The Essential Works of Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser

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      He hurried to Madison Street and boarded a horse-car, which carried him to Ogden Place in half an hour.

      Carrie had thought of going for a walk, and had put on a light grey woollen dress with a jaunty double-breasted jacket. She had out her hat and gloves, and was fastening a white lace tie about her throat when the housemaid brought up the information that Mr. Hurstwood wished to see her.

      She started slightly at the announcement, but told the girl to say that she would come down in a moment, and proceeded to hasten her dressing.

      Carrie could not have told herself at this moment whether she was glad or sorry that the impressive manager was awaiting her presence. She was slightly flurried and tingling in the cheeks, but it was more nervousness than either fear or favour. She did not try to conjecture what the drift of the conversation would be. She only felt that she must be careful, and that Hurstwood had an indefinable fascination for her. Then she gave her tie its last touch with her fingers and went below.

      The deep-feeling manager was himself a little strained in the nerves by the thorough consciousness of his mission. He felt that he must make a strong play on this occasion, but now that the hour was come, and he heard Carrie’s feet upon the stair, his nerve failed him. He sank a little in determination, for he was not so sure, after all, what her opinion might be.

      When she entered the room, however, her appearance gave him courage. She looked simple and charming enough to strengthen the daring of any lover. Her apparent nervousness dispelled his own.

      “How are you?” he said, easily. “I could not resist the temptation to come out this afternoon, it was so pleasant.”

      “Yes,” said Carrie, halting before him, “I was just preparing to go for a walk myself.”

      “Oh, were you?” he said. “Supposing, then, you get your hat and we both go?”

      They crossed the park and went west along Washington Boulevard, beautiful with its broad macadamised road, and large frame houses set back from the sidewalks. It was a street where many of the more prosperous residents of the West Side lived, and Hurstwood could not help feeling nervous over the publicity of it. They had gone but a few blocks when a livery stable sign in one of the side streets solved the difficulty for him. He would take her to drive along the new Boulevard.

      The Boulevard at that time was little more than a country road. The part he intended showing her was much farther out on this same West Side, where there was scarcely a house. It connected Douglas Park with Washington or South Park, and was nothing more than a neatly MADE road, running due south for some five miles over an open, grassy prairie, and then due east over the same kind of prairie for the same distance. There was not a house to be encountered anywhere along the larger part of the route, and any conversation would be pleasantly free of interruption.

      At the stable he picked a gentle horse, and they were soon out of range of either public observation or hearing.

      “Can you drive?” he said, after a time.

      “I never tried,” said Carrie.

      He put the reins in her hand, and folded his arms.

      “You see there’s nothing to it much,” he said, smilingly.

      “Not when you have a gentle horse,” said Carrie.

      “You can handle a horse as well as any one, after a little practice,” he added, encouragingly.

      He had been looking for some time for a break in the conversation when he could give it a serious turn. Once or twice he had held his peace, hoping that in silence her thoughts would take the colour of his own, but she had lightly continued the subject. Presently, however, his silence controlled the situation. The drift of his thoughts began to tell. He gazed fixedly at nothing in particular, as if he were thinking of something which concerned her not at all. His thoughts, however, spoke for themselves. She was very much aware that a climax was pending.

      “Do you know,” he said, “I have spent the happiest evenings in years since I have known you?”

      “Have you?” she said, with assumed airiness, but still excited by the conviction which the tone of his voice carried.

      “I was going to tell you the other evening,” he added, “but somehow the opportunity slipped away.”

      Carrie was listening without attempting to reply. She could think of nothing worth while to say. Despite all the ideas concerning right which had troubled her vaguely since she had last seen him, she was now influenced again strongly in his favour.

      “I came out here today,” he went on, solemnly, “to tell you just how I feel — to see if you wouldn’t listen to me.”

      Hurstwood was something of a romanticist after his kind. He was capable of strong feelings — often poetic ones — and under a stress of desire, such as the present, he waxed eloquent. That is, his feelings and his voice were coloured with that seeming repression and pathos which is the essence of eloquence.

      “You know,” he said, putting his hand on her arm, and keeping a strange silence while he formulated words, “that I love you?” Carrie did not stir at the words. She was bound up completely in the man’s atmosphere. He would have churchlike silence in order to express his feelings, and she kept it. She did not move her eyes from the flat, open scene before her. Hurstwood waited for a few moments, and then repeated the words.

      “You must not say that,” she said, weakly.

      Her words were not convincing at all. They were the result of a feeble thought that something ought to be said. He paid no attention to them whatever.

      “Carrie,” he said, using her first name with sympathetic familiarity, “I want you to love me. You don’t know how much I need some one to waste a little affection on me. I am practically alone. There is nothing in my life that is pleasant or delightful. It’s all work and worry with people who are nothing to me.”

      As he said this, Hurstwood really imagined that his state was pitiful. He had the ability to get off at a distance and view himself objectively — of seeing what he wanted to see in the things which made up his existence. Now, as he spoke, his voice trembled with that peculiar vibration which is the result of tensity. It went ringing home to his companion’s heart.

      “Why, I should think,” she said, turning upon him large eyes which were full of sympathy and feeling, “that you would be very happy. You know so much of the world.”

      “That is it,” he said, his voice dropping to a soft minor, “I know too much of the world.”

      It was an important thing to her to hear one so well-positioned and powerful speaking in this manner. She could not help feeling the strangeness of her situation. How was it that, in so little a while, the narrow life of the country had fallen from her as a garment, and the city, with all its mystery, taken its place? Here was this greatest mystery, the man of money and affairs sitting beside her, appealing to her. Behold, he had ease and comfort, his strength was great, his position high, his clothing rich, and yet he was appealing to her. She could formulate no thought which would be just and right. She troubled herself no more upon the matter. She only basked in the warmth of his feeling, which was as a grateful blaze to one who is cold. Hurstwood glowed with his own intensity, and the heat of his passion was already melting the wax of his companion’s scruples.

      “You СКАЧАТЬ