Jennie Gerhardt - Theodore Dreiser (recommended reading TXT) 📗

something which would help her. He took the train to Sandwood, but Jennie had gone to the Hotel Tremont in Chicago. He went there, but Jennie had gone to her daughter's grave; later he called again and found her in. When the boy presented his card she suffered an upwelling of feeling—a wave that was more intense than that with which she had received him in the olden days, for now her need of him was greater.

Lester, in spite of the glamor of his new affection and the restoration of his wealth, power, and dignities, had had time to think deeply of what he had done. His original feeling of doubt and dissatisfaction with himself had never wholly quieted. It did not ease him any to know that he had left Jennie comfortably fixed, for it was always so plain to him that money was not the point at issue with her. Affection was what she craved. Without it she was like a rudderless boat on an endless sea, and he knew it. She needed him, and he was ashamed to think that his charity had not outweighed his sense of self-preservation and his desire for material advantage. To-day as the elevator carried him up to her room he was really sorry, though he knew now that no act of his could make things right. He had been to blame from the very beginning, first for taking her, then for failing to stick by a bad bargain. Well, it could not be helped now. The best thing he could do was to be fair, to counsel with her, to give her the best of his sympathy and advice.

"Hello, Jennie," he said familiarly as she opened the door to him in her hotel room, his glance taking in the ravages which death and suffering had wrought. She was thinner, her face quite drawn and colorless, her eyes larger by contrast. "I'm awfully sorry about Vesta," he said a little awkwardly. "I never dreamed anything like that could happen."

It was the first word of comfort which had meant anything to her since Vesta died—since Lester had left her, in fact. It touched her that he had come to sympathize; for the moment she could not speak. Tears welled over her eyelids and down upon her cheeks.

"Don't cry, Jennie," he said, putting his arm around her and holding her head to his shoulder. "I'm sorry. I've been sorry for a good many things that can't be helped now. I'm intensely sorry for this. Where did you bury her?"

"Beside papa," she said, sobbing.

"Too bad," he murmured, and held her in silence. She finally gained control of herself sufficiently to step away from him; then wiping her eyes with her handkerchief, she asked him to sit down.

"I'm so sorry," he went on, "that this should have happened while I was away. I would have been with you if I had been here. I suppose you won't want to live out at Sand wood now?"

"I can't, Lester," she replied. "I couldn't stand it."

"Where are you thinking of going?"

"Oh, I don't know yet. I didn't want to be a bother to those people out there. I thought I'd get a little house somewhere and adopt a baby maybe, or get something to do. I don't like to be alone."

"That isn't a bad idea," he said, "that of adopting a baby. It would be a lot of company for you. You know how to go about getting one?"

"You just ask at one of these asylums, don't you?"

"I think there's something more than that," he replied thoughtfully. "There are some formalities—I don't know what they are. They try to keep control of the child in some way. You had better consult with Watson and get him to help you. Pick out your baby, and then let him do the rest. I'll speak to him about it."

Lester saw that she needed companionship badly. "Where is your brother George?" he asked.

"He's in Rochester, but he couldn't come. Bass said he was married," she added.

"There isn't any other member of the family you could persuade to come and live with you?"

"I might get William, but I don't know where he is."

"Why not try that new section west of Jackson Park," he suggested, "if you want a house here in Chicago? I see some nice cottages out that way. You needn't buy. Just rent until you see how well you're satisfied."

Jennie thought this good advice because it came from Lester. It was good of him to take this much interest in her affairs. She wasn't entirely separated from him after all. He cared a little. She asked him how his wife was, whether he had had a pleasant trip, whether he was going to stay in Chicago. All the while he was thinking that he had treated her badly. He went to the window and looked down into Dearborn Street, the world of traffic below holding his attention. The great mass of trucks and vehicles, the counter streams of hurrying pedestrians, seemed like a puzzle. So shadows march in a dream. It was growing dusk, and lights were springing up here and there.

"I want to tell you something, Jennie," said Lester, finally rousing himself from his fit of abstraction. "I may seem peculiar to you, after all that has happened, but I still care for you—in my way. I've thought of you right along since I left. I thought it good business to leave you—the way things were. I thought I liked Letty well enough to marry her. From one point of view it still seems best, but I'm not so much happier. I was just as happy with you as I ever will be. It isn't myself that's important in this transaction apparently; the individual doesn't count much in the situation. I don't know whether you see what I'm driving at, but all of us are more or less pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances over which we have no control."

"I understand, Lester," she answered. "I'm not complaining. I know it's for the best."

