Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 52

She was beginning to be afraid that she would soon be sorry all the time. Every day the war within burst forth afresh. She reproached herself for her growing hatred of her life. Ought she not to be grateful that she had so much--that she was not one of a squalid quartette in a foul, vermin-infested back bedroom--infested instead of only occasionally visited--that she was not a streetwalker, diseased, prowling in all weathers, the prey of the coa.r.s.e humors of contemptuous and usually drunken beasts; that she was not living where everyone about her would, by pity or out of spitefulness, tear open the wounds of that hideous brand which had been put upon her at birth? Above all, she ought to be thankful that she was not Jeb Ferguson's wife.

But her efforts to make herself resigned and contented, to kill her doubts as to the goodness of "goodness," were not successful. She had Tom Brashear's "ungrateful" nature--the nature that will not let a man or a woman stay in the cla.s.s of hewers of wood and drawers of water but drives him or her out of it--and up or down.

"You're one of those that things happen to," the old cabinetmaker said to her on a September evening, as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. The tenements had discharged their swarms into the hot street, and there was that lively panorama of dirt and disease and depravity which is fascinating--to unaccustomed eyes. "Yes," said Tom, "things'll happen to you."

"What--for instance?" she asked.

"G.o.d only knows. You'll up and do something some day. You're settin' here just to grow wings. Some day--swish!--and off you'll soar. It's a pity you was born female. Still--there's a lot of females that gets up. Come to think of it, I guess s.e.x don't matter. It's havin' the soul--and mighty few of either s.e.x has it."

"Oh, I'm like everybody else," said the girl with an impatient sigh. "I dream, but--it doesn't come to anything."

"No, you ain't like everybody else," retorted he, with a positive shake of his finely shaped head, thatched superbly with white hair. "You ain't afraid, for instance. That's the princ.i.p.al sign of a great soul, I guess."

"Oh, but I _am_ afraid," cried Susan. "I've only lately found out what a coward I am."

"You think you are," said the cabinetmaker. "There's them that's afraid to do, and don't do. Then there's them that's afraid to do, but goes ahead and does anyhow. That's you. I don't know where you came from--oh, I heard Etta's accountin' for you to her ma, but that's neither here nor there. I don't know where you come from, and I don't know where you're going. But--you ain't afraid--and you have imagination--and those two signs means something doing."

Susan shook her head dejectedly; it had been a cruelly hard day at the factory and the odors from the girls working on either side of her had all but overwhelmed her.

Old Tom nodded with stronger emphasis. "You're too young, yet,"

he said. "And not licked into shape. But wait a while. You'll get there."

Susan hoped so, but doubted it. There was no time to work at these large problems of destiny when the daily grind was so compelling, so wearing, when the problems of bare food, clothing and shelter took all there was in her.

For example, there was the matter of clothes. She had come with only what she was wearing. She gave the Brashears every Sat.u.r.day two dollars and a half of her three and was ashamed of herself for taking so much for so little, when she learned about the cost of living and how different was the food the Brashears had from that of any other family in those quarters! As soon as she had saved four dollars from her wages--it took nearly two months--she bought the necessary materials and made herself two plain outer skirts, three blouses and three pairs of drawers.

Chemises and corset covers she could not afford. She bought a pair of shoes for a dollar, two pairs of stockings for thirty cents, a corset for eighty cents, an umbrella for half a dollar, two underwaists for a quarter. She bought an untrimmed hat for thirty-five cents and trimmed it with the cleaned ribbon from her summer sailor and a left over bit of skirt material. She also made herself a jacket that had to serve as wrap too--and the materials for this took the surplus of her wages for another month. The cold weather had come, and she had to walk fast when she was in the open air not to be chilled to the bone. Her Aunt f.a.n.n.y had been one of those women, not too common in America, who understand and practice genuine economy in the household--not the shabby stinginess that pa.s.ses for economy but the laying out of money to the best advantage that comes only when one knows values. This training stood Susan in good stead now. It saved her from disaster--from disintegration.

She and Etta did some washing every night, hanging the things on the fire escape to dry. In this way she was able to be clean; but in appearance she looked as poor as she was. She found a cobbler who kept her shoes in fair order for a few cents; but nothing was right about them soon--except that they were not down at the heel. She could recall how she had often wondered why the poor girls at Sutherland showed so little taste, looked so dowdy. She wondered at her own stupidity, at the narrowness of an education, such as hers had been, an education that left her ignorant of the conditions of life as it was lived by all but a lucky few of her fellow beings.

