He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly
in the room. He had had a letter from her and
feared a terrible accident. He suggested breaking
open the door. The porter, who had been sullen
and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he could
not take the responsibility of breaking into the room;
they must go for the commissaire de police. They
walked together to the bureau, and then they fetched
a locksmith. Philip found that Miss Price had
not paid the last quarter’s rent: on New
Year’s Day she had not given the concierge the
present which old-established custom led him to regard
as a right. The four of them went upstairs, and
they knocked again at the door. There was no
reply. The locksmith set to work, and at last
they entered the room. Philip gave a cry and instinctively
covered his eyes with his hands. The wretched
woman was hanging with a rope round her neck, which
she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by some
previous tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed.
She had moved her own little bed out of the way and
had stood on a chair, which had been kicked away.
It was lying on its side on the floor. They cut
her down. The body was quite cold.
XLIX
The story which Philip made out in one way and another
was terrible. One of the grievances of the women-students
was that Fanny Price would never share their gay meals
in restaurants, and the reason was obvious: she
had been oppressed by dire poverty. He remembered
the luncheon they had eaten together when first he
came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had
disgusted him: he realised now that she ate in
that manner because she was ravenous. The concierge
told him what her food had consisted of. A bottle
of milk was left for her every day and she brought
in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the loaf and
drank half the milk at mid-day when she came back
from the school, and consumed the rest in the evening.
It was the same day after day. Philip thought
with anguish of what she must have endured. She
had never given anyone to understand that she was poorer
than the rest, but it was clear that her money had
been coming to an end, and at last she could not afford
to come any more to the studio. The little room
was almost bare of furniture, and there were no other
clothes than the shabby brown dress she had always
worn. Philip searched among her things for the
address of some friend with whom he could communicate.
He found a piece of paper on which his own name was
written a score of times. It gave him a peculiar
shock. He supposed it was true that she had loved
him; he thought of the emaciated body, in the brown
dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; and he
shuddered. But if she had cared for him why did
she not let him help her? He would so gladly have
done all he could. He felt remorseful because
he had refused to see that she looked upon him with
any particular feeling, and now these words in her
letter were infinitely pathetic: I can’t
bear the thought that anyone else should touch me.
She had died of starvation.
