Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 98

"I'm ready for anything," declared she giddily. "I don't give a d.a.m.n. I'm over the line. I--_don't_--give--a--d.a.m.n!"

"I used to hate the men I went up with," said Maud, "but now I hardly look at their faces. You'll soon be that way. Then you'll only drink for fun. Drink--and dope--they are about the only fun we have--them and caring about some fellow."

"How many girls has Freddie got?"

"Search me. Not many that he'd speak to himself. Jim's his wardman--does his collecting for him. Freddie's above most of the men in this business. The others are about like Jim--tough straight through, but Freddie's a kind of a pullman. The other men-even Jim--hate him for being such a snare and being able to hide it that he's in such a low business. They'd have done him up long ago, if they could. But he's to wise for them. That's why they have to do what he says. I tell you, you're in right, for sure. You'll have Freddie eating out of your hand, if you play a cool hand."

Susan ordered another drink and a package of Egyptian cigarettes. "They don't allow ladies to smoke in here," said Maud. "We'll go to the washroom."

And in the washroom they took a few hasty puffs before sallying forth again. Usually Sunday night was dull, all the men having spent their spare money the night before, and it being a bad night for married men to make excuses for getting away from home. Maud explained that, except "out-of-towners," the married men were the chief support of their profession--"and most of the cornhuskers are married men, too." But Susan had the novice's luck. When she and Maud met Maud's "little gentleman friend" Harry Tucker at midnight and went to Considine's for supper, Susan had taken in "presents" and commissions twenty-nine dollars and a half. Maud had not done so badly, herself; her net receipts were twenty-two fifty.

She would not let Susan pay any part of the supper bill, but gave Harry the necessary money. "Here's a five," said she, pressing the bill into his hand, "and keep the change."

And she looked at him with loving eyes of longing. He was a pretty, common-looking fellow, a mere boy, who clerked in a haberdashery in the neighborhood. As he got only six dollars a week and had to give five to his mother who sewed, he could not afford to spend money on Maud, and she neither expected nor wished it. When she picked him up, he like most of his fellow-clerks had no decent clothing but the suit he had to have to "make a front" at the store. Maud had outfitted him from the skin with the cheap but showy stuff exhibited for just such purposes in the Broadway windows. She explained confidentially to Susan:

"It makes me sort of feel that I own him. Then, too, in love there oughtn't to be any money. If he paid, I'd be as cold to him as I am to the rest. The only reason I like Jim at all is I like a good beating once in a while. It's exciting. Jim--he treats me like the dirt under his feet. And that's what we are--dirt under the men's feet. Every woman knows it, when it comes to a showdown between her and a man. As my pop used to say, the world was made for men, not for women. Still, our graft ain't so b.u.m, at that--if we work it right."

Freddie called on Susan about noon the next day. She was still in bed. He was dressed in the extreme of fashion, was wearing a chinchilla-lined coat. He looked the idle, sportively inclined son of some rich man in the Fifth Avenue district. He was having an affair with a much admired young actress--was engaged in it rather as a matter of vanity and for the fashionable half-world a.s.sociations into which it introduced him rather than from any present interest in the lady. He stood watching Susan with a peculiar expression--one he might perhaps have found it hard to define himself. He bent over her and carelessly brushed her ear with his lips. "How did your royal highness make out?" inquired he.

"The money's in the top bureau drawer," replied she, the covers up to her eyes and her eyes closed.

He went to the bureau, opened the drawer, with his gloved hands counted the money. As he counted his eyes had a look in them that was strangely like jealous rage. He kept his back toward her for some time after he had crossed to look at the money.

When he spoke it was to say:

"Not bad. And when you get dressed up a bit and lose your stage fright, you'll do a smashing business. I'll not take my share of this. I had a good run with the cards last night.

Anyhow, you've got to pay your rent and buy some clothes. I've got to invest something in my new property. It's badly run down. You'll get busy again tonight, of course. Never lay off, lady, unless the weather's bad. You'll find you won't average more than twenty good business days a month in summer and fall, and only about ten in winter and spring, when it's cold and often lots of bad weather in the afternoons and evenings. That means hustle."

