Susan thanked him but declined. “What’s the use of my taking a job I couldn’t keep more than a day or two?” explained she. “I haven’t it in me to boss people.”
“Then you’ve got to get it, or you’re done for,” said he. “Nobody ever gets anywhere until he’s making others work for him.”
It was the advice she had got from Matson, the paper box manufacturer in Cincinnati. It was the lesson she found in all prosperity on every hand. Make others work for you–and the harder you made them work the more prosperous you were–provided, of course, you kept all or nearly all the profits of their harder toil. Obvious common sense. But how could she goad these unfortunates, force their clumsy fingers to move faster, make their long and weary day longer and wearier–with nothing for them as the result but duller brain, clumsier fingers, more wretched bodies? She realized why those above lost all patience with them, treated them with contempt. Only as one of them could any intelligent, energetic human being have any sympathy for them, stupid and incompetent from birth, made ever more and more stupid and incapable by the degrading lives they led. She could scarcely conceal her repulsion for their dirty bodies, their stained and rotting clothing saturated with stale sweat, their coarse flesh reeking coarse food smells. She could not listen to their conversation, so vulgar, so inane. Yet she felt herself–for the time–one of them, and her heart bled for them. And while she knew that only their dullness of wit and ignorance kept them from climbing up and stamping and trampling full as savagely and cruelly as did those on top, still the fact remained that they were not stamping and trampling.
As she was turning in some work, Miss Tuohy said abruptly: “You don’t belong here. You ought to go back.”
Susan started, and her heart beat wildly. She was going to lose her job!
The forelady saw, and instantly understood. “I don’t mean that,” she said. “You can stay as long as you like–as long as your health lasts. But isn’t there somebody somewhere–_anybody_–you can go to and ask them to help you out of this?”
“No–there’s no one,” said she.
“That can’t be true,” insisted the forelady. “Everybody has somebody–or can get somebody–that is, anyone who looks like you. I wouldn’t suggest such a thing to a fool. But _you_ could keep your head. There isn’t any other way, and you might as well make up your mind to it.”
To confide is one of the all but universal longings–perhaps needs–of human nature. Susan’s honest, sympathetic eyes, her look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding Miss Tuohy. Susan was not much surprised when Miss Tuohy went on to say:
“I was spoiled when I was still a kid–by getting to know well a man who was above my class. I had tastes that way, and he appealed to them. After him I couldn’t marry the sort of man that wanted me. Then my looks went–like a flash–it often happens that way with us Irish girls. But I can get on. I know how to deal with these people–and _you_ never could learn. You’d treat ’em like ladies and they’d treat you as easy fruit. Yes, I get along all right, and I’m happy–away from here.”
Susan’s sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary encouragement. “It’s a baby,” Miss Tuohy explained–and Susan knew it was for the baby’s sake that this good heart had hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady. Her eyes shifted as she said, “A child of my sister’s–dead in Ireland. How I do love that baby—-”
They were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence was never resumed and finished. But Miss Tuohy had made her point with Susan–had set her to thinking less indefinitely. “I _must_ take hold!” Susan kept saying to herself. The phrase was always echoing in her brain. But how?–_how?_ And to that question she could find no answer.
Every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation was in large part due to its want ads–its daily section of closely printed columns of advertisements of help wanted and situations wanted. Susan read the columns diligently. At first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would be in a situation where the pay was good and the work agreeable, or at least not disagreeable. But after a few weeks she ceased from reading.
Why? Because she answered the advertisements, scores of them, more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave up. She found that throughout New York all the attractive or even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their families or in other ways, girls working at less than living wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for their support. And those help wanted advertisements were simply appeals for more girls of that sort–for cheaper girls; or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in exhaustion or in despair.
“Why do you always read the want ads?” she said to Lany Ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertisements in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day. “Did you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?”
“Oh, my, no,” replied Lany with a laugh. “I read for the same reason that all the rest do. It’s a kind of dope. You read and then you dream about the places–how grand they are and how well off you’ll be. But nobody’d be fool enough to answer one of ’em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and didn’t care how rotten it was. No, it’s just dope–like buyin’ policy numbers or lottery tickets. You know you won’t git a prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it.”
As Susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment. Some were doing a little better than she; others–the most–were worse off chiefly because her education, her developed intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows–such as illness from rotten food–against which their ignorance made them defenseless. Whenever she heard a story of someone’s getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories she used to get out of the Sunday school library and dream over! These almost actualities of getting on had nothing in them about honesty and virtue. According to them it was always some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how to get on. If the success under discussion was a woman’s, it was always how her boss or employer had “got stuck on her” and had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch. Now and then it was a wonderful dazzling success–some girl had got her rich employer so “dead crazy” about her that he had taken her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with a servant and a “swell trap”; there was even talk of marriage.
Was it true? Were the Sunday school books through and through lies–ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies–wicked because they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from the housetops? Susan was not sure. Perhaps envy twisted somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the workers to each other. But certain it was that, wherever she had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats. Certain it was also that the general belief among the workers was that success could be got in those ways only–and this belief made the falsehood, if it was a falsehood, or the partial truth, if it was a twisted truth, full as poisonous as if it had been true throughout. Also, if the thing were not true, how came it that everyone in practical life believed it to be so–how came it that everyone who talked in praise of honesty and virtue looked, as he talked, as if he were canting and half expected to be laughed at?
All about her as badly off as she, or worse off. Yet none so unhappy as she–not even the worse off. In fact, the worse off as the better off were not so deeply wretched. Because they had never in all their lives known the decencies of life clean lodgings, clean clothing, food fit to eat, leisure and the means of enjoying leisure. And Susan had known all these things. When she realized why her companions in misery, so feeble in self-restraint, were able to endure patiently and for the most part even cheerfully, how careful she was never to say or to suggest anything that might put ideas of what life might be, of what it was for the comfortable few, into the minds of these girls who never had known and could only be made wretched by knowing! How fortunate for them, she thought, that they had gone to schools where they met only their own kind! How fortunate that the devouring monster of industry had snatched them away from school before their minds had been awakened to the realities of life! How fortunate that their imaginations were too dull and too heavy to be touched by the sights of luxury they saw in the streets or by what they read in the newspapers and in the cheap novels! To them, as she soon realized, their world seemed the only world, and the world that lived in comfort seemed a vague unreality, as must seem whatever does not come into our own experience.
One lunch hour an apostle of discontent preaching some kind of politics or other held forth on the corner above the shop. Susan paused to listen. She had heard only a few words when she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him. He ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and degradation of their lot! He looked like an honest, earnest man. No doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good. These people who were always trying to do the poor good–they ought all to be suppressed! If someone could tell them how to cease to be poor, that would indeed be good. But such a thing would be impossible. In Sutherland, where the best off hadn’t so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time, had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind of Sunday clothes–in Sutherland the poverty was less than in Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous wealth, was piled up and up. So evidently the presence of riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. No, the disease was miserable, thought Susan. For most of the human race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and days of fierce, poorly paid toil–that was the law of this hell of a world. And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human.
The apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be changed, that the tyranny could be abolished. She listened, but he did not convince her. He sounded vague and dreamy–as fantastically false in his new way as she had found the Sunday school books to be. She passed on.
She continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper. She no longer bothered with the want ads. Pipe dreaming did not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she never could realize. She read the paper because, if she could not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was going on up in the light and air. She found every day news of great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly forcing itself into acceptance. But all this applied only to the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was rejected. For that mass, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor–squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter. And when she read one day–in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper–that the income of the average American family was less than twelve dollars a week–less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual–she realized that what she was seeing and living was not New York and Cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt world wide.
“_Must_ take hold!” her mind cried incessantly to her shrinking heart. “Somehow–anyhow–take hold!–must–must–_must!_”
Those tenement houses! Those tenement streets! Everywhere wandering through the crowds the lonely old women–holding up to the girls the mirror of time and saying: “Look at my misery! Look at my disease-blasted body. Look at my toil-bent form and toil-wrecked hands. Look at my masses of wrinkles, at my rags, at my leaky and rotten shoes. Think of my aloneness–not a friend–feared and cast off by my relatives because they are afraid they will have to give me food and lodgings. Look at me–think of my life–and know that I am _you_ as you will be a few years from now whether you work as a slave to the machine or as a slave to the passions of one or of many men. I am _you_. Not one in a hundred thousand escape my fate except by death.”
“Somehow–anyhow–I must take hold,” cried Susan to her swooning heart.
When her capital had dwindled to three dollars Mrs. Tucker appeared. Her face was so beaming bright that Susan, despite her being clad in garments on which a pawnshop would advance nothing, fancied she had come with good news.
“Now that I’m rid of that there house,” said she, “I’ll begin to perk up. I ain’t got nothing left to worry me. I’m ready for whatever blessings the dear Master’ll provide. My pastor tells me I’m the finest example of Christian fortitude he ever Saw. But”–and Mrs. Tucker spoke with genuine modesty–“I tell him I don’t deserve no credit for leaning on the Lord. If I can trust Him in death, why not in life?”
“You’ve got a place? The church has—-”
“Bless you, no,” cried Mrs. Tucker. “Would I burden ’em with myself, when there’s so many that has to be looked after? No, I go direct to the Lord.”
“What are you going to do? What place have you got?”
“None as yet. But He’ll provide something–something better’n I deserve.”
