Sister Carrie: Chapters 37–47

“I’d get that idea out of my head, if I were you. It’s a lot more difficult than you think.” Carrie felt this to contain, in some way, an aspersion upon her ability.

Hurstwood saw her depart with some faint stirrings of shame, which were the expression of a manhood rapidly becoming stultified.

“What is your address?” inquired a young lady behind the counter, taking up the curtailed conversation.

He was a large and corpulent individual, surfeited with good clothes and good eating.

It was lassitude’s apology to energy.

She saw a large, empty, shadowy play-house, still redolent of the perfumes and blazonry of the night.

It was ever a centre of light and mirth. And here she was of it. Oh, if she could only remain, how happy would be her days!

It was this constant urging, coupled with irascibility and energy, for three long hours.

Carrie looked at him askance, half-suspicious of an appeal.

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.

She seemed so experienced and self-reliant in her tinsel helmet and military accoutrements.

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.

“’Tis cold, all right, this morning,” said the one on the left, who possessed a rich brogue.

“Who’s on there?” asked the second officer, referring, of course, to its complement of policemen.

He was ably assisted by his brother of the blue, who poured ponderous oaths upon the troubled waters. No severe damage was done, owing to the agility of the strikers in keeping out of reach.

Voices called “scab” now and then, as well as other epithets, but no crowd attacked the car.

There was no word assigned to any of them, but on the evening when Hurstwood was housing himself in the loft of the street-car barn, the leading comedian and star, feeling exceedingly facetious, said in a profound voice, which created a ripple of laughter: “Well, who are you?”

It was a trivial thing to say, and yet something in the way she did it caught the audience, which laughed heartily at the mock-fierce potentate towering before the young woman.

All members of the company had been warned that to interpolate lines or “business” meant a fine or worse.

She looked at him the same evening she had made up her mind to go, and now he seemed not so shiftless and worthless, but run down and beaten upon by chance.

Knowing that the end was so near, she became rather solicitous.

Friday broke fair and warm. It was one of those lovely harbingers of spring, given as a sign in dreary winter that earth is not forsaken of warmth and beauty.

There it ran winding before his gaze, shining brightly in the clear light, between the undulating banks on the right and the tall, tree-covered heights on the left.

It was about this time that the newspapers and magazines were beginning to pay that illustrative attention to the beauties of the stage which has since become fervid.

He was too stilted, too self-opinionated.

They tried in time and were apprised of the proper date to apply again.

There she was, grey-suited, sweet-faced, demure, but scowling.

There were long notices in praise of the quality of the burlesque, touched with recurrent references to Carrie.

“You are to use this room, Miss Madenda,” said one of the stage lackeys.

No longer any need of climbing several flights of steps to a small coop shared with another. Instead, a comparatively large and commodious chamber with conveniences not enjoyed by the small fry overhead.

She had not had adulation and affectionate propositions before. Now they had come. Wherefore? She smiled to think that men should suddenly find her so much more attractive.

It took her back to the few weeks in which she had collected—or rather had received—almost with the air of a domestic, four-fifty per week from a lordly foreman in a shoe factory—a man who, in distributing the envelopes, had the manner of a prince doling out favours to a servile group of petitioners.

A crusty old codger, sitting near by, seemed disturbed; at least, he stared in a most pointed way.

Before Hurstwood could act, two ladies flounced across the broad walk and disappeared in the stage door.

It consisted of securing a bed for all such homeless wayfarers as should apply to him at this particular spot, though he had scarcely the wherewithal to provide a comfortable habitation for himself.

Already, at eleven o’clock of this morning, several such as he had shambled forward out of Sixth Avenue, their thin clothes flapping and fluttering in the wind.

The one recourse left him was to doze when a place offered and he could get the money to occupy it.

Especially fatigued because of the wandering propensity which had seized him in the morning, he now half dragged his wet feet, shuffling the soles upon the sidewalk.

Whether it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape, or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following.

It is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content.