Miss Flotsam and Mr Jetsam

by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

 

MISS FLOTSAM AND MR JETSAM

BY ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING

SHE had scarcely closed the door of her room when the electric lights went out. She was, however, prepared for this emergency, which was not rare; in fact she had caused it to happen once or twice herself while adjusting little devices for cooking and laundering. She groped her way to the bureau and lighted a candle always ready there, and instead of feeling annoyed, she was at heart innocently pleased by the diversion and by the flickering candle light. Then, just as she would hurry to the window at any unusual sound in the street, or would join any crowd, she went out into the passage, to lean over the balustrade. It was not curiosity that impelled her, but the terrible desire of her lonely and forgotten spirit to plunge into life. She wanted to see, to hear any one, anything.

Looking down the well of the staircase, she saw all the lodging house black and still. With a little sigh she turned back, and noticed that the door of the room next her own was open, showing in the dark interior the glowing end of a cigarette; she hesitated, struggling with one of those impulses which had given her so much trouble. Often as she had been rebuffed, hurt, derided, she could not stifle that violent longing to approach other human beings.

“No, I won't!” she said. “I won't...”

But it was too strong for her. Half reluctant, she approached the open door.

“Would you like a candle?” she asked.

A suave and weary voice replied, amiably.

“Thank you. But unless this is going to be more or less permanent, it doesn't matter.”

“Well, you never know...” she said, mendaciously, for she did know well enough that a new fuse would promptly be installed. “I've got a lot of extra candles....”

Decency compelled the man to say that he would like a candle, and she went off to fetch it. When she returned, he was standing in his doorway, a slender young fellow with a fastidious and melancholy air. He watched her coming; the light she carried lent to her face something long gone by daylight; she was lamentably thin and haggard; in a few years she would be grotesque, but youth still lingered with her now.

He took the candle from her with a word of thanks, but he could not turn away from her pitiable eagerness.

“I suppose this sort of thing's a serious inconvenience to some people,” he observed.

“Well,” she answered, with a nervous little giggle, “it is to me, I must say. I know I'm not supposed to, but just the same, I do cook my dinners in my room. And now I guess I'll have to wait.”

“Too bad!” he said. And still he hadn't the heart to go, even to discourage her. “Poor little devil!” he thought. “Famished for talk.” And aloud he said—“Won't you come in and sit down until the lights are on again?”

Her hollow cheeks grew scarlet.

“Well ... I don't think I'd better...” she said. “I'd like to, only...”

He didn't press the point; if necessary he could stand in the doorway until the candle burnt out in his hand, anything rather than drive away this poor creature.

“It's queer, isn't it?” she said. “A big house, all full of people, and nobody ever talking to anybody else.... And if you do try to be friendly, why ... they think you're after something.”

“I suppose they do,” he said, thoughtfully.

“There was a woman up on this floor last year,” she went on. “She looked so kind of miserable that one night when I'd fixed up a nice little supper, I knocked at her door and asked her to come in and eat with me. But she was so disagreeable about it, you'd have thought I was offering her poison. And then a little later she turned on the gas. It didn't kill her. They took her off to the hospital, and I saw in the paper that she said she'd done it because she was so lonely.... That's why they haven't any gas now. I guess a lot of people are lonely, like that.... Only, if they'd be more friendly, and not so suspicious about people, they wouldn't need to be.”

“Oh, you poor little devil!” he thought, so moved that he could not speak.

She misinterpreted his silence.

“Well, I'll be going, I guess—” she said, and her smile was intolerable.

“Please don't!' he said, hastily.

She looked at him, incredulous and delighted.

“I don't want to bother you—” she began, but he interrupted, vehemently.

“You're not. Not in the least.... Look here! If you can't cook your dinner, won't you come out somewhere with me? I'd appreciate it very much.”

“Oh! I couldn't!” she cried.

He knew that she could and would, but that whatever pride she had left required some urging on his part, and he made a creditable attempt to do what she wished. Her perfunctory little denials went down, one after the other.

“All right, then, I will!” she said, resolutely. “It's nice of you to ask me, I must say.”

“No; it's nice of you to come,” he retorted. “It's very—friendly.”

She went back into her room to get ready. That did not take her long, for she had lost interest in herself; she dressed her body as if it had been a doll which must be made neat and presentable for the street. But the magic of the candlelight still wrought its charm; looking at herself in the mirror she remembered how pretty she had been.

As she was adjusting her hat, the lights came on.

“Oh!” she cried, terribly grieved. “Now I can't go!” And she went out into the hall, to forestall his saying that she could very well cook her own meal now. But he was waiting for her, hat in hand, and she decided to say nothing.

