Sister Carrie: A Novel
being worthy of such as she, in front of her. Now, to think she had
caught him looking this way. He wrinkled his forehead in his distress.
“The devil!” he said a dozen times in an hour.
It was a quarter after four when he left the house. Carrie was in
tears. There would be no dinner that night.
“What the deuce,” he said, swaggering mentally to hide his own shame
from himself. “I’m not so bad. I’m not down yet.”
He looked around the square, and seeing the several large hotels,
decided to go to one for dinner. He would get his papers and make
himself comfortable there.
He ascended into the fine parlour of the Morton House, then one of the
best New York hotels, and, finding a cushioned seat, read. It did not
trouble him much that his decreasing sum of money did not allow of such
extravagance. Like the morphine fiend, he was becoming addicted to his
ease. Anything to relieve his mental distress, to satisfy his craving
for comfort. He must do it. No thoughts for the morrow—he could not
stand to think of it any more than he could of any other calamity. Like
the certainty of death, he tried to shut the certainty of soon being
without a dollar completely out of his mind, and he came very near
doing it.
Well-dressed guests moving to and fro over the thick carpets carried
him back to the old days. A young lady, a guest of the house, playing a
piano in an alcove pleased him. He sat there reading.
His dinner cost him $1.50. By eight o’clock he was through, and then,
seeing guests leaving and the crowd of pleasure-seekers thickening
outside wondered where he should go. Not home. Carrie would be up. No,
he would not go back there this evening. He would stay out and knock
around as a man who was independent—not broke—well might. He bought a
cigar, and went outside on the corner where other individuals were
lounging—brokers, racing people, thespians—his own flesh and blood. As
he stood there, he thought of the old evenings in Chicago, and how he
used to dispose of them. Many’s the game he had had. This took him to
poker.
“I didn’t do that thing right the other day,” he thought, referring to
his loss of sixty dollars. “I shouldn’t have weakened. I could have
bluffed that fellow down. I wasn’t in form, that’s what ailed me.”
Then he studied the possibilities of the game as it had been played,
and began to figure how he might have won, in several instances, by
bluffing a little harder.
“I’m old enough to play poker and do something with it. I’ll try my
hand to-night.”
Visions of a big stake floated before him. Supposing he did win a
couple of hundred, wouldn’t he be in it? Lots of sports he knew made
their living at this game, and a good living, too.
“They always had as much as I had,” he thought.
So off he went to a poker room in the neighbourhood, feeling much as he
had in the old days. In this period of self-forgetfulness, aroused
first by the shock of argument and perfected by a dinner in the hotel,
with cocktails and cigars, he was as nearly like the old Hurstwood as
he would ever be again. It was not the old Hurstwood—only a man arguing
with a divided conscience and lured by a phantom.
This poker room was much like the other one, only it was a back room in
a better drinking resort. Hurstwood watched a while, and then, seeing
an interesting game, joined in. As before, it went easy for a while, he
winning a few times and cheering up, losing a few pots and growing more
interested and determined on that account. At last the fascinating game
took a strong hold on him. He enjoyed its risks and ventured, on a
trifling hand, to bluff the company and secure a fair stake. To his
self-satisfaction intense and strong, he did it.
In the height of this feeling he began to think his luck was with him.
No one else had done so well. Now came another moderate hand, and again
he tried to open the jack-pot on it. There were others there who were
almost reading his heart, so close was their observation.
“I have three of a kind,” said one of the players to himself. “I’ll
just stay with that fellow to the finish.”
The result was that bidding began.
“I raise you ten.”
“Good.”
“Ten more.”
“Good.”
“Ten again.”
“Right you are.”
It got to where Hurstwood had seventy-five dollars up. The other man
really became serious. Perhaps this individual (Hurstwood) really did
have a stiff hand.
“I call,” he said.
Hurstwood showed his hand. He was done. The bitter fact that he had
lost seventy-five dollars made him desperate.
“Let’s have another pot,” he said, grimly.
“All right,” said the man.
Some of the other players quit, but observant loungers took their
places. Time passed, and it came to twelve o’clock. Hurstwood held on,
neither winning nor losing much. Then he grew weary, and on a last hand
lost twenty more. He was sick at heart.
At a quarter after one in the morning he came out of the place. The
chill, bare streets seemed a mockery of his state. He walked slowly
west, little thinking of his row with Carrie. He ascended the stairs
and went into his room as if there had been no trouble. It was his loss
that occupied his mind. Sitting down on the bedside he counted his
money. There was now but a hundred and ninety dollars and some change.
He put it up and began to undress.
“I wonder what’s getting into me, anyhow?” he said.
In the morning Carrie scarcely spoke and he felt as if he must go out
again. He had treated her badly, but he could not afford to make up.
Now desperation seized him, and for a day or two, going out thus, he
lived like a gentleman—or what he conceived to be a gentleman—which
took money. For his escapades he was soon poorer in mind and body, to
say nothing of his purse, which had lost thirty by the process. Then he
came down to cold, bitter sense again.
