Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 100

"I must drink," she repeated in the same stolid way.

He abruptly but without shock lifted her to a sitting position.

His arm held her body up; her head was thrown back and her face was looking calmly at him. She realized that he had been drinking--drinking hard. Her eyes met his terrible eyes without flinching. He kissed her full upon the lips. With her open palm she struck him across the cheek, bringing the red fierily to its smooth fair surface. The devil leaped into his eyes, the devil of cruelty and l.u.s.t. He smiled softly and wickedly. "I see you've forgotten the lesson I gave you three months ago. You've got to be taught to be afraid all over again."

"I _am_ not afraid," said she. "I _was_ not afraid. You can't make me afraid."

"We'll see," murmured he. And his fingers began to caress her round smooth throat.

"If you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "I'll kill you."

His eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know his innermost secret. "I want you--I want _you_--d.a.m.n you," he said, between his clinched teeth. "You're the first one I couldn't get. There's something in you I can't get!"

"That's _me_," she replied.

"You hate me, don't you?"

"No."

"Then you love me?"

"No. I care nothing about you."

He let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood looking out moodily. After a while he said without turning:

"My mother kept a book shop--on the lower East Side. She brought me up at home. At home!" And he laughed sardonically.

"She hated me because I looked like my father."

Silence, then he spoke again:

"You've never been to my flat. I've got a swell place. I want to cut out this part of the game. I can get along without it.

You're going to move in with me, and stop this street business.

I make good money. You can have everything you want."

"I prefer to keep on as I am."

"What's the difference? Aren't you mine whenever I want you?"

"I prefer to be free."

"_Free!_ Why, you're not free. Can't I send you to the Island any time I feel like it--just as I can the other girls?"

"Yes--you can do that. But I'm free, all the same."

"No more than the other girls."

"Yes."

"What do you mean?"

"Unless you understand, I couldn't make you see it," she said.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up her hair, which had partly fallen down. "I think you do understand."

"What in the h.e.l.l do you want, anyhow?" he demanded.

"If I knew--do you suppose I'd be here?"

He watched her with baffled, longing eyes. "What is it," he muttered, "that's so d.a.m.n peculiar about you?"

It was the question every shrewd observant person who saw her put to himself in one way or another; and there was excellent reason why this should have been.

Life has a certain set of molds--lawyer, financier, gambler, preacher, fas.h.i.+onable woman, prost.i.tute, domestic woman, laborer, clerk, and so on through a not extensive list of familiar types with which we all soon become acquainted. And to one or another of these patterns life fits each of us as we grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and, that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type.

When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost in the school, the fas.h.i.+on, the craze. We have not the courage to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the rank of real ident.i.ty. Individuality--distinction--where it does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it the most positive a.s.sertion of race and s.e.x, of family, type, and so on.

Susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the flower of pa.s.sionate love. But now there was beginning to show in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring through the streets of the city. It made the quicker observers in the pa.s.sing throng turn the head for a second and wondering glance. Most of them a.s.sumed they had been stirred by her superiority of face and figure. But striking faces and figures of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of New York and of several other American cities. The truth was that they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by experience which usually finds and molds mere pa.s.sive material.

This expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in her profile as in her full face. And as she sat there on the edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this expression that disconcerted Freddie Palmer, for the first time in all his contemptuous dealings with the female s.e.x. In his eyes was a ferocious desire to seize her and again try to conquer and to possess.

She had become almost unconscious of his presence. He startled her by suddenly crying, "Oh, you go to h.e.l.l!" and flinging from the room, cras.h.i.+ng the door shut behind him.

Maud had grown tired of the haberdasher's clerk and his presumptions upon her frank fondness which he wholly misunderstood. She had dropped him for a rough looking waiter-singer in a bas.e.m.e.nt drinking place. He was beating her and taking all the money she had for herself, and was spending it on another woman, much older than Maud and homely--and Maud knew, and complained of him bitterly to everyone but himself.

She was no longer hanging round Susan persistently, having been discouraged by the failure of her attempts at intimacy with a girl who spent nearly all her spare time at reading or at plays and concerts. Maud was now chumming with a woman who preyed upon the patrons of a big Broadway hotel--she picked them up near the entrance, robbed them, and when they asked the hotel detectives to help them get back their stolen money, the detectives, who divided with her, frightened them off by saying she was a mulatto and would compel them to make a public appearance against her in open court. This woman, older and harder than most of the girls, though of quiet and refined appearance and manner, was rapidly dragging Maud down. Also, Maud's looks were going because she ate irregularly all kinds of trash, and late every night ate herself full to bursting and drank herself drunk to stupefaction.

Susan's first horror of the men she met--men of all cla.s.ses--was rapidly modified into an inconsistent, therefore characteristically human, mingling of horror and tolerance.

n.o.body, nothing, was either good or bad, but all veered like weatherc.o.c.ks in the s.h.i.+fting wind. She decided that people were steadily good only where their lot happened to be cast in a place in which the good wind held steadily, and that those who were usually bad simply had the misfortune to have to live where the prevailing winds were bad.

