An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

think I hear someone coming. Please, now.” She looked about quite frightened, apparently, while Clyde laughed ecstatically. Life had presented him a delicious sweet at last. “You know I never did anything like this before,” she went on. “Honest, I didn’t. Please. It’s only because you said⁠—”

Clyde was pressing her close, not saying anything in reply⁠—his pale face and dark hungry eyes held very close to hers. He kissed her again and again despite her protests, her little mouth and chin and cheeks seeming too beautiful⁠—too irresistible⁠—then murmured pleadingly, for he was too overcome to speak vigorously.

“Oh, Roberta, dearest, please, please, say that you love me. Please do! I know that you do, Roberta. I can tell. Please, tell me now. I’m crazy about you. We have so little time.”

He kissed her again upon the cheek and mouth, and suddenly he felt her relax. She stood quite still and unresisting in his arms. He felt a wonder of something⁠—he could not tell what. All of a sudden he felt tears upon her face, her head sunk to his shoulder, and then he heard her say: “Yes, yes, yes. I do love you. Yes, yes. I do. I do.”

There was a sob⁠—half of misery, half of delight⁠—in her voice and Clyde caught that. He was so touched by her honesty and simplicity that tears sprang to his own eyes. “It’s all right, Roberta. It’s all right. Please don’t cry. Oh, I think you’re so sweet. I do. I do, Roberta.”

He looked up and before him in the east over the low roofs of the city was the thinnest, yellowest topmost arc of the rising July moon. It seemed at the moment as though life had given him all⁠—all⁠—that he could possibly ask of it.

XVIII

The culmination of this meeting was but the prelude, as both Clyde and Roberta realized, to a series of contacts and rejoicings which were to extend over an indefinite period. They had found love. They were deliciously happy, whatever the problems attending its present realization might be. But the ways and means of continuing with it were a different matter. For not only was her connection with the Newtons a bar to any normal procedure in so far as Clyde was concerned, but Grace Marr herself offered a distinct and separate problem. Far more than Roberta she was chained, not only by the defect of poor looks, but by the narrow teachings and domestic training of her early social and religious life. Yet she wanted to be gay and free, too. And in Roberta, who, while gay and boastful at times, was still well within the conventions that chained Grace, she imagined that she saw one who was not so bound. And so it was that she clung to her closely and as Roberta saw it a little wearisomely. She imagined that they could exchange ideas and jests and confidences in regard to the love life and their respective dreams without injury to each other. And to date this was her one solace in an otherwise gray world.

But Roberta, even before the arrival of Clyde in her life, did not want to be so clung to. It was a bore. And afterwards she developed an inhibition in regard to him where Grace was concerned. For she not only knew that Grace would resent this sudden desertion, but also that she had no desire to face out within herself the sudden and revolutionary moods which now possessed her. Having at once met and loved him, she was afraid to think what, if anything, she proposed to permit herself to do in regard to him. Were not such contacts between the classes banned here? She knew they were. Hence she did not care to talk about him at all.

In consequence on Monday evening following the Sunday on the lake when Grace had inquired most gayly and familiarly after Clyde, Roberta had as instantly decided not to appear nearly as interested in him as Grace might already be imagining. Accordingly, she said little other than that he was very pleasant to her and had inquired after Grace, a remark which caused the latter to eye her slyly and to wonder if she were really telling what had happened since. “He was so very friendly I was beginning to think he was struck on you.”

“Oh, what nonsense!” Roberta replied shrewdly, and a bit alarmed. “Why, he wouldn’t look at me. Besides, there’s a rule of the company that doesn’t permit him to, as long as I work there.”

This last, more than anything else, served to allay Grace’s notions in regard to Clyde and Roberta, for she was of that conventional turn of mind which would scarcely permit her to think of anyone infringing upon a company rule. Nevertheless Roberta was nervous lest Grace should be associating her and Clyde in her mind in some clandestine way, and she decided to be doubly cautious in regard to Clyde⁠—to feign a distance she did not feel.

But all this was preliminary to troubles and strains and fears which had nothing to do with what had gone before, but took their rise from difficulties which sprang up immediately afterwards. For once she had come to this complete emotional understanding with Clyde, she saw no way of meeting him except in this very clandestine way and that so very rarely and uncertainly that she could not say when there was likely to be another meeting.

“You see, it’s this way,” she explained to Clyde when, a few evenings later, she had managed to steal out for an hour and they walked from the region at the end of Taylor Street down to the Mohawk, where were some open fields and a low bank rising above the pleasant river. “The Newtons never go any place much without inviting me. And even if they didn’t, Grace’d never go unless I went along. It’s just because we were together so much in Trippetts Mills that she feels