Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 51

"I'll come at seven in the morning," said Susan.

"Do you live far?"

"I'm going to live just up the street."

"That's right. It adds ten cents a day to your wages--the ten you'll save in carfare. Sixty cents a week!" And Matson beamed and scratched as if he felt he had done a generous act. "Who are you livin' with? Respectable, I hope."

"With Miss Brashear--I think."

"Oh, yes--Tom Brashear's gal. They're nice people. Tom's an honest fellow--used to make good money till he had his hard luck. Him and me used to work together. But he never could seem to learn that it ain't workin' for yourself but makin' others work for you that climbs a man up. I never was much as a worker.

I was always thinkin' out ways of makin' people work for me. And here I am at the top. And where's Tom? Well--run along now--what's your name?"

"Lorna Sackville."

"Lorny." He burst into a loud guffaw. "Lord, what a name! Sounds like a theayter. Seven sharp, Lorny. So long."

Susan nodded with laughing eyes, thanked him and departed. She glanced up the street, saw Etta standing in the door of the restaurant. Etta did not move from her own doorway, though she was showing every sign of anxiety and impatience. "I can't leave even for a minute so near the dinner hour," she explained when Susan came, "or I'd, a' been outside the factory. And ma's got to stick to the kitchen. I see you got a job. How much?"

"Three," replied Susan.

"He must have offered it to you," said Etta, laughing. "I thought about it after you were gone and I knew you'd take whatever he said first. Oh, I've been so scared something'd happen. I do want you as my lady friend. Was he fresh?"

"Not a bit. He was--very nice."

"Well, he ought to be nice--as pa says, getting richer and richer, and driving the girls he robs to marry men they hate or to pick up a living in the gutter."

Susan felt that she owed her benefactor a strong protest. "Maybe I'm foolish," said she, "but I'm awful glad he's got that place and can give me work."

Etta was neither convinced nor abashed. "You don't understand things in our cla.s.s," replied she. "Pa says it was the kind of grateful thinking and talking you've just done that's made him poor in his old age. He says you've either got to whip or be whipped, rob or be robbed--and that the really good honest people are the fools who take the losing side. But he says, too, he'd rather be a fool and a failure than stoop to stamping on his fellow-beings and robbing them. And I guess he's right"--there Etta laughed--"though I'll admit I'd hate to be tempted with a chance to get up by stepping on somebody." She sighed. "And sometimes I can't help wishing pa had done some tramping and stamping. Why not? That's all most people are fit for--to be tramped and stamped on. Now, don't look so shocked.

You don't understand. Wait till you've been at work a while."

Susan changed the subject. "I'm going to work at seven in the morning. . . . I might as well have gone today. I had a kind of an engagement I thought I was going to keep, but I've about decided I won't."

Etta watched with awe and delight the mysterious look in Susan's suddenly flushed face and abstracted eyes. After a time she ventured to interrupt with:

"You'll try living with us?"

"If you're quite sure--did you talk to your mother?"

"Mother'll be crazy about you. She wants anything that'll make me more contented. Oh, I do get so lonesome!"

Mrs. Brashear, a spare woman, much bent by monotonous work--which, however, had not bent her courage or her cheerfulness--made Susan feel at home immediately in the little flat. The tenement was of rather a superior cla.s.s. But to Susan it seemed full of noisome smells, and she was offended by the halls littered with evidences of the uncleanness of the tenants.

She did not then realize that the apparent superior cleanness and neatness of the better-off cla.s.ses was really in large part only affected, that their secluded back doors and back ways gave them opportunity to hide their uncivilized habits from the world that saw only the front. However, once inside the Brashear flat, she had an instant rise of spirits.

"Isn't this nice?" exclaimed she as Etta showed her, at a glance from the sitting-room, the five small but scrupulously clean rooms. "I'll like it here!"

Etta reddened, glanced at her for signs of mockery, saw that she was in earnest. "I'm afraid it's better to look at than to live in," she began, then decided against saying anything discouraging.

"It seems cramped to us," said she, "after the house we had till a couple of years ago. I guess we'll make out, somehow."

The family paid twenty dollars a month for the flat. The restaurant earned twelve to fifteen a week; and the son, Ashbel, stocky, powerful and stupid, had a steady job as porter at ten a week. He gave his mother seven, as he had a room to himself and an enormous appet.i.te. He talked of getting married; if he did marry, the family finances would be in disorder. But his girl had high ideas, being the daughter of a grocer who fancied himself still an independent merchant though he was in fact the even more poorly paid selling agent of the various food products trusts. She had fixed twenty a week as the least on which she would marry; his prospects of any such raise were--luckily for his family--extremely remote; for he had nothing but physical strength to sell, and the price of physical strength alone was going down, under immigrant compet.i.tion, not only in actual wages like any other form of wage labor, but also in nominal wages.

Altogether, the Brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the families of prosperous and typical Cincinnati. While it was true that old Tom Brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully limited himself to two dollars a week. While it was true that he could not work at his trade and apparently did little but sit round and talk--usually high above his audience--nevertheless he was the actual head of the family and its chief bread-winner. It was his savings that were invested in the restaurant; he bought the supplies and was shrewd and intelligent about that vitally important department of the business--the department whose mismanagement in domestic economy is, next to drink, the main cause of failure and pauperism, of sickness, of premature disability, of those profound discouragements that lead to despair. Also, old Brashear had the sagacity and the nagging habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the mark. He had ideas--practical ideas as well as ideals--far above his station. But for him the housekeeping would have been in the familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the family would have been neat only on Sundays, and only on the surface then. Because he had the habit of speaking of himself as useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of him in that way. Although intelligence, indeed, virtue of every kind, is expected of tenement house people--and is needed by them beyond any other condition of humanity--they are unfortunately merely human, are tainted of all human weaknesses.

