SHE was like one who has fallen bleeding and broken into a
cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls
toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly
sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward
and down into a deeper chasm.
Occasionally sheer exhaustion of nerves made it impossible for
her to drink herself again into apathy before the effects of
the last doses of the poison had worn off. In these intervals
of partial awakening--she never permitted them to lengthen out,
as such sensation as she had was of one
falling--falling--through empty space--with whirling brain and
strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or
hallucinations before the eyes--falling
down--down--whither?--to how great a depth?--or was there no
bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black
of death's bottomless oblivion?
Drink--always drink. Yet in every other way she took care of
her health--a strange mingling of prudence and subtle hope with
recklessness and frank despair. All her refinement, baffled in
the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical. She would be
neat and well dressed; she would not let herself be seized of
the diseases on the pariah in those regions--the diseases
through dirt and ignorance and indifference.
In the regions she now frequented recklessness was the keynote.
There was the hilarity of the doomed; there was the cynical or
stolid indifference to heat or cold, to rain or shine, to rags,
to filth, to jail, to ejection for nonpayment of rent, to
insult of word or blow. The fire engines--the ambulance--the
patrol wagon--the city dead wagon--these were all ever passing
and repassing through those swarming streets. It was the
vastest, the most populous tenement area of the city. Its
inhabitants represented the common lot--for it is the common
lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to
nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever
being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. The
masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for
the comforts and luxuries. The masses are ignorant; the
classes are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious
and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes
automatically and of necessity stops just short of the
catastrophe point--for the masses must have enough to give them
the strength to work and reproduce. To go down through the
social system as had Susan from her original place well up
among the classes is like descending from the beautiful dining
room of the palace where the meat is served in taste and
refinement upon costly dishes by well mannered servants to
attractively dressed people--descending along the various stages
of the preparation of the meat, at each stage less of
refinement and more of coarseness, until one at last arrives at
the slaughter pen. The shambles, stinking and reeking blood
and filth! The shambles, with hideous groan or shriek, or more
hideous silent look of agony! The shambles of society where
the beauty and grace and charm of civilization are created out
of noisome sweat and savage toil, out of the health and
strength of men and women and children, out of their ground up
bodies, out of their ground up souls. Susan knew those regions
well. She had no theories about them, no resentment against
the fortunate classes, no notion that any other or better
system might be possible, any other or better life for the
masses. She simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as
best she could.
Throughout the masses of mankind life is sustained by
illusions--illusions of a better lot tomorrow, illusions of a
heaven beyond a grave, where the nightmare, life in the body,
will end and the reality, life in the spirit, will begin. She
could not join the throngs moving toward church and synagogue
to indulge in their dream that the present was a dream from
which death would be a joyful awakening. She alternately
pitied and envied them. She had her own dream that this dream,
the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and
freedom and light and beauty. She admitted to herself that the
dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs.
But she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were
of theirs. She dreamed it because she was a human being--and
to be human means to hope, and to hope means to dream of a
brighter future here or hereafter, or both here and hereafter.
The earth is peopled with dreamers; she was but one of them.
The last thought of despair as the black earth closes is a
hope, perhaps the most colossal of hope's delusions, that there
will be escape in the grave.
There is the time when we hope and know it and believe in it.
There is the time when we hope and know it but have ceased to
believe in it. There is the time when we hope, believing that
we have altogether ceased to hope. That time had come for
Susan. She seemed to think about the present. She moved about
like a sleepwalker.
What women did she know--what men? She only dimly remembered
from day to day--from hour to hour. Blurred faces passed
before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred
personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge
crowd in night streets. A vague sense of buffetings--of rude
contacts--of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of
disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten.
In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take
into account a more important factor--the merciful paralysis or
partial paralysis of any center of sensibility--that is
insistently assaulted.
She no longer had headaches or nausea after drinking deeply.
And where formerly it had taken many stiff doses of liquor to
get her into the state of recklessness or of indifference, she
was now able to put herself into the mood in which life was
endurable with two or three drinks, often with only one. The
most marked change was that never by any chance did she become
gay; the sky over her life was steadily gray--gray or black, to
gray again--never lighter.
