AFTER a few days, when she was viewing her situation in a
calmer, more normal mood with the practical feminine eye, she
regretted that she had refused Gideon's money. She was proud
of that within herself which had impelled and compelled her to
refuse it; but she wished she had it. Taking it, she felt,
would have added nothing to her humiliation in her own sight;
and for what he thought of her, one way or the other, she cared
not a pin. It is one of the familiar curiosities of human
inconsistency which is at bottom so completely consistent, that
she did not regret having refused his far more valuable offer
to aid her.
She did not regret even during those few next days of
disheartening search for work. We often read how purpose can
be so powerful that it compels. No doubt if Susan's purpose
had been to get temporary relief--or, perhaps, had it been to
get permanent relief by weaving a sex spell--she would in that
desperate mood have been able to compel. Unfortunately she was
not seeking to be a pauper or a parasite; she was trying to
find steady employment at living wages--that is, at wages above
the market value for female and for most male--labor. And that
sort of purpose cannot compel.
Our civilization overflows with charity--which is simply
willingness to hand back to labor as generous gracious alms a
small part of the loot from the just wages of labor. But of
real help--just wages for honest labor--there is little, for real
help would disarrange the system, would abolish the upper classes.
She had some faint hopes in the direction of millinery and
dressmaking, the things for which she felt she had distinct
talent. She was soon disabused. There was nothing for her,
and could be nothing until after several years of doubtful
apprenticeship in the trades to which any female person seeking
employment to piece out an income instinctively turned first
and offered herself at the employer's own price. Day after
day, from the first moment of the industrial day until its end,
she hunted--wearily, yet unweariedly--with resolve living on
after the death of hope. She answered advertisements; despite
the obviously sensible warnings of the working girls she talked
with she even consulted and took lists from the religious and
charitable organizations, patronized by those whose enthusiasm
about honest work had never been cooled by doing or trying to
do any of it, and managed by those who, beginning as workers,
had made all haste to escape from it into positions where they
could live by talking about it and lying about it--saying the
things comfortable people subscribe to philanthropies to hear.
There was work, plenty of it. But not at decent wages, and not
leading to wages that could be earned without viciously
wronging those under her in an executive position. But even in
those cases the prospect of promotion was vague and remote,
with illness and failing strength and poor food, worse clothing
and lodgings, as certainties straightway. At some places she
was refused with the first glance at her. No good-looking
girls wanted; even though they behaved themselves and attracted
customers, the customers lost sight of matters of merchandise
in the all-absorbing matter of sex. In offices a good-looking
girl upset discipline, caused the place to degenerate into a
deer-haunt in the mating season. No place did she find
offering more than four dollars a week, except where the dress
requirements made the nominally higher wages even less.
Everywhere women's wages were based upon the assumption that
women either lived at home or made the principal part of their
incomes by prostitution, disguised or frank. In fact, all
wages even the wages of men except in a few trades--were too
small for an independent support. There had to be a family--and
the whole family had to work--and even then the joint income
was not enough for decency. She had no family or friends to
help her--at least, no friends except those as poor as herself,
and she could not commit the crime of adding to their miseries.
She had less than ten dollars left. She must get to work at
once--and what she earned must supply her with all. A note
came from Jeffries--a curt request that she call--curt to
disguise the eagerness to have her back. She tore it up. She
did not even debate the matter. It was one of her significant
qualities that she never had the inclination, apparently lacked
the power, to turn back once she had turned away. Mary Hinkle
came, urged her. Susan listened in silence, merely shook her
head for answer, changed the subject.
In the entrance to the lofts of a tall Broadway building she
saw a placard: "Experienced hands at fancy ready-to-wear hat
trimming wanted." She climbed three steep flights and was in
a large, low-ceilinged room where perhaps seventy-five girls
were at work. She paused in the doorway long enough to observe
the kind of work--a purely mechanical process of stitching a
few trimmings in exactly the same way upon a cheap hat frame.
Then she went to an open window in a glass partition and asked
employment of a young Jew with an incredibly long nose
thrusting from the midst of a pimply face which seemed merely
its too small base.
"Experienced?" asked the young man.
"I can do what those girls are doing."
