Invincible Minnie/Book 4/Chapter 31
They went on, God knows how, for two years. Always in debt, always harassed, gradually going down and down, their style of living always deteriorating, themselves becoming more indifferent, more slovenly.
They ate their meals in the kitchen, horrible meals of fried chopped meat and eternal potatoes. The little child was pallid and under-nourished, they bought milk for her dutifully, but Minnie had perverted her appetite with sweets and all sorts of rubbish, and she refused to drink it, unless it were made ‘tasty’ with coffee or tea. Minnie even did the family washing, with incredible labour and pitiful results: Lionel went about dressed in greyish shirts and streaked soft collars. At first he suffered, but very soon he forgot to notice.
Horace helped them generously, without question. But under Minnie’s influence, Lionel learned to feel no gratitude, even to feel resentful. For some reason the childless Horace was held morally responsible for their child. He didn’t do enough, in fact, he couldn’t have done enough; the most fantastic sacrifice would not have sufficed. Lionel rarely went to see him, and when he did, was constrained and formal. He communicated with him by means of letters very unpleasant to receive. He was no longer a friend or a brother, he was—metaphors fail for his sex—he was the male equivalent of a milch cow, of the goose that laid the golden egg. No one realised how the poor fellow suffered from this exploitation.
Lionel was a ruined man, his health impaired by Minnie’s loving cooking, his soul debauched by her dogma. He had never been resolute or original; his strength had lain in his conventionality, his acceptance of the principles taught him by others. And this faith in his tradition Minnie had stifled, to fell him with her own horrible doctrine of expediency.
He tried to work. Horace offered to keep him on in his office, but it didn’t do. They quarrelled; Lionel, instigated by Minnie, said he wasn’t being paid enough, and didn’t have a position of sufficient importance. Horace was very much a business man; he was willing to give, even to be bled, but business was sacred; he couldn’t put Lionel in a responsible place.
He got him another job, but Lionel couldn’t keep it. He was very slow to learn, and very poor at figures. He wasn’t exactly stupid, but when he tried to hurry, he grew dazed and helpless. He was untrained and idiotically educated. He couldn’t compete with the men—even the girls—about him, with their wits sharpened by struggle and poverty, their shallow minds trained to run smoothly and rapidly in one groove.
Next he tried to sell automobiles. He saw a splendid future in this, and so did Minnie. But after he had called on one or two “prospects,” his enthusiasm vanished. The average American was exasperated by his slowness, his quite unconscious air of superiority, by his English accent. He was treated very rudely and he couldn’t stand that.
Then, on the strength of his distinguished appearance, and the English accent, he got a place as clerk in a very select book shop of Fifth Avenue. He liked that, and the customers liked him. They were “society people”; they appreciated his air, and he was well-disposed toward them. He was a cheerful, sweet-tempered fellow, willing to take any amount of trouble. But he knew nothing at all of books, and he could not learn the stock, couldn’t remember which books to push, or the names of former books by popular authors. And when he was asked, as he very frequently was, if he couldn’t recommend something “really good,” he had always to hurry and ask one of the clerks who could remember. After several months he was discharged.
If it hadn’t been for Horace, he would have been entirely discouraged. But so long as there was Horace to find him jobs and to support him during the intervals, he kept up his courage. There was the possibility of something delightful just round the corner. He rather enjoyed working, and trying new things. And it didn’t matter so very much if he did fail. There was always another chance to be had.
It was a very hot day in August, and Lionel found the trip from the city to his home suburb far from agreeable. He was in one of his moods for despising everything in his adopted country, a mood familiar to every alien in every country under the sun. He hated the way the people made themselves comfortable on the train, men with handkerchiefs in their collars and women in what he savagely called “ball dresses.” Personally he accepted hot weather in the proper British spirit, as one of the afflictions of the country, and he scorned to notice it by any extreme change of costume or of habit. He sat by an open window, but he kept his hat on, and his coat, and maintained at least a cool expression.
Three years of trouble had changed his appearance very little. He was as slim, as elegant, as supercilious as ever, in spite of increasing shabbiness. He had come from an interview with a corset manufacturer who had advertised for salesmen, and who had instantaneously and violently rejected Lionel. He really couldn’t find anything to do. He wanted to work, and to succeed, but it was a bit too hard. What advantages he had were unmarketable. He was bored with sitting about at home, and he wanted very much to be independent of Horace and free from debt and worry, and he wanted new clothes. Poverty was beginning to disagree with him acutely.
