Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 87

"What are you going to do? What place have you got?"

"None as yet. But He'll provide something--something better'n I deserve."

Susan had to turn away, to hide her pity--and her disappointment. Not only was she not to be helped, but also she must help another. "You might get a job at the hat factory," said she.

Mrs. Tucker was delighted. "I knew it!" she cried. "Don't you see how He looks after me?"

Susan persuaded Miss Tuohy to take Mrs. Tucker on. She could truthfully recommend the old woman as a hard worker. They moved into a room in a tenement in South Fifth Avenue. Susan read in the paper about a model tenement and went to try for what was described as real luxury in comfort and cleanliness.

She found that sort of tenements filled with middle-cla.s.s families on their way down in the world and making their last stand against rising rents and rising prices. The model tenement rents were far, far beyond her ability to pay. She might as well think of moving to the Waldorf. She and Mrs.

Tucker had to be content with a dark room on the fifth floor, opening on a damp air shaft whose odor was so foul that in comparison the Clinton Place shaft was as the pure breath of the open sky. For this shelter--more than one-half the free and proud citizens of prosperous America dwelling in cities occupy its like, or worse they paid three dollars a week--a dollar and a half apiece. They washed their underclothing at night, slept while it was drying. And Susan, who could not bring herself to imitate the other girls and wear a blouse of dark color that was not to be washed, rose at four to do the necessary ironing. They did their own cooking. It was no longer possible for Susan to buy quality and content herself with small quant.i.ty. However small the quant.i.ty of food she could get along on, it must be of poor quality--for good quality was beyond her means.

It maddened her to see the better cla.s.s of working girls.

Their fairly good clothing, their evidences of some comfort at home, seemed to mock at her as a poor fool who was being beaten down because she had not wit enough to get on. She knew these girls were either supporting themselves in part by prost.i.tution or were held up by their families, by the pooling of the earnings of several persons. Left to themselves, to their own earnings at work, they would be no better off than she, or at best so little better off that the difference was unimportant.

If to live decently in New York took an income of fifteen dollars a week, what did it matter whether one got five or ten or twelve? Any wages below fifteen meant a steady downward drag--meant exposure to the dirt and poison of poverty tenements--meant the steady decline of the power of resistance, the steady oozing away of self-respect, of the courage and hope that give the power to rise. To have less than the fifteen dollars absolutely necessary for decent surroundings, decent clothing, decent food--that meant one was drowning. What matter whether the death of the soul was quick, or slow, whether the waters of destruction were twenty feet deep or twenty thousand?

Mrs. Reardon, the servant woman on the top floor, was evicted and Susan and Mrs. Tucker took her in. She protested that she could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of her life--that she preferred it to most beds. But Susan made her up a kind of bed in the corner. They would not let her pay anything. She had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that preys upon working people. Her hair had dwindled to a meager wisp. This she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with an imitation tortoise-sh.e.l.l comb, huge, high, and broken, set with large pieces of gla.s.s cut like diamonds. Her teeth were all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth.

One day, when Mrs. Tucker and Mrs. Reardon were exchanging eulogies upon the goodness of G.o.d to them, Susan shocked them by harshly ordering them to be silent. "If G.o.d hears you," she said, "He'll think you're mocking Him. Anyhow, I can't stand any more of it. Hereafter do your talking of that kind when I'm not here."

Another day Mrs. Reardon told about her sister. The sister had worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture.

Like a series of others the sister caught the disease. But instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it with her fingers against her upper teeth. Used as Susan was to hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked shuddering about the streets--the streets with their incessant march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and worm-eaten. Until that day Susan had been about as un.o.bservant of the obvious things as is the rest of the race. On that day she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease.

Hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and hideously marked.

When she returned--and she did not stay out long--Mrs. Tucker was alone. Said she:

"Mrs. Reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a punishment for marrying a Protestant, she being a Catholic.

How ignorant some people is! Of course, the good Lord sent the judgment on her for being a Catholic at all."

