Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 86

"I make my four to five per," continued the woman. "And I've got only myself. Thank G.o.d, I was never fool enough to marry.

It's marrying that drags us poor people down and makes us miserable. Some says to me, 'Ain't you lonesome?' And I says to them, says I, 'Why, I'm used to being alone. I don't want anything else.' If they was all like me, they'd not be fightin'

and drinkin' and makin' bad worse. The bosses always likes to give me work. They say I'm a model worker, and I'm proud to say they're right. I'm mighty grateful to the bosses that provide for the like of us. What'd we do without 'em? That's what _I_'d like to know."

She had pitied this woman because she could never hope to experience any of the great joys of life. What a waste of pity, she now thought. She had overlooked the joy of joys--delusions.

This woman was secure for life against unhappiness.

A few days, and Susan was herself regarded as a model worker.

She turned out hats so rapidly that the forewoman, urged on by Mr. Himberg, the proprietor, began to nag at the other girls.

And presently a notice of general reduction to thirty-five cents a dozen was posted. There had been a union; it had won a strike two years before--and then had been broken up by shrewd employing of detectives who had got themselves elected officers. With the union out of the way, there was no check upon the bosses in their natural and lawful effort to get that profit which is the most high G.o.d of our civilization. A few of the youngest and most spirited girls--those from families containing several workers--indignantly quit. A few others murmured, but stayed on. The ma.s.s dumbly accepted the extra twist in the screw of the mighty press that was slowly squeezing them to death. Neither to them nor to Susan herself did it happen to occur that she was the cause of the general increase of hardship and misery. However, to have blamed her would have been as foolish and as unjust as to blame any other individual. The system ordained it all. Oppression and oppressed were both equally its helpless instruments. No wonder all the vast beneficent discoveries of science that ought to have made the whole human race healthy, long-lived and prosperous, are barely able to save the race from swift decay and destruction under the ravages of this modern system of labor worse than slavery--for under slavery the slave, being property whose loss could not be made good without expense, was protected in life and in health.

Susan soon discovered that she had miscalculated her earning power. She had been deceived by her swiftness in the first days, before the monotony of her task had begun to wear her down. Her first week's earnings were only four dollars and thirty cents. This in her freshness, and in the busiest season when wages were at the highest point.

In the room next hers--the same, perhaps a little dingier--lived a man. Like herself he had no trade--that is, none protected by a powerful union and by the still more powerful--in fact, the only powerful shield--requirements of health and strength and a certain grade of intelligence that together act rigidly to exclude most men and so to keep wages from dropping to the neighborhood of the line of pauperism. He was the most industrious and, in his small way, the most resourceful of men. He was insurance agent, toilet soap agent, piano tuner, giver of piano lessons, seller of pianos and of music on commission. He worked fourteen and sixteen hours a day. He made nominally about twelve to fifteen a week.

Actually--because of the poverty of his customers and his too sympathetic nature he made five to six a week--the most any working person could hope for unless in one of the few favored trades. Barely enough to keep body and soul together. And why should capital that needs so much for fine houses and wines and servants and automobiles and culture and charity and the other luxuries--why should capital pay more when so many were competing for the privilege of being allowed to work?

She gave up her room at Mrs. Tucker's--after she had spent several evenings walking the streets and observing and thinking about the miseries of the fast women of the only cla.s.s she could hope to enter. "A woman," she decided, "can't even earn a decent living that way unless she has the money to make the right sort of a start. 'To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.' Gideon was my chance and I threw it away."

Still, she did not regret. Of all the horrors the most repellent seemed to her to be dependence upon some one man who could take it away at his whim.

She disregarded the advice of the other girls and made the rounds of the religious and charitable homes for working girls.