Susan had to turn away, to hide her pity–and her disappointment. Not only was she not to be helped, but also she must help another. “You might get a job at the hat factory,” said she.
Mrs. Tucker was delighted. “I knew it!” she cried. “Don’t you see how He looks after me?”
Susan persuaded Miss Tuohy to take Mrs. Tucker on. She could truthfully recommend the old woman as a hard worker. They moved into a room in a tenement in South Fifth Avenue. Susan read in the paper about a model tenement and went to try for what was described as real luxury in comfort and cleanliness. She found that sort of tenements filled with middle-class families on their way down in the world and making their last stand against rising rents and rising prices. The model tenement rents were far, far beyond her ability to pay. She might as well think of moving to the Waldorf. She and Mrs. Tucker had to be content with a dark room on the fifth floor, opening on a damp air shaft whose odor was so foul that in comparison the Clinton Place shaft was as the pure breath of the open sky. For this shelter–more than one-half the free and proud citizens of prosperous America dwelling in cities occupy its like, or worse they paid three dollars a week–a dollar and a half apiece. They washed their underclothing at night, slept while it was drying. And Susan, who could not bring herself to imitate the other girls and wear a blouse of dark color that was not to be washed, rose at four to do the necessary ironing. They did their own cooking. It was no longer possible for Susan to buy quality and content herself with small quantity. However small the quantity of food she could get along on, it must be of poor quality–for good quality was beyond her means.
It maddened her to see the better class of working girls. Their fairly good clothing, their evidences of some comfort at home, seemed to mock at her as a poor fool who was being beaten down because she had not wit enough to get on. She knew these girls were either supporting themselves in part by prostitution or were held up by their families, by the pooling of the earnings of several persons. Left to themselves, to their own earnings at work, they would be no better off than she, or at best so little better off that the difference was unimportant. If to live decently in New York took an income of fifteen dollars a week, what did it matter whether one got five or ten or twelve? Any wages below fifteen meant a steady downward drag–meant exposure to the dirt and poison of poverty tenements–meant the steady decline of the power of resistance, the steady oozing away of self-respect, of the courage and hope that give the power to rise. To have less than the fifteen dollars absolutely necessary for decent surroundings, decent clothing, decent food–that meant one was drowning. What matter whether the death of the soul was quick, or slow, whether the waters of destruction were twenty feet deep or twenty thousand?
Mrs. Reardon, the servant woman on the top floor, was evicted and Susan and Mrs. Tucker took her in. She protested that she could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of her life–that she preferred it to most beds. But Susan made her up a kind of bed in the corner. They would not let her pay anything. She had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that preys upon working people. Her hair had dwindled to a meager wisp. This she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with an imitation tortoise-shell comb, huge, high, and broken, set with large pieces of glass cut like diamonds. Her teeth were all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth.
One day, when Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon were exchanging eulogies upon the goodness of God to them, Susan shocked them by harshly ordering them to be silent. “If God hears you,” she said, “He’ll think you’re mocking Him. Anyhow, I can’t stand any more of it. Hereafter do your talking of that kind when I’m not here.”
Another day Mrs. Reardon told about her sister. The sister had worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture. Like a series of others the sister caught the disease. But instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it with her fingers against her upper teeth. Used as Susan was to hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked shuddering about the streets–the streets with their incessant march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and worm-eaten. Until that day Susan had been about as unobservant of the obvious things as is the rest of the race. On that day she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease. Hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and hideously marked.
When she returned–and she did not stay out long–Mrs. Tucker was alone. Said she:
“Mrs. Reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a punishment for marrying a Protestant, she being a Catholic. How ignorant some people is! Of course, the good Lord sent the judgment on her for being a Catholic at all.”
“Mrs. Tucker,” said Susan, “did you ever hear of Nero?”
“He burned up Rome–and he burned up the Christian martyrs,” said Mrs. Tucker. “I had a good schooling. Besides, sermons is highly educating.”
“Well,” said Susan, “if I had a choice of living under Nero or of living under that God you and Mrs. Reardon talk about, I’d take Nero and be thankful and happy.”
Mrs. Tucker would have fled if she could have afforded it. As it was all she ventured was a sigh and lips moving in prayer.
On a Friday in late October, at the lunch hour, Susan was walking up and down the sunny side of Broadway. It was the first distinctly cool day of the autumn; there had been a heavy downpour of rain all morning, but the New York sun that is ever struggling to shine and is successful on all but an occasional day was tearing up and scattering the clouds with the aid of a sharp north wind blowing down the deep canyon. She was wearing her summer dress still–old and dingy but clean. That look of neatness about the feet–that charm of a well-shaped foot and a well-turned ankle properly set off–had disappeared–with her the surest sign of the extreme of desperate poverty. Her shoes were much scuffed, were even slightly down at the heel; her sailor hat would have looked only the worse had it had a fresh ribbon on its crown. This first hint of winter had stung her fast numbing faculties into unusual activity. She was remembering the misery of the cold in Cincinnati–the misery that had driven her into prostitution as a drunken driver’s lash makes the frenzied horse rush he cares not where in his desire to escape. This wind of Broadway–this first warning of winter–it was hissing in her ears: “Take hold! Winter is coming! Take hold!”
Summer and winter–fiery heat and brutal cold. Like the devils in the poem, the poor–the masses, all but a few of the human race–were hurried from fire to ice, to vary their torment and to make it always exquisite.
To shelter herself for a moment she paused at a spot that happened to be protected to the south by a projecting sidewalk sign. She was facing, with only a tantalizing sheet of glass between, a display of winter underclothes on wax figures. To show them off more effectively the sides and the back of the window were mirrors. Susan’s gaze traveled past the figures to a person she saw standing at full length before her. “Who is that pale, stooped girl?” she thought. “How dreary and sad she looks! How hard she is fighting to make her clothes look decent, when they aren’t! She must be something like me–only much worse off.” And then she realized that she was gazing at her own image, was pitying her own self. The room she and Mrs. Tucker and the old scrubwoman occupied was so dark, even with its one little gas jet lighted, that she was able to get only a faint look at herself in the little cracked and water-marked mirror over its filthy washstand–filthy because the dirt was so ground in that only floods of water and bars of soap could have cleaned down to its original surface. She was having a clear look at herself for the first time in three months.
She shrank in horror, yet gazed on fascinated. Why, her physical charm had gone gone, leaving hardly a trace! Those dull, hollow eyes–that thin and almost ghastly face–the emaciated form–the once attractive hair now looking poor and stringy because it could not be washed properly–above all, the sad, bitter expression about the mouth. Those pale lips! Her lips had been from childhood one of her conspicuous and most tempting beauties; and as the sex side of her nature had developed they had bloomed into wonderful freshness and vividness of form and color. Now—-
Those pale, pale lips! They seemed to form a sort of climax of tragedy to the melancholy of her face. She gazed on and on. She noted every detail. How she had fallen! Indeed, a fallen woman! These others had been born to the conditions that were destroying her; they were no worse off, in many cases better off. But she, born to comfort and custom of intelligent educated associations and associates—-
A fallen woman!
Honest work! Even if it were true that this honest work was a sort of probation through which one rose to better things–even if this were true, could it be denied that only a few at best could rise, that the most–including all the sensitive, and most of the children–must wallow on, must perish? Oh, the lies, the lies about honest work!
Rosa Mohr, a girl of her own age who worked in the same room, joined her. “Admiring yourself?” she said laughing. “Well, I don’t blame you. You _are_ pretty.”
Susan at first thought Rosa was mocking her. But the tone and expression were sincere.
“It won’t last long,” Rosa went on. “I wasn’t so bad myself when I quit the high school and took a job because father lost his business and his health. He got in the way of one of those trusts. So of course they handed it to him good and hard. But he wasn’t a squealer. He always said they’d done only what he’d been doing himself if he’d had the chance. I always think of what papa used to say when I hear people carrying on about how wicked this or that somebody else is.”
“Are you going to stay on–at this life?” asked Susan, still looking at her own image.
“I guess so. What else is there? . . . I’ve got a steady. We’ll get married as soon as he has a raise to twelve per. But I’ll not be any better off. My beau’s too stupid ever to make much. If you see me ten years from now I’ll probably be a fat, sloppy old thing, warming a window sill or slouching about in dirty rags.”
“Isn’t there any way to–to escape?”
“It does look as though there ought to be–doesn’t it? But I’ve thought and thought, and __I__ can’t see it–and I’m pretty near straight Jew. They say things are better than they used to be, and I guess they are. But not enough better to help me any. Perhaps my children–_if_ I’m fool enough to have any–perhaps they’ll get a chance. . . . But I wouldn’t gamble on it.”
Susan was still looking at her rags–at her pale lips–was avoiding meeting her own eyes. “Why not try the streets?”
“Nothing in it,” said Rosa, practically. “I did try it for a while and quit. Lots of the girls do, and only the fools stay at it. Once in a while there’s a girl who’s lucky and gets a lover that’s kind to her or a husband that can make good. But that’s luck. For one that wins out, a thousand lose.”
“Luck?” said Susan.
Rosa laughed. “You’re right. It’s something else besides luck. The trouble is a girl loses her head–falls in love–supports a man–takes to drink–don’t look out for her health–wastes her money. Still–where’s the girl with head enough to get on where there’s so many temptations?”
“But there’s no chance at all, keeping straight, you say.”