"Mrs. Tucker," said Susan, "did you ever hear of Nero?"

"He burned up Rome--and he burned up the Christian martyrs,"

said Mrs. Tucker. "I had a good schooling. Besides, sermons is highly educating."

"Well," said Susan, "if I had a choice of living under Nero or of living under that G.o.d you and Mrs. Reardon talk about, I'd take Nero and be thankful and happy."

Mrs. Tucker would have fled if she could have afforded it. As it was all she ventured was a sigh and lips moving in prayer.

On a Friday in late October, at the lunch hour, Susan was walking up and down the sunny side of Broadway. It was the first distinctly cool day of the autumn; there had been a heavy downpour of rain all morning, but the New York sun that is ever struggling to s.h.i.+ne and is successful on all but an occasional day was tearing up and scattering the clouds with the aid of a sharp north wind blowing down the deep canyon. She was wearing her summer dress still--old and dingy but clean. That look of neatness about the feet--that charm of a well-shaped foot and a well-turned ankle properly set off--had disappeared--with her the surest sign of the extreme of desperate poverty. Her shoes were much scuffed, were even slightly down at the heel; her sailor hat would have looked only the worse had it had a fresh ribbon on its crown. This first hint of winter had stung her fast numbing faculties into unusual activity. She was remembering the misery of the cold in Cincinnati--the misery that had driven her into prost.i.tution as a drunken driver's lash makes the frenzied horse rush he cares not where in his desire to escape. This wind of Broadway--this first warning of winter--it was hissing in her ears: "Take hold! Winter is coming! Take hold!"

Summer and winter--fiery heat and brutal cold. Like the devils in the poem, the poor--the ma.s.ses, all but a few of the human race--were hurried from fire to ice, to vary their torment and to make it always exquisite.

To shelter herself for a moment she paused at a spot that happened to be protected to the south by a projecting sidewalk sign. She was facing, with only a tantalizing sheet of gla.s.s between, a display of winter underclothes on wax figures. To show them off more effectively the sides and the back of the window were mirrors. Susan's gaze traveled past the figures to a person she saw standing at full length before her. "Who is that pale, stooped girl?" she thought. "How dreary and sad she looks! How hard she is fighting to make her clothes look decent, when they aren't! She must be something like me--only much worse off." And then she realized that she was gazing at her own image, was pitying her own self. The room she and Mrs.

Tucker and the old scrubwoman occupied was so dark, even with its one little gas jet lighted, that she was able to get only a faint look at herself in the little cracked and water-marked mirror over its filthy washstand--filthy because the dirt was so ground in that only floods of water and bars of soap could have cleaned down to its original surface. She was having a clear look at herself for the first time in three months.

She shrank in horror, yet gazed on fascinated. Why, her physical charm had gone gone, leaving hardly a trace! Those dull, hollow eyes--that thin and almost ghastly face--the emaciated form--the once attractive hair now looking poor and stringy because it could not be washed properly--above all, the sad, bitter expression about the mouth. Those pale lips! Her lips had been from childhood one of her conspicuous and most tempting beauties; and as the s.e.x side of her nature had developed they had bloomed into wonderful freshness and vividness of form and color. Now----

Those pale, pale lips! They seemed to form a sort of climax of tragedy to the melancholy of her face. She gazed on and on.

She noted every detail. How she had fallen! Indeed, a fallen woman! These others had been born to the conditions that were destroying her; they were no worse off, in many cases better off. But she, born to comfort and custom of intelligent educated a.s.sociations and a.s.sociates----

A fallen woman!

Honest work! Even if it were true that this honest work was a sort of probation through which one rose to better things--even if this were true, could it be denied that only a few at best could rise, that the most--including all the sensitive, and most of the children--must wallow on, must perish? Oh, the lies, the lies about honest work!

Rosa Mohr, a girl of her own age who worked in the same room, joined her. "Admiring yourself?" she said laughing. "Well, I don't blame you. You _are_ pretty."

