Don't Pick Me

CHAPTER XXXIII

When the train pulled out which carried his family into unknown country, Jerry turned across town, determined to walk back to the studio and get to work. He had scarcely closed his eyes the night before, and he felt all edgy. Exercise and hard work was his prescription for himself. He set off at a good pace, through a part of town he was unused to, hoping that it would divert his thoughts. He made himself look at the shabby old shops he passed—at the people on the street. He searched all their faces for traces of such experiences as he was sampling, but they were usually vacuous or hardened or only worried. He wondered if his face mirrored his misery.

Jerry was a stranger to defeat. His life had been a happy-go-lucky affair. Since the death of his parents, when he was a little boy, he had known no acute sorrows. To be sure he had been poor, but he had not minded that especially. The very small inheritance, left by his father, had barely met the demands of his art education. But youth and health and enthusiasm were his, and such success as he had achieved came easily and naturally. So he had grown accustomed to believe that destiny held in store for him pretty much what he wanted.

His marriage with Jane, entered into on the impulse of the moment, was characteristic of the way his life had been ordered—or unordered. He had drifted along, taking what he wanted with a sort of unconscious selfishness as a central motive force. This was poor training for disappointment or tragedy.

Arrived at the studio, he tried to paint, but he could not put his mind on his canvas, so after an hour of labour lost, he gave it up. He wandered about the empty house, where every spot, every room, spoke of Jane and the baby. He could not bear it. He went to the club for lunch, but the men at his table poked fun at his gloom so he left them in a rage. He went to some picture exhibitions he had been meaning to see, but they bored him. He dodged a fellow artist or two, because he didn't want to talk. He tramped up the Avenue and through the Park.

Finally he gave up fighting his thoughts, he let them come. He had gone over the scene with Christiansen thousands of times. Sometimes it ran off in his mind as it had really happened. Sometimes he fell upon his enemy and beat him, sometimes he even killed him, but always the scene was dominated by Jane, who, for the first time in his acquaintance with her, was deeply moved, shaken to the very depths of her being. He realized it fully; it was the thing that frightened him. Jane was so sure, so true to herself. If, thus aroused, she saw her relation to Jerry in a new light, nothing on earth would keep her from severing that relation. It must be that she loved Christiansen, for he, Jerry, had never roused her so.

He thought back over the years, from the time she had applied to him for work, up to now. The years of the silent, mysterious Jane, coming and going like a silhouette against the screen of the studios. Her quiet sense of power had been like a pillow for them all to rest on. What a fool he had been not to see that power like that generated itself and spread like electricity.

He went over the weeks before the pageant, when he had forced her into a more personal relation with him. He recalled the really deep impression she had made on him, on all the audience, the night of the pageant itself.

For the first time he deliberately analyzed the motives that finally ended in his proposal to her.

"Anything she does to me now serves me right!" was his final comment on himself.

He laid aside any suggestion that she cared for him when she married him; he knew she did not. In fact, it was her indifference to him, her elusiveness, which had roused his senses—which had driven him to try to reach her by clumsy physical means—but he had failed.