“The other thing’s worse. The street girls–of our class, I mean–don’t average as much as we do. And it’s an awful business in winter. And they spend so much time in station houses and over on the Island. And, gosh! how the men do treat them! You haven’t any idea. You wouldn’t believe the horrible things the girls have to do to earn their money–a quarter or half a dollar–and maybe the men don’t pay them even that. A girl tries to get her money in advance, but often she doesn’t. And as they have to dress better than we do, and live where they can clean up a little, they ‘most starve. Oh, that life’s hell.”
Susan had turned away from her image, was looking at Rosa.
“As for the fast houses—-” Rosa shuddered–“I was in one for a week. I ran away–it was the only way I could escape. I’d never tell any human being what I went through in that house. . . . Never!” She watched Susan’s fine sympathetic face, and in a burst of confidence said: “One night the landlady sent me up with seventeen men. And she kept the seventeen dollars I made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken longshoreman gave me as a present. She said I owed it for board and clothes. In those houses, high and low, the girls always owes the madam. They haven’t a stitch of their own to their backs.”
The two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the other into the wind-swept canyon of Broadway–the majestic vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy extravagance. Finally Susan said:
“Do you ever think of killing yourself?”
“I thought I would,” replied the other girl. “But I guess I wouldn’t have. Everybody knows there’s no hope, yet they keep on hopin’. And I’ve got pretty good health yet, and once in a while I have some fun. You ought to go to dances–and drink. You wouldn’t be blue _all_ the time, then.”
“If it wasn’t for the sun,” said Susan.
“The sun?” inquired Rosa.
“Where I came from,” explained Susan, “it rained a great deal, and the sky was covered so much of the time. But here in New York there is so much sun. I love the sun. I get desperate–then out comes the sun, and I say to myself, `Well, I guess I can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” said Rosa, “but the sun is a help.”
That indefatigable New York sun! It was like Susan’s own courage. It fought the clouds whenever clouds dared to appear and contest its right to shine upon the City of the Sun, and hardly a day was so stormy that for a moment at least the sun did not burst through for a look at its beloved.
For weeks Susan had eaten almost nothing. During her previous sojourn in the slums–the slums of Cincinnati, though they were not classed as slums–the food had seemed revolting. But she was less discriminating then. The only food she could afford now–the food that is the best obtainable for a majority of the inhabitants of any city–was simply impossible for her. She ate only when she could endure no longer. This starvation no doubt saved her from illness; but at the same time it drained her strength. Her vitality had been going down, a little each day–lower and lower. The poverty which had infuriated her at first was now acting upon her like a soothing poison. The reason she had not risen to revolt was this slow and subtle poison that explains the inertia of the tenement poor from babyhood. To be spirited one must have health or a nervous system diseased in some of the ways that cause constant irritation. The disease called poverty is not an irritant, but an anesthetic. If Susan had been born to that life, her naturally vivacious temperament would have made her gay in unconscious wretchedness; as it was, she knew her own misery and suffered from it keenly–at times hideously–yet was rapidly losing the power to revolt.
Perhaps it was the wind–yes, it must have been the wind with its threat of winter–that roused her sluggish blood, that whipped thought into action. Anything–anything would be right, if it promised escape. Right–wrong! Hypocritical words for comfortable people!
That Friday night, after her supper of half-cooked corn meal and tea, she went instantly to work at washing out clothes. Mrs. Tucker spent the evening gossiping with the janitress, came in about midnight. As usual she was full to the brim with news of misery–of jobs lost, abandoned wives, of abused children, of poisoning from rotten “fresh” food or from “embalmed” stuff in cans, of sickness and yet more sickness, of maiming accidents, of death–news that is the commonplace of tenement life. She loved to tell these tales with all the harrowing particulars and to find in each some evidence of the goodness of God to herself. Often Susan could let her run on and on without listening. But not that night. She resisted the impulse to bid her be silent, left the room and stood at the hall window. When she returned Mrs. Tucker was in bed, was snoring in a tranquillity that was the reverse of contagious. With her habitual cheerfulness she had adapted herself to her changed condition without fretting. She had become as ragged and as dirty as her neighbors; she so wrought upon Susan’s sensibilities, blunted though they were, that the girl would have been unable to sleep in the same bed if she had not always been tired to exhaustion when she lay down. But for that matter only exhaustion could have kept her asleep in that vermin-infested hole. Even the fiercest swarms of the insects that flew or ran or crawled and bit, even the filthy mice squeaking as they played upon the covers or ran over the faces of the sleepers, did not often rouse her.
While Mrs. Tucker snored, Susan worked on, getting every piece of at all fit clothing in her meager wardrobe into the best possible condition. She did not once glance at the face of the noisy sleeper–a face homely enough in Mrs. Tucker’s waking hours, hideous now with the mouth open and a few scattered rotten teeth exposed, and the dark yellow-blue of the unhealthy gums and tongue.
At dawn Mrs. Tucker awoke with a snort and a start. She rubbed her eyes with her dirty and twisted and wrinkled fingers–the nails were worn and broken, turned up as if warped at the edges, blackened with dirt and bruisings. “Why, are you up already?” she said to Susan.
“I’ve not been to bed,” replied the girl.
The woman stretched herself, sat up, thrust her thick, stockinged legs over the side of the bed. She slept in all her clothing but her skirt, waist, and shoes. She kneeled down upon the bare, sprung, and slanting floor, said a prayer, arose with a beaming face. “It’s nice and warm in the room. How I do dread the winter, the cold weather–though no doubt we’ll make out all right! Everything always does turn out well for me. The Lord takes care of me. I must make me a cup of tea.”
“I’ve made it,” said Susan.
The tea was frightful stuff–not tea at all, but cheap adulterants colored poisonously. Everything they got was of the same quality; yet the prices they paid for the tiny quantities they were able to buy at any one time were at a rate that would have bought the finest quality at the most expensive grocery in New York.
“Wonder why Mrs. Reardon don’t come?” said Mrs. Tucker. Mrs. Reardon had as her only work a one night job at scrubbing. “She ought to have come an hour ago.”
“Her rheumatism was bad when she started,” said Susan. “I guess she worked slow.”
When Mrs. Tucker had finished her second cup she put on her shoes, overskirt and waist, made a few passes at her hair. She was ready to go to work.
Susan looked at her, murmured: “An honest, God-fearing working woman!”
“Huh?” said Mrs. Tucker.
“Nothing,” replied Susan who would not have permitted her to hear. It would be cruel to put such ideas before one doomed beyond hope.
Susan was utterly tired, but even the strong craving for a stimulant could not draw that tea past her lips. She ate a piece of dry bread, washed her face, neck, and hands. It was time to start for the factory.
That day–Saturday–was a half-holiday. Susan drew her week’s earnings–four dollars and ten cents–and came home. Mrs. Tucker, who had drawn–“thanks to the Lord”–three dollars and a quarter, was with her. The janitress halted them as they passed and told them that Mrs. Reardon was dead. She looked like another scrubwoman, living down the street, who was known always to carry a sum of money in her dress pocket, the banks being untrustworthy. Mrs. Reardon, passing along in the dusk of the early morning, had been hit on the head with a blackjack. The one blow had killed her.
Violence, tragedy of all kinds, were too commonplace in that neighborhood to cause more than a slight ripple. An old scrubwoman would have had to die in some peculiarly awful way to receive the flattery of agitating an agitated street. Mrs. Reardon had died what was really almost a natural death. So the faint disturbance of the terrors of life had long since disappeared. The body was at the Morgue, of course.
“We’ll go up, right away,” said Mrs. Tucker.
“I’ve something to do that can’t be put, off,” replied Susan.
“I don’t like for anyone as young as you to be so hard,” reproached Mrs. Tucker.
“Is it hard,” said Susan, “to see that death isn’t nearly so terrible as life? She’s safe and at peace. I’ve got to _live_.”
Mrs. Tucker, eager for an emotional and religious opportunity, hastened away. Susan went at her wardrobe ironing, darning, fixing buttonholes, hooks and eyes. She drew a bucket of water from the tap in the hall and proceeded to wash her hair with soap; she rinsed it, dried it as well as she could with their one small, thin towel, left it hanging free for the air to finish the job.
It had rained all the night before–the second heavy rain in two months. But at dawn the rain had ceased, and the clouds had fled before the sun that rules almost undisputed nine months of the year and wars valiantly to rule the other three months–not altogether in vain. A few golden strays found their way into that cavelike room and had been helping her wonderfully. She bathed herself and scrubbed herself from head to foot. She manicured her nails, got her hands and feet into fairly good condition. She put on her best underclothes, her one remaining pair of undarned stockings, the pair of ties she had been saving against an emergency. And once more she had the charm upon which she most prided herself–the charm of an attractive look about the feet and ankles. She then took up the dark-blue hat frame–one of a lot of “seconds”–she had bought for thirty-five cents at a bargain sale, trimmed it with a broad dark-blue ribbon for which she had paid sixty cents. She was well pleased–and justly so–with the result. The trimmed hat might well have cost ten or fifteen dollars–for the largest part of the price of a woman’s hat is usually the taste of the arrangement of the trimming.
By this time her hair was dry. She did it up with a care she had not had time to give it in many a week. She put on the dark-blue serge skirt of the between seasons dress she had brought with her from Forty-fourth Street; she had not worn it at all. With the feeble aid of the mirror that distorted her image into grotesqueness, she put on her hat with the care that important detail of a woman’s toilet always deserves.
