Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics S - Theodore Dreiser [163]
“Was anybody here just now?” she asked of Hurstwood.
“Yes,” he said guiltily; “Mrs. Vance.”
“Did she see you?” she asked, expressing her full despair.
This cut Hurstwood like a whip, and made him sullen.
“If she had eyes, she did. I opened the door.”
“Oh,” said Carrie, closing one hand tightly out of sheer nervousness. “What did she have to say?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “She couldn’t stay.”
“And you looking like that!” said Carrie, throwing aside a long reserve.
“What of it?” he said, angering. “I didn’t know she was coming, did I?”
“You knew she might,” said Carrie. “I told you she said she was coming. I’ve asked you a dozen times to wear your other clothes. Oh, I think this is just terrible.”
“Oh, let up,” he answered. “What difference does it make? You couldn’t associate with her, anyway. They’ve got too much money.”
“Who said I wanted to?” said Carrie, fiercely.
“Well, you act like it, rowing around over my looks. You’d think I’d committed—”
Carrie interrupted:
“It’s true,” she said. “I couldn’t if I wanted to, but whose fault is it? You’re very free to sit and talk about who I could associate with. Why don’t you get out and look for work?”
This was a thunderbolt in camp.
“What’s it to you?” he said, rising, almost fiercely. “I pay the rent, don’t I? I furnish the—”
“Yes, you pay the rent,” said Carrie. “You talk as if there was nothing else in the world but a flat to sit around in. You haven’t done a thing for three months except sit around and interfere here. I’d like to know what you married me for?”
“I didn’t marry you,” he said, in a snarling tone.
“I’d like to know what you did, then, in Montreal?” she answered.
“Well, I didn’t marry you,” he answered. “You can get that out of your head. You talk as though you didn’t know.”
Carrie looked at him a moment, her eyes distending. She had believed it was all legal and binding enough.
“What did you lie to me for, then?” she asked, fiercely. “What did you force me to run away with you for?”
Her voice became almost a sob.
“Force!” he said, with curled lip. “A lot of forcing I did.”
“Oh!” said Carrie, breaking under the strain, and turning. “Oh, oh!” and she hurried into the front room.
Hurstwood was now hot and waked up. It was a great shaking up for him, both mental and moral. He wiped his brow as he looked around, and then went for his clothes and dressed. Not a sound came from Carrie; she ceased sobbing when she heard him dressing. She thought, at first, with the faintest alarm, of being left without money—not of losing him, though he might be going away permanently. She heard him open the top of the wardrobe and take out his hat. Then the dining-room door closed, and she knew he had gone.
After a few moments of silence, she stood up, dry-eyed, and looked out the window. Hurstwood was just strolling up the street, from the flat, toward Sixth Avenue.
The latter made progress along Thirteenth and across Fourteenth Street to Union Square.
“Look for work!” he said to himself. “Look for work! She tells me to get out and look for work.”
He tried to shield himself from his own mental accusation, which told him that she was right.
“What a cursed thing that Mrs. Vance’s call was, anyhow,” he thought. “Stood right there, and looked me over. I know what she was thinking.”
He remembered the few times he had seen her in Seventy-eighth Street. She was always a swell-looker, and he had tried to put on the air of being worthy of such as she, in front of her. Now, to think she had caught him looking this way. He wrinkled his forehead in his distress.
“The devil!” he said a dozen times in an hour.
It was a quarter after four when he left the house. Carrie was in tears. There would be no dinner that night.
“What the deuce,” he said, swaggering mentally to hide his own shame from himself. “I’m not so bad. I’m not down yet.”
He looked around the square, and seeing the several large hotels, decided to go to one for dinner. He would get his papers and make himself comfortable there.
He ascended into the fine parlour of the Morton House, then one of the best New York hotels, and, finding a cushioned seat, read. It did not trouble him much that his decreasing sum of money did not allow of such extravagance. Like the morphine fiend, he was becoming addicted to his ease. Anything to relieve his mental distress, to satisfy his craving for comfort. He must do it. No thoughts for the morrow