How far she had fallen! But swift descent or gradual, she had
adapted herself--had, in fact, learned by much experience of
disaster to mitigate the calamities, to have something to keep
a certain deep-lying self of selfs intact--unaffected by what
she had been forced to undergo. It seemed to her that if she
could get the chance--or could cure herself of the blindness
which was always preventing her from seeing and seizing the
chance that doubtless offered again and again--she could shed
the surface her mode of life had formed over her and would find
underneath a new real surface, stronger, sightly, better able
to bear--like the skin that forms beneath the healing wound.
In these tenements, as in all tenements of all degrees, she and
the others of her class were fiercely resented by the heads of
families where there was any hope left to impel a striving
upward. She had the best furnished room in the tenement. She
was the best dressed woman--a marked and instantly recognizable
figure because of her neat and finer clothes. Her profession
kept alive and active the instincts for care of the person that
either did not exist or were momentary and feeble in the
respectable women. The slovenliness, the scurrilousness of
even the wives and daughters of the well-to-do and the rich of
that region would not have been tolerated in any but the lowest
strata of her profession, hardly even in those sought by men of
the laboring class. Also, the deep horror of disease, which
her intelligence never for an instant permitted to relax its
hold, made her particular and careful when in other
circumstances drink might have reduced her to squalor. She
spent all her leisure time--for she no longer read--in the care
of her person.
She was watched with frightened, yet longing and curious, eyes
by all the girls who were at work. The mothers hated her; many
of them spat upon the ground after she had passed. It was a
heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their
daughters, not from prostitution, not from living with men
outside marriage, not from moral danger, but from the practical
danger, the danger of bringing into the world children with no
father to help feed and clothe them. In the opinion of these
people--an opinion often frankly expressed, rarely concealed
with any but the thinnest hypocrisy--the life of prostitution
was not so bad. Did the life of virtue offer any attractive
alternative? Whether a woman was "bad" or "good," she must
live in travail and die in squalor to be buried in or near the
Potter's Field. But if the girl still living at home were not
"good," that would mean a baby to be taken care of, would mean
the girl herself not a contributor to the family support but a
double burden. And if she went into prostitution, would her
family get the benefit? No.
The mothers made little effort to save their sons; they
concentrated on the daughters. It was pitiful to see how in
their ignorance they were unaware of the strongest forces
working against them. The talk of all this motley humanity--of
"good" no less than "bad" women, of steady workingmen, of
political heelers, thieves and bums and runners for dives--was
frankly, often hideously, obscene. The jammed together way of
living made modesty impossible, or scantest decency--made the
pictures of it among the aspiring few, usually for the benefit
of religion or charitable visitors, a pitiful, grotesque
hypocrisy. Indeed, the prostitute class was the highest in
this respect. The streetwalkers, those who prospered, had
better masters, learned something about the pleasures and
charms of privacy, also had more leisure in which to think, in
however crude a way, about the refinements of life, and more
money with which to practice those refinements. The boys from
the earliest age were on terms of licentious freedom with the
girls. The favorite children's games, often played in the open
street with the elders looking on and laughing, were sex games.
The very babies used foul language--that is, used the language
they learned both at home and in the street. It was primitive
man; Susan was at the foundation of the world.
To speak of the conditions there as a product of civilization
is to show ignorance of the history of our race, is to fancy
that we are civilized today, when in fact we
are--historically--in a turbulent and painful period of
transition from a better yesterday toward a tomorrow in which
life will be worth living as it never has been before in all
the ages of duration. In this today of movement toward
civilization which began with the discovery of iron and will
end when we shall have discovered how to use for the benefit of
all the main forces of nature--in this today of agitation
incident to journeying, we are in some respects better off, in
other respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen
thousand years ago. We have lost much of the freedom that was
ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have
gained much--not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and
the uneducated imagine, but still much. In the end we which
means the masses of us--will gain infinitely. But gain or loss
has not been in so-called morality. There is not a virtue that
has not existed from time ages before record. Not a vice which
is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of
over-civilization," but originated before man was man.
