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"We're all out of
flour," she said; "you'd better get some this afternoon. We haven't any meat, either.
How would it do if we had liver and bacon?"
"Suits me," said
Hurstwood.
"Better get a half or
three-quarters of a pound of that."
"Half 'll be enough,"
volunteered Hurstwood.
She opened her purse and laid
down a half dollar. He
pretended not to notice it.
Hurstwood bought the flour--which
all grocers sold in 3 1/2-pound packages--for thirteen cents and paid
fifteen cents for a half- pound of liver and bacon.
He left the packages, together with the balance of twenty-two cents,
upon the kitchen table, where Carrie found it.
It did not escape her that the change was accurate.
There was something sad in realising that, after all, all that he
wanted of her was something to eat. She
felt as if hard thoughts were unjust. Maybe
he would get something yet. He
had no vices.
That very evening, however, on
going into the theatre, one of the chorus girls passed her all newly arrayed
in a pretty mottled tweed suit, which took Carrie's eye.
The young woman wore a fine bunch of violets and seemed in high
spirits. She smiled at Carrie
good-naturedly as she passed, showing pretty, even teeth, and Carrie smiled
back.
"She can afford to dress
well," thought Carrie, "and so could I, if I could only keep my
money. I haven't a decent tie
of any kind to wear."
She put out her foot and looked
at her shoe reflectively. "I'll get a pair of shoes Saturday, anyhow; I
don't care what happens."
One of the sweetest and most
sympathetic little chorus girls in the company made friends with her because
in Carrie she found nothing to frighten her away.
She was a gay little Manon, unwitting of society's fierce conception
of morality, but, nevertheless, good to her neighbour and charitable.
Little license was allowed the chorus in the matter of conversation,
but, nevertheless, some was indulged in.
"It's warm to-night, isn't
it?" said this girl, arrayed in pink fleshings and an imitation golden
helmet. She also carried a
shining shield.
"Yes; it is," said
Carrie, pleased that some one should talk to her.
"I'm almost roasting,"
said the girl.
Carrie looked into her pretty
face, with its large blue eyes, and saw little beads of moisture.
"There's more marching in
this opera than ever I did before," added the girl.
"Have you been in
others?" asked Carrie, surprised at her experience.
"Lots of them," said
the girl; "haven't you?"
"This is my first
experience."
"Oh, is it? I thought I saw
you the time they ran 'The Queen's Mate' here."
"No," said Carrie,
shaking her head; "not me."
This conversation was interrupted
by the blare of the orchestra and the sputtering of the calcium lights in
the wings as the line was called to form for a new entrance. No further opportunity for conversation occurred, but the
next evening, when they were getting ready for the stage, this girl appeared
anew at her side.
"They say this show is going
on the road next month."
"Is it?" said Carrie.
"Yes; do you think you'll
go?"
"I don't know; I guess so,
if they'll take me."
"Oh, they'll take you.
I wouldn't go. They won't give you any more, and it will cost you everything
you make to live. I never leave
New York. There are too many
shows going on here."
"Can you always get in
another show?"
"I always have.
There's one going on up at the Broadway this month.
I'm going to try and get in that if this one really goes."
Carrie heard this with aroused
intelligence. Evidently it
wasn't so very difficult to get on. Maybe
she also could get a place if this show went away. "Do they all pay
about the same?" she asked.
"Yes. Sometimes you get a little more.
This show doesn't pay very much."
"I get twelve," said
Carrie.
"Do you?" said the
girl. "They pay me
fifteen, and you do more work than I do.
I wouldn't stand it if I were you.
They're just giving you less because they think you don't know.
You ought to be making fifteen."
"Well, I'm not," said
Carrie.
"Well, you'll get more at
the next place if you want it," went on the girl, who admired Carrie
very much. "You do fine,
and the manager knows it."
To say the truth, Carrie did
unconsciously move about with an air pleasing and somewhat distinctive.
It was due wholly to her natural manner and total lack of
self-consciousness.
"Do you suppose I could get
more up at the Broadway?"
"Of course you can,"
answered the girl. "You
come with me when I go. I'll do
the talking."
Carrie heard this, flushing with
thankfulness. She liked this
little gaslight soldier. She
seemed so experienced and self- reliant in her tinsel helmet and military
accoutrements.
"My future must be assured
if I can always get work this way," thought Carrie.