No sign from Susan. He sat on the bed and pulled the covers away from her face. "What are you so grouchy about, pet?" he inquired, chucking her under the chin.

"Nothing."

"Too much booze, I'll bet. Well, sleep your grouch off. I've got a date with Finnegan. The election's coming on, and I have to work--lining up the vote and getting the repeaters ready.

It all means good money for me. Look out about the booze, lady. It'll float you into trouble--trouble with me, I mean."

And he patted her bare shoulders, laughed gently, went to the door.

He paused there, struggled with an impulse to turn--departed.

CHAPTER VII

BUT she did not "look out about the booze." Each morning she awoke in a state of depression so horrible that she wondered why she could not bring herself to plan suicide. Why was it?

Her marriage? Yes--and she paid it its customary tribute of a shudder. Yes, her marriage had made all things thereafter possible. But what else? Lack of courage? Lack of self-respect? Was it not always a.s.sumed that a woman in her position, if she had a grain of decent instinct, would rush eagerly upon death? Was she so much worse than others? Or was what everybody said about these things--everybody who had experience--was it false, like nearly everything else she had been taught? She did not understand; she only knew that hope was as strong within her as health itself--and that she did not want to die--and that at present she was helpless.

One evening the man she was with--a good-looking and unusually interesting young chap--suddenly said:

"What a heart action you have got! Let me listen to that again."

"Is it all wrong?" asked Susan, as he pressed his ear against her chest.

"You ask that as if you rather hoped it was."

"I do--and I don't."

"Well," said he, after listening for a third time, "you'll never die of heart trouble. I never heard a heart with such a grand action--like a big, powerful pump, built to last forever.

You're never ill, are you?"

"Not thus far."

"And you'll have a hard time making yourself ill. Health? Why, your health must be perfect. Let me see." And he proceeded to thump and press upon her chest with an expertness that proclaimed the student of medicine. He was all interest and enthusiasm, took a pencil and, spreading a sheet upon her chest over her heart, drew its outlines. "There!" he cried.

"What is it?" asked Susan. "I don't understand."

The young man drew a second and much smaller heart within the outline of hers. "This," he explained, "is about the size of an ordinary heart. You can see for yourself that yours is fully one-fourth bigger than the normal."

"What of it?" said Susan.

"Why, health and strength--and vitality--courage--hope--all one-fourth above the ordinary allowance. Yes, more than a fourth. I envy you. You ought to live long, stay young until you're very old--and get pretty much anything you please. You don't belong to this life. Some accident, I guess. Every once in a while I run across a case something like yours. You'll go back where you belong. This is a dip, not a drop."

"You sound like a fortune-teller." She was smiling mockingly.

But in truth she had never in all her life heard words that thrilled her so, that heartened her so.

"I am. A scientific fortune-teller. And what that kind says comes true, barring accidents. As you're not ignorant and careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad. On the contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get the splendid exercise of walking--a much more healthful life, in the essential ways, than respectable women lead. They're always stuffing, and rumping it. They never move if they can help. No, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less intelligent than you look. Oh, yes--death and one other thing."

"Drink." And he looked shrewdly at her.

But drink she must. And each day, as soon as she dressed and was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities. There is a stage in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect. But she was far from this advanced stage. Her disposition was, if anything, more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of liquor. The whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to accustom. With these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety a.s.serted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning.

By observation and practice she was soon able to measure the exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." That gayety of hers was of the surface only. Behind it her real self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to her mood of the day. And she had the sense of being in the grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged through some dreadful probation from which she would presently emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her desperate fort.i.tude. The past--unreal. The present--a waking dream. But the future--ah, the future!