She completed her toilet with her one good and unworn blouse–plain white, the yoke gracefully pointed–and with a blue neck piece she had been saving. She made a bundle of all her clothing that was fit for anything–including the unworn batiste dress Jeffries and Jonas had given her. And into it she put the pistol she had brought away from Forty-fourth Street. She made a separate bundle of the Jeffries and Jonas hat with its valuable plumes. With the two bundles she descended and went to a pawnshop in Houston Street, to which she had made several visits.
A dirty-looking man with a short beard fluffy and thick like a yellow hen’s tail lurked behind the counter in the dark little shop. She put her bundles on the counter, opened them. “How much can I get for these things?” she asked.
The man examined every piece minutely. “There’s really nothing here but the summer dress and the hat,” said he. “And they’re out of style. I can’t give you more than four dollars for the lot–and one for the pistol which is good but old style now. Five dollars. How’ll you have it?”
Susan folded the things and tied up the bundles. “Sorry to have troubled you,” she said, taking one in either hand.
“How much did you expect to get, lady?” asked the pawnbroker.
“Twenty-five dollars.”
He laughed, turned toward the back of the shop. As she reached the door he called from his desk at which he seemed about to seat himself, “I might squeeze you out ten dollars.”
“The plumes on the hat will sell for thirty dollars,” said Susan. “You know as well as I do that ostrich feathers have gone up.”
The man slowly advanced. “I hate to see a customer go away unsatisfied,” said he. “I’ll give you twenty dollars.”
“Not a cent less than twenty-five. At the next place I’ll ask thirty–and get it.”
“I never can stand out against a lady. Give me the stuff.”
Susan put it on the counter again. Said she:
“I don’t blame you for trying to do me. You’re right to try to buy your way out of hell.”
The pawnbroker reflected, could not understand this subtlety, went behind his counter. He produced a key from his pocket, unlocked a drawer underneath and took out a large tin box. With another key from another pocket he unlocked this, threw back the lid revealing a disorder of papers. From the depths he fished a paper bag. This contained a roll of bills. He gave Susan a twenty and a five, both covered with dirt so thickly that she could scarcely make out the denominations.
“You’ll have to give me cleaner money than this,” said she.
“You are a fine lady,” grumbled he. But he found cleaner bills.
She turned to her room. At sight of her Mrs. Tucker burst out laughing with delight. “My, but you do look like old times!” cried she. “How neat and tasty you are! I suppose it’s no need to ask if you’re going to church?”
“No,” said Susan. “I’ve got nothing to give, and I don’t beg.”
“Well, I ain’t going there myself, lately–somehow. They got so they weren’t very cordial–or maybe it was me thinking that way because I wasn’t dressed up like. Still I do wish you was more religious. But you’ll come to it, for you’re naturally a good girl. And when you do, the Lord’ll give you a more contented heart. Not that you complain. I never knew anybody, especially a young person, that took things so quiet. . . . It can’t be you’re going to a dance?”
“No,” said Susan. “I’m going to leave–go back uptown.”
Mrs. Tucker plumped down upon the bed. “Leave for good?” she gasped.
“I’ve got Nelly Lemayer to take my place here, if you want her,” said Susan. “Here is my share of the rent for next week and half a dollar for the extra gas I’ve burned last night and today.”
“And Mrs. Reardon gone, too!” sobbed Mrs. Tucker, suddenly remembering the old scrubwoman whom both had forgotten. “And up to that there Morgue they wouldn’t let me see her except where the light was so poor that I couldn’t rightly swear it was her. How brutal everybody is to the poor! If they didn’t have the Lord, what would become of them! And you leaving me all alone!”
The sobs rose into hysteria. Susan stood impassive. She had seen again and again how faint the breeze that would throw those shallow waters into commotion and how soon they were tranquil again. It was by observing Mrs. Tucker that she first learned an important unrecognized truth about human nature that amiable, easily sympathetic and habitually good-humored people are invariably hard of heart. In this parting she had no sense of loss, none of the melancholy that often oppresses us when we separate from someone to whom we are indifferent yet feel bound by the tie of misfortunes borne together. Mrs. Tucker, fallen into the habits of their surroundings, was for her simply part of them. And she was glad she was leaving them–forever, she hoped. _Christian_, fleeing the City of Destruction, had no sterner mandate to flight than her instinct was suddenly urging upon her.
When Mrs. Tucker saw that her tears were not appreciated, she decided that they were unnecessary. She dried her eyes and said:
“Anyhow, I reckon Mrs. Reardon’s taking-off was a mercy.”
“She’s better dead,” said Susan. She had abhorred the old woman, even as she pitied and sheltered her. She had a way of fawning and cringing and flattering–no doubt in well meaning attempt to show gratitude–but it was unendurable to Susan. And now that she was dead and gone, there was no call for further pretenses.
“You ain’t going right away?” said Mrs. Tucker.
“Yes,” said Susan.
“You ought to stay to supper.”
Supper! That revolting food! “No, I must go right away,” replied Susan.
“Well, you’ll come to see me. And maybe you’ll be back with us. You might go farther and do worse. On my way from the morgue I dropped in to see a lady friend on the East Side. I guess the good Lord has abandoned the East Side, there being nothing there but Catholics and Jews, and no true religion. It’s dreadful the way things is over there–the girls are taking to the streets in droves. My lady friend was telling me that some of the mothers is sending their little girls out streetwalking, and some’s even taking out them that’s too young to be trusted to go alone. And no money in it, at that. And food and clothing prices going up and up. Meat and vegetables two and three times what they was a few years ago. And rents!” Mrs. Tucker threw up her hands.
“I must be going,” said Susan. “Good-by.”
She put out her hand, but Mrs. Tucker insisted on kissing her. She crossed Washington Square, beautiful in the soft evening light, and went up Fifth Avenue. She felt that she was breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean, happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere. It was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above. She was free–free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom, infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the fear of slavery closing in again. She had abandoned the old toilet articles. She had only the clothes she was wearing, the thirty-one dollars divided between her stockings, and the two-dollar bill stuffed into the palm of her left glove.
She had walked but a few hundred feet. She had advanced into a region no more prosperous to the eye than that she had been working in every day. Yet she had changed her world–because she had changed her point of view. The strata that form society lie in roughly parallel lines one above the other. The flow of all forms of the currents of life is horizontally along these strata, never vertically from one stratum to another. These strata, lying apparently in contact, one upon another, are in fact abysmally separated. There is not–and in the nature of things never can be any genuine human sympathy between any two strata. We _sympathize_ in our own stratum, or class; toward other strata–other classes–our attitude is necessarily a looking up or a looking down. Susan, a bit of flotsam, ascending, descending, ascending across the social layers–belonging nowhere having attachments, not sympathies, a real settled lot nowhere–Susan was once more upward bound.
At the corner of Fourteenth Street there was a shop with large mirrors in the show windows. She paused to examine herself. She found she had no reason to be disturbed about her appearance. Her dress and hat looked well; her hair was satisfactory; the sharp air had brought some life to the pallor of her cheeks, and the release from the slums had restored some of the light to her eyes. “Why did I stay there so long?” she demanded of herself. Then, “How have I suddenly got the courage to leave?” She had no answer to either question. Nor did she care for an answer. She was not even especially interested in what was about to happen to her.
The moment she found herself above Twenty-third Street and in the old familiar surroundings, she felt an irresistible longing to hear about Rod Spenser. She was like one who has been on a far journey, leaving behind him everything that has been life to him; he dismisses it all because he must, until he finds himself again in his own country, in his old surroundings. She went into the Hoffman House and at the public telephone got the _Herald_ office. “Is Mr. Drumley there?”
“No,” was the reply. “He’s gone to Europe.”
“Did Mr. Spenser go with him?”
“Mr. Spenser isn’t here–hasn’t been for a long time.
He’s abroad too. Who is this?”
“Thank you,” said Susan, hanging up the receiver.
She drew a deep breath of relief.
She left the hotel by the women’s entrance in Broadway. It was six o’clock. The sky was clear–a typical New York sky with air that intoxicated blowing from it–air of the sea–air of the depths of heaven. A crescent moon glittered above the Diana on the Garden tower. It was Saturday night and Broadway was thronged–with men eager to spend in pleasure part of the week’s wages or salary they had just drawn; with women sparkling-eyed and odorous of perfumes and eager to help the men. The air was sharp–was the ocean air of New York at its delicious best. And the slim, slightly stooped girl with the earnest violet-gray eyes and the sad bitter mouth from whose lips the once brilliant color had now fled was ready for whatever might come. She paused at the corner, and gazed up brilliantly lighted Broadway.
“Now!” she said half aloud and, like an expert swimmer adventuring the rapids, she advanced into the swift-moving crowd of the highway of New York’s gayety. V
AT the corner of Twenty-sixth Street a man put himself squarely across her path. She was attracted by the twinkle in his good-natured eyes. He was a youngish man, had the stoutness of indulgence in a fondness for eating and drinking–but the stoutness was still well within the bounds of decency. His clothing bore out the suggestion of his self-assured way of stopping her–the suggestion of a confidence-giving prosperity.
“You look as if you needed a drink, too,” said he. “How about it, lady with the lovely feet?”
For the first time in her life she was feeling on an equality with man. She gave him the same candidly measuring glance that man gives man. She saw good-nature, audacity without impudence–at least not the common sort of impudence. She smiled merrily, glad of the chance to show her delight that she was once more back in civilization after the long sojourn in the prison workshops where it is manufactured. She said:
“A drink? Thank you–yes.”
