The Financier by Theodore Dreiser

Instinctively she seemed to realize that prison walls could not make a prison for him. Indeed, on the first day she left she handed Bonhag ten dollars, and after thanking him in her attractive voice—without showing her face, however—for his obvious kindness to her, bespoke his further favor for Cowperwood—“a very great man,”

as she described him, which sealed that ambitious materialist’s fate completely. There was nothing the overseer would not do for the young lady in the dark cloak. She might have stayed in Cowperwood’s cell for a week if the visiting-hours of the penitentiary had not made it impossible.

The day that Cowperwood decided to discuss with his wife the weariness of his present married state and his desire to be free of it was some four months after he had entered the prison. By that time he had become inured to his convict life. The silence of his cell and the menial tasks he was compelled to perform, which had at first been so distressing, banal, maddening, in their pointless iteration, had now become merely commonplace—dull, but not painful. Furthermore he had learned many of the little resources of the solitary convict, such as that of using his lamp to warm up some delicacy which he had saved from a previous meal or from some basket which had been sent him by his wife or Aileen.

He had partially gotten rid of the sickening odor of his cell by persuading Bonhag to bring him small packages of lime; which he used with great freedom. Also he succeeded in defeating some of the more venturesome rats with traps; and with Bonhag’s permission, after his cell door had been properly locked at night, and sealed with the outer wooden door, he would take his chair, if it were not too cold, out into the little back yard of his cell and look at the sky, where, when the nights were clear, the stars were to be seen. He had never taken any interest in astronomy as a scientific study, but now the Pleiades, the belt of Orion, the Big Dipper and the North Star, to which one of its lines pointed, caught his attention, almost his fancy. He wondered why the stars of the belt of Orion came to assume the peculiar mathematical relation to each other which they held, as far as distance and arrangement were concerned, and whether that could possibly have any intellectual significance. The nebulous conglomeration of the suns in Pleiades suggested a soundless depth of space, and he thought of the earth floating like a little ball in immeasurable reaches of ether. His own life appeared very trivial in view of these things, and he found himself asking whether it was all really of any significance or importance. He shook these moods off with ease, however, for the man was possessed of a sense of grandeur, largely in relation to himself and his affairs; and his temperament was essentially material and vital. Something kept telling him that whatever his present state he must yet grow to be a significant personage, one whose fame would be heralded the world over—who must try, try, try. It was not given ail men to see far or to do brilliantly; but to him it was given, and he must be what he was cut out to be. There was no more escaping the greatness that was inherent in him than there was for so many others the littleness that was in them.

Mrs. Cowperwood came in that afternoon quite solemnly, bearing several changes of linen, a pair of sheets, some potted meat and a pie. She was not exactly doleful, but Cowperwood thought that she was tending toward it, largely because of her brooding over his relationship to Aileen, which he knew that she knew. Something in her manner decided him to speak before she left; and after asking her how the children were, and listening to her inquiries in regard to the things that he needed, he said to her, sitting on his single chair while she sat on his bed: “Lillian, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk with you about for some time. I should have done it before, but it’s better late than never. I know that you know that there is something between Aileen Butler and me, and we might as well have it open and aboveboard. It’s true I am very fond of her and she is very devoted to me, and if ever I get out of here I want to arrange it so that I can marry her. That means that you will have to give me a divorce, if you will; and I want to talk to you about that now. This can’t be so very much of a surprise to you, because you must have seen this long while that our relationship hasn’t been all that it might have been, and under the circumstances this can’t prove such a very great hardship to you—I am sure.” He paused, waiting, for Mrs. Cowperwood at first said nothing.

Her thought, when he first broached this, was that she ought to make some demonstration of astonishment or wrath: but when she looked into his steady, examining eyes, so free from the illusion of or interest in demonstrations of any kind, she realized how useless it would be. He was so utterly matter-of-fact in what seemed to her quite private and secret affairs—very shameless.

She had never been able to understand quite how he could take the subtleties of life as he did, anyhow. Certain things which she always fancied should be hushed up he spoke of with the greatest nonchalance. Her ears tingled sometimes at his frankness in disposing of a social situation; but she thought this must be characteristic of notable men, and so there was nothing to be said about it. Certain men did as they pleased; society did not seem to be able to deal with them in any way. Perhaps God would, later—she was not sure. Anyhow, bad as he was, direct as he was, forceful as he was, he was far more interesting than most of the more conservative types in whom the social virtues of polite speech and modest thoughts were seemingly predominate.

“I know,” she said, rather peacefully, although with a touch of anger and resentment in her voice. “I’ve known all about it all this time. I expected you would say something like this to me some day. It’s a nice reward for all my devotion to you; but it’s just like you, Frank. When you are set on something, nothing can stop you. It wasn’t enough that you were getting along so nicely and had two children whom you ought to love, but you had to take up with this Butler creature until her name and yours are a by-word throughout the city. I know that she comes to this prison. I saw her out here one day as I was coming in, and I suppose every one else knows it by now. She has no sense of decency and she does not care—the wretched, vain thing—but I would have thought that you would be ashamed, Frank, to go on the way that you have, when you still have me and the children and your father and mother and when you are certain to have such a hard fight to get yourself on your feet, as it is. If she had any sense of decency she would not have anything to do with you—the shameless thing.”

Cowperwood looked at his wife with unflinching eyes. He read in her remarks just what his observation had long since confirmed—

that she was sympathetically out of touch with him. She was no longer so attractive physically, and intellectually she was not Aileen’s equal. Also that contact with those women who had deigned to grace his home in his greatest hour of prosperity had proved to him conclusively she was lacking in certain social graces.

Aileen was by no means so vastly better, still she was young and amenable and adaptable, and could still be improved. Opportunity as he now chose to think, might make Aileen, whereas for Lillian—

or at least, as he now saw it—it could do nothing.

“I’ll tell you how it is, Lillian,” he said; “I’m not sure that you are going to get what I mean exactly, but you and I are not at all well suited to each other any more.”

“You didn’t seem to think that three or four years ago,” interrupted his wife, bitterly.

“I married you when I was twenty-one,” went on Cowperwood, quite brutally, not paying any attention to her interruption, “and I was really too young to know what I was doing. I was a mere boy.

It doesn’t make so much difference about that. I am not using that as an excuse. The point that I am trying to make is this—

that right or wrong, important or not important, I have changed my mind since. I don’t love you any more, and I don’t feel that I want to keep up a relationship, however it may look to the public, that is not satisfactory to me. You have one point of view about life, and I have another. You think your point of view is the right one, and there are thousands of people who will agree with you; but I don’t think so. We have never quarreled about these things, because I didn’t think it was important to quarrel about them. I don’t see under the circumstances that I am doing you any great injustice when I ask you to let me go. I don’t intend to desert you or the children—you will get a good living-income from me as long as I have the money to give it to you—but I want my personal freedom when I come out of here, if ever I do, and I want you to let me have it. The money that you had and a great deal more, once I am out of here, you will get back when I am on my feet again. But not if you oppose me—only if you help me. I want, and intend to help you always—but in my way.”