Still, in the morning, when her
household duties would infringe upon her and Hurstwood sat there, a perfect
load to contemplate, her fate seemed dismal and unrelieved. It did not take so very much to feed them under Hurstwood's
close-measured buying, and there would possibly be enough for rent, but it
left nothing else. Carrie
bought the shoes and some other things, which complicated the rent problem
very seriously. Suddenly, a
week from the fatal day, Carrie realised that they were going to run short.
"I don't believe," she
exclaimed, looking into her purse at breakfast, "that I'll have enough
to pay the rent."
"How much have you?"
inquired Hurstwood.
"Well, I've got twenty-two
dollars, but there's everything to be paid for this week yet, and if I use
all I get Saturday to pay this, there won't be any left for next week.
Do you think your hotel man will open his hotel this month?"
"I think so," returned
Hurstwood. "He said he
would."
After a while, Hurstwood said:
"Don't worry about it.
Maybe the grocer will wait. He
can do that. We've traded there long enough to make him trust us for a
week or two."
"Do you think he will?"
she asked.
"I think so." On this
account, Hurstwood, this very day, looked grocer Oeslogge clearly in the eye
as he ordered a pound of coffee, and said:
"Do you mind carrying my
account until the end of every week?"
"No, no, Mr. Wheeler," said Mr. Oeslogge.
"Dat iss all right."
Hurstwood, still tactful in
distress, added nothing to this. It
seemed an easy thing. He looked
out of the door, and then gathered up his coffee when ready and came away.
The game of a desperate man had begun.
Rent was paid, and now came the
grocer. Hurstwood managed by
paying out of his own ten and collecting from Carrie at the end of the week.
Then he delayed a day next time settling with the grocer, and so soon
had his ten back, with Oeslogge getting his pay on this Thursday or Friday
for last Saturday's bill.
This entanglement made Carrie
anxious for a change of some sort. Hurstwood did not seem to realise that
she had a right to anything. He
schemed to make what she earned cover all expenses, but seemed not to
trouble over adding anything himself.
"He talks about
worrying," thought Carrie. "If
he worried enough he couldn't sit there and wait for me.
He'd get something to do. No man could go seven months without
finding something if he tried."
The sight of him always around in
his untidy clothes and gloomy appearance drove Carrie to seek relief in
other places. Twice a week
there were matinees, and then Hurstwood ate a cold snack, which he prepared
himself. Two other days there
were rehearsals beginning at ten in the morning and lasting usually until
one. Now, to this Carrie added a few visits to one or two chorus girls,
including the blue-eyed soldier of the golden helmet.
She did it because it was pleasant and a relief from dulness of the
home over which her husband brooded.
The blue-eyed soldier's name was
Osborne--Lola Osborne. Her room
was in Nineteenth Street near Fourth Avenue, a block now given up wholly to
office buildings. Here she had
a comfortable back room, looking over a collection of back yards in which
grew a number of shade trees pleasant to see.
"Isn't your home in New
York?" she asked of Lola one day.
"Yes; but I can't get along
with my people. They always
want me to do what they want. Do
you live here?"
"Yes," said Carrie.
"With your family?"
Carrie was ashamed to say that
she was married. She had talked
so much about getting more salary and confessed to so much anxiety about her
future, that now, when the direct question of fact was waiting, she could
not tell this girl.
"With some relatives,"
she answered.
Miss Osborne took it for granted
that, like herself, Carrie's time was her own.
She invariably asked her to stay, proposing little outings and other
things of that sort until Carrie began neglecting her dinner hours.
Hurstwood noticed it, but felt in no position to quarrel with her.
Several times she came so late as scarcely to have an hour in which
to patch up a meal and start for the theatre.
"Do you rehearse in the
afternoons?" Hurstwood once asked, concealing almost completely the
cynical protest and regret which prompted it.
"No; I was looking around
for another place," said Carrie.
As a matter of fact she was, but
only in such a way as furnished the least straw of an excuse. Miss Osborne and she had gone to the office of the manager
who was to produce the new opera at the Broadway and returned straight to
the former's room, where they had been since three o'clock.
Carrie felt this question to be
an infringement on her liberty. She did not take into account how much
liberty she was securing. Only the latest step, the newest freedom, must not
be questioned.