“No use!” he said gloomily, as he came up the steps and sat down on the tiny front porch where Minnie was sewing, and keeping an eye on their child, digging in the sunny gutter. “What about a cup of tea?”
Then he noticed that she looked “queer.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Heat too much for you, old girl?”
“No,” she said, and was silent for a moment. Then: “telegram from ... I’m so sorry ... poor Horace is dead.”
He had an odd feeling of deliberately putting off his grief until a more fitting time. He discussed the thing with Minnie as if it concerned a stranger. Apoplexy. Not to be wondered at. The funeral was to be on Thursday.
“I don’t suppose Julie will be heart-broken,” said Minnie. “She’ll be very well off, won’t she, Lionel?”
He was aware that she longed to discuss his own prospects; how “well off” he was to be, but he refused to open the subject. It wasn’t decent. No doubt Horace had done the proper thing.
That evening, after the child was in bed and Minnie in the kitchen washing the dishes, he went out on the porch with his pipe and consecrated an hour to Horace. Recalled his unfailing kindness, his justice, his melancholy, saw, for an instant, and in a vague way, the tragedy of the man who is only a means of supplying others with money. Childless, friendless, the most exploited creature under the sun.
He knew what a loss he had suffered! And still had that wretched feeling that the real pain was coming later, that now only his brain knew it, not yet his heart.
He had a sudden vision of that tea with Horace and Frankie, something more vivid than a memory. It brought an awful, blinding realisation of his present solitude. His two friends gone, and he left alone with a stranger. Minnie was a stranger. He couldn’t talk to her about Horace.
“Poor old man!” he said, with a sigh for that kindly lost spirit.
Minnie was aware of something hostile in her husband’s attitude, and, with a very great effort, kept her opinions to herself.
The hot weather held, and it wore her out. The child couldn’t sleep at night. Her difficulties grew mountainous, outrageous. Horace’s assistance had stopped and they heard nothing about his will. At last she was forced to attack.
“Lionel,” she said, “I haven’t a penny. You’ll have to do something.”
He was silent.
“You know what those lawyers are,” she went on, “you have to keep after them. They expect it.”
But Lionel flatly refused even to make enquiries about the will. He would not run greedily after old Horace’s money.
“It’s not decent,” he said, stiffly.
“Oh, nonsense!” cried Minnie. “Do think a little, instead of using those silly stock phrases. There’s the poor baby. She needs clothes dreadfully. You shouldn’t let your pride stand in the way....”
“They’ll let us know at the proper time. Until they do, we can scrape along”
“We can’t! I’ve bills everywhere. People are getting nasty. It’s dreadfully humiliating for me.”
“Sorry, but there’s nothing to be done,” he repeated, frigidly.
“There is! You could just ask his lawyers to let you see the will”
“My dear girl, I am not going to go crawling after Horace’s money. It’s not decent. I absolutely will not!”
He might have known what would happen after that, but he didn’t even suspect....
Minnie said she was obliged to go to the city, shopping. And as she never concerned herself except about domestic matters, Lionel believed her object to be entirely serious and legitimate, and agreed to stop at home with the baby while she was gone. He had forgotten she had said she had no money, and anyway, he had learned that that statement from Minnie was not to be believed. She always said that.
It was a horrible day for him. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat on the sun scorched little porch conscientiously watching his languid child digging in the gutter. It seemed to him to spend all its waking hours there, busy with some patient work. At noon he brought her in and fed her with the lunch Minnie had left, then he rocked her to sleep in a hammock on the sweltering porch.
He wandered about the hot, dirty little house, smoking and trying not to think. He did not dare to reflect, he did not wish to face the secret desolation in his soul. He valiantly maintained that his life here with Minnie was “wholesome,” was “normal,” was really the best sort of life. And tried to deny visions of cool seaside hotels, or bars where men lounged in flannels and drank those amazing and adorable American drinks, with ice clinking in them.... He almost saw himself on the veranda of a country club, with other well-dressed people, gay, careless, enviable.
He strode across the tiny dining-room to disperse a swarm of flies about an uncovered sugar bowl, and jerked down the dark shades, as much to hide the room from his own eyes as to quiet the disgusting insects. She would leave the cloth on the table all day long, with its crumbs and grease spots.
