Jennie Gerhardt - Theodore Dreiser (recommended reading TXT) 📗

you'd have married her in the first place. Surely you wouldn't take a woman and live with her as you have with this woman for years, disgracing her and yourself, and still claim that you love her. You may have a passion for her, but it isn't love."

"How do you know I haven't married her?" inquired Lester coolly. He wanted to see how his father would take to that idea.

"You're not serious!" The old gentleman propped himself up on his arms and looked at him.

"No, I'm not," replied Lester, "but I might be. I might marry her."

"Impossible!" exclaimed his father vigorously. "I can't believe it. I can't believe a man of your intelligence would do a thing like that, Lester. Where is your judgment? Why, you've lived in open adultery with her for years, and now you talk of marrying her. Why, in heaven's name, if you were going to do anything like that, didn't you do it in the first place? Disgrace your parents, break your mother's heart, injure the business, become a public scandal, and then marry the cause of it? I don't believe it."

Old Archibald got up.

"Don't get excited, father," said Lester quickly. "We won't get anywhere that way. I say I might marry her. She's not a bad woman, and I wish you wouldn't talk about her as you do. You've never seen her. You know nothing about her."

"I know enough," insisted old Archibald, determinedly. "I know that no good woman would act as she has done. Why, man, she's after your money. What else could she want? It's as plain as the nose on your face."

"Father," said Lester, his voice lowering ominously, "why do you talk like that? You never saw the woman. You wouldn't know her from Adam's off ox. Louise comes down here and gives an excited report, and you people swallow it whole. She isn't as bad as you think she is, and I wouldn't use the language you're using about her if I were you. You're doing a good woman an injustice, and you won't, for some reason, be fair."

"Fair! Fair!" interrupted Archibald. "Talk about being fair. Is it fair to me, to your family, to your dead mother to take a woman of the streets and live with her? Is it—"

"Stop now, father," exclaimed Lester, putting up his hand. "I warn you. I won't listen to talk like that. You're talking about the woman that I'm living with—that I may marry. I love you, but I won't have you saying things that aren't so. She isn't a woman of the streets. You know, as well as you know anything, that I wouldn't take up with a woman of that kind. We'll have to discuss this in a calmer mood, or I won't stay here. I'm sorry. I'm awfully sorry. But I won't listen to any such language as that."

Old Archibald quieted himself. In spite of his opposition, he respected his son's point of view. He sat back in his chair and stared at the floor. "How was he to handle this thing?" he asked himself.

"Are you living in the same place?" he finally inquired.

"No, we've moved out to Hyde Park. I've taken a house out there."

"I hear there's a child. Is that yours?"

"No."

"Have you any children of your own?"

"No."

"Well, that's a God's blessing."

Lester merely scratched his chin.

"And you insist you will marry her?" Archibald went on.

"I didn't say that," replied his son. "I said I might."

"Might! Might!" exclaimed his father, his anger bubbling again. "What a tragedy! You with your prospects! Your outlook! How do you suppose I can seriously contemplate entrusting any share of my fortune to a man who has so little regard for what the world considers as right and proper? Why, Lester, this carriage business, your family, your personal reputation appear to be as nothing at all to you. I can't understand what has happened to your pride. It seems like some wild, impossible fancy."

"It's pretty hard to explain, father, and I can't do it very well. I simply know that I'm in this affair, and that I'm bound to see it through. It may come out all right. I may not marry her—I may. I'm not prepared now to say what I'll do. You'll have to wait. I'll do the best I can."

Old Archibald merely shook his head disapprovingly.

"You've made a bad mess of this, Lester," he said finally. "Surely you have. But I suppose you are determined to go your way. Nothing that I have said appears to move you."

"Not now, father. I'm sorry."

"Well, I warn you, then, that, unless you show some consideration for the dignity of your family and the honor of your position it will make a difference in my will. I can't go on countenancing this thing, and not be a party to it morally and every other way. I won't do it. You can leave her, or you can marry her. You certainly ought to do one or the other. If you leave her, everything will be all right. You can make any provision for her you like. I have no objection to that. I'll gladly pay whatever you agree to. You will share with the rest of the children, just as I had planned. If you marry her it will make a difference. Now do as you please. But don't blame me. I love you. I'm your father. I'm doing what I think is my bounden duty. Now you think that over and let me know."

Lester sighed. He saw how hopeless this argument was. He felt that his father probably meant what he said, but how could he leave Jennie, and justify himself to himself? Would his father really cut him off? Surely not. The old gentleman loved him even now—he could see it. Lester felt troubled and distressed; this attempt at coercion irritated him. The idea—he, Lester Kane, being made to do such a thing to throw Jennie down. He stared at the floor.