To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as
savagery is to misuse the word. Every transitional stage is
accompanied by a disintegration. Savagery was a settled state
in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed
position, settled duties and rights. With the downfall of
savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of
tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with
men and men with women, became unsettled. Such social systems
as the world has known since have all been makeshift and
temporary--like our social systems of today, like the moral and
extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude
of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a
distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in
the interval. In the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen
thousand years our present time is but a brief second. In that
second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift
organization which long served the working multitudes fairly
well. The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the
weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens
imposed upon them by the classes. And in that particular part
of the human race en route into which fate had flung Susan
Lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were
prevailing. A large part of the population lived off the
unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty
swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude
and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling
classes. And these petty parasites imitated the big parasites
in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains. To have
a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle Fifth Avenue; and
the notions of a "good time" in vogue in the two opposite
quarters differed in degree rather than in kind.
Nothing to think about but the appetites and their vices.
Nothing to hope for but the next carouse. Susan had brought
down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates
and neighbors--the desire to forget. If she could only forget!
If the poison would not wear off at times!
She could not quite forget. And to be unable to forget is to
remember--and to remember is to long--and to long is to hope.
Several times she heard of Freddie Palmer. Twice she chanced
upon his name in the newspaper--an incidental reference to him
in connection with local politics. The other times were when
men talking together in the drinking places frequented by both
sexes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization. Each
time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security. Once
she passed in Grand Street a detective she had often seen with
him in Considine's at Broadway and Forty-second. The "bull"
looked sharply at her. Her heart stood still. But he went on
without recognizing her. The sharp glance had been simply that
official expression of see-all and know-all which is mere
formality, part of the official livery, otherwise meaningless.
However, it is not to that detective's discredit that he failed to
recognize her. She had adapted herself to her changed surroundings.
Because she was of a different and higher class, and because
she picked and chose her company, even when drink had beclouded
her senses and instinct alone remained on drowsy guard, she
prospered despite her indifference. For that region had its
aristocracy of rich merchants, tenement-owners, politicians
whose sons, close imitators of the uptown aristocracies in
manners and dress, spent money freely in the amusements that
attract nearly all young men everywhere. Susan made almost as
much as she could have made in the more renowned quarters of
the town. And presently she was able to move into a tenement
which, except for two workingmen's families of a better class,
was given over entirely to fast women. It was much better
kept, much cleaner, much better furnished than the tenements
for workers chiefly; they could not afford decencies, much less
luxuries. All that sort of thing was, for the neighborhood,
concentrated in the saloons, the dance halls, the fast houses
and the fast flats.
Her walks in Grand Street and the Bowery, repelling and
capricious though she was with her alternating moods of cold
moroseness and sardonic and mocking gayety, were bringing her
in a good sum of money for that region. Sometimes as much as
twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen. And
despite her drinking and her freehandedness with her
fellow-professionals less fortunate and with the street beggars
and for tenement charities, she had in her stockings a capital
of thirty-one dollars.
She avoided the tough places, the hang-outs of the gangs. She
rarely went alone into the streets at night--and the afternoons
were, luckily, best for business as well as for safety. She
made no friends and therefore no enemies. Without meaning to
do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself
aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at
all through sense of superiority. Had it not been for her
scarlet lips, a far more marked sign in that region than
anywhere uptown, she would have passed in the street for a more
or less respectable woman--not thoroughly respectable; she was
too well dressed, too intelligently cared for to seem the good
working girl.
On one of the few nights when she lingered in the little back
room of the saloon a few doors away at the corner, as she
entered the dark passageway of the tenement, strong fingers
closed upon her throat and she was borne to the floor. She
knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors
of tenement fast women, the lobbygows--men who live by lying in
wait in the darkness to seize and rob the lonely, friendless
fast woman. She struggled--and she was anything but weak. But
not a sound could escape from her tight-pressed throat. Soon
she became unconscious.
One of the workingmen, returning drunk from the meeting of the
union, in the corner saloon, stumbled over her, gave her a kick
in his anger. This roused her; she uttered a faint cry.
"Thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a sitting
position. He struck a match. "Oh--it's you! Don't make any
noise. If my old woman came out, she'd kill us both."