The baby called him; he went out and took her out of the hammock, poor hot, patient little soul! He washed her pale little face, disfigured with mosquito bites, and carried her out on the porch again. He held her in his lap; she didn’t want to stir, lay against him, staring before her.
Toward five o’clock Minnie came home, pallid and limp from the heat, with her black hair escaping in wisps from under her crushed little hat.
“She looks like a char-woman,” he reflected, as he watched her coming.
She flung herself into a chair.
“Oh, Lionel!” she said, “what do you think!”
He asked “What?” without much interest, expecting to hear that cotton stockings were so much dearer, or some other Minnie news. She pulled a bulky paper out of her hand-bag.
“Horace’s will!” she said, “and he hasn’t left you a penny. The lawyer told me this is a new one, made only a month ago. And that he’d been arranging a trust fund or something of the sort for you—something all tied up, so you could only touch the interest—and then, before he’d signed anything, he died. Oh, Lionel! Not a penny!”
Then, too, he might have foreseen and prevented her next step, but again he failed to do so, because it was a bit beyond his imagination. She wrote a terrific letter to Julie, telling her she was defrauding Lionel of his rights, that she knew Horace’s intentions, and ought, if she had any feeling of honour, to carry them out.
Julie replied briefly:
“You won’t get a red cent out of me, now or any other time. I’m sorry for Lionel, but he has got to lie in the bed he’s made.”
Lionel didn’t even reproach Minnie for having written. What was the use? His humiliation couldn’t be hidden from any one.
They had a serious situation to confront. They were in debt, and they had an income on which they couldn’t exist. And Minnie, although she bought the cheapest and nastiest of everything, and never spent a penny on anything gracious or luxurious, had not the gift of stretching a dollar. Her economy was all negative. She never thought, “What is the best I can get with my money?” but always, “How little can I spend?” She had no idea of values, of proportion.
The poor thing worried unceasingly, because it was her duty to do so; lay awake at night by the side of her magnificent and superior husband and planned with desperation. During the day she was cheerful, that also being her duty, and tried as she always had tried, to make Lionel comfortable. She really loved and admired him more than he ever realised. She considered him finer than herself; she wanted to spare him, to please him, to keep him contented and happy at any cost to herself.
He, for his part, was past any worry. He simply existed from day to day like a caged animal, absolutely without hope, fortitude his only virtue. He endured, she struggled.
In the course of time she evolved a plan.
She came out on the porch after she had finished her laborious work in the kitchen, and sat down at the top of the steps, near Lionel’s feet. From either side came the nasal voices of their neighbours, silly laughs, and the whining cries of tired children. Little Sandra lay asleep in the hammock nearby. There was an arc light almost opposite; it shone on Minnie’s earnest face and Lionel’s unpolished boots.
“It’s very hot, isn’t it?” she said, rather pitifully.
“Very,” he agreed.
There was a long silence.
“Lionel!”
Minnie’s voice came out of the dark, fatigued and insistent.
“I’ve been thinking—it’s such a shame for you to be wasted this way.... I saw an advertisement and I wrote to it.... I think it would be just the thing for you. Gentlemanly, and yet you could make any amount of money.”
“What is it?” he asked, without much interest.
“Here’s the booklet.” She began to read in a solemn voice, “‘Be your own master! Read what others have done! The Manhattan Institute of Tonico-Therapy. Ten weeks course renders you independent for life. Highly paid selected staff instructs in all branches.’ And it goes on to tell you the theory of it. How all illnesses come from the chemical action of poisons in the stomach. You learn the antidotes for all these poisons, and then how to find which poison is causing the trouble, and there you are! I think—it sounds wonderful.”
“What rot! The ordinary fake!” said Lionel, impatiently.
“And you should read the money the doctors make!”
“It’s a swindle, I tell you! There are any number of them. The rankest sort of fraud.”
Then Minnie showed the cloven hoof.
“What if it is?” she asked, “we’ve got to live. It wouldn’t do any one any harm. I dare say in lots of cases it’s very good”
“I don’t intend to be a swindler,” he interrupted, “it’s no use talking any more about it. I’m surprised you could consider a thing like that.”
“Very well, then, think of something better.”
“I couldn’t think of anything much worse.”
“You could do it for a little while, and save up”
He jumped up.
“No!” he cried, angrily. “It’s outrageous! Don’t mention it again! There are some things I will not do!”
But there weren’t!