BUT she did not "look out about the booze." Each morning she
awoke in a state of depression so horrible that she wondered
why she could not bring herself to plan suicide. Why was it?
Her marriage? Yes--and she paid it its customary tribute of a
shudder. Yes, her marriage had made all things thereafter
possible. But what else? Lack of courage? Lack of
self-respect? Was it not always assumed that a woman in her
position, if she had a grain of decent instinct, would rush
eagerly upon death? Was she so much worse than others? Or was
what everybody said about these things--everybody who had
experience--was it false, like nearly everything else she had
been taught? She did not understand; she only knew that hope
was as strong within her as health itself--and that she did not
want to die--and that at present she was helpless.
One evening the man she was with--a good-looking and unusually
interesting young chap--suddenly said:
"What a heart action you have got! Let me listen to that again."
"Is it all wrong?" asked Susan, as he pressed his ear against
her chest.
"You ask that as if you rather hoped it was."
"I do--and I don't."
"Well," said he, after listening for a third time, "you'll
never die of heart trouble. I never heard a heart with such a
grand action--like a big, powerful pump, built to last forever.
You're never ill, are you?"
"Not thus far."
"And you'll have a hard time making yourself ill. Health? Why,
your health must be perfect. Let me see." And he proceeded to
thump and press upon her chest with an expertness that proclaimed
the student of medicine. He was all interest and enthusiasm,
took a pencil and, spreading a sheet upon her chest over her
heart, drew its outlines. "There!" he cried.
"What is it?" asked Susan. "I don't understand."
The young man drew a second and much smaller heart within the
outline of hers. "This," he explained, "is about the size of
an ordinary heart. You can see for yourself that yours is
fully one-fourth bigger than the normal."
"What of it?" said Susan.
"Why, health and strength--and vitality--courage--hope--all
one-fourth above the ordinary allowance. Yes, more than a
fourth. I envy you. You ought to live long, stay young until
you're very old--and get pretty much anything you please. You
don't belong to this life. Some accident, I guess. Every once
in a while I run across a case something like yours. You'll go
back where you belong. This is a dip, not a drop."
"You sound like a fortune-teller." She was smiling mockingly.
But in truth she had never in all her life heard words that
thrilled her so, that heartened her so.
"I am. A scientific fortune-teller. And what that kind says
comes true, barring accidents. As you're not ignorant and
careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad. On the
contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get
the splendid exercise of walking--a much more healthful life,
in the essential ways, than respectable women lead. They're
always stuffing, and rumping it. They never move if they can
help. No, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less
intelligent than you look. Oh, yes--death and one other thing."
"Drink." And he looked shrewdly at her.
But drink she must. And each day, as soon as she dressed and
was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until
she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the
mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic
pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities. There is a stage
in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved
and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect. But she was far
from this advanced stage. Her disposition was, if anything,
more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of
liquor. The whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed
to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and
throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she
was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to
accustom. With these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety
asserted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle
mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with
vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning.
By observation and practice she was soon able to measure the
exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper
state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." That
gayety of hers was of the surface only. Behind it her real
self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to
her mood of the day. And she had the sense of being in the
grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged
through some dreadful probation from which she would presently
emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her
desperate fortitude. The past--unreal. The present--a waking
dream. But the future--ah, the future!
He has not candidly explored far beneath the surface of things
who does not know the strange allure, charm even, that many
loathsome things possess. And drink is peculiarly fitted to
bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the
conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by
centuries and ages of unbroken custom. The human animal, for
all its pretenses of inflexibility, is almost infinitely
adaptable--that is why it has risen in several million years of
evolution from about the humblest rank in the mammalian family
to overlordship of the universe. Still, it is doubtful if,
without drink to help her, a girl of Susan's intelligence and
temperament would have been apt to endure. She would probably
have chosen the alternative--death. Hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of girls, at least her equals in sensibility, are
caught in the same calamity every year, tens of thousands, ever
more and more as our civilization transforms under the pressure
of industrialism, are caught in the similar calamities of
soul-destroying toil. And only the few survive who have
perfect health and abounding vitality. Susan's iron strength
enabled her to live; but it was drink that enabled her to
endure. Beyond question one of the greatest blessings that
could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the
drink evil. But at the same time, if drink were taken away
before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an
appalling increase in suicide--in insanity, in the general
total of human misery. For while drink retards the growth of
intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system,
does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of
those stupidities? Our crude and undeveloped new civilization,
strapping men and women and children to the machines and
squeezing all the energy out of them, all the capacity for
vital life, casts them aside as soon as they are useless but
long before they are dead. How unutterably wretched they would
be without drink to give them illusions!
