Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 53

Matson had too recently sprung from the working cla.s.s and was too ignorant of everything outside his business to have made radical changes in his habits. He smoked five-cent cigars instead of "twofurs"; he ate larger quant.i.ties of food, did not stint himself in beer or in treating his friends in the evenings down at Wielert's beer garden. Also he wore a somewhat better quality of clothing; but he looked precisely what he was. Like all the working cla.s.s above the pauper line, he made a Sunday toilet, the chief features of which were the weekly bath and the weekly clean white shirt. Thus, it being only Monday morning, he was looking notably clean when Susan entered--and was morally wound up to a higher key than he would be as the week wore on.

At sight of her his feet on the leaf of the desk wavered, then became inert; it would not do to put on manners with any of the "hands." Thanks to the bath, he was not exuding his usual odor that comes from bolting much strong, cheap food.

"Well, Lorny--what's the kick?" inquired he with his amiable grin. His rise in the world never for an instant ceased to be a source of delight to him; it--and a perfect digestion--kept him in a good humor all the time.

"I want to know," stammered Susan, "if you can't give me a little more money."

He laughed, eyeing her approvingly. Her clothing was that of the working girl; but in her face was the look never found in those born to the modern form of slavery-wage servitude. If he had been "cultured" he might have compared her to an enslaved princess, though in fact that expression of her courageous violet-gray eyes and sensitive mouth could never have been in the face of princess bred to the enslaving routine of the most conventional of conventional lives; it could come only from sheer erectness of spirit, the exclusive birthright of the sons and daughters of democracy.

"More money!" he chuckled. "You _have_ got a nerve!--when factories are shutting down everywhere and working people are tramping the streets in droves."

"I do about one-fourth more than the best hands you've got,"

replied Susan, made audacious by necessity. "And I'll agree to throw in my lunch time."

"Let me see, how much do you get?"

"Three dollars."

"And you aren't living at home. You must have a hard time. Not much over for diamonds, eh? You want to hustle round and get married, Lorny. Looks don't last long when a gal works. But you're holdin' out better'n them that gads and dances all night."

"I help at the restaurant in the evening to piece out my board.

I'm pretty tired when I get a chance to go to bed."

"I'll bet!. . . So, you want more money. I've been watchin'

you. I watch all my gals--I have to, to keep weedin' out the fast ones. I won't have no bad examples in _my_ place! As soon as I ketch a gal livin' beyond her wages I give her the bounce."

Susan lowered her eyes and her cheeks burned--not because Matson was frankly discussing the frivolous subject of s.e.x. Another girl might have affected the air of distressed modesty, but it would have been affectation, pure and simple, as in those regions all were used to hearing the frankest, vilest things--and we do not blush at what we are used to hearing.

Still, the tenement female s.e.x is as full of affectation as is the s.e.x elsewhere. But, Susan, the curiously self-unconscious, was incapable of affectation. Her indignation arose from her sense of the hideous injustice of Matson's discharging girls for doing what his meager wages all but compelled.

"Yes, I've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady. That'd mean six dollars a week. But you ain't fit. You've got the brains--plenty of 'em. But you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady."

"Why not?" asked Susan. Six dollars a week! Affluence! Wealth!

Matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself into an oracular att.i.tude.

"I'll show you. What's manufacturin'? Right down at the bottom, I mean." He looked hard at the girl. She looked receptively at him.

"Why, it's gettin' work out of the hands. New ideas is nothin'.

You can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em. No, it's all in gettin' work out of the hands."

Susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to see more of it. He proceeded:

"You work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff there's a profit of five dollars on, I get five dollars out of you. If I can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six dollars on, I get six dollars--a dollar more. Clear extra gain, isn't it? Now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and you'll see what it amounts to."

"I see," said Susan, nodding thoughtfully.

"Well! How did I get up? Because as a foreman I knew how to work the hands. I knew how to get those extra dollars. And how do I keep up? Because I hire forepeople that get work out of the hands."

Susan understood. But her expression was a comment that was not missed by the shrewd Matson.

"Now, listen to me, Lorny. I want to give you a plain straight talk because I'd like to see you climb. Ever since you've been here I've been laughin' to myself over the way your forelady--she's a fox, she is!--makes you the pacemaker for the other girls. She squeezes at least twenty-five cents a day over what she used to out of each hand in your room because you're above the rest of them dirty, shiftless muttonheads."

Susan flushed at this fling at her fellow-workers.

"Dirty, shiftless muttonheads," repeated Matson. "Ain't I right?

Ain't they dirty? Ain't they shiftless--so no-account that if they wasn't watched every minute they'd lay down--and let me and the factory that supports 'em go to rack and ruin? And ain't they muttonheads? Do you ever find any of 'em saying or doing a sensible thing?"

Susan could not deny. She could think of excuses--perfect excuses. But the facts were about as he brutally put it.

"Oh, I know 'em. I've dealt with 'em all my life," pursued the box manufacturer. "Now, Lorny, you ought to be a forelady.