“If he really wants me to come...” she thought. She could not quite believe that he did, but if he would pretend, so would she. And if he wished to pretend that he was not in all ways superior to her, but was her equal in misfortune, she would do that, too.

He asked her no questions, but nevertheless she told him lies. Sitting across the table from him in the chop house, she grew garrulous and she told him those things about herself which she had often dreamed were true. With now and then a fact; she was really cashier in a dairy, as she said, and she really had come from Seattle.

“That's a long way,” he remarked, smiling. “Aren't you ever homesick?”

Again her thin face grew scarlet. He wouldn't have asked that if he had known what her home or her life there had been.

“Well ... it was lovely there,” she said, and, so that he should not suspect, she invented still more wildly, an impossible past existence; she tried to make him see a delicately brought-up young girl leaving a home of marvellous luxury—

“Because I—I wanted to be independent,” she said.

“Quite right!” said he, absently. Didn't she know that all her history was written plain on her haggard little face? Weren't there thousands like her, everywhere, no mystery to any man? Independent! Perhaps a ball in flight from one careless hand to another might feel independent for a little moment, in mid-air.

Later on, when she fancied she had made the favourable impression she intended to make, she grew more candid.

“I haven't got on so very well,” she admitted. “I learned millinery back home, and I thought I'd do fine with that. But—” She paused. “I don't know,” she said, with a sigh. “I seem to have just sort of drifted.”

A bit of flotsam, he reflected, helplessly adrift on a swift and most merciless tide. Looking back, she could no longer see the ship from whence she had come; looking forward, not discern the shore toward which she was being carried; no use for her to struggle.

“If her life's flotsam,” he thought, “mine is jetsam—something that's been deliberately thrown overboard. Anyhow we're in the same current, and bound for the same rocks in the end.”

He pursued the fancy while she talked.

“I could swim back and climb on board the ship again, if I wanted. But I don't. I'd be one of the crew, helping to take her into God knows what port. Nobody'd care where I wanted to go. I'd rather float along alone.”

It was a pain to watch her, for beneath her uneasily dainty manners, her nervous little laugh, her strained vivacity, he could perceive an immeasurable lassitude. She had given up; even her vanity was gone, her finger nails neglected, her hair uncurled. She was anxious enough to please—not as a woman, only as a comrade.

“It's either despair or repentance,” he decided.

He wished with all his heart that she would go, for he had become weary beyond endurance. The quality of mercy is not strained, but pity is another and a more fragile thing. He was that tired of the pity she aroused in him; he wanted to be rid of her and to forget her.

“I can't help her,” he thought. “And I can't stand the sight of the poor little devil. I'm not capable of an impersonal interest in misery.”

But as surely as if she clung round his neck she held him with her chatter. He saw clearly enough a monstrous claim being made upon him, extending into an indefinite future. And he had already paid so dear to be free of claims! In moody silence he brought her back to the door of her room and said “good-night,” knowing well that he could not avoid her, that he would have to endure the most profound weariness and even unhappiness, not because of any faintest liking for her, but because he was by nature unable to hurt her.

The next evening she knocked at his door.

“I brought you a nice little bit of supper I just cooked,” she whispered, glancing round like a conspirator. With profuse thanks he retired into the room, and locking the door, slid the stuff off the plate into a paper bag.

“This must end!” he thought, scowling. Nevertheless, he had not the courage to go out to dinner for hours, until he was nearly famished, and when he returned, the certainty that she was waiting and longing to speak to him was too much for him.

She opened her door instantly.

“Here's your plate,” he said, “and thanks very much.”

His air of polite finality was only too successful; the look in her eyes was terrible.

“Oh, that's all right!” she said, airily, and turned away to hide her tears.

“No!” he said, hastily. “I— Look here! Please!”

“Oh, that's all right!” she repeated, still more gaily, and he saw her shoulders twitch in a sob like a shudder. It was unendurable. He came a step or two nearer and lightly touched her arm.

“You know we're neighbours,” he said, inanely.

She turned back then, with tears in her eyes, but smiling radiantly.

“I've got so silly, she explained. “I'm so afraid of being a nuisance....”

He assured her that she wasn't that; he went on to say a good many things which he didn't mean, and in the end, he asked her to come out for a walk. She took up her hat at once and pinned it on without even a glance in the mirror; her eyes on his face, garrulous and happy again now.

As they descended through the silent house, her light voice seemed to flutter like a scrap of paper in the wind—a lost voice, that was never to alight in any heart.