Hurstwood saw it all clearly
enough. He was shrewd after his
kind, and yet there was enough decency in the man to stop him from making
any effectual protest. In his
almost inexplicable apathy he was content to droop supinely while Carrie
drifted out of his life, just as he was willing supinely to see opportunity
pass beyond his control. He
could not help clinging and protesting in a mild, irritating, and
ineffectual way, however--a way that simply widened the breach by slow
degrees.
A further enlargement of this
chasm between them came when the manager, looking between the wings upon the
brightly lighted stage where the chorus was going through some of its
glittering evolutions, said to the master of the ballet:
"Who is that fourth girl
there on the right--the one coming round at the end now?"
"Oh," said the
ballet-master, "that's Miss Madenda."
"She's good looking.
Why don't you let her head that line?"
"I will," said the man.
"Just do that.
She'll look better there than the woman you've got."
"All right. I will do that," said the master.
The next evening Carrie was
called out, much as if for an error.
"You lead your company to
night," said the master.
"Yes, sir," said
Carrie.
"Put snap into it," he
added. "We must have
snap."
"Yes, sir," replied
Carrie.
Astonished at this change, she
thought that the heretofore leader must be ill; but when she saw her in the
line, with a distinct expression of something unfavourable in her eye, she
began to think that perhaps it was merit.
She had a chic way of tossing her
head to one side, and holding her arms as if for action--not listlessly.
In front of the line this showed up even more effectually.
"That girl knows how to
carry herself," said the manager, another evening. He began to think that he should like to talk with her. If he
hadn't made it a rule to have nothing to do with the members of the chorus,
he would have approached her most unbendingly.
"Put that girl at the head
of the white column," he suggested to the man in charge of the ballet.
This white column consisted of
some twenty girls, all in snow- white flannel trimmed with silver and blue.
Its leader was most stunningly arrayed in the same colours,
elaborated, however, with epaulets and a belt of silver, with a short sword
dangling at one side. Carrie
was fitted for this costume, and a few days later appeared, proud of her new
laurels. She was especially
gratified to find that her salary was now eighteen instead of twelve.
Hurstwood heard nothing about
this.
"I'll not give him the rest
of my money," said Carrie. "I
do enough. I am going to get me
something to wear."
As a matter of fact, during this
second month she had been buying for herself as recklessly as she dared,
regardless of the consequences. There
were impending more complications rent day, and more extension of the credit
system in the neighbourhood. Now, however, she proposed to do better by
herself.
Her first move was to buy a shirt
waist, and in studying these she found how little her money would buy--how
much, if she could only use all. She
forgot that if she were alone she would have to pay for a room and board,
and imagined that every cent of her eighteen could be spent for clothes and
things that she liked.
At last she picked upon
something, which not only used up all her surplus above twelve, but invaded
that sum. She knew she was
going too far, but her feminine love of finery prevailed.
The next day Hurstwood said:
"We owe the grocer five
dollars and forty cents this week."
"Do we?" said Carrie,
frowning a little.
She looked in her purse to leave
it.
"I've only got eight dollars
and twenty cents altogether."
"We owe the milkman sixty
cents," added Hurstwood.
"Yes, and there's the coal
man," said Carrie.
Hurstwood said nothing.
He had seen the new things she was buying; the way she was neglecting
household duties; the readiness with which she was slipping out afternoons
and staying. He felt that something was going to happen.
All at once she spoke: "I
don't know," she said; "I can't do it all.
I don't earn enough."
This was a direct challenge.
Hurstwood had to take it up. He
tried to be calm.
"I don't want you to do it
all," he said. "I
only want a little help until I can get something to do."
"Oh, yes," answered
Carrie. "That's always the
way. It takes more than I can
earn to pay for things. I don't
see what I'm going to do.
"Well, I've tried to get
something," he exclaimed. What
do you want me to do?"
"You couldn't have tried so
very hard," said Carrie. "I
got something."
"Well, I did," he said,
angered almost to harsh words. "You
needn't throw up your success to me. All
I asked was a little help until I could get something.
I'm not down yet. I'll come up all right."
He tried to speak steadily, but
his voice trembled a little.
Carrie's anger melted on the
instant. She felt ashamed.
"Well," she said,
"here's the money," and emptied it out on the table. "I haven't got quite enough to pay it all.
If they can wait until Saturday, though, I'll have some more."
"You keep it," said
Hurstwood sadly. "I only
want enough to pay the grocer."
