Jennie Gerhardt. Theodore Dreiser
to do. Right seemed a great thing to talk about. He loved the sounding phrases with which he could pour off, to the satisfaction of his hearers, the strong conceptions and feelings he had on this divine topic, but he could never reason clearly enough to discover for himself whether he was following it or not. Friendship called him to many things which courteous reason could have honorably prevented. Only in the last presidential election he had thrown his support to a man for governor who, as he well knew, had no claim which a strictly honorable conscience could have honored. Friends did it. He felt, in the last resort, that he could not go back of the protestations of his friends. They would vouch for the individual this time. Why not believe them?
In the same way, he had been guilty of some very questionable, and one or two actually unsavory, appointments. Personal interest dictated a part of this—friendship for friends of the applicants, the rest. Whenever his conscience pricked him too keenly, he would endeavor to cheer himself with his pet spoken phrase: “All in a lifetime.” Thinking over things quite alone in his easy chair, he would sometimes rise up with these words on his lips, and smile sheepishly as he did so. Conscience was not, by any means, dead in him. His sympathies, if anything, were keener than ever.
This man, three times congressman from the district of which Columbus was a part, and twice senator, had never married. In his youth, he had had a serious love affair, but there was nothing discreditable to him in the fact that it came to nothing. The lady found it inconvenient to wait for him. He was too long in earning a competence upon which they might subsist.
Tall, straight-shouldered, neither lean nor stout, he was today an imposing figure. Having received his hard knocks and endured his losses, there was that about him which touched and awakened the sympathies of the imaginative. People thought him naturally agreeable, and his senatorial peers looked upon him as not any too heavy mentally, but personally a fine man.
His presence in Columbus at this particular time was due to the fact that his political fences needed careful repairing. The general election had weakened his party in the state legislature. There were enough votes to re-elect him, but it would require the most careful political manipulation to hold them together. Other men were ambitious. There were a half-dozen available candidates, any one of whom would have rejoiced to step into his shoes. He realized the exigencies of the occasion. They could not well beat him, he thought; but if so, the president could be induced to give him a ministry abroad. The clinching of this, even, required party consultation and pledges.
It might be supposed that, under such circumstances, a man would be satisfied, bringing to bear the logic of life, and letting the world wag as it would. Such men exist in theory only. Brander, like all the rest of his fellow-men, felt the drag of the unsatisfied. He had wanted to do so many things. Here he was—fifty-two years of age, clean, honorable, highly distinguished, as the world takes it, but single. He could not help looking about him now and then and speculating upon the fact that he had no one to care for him. His chamber seemed strangely hollow at times—his own personality exceedingly disagreeable.
In the world of his associates, he knew many men who had lovely wives. He could see plainly that these women were all in all to their husbands. Homes, the finest and most comfortable he had ever known, were founded solidly on such. Sons, daughters, nephews and nieces, in merry and comforting array, all seemed to be gathered round some people, but he—he was alone.
“Fifty!” he often thought to himself. “Alone—absolutely alone.”
Sitting in his chamber that Saturday afternoon, he was aroused by a rap at his door. He had been speculating upon the futility of all of his political energy, in the light of the impermanence of life and fame.
“What a great fight we make to sustain ourselves,” he thought. “How little difference it will make to me a few years hence.”
He arose, and opening wide his door, perceived Jennie. She had come, as she had suggested to her mother, at this time, instead of on Monday, in order to give a more favorable impression of promptness.
“Come right in,” said the senator, and, as on the first occasion, graciously made way for her.
Jennie passed in, momentarily expecting some comment upon the brevity of time in which the washing had been done. The senator never noticed it at all.
“Well, my young lady,” he said when she had put the bundle down, “how do you find yourself this evening?”
“Very well,” replied Jennie. “We thought we’d better bring your clothes today instead of Monday.”
“Oh, that would not have made any difference,” replied Brander, who thus lightly waved aside what to her seemed so important. “Just leave them on the chair.”
Jennie stood up a moment, and considering that not even the fact of having received no recompense was an excuse for lingering, would have gone out, had not the senator detained her.
“How is your mother?” he asked pleasantly, the whole condition of the family distinctly coming back to him.
“She’s very well,” said Jennie simply.
“And your little sister? Is she any better?”
“The doctor thinks so,” replied Jennie, who was greatly concerned over the youngest.
“Sit down,” he went on entertainingly. “I want to talk to you.”
Stepping to a nearby chair, the young girl seated herself.
“Hem!” he went on, clearing his throat lightly. “What seems to be the matter with her?”
“She has the measles,” returned Jennie. “We thought once that she was going to die.”
Brander studied her face as she said this, and he thought he saw something exceedingly pathetic there. The girl’s poor clothes and her wondering admiration for his state affected him. He felt again that thing which she had made him feel before—the far way he had come along the path of comfort. How high up he was in the world, indeed!
Not recognizing the innate potentiality of any creature, however commonplace, who could make him feel this, he went glibly on, lured, and in a way, controlled by an unconscious power in her. She was a lodestone of a kind, and he was its metal; but neither she nor he knew it.
“Well,” he said after a moment or two of reflection, “that’s too bad, isn’t it.”
The spirit in which he said this was entirely conventional. He did not, by a hundredth part, feel the quality which it conveyed to her. Somehow, it brought to Jennie a general picture of her mother and father, and of all the stress and worry they were undergoing at present. She hardened herself intensely against the emotion, lurking so closely behind the surface in her, and silently let the comment pass. It was not lost on him, however. He put his hand to his chin, and in a cheery, legal way said:
“She is better now, though, of course. How old is your father?”
“Fifty-seven,” she replied.
“And is he any better?”
“Oh, yes sir. He’s around now, although he can’t go out just yet.”
“I believe your mother said he was a glass-blower by trade?”
“Yes sir.”
Brander well knew the depressed local conditions in this branch of manufacture. It had been part of the political issue in the last campaign. They must be in a bad way truly.
“Do all of the children go to school?” he inquired.
“Why, yes sir,” returned Jennie, stammering. She was too shamefaced to own that one was left out for the lack of shoes. The utterance of the falsehood troubled her.
He studied awhile and finding that he had no good excuse for further detaining her, arose and came over to her. Out of his pocket he took a thin layer of bills, and removing one, handed it to her.
“You take that,” he said, “and tell your mother that I said she should use it for whatever she wants.”