Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 97

He pressed a b.u.t.ton and rang a bell loudly. The responding waiter departed with orders for a whiskey and two lithias.

Maud explained to Susan:

"Max used to be a prize-fighter. He was middleweight champion."

"I've been a lot of things in my days," said Max with pride.

"So I've heard," joked Maud. "They say they've got your picture at headquarters."

"That's neither here nor there," said Max surlily. "Don't get too flip." Susan drank her whiskey as soon as it came, and the glow rushed to her ghastly face. Said Max with great politeness:

"You're having a little neuralgia, ain't you? I see your face is swhole some."

"Yes," said Susan. "Neuralgia." Maud laughed hilariously.

Susan herself had ceased to brood over the incident. In conventional lives, visited but rarely by perilous storms, by disaster, such an event would be what is called concise. But in life as it is lived by the ma.s.ses of the people--life in which awful disease, death, maiming, eviction, fire, violent event of any and every kind, is part of the daily routine in that life of the ma.s.ses there is no time for lingering upon the weathered storm or for bothering about and repairing its ravages. Those who live the comparatively languid, the sheltered life should not use their own standards of what is delicate and refined, what is conspicuous and strong, when they judge their fellow beings as differently situated.

Nevertheless, they do--with the result that we find the puny mud lark criticizing the eagle battling with the hurricane.

When Susan and Maud were in the street again, Susan declared that she must have another drink. "I can't offer to pay for one for you," said she to Maud. "I've almost no money. And I must spend what I've got for whiskey before I--can--can--start in."

Maud began to laugh, looked at Susan, and was almost crying instead. "I can lend you a fiver," she said. "Life's h.e.l.l--ain't it? My father used to have a good business--tobacco. The trust took it away from him--and then he drank--and mother, she drank, too. And one day he beat her so she died--and he ran away. Oh, it's all awful! But I've stopped caring. I'm stuck on Jim--and another little fellow he don't know about. For G.o.d's sake don't tell him or he'd have me pinched for doing business free. I get full every night and raise old Nick. Sometimes I hate Jim. I've tried to kill him twice when I was loaded. But a girl's got to have a backer with a pull. And Jim lets me keep a bigger share of what I make than some fellows. Freddie's pretty good too, they say--except when he's losing on the races or gets stuck on some actress that's too cla.s.sy to be shanghaied--like you was--and that makes him cough up."

Maud went on to disclose that Jim usually let her have all she made above thirty dollars a week, and in hard weeks had sometimes let her beg off with fifteen. Said she:

"I can generally count on about fifteen or twenty for myself.

Us girls that has backers make a lot more money than the girls that hasn't. They're always getting pinched too--though they're careful never to speak first to a man. _We_ can go right up and brace men with the cops looking on. A cop that'd touch us would get broke--unless we got too gay or robbed somebody with a pull. But none of our cla.s.s of girls do any robbing. There's nothing in it. You get caught sooner or later, and then you're down and out."

While Susan was having two more drinks Maud talked about Freddie. She seemed to know little about him, though he was evidently one of the conspicuous figures. He had started in the lower East Side--had been leader of one of those gangs that infest tenement districts--the young men who refuse to submit to the common lot of stupid and badly paid toil and try to fight their way out by the quick methods of violence instead of the slower but surer methods of robbing the poor through a store of some kind. These gangs were thieves, blackmailers, kidnapers of young girls for houses of prost.i.tution, repeaters.

Most of them graduated into habitual jailbirds, a few--the cleverest--became saloon-keepers and politicians and high-cla.s.s professional gamblers and race track men.

Freddie, Maud explained, was not much over twenty-five, yet was already well up toward the place where successful gang leaders crossed over into the respectable cla.s.s--that is, grafted in "big figures." He was a great reader, said Maud, and had taken courses at some college. "They say he and his gang used to kill somebody nearly every night. Then he got a lot of money out of one of his jobs--some say it was a bank robbery and some say they killed a miner who was drunk with a big roll on him.

Anyhow, Freddie got next to Finnegan--he's worth several millions that he made out of policy shops and poolrooms, and contracts and such political things. So he's in right--and he's got the brains. He's a good one for working out schemes for making people work hard and bring him their money. And everybody's afraid of him because he won't stop at nothing and is too slick to get caught."