They lack, for instance, discrimination. So, it never occurred to them that Tom Brashear was the sole reason why the Brashears lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to the ferocious and incessant downward pressure.

But for one thing the Brashears would have been going up in the world. That thing was old Tom's honesty. The restaurant gave good food and honest measure. Therefore, the margin of profit was narrow--too narrow. He knew what was the matter. He mocked at himself for being "such a weak fool" when everybody else with the opportunity and the intelligence was getting on by yielding to the compulsion of the iron rule of dishonesty in business.

But he remained honest--therefore, remained in the working cla.s.s, instead of rising among its exploiters.

"If I didn't drink, I'd kill myself," said old Tom to Susan, when he came to know her well and to feel that from her he could get not the mere blind admiration the family gave him but understanding and sympathy. "Whenever anybody in the working cla.s.s has any imagination," he explained, "he either kicks his way out of it into capitalist or into criminal--or else he takes to drink. I ain't mean enough to be either a capitalist or a criminal. So, I've got to drink."

Susan only too soon began to appreciate from her own experience what he meant.

In the first few days the novelty pleased her, made her think she was going to be contented. The new friends and acquaintances, different from any she had known, the new sights, the new way of living--all this interested her, even when it shocked one or many of her senses and sensibilities. But the novelty of folding and pasting boxes, of the queer new kind of girls who worked with her, hardly survived into the second week.

She saw that she was among a people where the highest known standard--the mode of life regarded by them as the acme of elegance and bliss--the best they could conceive was far, far below what she had been brought up to believe the scantest necessities of respectable and civilized living. She saw this life from the inside now--as the comfortable cla.s.ses never permit themselves to see it if they can avoid. She saw that to be a contented working girl, to look forward to the prospect of being a workingman's wife, a tenement housekeeper and mother, a woman must have been born to it--and born with little brains--must have been educated for it, and for nothing else. Etta was bitterly discontented; yet after all it was a vague endurable discontent. She had simply heard of and dreamed of and from afar off--chiefly through novels and poems and the theater--had glimpsed a life that was broader, that had comfort and luxury, people with refined habits and manners. Susan had not merely heard of such a life; she had lived it--it, and no other.

Always of the thoughtful temperament, she had been rapidly developed first by Burlingham and now by Tom Brashear--had been taught not only how to think but also how to gather the things to think about.

With a few exceptions the girls at the factory were woefully unclean about their persons. Susan did not blame them; she only wondered at Etta the more, and grew to admire her--and the father who held the whole family up to the mark. For, in spite of the difficulties of getting clean, without bathtub, without any but the crudest and cheapest appliances for cleanliness, without any leisure time, Etta kept herself in perfect order.

The show boat and the quarters at the hotel had been trying to Susan. But they had seemed an adventure, a temporary, pa.s.sing phase, a sort of somewhat prolonged camping-out lark. Now, she was settled down, to live, apparently for the rest of her life, with none of the comforts, with few of the decencies. What Etta and her people, using all their imagination, would have pictured as the pinnacle of luxury would have been for Susan a small and imperfect part of what she had been bred to regard as "living decently." She suspected that but for Etta's example she would be yielding, at least in the matter of cleanliness, when the struggle against dirt was so unequal, was thankless.

Discouragement became her frequent mood; she wondered if the time would not come when it would be her fixed habit, as it was with all but a handful of those about her.

Sometimes she and Etta walked in the quarter at the top of the hill where lived the families of prosperous merchants--establishments a little larger, a little more pretentious than her Uncle George's in Sutherland, but on the whole much like it--the houses of the solid middle cla.s.s which fancies itself grandly luxurious where it is in fact merely comfortable in a crude unimaginative way. Susan was one of those who are born with the instinct and mental bent for luxurious comfort; also, she had the accompanying peculiar talent for a.s.similating ideas about food and dress and surroundings from books and magazines, from the study of well-dressed people in the street, from glances into luxurious interiors through windows or open doors as she pa.s.sed by. She saw with even quicker and more intelligently critical eyes the new thing, the good idea, the improvement on what she already knew. Etta's excitement over these commonplace rich people amused her. She herself, on the wings of her daring young fancy, could soar into a realm of luxury, of beauty and exquisite comfort, that made these self-complacent mansions seem very ordinary indeed. It was no drag upon her fancy, but the reverse, that she was sharing a narrow bed and a narrow room in a humble and tiny tenement flat.

On one of these walks Etta confided to her the only romance of her life therefore the real cause of her deep discontent. It was a young man from one of these houses--a flirtation lasting about a year. She a.s.sured Susan it was altogether innocent.

Susan--perhaps chiefly because Etta protested so insistently about her unsullied purity--had her doubts.

"Then," said Etta, "when I saw that he didn't care anything about me except in one way--I didn't see him any more. I--I've been sorry ever since."

Susan did not offer the hoped-for sympathy. She was silent.

"Did you ever have anything like that happen to you?" inquired Etta.

"Yes," said Susan. "Something like that."

"And what did you do?"

"I didn't want to see him any more."

"Why?"

"I don't know--exactly.

"And you like him?"

"I think I would have liked him."

"You're sorry you stopped?"

"Sometimes," replied she, hesitatingly.