Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 92

"I feel like a human being for the first time in--it seems years--ages--to me."

"You've got a swell color--except your lips. Have they always been pale like that?"

"No."

"I thought not. It don't seem to fit in with your style. You ought to touch 'em up. You look too serious and innocent, anyhow. They make a rouge now that'll stick through everything--eating, drinking--anything."

Susan regarded herself critically in the gla.s.s. "I'll see,"

she said.

The odor of the cooking chops thrilled Susan like music. She drew a chair up to the table, sat in happy-go-lucky fas.h.i.+on, and attacked the chop, the hot biscuit, and the peas, with an enthusiasm that inspired Ida to imitation. "You know how to cook a chop," she said to Ida. "And anybody who can cook a chop right can cook. Cooking's like playing the piano. If you can do the simple things perfectly, you're ready to do anything."

"Wait till I have a flat of my own," said Ida. "I'll show you what eating means. And I'll have it, too, before very long.

Maybe we'll live together. I was to a fortune teller's yesterday. That's the only way I waste money. I go to fortune tellers nearly every day. But then all the girls do. You get your money's worth in excitement and hope, whether there's anything in it or not. Well, the fortune teller she said I was to meet a dark, slender person who was to change the whole course of my life--that all my troubles would roll away--and that if any more came, they'd roll away, too. My, but she did give me a swell fortune, and only fifty cents! I'll take you to her."

Ida made black coffee and the two girls, profoundly contented, drank it and talked with that buoyant cheerfulness which bubbles up in youth on the slightest pretext. In this case the pretext was anything but slight, for both girls had health as well as youth, had that freedom from hara.s.sing responsibility which is the chief charm of every form of unconventional life.

And Susan was still in the first flush of the joy of escape from the noisome prison whose poisons had been corroding her, soul and body. No, poison is not a just comparison; what poison in civilization parallels, or even approaches, in squalor, in vileness of food and air, in wretchedness of shelter and clothing, the tenement life that is really the typical life of the city? From time to time Susan, suffused with the happiness that is too deep for laughter, too deep for tears even, gazed round like a dreamer at those cheerful comfortable surroundings and drew a long breath--stealthily, as if she feared she would awaken and be again in South Fifth Avenue, of rags and filth, of hideous toil without hope.

"You'd better save your money to put in the millinery business with me," Ida advised. "I can show you how to make a lot.

Sometimes I clear as high as a hundred a week, and I don't often fall below seventy-five. So many girls go about this business in a no account way, instead of being regular and business-like."

Susan strove to hide the feelings aroused by this practical statement of what lay before her. Those feelings filled her with misgiving. Was the lesson still unlearned? Obviously Ida was right; there must be plan, calculation, a definite line laid out and held to, or there could not but be failure and disaster. And yet--Susan's flesh quivered and shrank away.

She struggled against it, but she could not conquer it.

Experience had apparently been in vain; her character had remained unchanged. . . . She must compel herself. She must do what she had to do; she must not ruin everything by imitating the people of the tenements with their fatal habit of living from day to day only, and taking no thought for the morrow except fatuously to hope and dream that all would be well.

While she was fighting with herself, Ida had been talking on--the same subject. When Susan heard again, Ida was saying:

"Now, take me, for instance. I don't smoke or drink. There's nothing in either one--especially drink. Of course sometimes a girl's got to drink. A man watches her too close for her to dodge out. But usually you can make him think you're as full as he is, when you really are cold sober."

"Do the men always drink when they--come with--with--us?" asked Susan.

"Most always. They come because they want to turn themselves loose. That's why a girl's got to be careful not to make a man feel nervous or shy. A respectable woman's game is to be modest and innocent. With us, the opposite. They're both games; one's just as good as the other."

"I don't think I could get along at all--at this," confessed Susan with an effort, "unless I drank too much--so that I was reckless and didn't care what happened."

Ida looked directly into her eyes; Susan's glance fell and a flush mounted. After a pause Ida went on:

"A girl does feel that way at first. A girl that marries as most of them do--because the old ones are pus.h.i.+ng her out of the nest and she's got no place else to go--she feels the same way till she hardens to it. Of course, you've got to get broke into any business."

"Go on," said Susan eagerly. "You are so sensible. You must teach me."

"Common sense is a thing you don't often hear--especially about getting on in the world. But, as I was saying--one of my gentlemen friends is a lawyer--such a nice fellow--so liberal.

Gives me a present of twenty or twenty-five extra, you understand--every time he makes a killing downtown. He asked me once how I felt when I started in; and when I told him, he said, 'That's exactly the way I felt the first time I won a case for a client I knew was a dirty rascal and in the wrong.

