Sister Carrie: A Novel
“Who is it?” said the other.
“Oh, a couple of girls over here in Fortieth Street. We could have a
dandy time. I was just looking for you.”
“Supposing you get ’em and take ’em out to dinner?”
“Sure,” said Drouet. “Wait’ll I go upstairs and change my clothes.”
“Well, I’ll be in the barber shop,” said the other. “I want to get a
shave.”
“All right,” said Drouet, creaking off in his good shoes toward the
elevator. The old butterfly was as light on the wing as ever.
On an incoming vestibuled Pullman, speeding at forty miles an hour
through the snow of the evening, were three others, all related.
“First call for dinner in the dining-car,” a Pullman servitor was
announcing, as he hastened through the aisle in snow-white apron and
jacket.
“I don’t believe I want to play any more,” said the youngest, a
black-haired beauty, turned supercilious by fortune, as she pushed a
euchre hand away from her.
“Shall we go into dinner?” inquired her husband, who was all that fine
raiment can make.
“Oh, not yet,” she answered. “I don’t want to play any more, though.”
“Jessica,” said her mother, who was also a study in what good clothing
can do for age, “push that pin down in your tie—it’s coming up.”
Jessica obeyed, incidentally touching at her lovely hair and looking at
a little jewel-faced watch. Her husband studied her, for beauty, even
cold, is fascinating from one point of view.
“Well, we won’t have much more of this weather,” he said. “It only
takes two weeks to get to Rome.”
Mrs. Hurstwood nestled comfortably in her corner and smiled. It was so
nice to be the mother-in-law of a rich young man—one whose financial
state had borne her personal inspection.
“Do you suppose the boat will sail promptly?” asked Jessica, “if it
keeps up like this?”
“Oh, yes,” answered her husband. “This won’t make any difference.”
Passing down the aisle came a very fair-haired banker’s son, also of
Chicago, who had long eyed this supercilious beauty. Even now he did
not hesitate to glance at her, and she was conscious of it. With a
specially conjured show of indifference, she turned her pretty face
wholly away. It was not wifely modesty at all. By so much was her pride
satisfied.
At this moment Hurstwood stood before a dirty four story building in a
side street quite near the Bowery, whose one-time coat of buff had been
changed by soot and rain. He mingled with a crowd of men—a crowd which
had been, and was still, gathering by degrees.
It began with the approach of two or three, who hung about the closed
wooden doors and beat their feet to keep them warm. They had on faded
derby hats with dents in them. Their misfit coats were heavy with
melted snow and turned up at the collars. Their trousers were mere
bags, frayed at the bottom and wobbling over big, soppy shoes, torn at
the sides and worn almost to shreds. They made no effort to go in, but
shifted ruefully about, digging their hands deep in their pockets and
leering at the crowd and the increasing lamps. With the minutes,
increased the number. There were old men with grizzled beards and
sunken eyes, men who were comparatively young but shrunken by diseases,
men who were middle-aged. None were fat. There was a face in the thick
of the collection which was as white as drained veal. There was another
red as brick. Some came with thin, rounded shoulders, others with
wooden legs, still others with frames so lean that clothes only flapped
about them. There were great ears, swollen noses, thick lips, and,
above all, red, blood-shot eyes. Not a normal, healthy face in the
whole mass; not a straight figure; not a straightforward, steady
glance.
In the drive of the wind and sleet they pushed in on one another. There
were wrists, unprotected by coat or pocket, which were red with cold.
There were ears, half covered by every conceivable semblance of a hat,
which still looked stiff and bitten. In the snow they shifted, now one
foot, now another, almost rocking in unison.
With the growth of the crowd about the door came a murmur. It was not
conversation, but a running comment directed at any one in general. It
contained oaths and slang phrases.
“By damn, I wish they’d hurry up.”
“Look at the copper watchin’.”
“Maybe it ain’t winter, nuther!”
“I wisht I was in Sing Sing.”
Now a sharper lash of wind cut down and they huddled closer. It was an
edging, shifting, pushing throng. There was no anger, no pleading, no
threatening words. It was all sullen endurance, unlightened by either
wit or good fellowship.
A carriage went jingling by with some reclining figure in it. One of
the men nearest the door saw it.
“Look at the bloke ridin’.”
“He ain’t so cold.”
“Eh, eh, eh!” yelled another, the carriage having long since passed out
of hearing.
Little by little the night crept on. Along the walk a crowd turned out
on its way home. Men and shop-girls went by with quick steps. The
cross-town cars began to be crowded. The gas lamps were blazing, and
every window bloomed ruddy with a steady flame. Still the crowd hung
about the door, unwavering.
“Ain’t they ever goin’ to open up?” queried a hoarse voice,
suggestively.