Susan grew fond of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest
she after a few weeks became numb--no new or strange phenomenon
in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running
sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or
excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably
in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at
least saw only those affected like herself--and that helped not
a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook
upon life.
The old Cartesian formula--"I think, therefore I am"--would
come nearer to expressing a truth, were it reversed--"I am,
therefore I think." Our characters are compressed, and our
thoughts bent by our environment. And most of us are
unconscious of our slavery because our environment remains
unchanged from birth until death, and so seems the whole
universe to us.
In spite of her life, in spite of all she did to disguise
herself, there persisted in her face--even when she was dazed or
giddied or stupefied with drink--the expression of the woman on
the right side of the line. Whether it was something in her
character, whether it was not rather due to superiority of
breeding and intelligence, would be difficult to say. However,
there was the _different_ look that irritated many of the other
girls, interfered with her business and made her feel a
hypocrite. She heard so much about the paleness of her lips
that she decided to end that comment by using paint--the
durable kind Ida had recommended. When her lips flamed
carmine, a strange and striking effect resulted. The sad sweet
pensiveness of her eyes--the pallor of her clear skin--then,
that splash of bright red, artificial, bold, defiant--the
contrast of the combination seemed somehow to tell the story of
her life her past no less than her present. And when her
beauty began to come back--for, hard though her life was, it
was a life of good food, of plenty of sleep, of much open air;
so it put no such strain upon her as had the life of the
factory and the tenement--when her beauty came back, the effect
of that contrast of scarlet splash against the sad purity of
pallid cheeks and violet-gray eyes became a mark of
individuality, of distinction. It was not long before Susan
would have as soon thought of issuing forth with her body
uncovered as with her lips unrouged.
She turned away from men who sought her a second time. She was
difficult to find, she went on "duty" only enough days each
week to earn a low average of what was expected from the girls
by their protectors. Yet she got many unexpected presents--and
so had money to lend to the other girls, who soon learned how
"easy" she was.
Maud, sometimes at her own prompting, sometimes prompted by
Jim, who was prompted by Freddie--warned her every few days that
she was skating on the thinnest of ice. But she went her way.
Not until she accompanied a girl to an opium joint to discover
whether dope had the merits claimed for it as a deadener of
pain and a producer of happiness--not until then did Freddie
come in person.
"I hear," said he and she wondered whether he had heard from
Max or from loose-tongued Maud--"that you come into the hotel
so drunk that men sometimes leave you right away again--go
without paying you."
"I must drink," said Susan.
"You must _stop_ drink," retorted he, amiable in his terrible
way. "If you don't, I'll have you pinched and sent up.
That'll bring you to your senses."
"I must drink," said Susan.
"Then I must have you pinched," said he with his mocking laugh.
"Don't be a fool," he went on. "You can make money enough to
soon buy the right sort of clothes so that I can afford to be
seen with you. I'd like to take you out once in a while and
give you a swell time. But what'd we look like together--with
you in those cheap things out of bargain troughs? Not that you
don't look well--for you do. But the rest of you isn't up to
your feet and to the look in your face. The whole thing's got to
be right before a lady can sit opposite _me_ in Murray's or Rector's."
"All I ask is to be let alone," said Susan.
"That isn't playing square--and you've got to play square. What
I want is to set you up in a nice parlor trade--chaps from the
college and the swell clubs and hotels. But I can't do
anything for you as long as you drink this way. You'll have to
stay on the streets."
"That's where I want to stay."
"Well, there's something to be said for the streets," Freddie
admitted. "If a woman don't intend to make sporting her life
business, she don't want to get up among the swells of the
profession, where she'd become known and find it hard to
sidestep. Still, even in the street you ought to make a
hundred, easy--and not go with any man that doesn't suit you."
"Any man that doesn't suit me," said Susan. And, after a
pause, she said it again: "Any man that doesn't suit me."
The young man, with his shrewdness of the street-graduate and
his sensitiveness of the Italian, gave her an understanding
glance. "You look as if you couldn't decide whether to laugh
or cry. I'd try to laugh if I was you."
She had laughed as he spoke.
Freddie nodded approval. "That sounded good to me. You're
getting broken in. Don't take yourself so seriously. After
all, what are you doing? Why, learning to live like a man."
She found this new point of view interesting--and true, too.