How few the lucky! What an amazing world--what a strange creation the human race! How was it possible that the lucky few, among whom she had been born and bred, should know so little, really nothing, about the lot of the vast ma.s.s of their fellows, living all around them, close up against them? "If I had only known!" she thought. And then she reflected that, if she had known, pleasure would have been impossible. She could see her bureau drawers, her closets at home. She had thought herself not any too well off. Now, how luxurious, how stuffed with shameful, wasteful unnecessaries those drawers and closets seemed!

And merely to keep herself in underclothes that were at least not in tatters she had to spend every cent over and above her board. If she had had to pay carfare ten cents a day, sixty cents a week!--as did many of the girls who lived at home, she would have been ruined. She understood now why every girl without a family back of her, and without good prospect of marriage, was revolving the idea of becoming a streetwalker--not as a hope, but as a fear. As she learned to observe more closely, she found good reasons for suspecting that from time to time the girls who became too hard pressed relieved the tension by taking to the streets on Sat.u.r.day and Sunday nights. She read in the _Commercial_ one noon--Mr. Matson sometimes left his paper where she could glance through it--she read an article on working girls, how they were seduced to lives of shame--by love of _finery_! Then she read that those who did not fall were restrained by religion and innate purity. There she laughed--bitterly. Fear of disease, fear of maternity, yes. But where was this religion? Who but the dullest fools in the throes of that bare and tortured life ever thought of G.o.d? As for the purity--what about the obscene talk that made her shudder because of its sheer filthy stupidity?--what about the frank shamelessness of the efforts to lure their "steadies" into speedy matrimony by using every charm of caress and of person to inflame pa.s.sion without satisfying it? She had thought she knew about the relations of the s.e.xes when she came to live and work in that tenement quarter. Soon her knowledge had seemed ignorance beside the knowledge of the very babies.

It was a sad, sad puzzle. If one ought to be good--chaste and clean in mind and body--then, why was there the most tremendous pressure on all but a few to make them as foul as the surroundings in which they were compelled to live? If it was wiser to be good, then why were most people imprisoned in a life from which they could escape only by being bad? What was this thing comfortable people had set up as good, anyhow--and what was bad? She found no answer. How could G.o.d condemn anyone for anything they did in the torments of the h.e.l.l that life revealed itself to her as being, after a few weeks of its moral, mental and physical horrors? Etta's father was right; those who realized what life really was and what it might be, those who were sensitive took to drink or went to pieces some other way, if they were gentle, and if they were cruel, committed any brutality, any crime to try to escape.

In former days Susan thought well of charity, as she had been taught. Old Tom Brashear gave her a different point of view. One day he insulted and drove from the tenement some pious charitable people who had come down from the fashionable hilltop to be good and gracious to their "less fashionable fellow-beings." After they had gone he explained his harshness to Susan:

"That's the only way you can make them slicked-up brutes feel,"

said he, "they're so thick in the hide and satisfied with themselves. What do they come here for! To do good! Yes--to themselves. To make themselves feel how generous and sweet they was. Well, they'd better go home and read their Russia-leather covered Bibles. They'd find out that when G.o.d wanted to really do something for man, he didn't have himself created a king, or a plutocrat, or a fat, slimy church deacon in a fashionable church. No, he had himself born a b.a.s.t.a.r.d in a manger."

Susan shivered, for the truth thus put sounded like sacrilege.

Then a glow--a glow of pride and of hope--swept through her.

"If you ever get up into another cla.s.s," went on old Tom, "don't come hangin' round the common people you'll be livin' off of and helpin' to grind down; stick to your own cla.s.s. That's the only place anybody can do any good--any real helpin' and lovin', man to man, and woman to woman. If you want to help anybody that's down, pull him up into your cla.s.s first. Stick to your cla.s.s.

You'll find plenty to do there."

"What, for instance?" asked Susan. She understood a little of what he had in mind, but was still puzzled.

"Them stall-fed fakers I just threw out," the old man went on.

"They come here, actin' as if this was the Middle Ages and the lord of the castle was doin' a fine thing when he went down among the low peasants who'd been made by G.o.d to work for the lords. But this ain't the Middle Ages. What's the truth about it?"

"I don't know," confessed Susan.

"Why, the big lower cla.s.s is poor because the little upper cla.s.s takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make.

Oh, it ain't the upper cla.s.s's fault. They do it because they're ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down here is ignorance more'n badness. But they do it, all the same.

And they're ignorant and need to be told. Supposin' you saw a big girl out yonder in the street beatin' her baby sister. What would you do? Would you go and hold out little pieces of candy to the baby and say how sorry you was for her? Or would you first grab hold of that big sister and throw her away from beatin' of the baby?"

"I see," said Susan.

