Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 56

Susan shook her head, went to the window and gazed into the snowy dreary prospect of tenement house yards. Ashbel, who had been hesitating through hope, vented a jeering laugh. "Ain't she the insultin'est, airiest lady!" sneered he. "Well, so long."

"But, Ashy, you haven't paid for last week yet," pleaded Etta, clinging to his arm.

"You kin have my share of the furniture for that."

"The furniture! Oh, my G.o.d!" shrieked Etta, releasing him to throw out her arms in despair. "How'll we pay for the furniture if you go?"

"Ask your high and mighty lady friend," said her brother. And he opened the door, pa.s.sed into the hall, slammed it behind him.

Susan waited a moment for Etta to speak, then turned to see what she was doing. She had dropped into one of the flimsy chairs, was staring into vacancy.

"We'll have to give up these rooms right away," said Susan.

Etta roused herself, looked at her friend. And Susan saw what Etta had not the courage to express--that she blamed her for not having "made the best of it" and kept Ashbel. And Susan was by no means sure that the reproach in Etta's eyes and heart were not justified. "I couldn't do it, Etta," she said with a faint suggestion of apology.

"Men are that way," said Etta sullenly.

"Oh, I don't blame him," protested Susan. "I understand. But--I can't do it, Etta--I simply can't!"

"No," said Etta. "You couldn't. I could, but you couldn't. I'm not as far down as Ashbel. I'm betwixt and between; so I can understand you both."

"You go and make up with him and let me look after myself. I'll get along."

Etta shook her head. "No," said she without any show of sentiment, but like one stating an unalterable fact. "I've got to stay on with you. I can't live without you. I don't want to go down. I want to go up."

"Up!" Susan smiled bitterly.

Silence fell between them, and Susan planned for the new conditions. She did not speak until Etta said, "What ever will we do?"

"We've got to give up the furniture. Thank goodness, we've paid only two-fifty on it."

"Yes, _it's_ got to go," said Etta.

"And we've got to pay Mrs. Quinlan the six we owe her and get out tonight. We'll go up to the top floor--up to Mrs. Ca.s.satt.

She takes sleepers. Then--we'll see."

An hour later they had moved; for Mrs. Quinlan was able to find two lodgers to take the rooms at once. They were established with Mrs. Ca.s.satt, had a foul and foul-smelling bed and one-half of her back room; the other half barely contained two even dirtier and more malodorous cots, in one of which slept Mrs.

Ca.s.satt's sixteen-year-old daughter Kate, in the other her fourteen-year-old son Dan. For these new quarters and the right to cook their food on the Ca.s.satt stove the girls agreed to pay three dollars and a half a week--which left them three dollars and a half a week for food and clothing--and for recreation and for the exercise of the virtue of thrift which the comfortable so a.s.siduously urge upon the poor.

CHAPTER XXI

EACH girl now had with her at all times everything she possessed in the world--a toothbrush, a cake of castile soap, the little money left out of the week's wages, these three items in the pocket of her one skirt, a cheap dark blue cloth much wrinkled and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade; an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's lacking one b.u.t.ton, Etta's lacking three and having a patch under the right arm.

Yet they often laughed and joked with each other, with their fellow-workers. You might have said their hearts were light; for so eager are we to believe our fellow-beings comfortable, a smile of poverty's face convinces us straightway that it is as happy as we, if not happier. There would have been to their mirth a little more than mere surface and youthful ability to find some jest in the most crus.h.i.+ng tragedy if only they could have kept themselves clean. The lack of sufficient food was a severe trial, for both had voracious appet.i.tes; Etta was tormented by visions of quant.i.ty, Susan by visions of quality as well as of quant.i.ty. But only at meal times, or when they had to omit a meal entirely, were they keenly distressed by the food question. The cold was a still severer trial; but it was warm in the factory and it was warm in Mrs. Ca.s.satt's flat, whose windows were never opened from closing in of winter until spring came round. The inability to keep clean was the trial of trials.

From her beginning at the box factory the physical uncleanness of the other girls had made Susan suffer keenly. And her suffering can be understood only by a clean person who has been through the same ordeal. She knew that her fellow-workers were not to blame. She even envied them the ignorance and the insensibility that enabled them to bear what, she was convinced, could never be changed. She wondered sometimes at the strength and grip of the religious belief among the girls--even, or, rather, especially, among those who had strayed from virtue into the path their priests and preachers and rabbis told them was the most sinful of all strayings. But she also saw many signs that religion was fast losing its hold. One day a Lutheran girl, Emma Schmeltz, said during a Monday morning lunch talk:

"Well, anyhow, I believe it's all a probation, and everything'll be made right hereafter. _I_ believe my religion, I do. Yes, we'll be rewarded in the hereafter."

Becky--Rebecca Lichtenspiel--laughed, as did most of the girls.

Said Becky:

"And there ain't no hereafter. Did you ever see a corpse? Ain't they the dead ones! Don't talk to me about no hereafter."

Everybody laughed. But this was a Monday morning conversation, high above the average of the girls' talk in intelligence and liveliness. Their minds had been stimulated by the Sunday rest from the dreary and degenerating drudgery of "honest toil."

