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

thousand, and try a practical investment of some kind—say a rival

carriage company. But did he want to jump in, at this stage of the game,

and begin a running fight on his father's old organisation? Moreover, it

would be a hard row to hoe. There was the keenest rivalry for business as it was, with the Kane Company very much in the lead. Lester's only

available capital was his seventy-five thousand dollars. Did he want to

begin in a picayune, obscure way? It took money to get a foothold in the

carriage business as things were now.

The trouble with Lester was that, while blessed with a fine imagination

and considerable insight, he lacked the ruthless, narrow-minded

insistence on his individual superiority which is a necessary element in

almost every great business success. To be a forceful figure in the

business world means, as a rule, that you must be an individual of one

idea, and that idea the God-given one that life has destined you for a

tremendous future in the particular field you have chosen. It means that

one thing, a cake of soap, a new can-opener, a safety razor, or speed-

accelerator, must seize on your imagination with tremendous force, burn

as a raging flame, and make itself the be-all and end-all of your existence.

As a rule, a man needs poverty to help him to this enthusiasm, and youth.

The thing he has discovered, and with which he is going to busy himself,

must be the door to a thousand opportunities and a thousand joys.

Happiness must be beyond or the fire will not burn as brightly as it might

—the urge will not be great enough to make a great success.

Lester did not possess this indispensable quality of enthusiasm. Life had already shown him the greater part of its so-called joys. He saw through

the illusions that are so often and so noisily labelled pleasure. Money, of course, was essential, and he had already had money—enough to keep

him comfortably. Did he want to risk it? He looked about him

thoughtfully. Perhaps he did. Certainly he could not comfortably

contemplate the thought of sitting by and watching other people work for

the rest of his days.

In the end he decided that he would bestir himself and look into things.

He was, as he said to himself, in no hurry; he was not going to make a

mistake. He would first give the trade, the people who were identified

with the manufacture and sale of carriages, time to realise that he was out of the Kane Company, for the time being, anyhow, and open to other

connections. So he announced that he was leaving the Kane Company

and going to Europe, ostensibly for a rest. He had never been abroad, and Jennie, too, would enjoy it. Vesta could be left at home with Gerhardt and a maid, and he and Jennie would travel around a bit, seeing what Europe

had to show. He wanted to visit Venice and Baden-Baden, and the great

watering- places that had been recommended to him. Cairo and Luxor

and the Parthenon had always appealed to his imagination. After he had

had his outing he could come back and seriously gather up the threads of

his intentions.

The spring after his father died, he put his plan into execution. He had

wound up the work of the warerooms and with a pleasant deliberation had

studied out a tour. He made Jennie his confidante, and now, having

gathered together their travelling comforts they took a steamer from New

York to Liverpool. After a few weeks in the British Isles they went to

Egypt. From there they came back, through Greece and Italy, into Austria

and Switzerland, and then later, through France and Paris, to Germany

and Berlin. Lester was diverted by the novelty of the experience and yet

he had an uncomfortable feeling that he was wasting his time. Great

business enterprises were not built by travellers, and he was not looking for health.

Jennie on the other hand, was transported by what she saw, and enjoyed

the new life to the full. Before Luxor and Karnak—places which Jennie

had never dreamed existed—she learned of an older civilisation,

powerful, complex, complete. Millions of people had lived and died here,

believing in other gods, other forms of government, other conditions of

existence. For the first time in her life Jennie gained a clear idea of how vast the world is. Now from this point of view—of decayed Greece, of

fallen Rome, of forgotten Egypt, she saw how pointless are our minor

difficulties, our minor beliefs. Her father's Lutheranism—it did not seem so significant any more; and the social economy of Columbus, Ohio—

rather pointless, perhaps. Her mother had worried so of what people—her

neighbours—thought, but here were dead worlds of people, some bad,

some good. Lester explained that their differences in standards of morals were due sometimes to climate, sometimes to religious beliefs, and

sometimes to the rise of peculiar personalities like Mohammed. Lester

liked to point out how small conventions bulked in this, the larger world, and vaguely she began to see. Admitting that she had been bad—locally it

was important, perhaps, but in the sum of civilisation, in the sum of big forces, what did it all amount to? They would be dead after a little while, she and Lester and all these people. Did anything matter except goodness

—goodness of heart? What else was there that was real?

CHAPTER XLV

It was while travelling abroad that Lester came across, first at the Carlton in London and later at Shepheards in Cairo, the one girl, before Jennie,

whom it might have been said he truly admired— Letty Pace. He had not

seen her for a long time, and she had been Mrs. Malcolm Gerald for

nearly four years, and a charming widow for nearly two years more.

Malcolm Gerald had been a wealthy man, having amassed a fortune in

banking and stock-brokering in Cincinnati, and he had left Mrs. Malcolm

Gerald very well off. She was the mother of one child, a little girl, who was safely in charge of a nurse and maid at all times, and she was

invariably the picturesque centre of a group of admirers recruited from

every capital of the civilised world. Letty Gerald was a talented woman,

beautiful, graceful, artistic, a writer of verse, an omnivorous reader, a student of art, and a sincere and ardent admirer of Lester Kane.

In her day she had truly loved him, for she had been a wise observer of

men and affairs, and Lester had always appealed to her as a real man. He

was so sane, she thought, so calm. He was always intolerant of sham, and

she liked him for it. He was inclined to wave aside the petty little

frivolities of common society conversation, and to talk of simple and

homely things. Many and many a time, in years past, they had deserted a

dance to sit out on a balcony somewhere, and talk while Lester smoked.

He had argued philosophy with her, discussed books, described political

and social conditions in other cities—in a word, he had treated her like a sensible human being, and she had hoped and hoped and hoped that he

would propose to her. More than once she had looked at his big, solid

head with its short growth of hardy brown hair, and wished that she could stroke it. It was a hard blow to her when he finally moved away to

Chicago; at that time she knew nothing of Jennie, but she felt

instinctively that her chance of winning him was gone.

Then Malcolm Gerald, always an ardent admirer, proposed for something

like the sixty-fifth time, and she took him. She did not love him, but she was getting along, and she had to marry some one. He was forty-four