"That's it exactly," exclaimed the old man, in triumph. "And I say to them pious charity fakers, 'Git the h.e.l.l out of here where you can't do no good. Git back to yer own cla.s.s that makes all this misery, makes it faster'n all the religion and charity in the world could help it. Git back to yer own cla.s.s and work with them, and teach them and make them stop robbin' and beatin'

the baby.'"

"Yes," said the girl, "you are right. I see it now. But, Mr.

Brashear, they meant well."

"The h.e.l.l they did," retorted the old man. "If they'd, a' had love in their hearts, they'd have seen the truth. Love's one of the greatest teachers in the world. If they'd, a' meant well, they'd, a' been goin' round teachin' and preachin' and prayin'

at their friends and fathers and brothers, the plutocrats.

They'd never 'a' come down here, pretendin' they was doin' good, killin' one bedbug out of ten million and offerin' one pair of good pants where a hundred thousand pairs is needed. They'd better go read about themselves in their Bible--what Jesus says.

He knew 'em. _He_ belonged to _us_--and _they_ crucified him."

The horrors of that by no means lowest tenement region, its horrors for a girl bred as Susan had been! Horrors moral, horrors mental, horrors physical--above all, the physical horrors; for, worse to her than the dull wits and the lack of education, worse than vile speech and gesture, was the hopeless battle against dirt, against the vermin that could crawl everywhere--and did. She envied the ignorant and the insensible their lack of consciousness of their own plight--like the disemboweled horse that eats tranquilly on. At first she had thought her unhappiness came from her having been used to better things, that if she had been born to this life she would have been content, gay at times. Soon she learned that laughter does not always mean mirth; that the ignorant do not lack the power to suffer simply because they lack the power to appreciate; that the diseases, the bent bodies, the harrowed faces, the drunkenness, quarreling, fighting, were safer guides to the real conditions of these people than their occasional guffaws and fits of horseplay.

A woman from the hilltop came in a carriage to see about a servant. On her way through the hall she cried out: "Gracious!

Why don't these lazy creatures clean up, when soap costs so little and water nothing at all!" Susan heard, was moved to face her fiercely, but restrained herself. Of what use? How could the woman understand, if she heard, "But, you fool, where are we to get the time to clean up?--and where the courage?--and would soap enough to clean up and keep clean cost so little, when every penny means a drop of blood?"

"If they only couldn't drink so much!" said Susan to Tom.

"What, then?" retorted he. "Why, pretty soon wages'd be cut faster than they was when street carfares went down from ten cents to five. Whenever the workin' people arrange to live cheaper and to try to save something, down goes wages. No, they might as well drink. It helps 'em bear it and winds 'em up sooner. I tell you, it ain't the workin' people's fault--it's the bosses, now. It's the system--the system. A new form of slavery, this here wage system--and it's got to go--like the slaveholder that looked so copper-riveted and Bible-backed in its day."

That idea of "the system" was beyond Susan. But not what her eyes saw, and her ears heard, and her nose smelled, and her sense of touch shrank from. No ambition and no reason for ambition. No real knowledge, and no chance to get any--neither the leisure nor the money nor the teachers. No hope, and no reason for hope. No G.o.d--and no reason for a G.o.d.

Ideas beyond her years, beyond her comprehension, were stirring in her brain, were making her grave and thoughtful. She was acc.u.mulating a store of knowledge about life; she was groping for the clew to its mystery, for the missing fact or facts which would enable her to solve the puzzle, to see what its lessons were for her. Sometimes her heavy heart told her that the mystery was plain and the lesson easy--hopelessness. For of all the sadness about her, of all the tragedies so sordid and unromantic, the most tragic was the hopelessness. It would be impossible to conceive people worse off; it would be impossible to conceive _these_ people better off. They were such a mult.i.tude that only they could save themselves--and they had no intelligence to appreciate, no desire to impel. If their miseries--miseries to which they had fallen heir at birth--had made them what they were, it was also true that they were what they were--hopeless, down to the babies playing in the filth. An unscalable cliff; at the top, in pleasant lands, lived the comfortable cla.s.ses; at the bottom lived the ma.s.ses--and while many came whirling down from the top, how few found their way up!

On a Sat.u.r.day night Ashbel came home with the news that his wages had been cut to seven dollars. And the restaurant had been paying steadily less as the hard times grew harder and the cost of unadulterated and wholesome food mounted higher and higher.

As the family sat silent and stupefied, old Tom looked up from his paper, fixed his keen, mocking eyes on Susan.

"I see, here," said he, "that _we_ are so rich that they want to raise the President's salary so as he can entertain _decently_--and to build palaces at foreign courts so as our representatives'll live worthy of _us_!"

CHAPTER XX

ON Monday at the lunch hour--or, rather, half-hour--Susan ventured in to see the boss.