With intelligent eyes he glanced at her face, then let his
glance rove contemptuously over the room full of workers. "I
should hope so," said he. "Forty cents a dozen. Want to try it?"
"When may I go to work?"
"Right away. Write your name here."
Susan signed her name to what she saw at a glance was some sort
of contract. She knew it contained nothing to her advantage,
much to her disadvantage. But she did not care. She had to
have work--something, anything that would stop the waste of her
slender capital. And within fifteen minutes she was seated in
the midst of the sweating, almost nauseatingly odorous women of
all ages, was toiling away at the simple task of making an ugly
hat frame still more ugly by the addition of a bit of tawdry
cotton ribbon, a buckle, and a bunch of absurdly artificial
flowers. She was soon able to calculate roughly what she could
make in six days. She thought she could do two dozen of the
hats a day; and twelve dozen hats at forty cents the dozen
would mean four dollars and eighty cents a week!
Four dollars and eighty cents! Less than she had planned to
set aside for food alone, out of her ten dollars as a model.
Next her on the right sat a middle-aged woman, grossly fat,
repulsively shapeless, piteously homely--one of those luckless
human beings who are foredoomed from the outset never to know
any of the great joys of life the joys that come through our
power to attract our fellow-beings. As this woman stitched
away, squinting through the steel-framed spectacles set upon
her snub nose, Susan saw that she had not even good health to
mitigate her lot, for her color was pasty and on her dirty skin
lay blotches of dull red. Except a very young girl here and
there all the women had poor or bad skins. And Susan was not
made disdainful by the odor which is far worse than that of any
lower animal, however dirty, because the human animal must wear
clothing. She had lived in wretchedness in a tenement; she
knew that this odor was an inevitable part of tenement life
when one has neither the time nor the means to be clean. Poor
food, foul air, broken sleep--bad health, disease, unsightly
faces, repulsive bodies!
No wonder the common people looked almost like another race in
contrast with their brothers and sisters of the comfortable
classes. Another race! The race into which she would soon be
reborn under the black magic of poverty! As she glanced and
reflected on what she saw, viewed it in the light of her
experience, her fingers slackened, and she could speed them up
only in spurts.
"If I stay here," thought she, "in a few weeks I shall be like
these others. No matter how hard I may fight, I'll be dragged
down." As impossible to escape the common lot as for a swimmer
alone in mid-ocean to keep up indefinitely whether long or
brief, the struggle could have but, the one end--to be sunk in,
merged in, the ocean.
It took no great amount of vanity for her to realize that she
was in every way the superior of all those around her--in every
way except one. What did she lack? Why was it that with her
superior intelligence, her superior skill both of mind and of
body, she could be thus dragged down and held far below her
natural level? Why could she not lift herself up among the
sort of people with whom she belonged--or even make a beginning
toward lifting herself up? Why could she not take hold? What
did she lack? What must she acquire--or what get rid of?
At lunch time she walked with the ugly woman up and down the
first side street above the building in which the factory was
located. She ate a roll she bought from a pushcart man, the
woman munched an apple with her few remnants of teeth. "Most
of the girls is always kicking," said the woman. "But I'm
mighty satisfied. I get enough to eat and to wear, and I've
got a bed to sleep in--and what else is there in life for
anybody, rich or poor?"
"There's something to be said for that," replied Susan,
marveling to find in this piteous creature the only case of
thorough content she had ever seen.
"I make my four to five per," continued the woman. "And I've
got only myself. Thank God, I was never fool enough to marry.
It's marrying that drags us poor people down and makes us
miserable. Some says to me, 'Ain't you lonesome?' And I says
to them, says I, 'Why, I'm used to being alone. I don't want
anything else.' If they was all like me, they'd not be fightin'
and drinkin' and makin' bad worse. The bosses always likes to
give me work. They say I'm a model worker, and I'm proud to
say they're right. I'm mighty grateful to the bosses that
provide for the like of us. What'd we do without 'em? That's
what _I_'d like to know."
She had pitied this woman because she could never hope to
experience any of the great joys of life. What a waste of pity,
she now thought. She had overlooked the joy of joys--delusions.
This woman was secure for life against unhappiness.
A few days, and Susan was herself regarded as a model worker.
