Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 128

"Well, Mrs. Spenser, I've had my lesson," replied Annie, apologetic but firm. "When I first came to New York, green as the gra.s.s that grows along the edge of the spring, what does I do but go to work and take up a note to a lady when her husband was there! Next thing I knew he went to work and hauled her round the floor by the hair and skinned out--yes, beat it for good. And my madam says to me, 'Annie, you're fired. Never give a note to a lady when her gent is by or to a gent when his lady's by. That's the first rule of life in gay New York.' And you can bet I never have since--nor never will."

Susan had glanced at the address on the note, had recognized the handwriting of Brent's secretary. Her heart had straightway sunk as if the foreboding of calamity had been realized. As she stood there uncertainly, Annie seized the opportunity to run on and on. Susan now said absently, "Thank you. Very well," and closed the door. It was a minute or so before she tore open the envelope with an impatient gesture and read:

DEAR MRS. SPENSER:

Mr. Brent requests me to ask you not to come until further notice. It may be sometime before he will be free to resume.

Yours truly, JOHN C. GARVEY.

It was a fair specimen of Garvey's official style, with which she had become acquainted--the style of the secretary who has learned by experience not to use frills or flourishes but to convey his message in the fewest and clearest words. Had it been a skillfully worded insult Susan, in this mood of depression and distorted mental vision, could not have received it differently. She dropped to a chair at the table and stared at the five lines of neat handwriting until her eyes became circled and her face almost haggard. Precisely as Rod had described! After a long, long time she crumpled the paper and let it fall into the waste-basket. Then she walked up and down the room--presently drifted into the bathroom and resumed cleaning the coffee machine. Every few moments she would pause in the task--and in her dressing afterwards--would be seized by the fear, the horror of again being thrust into that hideous underworld. What was between her and it, to save her from being flung back into its degradation? Two men on neither of whom she could rely. Brent might drop her at any time--perhaps had already dropped her. As for Rod--vain, capricious, faithless, certain to become an unendurable tyrant if he got her in his power--Rod was even less of a necessity than Brent. What a dangerous situation was hers!

How slender her chances of escape from another catastrophe.

She leaned against wall or table and was shaken by violent fits of shuddering. She felt herself slipping--slipping. It was all she could do to refrain from crying out. In those moments, no trace of the self-possessed Susan the world always saw. Her fancy went mad and ran wild. She quivered under the actuality of coa.r.s.e contacts--Mrs. Tucker in bed with her--the men who had bought her body for an hour--the vermin of the tenements--the brutal hands of policemen.

Then with an exclamation of impatience or of anger she would shake herself together and go resolutely on--only again to relapse. "Because I so suddenly cut off the liquor and the opium," she said. It was the obvious and the complete explanation. But her heart was like lead, and her sky like ink. This note, the day after having tried her out as a possibility for the stage and as a woman. She stared down at the crumpled note in the wast-basket. That note--it was herself. He had crumpled her up and thrown her into the waste-basket, where she no doubt belonged.

It was nearly noon before she, dressed with unconscious care, stood in the street doorway looking about uncertainly as if she did not know which way to turn. She finally moved in the direction of the theater where Rod's play was rehearsing. She had gone to none of the rehearsals because Rod had requested it. "I want you to see it as a total surprise the first night," explained he. "That'll give you more pleasure, and also it will make your criticism more valuable to us." And she had acquiesced, not displeased to have all her time for her own affairs. But now she, dazed, stunned almost, convinced that it was all over for her with Brent, instinctively turned to Rod to get human help--not to ask for it, but in the hope that somehow he would divine and would say or do something that would make the way ahead a little less forbidding--something that would hearten her for the few first steps, anyhow. She turned back several times--now, because she feared Rod wouldn't like her coming; again because her experience--enlightened good sense--told her that Rod would--could--not help her, that her sole reliance was herself. But in the end, driven by one of those spasms of terror lest the underworld should be about to engulf her again, she stood at the stage door.

As she was about to negotiate the surly looking man on guard within, Sperry came rus.h.i.+ng down the long dark pa.s.sageway. He was brus.h.i.+ng past her when he saw who it was. "Too late!" he cried. "Rehearsal's over."

"I didn't come to the rehearsal," explained Susan. "I thought perhaps Rod would be going to lunch."

"So he is. Go straight back. You'll find him on the stage.

I'll join you if you'll wait a minute or so." And Sperry hurried on into the street.