"Never mind me," said Susan. "I was only stunned."
"Oh, I thought it was the booze. They say you hit it
something fierce."
"No--a lobbygow." And she felt for her stockings. They were
torn away from her garters. Her bosom also was bare, for the
lobbygow had searched there, also.
"How much did he get?"
"About thirty-five."
"The hell he did! Want me to call a cop?"
"No," replied Susan, who was on her feet again. "What's the use?"
"Those damn cops!" cursed the workingman. "They'd probably pinch
you--or both of us. Ten to one the lobbygows divide with them."
"I didn't mean that," said Susan. The police were most
friendly and most kind to her. She was understanding the ways
of the world better now, and appreciated that the police
themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and
robbery that was compelling her. The police made her pay
because they dared not refuse to be collectors. They bound
whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind;
they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. She had no
quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse
oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected
her. And if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it
was because the overshadowing power ordained it so.
"Needn't be afraid I'll blow to the cop," said the drunken
artisan. "You can damn the cops all you please to me. They
make New York worse than Russia."
"I guess they do the best they can--like everybody else," said
the girl wearily.
"I'll help you upstairs."
"No, thank you," said she. Not that she did not need help; but
she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wife who
might open the door as they passed his family's flat.
She went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be
safe--and out of the way. She staggered into her room,
tottered to the bed, fell upon it. A girl named Clara, who
lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a
nightgown, reading a Bertha Clay novel and smoking a cigarette.
She glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in Susan's eyes.
"Hello--been hitting the pipe, I see," said she. "Down in
Gussie's room?"
"No. A lobbygow," said Susan.
"Did he get much?"
"About thirty-five."
"The ----!" cried Clara. "I'll bet it was Gussie's fellow.
I've suspected him. Him and her stay in, hitting the pipe all
the time. That costs money, and she hasn't been out for I
don't know how long. Let's go down there and raise hell."
"What's the use?" said Susan.
"You ought to 'a' put it in the savings bank. That's what I
do--when I have anything. Then, when I'm robbed, they only get
what I've just made. Last time, they didn't get nothing--but
me." And she laughed. Her teeth were good in front, but out
on one side and beginning to be discolored on the other. "How
long had you been saving?"
"Nearly six months."
"Gee! _Isn't_ that hell!" Presently she laughed. "Six months'
work and only thirty-five to show for it. Guess you're about
as poor at hiving it up as I am. I give it to that loafer I
live with. You give it away to anybody that wants a stake.
Well--what's the diff? It all goes."
"Give me a cigarette," said Susan, sitting up and inspecting
the bruises on her bosom and legs. "And get that bottle of
whiskey from under the soiled clothes in the bottom of the
washstand."
"It _is_ something to celebrate, isn't it?" said Clara. "My
fellow's gone to his club tonight, so I didn't go out. I never
do any more, unless he's there to hang round and see that I
ain't done up. You'll have to get a fellow. You'll have to
come to it, as I'm always telling you. They're expensive, but
they're company--anybody you can count on for shining up, even
if it is for what they can get out of you, is better than not
having nobody nowhere. And they keep off bums and lobbygows
and scare the bilkers into coughing up."
"Not for me," replied Susan.
The greater the catastrophe, the longer the time before it is
fully realized. Susan's loss of the money that represented so
much of savage if momentary horror, and so much of unconscious
hope this calamity did not overwhelm her for several days.
Then she yielded for the first time to the lure of opium. She
had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as
girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked--or took
cocaine. But to Clara's or Gussie's invitations to join the
happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "Not yet. I'm
saving that." Now, however, she felt that the time had come.
Hope in this world she had none. Before the black adventure,
why not try the world of blissful unreality to which it gave
entrance? Why leave life until she had exhausted all it put
within her reach?
She went to Gussie's room at midnight and flung herself down in
a wrapper upon a couch opposite a sallow, delicate young man.
