An American Tragedy II

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY II

might be possible afterwards that his feeling toward her would change to a much more kindly one. “You can leave me after a while if you want to. After I’m out of this. I can’t prevent you from doing that and I wouldn’t want to if I could. But you can’t leave me now. You can’t. You can’t! Besides,” she added, “I didn’t want to get myself in this position and I wouldn’t have, but for you. But you made me and made me let you come in here. And now you want to leave me to shift for myself, just because you think you won’t be able to go in society any more, if they find out about me.”

She paused, the strain of this contest proving almost too much for her tired nerves. At the same time she began to sob nervously and yet not violently – a marked effort at self-re- straint and recovery marking her every gesture. And after a moment or two in which both stood there, he gazing dumbly and wondering what else he was to say in answer to all this, she struggling and finally managing to recover her poise, she added: “Oh, what is it about me that’s so different to what I was a couple of months ago, Clyde? Will you tell me that? I’d like to know. What is it that has caused you to change so? Up to Christmas, almost, you were as nice to me as any human being could be. You were with me nearly all the time you had, and since then I’ve scarcely had an evening that I didn’t beg for. Who is it? What is it? Some other girl, or what, I’d like to know – that Sondra Finchley or Bertine Cranston, or who?”

Her eyes as she said this were a study. For even to this hour, as Clyde could now see to his satisfaction, since he feared the effect on Roberta of definite and absolute knowledge concerning Sondra, she had no specific suspicion, let alone positive knowledge concerning any girl. And coward-wise, in the face of her present predicament and her assumed and threatened

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claims on him, he was afraid to say what or who the real cause of this change was. Instead he merely replied and almost unmoved by her sorrow, since he no longer really cared for her: “Oh, you’re all wrong, Bert. You don’t see what the trouble is. It’s my future here – if I leave here I certainly will never find such an opportunity. And if I have to marry in this way or leave here it will all go flooey. I want to wait and get some place first before I marry, see – save some money and if I do this I won’t have a chance and you won’t either,” he added feebly, forgetting for the moment that up to this time he had been indicating rather clearly that he did not want to have anything more to do with her in any way.

“Besides,” he continued, “if you could only find some one, or if you would go away by yourself somewhere for a while, Bert, and go through with this alone, I could send you the money to do it on, I know. I could have it between now and the time you had to go.”

His face, as he said this, and as Roberta clearly saw, mirrored the complete and resourceless collapse of all his recent plans in regard to her. And she, realizing that his indifference to her had reached the point where he could thus dispose of her and their prospective baby in this casual and really heartless manner, was not only angered in part, but at the same time frightened by the meaning of it all.

“Oh, Clyde,” she now exclaimed boldly and with more courage and defiance than at any time since she had known him, “how you have changed! And how hard you can be. To want me to go off all by myself and just to save you – so you can stay here and get along and marry some one here when I am out of the way and you don’t have to bother about me any more. Well, I won’t do it. It’s not fair. And I won’t, that’s all. I

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won’t. And that’s all there is to it. You can get some one to get me out of this or you can marry me and come away with me, at least long enough for me to have the baby and place myself right before my people and every one else that knows me. I don’t care if you leave me afterwards, because I see now that you really don’t care for me any more, and if that’s the way you feel, I don’t want you any more than you want me. But just the same, you must help me now – you must. But, oh, dear,” she began whimpering again, and yet only slightly and bitterly. “To think that all our love for each other should have come to this – that I am asked to go away by myself – all alone – with no one – while you stay here, oh, dear! oh, dear! And with a baby on my hands afterwards. And no husband.”

She clinched her hands and shook her head bleakly. Clyde, realizing well enough that his proposition certainly was cold and indifferent but, in the face of his intense desire for Sondra, the best or at least safest that he could devise, now stood there unable for the moment to think of anything more to say.

And although there was some other discussion to the same effect, the conclusion of this very difficult hour was that Clyde had another week or two at best in which to see if he could find a physician or any one who would assist him. After that – well after that the implied, if not openly expressed, threat which lay at the bottom of this was, unless so extricated and speedily, that he would have to marry her, if not permanently, then at least temporarily, but legally just the same, until once again she was able to look after herself – a threat which was as crushing and humiliating to Roberta as it was torturing to him.

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CHAPTER 39

Opposing views such as these, especially where no real skill to meet such a situation existed, could only spell greater difficulty and even eventual disaster unless chance in some form should aid. And chance did not aid. And the presence of Roberta in the factory was something that would not permit him to dismiss it from his mind. If only he could persuade her to leave and go somewhere else to live and work so that he should not always see her, he might then think more calmly. For with her asking continuously, by her presence if no more, what he intended to do, it was impossible for him to think. And the fact that he no longer cared for her as he had, tended to reduce his normal consideration of what was her due. He was too infatuated with, and hence disarranged by his thoughts of Sondra.

