An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser (whitelam books .TXT) 📖

he not said that he was coming on the 28th or thereabouts if he could? Well, he would if he could, only it looked now as though it might be necessary for him to postpone it for another week or so, until the seventh or eighth of July⁠—long enough for him to get together an extra fifty for which he had a plan, and which would be necessary for him to have. But really, which was the thought behind this other, long enough for him to pay one more visit to Sondra as he was yearning to do, over the next weekend. But this demand of hers, now! Couldn’t she go with her parents for a week or so and then let him come for her there or she come to him? It would give him more needed time, and⁠—

But at this Roberta, bursting forth in a storm of nervous disapproval⁠—saying that most certainly if that were the case she was going back to her room at the Gilpins’, if she could get it, and not waste her time up there getting ready and waiting for him when he was not coming⁠—he suddenly decided that he might as well say that he was coming on the third, or that if he did not, that at least by then he would have arranged with her where to meet him. For even by now, he had not made up his mind as to how he was to do. He must have a little more time to think⁠—more time to think.

And so now he altered his tone greatly and said: “But listen, Bert. Please don’t be angry with me. You talk as though I didn’t have any troubles in connection with all this, either. You don’t know what this may be going to cost me before I’m through with it, and you don’t seem to care much. I know you’re worried and all that, but what about me? I’m doing the very best I can now, Bert, with all I have to think about. And won’t you just be patient now until the third, anyhow? Please do. I promise to write you and if I don’t, I’ll call you up every other day. Will that be all right? But I certainly don’t want you to be using my name like you did a while ago. That will lead to trouble, sure. Please don’t. And when I call again, I’ll just say it’s Mr. Baker asking, see, and you can say it’s anyone you like afterwards. And then, if by any chance anything should come up that would stop our starting exactly on the third, why you can come back here if you want to, see, or somewhere near here, and then we can start as soon as possible after that.”

His tone was so pleading and soothing, infused as it was⁠—but because of his present necessity only with a trace of that old tenderness and seeming helplessness which, at times, had quite captivated Roberta, that even now it served to win her to a bizarre and groundless gratitude. So much so that at once she had replied, warmly and emotionally, even: “Oh, no, dear. I don’t want to do anything like that. You know I don’t. It’s just because things are so bad as they are with me and I can’t help myself now. You know that, Clyde, don’t you? I can’t help loving you. I always will, I suppose. And I don’t want to do anything to hurt you, dear, really I don’t if I can help it.”

And Clyde, hearing the ring of genuine affection, and sensing anew his old-time power over her, was disposed to reenact the role of lover again, if only in order to dissuade Roberta from being too harsh and driving with him now. For while he could not like her now, he told himself, and could not think of marrying her, still in view of this other dream he could at least be gracious to her⁠—could he not?⁠—Pretend! And so this conversation ended with a new peace based on this agreement.

The preceding day⁠—a day of somewhat reduced activities on the lakes from which he had just returned⁠—he and Sondra and Stuart and Bertine, together with Nina Temple and a youth named Harley Baggott, then visiting the Thurstons, had motored first from Twelfth Lake to Three Mile Bay, a small lakeside resort some twenty-five miles north, and from thence, between towering walls of pines, to Big Bittern and some other smaller lakes lost in the recesses of the tall pines of the region to the north of Trine Lake. And en route, Clyde, as he now recalled, had been most strangely impressed at moments and in spots by the desolate and for the most part lonely character of the region. The narrow and rain-washed and even rutted nature of the dirt roads that wound between tall, silent and darksome trees⁠—forests in the largest sense of the word⁠—that extended for miles and miles apparently on either hand. The decadent and weird nature of some of the bogs and tarns on either side of the only comparatively passable dirt roads which here and there were festooned with funereal or viperous vines, and strewn like deserted battlefields with soggy and decayed piles of fallen and crisscrossed logs⁠—in places as many as four deep⁠—one above the other⁠—in the green slime that an undrained depression in the earth had accumulated. The eyes and backs of occasional frogs that, upon lichen or vine or moss-covered stumps and rotting logs in this warm June weather, there sunned themselves apparently undisturbed; the spirals of gnats, the solitary flick of a snake’s tail as disturbed by the sudden approach of the machine, one made off into the muck and the poisonous grasses and water-plants which were thickly imbedded in it.

And in seeing one of these Clyde, for some reason, had thought of the accident at Pass Lake. He did not realize it, but at the moment his own subconscious