His great dark eyes were gazing unseeingly at her, were perhaps
using her as an outline sketch from which his imagination could
picture a beauty of loveliness beyond human. Gussie taught her
how to prepare the little ball of opium, how to put it on the
pipe and draw in its fumes. Her system was so well prepared
for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory
results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest
period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her
profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the
imagination. Opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene,
into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. The world she had
been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur
the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant
thing seen in a dream. Her opium world became the vivid reality.
The life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had
hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad,
shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a
thousand mercenary and lustful kisses. The opium soon changed
all this. Her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of
the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an
ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop.
Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes
looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without
ceasing upon an altar to the god of dreams. Never had she been
so beautiful; never had she been so happy--not with the coarser
happiness of dancing eye and laughing lip, but with the ecstasy
of soul that is like the shimmers of a tranquil sea quivering
rhythmically under the caresses of moonlight.
In her descent she had now reached that long narrow shelf along
which she would walk so long as health and looks should
last--unless some accident should topple her off on the one
side into suicide or on the other side into the criminal
prostitute class. And such accidents were likely to happen.
Still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until
loss of looks and loss of health--the end of the shelf--should
drop her abruptly to the very bottom. She could guess what was
there. Every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and
most forlorn of its wretched and forlorn things, the solitary
old women, bent and twisted, wrapped in rotting rags, picking
papers and tobacco from the gutters and burrowing in garbage
barrels, seeking somehow to get the drink or the dope that
changed hell into heaven for them.
Despite liquor and opium and the degradations of the
street-woman's life she walked that narrow ledge with curious
steadiness. She was unconscious of the cause. Indeed,
self-consciousness had never been one of her traits. The cause
is interesting.
In our egotism, in our shame of what we ignorantly regard as
the lowliness of our origin we are always seeking alleged lofty
spiritual explanations of our doings, and overlook the actual,
quite simple real reason. One of the strongest factors in
Susan's holding herself together in face of overwhelming odds,
was the nearly seventeen years of early training her Aunt Fanny
Warham had given her in orderly and systematic ways--a place
for everything and everything in its place; a time for
everything and everything at its time, neatness, scrupulous
cleanliness, no neglecting of any of the small, yet large,
matters that conserve the body. Susan had not been so apt a
pupil of Fanny Warham's as was Ruth, because Susan had not
Ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional.
But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life
Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had
become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium
and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general
break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman
or girl she had met who was not rapidly breaking up, but was
offering more or less resistance to the assaults of bad habits,
was one who like herself had acquired in childhood strong good
habits to oppose the bad habits and to fight them with. An
enemy must be met with his own weapons or stronger. The
strongest weapons that can be given a human animal for
combating the destructive forces of the struggle for existence
are not good sentiments or good principles or even pious or
moral practices--for, bad habits can make short work of all
these--but are good habits in the practical, material matters
of life. They operate automatically, they apply to all the
multitude of small, every day; semi-unconscious actions of the
daily routine. They preserve the _morale_. And not morality
but morals is the warp of character--the part which, once
destroyed or even frayed, cannot be restored.
Susan, unconsciously and tenaciously practicing her early
training in order and system whenever she could and wherever
she could, had an enormous advantage over the mass of the
girls, both respectable and fast. And while their evidence was
always toward "going to pieces" her tendency was always to
repair and to put off the break-up.
One June evening she was looking through the better class of
dance halls and drinking resorts for Clara, to get her to go up
to Gussie's for a smoke. She opened a door she had never
happened to enter before--a dingy door with the glass frosted.
Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of
the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the
sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in
such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen.
She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping
with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was
the piano, battered, about to fall to pieces, its ancient and
horrid voice cracked by the liquor which had been poured into
it by facetious drunkards. At the keyboard sat an old
hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye
instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made
her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was
evidently imagining. His filthy fingers were pounding out a
waltz. About the floor were tottering in the measure of the
waltz a score of dreadful old women. They were in calico.
They had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon
the crown of the head. From their bleached, seamed old faces
gleamed the longings or the torments of all the passions they
could no longer either inspire or satisfy. They were one time
prostitutes, one time young, perhaps pretty women, now
descending to death--still prostitutes in heart and mind but
compelled to live as scrub women, cleaners of all manner of
loathsome messes in dives after the drunkards had passed on.
