At this point Berenice expressed the wish that he take her to see some of the sections of New York which would substantiate his statements, for she had seen or heard little of such conditions throughout her life.
Dr. James was not surprised to hear her say that, for he knew that her social path from her youth onward had been a sheltered one.
After visiting with him a little longer, Berenice left for her hotel.
But on her way home she could not drive from her mind the account by James of the dissipation of Cowperwood’s wealth.
She was filled with sorrow as she inwardly reviewed the wreckage of all of his plans.
How completely they had failed!
At the same time, she was thinking of his love for her, his mental and emotional dependency on her, and her affection for him.
It was through her influence, as she recalled, that he had decided to go to London and work on his plan for the underground system.
And now, here she was, planning on the morrow to visit his tomb again, the last material vestige of all the values that had seemed so vividly real and wonderful to her at the time, but which now, in comparison with all she had experienced in India, were no longer important to her.
The following day was almost a duplicate of the day on which Cowperwood had been buried.
For the sky was again gray and overcast, and, as she approached the tomb, it was as though a lone finger of stone pointed upward to the leaden noonday sky.
As she walked down the pebbled path, her arms rilled with flowers, she noted the name: AILEEN BUTLER COWPERWOOD, under the name, FRANK ALGERNON COWPERWOOD, and she was grateful that Aileen was now at last alongside of the man for whom she had suffered so intensely and lost.
She, Berenice, had seemingly won, but only for a time, for she also had suffered and lost in the end.
As she stood gazing thoughtfully at Cowperwood’s last resting place, she felt she could hear again the sonorous tones of the minister as he had spoken at the burial service:
“As soon as Thou scatterest them, they are even as asleep and fade suddenly like the grass. In the morning, it is green, and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up and withered.”
But now she could not think of death as she had thought of it before going to India.
There death was considered but a phase of life, and the destruction of one material form but a prelude to the building up of another.
“We are never born and we never die,” they said.
And as she walked about arranging the flowers in a bronze urn on the steps of the tomb, she thought that Cowperwood must know, if he had not when he was here in the flesh, that his worship and constant search for beauty in every form, and especially in the form of a woman, was nothing more than a search for the Divine design behind all forms—the face of Brahman shining through.
She wished that he might have shared these thoughts with her when they were together, and recalled the words: Absorbed in Brahman He overcomes the world, Even here, alive in the world, Brahman is one, Changeless, untouched by evil; What home have we but Him? And what was it that the Guru had said of charity?
“Be thankful for the opportunity to give to others.
Be grateful that by helping a poor man, you are able to help yourself.
For, is not the universe yourself?
If a man come to your door, go and meet yourself.”
But, as she now searched her conscience, what place had charity ever had in her life?
What had she ever done to help others?
What had she ever done to justify her right to live?
True, Cowperwood had not only conceived the idea of founding a hospital for the poor, but he had done everything humanly possible to bring it into existence, even though his plans had failed. But she—had she ever had a desire to help the poor?
Not that she could recall her entire life, as she realized—with the exception of the past few years—had been spent in the pursuit of pleasure and self-advancement.
But now she knew that one must live for something outside of one’s self, something that would tend to answer the needs of the many as opposed to the vanities and comforts of the few, of which she herself was one.
What could she do to help?
And suddenly at that point in her meditations, the thought of Cowperwood’s hospital crossed her mind.
Why couldn’t she, herself, found a hospital?
After all, he had left her a large fortune, a fine home filled with valuable art objects on which she could easily realize a considerable sum of money, which, added to what she already had, might enable her at least to start the project.
And perhaps she could induce others to help.
Dr. James would surely be one of these.
What a wonderful thought this was!
APPENDIX
The preceding chapter consists of the last lines ever written by Theodore Dreiser on the day before his death, December 28, 1945.
He left notes, however, for an additional chapter and a summary of the three books of the trilogy: The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic.
The summary would have been written in the form of a soliloquy which, Mrs. Dreiser points out, would have left no doubt in the mind of the reader as to his conception of life, strength and weakness, wealth and poverty, good and evil.
The following was prepared by Mrs. Theodore Dreiser from the notes of her husband.
As Berenice rode home from Green Wood in her carriage, she contemplated the possibilities of promoting a hospital, realistically facing the complicated practical, as well as technical and medical aspects, which would necessitate the enlistment of people of wealth and a charitable turn of mind and those of the proper technical skill and knowledge that it would take to correctly organize and promote such a large undertaking.
She planned to sell her house on Park Avenue with all of its contents, which would bring at least four hundred thousand dollars.
She would add to this half of her present fortune, which, altogether, would be a small beginning.
Of course, as she thought, Dr. James would be the right man as head physician and director, but could she interest him?
Her mind was filled with thoughts and anticipations of the possibilities in connection with the hospital until she again saw Dr. James, who had invited her to accompany him on a tour of one of the worst of New York’s East Side tenements.
To Berenice, who, never in her youth, had visited any of the poverty-stricken, beggarly, or neglected sections of New York, this first visit to the East Side streets was a painful revelation.
Sheltered as she had always been, by her mother, until the fateful night she was so bitterly embarrassed in a dining room of one of New York’s principal hotels, when she publicly learned the truth about her mother, Hattie Starr of Louisville, and when for the first time the import and horror of social ostracism had flashed upon her!
But Berenice had survived all this.