AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY. Theodore Dreiser
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his father was never very practical and I doubt if Clyde has ever had a real chance.” (His son winced at this friendly and familiar use of his cousin’s first name.) “My only idea in bringing him on here was to give him a start. I haven’t the faintest idea whether he would make good or not. He might and again he might not. If he didn’t —” He threw up one hand as much as to say, “If he doesn’t, we will have to toss him aside, of course.”
“Well, I think that’s very kind of you, father,” observed Mrs. Griffiths, pleasantly and diplomatically. “I hope he proves satisfactory.”
“And there’s another thing,” added Griffiths wisely and sententiously. “I don’t expect this young man, so long as he is in my employ and just because he’s a nephew of mine, to be treated differently to any other employee in the factory. He’s coming here to work — not play. And while he is here, trying, I don’t expect any of you to pay him any social attention — not the slightest. He’s not the sort of boy anyhow, that would want to put himself on us — at least he didn’t impress me that way, and he wouldn’t be coming down here with any notion that he was to be placed on an equal footing with any of us. That would be silly. Later on, if he proves that he is really worth while, able to take care of himself, knows his place and keeps it, and any of you wanted to show him any little attention, well, then it will be time enough to see, but not before then.”
By then, the maid, Amanda, assistant to Mrs. Truesdale, was taking away the dinner plates and preparing to serve the dessert. But as Mr. Griffiths rarely ate dessert, and usually chose this period, unless company was present, to look after certain stock and banking matters which he kept in a small desk in the library, he now pushed back his chair, arose, excusing himself to his family, and walked into the library adjoining. The others remained.
“I would like to see what he’s like, wouldn’t you?” Myra asked her mother.
“Yes. And I do hope he measures up to all of your father’s expectations. He will not feel right if he doesn’t.”
“I can’t get this,” observed Gilbert, “bringing people on now when we can hardly take care of those we have. And besides, imagine what the bunch around here will say if they find out that our cousin was only a bell-hop before coming here!”
“Oh, well, they won’t have to know that, will they?” said Myra.
“Oh, won’t they? Well, what’s to prevent him from speaking about it — unless we tell him not to — or some one coming along who has seen him there.” His eyes snapped viciously. “At any rate, I hope he doesn’t. It certainly wouldn’t do us any good around here.”
And Bella added, “I hope he’s not dull as Uncle Allen’s two boys. They’re the most uninteresting boys I ever did see.”
“Bella,” cautioned her mother once more.
Chapter 3
The Clyde whom Samuel Griffiths described as having met at the Union League Club in Chicago, was a somewhat modified version of the one who had fled from Kansas City three years before. He was now twenty, a little taller and more firmly but scarcely any more robustly built, and considerably more experienced, of course. For since leaving his home and work in Kansas City and coming in contact with some rough usage in the world — humble tasks, wretched rooms, no intimates to speak of, plus the compulsion to make his own way as best he might — he had developed a kind of self-reliance and smoothness of address such as one would scarcely have credited him with three years before. There was about him now, although he was not nearly so smartly dressed as when he left Kansas City, a kind of conscious gentility of manner which pleased, even though it did not at first arrest attention. Also, and this was considerably different from the Clyde who had crept away from Kansas City in a box car, he had much more of an air of caution and reserve.
For ever since he had fled from Kansas City, and by one humble device and another forced to make his way, he had been coming to the conclusion that on himself alone depended his future. His family, as he now definitely sensed, could do nothing for him. They were too impractical and too poor — his mother, father, Esta, all of them.
At the same time, in spite of all their difficulties, he could not now help but feel drawn to them, his mother in particular, and the old home life that had surrounded him as a boy — his brother and sisters, Esta included, since she, too, as he now saw it, had been brought no lower than he by circumstances over which she probably had no more control. And often, his thoughts and mood had gone back with a definite and disconcerting pang because of the way in which he had treated his mother as well as the way in which his career in Kansas City had been suddenly interrupted — his loss of Hortense Briggs — a severe blow; the troubles that had come to him since; the trouble that must have come to his mother and Esta because of him.
On reaching St. Louis two days later after his flight, and after having been most painfully bundled out into the snow a hundred miles from Kansas City in the gray of a winter morning, and at the same time relieved of his watch and overcoat by two brakemen who had found him hiding in the car, he had picked up a Kansas City paper — The Star — only to realize that his worst fear in regard to all that had occurred had come true. For there, under a two-column head, and with fully a column and a half of reading matter below, was the full story of all that had happened: a little girl, the eleven-year-old daughter of a well-to-do Kansas City family, knocked down and almost instantly killed — she had died an hour later; Sparser and Miss Sipe in a hospital and under arrest at the same time, guarded by a policeman sitting in the hospital awaiting their recovery; a splendid car very seriously damaged; Sparser’s father, in the absence of the owner of the car for whom he worked, at once incensed and made terribly unhappy by the folly and seeming criminality and recklessness of his son.
But what was worse, the unfortunate Sparser had already been charged with larceny and homicide, and wishing, no doubt, to minimize his own share in this grave catastrophe, had not only revealed the names of all who were with him in the car — the youths in particular and their hotel address — but had charged that they along with him were equally guilty, since they had urged him to make speed at the time and against his will — a claim which was true enough, as Clyde knew. And Mr. Squires, on being interviewed at the hotel, had furnished the police and the newspapers with the names of their parents and their home addresses.
This last was the sharpest blow of all. For there followed disturbing pictures of how their respective parents or relatives had taken it on being informed of their sins. Mrs. Ratterer, Tom’s mother, had cried and declared her boy was a good boy, and had not meant to do any harm, she was sure. And Mrs. Hegglund — Oscar’s devoted but aged mother — had said that there was not a more honest or generous soul and that he must have been drinking. And at his own home — The Star had described his mother as standing, pale, very startled and very distressed, clasping and unclasping her hands and looking as though she were scarcely able to grasp what was meant, unwilling to believe that her son had been one of the party and assuring all that he would most certainly return soon and explain all, and that there must be some mistake.
However, he had not returned. Nor had he heard anything more after that. For, owing to his fear of the police, as well as of his mother — her sorrowful, hopeless eyes, he had not written for months, and then a letter to his mother only to say that he was well and that she must not worry. He gave neither name nor address. Later, after that he had wandered on, essaying one small job and another, in St. Louis, Peoria, Chicago, Milwaukee — dishwashing in a restaurant, soda-clerking in a small outlying drug-store, attempting to learn to be a shoe clerk, a grocer’s clerk, and what not; and being discharged and laid off and quitting because he did not like it. He had sent her ten dollars once — another time five, having, as he felt, that much to spare. After nearly a year and a half he had decided that the search must have lessened, his own part in the crime being forgotten, possibly, or by then not deemed sufficiently important to pursue — and when he was once more making a moderate living as the driver of a delivery wagon in Chicago, a job that paid him fifteen