"After all, life is more or less of a farce," he went on a little bitterly. "It's a silly show. The best we can do is to hold our personality intact. It doesn't appear that integrity has much to do with it."

Jennie did not quite grasp what he was talking about, but she knew it meant that he was not entirely satisfied with himself and was sorry for her.

"Don't worry over me, Lester," she consoled. "I'm all right; I'll get along. It did seem terrible to me for a while—getting used to being alone. I'll be all right now. I'll get along."

"I want you to feel that my attitude hasn't changed," he continued eagerly. "I'm interested in what concerns you. Mrs.—Letty understands that. She knows just how I feel. When you get settled I'll come in and see how you're fixed. I'll come around here again in a few days. You understand how I feel, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," she said.

He took her hand, turning it sympathetically in his own. "Don't worry," he said. "I don't want you to do that. I'll do the best I can. You're still Jennie to me, if you don't mind. I'm pretty bad, but I'm not all bad."

"It's all right, Lester. I wanted you to do as you did. It's for the best. You probably are happy since—"

"Now, Jennie," he interrupted; then he pressed affectionately her hand, her arm, her shoulder. "Want to kiss me for old times' sake?" he smiled.

She put her hands over his shoulders, looked long into his eyes, then kissed him. When their lips met she trembled. Lester also felt unsteady. Jennie saw his agitation, and tried hard to speak.

"You'd better go now," she said firmly. "It's getting dark."

He went away, and yet he knew that he wanted above all things to remain; she was still the one woman in the world for him. And Jennie felt comforted even though the separation still existed in all its finality. She did not endeavor to explain or adjust the moral and ethical entanglements of the situation. She was not, like so many, endeavoring to put the ocean into a tea-cup, or to tie up the shifting universe in a mess of strings called law. Lester still cared for her a little. He cared for Letty too. That was all right. She had hoped once that he might want her only. Since he did not, was his affection worth nothing? She could not think, she could not feel that. And neither could he.

CHAPTER LX

The drift of events for a period of five years carried Lester and Jennie still farther apart; they settled naturally into their respective spheres, without the renewal of the old time relationship which their several meetings at the Tremont at first seemed to foreshadow. Lester was in the thick of social and commercial affairs; he walked in paths to which Jennie's retiring soul had never aspired. Jennie's own existence was quiet and uneventful. There was a simple cottage in a very respectable but not showy neighborhood near Jackson Park, on the South Side, where she lived in retirement with a little foster-child—a chestnut-haired girl taken from the Western Home for the Friendless—as her sole companion. Here she was known as Mrs. J. G. Stover, for she had deemed it best to abandon the name of Kane. Mr. and Mrs. Lester Kane when resident in Chicago were the occupants of a handsome mansion on the Lake Shore Drive, where parties, balls, receptions, dinners were given in rapid and at times almost pyrotechnic succession.

Lester, however, had become in his way a lover of a peaceful and well-entertained existence. He had cut from his list of acquaintances and associates a number of people who had been a little doubtful or overfamiliar or indifferent or talkative during a certain period which to him was a memory merely. He was a director, and in several cases the chairman of a board of directors, in nine of the most important financial and commercial organizations of the West—The United Traction Company of Cincinnati, The Western Crucible Company, The United Carriage Company, The Second National Bank of Chicago, the First National Bank of Cincinnati, and several others of equal importance. He was never a personal factor in the affairs of The United Carriage Company, preferring to be represented by counsel—Mr. Dwight L. Watson, but he took a keen interest in its affairs. He had not seen his brother Robert to speak to him in seven years. He had not seen Imogene, who lived in Chicago, in three. Louise, Amy, their husbands, and some of their closest acquaintances were practically strangers. The firm of Knight, Keatley & O'Brien had nothing whatever to do with his affairs.

The truth was that Lester, in addition to becoming a little phlegmatic, was becoming decidedly critical in his outlook on life. He could not make out what it was all about. In distant ages a queer thing had come to pass. There had started on its way in the form of evolution a minute cellular organism which had apparently reproduced itself by division, had early learned to combine itself with others, to organize itself into bodies, strange forms of fish, animals, and birds, and had finally learned to organize itself into man. Man, on his part, composed as he was of self-organizing cells, was pushing himself forward into comfort and different aspects of existence by means of union and organization with other men. Why? Heaven only knew. Here he was endowed with a peculiar brain and a certain amount of talent, and he had inherited a certain amount of wealth which he now scarcely believed he deserved, only luck had favored him. But he could not see that any one else might be said to deserve this wealth any more than himself, seeing that his use of it was as conservative and constructive and practical as the next one's.