It was a cold night and she was thinly dressed, but what did she care for that? She would have walked on for ever, anywhere, in any weather, so that he walked beside her. Without a word, she made him aware of that, and it hurt and angered him.

“This can't go on!” he thought. “It's the worst sort of folly. She's got to be made to see....”

He began to talk a little at random.

“I shan't stop here long,” he said. “I'm old enough to know that one place is very like another, and still I'm always looking for one that won't be.”

“Oh! You're going away?” she asked, with a little gasp.

“Yes. There's nothing to keep me here,” he answered.

They went on in silence for some time; now that he had made her see, he had a very uncomfortable consciousness that she was seeing very clearly in the dark at that moment.

“Well ... of course ... you've got such a lot ahead of you” she said at last, in a trembling voice.

“Only what everyone else has,” he answered, impatiently.

“You mean—dying?”

“Ending,” he said.

“Maybe it isn't ending,” she said, with an unconcealed sob. “I hope it isn't.”

“Good Lord! Haven't you had enough?” he demanded.

“No, no! I just wish I could have another chance....”

“But have you ever had a chance?”

“Yes, I did! Oh, I could have been different!” she cried. “You don't know... I could have been... Now, you see, I haven't anything.... Not anything. When I think how different I could have been!...”

Pitiable illusion!

“No, you couldn't have been,” he said, suddenly gentle. “Don't think that.... And you're very sweet and dear as you are.”

“I? I?” she asked, with a sort of terror.

He was now utterly defeated, committed to the endless assuagement of this hapless creature.

“Very well!” he said to himself, resigned and weary. “Apparently I haven't the moral courage to drown Miss Flotsam. And there's no point in half-drowning her. I shall have to be humane—to breaking point.”

He suggested turning back, and his docile companion assented at once.

“But is there a breaking point?” he reflected. “I rather think there's not. Of all extraordinary things, the most extraordinary is the endurance of human beings. There's nothing imaginable we won't suffer without mutiny. Nothing! I'll take on the burden of this very tiresome Miss Flotsam, for no reason at all. I don't like her, certainly I don't admire her. I'm not even sure that I'm especially sorry for her. Simply, she makes a claim on my sympathy, and I'm obliged to acknowledge the claim. I can't help her; I've nothing to give. But I'll be the illusion she wants. I'll be the carrot in front of the donkey's nose....”

His long silence frightened her; she waited terribly anxious, for his next words. She sweet and dear? Oh, no!

“You didn't mean that, did you?” she asked, and her effort to sound careless and gay was a shocking failure.

“Yes!” he almost shouted. “Yes! I did!”

“Oh, but why?” she asked. “What makes you think that?”

To save his life, he could invent nothing plausible, and she kept on, desperate for reassurance, for a repetition of those words incredible and exquisite.

“I'd just like to know what you think is nice about me,” she entreated.

“Nothing!” he thought, ready to laugh at the insufferable farce. And, in lieu of spoken words, laid a hand on her arm. To his consternation, both her hands clasped his, she was trembling and cold.

“I can be a friend...” she said. “I know—I know what it means to be lonely and—I'll be the best friend you ever had.”

He was shaken with bitter mirth, grinning to himself in the dark, moved by pity that transcended human limitations, that had grown monstrous. It was what one feels at the sight of a butterfly, still fluttering, but mangled beyond remedy; the overmastering impulse is to destroy it quickly, to end its anguish—and one's own. But this creature was human, and beyond such mercy.

They returned to the house, and on the landing he wished her good night. But she did not go.

“You're so—so quiet she said, faintly. “I'm afraid—I hope you haven't anything very bad to worry you?...”

He was so mortally weary of this that he could no longer respond.

“No, thanks, I haven't,” he answered, stiff and unsmiling. “Good-night!”

He shut himself into his room with a sigh of relief. But through the thin wall he heard her stirring, and it exasperated him; he imagined that she moved feebly, like a stricken animal; he imagined her stumbling about because her eyes were blind with tears. He couldn't sleep, couldn't rest, with that going on; he walked up and down, angry, yet interested.

“Where's the line between cruelty and pity?” he thought. “I'm not sure that they aren't sometimes manifestations of the same emotion—the wish to get rid of what you don't like—”

He was interrupted by a knock at the door which he knew to be hers.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, half aloud. “Can't you let me alone?” And he flung open the door with a crash. The light from his room was full upon her, and he was appalled at her face. But she was without shame, utterly abandoned to her anguish, tears running down her cheeks in streams.