He has not candidly explored far beneath the surface of things who does not know the strange allure, charm even, that many loathsome things possess. And drink is peculiarly fitted to bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by centuries and ages of unbroken custom. The human animal, for all its pretenses of inflexibility, is almost infinitely adaptable--that is why it has risen in several million years of evolution from about the humblest rank in the mammalian family to overlordship of the universe. Still, it is doubtful if, without drink to help her, a girl of Susan's intelligence and temperament would have been apt to endure. She would probably have chosen the alternative--death. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of girls, at least her equals in sensibility, are caught in the same calamity every year, tens of thousands, ever more and more as our civilization transforms under the pressure of industrialism, are caught in the similar calamities of soul-destroying toil. And only the few survive who have perfect health and abounding vitality. Susan's iron strength enabled her to live; but it was drink that enabled her to endure. Beyond question one of the greatest blessings that could now be conferred upon the race would be to cure it of the drink evil. But at the same time, if drink were taken away before the causes of drink were removed, there would be an appalling increase in suicide--in insanity, in the general total of human misery. For while drink r.e.t.a.r.ds the growth of intelligent effort to end the stupidities in the social system, does it not also help men and women to bear the consequences of those stupidities? Our crude and undeveloped new civilization, strapping men and women and children to the machines and squeezing all the energy out of them, all the capacity for vital life, casts them aside as soon as they are useless but long before they are dead. How unutterably wretched they would be without drink to give them illusions!

Susan grew fond of cigarettes, fond of whiskey; to the rest she after a few weeks became numb--no new or strange phenomenon in a world where people with a cancer or other hideous running sore or some gross and frightful deformity of fat or excrescence are seen laughing, joining freely and comfortably in the company of the unafflicted. In her affliction Susan at least saw only those affected like herself--and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook upon life.

The old Cartesian formula--"I think, therefore I am"--would come nearer to expressing a truth, were it reversed--"I am, therefore I think." Our characters are compressed, and our thoughts bent by our environment. And most of us are unconscious of our slavery because our environment remains unchanged from birth until death, and so seems the whole universe to us.

In spite of her life, in spite of all she did to disguise herself, there persisted in her face--even when she was dazed or giddied or stupefied with drink--the expression of the woman on the right side of the line. Whether it was something in her character, whether it was not rather due to superiority of breeding and intelligence, would be difficult to say. However, there was the _different_ look that irritated many of the other girls, interfered with her business and made her feel a hypocrite. She heard so much about the paleness of her lips that she decided to end that comment by using paint--the durable kind Ida had recommended. When her lips flamed carmine, a strange and striking effect resulted. The sad sweet pensiveness of her eyes--the pallor of her clear skin--then, that splash of bright red, artificial, bold, defiant--the contrast of the combination seemed somehow to tell the story of her life her past no less than her present. And when her beauty began to come back--for, hard though her life was, it was a life of good food, of plenty of sleep, of much open air; so it put no such strain upon her as had the life of the factory and the tenement--when her beauty came back, the effect of that contrast of scarlet splash against the sad purity of pallid cheeks and violet-gray eyes became a mark of individuality, of distinction. It was not long before Susan would have as soon thought of issuing forth with her body uncovered as with her lips unrouged.

She turned away from men who sought her a second time. She was difficult to find, she went on "duty" only enough days each week to earn a low average of what was expected from the girls by their protectors. Yet she got many unexpected presents--and so had money to lend to the other girls, who soon learned how "easy" she was.

Maud, sometimes at her own prompting, sometimes prompted by Jim, who was prompted by Freddie--warned her every few days that she was skating on the thinnest of ice. But she went her way.

Not until she accompanied a girl to an opium joint to discover whether dope had the merits claimed for it as a deadener of pain and a producer of happiness--not until then did Freddie come in person.

"I hear," said he and she wondered whether he had heard from Max or from loose-tongued Maud--"that you come into the hotel so drunk that men sometimes leave you right away again--go without paying you."

"I must drink," said Susan.

"You must _stop_ drink," retorted he, amiable in his terrible way. "If you don't, I'll have you pinched and sent up.