Like a man--like all men, except possibly a few--not enough
exceptions to change the rule. Like a man; getting herself
hardened up to the point where she could take part in the cruel
struggle on equal terms with the men. It wasn't their
difference of body any more than it was their difference of
dress that handicapped women; it was the idea behind skirt and
sex--and she was getting rid of that. . . .
The theory was admirable; but it helped her not at all in
practice. She continued to keep to the darkness, to wait in
the deep doorways, so far as she could in her "business hours,"
and to repulse advances in the day time or in public
places--and to drink. She did not go again to the opium joint,
and she resisted the nightly offers of girls and their
"gentlemen friends" to try cocaine in its various forms.
"Dope," she saw, was the medicine of despair. And she was far
from despair. Had she not youth? Had she not health and
intelligence and good looks? Some day she would have finished
her apprenticeship. Then--the career!
Freddie let her alone for nearly a month, though she was
earning less than fifty dollars a week--which meant only thirty
for him. He had never "collected" from her directly, but
always through Jim; and she had now learned enough of the
methods of the system of which she was one of the thousands of
slaves to appreciate that she was treated by Jim with unique
consideration. Not only by the surly and brutal Jim, but also
by the police who oppressed in petty ways wherever they dared
because they hated Freddie's system which took away from them
a part of the graft they regarded as rightfully theirs.
Yes, rightfully theirs. And anyone disposed to be critical of
police morality--or of Freddie Palmer morality--in this matter
of graft would do well to pause and consider the source of his
own income before he waxes too eloquent and too virtuous.
Graft is one of those general words that mean everything and
nothing. What is graft and what is honest income? Just where
shall we draw the line between rightful exploitation of our
fellow-beings through their necessities and their ignorance of
their helplessness, and wrongful exploitation? Do attempts to
draw that line resolve down to making virtuous whatever I may
appropriate and vicious whatever is appropriated in ways other
than mine? And if so are not the police and the Palmers
entitled to their day in the moral court no less than the
tariff-baron and market-cornerer, the herder and driver of wage
slaves, the retail artists in cold storage filth, short weight
and shoddy goods? However, "we must draw the line somewhere"
or there will be no such thing as morality under our social
system. So why not draw it at anything the other fellow does
to make money. In adopting this simple rule, we not only
preserve the moralities from destruction but also establish our
own virtue and the other fellow's villainy. Truly, never is
the human race so delightfully, so unconsciously, amusing as
when it discusses right and wrong.
When she saw Freddie again, he was far from sober. He showed
it by his way of beginning. Said he:
"I've got to hand you a line of rough talk, Queenie. I took on
this jag for your especial benefit," said he. "I'm a fool
about you and you take advantage of it. That's bad for both of
us. . . . You're drinking as much as ever?"
"More," replied she. "It takes more and more."
"How can you expect to get on?" cried he, exasperated.
"As I told you, I couldn't make a cent if I didn't drink."
Freddie stared moodily at her, then at the floor--they were in
her room. Finally he said:
"You get the best class of men. I put my swell friends on to
where you go slipping by, up and down in the shadow--and it's
all they can do to find you. The best class of men--men all
the swell respectable girls in town are crazy to hook up
with--those of 'em that ain't married already. If you're good
enough for those chaps they ought to be good enough for you.
Yet some of 'em complain to me that they get thrown down--and
others kick because you were too full--and, damn it, you act so
queer that you scare 'em away. What am I to do about it?"
She was silent.
"I want you to promise me you'll take a brace."
No answer.
"You won't promise?"
"No--because I don't intend to. I'm doing the best I can."
"You think I'm a good thing. You think I'll take anything off
you, because I'm stuck on you--and appreciate that you ain't on
the same level with the rest of these heifers. Well--I'll not
let any woman con me. I never have. I never will. And I'll
make you realize that you're not square with me. I'll let you
get a taste of life as it is when a girl hasn't got a friend
with a pull."
"As you please," said Susan indifferently. "I don't in the
least care what happens to me."
"We'll see about that," cried he, enraged. "I'll give you a
week to brace up in."
The look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was
menacing enough. But she was not disturbed; these signs of
anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him.
For it was wholly unlike the Freddie Palmer the rest of the
world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way. She knew
that Palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked
her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the
aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit.
A week passed, during which she did not see him. But she heard
that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was
drinking wildly. A week--ten days--then----
One night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down Seventh
Avenue from Forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm.
"Come along," said he roughly. "You're drinking and
soliciting. I've got to clear the streets of some of these
tarts. It's got so decent people can't move without falling
over 'em."
Susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the
ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can
make itself heard among the ruling classes make the sway of the
police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived
there without getting something of that dread and horror of the
police which to people of the upper classes seems childish or
evidence of secret criminal hankerings. And this nervousness
had latterly been increased to terror by what she had learned
from her fellow-outcasts--the hideous tales of oppression, of
robbery, of bodily and moral degradation. But all this terror
had been purely fanciful, as any emotion not of experience
proves to be when experience evokes the reality. At that
touch, at the sound of those rough words--at that _reality_ of
the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work
at Matson's and to live with the Brashears, she straightway
lost consciousness. When her senses returned she was in a
cell, lying on a wooden bench.
There must have been some sort of wild struggle; for her
clothes were muddy, her hat was crushed into shapelessness, her
veil was so torn that she had difficulty in arranging it to act
as any sort of concealment. Though she had no mirror at which
to discover the consolation, she need have had no fear of being
recognized, so distorted were all her features by the frightful
paroxysms of grief that swept and ravaged her body that night.
She fainted again when they led her out to put her in the wagon.
She fainted a third time when she heard her name--"Queenie
Brown"--bellowed out by the court officer. They shook her into
consciousness, led her to the court-room. She was conscious of
a stifling heat, of a curious crowd staring at her with eyes
which seemed to bore red hot holes into her flesh. As she
stood before the judge, with head limp upon her bosom, she
heard in her ear a rough voice bawling, "You're discharged.
The judge says don't come here again." And she was pushed
through an iron gate. She walked unsteadily up the aisle,
between two masses of those burning-eyed human monsters. She
felt the cold outside air like a vast drench of icy water flung
upon her. If it had been raining, she might have gone toward
the river. But than that day New York had never been more
radiantly the City of the Sun. How she got home she never
knew, but late in the afternoon she realized that she was in
her own room.
Hour after hour she lay upon the bed, body and mind inert.
Helpless--no escape--no courage to live--yet no wish to die.
How much longer would it last? Surely the waking from this
dream must come soon.
About noon the next day Freddie came. "I let you off easy,"
said he, sitting on the bed upon which she was lying dressed as
when she came in the day before. "Have you been drinking again?"
"No," she muttered.
"Well--don't. Next time, a week on the Island. . . . Did you hear?"
"Yes."
"Don't turn me against you. I'd hate to have to make an awful
example of you."
"I must drink," she repeated in the same stolid way.
He abruptly but without shock lifted her to a sitting position.
His arm held her body up; her head was thrown back and her face
was looking calmly at him. She realized that he had been
drinking--drinking hard. Her eyes met his terrible eyes
without flinching. He kissed her full upon the lips. With her
open palm she struck him across the cheek, bringing the red
fierily to its smooth fair surface. The devil leaped into his
eyes, the devil of cruelty and lust. He smiled softly and
wickedly. "I see you've forgotten the lesson I gave you three
months ago. You've got to be taught to be afraid all over again."
"I _am_ not afraid," said she. "I _was_ not afraid. You can't
make me afraid."
"We'll see," murmured he. And his fingers began to caress her
round smooth throat.
"If you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "I'll kill you."
His eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know
his innermost secret. "I want you--I want _you_--damn you," he
said, between his clinched teeth. "You're the first one I
couldn't get. There's something in you I can't get!"
"That's _me_," she replied.
"You hate me, don't you?"
"No."
"Then you love me?"
"No. I care nothing about you."
He let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood
looking out moodily. After a while he said without turning:
"My mother kept a book shop--on the lower East Side. She
brought me up at home. At home!" And he laughed sardonically.
"She hated me because I looked like my father."
Silence, then he spoke again:
"You've never been to my flat. I've got a swell place. I want
to cut out this part of the game. I can get along without it.
You're going to move in with me, and stop this street business.
I make good money. You can have everything you want."
"I prefer to keep on as I am."
"What's the difference? Aren't you mine whenever I want you?"
"I prefer to be free."
"_Free!_ Why, you're not free. Can't I send you to the Island
any time I feel like it--just as I can the other girls?"
"Yes--you can do that. But I'm free, all the same."
"No more than the other girls."
"Yes."
"What do you mean?"
"Unless you understand, I couldn't make you see it," she said.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair,
which had partly fallen down. "I think you do understand."
"What in the hell do you want, anyhow?" he demanded.
"If I knew--do you suppose I'd be here?"
