The Greatest Works of Theodore Dreiser. Theodore Dreiser
to her openly and coldly that he could not and would not marry her? And unless he did so now she might think it would be fair and legitimate enough for her to compel him to do so. She might even feel privileged to go to his uncle — his cousin (he could see Gilbert’s cold eyes) and expose him! And then destruction! Ruin! The end of all his dreams in connection with Sondra and everything else here. But all he could think of saying now was: “But I can’t do this, Bert, not now, anyway,” a remark which at once caused Roberta to assume that the idea of marriage, as she had interjected it here, was not one which, under the circumstances, he had the courage to oppose — his saying, “not now, anyway.” Yet even as she was thinking this, he went swiftly on with: “Besides I don’t want to get married so soon. It means too much to me at this time. In the first place I’m not old enough and I haven’t got anything to get married on. And I can’t leave here. I couldn’t do half as well anywhere else. You don’t realize what this chance means to me. My father’s all right, but he couldn’t do what my uncle could and he wouldn’t. You don’t know or you wouldn’t ask me to do this.”
He paused, his face a picture of puzzled fear and opposition. He was not unlike a harried animal, deftly pursued by hunter and hound. But Roberta, imagining that his total defection had been caused by the social side of Lycurgus as opposed to her own low state and not because of the superior lure of any particular girl, now retorted resentfully, although she desired not to appear so: “Oh, yes, I know well enough why you can’t leave. It isn’t your position here, though, half as much as it is those society people you are always running around with. I know. You don’t care for me any more, Clyde, that’s it, and you don’t want to give these other people up for me. I know that’s it and nothing else. But just the same it wasn’t so very long ago that you did, although you don’t seem to remember it now.” Her cheeks burned and her eyes flamed as she said this. She paused a moment while he gazed at her wondering about the outcome of all this. “But you can’t leave me to make out any way I can, just the same, because I won’t be left this way, Clyde. I can’t! I can’t! I tell you.” She grew tense and staccato, “It means too much to me. I don’t know how to do alone and I, besides, have no one to turn to but you and you must help me. I’ve got to get out of this, that’s all, Clyde, I’ve got to. I’m not going to be left to face my people and everybody without any help or marriage or anything.” As she said this, her eyes turned appealingly and yet savagely toward him and she emphasized it all with her hands, which she clinched and unclinched in a dramatic way. “And if you can’t help me out in the way you thought,” she went on most agonizedly as Clyde could see, “then you’ve got to help me out in this other, that’s all. At least until I can do for myself I just won’t be left. I don’t ask you to marry me forever,” she now added, the thought that if by presenting this demand in some modified form, she could induce Clyde to marry her, it might be possible afterwards that his feeling toward her would change to a much more kindly one. “You can leave me after a while if you want to. After I’m out of this. I can’t prevent you from doing that and I wouldn’t want to if I could. But you can’t leave me now. You can’t. You can’t! Besides,” she added, “I didn’t want to get myself in this position and I wouldn’t have, but for you. But you made me and made me let you come in here. And now you want to leave me to shift for myself, just because you think you won’t be able to go in society any more, if they find out about me.”
She paused, the strain of this contest proving almost too much for her tired nerves. At the same time she began to sob nervously and yet not violently — a marked effort at self-restraint and recovery marking her every gesture. And after a moment or two in which both stood there, he gazing dumbly and wondering what else he was to say in answer to all this, she struggling and finally managing to recover her poise, she added: “Oh, what is it about me that’s so different to what I was a couple of months ago, Clyde? Will you tell me that? I’d like to know. What is it that has caused you to change so? Up to Christmas, almost, you were as nice to me as any human being could be. You were with me nearly all the time you had, and since then I’ve scarcely had an evening that I didn’t beg for. Who is it? What is it? Some other girl, or what, I’d like to know — that Sondra Finchley or Bertine Cranston, or who?”
Her eyes as she said this were a study. For even to this hour, as Clyde could now see to his satisfaction, since he feared the effect on Roberta of definite and absolute knowledge concerning Sondra, she had no specific suspicion, let alone positive knowledge concerning any girl. And coward-wise, in the face of her present predicament and her assumed and threatened claims on him, he was afraid to say what or who the real cause of this change was. Instead he merely replied and almost unmoved by her sorrow, since he no longer really cared for her: “Oh, you’re all wrong, Bert. You don’t see what the trouble is. It’s my future here — if I leave here I certainly will never find such an opportunity. And if I have to marry in this way or leave here it will all go flooey. I want to wait and get some place first before I marry, see — save some money and if I do this I won’t have a chance and you won’t either,” he added feebly, forgetting for the moment that up to this time he had been indicating rather clearly that he did not want to have anything more to do with her in any way.
“Besides,” he continued, “if you could only find some one, or if you would go away by yourself somewhere for a while, Bert, and go through with this alone, I could send you the money to do it on, I know. I could have it between now and the time you had to go.”
His face, as he said this, and as Roberta clearly saw, mirrored the complete and resourceless collapse of all his recent plans in regard to her. And she, realizing that his indifference to her had reached the point where he could thus dispose of her and their prospective baby in this casual and really heartless manner, was not only angered in part, but at the same time frightened by the meaning of it all.
“Oh, Clyde,” she now exclaimed boldly and with more courage and defiance than at any time since she had known him, “how you have changed! And how hard you can be. To want me to go off all by myself and just to save you — so you can stay here and get along and marry some one here when I am out of the way and you don’t have to bother about me any more. Well, I won’t do it. It’s not fair. And I won’t, that’s all. I won’t. And that’s all there is to it. You can get some one to get me out of this or you can marry me and come away with me, at least long enough for me to have the baby and place myself right before my people and every one else that knows me. I don’t care if you leave me afterwards, because I see now that you really don’t care for me any more, and if that’s the way you feel, I don’t want you any more than you want me. But just the same, you must help me now — you must. But, oh, dear,” she began whimpering again, and yet only slightly and bitterly. “To think that all our love for each other should have come to this — that I am asked to go away by myself — all alone — with no one — while you stay here, oh, dear! oh, dear! And with a baby on my hands afterwards. And no husband.”
She clinched her hands and shook her head bleakly. Clyde, realizing well enough that his proposition certainly was cold and indifferent but, in the face of his intense desire for Sondra, the best or at least safest that he could devise, now stood there unable for the moment to think of anything more to say.
And although there was some other discussion to the same effect, the conclusion of this very difficult hour was that Clyde had another week or two at best in which to see if he could find a physician or any one who would assist him. After that — well after that the implied, if not openly expressed, threat which lay at the bottom of this was, unless so extricated and speedily, that he would have to marry her, if not permanently, then at least temporarily, but legally just the same, until once again she was able to look after herself — a threat which was as crushing and humiliating to Roberta as it was torturing to him.
Chapter 39
Opposing views such as these, especially where no real skill to meet such a situation existed, could only spell greater difficulty and even eventual disaster unless chance in some form should aid. And chance did not aid. And the presence of Roberta in the factory was something that would not permit