They were now enjoying the reward of their toil, the pleasures
of which they dreamed and to which they looked forward as they
dragged their stiff old knees along the floors in the wake of
the brush and the cloth. They were drinking biting poisons
from tin cups--for those hands quivering with palsy could not
be trusted with glass-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or
twisted legs--venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange
cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of damned souls at
the licking of quenchless flames.
Susan stood rooted to the threshold of that frightful
scene--that vision of the future toward which she was hurrying.
A few years--a very few years--and, unless she should have
passed through the Morgue, here she would be, abandoning her
body to abominations beyond belief at the hands of degenerate
oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of
this dance hall. And she would laugh, as did these, would
enjoy as did these, would revel in the filth her senses had
been trained to find sweet. "No! No!" she protested. "I'd
kill myself first!" And then she cowered again, as the thought
came that she probably would not, any more than these had
killed themselves. The descent would be gradual--no matter how
swift, still gradual. Only the insane put an end to life.
Yes--she would come here some day.
She leaned against the wall, her throat contracting in a fit of
nausea. She grew cold all over; her teeth chattered. She
tried in vain to tear her gaze from the spectacle; some
invisible power seemed to be holding her head in a vise,
thrusting her struggling eyelids violently open.
There were several men, dead drunk, asleep in old wooden chairs
against the wall. One of these men was so near her that she
could have touched him. His clothing was such an assortment of
rags slimy and greasy as one sometimes sees upon the top of a
filled garbage barrel to add its horrors of odor of long
unwashed humanity to the stenches from vegetable decay. His
wreck of a hard hat had fallen from his head as it dropped
forward in drunken sleep. Something in the shape of the head
made her concentrate upon this man. She gave a sharp cry,
stretched out her hand, touched the man's shoulder.
"Rod!" she cried. "Rod!"
The head slowly lifted, and the bleary, blowsy wreck of
Roderick Spenser's handsome face was turned stupidly toward
her. Into his gray eyes slowly came a gleam of recognition.
Then she saw the red of shame burst into his hollow cheeks, and
the head quickly drooped.
She shook him. "Rod! It's _you!_"
"Get the hell out," he mumbled. "I want to sleep."
"You know me," she said. "I see the color in your face. Oh,
Rod--you needn't be ashamed before _me_."
She felt him quiver under her fingers pressing upon his
shoulder. But he pretended to snore.
"Rod," she pleaded, "I want you to come along with me. I can't
do you any harm now."
The hunchback had stopped playing. The old women were crowding
round Spenser and her, were peering at them, with eyes eager
and ears a-cock for romance--for nowhere on this earth do the
stars shine so sweetly as down between the precipices of shame
to the black floor of the slum's abyss. Spenser, stooped and
shaking, rose abruptly, thrust Susan aside with a sweep of the
arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. She recovered
her balance and amid hoarse croakings of "That's right, honey!
Don't give him up!" followed the shambling, swaying figure.
He was too utterly drunk to go far; soon down he sank, a heap
of rags and filth, against a stoop.
She bent over him, saw he was beyond rousing, straightened and
looked about her. Two honest looking young Jews stopped.
"Won't you help me get him home?" she said to them.
"Sure!" replied they in chorus. And, with no outward sign of
the disgust they must have felt at the contact, they lifted up
the sot, in such fantastic contrast to Susan's clean and even
stylish appearance, and bore him along, trying to make him seem
less the helpless whiskey-soaked dead weight. They dragged him
up the two flights of stairs and, as she pushed back the door,
deposited him on the floor. She assured them they could do
nothing more, thanked them, and they departed. Clara appeared
in her doorway.
"God Almighty, Lorna!" she cried. "_What_ have you got there?
How'd it get in?"
"You've been advising me to take a fellow," said Susan.
"Well--here he is."
Clara looked at her as if she thought her crazed by drink or
dope. "I'll call the janitor and have him thrown out."
"No, he's my lover," said Susan. "Will you help me clean him up?"
Clara, looking at Spenser's face now, saw those signs which not
the hardest of the world's hard uses can cut or tear away.
"Oh!" she said, in a tone of sympathy. "He _is_ down, isn't he?
But he'll pull round all right."