“I can't help it” she stammered. “I—oh, I heard you walking up and down.... I was afraid—you—you were—like me.... All alone—and—and suffering so....”

He said nothing at all; there was a shocking relief in being silent, in making no attempt at consolation. He looked at her with calm indifference.

“This must end,” he reflected. “If I don't speak, she'll have to go away.”

But apparently she didn't notice his silence; she came nearer and caught his passive hand in both of hers.

“I want you to know there's someone who's thinking of you,” she said. “Someone who cares.... Don't feel lonely! Don't!”

“No, I won't,” he assured her, a little dazed. “There's nothing wrong with me, I promise you. I'm not 'suffering.'”

“But I'm sorry for you! I am! I am!” she cried, with a great tearing sob like a hiccough. “You told me I—I was dear and sweet... Nobody else—for years and years... I want—to help you...”

“You do,” he answered, looking with profound apprehension at all the other closed doors. “Please don't cry! You do help me—very much. I don't know what I'd do without you.”

His insincerity seemed to him so patent and so brutal that he would not have felt surprised if she had struck him. All he wanted was to make her keep quiet at any cost. He was by no means so far gone in pessimism as to be indifferent to the possibility of other people observing or hearing this scene. The only thing he would not do was to let her set foot in his room; that was his last stronghold, his one refuge, and she should never, never pass that threshold. Otherwise, he was quite reckless; he would go to any lengths to tranquillize—and to get rid of her.

She had grasped his hand tighter, and on her disfigured and piteous face, still streaming tears, there was a strange light.

“Do I?” she asked. “Really? Does it comfort you to think—to think—there's someone near you?”

“It does,” he said solemnly. “It's a blessing.”

She dropped his hand, and stepped back, staring at him with dilated eyes. “You think that?” she said, so low he could scarcely hear her. “Then you don't know—about me.”

“I don't care,” he interposed hastily, in terror of a confession then and there. “I can see what you are—altogether gentle and good and kind.”

“No, no!” she cried.

“Don't spoil everything!” he said, in a tone of sad entreaty. “Only say good-night to me now, and let me think—what I like.”

She took a step forward and a step back, in an odd, mincing way, as if she were dancing. Then she rushed toward him and flung her arms about his neck, her wet cheek was against his, her fine, dry hair in his mouth and eyes.

“Good-night! Good-night, you dear boy! Oh, don't be sad! Just you remember—I'm here...” Her quavering voice broke. “And thinking of you!” she ended in a gasp.

He stood like a stone, amazed, a little affronted. She drew back, but her trembling hand lingered on his head, and her anxious, troubled glance could not leave him.

“Will you try not to be sad?” she asked.

“I'm not sad,” he answered, mildly.

“That's right!” she said, patting his head, and smiling weakly. “That's right.”

At last she went, and he was closing the door, when she came back, in great haste.

“I've got something that's wonderful for making you sleep!” she whispered.

But the door was closed, and he leaned against it, grimly resolute.

“No, thanks!” he said.

Then he forgot her; not that he consciously repudiated thinking of her, but because this thing was so incredible and nebulous that it eluded him. If she wasn't before his eyes, she didn't, she couldn't exist.

He waked the next morning with more energy than he had had for a long time. He made up his mind to escape Miss Flotsam, to give up his room at once, and to be gone when she returned that evening.

“Without a word,” he decided. “That's the kindest way. Then she can invent any sort of romance she likes to account for it. Poor little devil!”

But he was not to be let off so easily. Under his door was a note. In an infantile rage he put his foot on it.

“I won't read it!” he said.

Impossible! He had to read it, just as he was obliged to listen to all that she said. He picked up the envelope with a mental apology for the boot mark that sullied it, and, with a sigh, tore it open.

Like every appeal she made, it was too long. The words that might have touched him were repeated until they could only exasperate; she was not content with a simple explanation of her tormented life; she had felt obliged to lie a little, to ornament, and to cheapen every detail. A sickening letter, as if she were grovelling at his feet.... He had known at the first glance that she had suffered; that was enough to know of any human creature.

 

“You can't think what it means to me to write this letter. I know it may be the end of everything. But I couldn't let you go on thinking I was different and better than I really am. You said I was gentle and good and kind. You said it was a blessing to have me near you. But if I deceived you, and you found out, it would be a curse. I know what it is to be deceived in people. I wouldn't do that to you. I want you to know all about me.

“I think you know how hard life is for some people, and may be you can still go on being friends with me. I'm not trying to excuse any of the wrong things I have done, but some of it was not my fault. I am not going to work to-day. I shall stay in my room and wait to see how you feel about it. If you don't come by noon, I shall know that you feel you can't be friends any more. I won't blame you. I promise you I won't blame you, not one bit. Only, if you can't, I don't think I can go on any longer. I won't mind not going on.”