She believed she could endure perhaps better than could girls with more false pride, with more awe of sn.o.bbish conventionalities--at least she could try to endure--the superciliousness, the patronizing airs, the petty restraints and oppressions, the nauseating smugness, the constant prying and peeping, the hypocritical lectures, the heavy doses of smug morality. She felt that she could bear with almost any annoyances and humiliations to be in clean surroundings and to get food that was at least not so rotten that the eye could see it and the nose smell it. But she found all the homes full, with long waiting lists, filled for the most part, so the working girls said, with professional objects of charity. Thus she had no opportunity to judge for herself whether there was any truth in the prejudice of the girls against these few and feeble attempts to mitigate the miseries of a vast and ever vaster mult.i.tude of girls. Adding together all the accommodations offered by all the homes of every description, there was a total that might possibly have provided for the homeless girls of a dozen factories or sweatshops--and the number of homeless girls was more than a quarter of a million, was increasing at the rate of more than a hundred a day.

Charity is so trifling a force that it can, and should be, disregarded. It serves no _good_ useful service. It enables comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor bring upon themselves. It obscures the truth that modern civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prost.i.tution. The reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish to be disturbed--and that we dearly love the tickling sensation in our vanity of generosity.

Susan was compelled to the common lot--the lot that will be the common lot as long as there are people to be made, by taking advantage of human necessities, to force men and women and children to degrade themselves into machines as wage-slaves.

At two dollars a week, double what her income justified--she rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street. It was a closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no protection against sound or vermin, not giving even privacy from prying eyes. She might have done a little better had she been willing to share room and bed with one or more girls, but not enough better to compensate for what that would have meant.

The young Jew with the nose so impossible that it elevated his countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had taken a friendly fancy to her. He was Julius Bam, nephew of the proprietor. In her third week he offered her the forewoman's place. "You've got a few brains in your head,"

said he. "Miss Tuohy's a b.o.o.b. Take the job and you'll push up. We'll start you at five per."

Susan thanked him but declined. "What's the use of my taking a job I couldn't keep more than a day or two?" explained she.

"I haven't it in me to boss people."

"Then you've got to get it, or you're done for," said he.

"n.o.body ever gets anywhere until he's making others work for him."

It was the advice she had got from Matson, the paper box manufacturer in Cincinnati. It was the lesson she found in all prosperity on every hand. Make others work for you--and the harder you made them work the more prosperous you were--provided, of course, you kept all or nearly all the profits of their harder toil. Obvious common sense. But how could she goad these unfortunates, force their clumsy fingers to move faster, make their long and weary day longer and wearier--with nothing for them as the result but duller brain, clumsier fingers, more wretched bodies? She realized why those above lost all patience with them, treated them with contempt.

Only as one of them could any intelligent, energetic human being have any sympathy for them, stupid and incompetent from birth, made ever more and more stupid and incapable by the degrading lives they led. She could scarcely conceal her repulsion for their dirty bodies, their stained and rotting clothing saturated with stale sweat, their coa.r.s.e flesh reeking coa.r.s.e food smells. She could not listen to their conversation, so vulgar, so inane. Yet she felt herself--for the time--one of them, and her heart bled for them. And while she knew that only their dullness of wit and ignorance kept them from climbing up and stamping and trampling full as savagely and cruelly as did those on top, still the fact remained that they were not stamping and trampling.

As she was turning in some work, Miss Tuohy said abruptly: "You don't belong here. You ought to go back."

Susan started, and her heart beat wildly. She was going to lose her job!

The forelady saw, and instantly understood. "I don't mean that," she said. "You can stay as long as you like--as long as your health lasts. But isn't there somebody somewhere--_anybody_--you can go to and ask them to help you out of this?"

"No--there's no one," said she.

"That can't be true," insisted the forelady. "Everybody has somebody--or can get somebody--that is, anyone who looks like you. I wouldn't suggest such a thing to a fool. But _you_ could keep your head. There isn't any other way, and you might as well make up your mind to it."

To confide is one of the all but universal longings--perhaps needs--of human nature. Susan's honest, sympathetic eyes, her look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding Miss Tuohy. Susan was not much surprised when Miss Tuohy went on to say:

"I was spoiled when I was still a kid--by getting to know well a man who was above my cla.s.s. I had tastes that way, and he appealed to them. After him I couldn't marry the sort of man that wanted me. Then my looks went--like a flash--it often happens that way with us Irish girls. But I can get on. I know how to deal with these people--and _you_ never could learn.

