like a baby pacified with a sugar plum. After that, he came out regularly every Saturday afternoon, and as regularly complained bitterly at the secrecy which appeared to him so unnecessary. But Minnie assured him that it was not, and entreated him to be patient until she had enough money saved to start a new home.
He grew more and more ill; at last she advised him to give up his work.
“I’ll find you a place to board somewhere near,” she said, “and you can rest for a few weeks.”
Under the circumstances, it was extraordinarily difficult to find a place for him where there was no possibility of his hearing of Mr. Petersen and Mr. Petersen’s household. She had to be satisfied with a room in a family of Hungarians who spoke very little English and knew no one outside of their own colony. They lived three miles away, in Sanasset.
The poor fellow was glad enough to rest, glad, too, to get away from the dreadful men’s lodging house in the city. Minnie met him every day and brought him things to eat, which he took back to his clean, lonely little room and consumed with relish. Minnie explained to him that the family where she was housekeeper was very wasteful, very capricious.
“You might just as well have this,” she would say, “Otherwise it would only be thrown away.”
Naturally he was not altogether happy in such an existence, living on his wife’s earnings, taking money from her even for his cigarettes, fed with the munificent scraps from her employer’s table. He had nothing to do, no living soul to speak to, he was ill and growing no better. But he wasn’t anything like so miserable as one might imagine. His feelings were all dull, torpid; he really didn’t think at all. He was forced—literally forced by nature to lie quiescent, to rest.
He was, in a way, beginning to be healed of his terrible moral wounds in this solitude and idleness he so needed. He was not under the influence of anyone now; he was little by little going back to his old traditions.
And then came Minnie’s note; exactly what the familiar phrase calls a “bolt from the blue,” a dazzling and awful blow.
“Dearest Lionel: For reasons which I will explain when I see you, I have thought best to call myself Mr. Petersen’s wife. I want you to come back with him and I will explain everything. He thinks you are my brother, named Alec. Don’t say anything to him, but wait until you have seen me. I am very ill. I cannot write any more.
Even then he hadn’t been much impressed; he did not realise what her words implied. Simply another piece of her tiresome chicanery; posing as someone’s wife to make herself more important, or something of that sort. Treachery to himself he never suspected, or that she could possibly be actually guilty of bigamy.... Until Mr. Petersen told him of the baby that was expected. Minnie was to be the mother of another man’s child!
Oh, even she couldn’t explain that away, couldn’t make him swallow that! He might be contemptible, a tool in her hands, but there was a limit, an end! He walked beside the innocent other man in the dark, smiling grimly to himself, filled with a curiously impersonal thirst for revenge. That woman must be exposed, disgraced, crushed. He was savagely delighted to do it. A long repressed and unrecognised wish came struggling to the surface of his mind, the wish to be free of her and her domination. So long as she loved him and was faithful to him, worked and schemed for him, he couldn’t even wish to be rid of her. Only falseness in her could justify him, and he rejoiced now in finding her false.
“It’s the end of her,” he reflected, “of her and her beastly trickery!”
But it was not. When he got to the house, and actually saw her, ill, tortured with anxiety, when he once more heard her voice, his resolution failed him. It was not so much through pity or affection, either; it was the woman’s uncanny plausibility, the preposterous air of respectability she threw over all she did. He could not see her as a criminal.
Fate had reserved curious sufferings for him, unique pains. To live through that night, with honest Mr. Petersen, to be in his house, while Minnie bore his child.... And then, still at Mr. Petersen’s side, to go in to her, and look at her son....
He was in a state of utter chaos. His little girl didn’t know him. In a year and a half she had quite forgotten him, was growing up contentedly under another man’s roof. It hurt him beyond measure. He had no idea how he had changed, what with his beard, and the ravages of his illness. It gave him a sensation of being already dead and buried and forgotten.
He couldn’t make himself feel as he believed he should feel. He could not hate Minnie, and he actually liked Mr. Petersen. And pitied them both. He thought, more seriously than he had ever thought before in his life, and came to a conclusion which was quite at variance with his tradition.
