The Financier by Theodore Dreiser

Ye must make it all seem natcheral and ordinary to yer mother; but ye must go—d’ye hear? Ye must.”

He paused, looking sadly but firmly at Aileen under his shaggy eyebrows. She knew he meant this. It was his most solemn, his most religious expression. But she did not answer. She could not.

What was the use? Only she was not going. She knew that—and so she stood there white and tense.

“Now get all the clothes ye want,” went on Butler, by no means grasping her true mood. “Fix yourself up in any way you plase.

Say where ye want to go, but get ready.”

“But I won’t, father,” finally replied Aileen, equally solemnly, equally determinedly. “I won’t go! I won’t leave Philadelphia.”

“Ye don’t mane to say ye will deliberately disobey me when I’m asking ye to do somethin’ that’s intended for yer own good, will ye daughter?”

“Yes, I will,” replied Aileen, determinedly. “I won’t go! I’m sorry, but I won’t!”

“Ye really mane that, do ye?” asked Butler, sadly but grimly.

“Yes, I do,” replied Aileen, grimly, in return.

“Then I’ll have to see what I can do, daughter,” replied the old man. “Ye’re still my daughter, whatever ye are, and I’ll not see ye come to wreck and ruin for want of doin’ what I know to be my solemn duty. I’ll give ye a few more days to think this over, but go ye must. There’s an end of that. There are laws in this land still. There are things that can be done to those who won’t obey the law. I found ye this time—much as it hurt me to do it. I’ll find ye again if ye try to disobey me. Ye must change yer ways.

I can’t have ye goin’ on as ye are. Ye understand now. It’s the last word. Give this man up, and ye can have anything ye choose.

Ye’re my girl—I’ll do everything I can in this world to make ye happy. Why, why shouldn’t I? What else have I to live for but me children? It’s ye and the rest of them that I’ve been workin’ and plannin’ for all these years. Come now, be a good girl. Ye love your old father, don’t ye? Why, I rocked ye in my arms as a baby, Aileen. I’ve watched over ye when ye were not bigger than what would rest in me two fists here. I’ve been a good father to ye—

ye can’t deny that. Look at the other girls you’ve seen. Have any of them had more nor what ye have had? Ye won’t go against me in this. I’m sure ye won’t. Ye can’t. Ye love me too much—surely ye do—don’t ye?” His voice weakened. His eyes almost filled.

He paused and put a big, brown, horny hand on Aileen’s arm. She had listened to his plea not unmoved—really more or less softened—

because of the hopelessness of it. She could not give up Cowperwood.

Her father just did not understand. He did not know what love was.

Unquestionably he had never loved as she had.

She stood quite silent while Butler appealed to her.

“I’d like to, father,” she said at last and softly, tenderly.

“Really I would. I do love you. Yes, I do. I want to please you; but I can’t in this—I can’t! I love Frank Cowperwood. You don’t understand—really you don’t!”

At the repetition of Cowperwood’s name Butler’s mouth hardened.

He could see that she was infatuated—that his carefully calculated plea had failed. So he must think of some other way.

“Very well, then,” he said at last and sadly, oh, so sadly, as Aileen turned away. “Have it yer own way, if ye will. Ye must go, though, willy-nilly. It can’t be any other way. I wish to God it could.”

Aileen went out, very solemn, and Butler went over to his desk and sat down. “Such a situation!” he said to himself. Such a complication!”

Chapter XXXVIII

The situation which confronted Aileen was really a trying one. A girl of less innate courage and determination would have weakened and yielded. For in spite of her various social connections and acquaintances, the people to whom Aileen could run in an emergency of the present kind were not numerous. She could scarcely think of any one who would be likely to take her in for any lengthy period, without question. There were a number of young women of her own age, married and unmarried, who were very friendly to her, but there were few with whom she was really intimate. The only person who stood out in her mind, as having any real possibility of refuge for a period, was a certain Mary Calligan, better known as “Mamie”

among her friends, who had attended school with Aileen in former years and was now a teacher in one of the local schools.

The Calligan family consisted of Mrs. Katharine Calligan, the mother, a dressmaker by profession and a widow—her husband, a house-mover by trade, having been killed by a falling wall some ten years before—and Mamie, her twenty-three-year-old daughter.

They lived in a small two-story brick house in Cherry Street, near Fifteenth. Mrs. Calligan was not a very good dressmaker, not good enough, at least, for the Butler family to patronize in their present exalted state. Aileen went there occasionally for gingham house-dresses, underwear, pretty dressing-gowns, and alterations on some of her more important clothing which was made by a very superior modiste in Chestnut Street. She visited the house largely because she had gone to school with Mamie at St. Agatha’s, when the outlook of the Calligan family was much more promising. Mamie was earning forty dollars a month as the teacher of a sixth-grade room in one of the nearby public schools, and Mrs. Calligan averaged on the whole about two dollars a day—sometimes not so much. The house they occupied was their own, free and clear, and the furniture which it contained suggested the size of their joint income, which was somewhere near eighty dollars a month.

Mamie Calligan was not good-looking, not nearly as good-looking as her mother had been before her. Mrs. Calligan was still plump, bright, and cheerful at fifty, with a fund of good humor. Mamie was somewhat duller mentally and emotionally. She was serious-minded—

made so, perhaps, as much by circumstances as by anything else, for she was not at all vivid, and had little sex magnetism. Yet she was kindly, honest, earnest, a good Catholic, and possessed of that strangely excessive ingrowing virtue which shuts so many people off from the world—a sense of duty. To Mamie Calligan duty (a routine conformity to such theories and precepts as she had heard and worked by since her childhood) was the all-important thing, her principal source of comfort and relief; her props in a queer and uncertain world being her duty to her Church; her duty to her school; her duty to her mother; her duty to her friends, etc. Her mother often wished for Mamie’s sake that she was less dutiful and more charming physically, so that the men would like her.

In spite of the fact that her mother was a dressmaker, Mamie’s clothes never looked smart or attractive—she would have felt out of keeping with herself if they had. Her shoes were rather large, and ill-fitting; her skirt hung in lifeless lines from her hips to her feet, of good material but seemingly bad design. At that time the colored “jersey,” so-called, was just coming into popular wear, and, being close-fitting, looked well on those of good form.

Alas for Mamie Calligan! The mode of the time compelled her to wear one; but she had neither the arms nor the chest development which made this garment admirable. Her hat, by choice, was usually a pancake affair with a long, single feather, which somehow never seemed to be in exactly the right position, either to her hair or her face. At most times she looked a little weary; but she was not physically weary so much as she was bored. Her life held so little of real charm; and Aileen Butler was unquestionably the most significant element of romance in it.

Mamie’s mother’s very pleasant social disposition, the fact that they had a very cleanly, if poor little home, that she could entertain them by playing on their piano, and that Mrs. Calligan took an adoring interest in the work she did for her, made up the sum and substance of the attraction of the Calligan home for Aileen.

She went there occasionally as a relief from other things, and because Mamie Calligan had a compatible and very understanding interest in literature. Curiously, the books Aileen liked she liked—Jane Eyre, Kenelm Chillingly, Tricotrin, and A Bow of Orange Ribbon. Mamie occasionally recommended to Aileen some latest effusion of this character; and Aileen, finding her judgment good, was constrained to admire her.

In this crisis it was to the home of the Calligans that Aileen turned in thought. If her father really was not nice to her, and she had to leave home for a time, she could go to the Calligans.