You'd treat 'em like ladies and they'd treat you as easy fruit.

Yes, I get along all right, and I'm happy--away from here."

Susan's sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary encouragement. "It's a baby," Miss Tuohy explained--and Susan knew it was for the baby's sake that this good heart had hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady. Her eyes shifted as she said, "A child of my sister's--dead in Ireland.

How I do love that baby----"

They were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence was never resumed and finished. But Miss Tuohy had made her point with Susan--had set her to thinking less indefinitely.

"I _must_ take hold!" Susan kept saying to herself. The phrase was always echoing in her brain. But how?--_how?_ And to that question she could find no answer.

Every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation was in large part due to its want ads--its daily section of closely printed columns of advertis.e.m.e.nts of help wanted and situations wanted. Susan read the columns diligently. At first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would be in a situation where the pay was good and the work agreeable, or at least not disagreeable. But after a few weeks she ceased from reading.

Why? Because she answered the advertis.e.m.e.nts, scores of them, more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave up. She found that throughout New York all the attractive or even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their families or in other ways, girls working at less than living wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for their support. And those help wanted advertis.e.m.e.nts were simply appeals for more girls of that sort--for cheaper girls; or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in exhaustion or in despair.

"Why do you always read the want ads?" she said to Lany Ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertis.e.m.e.nts in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day. "Did you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?"

"Oh, my, no," replied Lany with a laugh. "I read for the same reason that all the rest do. It's a kind of dope. You read and then you dream about the places--how grand they are and how well off you'll be. But n.o.body'd be fool enough to answer one of 'em unless she was out of a job and had to get another and didn't care how rotten it was. No, it's just dope--like buyin'

policy numbers or lottery tickets. You know you won't git a prize, but you have a lot of fun dreaming about it."

As Susan walked up and down at the lunch hour, she talked with workers, both men and women, in all sorts of employment. Some were doing a little better than she; others--the most--were worse off chiefly because her education, her developed intelligence, enabled her to ward off savage blows--such as illness from rotten food--against which their ignorance made them defenseless. Whenever she heard a story of someone's getting on, how grotesquely different it was from the stories she used to get out of the Sunday school library and dream over! These almost actualities of getting on had nothing in them about honesty and virtue. According to them it was always some sort of meanness or trickery; and the particular meanness or tricks were, in these practical schools of success in session at each lunch hour, related in detail as lessons in how to get on. If the success under discussion was a woman's, it was always how her boss or employer had "got stuck on her" and had given her an easier job with good pay so that she could wear clothes more agreeable to his eyes and to his touch. Now and then it was a wonderful dazzling success--some girl had got her rich employer so "dead crazy" about her that he had taken her away from work altogether and had set her up in a flat with a servant and a "swell trap"; there was even talk of marriage.

Was it true? Were the Sunday school books through and through lies--ridiculous, misleading lies, wicked lies--wicked because they hid the shameful truth that ought to be proclaimed from the housetops? Susan was not sure. Perhaps envy twisted somewhat these tales of rare occasional successes told by the workers to each other. But certain it was that, wherever she had the opportunity to see for herself, success came only by hardness of heart, by tricks and cheats. Certain it was also that the general belief among the workers was that success could be got in those ways only--and this belief made the falsehood, if it was a falsehood, or the partial truth, if it was a twisted truth, full as poisonous as if it had been true throughout. Also, if the thing were not true, how came it that everyone in practical life believed it to be so--how came it that everyone who talked in praise of honesty and virtue looked, as he talked, as if he were canting and half expected to be laughed at?