He watched her with baffled, longing eyes. "What is it," he
muttered, "that's so damn peculiar about you?"
It was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her
put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent
reason why this should have been.
Life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler,
preacher, fashionable woman, prostitute, domestic woman,
laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of
familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted. And
to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we
grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is
arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be
immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for
this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather
monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with
any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have
is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is
throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey
the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever
a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and,
that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type.
When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous
effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a
thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost
in the school, the fashion, the craze. We have not the courage
to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might
be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the
rank of real identity. Individuality--distinction--where it
does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it
out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is
like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it
the most positive assertion of race and sex, of family, type,
and so on.
Susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of
physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and
body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the
flower of passionate love. But now there was beginning to show
in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring
through the streets of the city. It made the quicker observers
in the passing throng turn the head for a second and wondering
glance. Most of them assumed they had been stirred by her
superiority of face and figure. But striking faces and figures
of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of New
York and of several other American cities. The truth was that
they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression
telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by
experience which usually finds and molds mere passive material.
This expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in
her profile as in her full face. And as she sat there on the
edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this
expression that disconcerted Freddie Palmer, for the first time
in all his contemptuous dealings with the female sex. In his
eyes was a ferocious desire to seize her and again try to
conquer and to possess.
She had become almost unconscious of his presence. He startled
her by suddenly crying, "Oh, you go to hell!" and flinging from
the room, crashing the door shut behind him.
Maud had grown tired of the haberdasher's clerk and his
presumptions upon her frank fondness which he wholly
misunderstood. She had dropped him for a rough looking
waiter-singer in a basement drinking place. He was beating her
and taking all the money she had for herself, and was spending
it on another woman, much older than Maud and homely--and Maud
knew, and complained of him bitterly to everyone but himself.
She was no longer hanging round Susan persistently, having been
discouraged by the failure of her attempts at intimacy with a
girl who spent nearly all her spare time at reading or at plays
and concerts. Maud was now chumming with a woman who preyed
upon the patrons of a big Broadway hotel--she picked them up
near the entrance, robbed them, and when they asked the hotel
detectives to help them get back their stolen money, the
detectives, who divided with her, frightened them off by saying
she was a mulatto and would compel them to make a public
appearance against her in open court. This woman, older and
harder than most of the girls, though of quiet and refined
appearance and manner, was rapidly dragging Maud down. Also,
Maud's looks were going because she ate irregularly all kinds
of trash, and late every night ate herself full to bursting and
drank herself drunk to stupefaction.
Susan's first horror of the men she met--men of all
classes--was rapidly modified into an inconsistent, therefore
characteristically human, mingling of horror and tolerance.
Nobody, nothing, was either good or bad, but all veered like
weathercocks in the shifting wind. She decided that people
were steadily good only where their lot happened to be cast in
a place in which the good wind held steadily, and that those
who were usually bad simply had the misfortune to have to live
where the prevailing winds were bad.
For instance, there was the handsome, well educated, well
mannered young prize-fighter, Ned Ballou, who was Estelle's
"friend." Ballou, big and gentle and as incapable of bad humor
as of constancy or of honesty about money matters, fought under
the name of Joe Geary and was known as Upper Cut Joe because
usually, in the third round, never later than the fifth, he
gave the knockout to his opponent by a cruelly swift and savage
uppercut. He had educated himself marvelously well. But he
had been brought up among thieves and had by some curious freak
never learned to know what a moral sense was, which is one--and
a not unattractive--step deeper down than those who know what
a moral sense is but never use it. At supper in Gaffney's he
related to Susan and Estelle how he had won his greatest
victory--the victory of Terry the Cyclone, that had lifted him
up into the class of secure money-makers. He told how he
always tried to "rattle" his opponent by talking to him, by
pouring out in an undertone a stream of gibes, jeers, insults.
The afternoon of the fight Terry's first-born had died, but the
money for the funeral expenses and to save the wife from the
horrors and dangers of the free wards had to be earned. Joe
Geary knew that he must win this fight or drop into the working
or the criminal class. Terry was a "hard one"; so
circumstances compelled, those desperate measures which great
men, from financiers and generals down to prize-fighters, do
not shrink from else they would not be great, but small.
As soon as he was facing Terry in the ring--Joe so he related
with pride in his cleverness--began to "guy"--"Well, you Irish
fake--so the kid's dead--eh? Who was its pa, say?--the dirty
little bastard--or does the wife know which one it was----" and
so on. And Terry, insane with grief and fury, fought wild--and
Joe became a champion.