Old Archibald saw that he had let fly a telling bullet.

"Well," said Lester finally, "there's no use of our discussing it any further now—that's certain, isn't it? I can't say what I'll do. I'll have to take time and think. I can't decide this offhand."

The two looked at each other. Lester was sorry for the world's attitude and for his father's keen feeling about the affair. Kane senior was sorry for his son, but he was determined to see the thing through. He wasn't sure whether he had converted Lester or not, but he was hopeful. Maybe he would come around yet.

"Good-by, father," said Lester, holding out his hand. "I think I'll try and make that two-ten train. There isn't anything else you wanted to see me about?"

"No."

The old man sat there after Lester had gone, thinking deeply. What a twisted career! What an end to great possibilities? What a foolhardy persistence in evil and error! He shook his head. Robert was wiser. He was the one to control a business. He was cool and conservative. If Lester were only like that. He thought and thought. It was a long time before he stirred. And still, in the bottom of his heart, his erring son continued to appeal to him.

CHAPTER XL

Lester returned to Chicago. He realized that he had offended his father seriously, how seriously he could not say. In all his personal relations with old Archibald he had never seen him so worked up. But even now Lester did not feel that the breach was irreparable; he hardly realized that it was necessary for him to act decisively if he hoped to retain his father's affection and confidence. As for the world at large, what did it matter how much people talked or what they said. He was big enough to stand alone. But was he? People turn so quickly from weakness or the shadow of it. To get away from failure—even the mere suspicion of it—that seems to be a subconscious feeling with the average man and woman; we all avoid non-success as though we fear that it may prove contagious. Lester was soon to feel the force of this prejudice.

One day Lester happened to run across Berry Dodge, the millionaire head of Dodge, Holbrook & Kingsbury, a firm that stood in the dry-goods world, where the Kane Company stood in the carriage world. Dodge had been one of Lester's best friends. He knew him as intimately as he knew Henry Bracebridge, of Cleveland, and George Knowles, of Cincinnati. He visited at his handsome home on the North Shore Drive, and they met constantly in a business and social way. But since Lester had moved out to Hyde Park, the old intimacy had lapsed. Now they came face to face on Michigan Avenue near the Kane building.

"Why, Lester, I'm glad to see you again," said Dodge.

He extended a formal hand, and seemed just a little cool. "I hear you've gone and married since I saw you."

"No, nothing like that," replied Lester, easily, with the air of one who prefers to be understood in the way of the world sense.

"Why so secret about it, if you have?" asked Dodge, attempting to smile, but with a wry twist to the corners of his mouth. He was trying to be nice, and to go through a difficult situation gracefully. "We fellows usually make a fuss about that sort of thing. You ought to let your friends know."

"Well," said Lester, feeling the edge of the social blade that was being driven into him, "I thought I'd do it in a new way. I'm not much for excitement in that direction, anyhow."

"It is a matter of taste, isn't it?" said Dodge a little absently. "You're living in the city, of course?"

"In Hyde Park."

"That's a pleasant territory. How are things otherwise?" And he deftly changed the subject before waving him a perfunctory farewell.

Lester missed at once the inquiries which a man like Dodge would have made if he had really believed that he was married. Under ordinary circumstances his friend would have wanted to know a great deal about the new Mrs. Kane. There would have been all those little familiar touches common to people living on the same social plane. Dodge would have asked Lester to bring his wife over to see them, would have definitely promised to call. Nothing of the sort happened, and Lester noticed the significant omission.

It was the same with the Burnham Moores, the Henry Aldriches, and a score of other people whom he knew equally well. Apparently they all thought that he had married and settled down. They were interested to know where he was living, and they were rather disposed to joke him about being so very secretive on the subject, but they were not willing to discuss the supposed Mrs. Kane. He was beginning to see that this move of his was going to tell against him notably.

One of the worst stabs—it was the cruelest because, in a way, it was the most unintentional—he received from an old acquaintance, Will Whitney, at the Union Club. Lester was dining there one evening, and Whitney met him in the main reading-room as he was crossing from the cloak-room to the cigar-stand. The latter was a typical society figure, tall, lean, smooth-faced, immaculately garbed, a little cynical, and to-night a little the worse for liquor. "Hi, Lester!" he called out, "what's this talk about a ménage of yours out in Hyde Park? Say, you're going some. How are you going to explain all this to your wife when you get married?"

"I don't have to explain it," replied Lester irritably. "Why should you be so interested in my affairs? You're not living in a stone house, are you?"

"Say, ha! ha! that's pretty good now, isn't it? You didn't marry that little beauty you used to travel around with on the North Side, did you? Eh, now! Ha, ha! Well, I swear. You married! You didn't, now, did you?"

"Cut it out, Whitney," said