Maud broke off abruptly and rose, warned by the glazed look in Susan's eyes. Susan was so far gone that she had difficulty in not staggering and did not dare speak lest her uncertain tongue should betray her. Maud walked her up and down the block several times to give the fresh air a chance, then led her up to a man who had looked at them in pa.s.sing and had paused to look back. "Want to go have a good time, sweetheart?" said Maud to the man. He was well dressed, middle-aged, with a full beard and spectacles, looked as if he might be a banker, or perhaps a professor in some college.

"How much?" asked he.

"Five for a little while. Come along, sporty. Take me or my lady friend."

"How much for both of you?"

"Ten. We don't cut rates. Take us both, dearie. I know a hotel where it'd be all right."

"No. I guess I'll take your lady friend." He had been peering at Susan through his gla.s.ses. "And if she treats me well, I'll take her again. You're sure you're all right? I'm a married man."

"We've both been home visiting for a month, and walking the chalk. My, but ma's strict! We got back tonight," said Maud glibly. "Go ahead, Queenie. I'll be chasing up and down here, waiting." In a lower tone: "Get through with him quick. Strike him for five more after you get the first five. He's a blob."

When Susan came slinking through the office of the hotel in the wake of the man two hours later, Maud sprang from the little parlor. "How much did you get?" she asked in an undertone.

Susan looked nervously at the back of the man who was descending the stairway to the street. "He said he'd pay me next time,"

she said. "I didn't know what to do. He was polite and----"

Maud seized her by the arm. "Come along!" she cried. As she pa.s.sed the desk she said to the clerk, "A dirty bilker! Tryin'

to kiss his way out!"

"Give him h.e.l.l," said the clerk.

Maud, still gripping Susan, overtook the man at the sidewalk.

"What do you mean by not paying my lady friend?" she shouted.

"Get out!" said the man in a low tone, with an uneasy glance round. "If you annoy me I'll call the police."

"If you don't cough up mighty d.a.m.n quick," cried Maud so loudly that several pa.s.sers-by stopped, "I'll do the calling myself, you b.u.m, and have you pinched for insulting two respectable working girls." And she planted herself squarely before him.

Susan drew back into the shadow of the wall.

Up stepped Max, who happened to be standing outside his place.

"What's the row about?" he demanded.

"These women are trying to blackmail me," said the man, sidling away.

Maud seized him by the arm. "Will you cough up or shall I scream?" she cried.

"Stand out of the way, girls," said Max savagely, "and let me take a crack at the----."

The man dived into his pocket, produced a bill, thrust it toward Susan. Maud saw that it was a five. "That's only five," she cried. "Where's the other five?"

"Five was the bargain," whined the man.

"Do you want me to push in your blinkers, you d.a.m.ned old bilk, you?" cried Max, seizing him violently by the arm. The man visited his pocket again, found another five, extended the two.

Maud seized them. "Now, clear out!" said Max. "I hate to let you go without a swift kick in the pants."

Maud pressed the money on Susan and thanked Max. Said Max, "Don't forget to tell Freddie what I done for his girl."

"She'll tell him, all right," Maud a.s.sured him.

As the girls went east through Forty-second Street, Susan said, "I'm afraid that man'll lay for us."

"Lay for us," laughed Maud. "He'll run like a cat afire if he ever sights us again."

"I feel queer and faint," said Susan. "I must have a drink."

"Well--I'll go with you. But I've got to get busy. I want a couple of days off this week for my little fellow, so I must hustle. You let that dirty dog keep you too long. Half an hour's plenty enough. Always make 'em cough up in advance, then hustle 'em through. And don't listen to their guff about wanting to see you again if you treat 'em right. There's nothing in it."

They went into a restaurant bar near Broadway. Susan took two drinks of whiskey raw in rapid succession; Maud took one drink--a green mint with ice. "While you was fooling away time with that thief," said she, "I had two men--got five from one, three from the other. The five-dollar man took a three-dollar room--that was seventy-five for me. The three-dollar man wouldn't stand for more than a dollar room--so I got only a quarter there. But he set 'em up to two rounds of drinks--a quarter more for me. So I cleared nine twenty-five. And you'd 'a' got only your twenty-five cents commission on the room if it hadn't been for me. You forgot to collect your commission.

Well, you can get it next time. Only I wouldn't _ask_ for it, Max was so nice in helping out. He'll give you the quarter."

When Susan had taken her second stiff drink, her eyes were sparkling and she was laughing recklessly. "I want a cigarette," she said.

"You feel bully, don't you?"