“That’s a superior quality of smile you’ve got there,” said he. “That, and those nice slim feet of yours ought to win for you anywhere. Let’s go to the Martin.”
“Down University Place?”
The stout young man pointed his slender cane across the street. “You must have been away.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “I’ve been–dead.”
“I’d like to try that myself–if I could be sure of coming to life in little old New York.” And he looked round with laughing eyes as if the lights, the crowds, the champagne-like air intoxicated him.
At the first break in the thunderous torrent of traffic they crossed Broadway and went in at the Twenty-sixth Street entrance. The restaurant, to the left, was empty. Its little tables were ready, however, for the throng of diners soon to come. Susan had difficulty in restraining herself. She was almost delirious with delight. She was agitated almost to tears by the freshness, the sparkle in the glow of the red-shaded candles, in the colors and odors of the flowers decorating every table. While she had been down there all this had been up here–waiting for her! Why had she stayed down there? But then, why had she gone? What folly, what madness! To suffer such horrors for no reason–beyond some vague, clinging remnant of a superstition–or had it been just plain insanity? “Yes, I’ve been crazy–out of my head. The break with–Rod–upset my mind.”
Her companion took her into the cafe to the right. He seated her on one of the leather benches not far from the door, seated himself in a chair opposite; there was a narrow marble-topped table between them. On Susan’s right sat a too conspicuously dressed but somehow important looking actress; on her left, a shopkeeper’s fat wife. Opposite each woman sat the sort of man one would expect to find with her. The face of the actress’s man interested her. It was a long pale face, the mouth weary, in the eyes a strange hot fire of intense enthusiasm. He was young–and old–and neither. Evidently he had lived every minute of every year of his perhaps forty years. He was wearing a quiet suit of blue and his necktie was of a darker shade of the same color. His clothes were draped upon his good figure with a certain fascinating distinction. He was smoking an unusually long and thick cigarette. The slender strong white hand he raised and lowered was the hand of an artist. He might be a bad man, a very bad man–his face had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes–and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. The woman with him evidently wished to convince him that she loved him, to convince those about her that they were lovers; the man evidently knew exactly what she had in mind–for he was polite, attentive, indifferent, and–Susan suspected–secretly amused.
Susan’s escort leaned toward her and said in a low tone, “The two at the next table–the woman’s Mary Rigsdall, the actress, and the man’s Brent, the fellow who writes plays.” Then in a less cautious tone, “What are you drinking?”
“What are _you_ drinking?” asked Susan, still covertly watching Brent.
“You are going to dine with me?”
“I’ve no engagement.”
“Then let’s have Martinis–and I’ll go get a table and order dinner while the waiter’s bringing them.”
When Susan was alone, she gazed round the crowded cafe, at the scores of interesting faces–thrillingly interesting to her after her long sojourn among countenances merely expressing crude elemental appetites if anything at all beyond toil, anxiety, privation, and bad health. These were the faces of the triumphant class–of those who had wealth or were getting it, fame or were striving for it, of those born to or acquiring position of some sort among the few thousands who lord it over the millions. These were the people among whom she belonged. Why was she having such a savage struggle to attain it? Then, all in an instant the truth she had been so long groping for in vain flung itself at her. None of these women, none of the women of the prosperous classes would be there but for the assistance and protection of the men. She marveled at her stupidity in not having seen the obvious thing clearly long ago. The successful women won their success by disposing of their persons to advantage–by getting the favor of some man of ability. Therefore, she, a woman, must adopt that same policy if she was to have a chance at the things worth while in life. She must make the best bargain–or series of bargains–she could. And as her necessities were pressing she must lose no time. She understood now the instinct that had forced her to fly from South Fifth Avenue, that had overruled her hesitation and had compelled her to accept the good-natured, prosperous man’s invitation. . . . There was no other way open to her. She must not evade that fact; she must accept it. Other ways there might be–for other women. But not for her, the outcast without friends or family, the woman alone, with no one to lean upon or to give her anything except in exchange for what she had to offer that was marketable. She must make the bargain she could, not waste time in the folly of awaiting a bargain to her liking. Since she was living in the world and wished to continue to live there, she must accept the world’s terms. To be sad or angry either one because the world did not offer her as attractive terms as it apparently offered many other women–the happy and respected wives and mothers of the prosperous classes, for instance–to rail against that was silly and stupid, was unworthy of her intelligence. She would do as best she could, and move along, keeping her eyes open; and perhaps some day a chance for much better terms might offer–for the best–for such terms as that famous actress there had got. She looked at Mary Rigsdall. An expression in her interesting face–the latent rather than the surface expression–set Susan to wondering whether, if she knew Rigsdall’s _whole_ story–or any woman’s whole story–she might not see that the world was not bargaining so hardly with her, after all. Or any man’s whole story. There her eyes shifted to Rigsdall’s companion, the famous playwright of whom she had so often heard Rod and his friends talk.
She was startled to find that his gaze was upon her–an all-seeing look that penetrated to the very core of her being. He either did not note or cared nothing about her color of embarrassment. He regarded her steadily until, so she felt, he had seen precisely what she was, had become intimately acquainted with her. Then he looked away. It chagrined her that his eyes did not again turn in her direction; she felt that he had catalogued her as not worth while. She listened to the conversation of the two. The woman did the talking, and her subject was herself–her ability as an actress, her conception of some part she either was about to play or was hoping to play. Susan, too young to have acquired more than the rudiments of the difficult art of character study, even had she had especial talent for it–which she had not–Susan decided that the famous Rigsdall was as shallow and vain as Rod had said all stage people were.
The waiter brought the cocktails and her stout young companion came back, beaming at the thought of the dinner he had painstakingly ordered. As he reached the table he jerked his head in self-approval. “It’ll be a good one,” said he. “Saturday night dinner–and after–means a lot to me. I work hard all week. Saturday nights I cut loose. Sundays I sleep and get ready to scramble again on Monday for the dollars.” He seated himself, leaned toward her with elevated glass. “What name?” inquired he.
“Susan.”
“That’s a good old-fashioned name. Makes me see the hollyhocks, and the hens scratching for worms. Mine’s Howland. Billy Howland. I came from Maryland . . . and I’m mighty glad I did. I wouldn’t be from anywhere else for worlds, and I wouldn’t be there for worlds. Where do you hail from?”
“The West,” said Susan.
“Well, the men in your particular corner out yonder must be a pretty poor lot to have let you leave. I spotted you for mine the minute I saw you–Susan. I hope you’re not as quiet as your name. Another cocktail?”
“Thanks.”
“Like to drink?”
“I’m going to do more of it hereafter.”
“Been laying low for a while–eh?”
“Very low,” said Susan. Her eyes were sparkling now; the cocktail had begun to stir her long languid blood.
“Live with your family?”
“I haven’t any. I’m free.”
“On the stage?”
“I’m thinking of going on.”
“And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile–whatever comes.”
Billy Howland’s face was radiant. “I had a date tonight and the lady threw me down. One of those drummer’s wives that take in washing to add to the family income while hubby’s flirting round the country. This hubby came home unexpectedly. I’m glad he did.”
He beamed with such whole-souled good-nature that Susan laughed. “Thanks. Same to you,” said she.
“Hope you’re going to do a lot of that laughing,” said he. “It’s the best I’ve heard–such a quiet, gay sound. I sure do have the best luck. Until five years ago there was nothing doing for Billy–hall bedroom–Wheeling stogies–one shirt and two pairs of cuffs a week–not enough to buy a lady an ice-cream soda. All at once–bang! The hoodoo busted, and everything that arrived was for William C. Howland. Better get aboard.”
“Here I am.”
“Hold on tight. I pay no attention to the speed laws, and round the corners on two wheels. Do you like good things to eat?”
“I haven’t eaten for six months.”
“You must have been out home. Ah!–There’s the man to tell us dinner’s ready.”
They finished the second cocktail. Susan was pleased to note that Brent was again looking at her; and she thought–though she suspected it might be the cocktail–that there was a question in his look–a question about her which he had been unable to answer to his satisfaction. When she and Howland were at one of the small tables against the wall in the restaurant, she said to him:
“You know Mr. Brent?”
“The play man? Lord, no. I’m a plain business dub. He wouldn’t bother with me. You like that sort of man?”
“I want to get on the stage, if I can,” was Susan’s diplomatic reply.
“Well–let’s have dinner first. I’ve ordered champagne, but if you prefer something else—-”
“Champagne is what I want. I hope it’s very dry.”
Howland’s eyes gazed tenderly at her. “I do like a woman who knows the difference between champagne and carbonated sirup. I think you and I’ve got a lot of tastes in common. I like eating–so do you. I like drinking–so do you. I like a good time–so do you. You’re a little bit thin for my taste, but you’ll fatten up. I wonder what makes your lips so pale.”
“I’d hate to remind myself by telling you,” said Susan.
