Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 108

"I had to come," said he hoa.r.s.ely, a mere voice in the darkness. "I can't hold out no longer without you, Lorna."

"Go--go," urged Susan.

But it was too late. In the doorway, candle in hand, appeared Mrs. Lange. Despite her efforts at "dressiness" she was in her best hour homely and nearly shapeless. In night dress and released from corsets she was hideous and monstrous. "I thought so!" she shrieked. "I thought so!"

"I heard a burglar, mother," whined Lange, an abject and guilty figure.

"Shut your mouth, you loafer!" shrieked Mrs. Lange. And she turned to Susan. "You gutter hussy, get on your clothes and clear out!"

"But--Mrs. Lange----" began Susan.

"Clear out!" she shouted, opening the outer hall. "Dress mighty d.a.m.n quick and clear out!"

"Mother, you'll wake the people upstairs," pleaded Lange--and Susan had never before realized how afraid of his wife the little man was. "For G.o.d's sake, listen to sense."

"After I've thrown you--into the streets," cried his wife, beside herself with jealous fury. "Get dressed, I tell you!"

she shouted at Susan.

And the girl hurried into her clothes, making no further attempt to speak. She knew that to plead and to explain would be useless; even if Mrs. Lange believed, still she would drive from the house the temptation to her husband. Lange, in a quaking, cowardly whine, begged his wife to be sensible and believe his burglar story. But with each half-dozen words he uttered, she interrupted to hurl obscene epithets at him or at Susan. The tenants of the upstairs flats came down. She told her wrongs to a dozen half-clad men, women and children; they took her side at once, and with the women leading showered vile insults upon Susan. The uproar was rising, rising. Lange cowered in a corner, crying bitterly like a whipped child.

Susan, only partly dressed, caught up her hat and rushed into the hall. Several women struck at her as she pa.s.sed. She stumbled on the stairs, almost fell headlong. With the most frightful words in tenement house vocabulary pursuing her she fled into the street, and did not pause until she was within a few yards of the Bowery. There she sat down on a doorstep and, half-crazed by the horror of her sudden downfall, laced her shoes and b.u.t.toned her blouse and put on her hat with fumbling, shaking fingers. It had all happened so quickly that she would have thought she was dreaming but for the cold night air and the dingy waste of the Bowery with the streetwalkers and drunken b.u.ms strolling along under the elevated tracks. She had trifled with the opportunity too long. It had flown in disgust, dislodging her as it took flight. If she would be over nice and critical, would hesitate to take the only upward path fate saw fit to offer, then--let her seek the bottom!

Susan peered down, and shuddered.

She went into the saloon at the corner, into the little back room. She poured down drink after drink of the frightful poison sold as whiskey with the permission of a government owned by every interest that can make big money out of a race of free men and so can afford to pay big bribes. It is characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of quick insanity, of immediate degeneration--a desire to commit crime, to do degraded acts. Within an hour of Susan's being thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her. She had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table.

The three, fired and maddened by the poison, were amusing themselves and two young men as recklessly intoxicated as they.

Susan, in an att.i.tude she had seen often enough but had never dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coa.r.s.e song, was standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken rhythm as she led the chorus.

When the barkeeper announced closing time, one of the young men said to her:

"Which way?"

"To h.e.l.l," laughed she. "I've been thrown out everywhere else.

Want to go along?"

"I'll never desert a perfect lady," replied he.

CHAPTER X

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 s.p.a.ce--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 pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing 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 ma.s.s of mankind to live near to nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved. The ma.s.ses are eager for the necessities; the cla.s.ses are eager for the comforts and luxuries. The ma.s.ses are ignorant; the cla.s.ses are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious and inevitable exploitation of the ma.s.ses by the cla.s.ses automatically and of necessity stops just short of the catastrophe point--for the ma.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 coa.r.s.eness, 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 cla.s.ses, no notion that any other or better system might be possible, any other or better life for the ma.s.ses. She simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as best she could.

Throughout the ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.saulted.

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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed. It was a heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their daughters, not from prost.i.tution, 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 prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tution, 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 b.u.ms 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 prost.i.tute cla.s.s 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 s.e.x 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 cla.s.ses; 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 ma.s.ses 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 mult.i.tude 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 mult.i.tudes fairly well. The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the weak, in which the ma.s.ses are being crushed by the burdens imposed upon them by the cla.s.ses. 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 prost.i.tution, by thieving, by petty swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coa.r.s.e, crude and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling cla.s.ses. 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 appet.i.tes and their vices.

Nothing to hope for but the next carouse. Susan had brought down with her from above one desire unknown to her a.s.sociates 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 s.e.xes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization. Each time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security. Once she pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sageway 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."