Susan at first thought Rosa was mocking her. But the tone and expression were sincere.

"It won't last long," Rosa went on. "I wasn't so bad myself when I quit the high school and took a job because father lost his business and his health. He got in the way of one of those trusts. So of course they handed it to him good and hard. But he wasn't a squealer. He always said they'd done only what he'd been doing himself if he'd had the chance. I always think of what papa used to say when I hear people carrying on about how wicked this or that somebody else is."

"Are you going to stay on--at this life?" asked Susan, still looking at her own image.

"I guess so. What else is there? . . . I've got a steady.

We'll get married as soon as he has a raise to twelve per. But I'll not be any better off. My beau's too stupid ever to make much. If you see me ten years from now I'll probably be a fat, sloppy old thing, warming a window sill or slouching about in dirty rags."

"Isn't there any way to--to escape?"

"It does look as though there ought to be--doesn't it? But I've thought and thought, and _I_ can't see it--and I'm pretty near straight Jew. They say things are better than they used to be, and I guess they are. But not enough better to help me any. Perhaps my children--_if_ I'm fool enough to have any--perhaps they'll get a chance. . . . But I wouldn't gamble on it."

Susan was still looking at her rags--at her pale lips--was avoiding meeting her own eyes. "Why not try the streets?"

"Nothing in it," said Rosa, practically. "I did try it for a while and quit. Lots of the girls do, and only the fools stay at it. Once in a while there's a girl who's lucky and gets a lover that's kind to her or a husband that can make good. But that's luck. For one that wins out, a thousand lose."

"Luck?" said Susan.

Rosa laughed. "You're right. It's something else besides luck. The trouble is a girl loses her head--falls in love--supports a man--takes to drink--don't look out for her health--wastes her money. Still--where's the girl with head enough to get on where there's so many temptations?"

"But there's no chance at all, keeping straight, you say."

"The other thing's worse. The street girls--of our cla.s.s, I mean--don't average as much as we do. And it's an awful business in winter. And they spend so much time in station houses and over on the Island. And, gos.h.!.+ how the men do treat them! You haven't any idea. You wouldn't believe the horrible things the girls have to do to earn their money--a quarter or half a dollar--and maybe the men don't pay them even that. A girl tries to get her money in advance, but often she doesn't. And as they have to dress better than we do, and live where they can clean up a little, they 'most starve. Oh, that life's h.e.l.l."

Susan had turned away from her image, was looking at Rosa.

"As for the fast houses----" Rosa shuddered--"I was in one for a week. I ran away--it was the only way I could escape. I'd never tell any human being what I went through in that house. . . .

Never!" She watched Susan's fine sympathetic face, and in a burst of confidence said: "One night the landlady sent me up with seventeen men. And she kept the seventeen dollars I made, and took away from me half a dollar one drunken longsh.o.r.eman gave me as a present. She said I owed it for board and clothes. In those houses, high and low, the girls always owes the madam. They haven't a st.i.tch of their own to their backs."

The two girls stood facing each other, each looking past the other into the wind-swept canyon of Broadway--the majestic vista of lofty buildings, symbols of wealth and luxury so abundant that it flaunted itself, overflowed in gaudy extravagance. Finally Susan said:

"Do you ever think of killing yourself?"

"I thought I would," replied the other girl. "But I guess I wouldn't have. Everybody knows there's no hope, yet they keep on hopin'. And I've got pretty good health yet, and once in a while I have some fun. You ought to go to dances--and drink.

You wouldn't be blue _all_ the time, then."

"If it wasn't for the sun," said Susan.

"The sun?" inquired Rosa.

"Where I came from," explained Susan, "it rained a great deal, and the sky was covered so much of the time. But here in New York there is so much sun. I love the sun. I get desperate--then out comes the sun, and I say to myself, 'Well, I guess I can go on a while longer, with the sun to help me.'"

"I hadn't thought of it," said Rosa, "but the sun is a help."