As she listened Susan grew cold with horror and with hate.
Estelle said:
"Tell the rest of it, Joe."
"Oh, that was nothing," replied he.
When he strolled away to talk with some friends Estelle told
"the rest" that was "nothing." The championship secure, Joe
had paid all Terry's bills, had supported Terry and his wife
for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job"
of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay
poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month
or so. He was caught, did a year on the Island before his
"pull" could get him out. And all the time he was in the "pen"
he so arranged it with his friends that the invalid Terry and
his invalid wife did not suffer. And all this he had done not
because he had a sense of owing Terry, but because he was of
the "set" in which it is the custom to help anybody who happens
to need it, and aid begun becomes an obligation to "see it through."
It was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos
she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and Ruth
conspiring to take Sam away from her.
What a world! If only these shifting, usually evil winds of
circumstance could be made to blow good!
A few evenings after the arrest Maud came for Susan, persuaded
her to go out. They dined at about the only good restaurant
where unescorted women were served after nightfall. Afterward
they went "on duty." It was fine overhead and the air was
cold and bracing--one of those marvelous New York winter nights
which have the tonic of both sea and mountains and an
exhilaration, in addition, from the intense bright-burning life
of the mighty city. For more than a week there had been a
steady downpour of snow, sleet and finally rain. Thus, the
women of the streets had been doing almost no business. There
was not much money in sitting in drinking halls and the back
rooms of saloons and picking up occasional men; the best trade
was the men who would not venture to show themselves in such
frankly disreputable places, but picked out women in the
crowded streets and followed them to quiet dark places to make
the arrangements--men stimulated by good dinners, or, later on,
in the evening, those who left parties of elegant
respectability after theater or opera. On this first night of
business weather in nearly two weeks the streets were crowded
with women and girls. They were desperately hard up and they
made open dashes for every man they could get at. All classes
were made equally bold--the shop and factory and office and
theater girls with wages too small for what they regarded as a
decent living; the women with young children to support and
educate; the protected professional regulars; the miserable
creatures who had to get along as best they could without
protection, and were prey to every blackmailing officer of an
anti-vice society and to every policeman and fly-cop not above
levying upon women who were "too low to be allowed to live,
anyhow." Out from all kinds of shelters swarmed the women who
were demonstrating how prostitution flourishes and tends to
spread to every class of society whenever education develops
tastes beyond the earning power of their possessors. And with
clothes and food to buy, rent to pay, dependents to support,
these women, so many days hampered in the one way that was open
to them to get money, made the most piteous appeals to the men.
Not tearful appeals, not appeals to sympathy or even to
charity, but to passion. They sought in every way to excite.
They exhibited their carefully gotten-up legs; they made
indecent gestures; they said the vilest things; they offered
the vilest inducements; they lowered their prices down and
down. And such men as did not order them off with disdain,
listened with laughter, made jokes at which the wretched
creatures laughed as gayly as if they were not mad with anxiety
and were not hating these men who were holding on to that which
they must have to live.
"Too many out tonight," said Maud as they walked their
beat--Forty-second between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. "I knew
it would be this way. Let's go in here and get warm."
They went into the back room of a saloon where perhaps half a
dozen women were already seated, some of them gray with the
cold against which their thin showy garments were no
protection. Susan and Maud sat at a table in a corner; Maud
broke her rule and drank whiskey with Susan. After they had
taken perhaps half a dozen drinks, Maud grew really
confidential. She always, even in her soberest moments, seemed
to be telling everything she knew; but Susan had learned that
there were in her many deep secrets, some of which not even
liquor could unlock.
"I'm going to tell you something," she now said to Susan. "You
must promise not to give me away."
"Don't tell me," replied Susan. She was used to being
flattered--or victimized, according to the point of view--with
confidences. She assumed Maud was about to confess some secret
about her own self, as she had the almost universal habit of
never thinking of anyone else. "Don't tell me," said she.
"I'm tired of being used to air awful secrets. It makes me
feel like a tenement wash line."
"This is about you," said Maud. "If it's ever found out that
I put you wise, Jim'll have me killed. Yes--killed."
Susan, reckless by this time, laughed. "Oh, trash!" she said.
"No trash at all," insisted Maud. "When you know this town
through and through you'll know that murder's something that
can be arranged as easy as buying a drink. What risk is there
in making one of _us_ 'disappear'? None in the world. I always
feel that Jim'll have me killed some day--unless I go crazy
sometime and kill him. He's stuck on me--or, at least, he's
jealous of me--and if he ever found out I had a
lover--somebody--anybody that didn't pay--why, it'd be all up
with me. Little Maud would go on the grill."
