THE STOIC. Theodore Dreiser
or a dissolving ether.
“Well, I’ve been thinking and reading about you for years, you know. Only last Sunday, in New York, I read two whole pages about you in the Sun. They made me understand you a little better, I think.”
“The newspapers! Did they, really?”
“Yes, and no. Not what they said about you critically, but the facts, if they are facts, that they pieced together. You never cared for your first wife, did you?”
“Well, I thought I did, at first. But, of course, I was very young when I married her.”
“And the present Mrs. Cowperwood?”
“Oh, Aileen, yes. I cared for her very much at one time,” he confessed. “She did a great deal for me once, and I am not ungrateful, Bevy. Besides, she was very attractive, very, to me at that time. But I was still young, and not as exacting mentally as I am now. The fault is not Aileen’s. It was a mistake due to inexperience.”
“You make me feel better when you talk that way,” she said. “You’re not as ruthless as you’re said to be. Just the same, I am many years younger than Aileen, and I have the feeling that without my looks my mind might not be very important to you.”
Cowperwood smiled. “Quite true. I have no excuses to offer for the way I am,” he said. “Intelligently or unintelligently, I try to follow the line of self-interest, because, as I see it, there is no other guide. Maybe I am wrong, but I think most of us do that. It may be that there are other interests that come before those of the individual, but in favoring himself, he appears, as a rule, to favor others.”
“I agree, somehow, with your point of view,” commented Berenice.
“The one thing I am trying to make clear to you,” went on Cowperwood, smiling affectionately at her, “is that I am not seeking to belittle or underestimate any hurt I may have inflicted. Pain seems to go with life and change. I just want to state my case as I see it, so that you may understand me.”
“Thanks,” and Berenice laughed lightly, “but you needn’t feel you are on the witness stand.”
“Well, almost. But please let me explain a little about Aileen. Her nature is one of love and emotion, but her intellect is not, and never was, sufficient for my needs. I understand her thoroughly, and I am grateful for all she did for me in Philadelphia. She stood by me, to her own social detriment. Because of that I have stood by her, even though I cannot possibly love her as I once did. She has my name, my residence. She feels she should have both.” He paused, a little dubious as to what Berenice would say. “You understand, of course?” he asked.
“Yes, yes,” exclaimed Berenice, “of course, I understand. And, please, I do not want to disturb her in any way. I did not come to you with that in view.”
“You’re very generous, Bevy, but unfair to yourself,” said Cowperwood. “But I want you to know how much you mean to my entire future. You may not understand, but I acknowledge it here and now. I have not followed you for eight years for nothing. It means that I care, and care deeply.”
“I know,” she said, softly, not a little impressed by this declaration.
“For all of eight years,” he continued, “I have had an ideal. That ideal is you.”
He paused, wishing to embrace her, but feeling for the moment that he should not. Then, reaching into a waistcoat pocket, he took from it a thin gold locket, the size of a silver dollar, which he opened and handed to her. One interior face of it was lined with a photograph of Berenice as a girl of twelve, thin, delicate, supercilious, self-contained, distant, as she was to this hour.
She looked at it and recognized it as a photograph that had been taken when she and her mother were still in Louisville, her mother a woman of social position and means. How different the situation now, and how much she had suffered because of that change! She gazed at it, recalling pleasant memories.
“Where did you get this?” she asked at last.
“I took it from your mother’s bureau in Louisville, the first time I saw it. It was not in this case, though; I have added that.”
He closed it affectionately and returned it to his pocket. “It has been close to me ever since,” he said.
Berenice smiled. “I hope, unseen. But I am such a child there.”
“Just the same, an ideal to me. And more so now than ever. I have known many women, of course. I have dealt with them according to my light and urge at the time. But apart from all that, I have always had a certain conception of what I really desired. I have always dreamed of a strong, sensitive, poetic girl like yourself. Think what you will about me, but judge me now by what I do, not by what I say. You said you came because you thought I needed you. I do.”
She laid her hand on his arm. “I have decided,” she said, calmly. “The best I can do with my life is to help you. But we . . . I . . . neither of us can do just as we please. You know that.”
“Perfectly. I want you to be happy with me, and I want to be happy with you. And, of course, I can’t be if you are going to worry over anything. Here in Chicago, particularly at this time, I have to be most careful, and so do you. And that’s why you’re going back to your hotel very shortly. But tomorrow is another day, and at about eleven, I hope you will telephone me. Then perhaps we can talk this over. But wait a moment.” He took her arm and directed her into his bedroom. Closing the door, he walked briskly to a handsome wrought-iron chest of considerable size which stood in a corner of the room. Unlocking it, he lifted from it three trays containing a collection of ancient Greek and Phoenician rings. After setting them in order before her, he said:
“With which of these would you like me to pledge you?”
Indulgently, and a little indifferently, as was her way—always the one to be pleaded with, not the one to plead—Berenice studied and toyed with the rings, occasionally exclaiming over one that interested her. At last, she said:
“Circe might have chosen this twisted silver snake. And Helen, this green bronze circlet of flowers, perhaps. I think Aphrodite might have liked this curled arm and hand encircling the stone. But I will not choose for beauty alone. For myself, I will take this tarnished silver band. It has strength as well as beauty.”
“Always the unexpected, the original!” exclaimed Cowperwood. “Bevy, you are incomparable!” He kissed her tenderly as he placed the ring on her finger.
Chapter 2
The essential thing which Berenice achieved for Cowperwood in coming to him at the time of his defeat was to renew his faith in the unexpected and, better yet, in his own luck. For hers was an individuality, as he saw it, self-seeking, poised, ironic, but less brutal and more poetic than his own. Where he desired money in order to release its essential content, power, to be used by him as he pleased, Berenice appeared to demand the privilege of expressing her decidedly varied temperament in ways which would make for beauty and so satisfy her essentially aesthetic ideals. She desired not so much to express herself in a given form of art as to live so that her life as well as her personality should be in itself an art form. She had more than once thought, if only she had great wealth, very great power, how creatively she would use it. She would never waste it on great houses and lands and show, but rather surround herself with an atmosphere which should be exquisite and, of course, inspirational.
Yet of that she had never spoken. Rather, it was implicit in her nature, which Cowperwood by no means always clearly interpreted. He realized that she was delicate, sensitive, evasive, elusive, mysterious. And, for these reasons, he was never tired of contemplating her, any more than he was of contemplating nature itself: the new day, the strange wind, the changing scene. What would the morrow be like? What would Berenice be like when next he saw her? He could not tell. And Berenice, conscious of this strangeness in herself,