The restaurant was filling. Most of the men and women were in evening dress. Each arriving woman brought with her a new exhibition of extravagance in costume, diffused a new variety of powerful perfume. The orchestra in the balcony was playing waltzes and the liveliest Hungarian music and the most sensuous strains from Italy and France and Spain. And before her was food!–food again!–not horrible stuff unfit for beasts, worse than was fed to beasts, but human food–good things, well cooked and well served. To have seen her, to have seen the expression of her eyes, without knowing her history and without having lived as she had lived, would have been to think her a glutton. Her spirits giddied toward the ecstatic. She began to talk–commenting on the people about her–the one subject she could venture with her companion. As she talked and drank, he ate and drank, stuffing and gorging himself, but with a frankness of gluttony that delighted her. She found she could not eat much, but she liked to see eating; she who had so long been seeing only poverty, bolting wretched food and drinking the vilest kinds of whiskey and beer, of alleged coffee and tea–she reveled in Howland’s exhibition. She must learn to live altogether in her senses, never to think except about an appetite. Where could she find a better teacher? . . . They drank two quarts of champagne, and with the coffee she took _creme de menthe_ and he brandy. And as the sensuous temperament that springs from intense vitality reasserted itself, the opportunity before her lost all its repellent features, became the bright, vivid countenance of lusty youth, irradiating the joy of living.
“I hear there’s a lively ball up at Terrace Garden,” said he. “Want to go?”
“That’ll be fine!” cried she.
She saw it would have taken nearly all the money she possessed to have paid that bill. About four weeks’ wages for one dinner! Thousands of families living for two weeks on what she and he had consumed in two hours! She reached for her half empty champagne glass, emptied it. She must forget all those things! “I’ve played the fool once. I’ve learned my lesson. Surely I’ll never do it again.” As she drank, her eyes chanced upon the clock. Half-past ten. Mrs. Tucker had probably just fallen asleep. And Mrs. Reardon was going out to scrub–going out limping and groaning with rheumatism. No, Mrs. Reardon was lying up at the morgue dead, her one chance to live lost forever. Dead! Yet better off than Mrs. Tucker lying alive. Susan could see her–the seamed and broken and dirty old remnant of a face–could see the vermin–and the mice could hear the snoring–the angry grunt and turning over as the insects—-
“I want another drink–right away,” she cried.
“Sure!” said Howland. “I need one more, too.”
They drove in a taxi to Terrace Garden, he holding her in his arms and kissing her with an intoxicated man’s enthusiasm. “You certainly are sweet,” said he. “The wine on your breath is like flowers. Gosh, but I’m glad that husband came home! Like me a little?”
“I’m so happy, I feel like standing up and screaming,” declared she.
“Good idea,” cried he. Whereupon he released a war whoop and they both went off into a fit of hysterical laughter. When it subsided he said, “I sized you up as a live wire the minute I saw you. But you’re even better than I thought. What are you in such a good humor about?”
“You couldn’t understand if I told you,” replied she. “You’d have to go and live where I’ve been living–live there as long as I have.”
“Convent?”
“Worse. Worse than a jail.”
The ball proved as lively as they hoped. A select company from the Tenderloin was attending, and the regulars were all of the gayest crowd among the sons and daughters of artisans and small merchants up and down the East Side. Not a few of the women were extremely pretty. All, or almost all, were young, and those who on inspection proved to be older than eighteen or twenty were acting younger than the youngest. Everyone had been drinking freely, and continued to drink. The orchestra played continuously. The air was giddy with laughter and song. Couples hugged and kissed in corners, and finally openly on the dancing floor. For a while Susan and Howland danced together. But soon they made friends with the crowd and danced with whoever was nearest. Toward three in the morning it flashed upon her that she had not even seen him for many a dance. She looked round–searched for him–got a blond-bearded man in evening dress to assist her.
“The last seen of your stout friend,” this man finally reported, “he was driving away in a cab with a large lady from Broadway. He was asleep, but I guess she wasn’t.”
A sober thought winked into her whirling brain–he had warned her to hold on tight, and she had lost her head–and her opportunity. A bad start–a foolishly bad start. But out winked the glimpse of sobriety and Susan laughed. “That’s the last I’ll ever see of _him_,” said she.
This seemed to give Blond-Beard no regrets. Said he: “Let’s you and I have a little supper. I’d call it breakfast, only then we couldn’t have champagne.”
And they had supper–six at the table, all uproarious, Susan with difficulty restrained from a skirt dance on the table up and down among the dishes and bottles. It was nearly five o’clock when she and Blond-Beard helped each other toward a cab.
“What’s your address?” said he.
“The same as yours,” replied she drowsily.
Late that afternoon she established herself in a room with a bath in West Twenty-ninth Street not far from Broadway. The exterior of the house was dingy and down-at-the-heel. But the interior was new and scrupulously clean. Several other young women lived there alone also, none quite so well installed as Susan, who had the only private bath and was paying twelve dollars a week. The landlady, frizzled and peroxide, explained–without adding anything to what she already knew–that she could have “privileges,” but cautioned her against noise. “I can’t stand for it,” said she. “First offense–out you go. This house is for ladies, and only gentlemen that know how to conduct themselves as a gentleman should with a lady are allowed to come here.”
Susan paid a week in advance, reducing to thirty-one dollars her capital which Blond-Beard had increased to forty-three. The young lady who lived at the other end of the hall smiled at her, when both happened to glance from their open doors at the same time. Susan invited her to call and she immediately advanced along the hall in the blue silk kimono she was wearing over her nightgown.
“My name’s Ida Driscoll,” said she, showing a double row of charming white teeth–her chief positive claim to beauty.
She was short, was plump about the shoulders but slender in the hips. Her reddish brown hair was neatly done over a big rat, and was so spread that its thinness was hidden well enough to deceive masculine eyes. Nor would a man have observed that one of her white round shoulders was full two inches higher than the other. Her skin was good, her features small and irregular, her eyes shrewd but kindly.
“My name’s”–Susan hesitated–“Lorna Sackville.”
“I guess Lorna and Ida’ll be enough for us to bother to remember,” laughed Miss Driscoll. “The rest’s liable to change. You’ve just come, haven’t you?”
“About an hour ago. I’ve got only a toothbrush, a comb, a washrag and a cake of soap. I bought them on my way here.”
“Baggage lost–eh?” said Ida, amused.
“No,” admitted Susan. “I’m beginning an entire new deal.”
“I’ll lend you a nightgown. I’m too short for my other things to fit you.”
“Oh, I can get along. What’s good for a headache? I’m nearly crazy with it.”
“Wine?”
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute.” Ida, with bedroom slippers clattering, hurried back to her room, returned with a bottle of bromo seltzer and in the bathroom fixed Susan a dose. “You’ll feel all right in half an hour or so. Gee, but you’re swell–with your own bathroom.”
Susan shrugged her shoulders and laughed.
Ida shook her head gravely. “You ought to save your money. I do.”
“Later–perhaps. Just now–I _must_ have a fling.”
Ida seemed to understand. She went on to say: “I was in millinery. But in this town there’s nothing in anything unless you have capital or a backer. I got tired of working for five per, with ten or fifteen as the top notch. So I quit, kissed my folks up in Harlem good-by and came down to look about. As soon as I’ve saved enough I’m going to start a business. That’ll be about a couple of years–maybe sooner, if I find an angel.”
“I’m thinking of the stage.”
“Cut it out!” cried Ida. “It’s on the bum. There’s more money and less worry in straight sporting–if you keep respectable. Of course, there’s nothing in out and out sporting.”
“Oh, I haven’t decided on anything. My head is better.”
“Sure! If the dose I gave you don’t knock it you can get one at the drug store two blocks up Sixth Avenue that’ll do the trick. Got a dinner date?”
“No. I haven’t anything on hand.”
“I think you and I might work together,” said Ida. “You’re thin and tallish. I’m short and fattish. We’d catch ’em coming and going.”
“That sounds good,” said Susan.
“You’re new to–to the business?”
“In a way–yes.”
“I thought so. We all soon get a kind of a professional look. You haven’t got it. Still, so many dead respectable women imitate nowadays, and paint and use loud perfumes, that sporting women aren’t nearly so noticeable. Seems to me the men’s tastes even for what they want at home are getting louder and louder all the time. They hate anything that looks slow. And in our business it’s harder and harder to please them–except the yaps from the little towns and the college boys. A woman has to be up to snuff if she gets on. If she looks what she is, men won’t have her–nor if she is what she looks.”
Susan had not lived where every form of viciousness is openly discussed and practiced, without having learned the things necessary to a full understanding of Ida’s technical phrases and references. The liveliness that had come with the departure of the headache vanished. To change the subject she invited Ida to dine with her.
“What’s the use of your spending money in a restaurant?” objected Ida. “You eat with me in my room. I always cook myself something when I ain’t asked out by some one of my gentleman friends. I can cook you a chop and warm up a can of French peas and some dandy tea biscuits I bought yesterday.”
Susan accepted the invitation, promising that when she was established she would reciprocate. As it was about six, they arranged to have the dinner at seven, Susan to dress in the meantime. The headache had now gone, even to that last heaviness which seems to be an ominous threat of a return. When she was alone, she threw off her clothes, filled the big bathtub with water as hot as she could stand it. Into this she gently lowered herself until she was able to relax and recline without discomfort. Then she stood up and with the soap and washrag gave herself the most thorough scrubbing of her life. Time after time she soaped and rubbed and scrubbed, and dipped herself in the hot water. When she felt that she had restored her body to some where near her ideal of cleanness, she let the water run out and refilled the tub with even hotter water. In this she lay luxuriously, reveling in the magnificent sensations of warmth and utter cleanliness. Her eyes closed; a delicious languor stole over her and through her, soothing every nerve. She slept.