She ordered and slowly drank another whiskey before she
recalled what she had set out to confide. By way of a fresh
start she said, "What do you think of Freddie?"
"I don't know," replied Susan. And it was the truth. Her
instinctive belief in a modified kind of fatalism made her
judgments of people--even of those who caused her to
suffer--singularly free from personal bitterness. Freddie, a
mere instrument of destiny, had his good side, his human side,
she knew. At his worst he was no worse than the others, And
aside from his queer magnetism, there was a certain force in
him that compelled her admiration; at least he was not one of
the petty instruments of destiny. He had in him the same
quality she felt gestating within herself. "I don't know what
to think," she repeated.
Maud had been reflecting while Susan was casting about, as she
had many a time before, for her real opinion of her master who
was in turn the slave of Finnegan, who was in his turn the
slave of somebody higher up, she didn't exactly know who--or
why--or the why of any of it--or the why of the grotesque
savage purposeless doings of destiny in general. Maud now
burst out:
"I don't care. I'm going to put you wise if I die for it."
"Don't," said Susan. "I don't want to know."
"But I've _got_ to tell you. Do you know what Freddie's going to do?"
Susan smiled disdainfully. "I don't care. You mustn't tell
me--when you've been drinking this way----"
"Finnegan's police judge is a man named Bennett. As soon as
Bennett comes back to Jefferson Market Police Court, Freddie's
going to have you sent up for three months."
Susan's glass was on the way to her lips. She set it down
again. The drunken old wreck of an entertainer at the piano in
the corner was bellowing out his favorite song--"I Am the King
of the Vikings." Susan began to hum the air.
"It's gospel," cried Maud, thinking Susan did not believe her.
"He's a queer one, is Freddie. They're all afraid of him.
You'd think he was a coward, the way he bullies women and that.
But somehow he ain't--not a bit. He'll be a big man in the
organization some day, they all say. He never lets up till he
gets square. And he thinks you're not square--after all he's
done for you."
"Perhaps not--as he looks at it," said Susan.
"And Jim says he's crazy in love with you, and that he wants to
put you where other men can't see you and where maybe he can
get over caring about you. That's the real reason. He's a
queer devil. But then all men are though none quite like Freddie."
"So I'm to go to the Island for three months," said Susan reflectively.
"You don't seem to care. It's plain you never was there. . . .
And you've got to go. There's no way out of it--unless you
skip to another city. And if you did you never could come back
here. Freddie'd see that you got yours as soon as you landed."
Susan sat looking at her glass. Maud watched her in
astonishment. "You're as queer as Freddie," said she at
length. "I never feel as if I was acquainted with you--not
really. I never had a lady friend like that before. You don't
seem to be a bit excited about what Freddie's going to do. Are
you in love with him?"
Susan lifted strange, smiling eyes to Maud's curious gaze.
"I--in _love_--with a _man_," she said slowly. And then she laughed.
"Don't laugh that way," cried Maud. "It gives me the creeps.
What are you going to do?"
"What can I do?"
"Nothing."
"Then if there's nothing to do, I'll no nothing."
"Go to the Island for three months?"
Susan shrugged her shoulders. "I haven't gone yet." She rose.
"It's too stuffy and smelly in here," said she. "Let's move out."
"No. I'll wait. I promised to meet a gentleman friend here.
You'll not tell that I tipped you off?"
"You'd not have told me if you hadn't known I wouldn't."
"That's so. But--why don't you make it up with Freddie?"
"I couldn't do that."
"He's dead in love. I'm sure you could."
Again Susan's eyes became strange. "I'm sure I couldn't. Good
night." She got as far as the door, came back. "Thank you for
telling me."
"Oh, that's all right," murmured the girl. She was embarrassed
by Susan's manner. She was frightened by Susan's eyes. "You
ain't going to----" There she halted.
"What?"
"To jump off? Kill yourself?"
"Hardly," said Susan. "I've got a lot to do before I die."
She went directly home. Palmer was lying on the bed, a
cigarette between his lips, a newspaper under his feet to
prevent his boots from spoiling the spread--one of the many
small indications of the prudence, thrift and calculation that
underlay the almost insane recklessness of his surface
character, and that would save him from living as the fool
lives and dying as the fool dies.
"I thought you wouldn't slop round in these streets long," said
he, as she paused upon the threshold. "So I waited."
