Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 99

That'll bring you to your senses."

"I must drink," said Susan.

"Then I must have you pinched," said he with his mocking laugh.

"Don't be a fool," he went on. "You can make money enough to soon buy the right sort of clothes so that I can afford to be seen with you. I'd like to take you out once in a while and give you a swell time. But what'd we look like together--with you in those cheap things out of bargain troughs? Not that you don't look well--for you do. But the rest of you isn't up to your feet and to the look in your face. The whole thing's got to be right before a lady can sit opposite _me_ in Murray's or Rector's."

"All I ask is to be let alone," said Susan.

"That isn't playing square--and you've got to play square. What I want is to set you up in a nice parlor trade--chaps from the college and the swell clubs and hotels. But I can't do anything for you as long as you drink this way. You'll have to stay on the streets."

"That's where I want to stay."

"Well, there's something to be said for the streets," Freddie admitted. "If a woman don't intend to make sporting her life business, she don't want to get up among the swells of the profession, where she'd become known and find it hard to sidestep. Still, even in the street you ought to make a hundred, easy--and not go with any man that doesn't suit you."

"Any man that doesn't suit me," said Susan. And, after a pause, she said it again: "Any man that doesn't suit me."

The young man, with his shrewdness of the street-graduate and his sensitiveness of the Italian, gave her an understanding glance. "You look as if you couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry. I'd try to laugh if I was you."

She had laughed as he spoke.

Freddie nodded approval. "That sounded good to me. You're getting broken in. Don't take yourself so seriously. After all, what are you doing? Why, learning to live like a man."

She found this new point of view interesting--and true, too.

Like a man--like all men, except possibly a few--not enough exceptions to change the rule. Like a man; getting herself hardened up to the point where she could take part in the cruel struggle on equal terms with the men. It wasn't their difference of body any more than it was their difference of dress that handicapped women; it was the idea behind skirt and s.e.x--and she was getting rid of that. . . .

The theory was admirable; but it helped her not at all in practice. She continued to keep to the darkness, to wait in the deep doorways, so far as she could in her "business hours,"

and to repulse advances in the day time or in public places--and to drink. She did not go again to the opium joint, and she resisted the nightly offers of girls and their "gentlemen friends" to try cocaine in its various forms.

"Dope," she saw, was the medicine of despair. And she was far from despair. Had she not youth? Had she not health and intelligence and good looks? Some day she would have finished her apprenticeship. Then--the career!

Freddie let her alone for nearly a month, though she was earning less than fifty dollars a week--which meant only thirty for him. He had never "collected" from her directly, but always through Jim; and she had now learned enough of the methods of the system of which she was one of the thousands of slaves to appreciate that she was treated by Jim with unique consideration. Not only by the surly and brutal Jim, but also by the police who oppressed in petty ways wherever they dared because they hated Freddie's system which took away from them a part of the graft they regarded as rightfully theirs.

Yes, rightfully theirs. And anyone disposed to be critical of police morality--or of Freddie Palmer morality--in this matter of graft would do well to pause and consider the source of his own income before he waxes too eloquent and too virtuous.

Graft is one of those general words that mean everything and nothing. What is graft and what is honest income? Just where shall we draw the line between rightful exploitation of our fellow-beings through their necessities and their ignorance of their helplessness, and wrongful exploitation? Do attempts to draw that line resolve down to making virtuous whatever I may appropriate and vicious whatever is appropriated in ways other than mine? And if so are not the police and the Palmers ent.i.tled to their day in the moral court no less than the tariff-baron and market-cornerer, the herder and driver of wage slaves, the retail artists in cold storage filth, short weight and shoddy goods? However, "we must draw the line somewhere"

or there will be no such thing as morality under our social system. So why not draw it at anything the other fellow does to make money. In adopting this simple rule, we not only preserve the moralities from destruction but also establish our own virtue and the other fellow's villainy. Truly, never is the human race so delightfully, so unconsciously, amusing as when it discusses right and wrong.

When she saw Freddie again, he was far from sober. He showed it by his way of beginning. Said he:

"I've got to hand you a line of rough talk, Queenie. I took on this jag for your especial benefit," said he. "I'm a fool about you and you take advantage of it. That's bad for both of us. . . . You're drinking as much as ever?"

