Sister Carrie: A Novel
Hale received a salary of forty-five dollars a week. His wife, quite
attractive, affected the feeling of youth, and objected to that sort of
home life which means the care of a house and the raising of a family.
Like Drouet and Carrie, they also occupied three rooms on the floor
above.
Not long after she arrived Mrs. Hale established social relations with
her, and together they went about. For a long time this was her only
companionship, and the gossip of the manager’s wife formed the medium
through which she saw the world. Such trivialities, such praises of
wealth, such conventional expression of morals as sifted through this
passive creature’s mind, fell upon Carrie and for the while confused
her.
On the other hand, her own feelings were a corrective influence. The
constant drag to something better was not to be denied. By those things
which address the heart was she steadily recalled. In the apartments
across the hall were a young girl and her mother. They were from
Evansville, Indiana, the wife and daughter of a railroad treasurer. The
daughter was here to study music, the mother to keep her company.
Carrie did not make their acquaintance, but she saw the daughter coming
in and going out. A few times she had seen her at the piano in the
parlour, and not infrequently had heard her play. This young woman was
particularly dressy for her station, and wore a jewelled ring or two
which flashed upon her white fingers as she played.
Now Carrie was affected by music. Her nervous composition responded to
certain strains, much as certain strings of a harp vibrate when a
corresponding key of a piano is struck. She was delicately moulded in
sentiment, and answered with vague ruminations to certain wistful
chords. They awoke longings for those things which she did not have.
They caused her to cling closer to things she possessed. One short song
the young lady played in a most soulful and tender mood. Carrie heard
it through the open door from the parlour below. It was at that hour
between afternoon and night when, for the idle, the wanderer, things
are apt to take on a wistful aspect. The mind wanders forth on far
journeys and returns with sheaves of withered and departed joys. Carrie
sat at her window looking out. Drouet had been away since ten in the
morning. She had amused herself with a walk, a book by Bertha M. Clay
which Drouet had left there, though she did not wholly enjoy the
latter, and by changing her dress for the evening. Now she sat looking
out across the park as wistful and depressed as the nature which craves
variety and life can be under such circumstances. As she contemplated
her new state, the strain from the parlour below stole upward. With it
her thoughts became coloured and enmeshed. She reverted to the things
which were best and saddest within the small limit of her experience.
She became for the moment a repentant.
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 _blasé_ 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. He gave Drouet no credit for any
feelings toward Carrie whatever. He envied him, and now, as he looked
at the well-dressed jolly salesman, whom he so much liked, the gleam of
the rival glowed in his eye. He began to “size up” Drouet from the
standpoints of wit and fascination. He began to look to see where he
was weak. There was no disputing that, whatever he might think of him
as a good fellow, he felt a certain amount of contempt for him as a
lover. He could hoodwink him all right. Why, if he would just let
Carrie see one such little incident as that of Thursday, it would
settle the matter. He ran on in thought, almost exulting, the while he
laughed and chatted, and Drouet felt nothing. He had no power of
analysing the glance and the atmosphere of a man like Hurstwood. He
stood and smiled and accepted the invitation while his friend examined
him with the eye of a hawk.
The object of this peculiarly involved comedy was not thinking of
either. She was busy adjusting her thoughts and feelings to newer
conditions, and was not in danger of suffering disturbing pangs from
either quarter. One evening Drouet found her dressing herself before
the glass.
“Cad,” said he, catching her, “I believe you’re getting vain.”
“Nothing of the kind,” she returned, smiling.
“Well, you’re mighty pretty,” he went on, slipping his arm around her.
“Put on that navy-blue dress of yours and I’ll take you to the show.”
“Oh, I’ve promised Mrs. Hale to go with her to the Exposition
to-night,” she returned, apologetically.
“You did, eh?” he said, studying the situation abstractedly. “I
wouldn’t care to go to that myself.”
“Well, I don’t know,” answered Carrie, puzzling, but not offering to
break her promise in his favour.
Just then a knock came at their door and the maidservant handed a
letter in.
“He says there’s an answer expected,” she explained.