She turned out hats so rapidly that the forewoman, urged on by
Mr. Himberg, the proprietor, began to nag at the other girls.
And presently a notice of general reduction to thirty-five
cents a dozen was posted. There had been a union; it had won
a strike two years before--and then had been broken up by
shrewd employing of detectives who had got themselves elected
officers. With the union out of the way, there was no check
upon the bosses in their natural and lawful effort to get that
profit which is the most high god of our civilization. A few
of the youngest and most spirited girls--those from families
containing several workers--indignantly quit. A few others
murmured, but stayed on. The mass dumbly accepted the extra
twist in the screw of the mighty press that was slowly
squeezing them to death. Neither to them nor to Susan herself
did it happen to occur that she was the cause of the general
increase of hardship and misery. However, to have blamed her
would have been as foolish and as unjust as to blame any other
individual. The system ordained it all. Oppression and
oppressed were both equally its helpless instruments. No
wonder all the vast beneficent discoveries of science that
ought to have made the whole human race healthy, long-lived and
prosperous, are barely able to save the race from swift decay
and destruction under the ravages of this modern system of
labor worse than slavery--for under slavery the slave, being
property whose loss could not be made good without expense, was
protected in life and in health.
Susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning
power. She had been deceived by her swiftness in the first
days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her
down. Her first week's earnings were only four dollars and
thirty cents. This in her freshness, and in the busiest season
when wages were at the highest point.
In the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little
dingier--lived a man. Like herself he had no trade--that is,
none protected by a powerful union and by the still more
powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of
health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that
together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages
from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism. He
was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most
resourceful of men. He was insurance agent, toilet soap agent,
piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of
music on commission. He worked fourteen and sixteen hours a
day. He made nominally about twelve to fifteen a week.
Actually--because of the poverty of his customers and his too
sympathetic nature he made five to six a week--the most any
working person could hope for unless in one of the few favored
trades. Barely enough to keep body and soul together. And why
should capital that needs so much for fine houses and wines and
servants and automobiles and culture and charity and the other
luxuries--why should capital pay more when so many were
competing for the privilege of being allowed to work?
She gave up her room at Mrs. Tucker's--after she had spent
several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking
about the miseries of the fast women of the only class she
could hope to enter. "A woman," she decided, "can't even earn
a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the
right sort of a start. 'To him that hath shall be given; from
him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he
hath.' Gideon was my chance and I threw it away."
Still, she did not regret. Of all the horrors the most
repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who
could take it away at his whim.
She disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the
rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls.
She believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls
with more false pride, with more awe of snobbish
conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the
superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints
and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying
and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug
morality. She felt that she could bear with almost any
annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to
get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see
it and the nose smell it. But she found all the homes full,
with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the
working girls said, with professional objects of charity. Thus
she had no opportunity to judge for herself whether there was
any truth in the prejudice of the girls against these few and
feeble attempts to mitigate the miseries of a vast and ever
vaster multitude of girls. Adding together all the
accommodations offered by all the homes of every description,
there was a total that might possibly have provided for the
homeless girls of a dozen factories or sweatshops--and the
number of homeless girls was more than a quarter of a million,
was increasing at the rate of more than a hundred a day.
Charity is so trifling a force that it can, and should be,
disregarded. It serves no _good_ useful service. It enables
comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be
done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor
bring upon themselves. It obscures the truth that modern
civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of
decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution. The
reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our
magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish
to be disturbed--and that we dearly love the tickling sensation
in our vanity of generosity.
Susan was compelled to the common lot--the lot that will be the
common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking
advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and
children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves.
At two dollars a week, double what her income justified--she
rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street. It was a
closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no
protection against sound or vermin, not giving even privacy
from prying eyes. She might have done a little better had she
been willing to share room and bed with one or more girls, but
not enough better to compensate for what that would have meant.
The young Jew with the nose so impossible that it elevated his
countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had
taken a friendly fancy to her. He was Julius Bam, nephew of
the proprietor. In her third week he offered her the
forewoman's place. "You've got a few brains in your head,"
said he. "Miss Tuohy's a boob. Take the job and you'll push
up. We'll start you at five per."
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.