|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
Broadway, outside. It was nearly the first time since he had arrived in the city that his leisure afforded him ample opportunity to contemplate this spectacle. Now, being, perforce, idle himself, he wondered at the activity of others. How gay were the youths he saw, how pretty the women. Such fine clothes they all wore. They were so intent upon getting somewhere. He saw coquettish glances cast by magnificent girls. Ah, the money it required to train with such-how well he knew! How long it had been since he had had the opportunity to do so! The clock outside registered four. It was a little early, but he thought he would go back to the flat. This going back to the flat was coupled with the thought that Carrie would think he was sitting around too much if he came home early. He hoped he wouldn’t have to, but the day hung heavily on his hands. Over there he was on his own ground. He could sit in his rocking-chair and read. This busy, distracting, suggestive scene was shut out. He could read his papers. Accordingly, he went home. Carrie was reading, quite alone. It was rather dark in the flat, shut in as it was. "You’ll hurt your eyes," he said when he saw her. After taking off his coat, he felt it incumbent upon him to make some little report of his day. "I’ve been talking with a wholesale liquor company," he said. "I may go out on the road." "Wouldn’t that be nice!" said Carrie. "It wouldn’t be such a bad thing," he answered. Always from the man at the corner now he bought two papers-the "Evening World" and "Evening Sun." So now he merely picked his papers up, as he came by, without stopping. He drew up his chair near the radiator and lighted the gas. Then it was as the evening before. His difficulties vanished in the items he so well loved to read. The next day was even worse than the one before, because now he could not think of where to go. Nothing he saw in the papers he studied-till ten o’clock-appealed to him. He felt that he ought to go out, and yet he sickened at the thought. Where to, where to? "You mustn’t forget to leave me my money for this week," said Carrie, quietly. They had an arrangement by which he placed twelve dollars a week in her hands, out of which to pay current expenses. He heaved a little sigh as she said this, and drew out his purse. Again he felt the dread of the thing. Here he was taking off, taking off, and nothing coming in. "Lord!" he said, in his own thoughts, "this can’t go on." To Carrie he said nothing whatsoever. She could feel that her request disturbed him. To pay her would soon become a distressing thing. "Yet, what have I got to do with it?" she thought. "Oh, why should I be made to worry?" Hurstwood went out and made for Broadway. He wanted to think up some place. Before long, though, he reached the Grand Hotel at Thirty-first Street. He knew of its comfortable lobby. He was cold after his twenty blocks’ walk. "I’ll go in their barber shop and get a shave," he thought. Thus he justified himself in sitting down in here after his tonsorial treatment. Again, time hanging heavily on his hands, he went home early, and this continued for several days, each day the need to hunt paining him, and each day disgust, depression, shamefacedness driving him into lobby idleness. At last three days came in which a storm prevailed, and he did not go out at all. The snow began to fall late one afternoon. It was a regular flurry of large, soft, white flakes. In the morning it was still coming down with a high wind, and the papers announced a blizzard. From out the front windows one could see a deep, soft bedding. "I guess I’ll not try to go out to-day," he said to Carrie at breakfast. "It’s going to be awful bad, so the papers say." "The man hasn’t brought my coal, either," said Carrie, who ordered by the bushel. |