This seemed to renew the general interest in the closed door, and many
gazed in that direction. They looked at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs
paw and whine and study the knob. They shifted and blinked and
muttered, now a curse, now a comment. Still they waited and still the
snow whirled and cut them with biting flakes. On the old hats and
peaked shoulders it was piling. It gathered in little heaps and curves
and no one brushed it off. In the centre of the crowd the warmth and
steam melted it, and water trickled off hat rims and down noses, which
the owners could not reach to scratch. On the outer rim the piles
remained unmelted. Hurstwood, who could not get in the centre, stood
with head lowered to the weather and bent his form.
A light appeared through the transom overhead. It sent a thrill of
possibility through the watchers. There was a murmur of recognition. At
last the bars grated inside and the crowd pricked up its ears.
Footsteps shuffled within and it murmured again. Some one called: “Slow
up there, now,” and then the door opened. It was push and jam for a
minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then it
melted inward, like logs floating, and disappeared. There were wet hats
and wet shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass, pouring in
between bleak walls. It was just six o’clock and there was supper in
every hurrying pedestrian’s face. And yet no supper was provided
here—nothing but beds.
Hurstwood laid down his fifteen cents and crept off with weary steps to
his allotted room. It was a dingy affair—wooden, dusty, hard. A small
gas-jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner.
“Hm!” he said, clearing his throat and locking the door.
Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with
his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he
arranged in the same place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly
upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down.
It seemed as if he thought a while, for now he arose and turned the gas
out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few
moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned
the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there,
hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes
filled the room. When the odour reached his nostrils, he quit his
attitude and fumbled for the bed. “What’s the use?” he said, weakly, as
he stretched himself to rest.
And now Carrie had attained that which in the beginning seemed life’s
object, or, at least, such fraction of it as human beings ever attain
of their original desires. She could look about on her gowns and
carriage, her furniture and bank account. Friends there were, as the
world takes it—those who would bow and smile in acknowledgment of her
success. For these she had once craved. Applause there was, and
publicity—once far off, essential things, but now grown trivial and
indifferent. Beauty also—her type of loveliness—and yet she was lonely.
In her rocking-chair she sat, when not otherwise engaged—singing and
dreaming.
Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional
nature—the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels. Of one come the
men of action—generals and statesmen; of the other, the poets and
dreamers—artists all.
As harps in the wind, the latter respond to every breath of fancy,
voicing in their moods all the ebb and flow of the ideal.
Man has not yet comprehended the dreamer any more than he has the
ideal. For him the laws and morals of the world are unduly severe. Ever
hearkening to the sound of beauty, straining for the flash of its
distant wings, he watches to follow, wearying his feet in travelling.
So watched Carrie, so followed, rocking and singing.
And it must be remembered that reason had little part in this. Chicago
dawning, she saw the city offering more of loveliness than she had ever
known, and instinctively, by force of her moods alone, clung to it. In
fine raiment and elegant surroundings, men seemed to be contented.
Hence, she drew near these things. Chicago, New York; Drouet,
Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of stage—these were but
incidents. Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for.
Time proved the representation false.
Oh, the tangle of human life! How dimly as yet we see. Here was Carrie,
in the beginning poor, unsophisticated, emotional; responding with
desire to everything most lovely in life, yet finding herself turned as
by a wall. Laws to say: “Be allured, if you will, by everything lovely,
but draw not nigh unless by righteousness.” Convention to say: “You
shall not better your situation save by honest labour.” If honest
labour be unremunerative and difficult to endure; if it be the long,
long road which never reaches beauty, but wearies the feet and the
heart; if the drag to follow beauty be such that one abandons the
admired way, taking rather the despised path leading to her dreams
quickly, who shall cast the first stone? Not evil, but longing for that
which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring. Not evil,
but goodness more often allures the feeling mind unused to reason.
Amid the tinsel and shine of her state walked Carrie, unhappy. As when
Drouet took her, she had thought: “Now I am lifted into that which is
best”; as when Hurstwood seemingly offered her the better way: “Now am
I happy.” But since the world goes its way past all who will not
partake of its folly, she now found herself alone. Her purse was open
to him whose need was greatest. In her walks on Broadway, she no longer
thought of the elegance of the creatures who passed her. Had they more
of that peace and beauty which glimmered afar off, then were they to be
envied.
Drouet abandoned his claim and was seen no more. Of Hurstwood’s death
she was not even aware. A slow, black boat setting out from the pier at
Twenty-seventh Street upon its weekly errand bore, with many others,
his nameless body to the Potter’s Field.
Thus passed all that was of interest concerning these twain in their
relation to her. Their influence upon her life is explicable alone by
the nature of her longings. Time was when both represented for her all
that was most potent in earthly success. They were the personal
representatives of a state most blessed to attain—the titled
ambassadors of comfort and peace, aglow with their credentials. It is
but natural that when the world which they represented no longer
allured her, its ambassadors should be discredited. Even had Hurstwood