Jennie Gerhardt - Драйзер Теодор (книги бесплатно без онлайн .txt) 📗

"He sits and smokes, and this is the way he uses matches. Five cents a box they cost—five cents. How can a man hope to do well and carry on

like that, I like to know. Look at them."

Jennie looked. She shook her head. "Lester is extravagant," she said.

Gerhardt carried them to the basement. At least they should be burned in

the furnace. He would have used them as lighters for his own pipe,

sticking them in the fire to catch a blaze, only old newspapers were better, and he had stacks of these—another evidence of his lord and master's

wretched, spendthrift disposition. It was a sad world to work in. Almost

everything was against him. Still he fought as valiantly as he could

against waste and shameless extravagance. His own economies were

rigid. He would wear the same suit of black—cut down from one of

Lester's expensive investments of years before—every Sunday for a

couple of years. Lester's shoes, by a little stretch of the imagination, could be made to seem to fit, and these he wore. His old ties also—the black

ones—they were fine. If he could have cut down Lester's shirts he would

have done so; he did make over the underwear, with the friendly aid of

the cook's needle. Lester's socks, of course, were just right. There was

never any expense for Gerhardt's clothing.

The remaining stock of Lester's discarded clothing—shoes, shirts, collars, suits, ties, and what not—he would store away for weeks and months, and

then, in a sad and gloomy frame of mind, he would call in a tailor, or an old-shoe man, or a ragman, and dispose of the lot at the best price he

could. He learned that all second- hand clothes men were sharks; that

there was no use in putting the least faith in the protests of any rag dealer or old-shoe man. They all lied. They all claimed to be very poor, when as a matter of fact they were actually rolling in wealth. Gerhardt had

investigated these stories; he had followed them up; he had seen what

they were doing with the things he sold them.

"Scoundrels!" he declared. "They offer me ten cents for a pair of shoes, and then I see them hanging out in front of their places marked two

dollars. Such robbery! My God! They could afford to give me a dollar."

Jennie smiled. It was only to her that he complained, for he could expect no sympathy from Lester. So far as his own meagre store of money was

concerned, he gave the most of it to his beloved church, where he was

considered to be a model of propriety, honesty, faith— in fact, the

embodiment of all the virtues.

And so, for all the ill winds that were beginning to blow socially, Jennie was now leading the dream years of her existence. Lester, in spite of the doubts which assailed him at times as to the wisdom of his career, was

invariably kind and considerate, and he seemed to enjoy his home life.

"Everything all right?" she would ask when he came in of an evening.

"Sure!" he would answer, and pinch her chin or cheek.

She would follow him in while Jeannette, always alert, would take his

coat and hat. In the winter-time they would sit in the library before the big grate-fire. In the spring, summer, or fall Lester preferred to walk out on the porch, one corner of which commanded a sweeping view of the lawn

and the distant street, and light his before-dinner cigar. Jennie would sit on the side of his chair and stroke his head. "Your hair is not getting the least bit thin, Lester; aren't you glad?" she would say; or, "Oh, see how your brow is wrinkled now. You mustn't do that. You didn't change your

tie, mister, this morning. Why didn't you? I laid one out for you."

"Oh, I forgot," he would answer, or he would cause the wrinkles to disappear, or laughingly predict that he would soon be getting bald if he wasn't so now.

In the drawing-room or library, before Vesta and Gerhardt, she was not

less loving, though a little more circumspect. She loved odd puzzles like pigs in clover, the spider's hole, baby billiards, and the like. Lester shared in these simple amusements. He would work by the hour, if necessary, to

make a difficult puzzle come right. Jennie was clever at solving these

mechanical problems. Sometimes she would have to show him the right

method, and then she would be immensely pleased with herself. At other

times she would stand behind him watching, her chin on his shoulder, her

arms about his neck. He seemed not to mind—indeed, he was happy in

the wealth of affection she bestowed. Her cleverness, her gentleness, her tact created an atmosphere which was immensely pleasing; above all her

youth and beauty appealed to him. It made him feel young, and if there

was one thing Lester objected to, it was the thought of drying up into an aimless old age. "I want to keep young, or die young," was one of his pet remarks; and Jennie came to understand. She was glad that she was so

much younger now for his sake.

Another pleasant feature of the home life was Lester's steadily increasing affection for Vesta. The child would sit at the big table in the library in the evening conning her books, while Jennie would sew, and Gerhardt would

read his interminable list of German Lutheran papers. It grieved the old

man that Vesta should not be allowed to go to a German Lutheran

parochial school, but Lester would listen to nothing of the sort. "We'll not have any thick- headed German training in this," he said to Jennie, when she suggested that Gerhardt had complained. "The public schools are

good enough for any child. You tell him to let her alone."

There were really some delightful hours among the four. Lester liked to

take the little seven-year-old school-girl between his knees and tease her.

He liked to invert the so-called facts of life, to propound its paradoxes, and watch how the child's budding mind took them. "What's water?" he would ask; and being informed that it was "what we drink," he would stare and say, "That's so, but what is it? Don't they teach you any better than that?"

"Well, it is what we drink, isn't it?" persisted Vesta.

"The fact that we drink it doesn't explain what it is," he would retort.

"You ask your teacher what water is"; and then he would leave her with this irritating problem troubling her young soul.

Food, china, her dress, anything was apt to be brought back to its

chemical constituents, and he would leave her to struggle with these dark suggestions of something else back of the superficial appearance of things until she was actually in awe of him. She had a way of showing him how

nice she looked before she started to school in the morning, a habit that arose because of his constant criticism of her appearance. He wanted her

to look smart, he insisted on a big bow of blue ribbon for her hair, he

demanded that her shoes be changed from low quarter to high boots with

the changing character of the seasons and that her clothing be carried out on a colour scheme suited to her complexion and disposition.

"That child's light and gay by disposition. Don't put anything sombre on her," he once remarked.

Jennie had come to realise that he must be consulted in this, and would

say, "Run to your papa and show him how you look."

Vesta would come and turn briskly around before him, saying, "See."

"Yes. You're all right. Go on"; and on she would go.

He grew so proud of her that on Sundays and some weekdays when they

drove he would always have her in between them. He insisted that Jennie