“I’m no good to Minnie or Sandra,” he said to himself, “I’ll go away, and leave them to the man who can take care of them.”
And above all, he wished to consider Mr. Petersen. He was more anxious to spare him than to spare Minnie. His one comfort was that he was not “wronging” that honest man, that he was, in fact, making an honourable and terribly difficult sacrifice for him, in thus giving up to him not only Minnie but little Sandra. He would leave Mr. Petersen undisturbed in his fool’s Paradise. He wanted passionately, with all his soul, to do this one decent thing, to atone for Minnie’s sins and his own by this restitution. It saved him in his own eyes.
Minnie did not oppose him. But she begged him to wait until she was a little better. She was so heart-broken over the separation and so docile that he yielded, and waited there in Mr. Petersen’s house during the days of her convalescence.
But, no sooner had she begun to grow well again than she began shamelessly to—as the novels say—persecute him with her attentions. He was immeasurably shocked; he told her plainly what he thought of such conduct. Under Mr. Petersen’s very roof!
“But you’re my own husband,” said Minnie.
“Do you mean to say you’re so depraved that you can’t see? That you’d deceive that fine fellow again?”
“He’s nothing to me,” said Minnie, “I never even pretended to love him.”
And added:
“I only did it for Sandra’s sake.”
“Didn’t you know it was criminal? You’re a bigamist. You”
She began to cry.
“I know it! But a mother will do anything in the world for her child. If she’s a true woman.”
She was not to be convinced of wrong-doing. It wasn’t nice to have two husbands; that she conceded: it was a painful and disagreeable necessity, her only means of providing for her child.
“And Chris never need know,” she said. “It’s not doing him any harm. In fact, he’s very happy.”
“Then you intend to go on like this forever?”
“Oh, I don’t know!” she cried, impatiently, “one has to be guided by circumstances.”
And they were all the guide she had. Or could they be called a guide, when she so deliberately manufactured them, and distorted them? Even the poor chap’s love for Sandra she tried to utilise, in order to keep him near her. She was continually throwing them together, fostering the child’s affection for her “uncle.”
“She didn’t recognise you,” she said. “Poor little baby! But she knows you. She feels differently toward you.”
She was conscious that her own spell had waned; she could do nothing with him. No matter how she clung to him, how she implored him, he would not so much as say he loved her. He was absolutely impervious to her seductions, although he was touched by her blind love for him. She would have caused any suffering to Mr. Petersen if it would have benefited Lionel. He was, as she said, and he well knew, the only man she had ever cared for, the first and the last. She would even go so far as to admit that she regretted having been obliged to marry Mr. Petersen. Not because it was wrong, but because it hurt Lionel. She acknowledged that it had not been an altogether loyal act, although, like so very many of her sex, she couldn’t see that a merely physical infidelity really mattered much. An idea that men have, which must be submitted to, because of its importance to them.
“But in my heart,” she insisted, “there’s never been anyone but you.”
The war seemed to offer Lionel a remarkable opportunity for carrying out his plan with dignity and nobility. He might even get himself killed, which, according to his tradition, rights every wrong, wipes out every offense. He resisted Minnie’s objections with firmness.
Then, so cruelly, before he had made his great renunciation, came Frances and the shameful and horrible revelation. He was forced to go away with Minnie; he couldn’t desert her then, when she was so utterly alone. He tried to comfort her a little, and found it only too easy. She wasn’t really very much ashamed or grieved. She was willing, eager, to take up life with him again, the same slipshod and futile life of their former years. She looked forward happily to another little house, more amazing financial adventures, and, quite frankly, a subsidy from Mr. Petersen.
“He’d be glad!” she told Lionel, “On account of little Robert. And he has plenty of money. He could easily spare two or three thousand a year.”
That was the final straw. Lionel said nothing against her scheme; he saw her decently settled in a respectable boarding-house, well-supplied with money salvaged from Mr. Petersen’s housekeeping allowance; then he went away, disappeared. He left her a note, to say that he was going to enlist, but she never quite knew what became of him.