"More," replied she. "It takes more and more."

"How can you expect to get on?" cried he, exasperated.

"As I told you, I couldn't make a cent if I didn't drink."

Freddie stared moodily at her, then at the floor--they were in her room. Finally he said:

"You get the best cla.s.s of men. I put my swell friends on to where you go slipping by, up and down in the shadow--and it's all they can do to find you. The best cla.s.s of men--men all the swell respectable girls in town are crazy to hook up with--those of 'em that ain't married already. If you're good enough for those chaps they ought to be good enough for you.

Yet some of 'em complain to me that they get thrown down--and others kick because you were too full--and, d.a.m.n it, you act so queer that you scare 'em away. What am I to do about it?"

She was silent.

"I want you to promise me you'll take a brace."

No answer.

"You won't promise?"

"No--because I don't intend to. I'm doing the best I can."

"You think I'm a good thing. You think I'll take anything off you, because I'm stuck on you--and appreciate that you ain't on the same level with the rest of these heifers. Well--I'll not let any woman con me. I never have. I never will. And I'll make you realize that you're not square with me. I'll let you get a taste of life as it is when a girl hasn't got a friend with a pull."

"As you please," said Susan indifferently. "I don't in the least care what happens to me."

"We'll see about that," cried he, enraged. "I'll give you a week to brace up in."

The look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was menacing enough. But she was not disturbed; these signs of anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him.

For it was wholly unlike the Freddie Palmer the rest of the world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way. She knew that Palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit.

A week pa.s.sed, during which she did not see him. But she heard that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was drinking wildly. A week--ten days--then----

One night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down Seventh Avenue from Forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm.

"Come along," said he roughly. "You're drinking and soliciting. I've got to clear the streets of some of these tarts. It's got so decent people can't move without falling over 'em."

Susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can make itself heard among the ruling cla.s.ses make the sway of the police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived there without getting something of that dread and horror of the police which to people of the upper cla.s.ses seems childish or evidence of secret criminal hankerings. And this nervousness had latterly been increased to terror by what she had learned from her fellow-outcasts--the hideous tales of oppression, of robbery, of bodily and moral degradation. But all this terror had been purely fanciful, as any emotion not of experience proves to be when experience evokes the reality. At that touch, at the sound of those rough words--at that _reality_ of the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work at Matson's and to live with the Brashears, she straightway lost consciousness. When her senses returned she was in a cell, lying on a wooden bench.

There must have been some sort of wild struggle; for her clothes were muddy, her hat was crushed into shapelessness, her veil was so torn that she had difficulty in arranging it to act as any sort of concealment. Though she had no mirror at which to discover the consolation, she need have had no fear of being recognized, so distorted were all her features by the frightful paroxysms of grief that swept and ravaged her body that night.

She fainted again when they led her out to put her in the wagon.

She fainted a third time when she heard her name--"Queenie Brown"--bellowed out by the court officer. They shook her into consciousness, led her to the court-room. She was conscious of a stifling heat, of a curious crowd staring at her with eyes which seemed to bore red hot holes into her flesh. As she stood before the judge, with head limp upon her bosom, she heard in her ear a rough voice bawling, "You're discharged.

The judge says don't come here again." And she was pushed through an iron gate. She walked unsteadily up the aisle, between two ma.s.ses of those burning-eyed human monsters. She felt the cold outside air like a vast drench of icy water flung upon her. If it had been raining, she might have gone toward the river. But than that day New York had never been more radiantly the City of the Sun. How she got home she never knew, but late in the afternoon she realized that she was in her own room.

Hour after hour she lay upon the bed, body and mind inert.

Helpless--no escape--no courage to live--yet no wish to die.

How much longer would it last? Surely the waking from this dream must come soon.

About noon the next day Freddie came. "I let you off easy,"

said he, sitting on the bed upon which she was lying dressed as when she came in the day before. "Have you been drinking again?"

"No," she muttered.

"Well--don't. Next time, a week on the Island. . . . Did you hear?"

"Yes."

"Don't turn me against you. I'd hate to have to make an awful example of you."