She went into her room to take off her street clothes and to
get herself into garments as suitable as she possessed for one
of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the
bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital.
When she returned, Susan too was in her chemise and ready to
begin the search for the man, if man there was left deep buried
in that muck. While Susan took off the stinking and rotten
rags, and flung them into the hall, Clara went to the bathroom
they and Mollie shared, and filled the tub with water as hot as
her hand could bear. With her foot Susan pushed the rags along
the hall floor and into the garbage closet. Then she and Clara
lifted the emaciated, dirt-streaked, filth-smeared body,
carried it to the bathroom, let it down into the water. There
were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps
and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their
kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. With these
they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if
he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it
could be used.
Again and again they let out the water, black, full of dead and
dying vermin; again and again they rinsed him, attacked him
afresh. Their task grew less and less repulsive as the man
gradually appeared, a young man with a soft skin, a well-formed
body, unusually good hands and feet, a distinguished face
despite its savage wounds from dissipation, hardly the less
handsome for the now fair and crisp beard which gave it a look
of more years than Spenser had lived.
If Spenser recovered consciousness--and it seems hardly
possible that he did not--he was careful to conceal the fact.
He remained limp, inert, apparently in a stupor. They gave him
one final scrubbing, one final rinsing, one final thorough
inspection. "Now, he's all right," declared Clara. "What
shall we do with him?"
"Put him to bed," said Susan.
They had already dried him off in the empty tub. They now
rubbed him down with a rough towel, lifted him, Susan taking
the shoulders, Clara the legs, and put him in Susan's bed.
Clara ran to her room, brought one of the two nightshirts she
kept for her fellow. When they had him in this and with a
sheet over him, they cleaned and straightened the bathroom,
then lit cigarettes and sat down to rest and to admire the work
of their hands.
"Who is he?" asked Clara.
"A man I used to know," said Susan. Like all the girls in that
life with a real story to tell, she never told about her past
self. Never tell? They never even remember if drink and drugs
will do their duty.
"I don't blame you for loving him," said Clara. "Somehow, the
lower a man sinks the more a woman loves him. It's the other
way with men. But then men don't know what love is. And a
woman don't really know till she's been through the mill."
"I don't love him," said Susan.
"Same thing," replied the practical Clara, with a wave of the
bare arm at the end of which smoked the cigarette. "What're
you going to do with him?"
"I don't know," confessed Susan.
She was not a little uneasy at the thought of his awakening.
Would he despise her more than ever now--fly from her back to
his filth? Would he let her try to help him? And she looked
at the face which had been, in that other life so long, long
ago, dearer to her than any face her eyes had ever rested upon;
a sob started deep down within her, found its slow and painful
way upward, shaking her whole body and coming from between her
clenched teeth in a groan. She forgot all she had suffered
from Rod--forgot the truth about him which she had slowly
puzzled out after she left him and as experience enabled her to
understand actions she had not understood at the time. She
forgot it all. That past--that far, dear, dead past! Again
she was a simple, innocent girl upon the high rock, eating that
wonderful dinner. Again the evening light faded, stars and
moon came out, and she felt the first sweet stirring of love
for him. She could hear his voice, the light, clear,
entrancing melody of the Duke's song--
La Donna è mobile
Qua penna al vento--
She burst into tears--tears that drenched her soul as the rain
drenches the blasted desert and makes the things that could
live in beauty stir deep in its bosom. And Clara, sobbing in
sympathy, kissed her and stole away, softly closing the door.
"If a man die, shall he live again?" asked the old Arabian
philosopher. If a woman die, shall she live again?. . .
Shall not that which dies in weakness live again in strength?. . .
Looking at him, as he lay there sleeping so quietly, her
being surged with the heaving of high longings and hopes.
If _they_ could only live again! Here they were, together, at
the lowest depth, at the rock bottom of life. If they could
build on that rock, build upon the very foundation of the
world, then would they indeed build in strength! Then, nothing
could destroy--nothing!. . . If they could live again! If
they could build!
She had something to live for--something to fight for. Into
her eyes came a new light; into her soul came peace and
strength. Something to live for--someone to redeem.