“The rent man comes to-day,” said Carrie, greeting him thus
indifferently three mornings later.
“He does?”
“Yes; this is the second,” answered Carrie.
Hurstwood frowned. Then in despair he got out his purse.
“It seems an awful lot to pay for rent,” he said.
He was nearing his last hundred dollars.
Chapter XXXVII. THE SPIRIT AWAKENS: NEW SEARCH FOR THE GATE
It would be useless to explain how in due time the last fifty dollars
was in sight. The seven hundred, by his process of handling, had only
carried them into June. Before the final hundred mark was reached he
began to indicate that a calamity was approaching.
“I don’t know,” he said one day, taking a trivial expenditure for meat
as a text, “it seems to take an awful lot for us to live.”
“It doesn’t seem to me,” said Carrie, “that we spend very much.”
“My money is nearly gone,” he said, “and I hardly know where it’s gone
to.”
“All that seven hundred dollars?” asked Carrie.
“All but a hundred.”
He looked so disconsolate that it scared her. She began to see that she
herself had been drifting. She had felt it all the time.
“Well, George,” she exclaimed, “why don’t you get out and look for
something? You could find something.”
“I have looked,” he said. “You can’t make people give you a place.”
She gazed weakly at him and said: “Well, what do you think you will do?
A hundred dollars won’t last long.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t do any more than look.”
Carrie became frightened over this announcement. She thought
desperately upon the subject. Frequently she had considered the stage
as a door through which she might enter that gilded state which she had
so much craved. Now, as in Chicago, it came as a last resource in
distress. Something must be done if he did not get work soon. Perhaps
she would have to go out and battle again alone.
She began to wonder how one would go about getting a place. Her
experience in Chicago proved that she had not tried the right way.
There must be people who would listen to and try you—men who would give
you an opportunity.
They were talking at the breakfast table, a morning or two later, when
she brought up the dramatic subject by saying that she saw that Sarah
Bernhardt was coming to this country. Hurstwood had seen it, too.
“How do people get on the stage, George?” she finally asked,
innocently.
“I don’t know,” he said. “There must be dramatic agents.”
Carrie was sipping coffee, and did not look up.
“Regular people who get you a place?”
“Yes, I think so,” he answered.
Suddenly the air with which she asked attracted his attention.
“You’re not still thinking about being an actress, are you?” he asked.
“No,” she answered, “I was just wondering.”
Without being clear, there was something in the thought which he
objected to. He did not believe any more, after three years of
observation, that Carrie would ever do anything great in that line. She
seemed too simple, too yielding. His idea of the art was that it
involved something more pompous. If she tried to get on the stage she
would fall into the hands of some cheap manager and become like the
rest of them. He had a good idea of what he meant by _them_. Carrie was
pretty. She would get along all right, but where would he be?
“I’d get that idea out of my head, if I were you. It’s a lot more
difficult than you think.”
Carrie felt this to contain, in some way, an aspersion upon her
ability.
“You said I did real well in Chicago,” she rejoined.
“You did,” he answered, seeing that he was arousing opposition, “but
Chicago isn’t New York, by a big jump.”
Carrie did not answer this at all. It hurt her.
“The stage,” he went on, “is all right if you can be one of the big
guns, but there’s nothing to the rest of it. It takes a long while to
get up.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Carrie, slightly aroused.
In a flash, he thought he foresaw the result of this thing. Now, when
the worst of his situation was approaching, she would get on the stage
in some cheap way and forsake him. Strangely, he had not conceived well
of her mental ability. That was because he did not understand the
nature of emotional greatness. He had never learned that a person might
be emotionally—instead of intellectually—great. Avery Hall was too far
away for him to look back and sharply remember. He had lived with this
woman too long.
“Well, I do,” he answered. “If I were you I wouldn’t think of it. It’s
not much of a profession for a woman.”
“It’s better than going hungry,” said Carrie. “If you don’t want me to
do that, why don’t you get work yourself?”
There was no answer ready for this. He had got used to the suggestion.
“Oh, let up,” he answered.
The result of this was that she secretly resolved to try. It didn’t
matter about him. She was not going to be dragged into poverty and
something worse to suit him. She could act. She could get something and
then work up. What would he say then? She pictured herself already
appearing in some fine performance on Broadway; of going every evening
to her dressing-room and making up. Then she would come out at eleven
o’clock and see the carriages ranged about, waiting for the people. It
did not matter whether she was the star or not. If she were only once
in, getting a decent salary, wearing the kind of clothes she liked,
having the money to do with, going here and there as she pleased, how
delightful it would all be. Her mind ran over this picture all the day
long. Hurstwood’s dreary state made its beauty become more and more
vivid.
Curiously this idea soon took hold of Hurstwood. His vanishing sum
suggested that he would need sustenance. Why could not Carrie assist
him a little until he could get something?
He came in one day with something of this idea in his mind.
“I met John B. Drake to-day,” he said. “He’s going to open a hotel here
in the fall. He says that he can make a place for me then.”
“Who is he?” asked Carrie.