You've got to toughen up and stop bein' so polite and helpful and all that. You'll _never_ get on if you don't toughen up.

Business is business. Be as sentimental as you like away from business, and after you've clum to the top. But not _in_ business or while you're kickin' and scratchin' and clawin' your way up."

Susan shook her head slowly. She felt painfully young and inexperienced and unfit for the ferocious struggle called life. She felt deathly sick.

"Of course it's a hard world," said Matson with a wave of his cigar. "But did I make it?"

"No," admitted Susan, as his eyes demanded a reply.

"Sure not," said he. "And how's anybody to get up in it? Is there any other way but by kickin' and stampin', eh?"

"None that I see," conceded Susan reluctantly.

"None that is," declared he. "Them that says there's other ways either lies or don't know nothin' about the practical game.

Well, then!" Matson puffed triumphantly at the cigar. "Such bein' the case--and as long as the crowd down below's got to be kicked in the face by them that's on the way up, why shouldn't I do the kickin'--which is goin' to be done anyhow--instead of gettin' kicked? Ain't that sense?"

"Yes," admitted Susan. She sighed. "Yes," she repeated.

"Well--toughen up. Meanwhile, I'll raise you, to spur the others on. I'll give you four a week." And he cut short her thanks with an "Oh, don't mention it. I'm only doin' what's square--what helps me as well as you. I want to encourage you. You don't belong down among them cattle. Toughen up, Lorny. A girl with a bank account gets the pick of the beaux." And he nodded a dismissal.

Matson, and his hands, bosses and workers, brutal, brutalizing each other more and more as they acted and reacted upon each other. Where would it end?

She was in dire need of underclothes. Her undershirts were full of holes from the rubbing of her cheap, rough corset; her drawers and stockings were patched in several places--in fact, she could not have worn the stockings had not her skirt now been well below her shoetops. Also, her shoes, in spite of the money she had spent upon them, were about to burst round the edges of the soles. But she would not longer accept from the Brashears what she regarded as charity.

"You more than pay your share, what with the work you do,"

protested Mrs. Brashear. "I'll not refuse the extra dollar because I've simply got to take it. But I don't want to pertend."

The restaurant receipts began to fall with the increasing hardness of the times among the working people. Soon it was down to practically no profit at all--that is, nothing toward the rent. Tom Brashear was forced to abandon his policy of honesty, to do as all the other purveyors were doing--to buy cheap stuff and to cheapen it still further. He broke abruptly with his tradition and his past. It aged him horribly all in a few weeks--but, at least, ruin was put off. Mrs. Brashear had to draw twenty of the sixty-three dollars which were in the savings bank against sickness. Funerals would be taken care of by the burial insurance; each member of the family, including Susan, had a policy. But sickness had to have its special fund; and it was frequently drawn upon, as the Brashears knew no more than their neighbors about hygiene, and were constantly catching the colds of foolish exposure or indigestion and letting them develop into fevers, bad attacks of rheumatism, stomach trouble, backache all regarded by them as by their neighbors as a necessary part of the routine of life. Those tenement people had no more notion of self-restraint than had the "better cla.s.ses"

whose self-indulgences maintain the vast army of doctors and druggists. The only thing that saved Susan from all but an occasional cold or sore throat from wet feet was eating little through being unable to accustom herself to the fare that was the best the Brashears could now afford--cheap food in cheap lard, coa.r.s.e and poisonous sugar, vilely adulterated coffee, doctored meat and vegetables--the food which the poor in their ignorance buy--and for which they in their helplessness pay actually higher prices than do intelligent well-to-do people for the better qualities. And not only were the times hard, but the winter also. Snow--sleet--rain--thaw--slush--noisome, disease-laden vapor--and, of course, sickness everywhere--with occasional relief in death, relief for the one who died, relief for the living freed from just so much of the burden. The sickness on every hand appalled Susan. Surely, she said to old Brashear, the like had never been before; on the contrary, said he, the amount of illness and death was, if anything, less than usual because the hard times gave people less for eating and drinking. These ghastly creatures crawling toward the hospital or borne out on stretchers to the ambulance--these yet ghastlier creatures tottering feebly homeward, discharged as cured--these corpses of men, of women, of boys and girls, of babies--oh, how many corpses of babies!--these corpses borne away for burial, usually to the public burying ground--all these stricken ones in the battle ever waging, with curses, with hoa.r.s.e loud laughter, with shrieks and moans, with dull, drawn faces and jaws set--all these stricken ones were but the ordinary losses of the battle!

"And in the churches," said old Tom Brashear, "they preach the goodness and mercy of G.o.d. And in the papers they talk about how rich and prosperous we are."

"I don't care to live! It is too horrible," cried the girl.

"Oh, you mustn't take things so to heart," counseled he. "Us that live this life can't afford to take it to heart. Leave that to them who come down here from the good houses and look on us for a minute and enjoy themselves with a little weepin' and sighin' as if it was in the theater."

"It seems worse every, day," she said. "I try to fool myself, because I've got to stay and----"

"Oh, no, you haven't," interrupted he.