The Essential Works of Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      While she was in this mood Drouet came in, bringing with him an entirely different atmosphere. It was dusk and Carrie had neglected to light the lamp. The fire in the grate, too, had burned low.

      “Where are you, Cad?” he said, using a pet name he had given her.

      “Here,” she answered.

      There was something delicate and lonely in her voice, but he could not hear it. He had not the poetry in him that would seek a woman out under such circumstances and console her for the tragedy of life. Instead, he struck a match and lighted the gas.

      “Hello,” he exclaimed, “you’ve been crying.”

      Her eyes were still wet with a few vague tears.

      “Pshaw,” he said, “you don’t want to do that.”

      He took her hand, feeling in his good-natured egotism that it was probably lack of his presence which had made her lonely.

      “Come on, now,” he went on; “it’s all right. Let’s waltz a little to that music.”

      He could not have introduced a more incongruous proposition. It made clear to Carrie that he could not sympathise with her. She could not have framed thoughts which would have expressed his defect or made clear the difference between them, but she felt it. It was his first great mistake.

      What Drouet said about the girl’s grace, as she tripped out evenings accompanied by her mother, caused Carrie to perceive the nature and value of those little modish ways which women adopt when they would presume to be something. She looked in the mirror and pursed up her lips, accompanying it with a little toss of the head, as she had seen the railroad treasurer’s daughter do. She caught up her skirts with an easy swing, for had not Drouet remarked that in her and several others, and Carrie was naturally imitative. She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In short, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of considerable taste.

      Drouet noticed this. He saw the new bow in her hair and the new way of arranging her locks which she affected one morning.

      “You look fine that way, Cad,” he said.

      “Do I?” she replied, sweetly. It made her try for other effects that selfsame day.

      She used her feet less heavily, a thing that was brought about by her attempting to imitate the treasurer’s daughter’s graceful carriage. How much influence the presence of that young woman in the same house had upon her it would be difficult to say. But, because of all these things, when Hurstwood called he had found a young woman who was much more than the Carrie to whom Drouet had first spoken. The primary defects of dress and manner had passed. She was pretty, graceful, rich in the timidity born of uncertainty, and with a something childlike in her large eyes which captured the fancy of this starched and conventional poser among men. It was the ancient attraction of the fresh for the stale. If there was a touch of appreciation left in him for the bloom and unsophistication which is the charm of youth, it rekindled now. He looked into her pretty face and felt the subtle waves of young life radiating therefrom. In that large clear eye he could see nothing that his blase nature could understand as guile. The little vanity, if he could have perceived it there, would have touched him as a pleasant thing.

      “I wonder,” he said, as he rode away in his cab, “how Drouet came to win her.”

      He gave her credit for feelings superior to Drouet at the first glance.

      The cab plopped along between the far-receding lines of gas lamps on either hand. He folded his gloved hands and saw only the lighted chamber and Carrie’s face. He was pondering over the delight of youthful beauty.

      “I’ll have a bouquet for her,” he thought. “Drouet won’t mind.” He never for a moment concealed the fact of her attraction for himself. He troubled himself not at all about Drouet’s priority. He was merely floating those gossamer threads of thought which, like the spider’s, he hoped would lay hold somewhere. He did not know, he could not guess, what the result would be.

      A few weeks later Drouet, in his peregrinations, encountered one of his well-dressed lady acquaintances in Chicago on his return from a short trip to Omaha. He had intended to hurry out to Ogden Place and surprise Carrie, but now he fell into an interesting conversation and soon modified his original intention.

      “Let’s go to dinner,” he said, little recking any chance meeting which might trouble his way.

      “Certainly,” said his companion.

      They visited one of the better restaurants for a social chat. It was five in the afternoon when they met; it was seven-thirty before the last bone was picked.

      Drouet was just finishing a little incident he was relating, and his face was expanding into a smile, when Hurstwood’s eye caught his own. The latter had come in with several friends, and, seeing Drouet and some woman, not Carrie, drew his own conclusion.

      “Ah, the rascal,” he thought, and then, with a touch of righteous sympathy, “that’s pretty hard on the little girl.”

      Drouet jumped from one easy thought to another as he caught Hurstwood’s eye. He felt but very little misgiving, until he saw that Hurstwood was cautiously pretending not to see. Then some of the latter’s impression forced itself upon him. He thought of Carrie and their last meeting. By George, he would have to explain this to Hurstwood. Such a chance half-hour with an old friend must not have anything more attached to it than it really warranted.

      For the first time he was troubled. Here was a moral complication of which he could not possibly get the ends. Hurstwood would laugh at him for being a fickle boy. He would laugh with Hurstwood. Carrie would never hear, his present companion at table would never know, and yet he could not help feeling that he was getting the worst of it — there was some faint stigma attached, and he was not guilty. He broke up the dinner by becoming dull, and saw his companion on her car. Then he went home.

      “He hasn’t talked to me about any of these later flames,” thought Hurstwood to himself. “He thinks I think he cares for the girl out there.”

      “He ought not to think I’m knocking around, since I have just introduced him out there,” thought Drouet.

      “I saw you,” Hurstwood said, genially, the next time Drouet drifted in to his polished resort, from which he could not stay away. He raised his forefinger indicatively, as parents do to children.

      “An old acquaintance of mine that I ran into just as I was coming up from the station,” explained Drouet. “She used to be quite a beauty.”

      “Still attracts a little, eh?” returned the other, affecting to jest.

      “Oh, no,” said Drouet, “just couldn’t escape her this time.”

      “How long are you here?” asked Hurstwood.

      “Only a few days.”

      “You must bring the girl down and take dinner with me,” he said. “I’m afraid you keep her cooped up out there. I’ll get a box for Joe Jefferson.”

      “Not me,” answered the drummer. “Sure I’ll come.”

      This pleased Hurstwood immensely. СКАЧАТЬ