She was awakened by Ida, who had entered after knocking and calling at the outer door in vain. Susan slowly opened her eyes, gazed at Ida with a soft dreamy smile. “You don’t know what this means. It seems to me I was never quite so comfortable or so happy in my life.”
“It’s a shame to disturb you,” said Ida. “But dinner’s ready. Don’t stop to dress first. I’ll bring you a kimono.”
Susan turned on the cold water, and the bath rapidly changed from warm to icy. When she had indulged in the sense of cold as delightful in its way as the sense of warmth, she rubbed her glowing skin with a rough towel until she was rose-red from head to foot. Then she put on stockings, shoes and the pink kimono Ida had brought, and ran along the hall to dinner. As she entered Ida’s room, Ida exclaimed, “How sweet and pretty you do look! You sure ought to make a hit!”
“I feel like a human being for the first time in–it seems years–ages–to me.”
“You’ve got a swell color–except your lips. Have they always been pale like that?”
“No.”
“I thought not. It don’t seem to fit in with your style. You ought to touch ’em up. You look too serious and innocent, anyhow. They make a rouge now that’ll stick through everything–eating, drinking–anything.”
Susan regarded herself critically in the glass. “I’ll see,” she said.
The odor of the cooking chops thrilled Susan like music. She drew a chair up to the table, sat in happy-go-lucky fashion, and attacked the chop, the hot biscuit, and the peas, with an enthusiasm that inspired Ida to imitation. “You know how to cook a chop,” she said to Ida. “And anybody who can cook a chop right can cook. Cooking’s like playing the piano. If you can do the simple things perfectly, you’re ready to do anything.”
“Wait till I have a flat of my own,” said Ida. “I’ll show you what eating means. And I’ll have it, too, before very long. Maybe we’ll live together. I was to a fortune teller’s yesterday. That’s the only way I waste money. I go to fortune tellers nearly every day. But then all the girls do. You get your money’s worth in excitement and hope, whether there’s anything in it or not. Well, the fortune teller she said I was to meet a dark, slender person who was to change the whole course of my life–that all my troubles would roll away–and that if any more came, they’d roll away, too. My, but she did give me a swell fortune, and only fifty cents! I’ll take you to her.”
Ida made black coffee and the two girls, profoundly contented, drank it and talked with that buoyant cheerfulness which bubbles up in youth on the slightest pretext. In this case the pretext was anything but slight, for both girls had health as well as youth, had that freedom from harassing responsibility which is the chief charm of every form of unconventional life. And Susan was still in the first flush of the joy of escape from the noisome prison whose poisons had been corroding her, soul and body. No, poison is not a just comparison; what poison in civilization parallels, or even approaches, in squalor, in vileness of food and air, in wretchedness of shelter and clothing, the tenement life that is really the typical life of the city? From time to time Susan, suffused with the happiness that is too deep for laughter, too deep for tears even, gazed round like a dreamer at those cheerful comfortable surroundings and drew a long breath–stealthily, as if she feared she would awaken and be again in South Fifth Avenue, of rags and filth, of hideous toil without hope.
“You’d better save your money to put in the millinery business with me,” Ida advised. “I can show you how to make a lot. Sometimes I clear as high as a hundred a week, and I don’t often fall below seventy-five. So many girls go about this business in a no account way, instead of being regular and businesslike.”
Susan strove to hide the feelings aroused by this practical statement of what lay before her. Those feelings filled her with misgiving. Was the lesson still unlearned? Obviously Ida was right; there must be plan, calculation, a definite line laid out and held to, or there could not but be failure and disaster. And yet–Susan’s flesh quivered and shrank away. She struggled against it, but she could not conquer it. Experience had apparently been in vain; her character had remained unchanged. . . . She must compel herself. She must do what she had to do; she must not ruin everything by imitating the people of the tenements with their fatal habit of living from day to day only, and taking no thought for the morrow except fatuously to hope and dream that all would be well.
While she was fighting with herself, Ida had been talking on–the same subject. When Susan heard again, Ida was saying:
“Now, take me, for instance. I don’t smoke or drink. There’s nothing in either one–especially drink. Of course sometimes a girl’s got to drink. A man watches her too close for her to dodge out. But usually you can make him think you’re as full as he is, when you really are cold sober.”
“Do the men always drink when they–come with–with–us?” asked Susan.
“Most always. They come because they want to turn themselves loose. That’s why a girl’s got to be careful not to make a man feel nervous or shy. A respectable woman’s game is to be modest and innocent. With us, the opposite. They’re both games; one’s just as good as the other.”
“I don’t think I could get along at all–at this,” confessed Susan with an effort, “unless I drank too much–so that I was reckless and didn’t care what happened.”
Ida looked directly into her eyes; Susan’s glance fell and a flush mounted. After a pause Ida went on:
“A girl does feel that way at first. A girl that marries as most of them do–because the old ones are pushing her out of the nest and she’s got no place else to go–she feels the same way till she hardens to it. Of course, you’ve got to get broke into any business.”
“Go on,” said Susan eagerly. “You are so sensible. You must teach me.”
“Common sense is a thing you don’t often hear–especially about getting on in the world. But, as I was saying–one of my gentlemen friends is a lawyer–such a nice fellow–so liberal. Gives me a present of twenty or twenty-five extra, you understand–every time he makes a killing downtown. He asked me once how I felt when I started in; and when I told him, he said, `That’s exactly the way I felt the first time I won a case for a client I knew was a dirty rascal and in the wrong. But now–I take that sort of thing as easy as you do.’ He says the thing is to get on, no matter how, and that one way’s as good as another. And he’s mighty right. You soon learn that in little old New York, where you’ve got to have the mon. or you get the laugh and the foot–the swift, hard kick. Clean up after you’ve arrived, he says–and don’t try to keep clean while you’re working–and don’t stop for baths and things while you’re at the job.”
Susan was listening with every faculty she possessed.
“He says he talks the other sort of thing–the dope–the fake stuff–just as the rest of the hustlers do. He says it’s necessary in order to keep the people fooled–that if they got wise to the real way to succeed, then there’d be nobody to rob and get rich off of. Oh, he’s got it right. He’s a smart one.”
The sad, bitter expression was strong in Susan’s face.
After a pause, Ida went on: “If a girl’s an ignorant fool or squeamish, she don’t get up in this business any more than in any other. But if she keeps a cool head, and don’t take lovers unless they pay their way, and don’t drink, why she can keep her self-respect and not have to take to the streets.”
Susan lifted her head eagerly. “Don’t have to take to the streets?” she echoed.
“Certainly not,” declared Ida. “I very seldom let a man pick me up after dark–unless he looks mighty good. I go out in the daytime. I pretend I’m an actress out of a job for the time being, or a forelady in a big shop who’s taking a day or so off, or a respectable girl living with her parents. I put a lot of money into clothes–quiet, ladylike clothes. Mighty good investment. If you ain’t got clothes in New York you can’t do any kind of business. I go where a nice class of men hangs out, and I never act bold, but just flirt timidly, as so many respectable girls or semi-respectables do. But when a girl plays that game, she has to be careful not to make a man think he ain’t expected to pay. The town’s choked full of men on the lookout for what they call love–which means, for something cheap or, better still, free. Men are just crazy about themselves. Nothing easier than to fool ’em–and nothing’s harder than to make ’em think you ain’t stuck on ’em. I tell you, a girl in our life has a chance to learn men. They turn themselves inside out to us.”
Susan, silent, her thoughts flowing like a mill race, helped Ida with the dishes. Then they dressed and went together for a walk. It being Sunday evening, the streets were quiet. They sauntered up Fifth Avenue as far as Fifty-ninth Street and back. Ida’s calm and sensible demeanor gave Susan much needed courage every time a man spoke to them. None of these men happened to be up to Ida’s standard, which was high.
“No use wasting time on snide people,” explained she. “We don’t want drinks and a gush of loose talk, and I saw at a glance that was all those chappies were good for.”
They returned home at half-past nine without adventure. Toward midnight one of Ida’s regulars called and Susan was free to go to bed. She slept hardly at all. Ever before her mind hovered a nameless, shapeless horror. And when she slept she dreamed of her wedding night, woke herself screaming, “Please, Mr. Ferguson–please!”
Ida had three chief sources of revenue.
The best was five men–her “regular gentleman friends”–who called by appointment from time to time. These paid her ten dollars apiece, and occasionally gave her presents of money or jewelry–nothing that amounted to much. From them she averaged about thirty-five dollars a week. Her second source was a Mrs. Thurston who kept in West Fifty-sixth Street near Ninth Avenue a furnished-room house of the sort that is on the official–and also the “revenue”–lists of the police and the anti-vice societies. This lady had a list of girls and married women upon whom she could call. Gentlemen using her house for rendezvous were sometimes disappointed by the ladies with whom they were intriguing. Again a gentleman grew a little weary of his perhaps too respectable or too sincerely loving ladylove and appealed to Mrs. Thurston. She kept her list of availables most select and passed them off as women of good position willing to supplement a small income, or to punish stingy husbands or fathers and at the same time get the money they needed for dress and bridge, for matinees and lunches. Mrs. Thurston insisted–and Ida was inclined to believe–that there were genuine cases of this kind on the list.