She went to the bureau, unlocked the top drawer, took the
ten-dollar bill she had under some undershirts there, put it in
her right stocking where there were already a five and a two.
She locked the drawer, tossed the key into an open box of
hairpins. She moved toward the door.
"Where are you going?" asked he, still staring at the ceiling.
"Out. I've made almost nothing this week."
"Sit down. I want to talk to you."
She hesitated, seated herself on a chair near the bed.
He frowned at her. "You've been drinking?"
"Yes."
"I've been drinking myself, but I've got a nose like a hunting
dog. What do you do it for?"
"What's the use of explaining? You'd not understand."
"Perhaps I would. I'm one-fourth Italian--and they understand
everything. . . . You're fond of reading, aren't you?"
"It passes the time."
"While I was waiting for you I glanced at your new
books--Emerson--Dickens--Zola." He was looking toward the row of
paper backs that filled almost the whole length of the mantel.
"I must read them. I always like your books. You spend nearly
as much time reading as I do--and you don't need it, for you've
got a good education. What do you read for? To amuse yourself?"
"No."
"To get away from yourself?"
"No."
"Then why?" persisted he.
"To find out about myself."
He thought a moment, turned his face toward her. "You _are_
clever!" he said admiringly. "What's your game?"
"My game?"
"What are you aiming for? You've got too much sense not to be
aiming for something."
She looked at him; the expression that marked her as a person
peculiar and apart was glowing in her eyes like a bed of
red-hot coals covered with ashes.
"What?" he repeated.
"To get strong," replied she. "Women are born weak and bred
weaker. I've got to get over being a woman. For there isn't
any place in this world for a woman except under the shelter of
some man. And I don't want that." The underlying strength of
her features abruptly came into view. "And I won't have it,"
she added.
He laughed. "But the men'll never let _you_ be anything but a woman."
"We'll see," said she, smiling. The strong look had vanished
into the soft contour of her beautiful youth.
"Personally, I like you better when you've been drinking," he
went on. "You're sad when you're sober. As you drink you
liven up."
"When I get over being sad if I'm sober, when I learn to take
things as they come, just like a man--a strong man, then I'll
be----" She stopped.
"Be what?"
"Ready."
"Ready for what?"
"How do I know?"
He swung himself to a sitting position. "Meanwhile, you're
coming to live with me. I've been fighting against it, but I
give up. I need you. You're the one I've been looking for.
Pack your traps. I'll call a cab and we'll go over to my flat.
Then we'll go to Rector's and celebrate."
She shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I can't."
"Why not?"
"I told you. There's something in me that won't let me."
He rose, walked to her very deliberately. He took one of her
hands from her lap, drew her to her feet, put his hands
strongly on her shoulders. "You belong to me," he said, his
lips smiling charmingly, but the devil in the gleam of his eyes
and in the glistening of his beautiful, cruel teeth. "Pack up."
"You know that I won't."
He slowly crushed her in his arms, slowly pressed his lips upon
hers. A low scream issued from her lips and she seized him by
the throat with both hands, one hand over the other, and thrust
him backward. He reeled, fell upon his back on the bed; she
fell with him, clung to him--like a bull dog--not as if she
would not, but as if she could not, let go. He clutched at her
fingers; failing to dislodge them, he tried to thrust his
thumbs into her eyes. But she seized his right thumb between
her teeth and bit into it until they almost met. And at the
same time her knees ground into his abdomen. He choked,
gurgled, grew dark red, then gray, then a faint blackish blue,
lay limp under her. But she did not relax until the blue of
his face had deepened to black and his eyes began to bulge from
their sockets. At those signs that he was beyond doubt
unconscious, she cautiously relaxed her fingers. She
unclenched her teeth; his arm, which had been held up by the
thumb she was biting, dropped heavily. She stood over him, her
eyes blazing insanely at him. She snatched out her hatpin,
flung his coat and waistcoat from over his chest, felt for his
heart. With the murderous eight inches of that slender steel
poniard poised for the drive, she began to sob, flung the
weapon away, took his face between her hands and kissed him.
"You fiend! You fiend!" she sobbed.
She changed to her plainest dress. Leaving the blood-stained
blouse on the bed beside him where she had flung it down after
tearing it off, she turned out the light, darted down stairs
and into the street. At Times Square she took the Subway for
the Bowery. To change one's world, one need not travel far in
New York; the ocean is not so wide as is the gap between the
Tenderloin and the lower East Side.