Susan advanced along the pa.s.sageway cautiously as it was but one remove from pitch dark. Perhaps fifty feet, and she came to a cross pa.s.sage. As she hesitated, a door at the far end of it opened and she caught a glimpse of a dressing-room and, in the s.p.a.ce made by the partly opened door, a woman half-dressed--an attractive glimpse. The woman--who seemed young--was not looking down the pa.s.sage, but into the room.

She was laughing in the way a woman laughs only when it is for a man, for _the_ man--and was saying, "Now, Rod, you must go, and give me a chance to finish dressing." A man's arm--Rod's arm--reached across the opening in the doorway. A hand--Susan recognized Rod's well-shaped hand--was laid strongly yet tenderly upon the pretty bare arm of the struggling, laughing young woman--and the door closed--and the pa.s.sage was soot-dark again. All this a matter of less than five seconds. Susan, ashamed at having caught him, frightened lest she should be found where she had no business to be, fled back along the main pa.s.sage and jerked open the street door. She ran squarely into Sperry.

"I--I beg your pardon," stammered he. "I was in such a rush--I ought to have been thinking where I was going. Did I hurt you?" This last most anxiously. "I'm so sorry----"

"It's nothing--nothing," laughed Susan. "You are the one that's hurt."

And in fact she had knocked Sperry breathless. "You don't look anything like so strong," gasped he.

"Oh, my appearance is deceptive--in a lot of ways."

For instance, he could have got from her face just then no hint of the agony of fear torturing her--fear of the drop into the underworld.

"Find Rod?" asked he.

"He wasn't on the stage. So--I came out again."

"Wait here," said Sperry. "I'll hunt him up."

"Oh, no--please don't. I stopped on impulse. I'll not bother him." She smiled mischievously. "I might be interrupting."

Sperry promptly reddened. She had no difficulty in reading what was in his mind--that her remark had reminded him of Rod's "affair," and he was cursing himself for having been so stupid as to forget it for the moment and put his partner in danger of detection.

"I--I guess he's gone," stammered Sperry. "Lord, but that was a knock you gave me! Better come to lunch with me."

Susan hesitated, a wistful, forlorn look in her eyes. "Do you really want me?" asked she.

"Come right along," said Sperry in a tone that left no doubt of his sincerity. "We'll go to the Knickerbocker and have something good to eat."

"Oh, no--a quieter place," urged Susan.

Sperry laughed. "You mean less expensive. There's one of the great big differences between you and the make-believe ladies one b.u.mps into in this part of town. _You_ don't like to be troublesome or expensive. But we'll go to the Knickerbocker.

I feel 'way down today, and I intended to treat myself. You don't look any too gay-hearted yourself."

"I'll admit I don't like the way the cards are running," said Susan. "But--they'll run better--sooner or later."

"Sure!" cried Sperry. "You needn't worry about the play.

That's all right. How I envy women!"

"Why?"

"Oh--you have Rod between you and the fight. While I--I've got to look out for myself."

"So have I," said Susan. "So has everyone, for that matter."

"Believe me, Mrs. Spenser," cried Sperry, earnestly, "you can count on Rod. No matter what----"

"Please!" protested Susan. "I count on n.o.body. I learned long ago not to lean."

"Well, leaning isn't exactly a safe position," Sperry admitted. "There never was a perfectly reliable crutch.

Tell me your troubles."

Susan smilingly shook her head. "That'd be leaning. . . . No, thank you. I've got to think it out for myself. I believed I had arranged for a career for myself. It seems to have gone to pieces That's all. Something else will turn up--after lunch."

"Not a doubt in the world," replied he confidently.

"Meanwhile--there's Rod."

Susan's laugh of raillery made him blush guiltily. "Yes,"

said she, "there's Rod." She laughed again, merrily.

"There's Rod--but where is there?"

"You're the only woman in the world he has any real liking for," said Sperry, earnest and sincere. "Don't you ever doubt that, Mrs. Spenser."

When they were seated in the cafe and he had ordered, he excused himself and Susan saw him make his way to a table where sat Fitzalan and another man who looked as if he too had to do with the stage. It was apparent that Fitzalan was excited about something; his lips, his arms, his head were in incessant motion. Susan noted that he had picked up many of Brent's mannerisms; she had got the habit of noting this imitativeness in men--and in women, too--from having seen in the old days how Rod took on the tricks of speech, manner, expression, thought even, of whatever man he happened at the time to be admiring. May it not have been this trait of Rod's that gave her the clue to his character, when she was thinking him over, after the separation?

Sperry was gone nearly ten minutes. He came, full of apologies. "Fitz held on to me while he roasted Brent.

You've heard of Brent, of course?"

"Yes," said Susan.

"Fitz has been seeing him off. And he says it's----"