“It’s mighty hard for women with expensive tastes and small means to keep straight in New York,” said she to Susan. “It costs so much to live, and there are so many ways to spend money. And they always have rich lady friends who set an extravagant pace. They’ve got to dress–and to kind of keep up their end. So–” Ida laughed, went on: “Besides the city women are getting so they like a little sporty novelty as much as their brothers and husbands and fathers do. Oh, I’m not ashamed of my business any more. We’re as good as the others, and we’re not hypocrites. As my lawyer friend says, everybody’s got to make a _good_ living, and good livings can’t be made on the ways that used to be called on the level–they’re called damfool ways now.”
Ida’s third source of income was to her the most attractive because it had such a large gambling element in it. This was her flirtations as a respectable woman in search of lively amusement and having to take care not to be caught. There are women of all kinds who delight in deceiving men because it gives them a sweet stealthy sense of superiority to the condescending sex. In women of the Ida class this pleasure becomes as much a passion as it is in the respectable woman whom her husband tries to enslave. With Susan, another woman and one in need of education, Ida was simple and scrupulously truthful. But it would have been impossible for a man to get truth as to anything from her. She amused herself inventing plausible romantic stories about herself that she might enjoy the gullibility of the boastfully superior and patronizing male. She was devoid of sentiment, even of passion. Yet at times she affected both in the most extreme fashion. And afterward, with peals of laughter, she would describe to Susan how the man had acted, what an ass she had made of him.
“Men despise us,” she said. “But it’s nothing to the way I despise them. The best of them are rotten beasts when they show themselves as they are. And they haven’t any mercy on us. It’s too ridiculous. Men despise a man who is virtuous and a woman who isn’t. What rot!”
She deceived the “regulars” without taking the trouble to remember her deceptions. They caught her lying so often that she knew they thought her untruthful through and through. But this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure–the pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of their distrust of her. “Anyhow,” said she, “haven’t you noticed the liars everybody’s on to are always believed and truthful people are doubted?”
Upon the men with whom she flirted, she practiced the highly colored romances it would have been useless to try upon the regulars. Her greatest triumph at this game was a hard luck story she had told so effectively that the man had given her two hundred dollars. Most of her romances turned about her own ruin. As a matter of fact, she had told Susan the exact truth when she said she had taken up her mode of life deliberately; she had grown weary and impatient of the increasing poverty of a family which, like so many of the artisan and small merchant and professional classes in this day of concentrating wealth and spreading tastes for comfort and luxury, was on its way down from comfort toward or through the tenements. She was a type of the recruits that are swelling the prostitute class in ever larger numbers and are driving the prostitutes of the tenement class toward starvation–where they once dominated the profession even to its highest ranks, even to the fashionable _cocotes_ who prey upon the second generation of the rich. But Ida never told her lovers her plain and commonplace tale of yielding to the irresistible pressure of economic forces. She had made men weep at her recital of her wrongs. It had even brought her offers of marriage–none, however, worth accepting.
“I’d be a boob to marry a man with less than fifteen or twenty thousand a year, wouldn’t I?” said she. “Why, two of the married men who come to see me regularly give me more than they give their wives for pin money. And in a few years I’ll be having my own respectable business, with ten thousand income–maybe more–and as well thought of as the next woman.”
Ida’s dream was a house in the country, a fine flat in town, a husband in some “refined” profession and children at high-class schools. “And I’ll get there, don’t you doubt it!” exclaimed she. “Others have–of course, you don’t know about them–they’ve looked out for that. Yes, lots of others have–but–well, just you watch your sister Ida.”
And Susan felt that she would indeed arrive. Already she had seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined about recrossing the line to respectability. The only real problem in that matter was how to get together enough to make the crossing worth while–for what was there in respectability without money, in a day when respectability had ceased to mean anything but money?
Ida wished to take her to Mrs. Thurston and get her a favored place on the list. Susan thanked her, but said, “Not yet–not quite yet.” Ida suggested that they go out together as two young married women whose husbands had gone on the road. Susan put her off from day to day. Ida finally offered to introduce her to one of the regulars: “He’s a nice fellow–knows how to treat a lady in a gentlemanly way. Not a bit coarse or familiar.” Susan would not permit this generosity. And all this time her funds were sinking. She had paid a second week’s rent, had bought cooking apparatus, some food supplies, some necessary clothing. She was down to a five-dollar bill and a little change.
“Look here, Lorna,” said Ida, between remonstrance and exasperation, “when _are_ you going to start in?”
Susan looked fixedly at her, said with a slow smile, “When I can’t hold out another minute.”
Ida tossed her head angrily. “You’ve got brains–more than I have,” she cried. “You’ve got every advantage for catching rich men–even a rich husband. You’re educated. You speak and act and look refined. Why you could pretend to be a howling fashionable swell. You’ve got all the points. But what have you got ’em for? Not to use that’s certain.”
“You can’t be as disgusted with me as I am.”
“If you’re going to do a thing, why, _do_ it!”
“That’s what I tell myself. But–I can’t make a move.”
Ida gave a gesture of despair. “I don’t see what’s to become of you. And you could do _so_ well! . . . Let me phone Mr. Sterling. I told him about you. He’s anxious to meet you. He’s fond of books–like you. You’d like him. He’d give up a lot to you, because you’re classier than I am.”
Susan threw her arms round Ida and kissed her. “Don’t bother about me,” she said. “I’ve got to act in my own foolish, stupid way. I’m like a child going to school. I’ve got to learn a certain amount before I’m ready to do whatever it is I’m going to do. And until I learn it, I can’t do much of anything. I thought I had learned in the last few months. I see I haven’t.”
“Do listen to sense, Lorna,” pleaded Ida. “If you wait till the last minute, you’ll get left. The time to get the money’s when you have money. And I’ve a feeling that you’re not particularly flush.”
“I’ll do the best I can. And I can’t move till I’m ready.”
Meanwhile she continued to search for work–work that would enable her to live _decently_, wages less degrading than the wages of shame. In a newspaper she read an advertisement of a theatrical agency. Advertisements of all kinds read well; those of theatrical agencies read–like the fairy tales that they were. However, she found in this particular offering of dazzling careers and salaries a peculiar phrasing that decided her to break the rule she had made after having investigated scores of this sort of offers.
Rod was abroad; anyhow, enough time had elapsed. One of the most impressive features of the effect of New York–meaning by “New York” only that small but significant portion of the four millions that thinks–at least, after a fashion, and acts, instead of being mere passive tools of whatever happens to turn up–the most familiar notable effect of this New York is the speedy distinction in the newcomer of those illusions and delusions about life and about human nature, about good and evil, that are for so many people the most precious and the only endurable and beautiful thing in the world. New York, destroyer of delusions and cherished hypocrisies and pretenses, therefore makes the broadly intelligent of its citizens hardy, makes the others hard–and between the hardy and hard, between sense and cynicism, yawns a gulf like that between Absalom and Dives. Susan, a New Yorker now, had got the habit–in thought, at least–of seeing things with somewhat less distortion from the actual. She no longer exaggerated the importance of the Rod-Susan episode. She saw that in New York, where life is crowded with events, everything in one’s life, except death, becomes incident, becomes episode, where in regions offering less to think about each rare happening took on an aspect of vast importance. The Rod-Susan love adventure, she now saw, was not what it would have seemed–therefore, would have been–in Sutherland, but was mere episode of a New York life, giving its light and shade to a certain small part of the long, variedly patterned fabric of her life, and of his, not determining the whole. She saw that it was simply like a bend in the river, giving a new turn to current and course but not changing the river itself, and soon left far behind and succeeded by other bends giving each its equal or greater turn to the stream.
Rod had passed from her life, and she from his life. Thus she was free to begin her real career–the stage–if she could. She went to the suite of offices tenanted by Mr. Josiah Ransome. She was ushered in to Ransome himself, instead of halting with underlings. She owed this favor to advantages which her lack of vanity and of self-consciousness prevented her from surmising. Ransome–smooth, curly, comfortable looking–received her with a delicate blending of the paternal and the gallant. After he had inspected her exterior with flattering attentiveness and had investigated her qualifications with a thoroughness that was convincing of sincerity he said:
“Most satisfactory! I can make you an exceptional assurance. If you register with me, I can guarantee you not less than twenty-five a week.”
Susan hesitated long and asked many questions before she finally–with reluctance paid the five dollars. She felt ashamed of her distrust, but might perhaps have persisted in it had not Mr. Ransome said:
“I don’t blame you for hesitating, my dear young lady. And if I could I’d put you on my list without payment. But you can see how unbusinesslike that would be. I am a substantial, old-established concern. You–no doubt you are perfectly reliable. But I have been fooled so many times. I must not let myself forget that after all I know nothing about you.”
As soon as Susan had paid he gave her a list of vaudeville and musical comedy houses where girls were wanted. “You can’t fail to suit one of them,” said he. “If not, come back here and get your money.”
After two weary days of canvassing she went back to Ransome. He was just leaving. But he smiled genially, opened his desk and seated himself. “At your service,” said he. “What luck?”
“None,” replied Susan. “I couldn’t live on the wages they offered at the musical comedy places, even if I could get placed.”
“And the vaudeville people?”
“When I said I could only sing and not dance, they looked discouraged. When I said I had no costumes they turned me down.”
“Excellent!” cried Ransome. “You mustn’t be so easily beaten. You must take dancing lessons–perhaps a few singing lessons, too. And you must get some costumes.”
“But that means several hundred dollars.”
“Three or four hundred,” said Ransome airily. “A matter of a few weeks.”