All about her as badly off as she, or worse off. Yet none so unhappy as she--not even the worse off. In fact, the worse off as the better off were not so deeply wretched. Because they had never in all their lives known the decencies of life clean lodgings, clean clothing, food fit to eat, leisure and the means of enjoying leisure. And Susan had known all these things. When she realized why her companions in misery, so feeble in self-restraint, were able to endure patiently and for the most part even cheerfully, how careful she was never to say or to suggest anything that might put ideas of what life might be, of what it was for the comfortable few, into the minds of these girls who never had known and could only be made wretched by knowing! How fortunate for them, she thought, that they had gone to schools where they met only their own kind! How fortunate that the devouring monster of industry had s.n.a.t.c.hed them away from school before their minds had been awakened to the realities of life! How fortunate that their imaginations were too dull and too heavy to be touched by the sights of luxury they saw in the streets or by what they read in the newspapers and in the cheap novels! To them, as she soon realized, their world seemed the only world, and the world that lived in comfort seemed a vague unreality, as must seem whatever does not come into our own experience.

One lunch hour an apostle of discontent preaching some kind of politics or other held forth on the corner above the shop.

Susan paused to listen. She had heard only a few words when she was incensed to the depths of her heart against him. He ought to be stopped by the police, this scoundrel trying to make these people unhappy by awakening them to the misery and degradation of their lot! He looked like an honest, earnest man. No doubt he fancied that he was in some way doing good.

These people who were always trying to do the poor good--they ought all to be suppressed! If someone could tell them how to cease to be poor, that would indeed be good. But such a thing would be impossible. In Sutherland, where the best off hadn't so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time, had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind of Sunday clothes--in Sutherland the poverty was less than in Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous wealth, was piled up and up. So evidently the presence of riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it. No, the disease was miserable, thought Susan. For most of the human race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this h.e.l.l of a world. And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human.

The apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be changed, that the tyranny could be abolished. She listened, but he did not convince her. He sounded vague and dreamy--as fantastically false in his new way as she had found the Sunday school books to be. She pa.s.sed on.

She continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper.

She no longer bothered with the want ads. Pipe dreaming did not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she never could realize. She read the paper because, if she could not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was going on up in the light and air. She found every day news of great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly forcing itself into acceptance. But all this applied only to the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the ma.s.s was rejected. For that ma.s.s, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor--squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter. And when she read one day--in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper--that the income of the average American family was less than twelve dollars a week--less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual--she realized that what she was seeing and living was not New York and Cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt world wide.

"_Must_ take hold!" her mind cried incessantly to her shrinking heart. "Somehow--anyhow--take hold!--must--must--_must!_"

Those tenement houses! Those tenement streets! Everywhere wandering through the crowds the lonely old women--holding up to the girls the mirror of time and saying: "Look at my misery! Look at my disease-blasted body. Look at my toil-bent form and toil-wrecked hands. Look at my ma.s.ses of wrinkles, at my rags, at my leaky and rotten shoes. Think of my aloneness--not a friend--feared and cast off by my relatives because they are afraid they will have to give me food and lodgings. Look at me--think of my life--and know that I am _you_ as you will be a few years from now whether you work as a slave to the machine or as a slave to the pa.s.sions of one or of many men. I am _you_. Not one in a hundred thousand escape my fate except by death."

"Somehow--anyhow--I must take hold," cried Susan to her swooning heart.

When her capital had dwindled to three dollars Mrs. Tucker appeared. Her face was so beaming bright that Susan, despite her being clad in garments on which a p.a.w.nshop would advance nothing, fancied she had come with good news.

"Now that I'm rid of that there house," said she, "I'll begin to perk up. I ain't got nothing left to worry me. I'm ready for whatever blessings the dear Master'll provide. My pastor tells me I'm the finest example of Christian fort.i.tude he ever Saw. But"--and Mrs. Tucker spoke with genuine modesty--"I tell him I don't deserve no credit for leaning on the Lord. If I can trust Him in death, why not in life?"

"You've got a place? The church has----"

"Bless you, no," cried Mrs. Tucker. "Would I burden 'em with myself, when there's so many that has to be looked after? No, I go direct to the Lord."