But now--I take that sort of thing as easy as you do.' He says the thing is to get on, no matter how, and that one way's as good as another. And he's mighty right. You soon learn that in little old New York, where you've got to have the money or you get the laugh and the foot--the swift, hard kick. Clean up after you've arrived, he says--and don't try to keep clean while you're working--and don't stop for baths and things while you're at the job."

Susan was listening with every faculty she possessed.

"He says he talks the other sort of thing--the dope--the fake stuff--just as the rest of the hustlers do. He says it's necessary in order to keep the people fooled--that if they got wise to the real way to succeed, then there'd be n.o.body to rob and get rich off of. Oh, he's got it right. He's a smart one."

The sad, bitter expression was strong in Susan's face.

After a pause, Ida went on: "If a girl's an ignorant fool or squeamish, she don't get up in this business any more than in any other. But if she keeps a cool head, and don't take lovers unless they pay their way, and don't drink, why she can keep her self-respect and not have to take to the streets."

Susan lifted her head eagerly. "Don't have to take to the streets?" she echoed.

"Certainly not," declared Ida. "I very seldom let a man pick me up after dark--unless he looks mighty good. I go out in the daytime. I pretend I'm an actress out of a job for the time being, or a forelady in a big shop who's taking a day or so off, or a respectable girl living with her parents. I put a lot of money into clothes--quiet, ladylike clothes. Mighty good investment. If you ain't got clothes in New York you can't do any kind of business. I go where a nice cla.s.s of men hangs out, and I never act bold, but just flirt timidly, as so many respectable girls or semi-respectables do. But when a girl plays that game, she has to be careful not to make a man think he ain't expected to pay. The town's choked full of men on the lookout for what they call love--which means, for something cheap or, better still, free. Men are just crazy about themselves. Nothing easier than to fool 'em--and nothing's harder than to make 'em think you ain't stuck on 'em.

I tell you, a girl in our life has a chance to learn men. They turn themselves inside out to us."

Susan, silent, her thoughts flowing like a mill race, helped Ida with the dishes. Then they dressed and went together for a walk. It being Sunday evening, the streets were quiet. They sauntered up Fifth Avenue as far as Fifty-ninth Street and back. Ida's calm and sensible demeanor gave Susan much needed courage every time a man spoke to them. None of these men happened to be up to Ida's standard, which was high.

"No use wasting time on snide people," explained she. "We don't want drinks and a gush of loose talk, and I saw at a glance that was all those chappies were good for."

They returned home at half-past nine without adventure. Toward midnight one of Ida's regulars called and Susan was free to go to bed. She slept hardly at all. Ever before her mind hovered a nameless, shapeless horror. And when she slept she dreamed of her wedding night, woke herself screaming, "Please, Mr.

Ferguson--please!"

Ida had three chief sources of revenue.

The best was five men--her "regular gentleman friends"--who called by appointment from time to time. These paid her ten dollars apiece, and occasionally gave her presents of money or jewelry--nothing that amounted to much. From them she averaged about thirty-five dollars a week. Her second source was a Mrs.

Thurston who kept in West Fifty-sixth Street near Ninth Avenue a furnished-room house of the sort that is on the official--and also the "revenue"--lists of the police and the anti-vice societies. This lady had a list of girls and married women upon whom she could call. Gentlemen using her house for rendezvous were sometimes disappointed by the ladies with whom they were intriguing. Again a gentleman grew a little weary of his perhaps too respectable or too sincerely loving ladylove and appealed to Mrs. Thurston. She kept her list of availables most select and pa.s.sed them off as women of good position willing to supplement a small income, or to punish stingy husbands or fathers and at the same time get the money they needed for dress and bridge, for matinees and lunches. Mrs.

Thurston insisted--and Ida was inclined to believe--that there were genuine cases of this kind on the list.

"It's mighty hard for women with expensive tastes and small means to keep straight in New York," said she to Susan. "It costs so much to live, and there are so many ways to spend money. And they always have rich lady friends who set an extravagant pace. They've got to dress--and to kind of keep up their end. So--" Ida laughed, went on: "Besides the city women are getting so they like a little sporty novelty as much as their brothers and husbands and fathers do. Oh, I'm not ashamed of my business any more. We're as good as the others, and we're not hypocrites. As my lawyer friend says, everybody's got to make a _good_ living, and good livings can't be made on the ways that used to be called on the level--they're called damfool ways now."