For in the very teeth of this grave dilemma he continued to pursue the enticing dream in connection with Sondra – the dark situation in connection with Roberta seeming no more at moments than a dark cloud which shadowed this other. And hence nightly, or as often as the exigencies of his still unbroken connection with Roberta would permit, he was availing himself of such opportunities as his flourishing connections now afforded. Now, and to his great pride and satisfaction, it was a dinner at the Harriets’ or Taylors’ to which he was invited; or a party at the Finchleys’ or the Cranstons’, to which he would either escort Sondra or be animated by the hope of encounter-

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ing her. And now, also without so many of the former phases or attempts at subterfuge, which had previously characterized her curiosity in regard to him, she was at times openly seeking him out and making opportunities for social contact. And, of course, these contacts being identical with this typical kind of group gathering, they seemed to have no special significance with the more conservative elders.

For although Mrs. Finchley, who was of an especially shrewd and discerning turn socially, had at first been dubious over the attentions being showered upon Clyde by her daughter and others, still observing that Clyde was more and more being entertained, not only in her own home by the group of which her daughter was a part, but elsewhere, everywhere, was at last inclined to imagine that he must be more solidly placed in this world than she had heard, and later to ask her son and even Sondra concerning him. But receiving from Sondra only the equivocal information that, since he was Gil and Bella Griffiths’ cousin, and was being taken up by everybody because he was so charming – even if he didn’t have any money – she couldn’t see why she and Stuart should not be allowed to entertain him also, her mother rested on that for the time being – only cautioning her daughter under no circumstances to become too friendly. And Sondra, realizing that in part her mother was right, yet being so drawn to Clyde was now determined to deceive her, at least to the extent of being as clandestinely free with Clyde as she could contrive. And was, so much so that every one who was privy to the intimate contacts between Clyde and Sondra might have reported that the actual understanding between them was assuming an intensity which most certainly would have shocked the elder Finchleys, could they have known. For apart from what Clyde had been,

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and still was dreaming in regard to her, Sondra was truly being taken with thoughts and moods in regard to him which were fast verging upon the most destroying aspects of the very profound chemistry of love. Indeed, in addition to handclasps, kisses and looks of intense admiration always bestowed when presumably no one was looking, there were those nebulous and yet strengthening and lengthening fantasies concerning a future which in some way or other, not clear to either as yet, was still always to include each other.

Summer days perhaps, and that soon, in which he and she would be in a canoe at Twelfth Lake, the long shadows of the trees on the bank lengthening over the silvery water, the wind rippling the surface while he paddled and she idled and tortured him with hints of the future; a certain forest path, grasssodden and sun-mottled to the south and west of the Cranston and Phant estates, near theirs, through which they might canter in June and July to a wonderful view known as Inspiration Point some seven miles west; the country fair at Sharon, at which, in a gypsy costume, the essence of romance itself, she would superintend a booth, or, in her smartest riding habit, give an exhibition of her horsemanship – teas, dances in the afternoon and in the moonlight at which, languishing in his arms, their eyes would speak.

None of the compulsion of the practical. None of the inhibitions which the dominance and possible future opposition of her parents might imply. Just love and summer, and idyllic and happy progress toward an eventual secure and unopposed union which should give him to her forever.

And in the meantime, in so far as Roberta was concerned, two more long, dreary, terrifying months going by without that meditated action on her part which must result once it

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was taken in Clyde’s undoing. For, as convinced as she was that apart from meditating and thinking of some way to escape his responsibility, Clyde had no real intention of marrying her, still, like Clyde, she drifted, fearing to act really. For in several conferences following that in which she had indicated that she expected him to marry her, he had reiterated, if vaguely, a veiled threat that in case she appealed to his uncle he would not be compelled to marry her, after all, for he could go elsewhere.

The way he put it was that unless left undisturbed in his present situation he would be in no position to marry her and furthermore could not possibly do anything to aid her at the coming time when most of all she would stand in need of aid – a hint which caused Roberta to reflect on a hitherto not fully developed vein of hardness in Clyde, although had she but sufficiently reflected, it had shown itself at the time that he compelled her to admit him to her room.

In addition and because she was doing nothing and yet he feared that at any moment she might, he shifted in part at least from the attitude of complete indifference, which had availed him up to the time that she had threatened him, to one of at least simulated interest and good-will and friendship. For the very precarious condition in which he found himself was sufficiently terrifying to evoke more diplomacy than ever before had characterized him. Besides he was foolish enough to hope, if not exactly believe, that by once more conducting himself as though he still entertained a lively sense of the problem that afflicted her and that he was willing, in case no other way was found, to eventually marry her (though he could never definitely be persuaded to commit himself as to this), he could reduce her determination to compel him to act soon at least to

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a minimum, and so leave him more time in which to exhaust every possibility of escape without marriage, and without being compelled to run away.

And although Roberta sensed the basis of this sudden shift, still she was so utterly alone and distrait that she was willing to give ear to Clyde’s mock genial, if not exactly affectionate observations and suggestions. It caused her, at his behest, to wait a while longer, the while, as he now explained, he would not only have saved up some money, but devised some plan in connection with his work which would permit him to leave for a time anyhow, marry her somewhere and then establish her and the baby as a lawful married woman somewhere else, while, although he did not explain this just now, he returned to Lycurgus and sent her such aid as he could. But on condition, of course, that never anywhere, unless he gave her permission, must she assert that he had married her, or point to him in any way as the father of her child. Also it was understood that she, as she herself had asserted over and over that she would, if only he would do this – marry her – take steps to free herself on the ground of desertion, or something, in some place sufficiently removed from Lycurgus for no one to hear. And that within a reasonable time after her marriage to him, although he was not at all satisfied that, assuming that he did marry her, she would.

But Clyde, of course, was insincere in regard to all his overtures at this time, and really not concerned as to her sincerity or insincerity. Nor did he have any intention of leaving Lycurgus even for the moderate length of time that her present extrication would require unless he had to. For that meant that he would be separated from Sondra, and such absence, for whatever period, would most definitely interfere with his

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plans. And so, on the contrary, he drifted – thinking most idly at times of some possible fake or mock marriage such as he had seen in some melodramatic movie – a fake minister and witnesses combining to deceive some simple country girl such as Roberta was not, but at such expense of time, resources, courage and subtlety as Clyde himself, after a little reflection, was wise enough to see was beyond him.

Again, knowing that, unless some hitherto unforeseen aid should eventuate, he was heading straight toward a disaster which could not much longer be obviated, he even allowed himself to dream that, once the fatal hour was at hand and Roberta, no longer to be put off by any form of subterfuge, was about to expose him, he might even flatly deny that he had ever held any such relationship with her as then she would be charging – rather that at all times his relationship with her had been that of a department manager to employee – no more. Terror – no less!

But at the same time, early in May, when Roberta, because of various gestative signs and ailments, was beginning to explain, as well as insist, to Clyde that by no stretch of the imagination or courage could she be expected to retain her position at the factory or work later than June first, because by then the likelihood of the girls there beginning to notice something, would be too great for her to endure, Sondra was beginning to explain that not so much later than the fourth or fifth of June she and her mother and Stuart, together with some servants, would be going to their new lodge at Twelfth Lake in order to supervise certain installations then being made before the regular season should begin. And after that, not later than the eighteenth, at which time the Cranstons, Harriets, and some others would have arrived, including very likely visits from

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Bella and Myra, he might expect a week-end invitation from the Cranstons, with whom, through Bertine, she would arrange as to this. And after that, the general circumstances proving fairly propitious, there would be, of course, other week-end invitations to the Harriets’, Phants’ and some others who dwelt there, as well as to the Griffiths’ at Greenwood, to which place, on account of Bella, he could easily come. And during his two weeks’ vacation in July, he could either stop at the Casino, which was at Pine Point, or perhaps the Cranstons or Harriets, at her suggestion, might choose to invite him. At any rate, as Clyde could see, and with no more than such expenditures as, with a little scrimping during his ordinary working days here, he could provide for, he might see not a little of that lake life of which he had read so much in the local papers, to say nothing of Sondra at one and another of the lodges, the masters of which were not so inimical to his presence and overtures as were Sondra’s parents.

For now it was, and for the first time, as she proceeded to explain to him that her mother and father, because of his continued and reported attentions to her, were already beginning to talk of an extended European tour which might keep her and Stuart and her mother abroad for at least the next two years. But since, at news of this, Clyde’s face as well as his spirits darkened, and she herself was sufficiently enmeshed to suffer because of this, she at once added that he must not feel so bad – he must not; things would work out well enough, she knew. For at the proper time, and unless between then and now, something – her own subtle attack if not her at present feverish interest in Clyde – should have worked to alter her mother’s viewpoint in regard to him – she might be compelled to take some steps of her own in order to frustrate her mother.

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