She put it back, and proceeded to
get dinner early and in good time. Her
little bravado made her feel as if she ought to make amends.
In a little while their old
thoughts returned to both.
"She's making more than she
says," thought Hurstwood. "She
says she's making twelve, but that wouldn't buy all those things.
I don't care. Let her
keep her money. I'll get
something again one of these days. Then
she can go to the deuce."
He only said this in his anger,
but it prefigured a possible course of action and attitude well enough.
"I don't care," thought
Carrie. "He ought to be
told to get out and do something. It
isn't right that I should support him."
In these days Carrie was
introduced to several youths, friends of Miss Osborne, who were of the kind
most aptly described as gay and festive.
They called once to get Miss Osborne for an afternoon drive.
Carrie was with her at the time.
"Come and go along,"
said Lola.
"No, I can't," said
Carrie.
"Oh, yes, come and go.
What have you got to do?"
"I have to be home by
five," said Carrie.
"What for?"
"Oh, dinner."
"They'll take us to
dinner," said Lola.
"Oh, no," said Carrie.
"I won't go. I can't."
"Oh, do come.
They're awful nice boys. We'll
get you back in time. We're
only going for a drive in Central Park." Carrie thought a while, and at
last yielded.
"Now, I must be back by
half-past four," she said.
The information went in one ear
of Lola and out the other.
After Drouet and Hurstwood, there
was the least touch of cynicism in her attitude toward young men--especially
of the gay and frivolous sort. She
felt a little older than they. Some
of their pretty compliments seemed silly.
Still, she was young in heart and body and youth appealed to her.
"Oh, we'll be right back,
Miss Madenda," said one of the chaps, bowing.
"You wouldn't think we'd keep you over time, now, would
you?"
"Well, I don't know,"
said Carrie, smiling.
They were off for a drive--she,
looking about and noticing fine clothing, the young men voicing those silly
pleasantries and weak quips which pass for humour in coy circles.
Carrie saw the great park parade of carriages, beginning at the
Fifty-ninth Street entrance and winding past the Museum of Art to the exit
at One Hundred and Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue.
Her eye was once more taken by the show of wealth--the elaborate
costumes, elegant harnesses, spirited horses, and, above all, the beauty.
Once more the plague of poverty galled her, but now she forgot in a
measure her own troubles so far as to forget Hurstwood.
He waited until four, five, and even six.
It was getting dark when he got up out of his chair.
"I guess she isn't coming
home," he said, grimly.
"That's the way," he
thought. "She's getting a
start now. I'm out of it."
Carrie had really discovered her
neglect, but only at a quarter after five, and the open carriage was now far
up Seventh Avenue, near the Harlem River.
"What time is it?" she
inquired. "I must be
getting back."
"A quarter after five,"
said her companion, consulting an elegant, open-faced watch.
"Oh, dear me!"
exclaimed Carrie. Then she
settled back with a sigh. "There's
no use crying over spilt milk," she said.
"It's too late."
"Of course it is," said
the youth, who saw visions of a fine dinner now, and such invigorating talk
as would result in a reunion after the show.
He was greatly taken with Carrie. "We'll drive down to
Delmonico's now and have something there, won't we, Orrin?"
"To be sure," replied
Orrin, gaily.
Carrie thought of Hurstwood.
Never before had she neglected dinner without an excuse.
They drove back, and at 6.15 sat
down to dine. It was the Sherry
incident over again, the remembrance of which came painfully back to Carrie.
She remembered Mrs. Vance, who had never called again after
Hurstwood's reception, and Ames.
At this figure her mind halted.
It was a strong, clean vision. He liked better books than she read,
better people than she associated with.
His ideals burned in her heart.
"It's fine to be a good
actress," came distinctly back.
What sort of an actress was she?
"What are you thinking
about, Miss Madenda?" inquired her merry companion.
"Come, now, let's see if I can guess."
"Oh, no," said Carrie.
"Don't try."
She shook it off and ate.
She forgot, in part, and was merry. When it came to the after-theatre
proposition, however, she shook her head.
"No," she said, "I
can't. I have a previous
engagement."
"Oh, now, Miss Madenda,"
pleaded the youth.
"No," said Carrie,
"I can't. You've been so
kind, but you'll have to excuse me."
The youth looked exceedingly
crestfallen.
"Cheer up, old man,"
whispered his companion. "We'll
go around, anyhow. She may
change her mind."
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