Ida's third source of income was to her the most attractive because it had such a large gambling element in it. This was her flirtations as a respectable woman in search of lively amus.e.m.e.nt and having to take care not to be caught. There are women of all kinds who delight in deceiving men because it gives them a sweet stealthy sense of superiority to the condescending s.e.x. In women of the Ida cla.s.s this pleasure becomes as much a pa.s.sion as it is in the respectable woman whom her husband tries to enslave. With Susan, another woman and one in need of education, Ida was simple and scrupulously truthful. But it would have been impossible for a man to get truth as to anything from her. She amused herself inventing plausible romantic stories about herself that she might enjoy the gullibility of the boastfully superior and patronizing male. She was devoid of sentiment, even of pa.s.sion. Yet at times she affected both in the most extreme fas.h.i.+on. And afterward, with peals of laughter, she would describe to Susan how the man had acted, what an a.s.s she had made of him.

"Men despise us," she said. "But it's nothing to the way I despise them. The best of them are rotten beasts when they show themselves as they are. And they haven't any mercy on us.

It's too ridiculous. Men despise a man who is virtuous and a woman who isn't. What rot!"

She deceived the "regulars" without taking the trouble to remember her deceptions. They caught her lying so often that she knew they thought her untruthful through and through. But this only gave her an opportunity for additional pleasure--the pleasure of inventing lies that they would believe in spite of their distrust of her. "Anyhow," said she, "haven't you noticed the liars everybody's on to are always believed and truthful people are doubted?"

Upon the men with whom she flirted, she practiced the highly colored romances it would have been useless to try upon the regulars. Her greatest triumph at this game was a hard luck story she had told so effectively that the man had given her two hundred dollars. Most of her romances turned about her own ruin. As a matter of fact, she had told Susan the exact truth when she said she had taken up her mode of life deliberately; she had grown weary and impatient of the increasing poverty of a family which, like so many of the artisan and small merchant and professional cla.s.ses in this day of concentrating wealth and spreading tastes for comfort and luxury, was on its way down from comfort toward or through the tenements. She was a type of the recruits that are swelling the prost.i.tute cla.s.s in ever larger numbers and are driving the prost.i.tutes of the tenement cla.s.s toward starvation--where they once dominated the profession even to its highest ranks, even to the fas.h.i.+onable _cocotes_ who prey upon the second generation of the rich. But Ida never told her lovers her plain and commonplace tale of yielding to the irresistible pressure of economic forces. She had made men weep at her recital of her wrongs. It had even brought her offers of marriage--none, however, worth accepting.

"I'd be a b.o.o.b to marry a man with less than fifteen or twenty thousand a year, wouldn't I?" said she. "Why, two of the married men who come to see me regularly give me more than they give their wives for pin money. And in a few years I'll be having my own respectable business, with ten thousand income--maybe more--and as well thought of as the next woman."

Ida's dream was a house in the country, a fine flat in town, a husband in some "refined" profession and children at high-cla.s.s schools. "And I'll get there, don't you doubt it!" exclaimed she. "Others have--of course, you don't know about them--they've looked out for that. Yes, lots of others have--but--well, just you watch your sister Ida."

And Susan felt that she would indeed arrive. Already she had seen that there was no difficulty such as she had once imagined about recrossing the line to respectability. The only real problem in that matter was how to get together enough to make the crossing worth while--for what was there in respectability without money, in a day when respectability had ceased to mean anything but money?

Ida wished to take her to Mrs. Thurston and get her a favored place on the list. Susan thanked her, but said, "Not yet--not quite yet." Ida suggested that they go out together as two young married women whose husbands had gone on the road. Susan put her off from day to day. Ida finally offered to introduce her to one of the regulars: "He's a nice fellow--knows how to treat a lady in a gentlemanly way. Not a bit coa.r.s.e or familiar." Susan would not permit this generosity. And all this time her funds were sinking. She had paid a second week's rent, had bought cooking apparatus, some food supplies, some necessary clothing. She was down to a five-dollar bill and a little change.

"Look here, Lorna," said Ida, between remonstrance and exasperation, "when _are_ you going to start in?"

Susan looked fixedly at her, said with a slow smile, "When I can't hold out another minute."

Ida tossed her head angrily. "You've got brains--more than I have," she cried. "You've got every advantage for catching rich men--even a rich husband. You're educated. You speak and act and look refined. Why you could pretend to be a howling fas.h.i.+onable swell. You've got all the points. But what have you got 'em for? Not to use that's certain."

"You can't be as disgusted with me as I am."