 

She had signed this “Elaine,” and after the signature there was a postscript:

 

“Please believe that I won't mind not going on. I am pretty much discouraged anyhow and I know a very easy way.”

 

His hand was raised to knock at her door when he stopped.

“But what am I to say?” he thought, in a panic. “What am I to do? Friends! It's not quite that with her, poor little devil. What can I do but go on hurting her for a little while longer? I couldn't keep it up. She'd know....”

He turned back into his own room and walked up and down, in anguish, in intolerable longing to be free.

“I couldn't keep it up.... If I don't go to her, she'll think that I loved her and that her letter overwhelmed me.... She'll think it's a tragedy.... O God! Isn't it better to make it a tragedy, instead of playing out the farce? Go and tell her the letter doesn't make any difference and I'm still her friend? Then if she puts her arms around me—if she touches me again, I'll hate her. And she'll see.... I can't do it.”

Then a thought came to him of such exquisite relief that he sank into a chair, suddenly grown weak.

“She doesn't mean it.... I'll put the letter under the door again, where she'll see it from the hall. She's sure to come out after me. And I won't answer; then she'll think I never got it.”

So he replaced the letter and sat down to wait.

What was she doing in there? Not a sound came through the thin partition. What was she doing? What could she do? Think? Her thoughts would be unendurable; he fancied that they were drifting in through the wall in little invisible clouds, acrid, bitter with tears, of no form or substance.

But if he went to her now, and set this right for a day, a month, there would be the rest of her life to be passed in there, thinking.

“No! She'll come,” he thought. “She'll take her letter away again, and nothing will happen. She'll simply go on. And I'll go on ... the natural course of events.”

The phrase was soothing until he analysed it and recalled instances of the natural course of events in certain cases he had observed. He was ready to believe that a humane man might well occupy his life in deflecting the natural course of events.

The clock in the Metropolitan tower struck eleven. What was she doing?

“She's dropped asleep.... Or she's forgotten. She's capable of forgetting anything, losing anything in that incredibly muddled brain of hers. And last night she was—distinctly exaltée.... Very much so!”

For a moment he was able to see something amusing in this thing.

“It's a compliment,” he observed, with a faint grin. “A lady to threaten to die for me. That's something, after all.”

Then he remembered her face. He sprang up, overturning the chair and the crash it made seemed a new affront to her august and terrible silence. He wanted to hurry to her and apologize. Apologize for pity?

“If I make a row, she'll come out,” he thought. “She'll want to know whether I'm 'sad.'”

He moved about noisily, angrily, for a time, but she did not come.

“It's a cheap, silly trick ...” he muttered. “Nothing more. She thought that would fetch me, that old, old tale about 'ending it all.' It won't though. It's despicable.”

On the fitful wind came the sound of the chimes ringing the half hour, faint at first, and ending in a clear ringing note as a strong gust blew. It chilled him. He stood still in the centre of the room, everything so quiet, his watch and his heart racing together, like nature and civilization in a laughable competition. And then behind the wall came a little sound, something indistinct, a rustle or a tiny sigh.

“This must be ended!” he said, aloud, and took a step toward the door. There at his feet was the letter. “'Friends'... 'Go on being friends!'” To go on—to go on—to keep the fluttering tormented thing alive a little longer, only to meet the same end. He could not keep it up; very soon she would see... A farce, or a tragedy?

He flung himself into a chair and covered his face with his hands—a mechanical and self-conscious gesture, done only out of regard for the situation. He was not able even to think of her now; he was lost in contemplation of a procession of doleful images, all the brothers and sisters of Miss Flotsam, from the beginning of time, all floating helpless in the current, their perishing faces turned without hope, without reproach, toward those others who did not drift, who were aboard their ship and bound for an unimaginable port.

The clock struck twelve. It was the most tremendous clamour he had ever heard, it rang in his own body with violent vibrations. After the actual sound had died away, the waves still beat on his ears with the brutal excitement of a tocsin. The terror, the ecstacy, it must be for her! But for her it would end, and for him it would go on ringing....

He got up when he could, when the deafening and sublime clangour had grown fainter in his heart. He went out and knocked upon her door. He waited, and knocked again, but there was no answer.

He tore up the letter and left the house, not to return, without advising any one of what had happened under that roof. Miss Flotsam was washed up on the beach now, out of reach of the sea; let her lie there in peace.