An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [236]
And yet how was he to oppose this idea with safety, since she felt that she had this claim on him—how say 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