For instance, there was the handsome, well educated, well mannered young prize-fighter, Ned Ballou, who was Estelle's "friend." Ballou, big and gentle and as incapable of bad humor as of constancy or of honesty about money matters, fought under the name of Joe Geary and was known as Upper Cut Joe because usually, in the third round, never later than the fifth, he gave the knockout to his opponent by a cruelly swift and savage uppercut. He had educated himself marvelously well. But he had been brought up among thieves and had by some curious freak never learned to know what a moral sense was, which is one--and a not unattractive--step deeper down than those who know what a moral sense is but never use it. At supper in Gaffney's he related to Susan and Estelle how he had won his greatest victory--the victory of Terry the Cyclone, that had lifted him up into the cla.s.s of secure money-makers. He told how he always tried to "rattle" his opponent by talking to him, by pouring out in an undertone a stream of gibes, jeers, insults.

The afternoon of the fight Terry's first-born had died, but the money for the funeral expenses and to save the wife from the horrors and dangers of the free wards had to be earned. Joe Geary knew that he must win this fight or drop into the working or the criminal cla.s.s. Terry was a "hard one"; so circ.u.mstances compelled, those desperate measures which great men, from financiers and generals down to prize-fighters, do not shrink from else they would not be great, but small.

As soon as he was facing Terry in the ring--Joe so he related with pride in his cleverness--began to "guy"--"Well, you Irish fake--so the kid's dead--eh? Who was its pa, say?--the dirty little b.a.s.t.a.r.d--or does the wife know which one it was----" and so on. And Terry, insane with grief and fury, fought wild--and Joe became a champion.

As she listened Susan grew cold with horror and with hate.

Estelle said:

"Tell the rest of it, Joe."

"Oh, that was nothing," replied he.

When he strolled away to talk with some friends Estelle told "the rest" that was "nothing." The champions.h.i.+p secure, Joe had paid all Terry's bills, had supported Terry and his wife for a year, had relapsed into old habits and "pulled off a job"

of safe-cracking because, the prize-fighting happening to pay poorly, he would have had a default on the payments for a month or so. He was caught, did a year on the Island before his "pull" could get him out. And all the time he was in the "pen"

he so arranged it with his friends that the invalid Terry and his invalid wife did not suffer. And all this he had done not because he had a sense of owing Terry, but because he was of the "set" in which it is the custom to help anybody who happens to need it, and aid begun becomes an obligation to "see it through."

It was an extreme case of the moral chaos about her--the chaos she had begun to discover when she caught her aunt and Ruth conspiring to take Sam away from her.

What a world! If only these s.h.i.+fting, usually evil winds of circ.u.mstance could be made to blow good!

A few evenings after the arrest Maud came for Susan, persuaded her to go out. They dined at about the only good restaurant where unescorted women were served after nightfall. Afterward they went "on duty." It was fine overhead and the air was cold and bracing--one of those marvelous New York winter nights which have the tonic of both sea and mountains and an exhilaration, in addition, from the intense bright-burning life of the mighty city. For more than a week there had been a steady downpour of snow, sleet and finally rain. Thus, the women of the streets had been doing almost no business. There was not much money in sitting in drinking halls and the back rooms of saloons and picking up occasional men; the best trade was the men who would not venture to show themselves in such frankly disreputable places, but picked out women in the crowded streets and followed them to quiet dark places to make the arrangements--men stimulated by good dinners, or, later on, in the evening, those who left parties of elegant respectability after theater or opera. On this first night of business weather in nearly two weeks the streets were crowded with women and girls. They were desperately hard up and they made open dashes for every man they could get at. All cla.s.ses were made equally bold--the shop and factory and office and theater girls with wages too small for what they regarded as a decent living; the women with young children to support and educate; the protected professional regulars; the miserable creatures who had to get along as best they could without protection, and were prey to every blackmailing officer of an anti-vice society and to every policeman and fly-cop not above levying upon women who were "too low to be allowed to live, anyhow." Out from all kinds of shelters swarmed the women who were demonstrating how prost.i.tution flourishes and tends to spread to every cla.s.s of society whenever education develops tastes beyond the earning power of their possessors. And with clothes and food to buy, rent to pay, dependents to support, these women, so many days hampered in the one way that was open to them to get money, made the most piteous appeals to the men.

Not tearful appeals, not appeals to sympathy or even to charity, but to pa.s.sion. They sought in every way to excite.

They exhibited their carefully gotten-up legs; they made indecent gestures; they said the vilest things; they offered the vilest inducements; they lowered their prices down and down. And such men as did not order them off with disdain, listened with laughter, made jokes at which the wretched creatures laughed as gayly as if they were not mad with anxiety and were not hating these men who were holding on to that which they must have to live.