It was the physical contacts that most preyed upon Susan. She was too gentle, too considerate to show her feelings; in her determined and successful effort to conceal them she at times went to the opposite extreme and not only endured but even courted contacts that were little short of loathsome. Tongue could not tell what she suffered through the persistent affectionateness of Letty Southard, a sweet and pretty young girl of wretchedly poor family who developed an enormous liking for her. Letty, dirty and clad in noisome undergarments beneath soiled rags and patches, was always hugging and kissing her--and not to have submitted would have been to stab poor Letty to the heart and humiliate all the other girls. So no one, not even Etta, suspected what she was going through.

From her coming to the factory in the morning, to hang her hat and jacket in the only possible place, along with the soiled and smelling and often vermin-infected wraps of the others--from early morning until she left at night she was forced into contacts to which custom never in the least blunted her.

However, so long as she had a home with the Brashears there was the nightly respite. But now--

There was little water, and only a cracked and filthy basin to wash in. There was no chance to do laundry work; for their underclothes must be used as night clothes also. To wash their hair was impossible.

"Does my hair smell as bad as yours?" said Etta. "You needn't think yours is clean because it doesn't show the dirt like mine."

"Does my hair smell as bad as the rest of the girls'?" said Susan.

"Not quite," was Etta's consoling reply.

By making desperate efforts they contrived partially to wash their bodies once a week, not without interruptions of privacy--to which, however, they soon grew accustomed. In spite of efforts which were literally heroic, they could not always keep free from parasites; for the whole tenement and all persons and things in it were infected--and how could it be otherwise where no one had time or money or any effective means whatsoever to combat nature's inflexible determination to breed wherever there is a breeding spot? The last traces of civilization were slipping from the two girls; they were sinking to a state of nature.

Even personal pride, powerful in Susan and strong in Etta through Susan's example, was deserting them. They no longer minded Dan's sleeping in their room. They saw him, his father, the other members of the family in all stages of nudity and at the most private acts; and they were seen by the Ca.s.satts in the same way. To avoid this was impossible, as impossible as to avoid the parasites swarming in the bed, in the woodwork, in cracks of ceiling, walls, floor.

The Ca.s.satts were an example of how much the people who live in the sheltered and more or less sunny nooks owe to their shelter and how little to their own boasted superiority of mind and soul. They had been a high cla.s.s artisan family until a few months before. The hard times struck them a series of quick, savage blows, such as are commonplace enough under our social system, intricate because a crude jumble of makes.h.i.+fts, and easily disordered because intricate. They were swept without a breathing pause down to the bottom. Those who have always been accustomed to prosperity have no reserve of experience or courage to enable them to recuperate from sudden and extreme adversity. In an amazingly short time the Ca.s.satts had become demoralized--a familiar ill.u.s.tration of how civilization is merely a wafer-thin veneer over most human beings as yet. Over how many is it more? They fought after a fas.h.i.+on; they fought valiantly. But how would it have been possible not steadily to yield ground against such a pitiless, powerful foe as poverty?

The man had taken to drink, to blunt outraged self-respect and to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's downfall. Mrs. Ca.s.satt was as poor a manager as the average woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating woman in the most slipshod fas.h.i.+on, if at all, in any other part of the business but s.e.x-trickery. Thus she was helpless before the tenement conditions. She gave up, went soddenly about in rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling tail of hair.

"Why don't you tie up that tail, ma?" said the son Dan, who had ideas about neatness.

"What's the use?" said Mrs. Ca.s.satt. "What's the use of _anything_?"

"Ma don't want to look stylish and stuck up," said the daughter.

Mrs. Ca.s.satt's haunting terror was lest someone who had known them in the days of their prosperity with a decently furnished little house of their own should run into one of the family now.

Kate, the sixteen-year-old had a place as saleslady in a big shop in Fifth, Street; her six dollars a week was the family's entire steady income. She had formerly possessed a good deal of finery for a girl in her position, though really not much more than the daughter of the average prosperous artisan or small shopkeeper expects, and is expected, to have. Being at the shop where finery was all the talk and sight and thought from opening until closing had developed in her a greedy taste for luxury. She pilfered from the stocks of goods within her reach and exchanged her stealings for the stealings of girls who happened to be able to get things more to her liking or need.

But now that the family savings--bank account was exhausted, all these pilferings had to go at once to the p.a.w.nshop. Kate grew more and more ill-tempered as the family sank. Formerly she had been noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased with a careless compliment from no matter whom--a jocose, half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart seat quite as satisfactory as anybody. But poverty was bringing out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish instincts--those primal instincts of human nature that civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for example, prehensile toes and a covering of hair.

"Well, I for one don't have to stay in this slop barrel," Kate was always saying. "Some fine morning I'll turn up missing--and you'll see me in my own turnout."

She was torturing her mother and father with the dread that she would leave the family in the lurch and enter a house of prost.i.tution. She recounted with the utmost detail how the madam of a house in Longworth Street came from time to time to her counter in the perfumery and soap department--and urged her to "stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." The idea grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints--for modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest. More and more boldly Kate was announcing that she wasn't going to be a fool much longer.

Dan, the fourteen-year-old boy, had attracted the attention of what Ca.s.satt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below them. She made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury. She was caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a professional seducer and "lover."

Said Mrs. Ca.s.satt in one of her noisy wailing appeals to Dan: