"Never mind me," said Susan. "I was only stunned."
"Oh, I thought it was the booze. They say you hit it something fierce."
"No--a lobbygow." And she felt for her stockings. They were torn away from her garters. Her bosom also was bare, for the lobbygow had searched there, also.
"How much did he get?"
"About thirty-five."
"The h.e.l.l he did! Want me to call a cop?"
"No," replied Susan, who was on her feet again. "What"s the use?"
"Those d.a.m.n cops!" cursed the workingman. "They"d probably pinch you--or both of us. Ten to one the lobbygows divide with them."
"I didn"t mean that," said Susan. The police were most friendly and most kind to her. She was understanding the ways of the world better now, and appreciated that the police themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and robbery that was compelling her. The police made her pay because they dared not refuse to be collectors. They bound whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind; they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. She had no quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected her. And if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it was because the overshadowing power ordained it so.
"Needn"t be afraid I"ll blow to the cop," said the drunken artisan. "You can d.a.m.n the cops all you please to me. They make New York worse than Russia."
"I guess they do the best they can--like everybody else," said the girl wearily.
"I"ll help you upstairs."
"No, thank you," said she. Not that she did not need help; but she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman"s wife who might open the door as they pa.s.sed his family"s flat.
She went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be safe--and out of the way. She staggered into her room, tottered to the bed, fell upon it. A girl named Clara, who lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a nightgown, reading a Bertha Clay novel and smoking a cigarette.
She glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in Susan"s eyes.
"h.e.l.lo--been hitting the pipe, I see," said she. "Down in Gussie"s room?"
"No. A lobbygow," said Susan.
"Did he get much?"
"About thirty-five."
"The ----!" cried Clara. "I"ll bet it was Gussie"s fellow.
I"ve suspected him. Him and her stay in, hitting the pipe all the time. That costs money, and she hasn"t been out for I don"t know how long. Let"s go down there and raise h.e.l.l."
"What"s the use?" said Susan.
"You ought to "a" put it in the savings bank. That"s what I do--when I have anything. Then, when I"m robbed, they only get what I"ve just made. Last time, they didn"t get nothing--but me." And she laughed. Her teeth were good in front, but out on one side and beginning to be discolored on the other. "How long had you been saving?"
"Nearly six months."
"Gee! _Isn"t_ that h.e.l.l!" Presently she laughed. "Six months"
work and only thirty-five to show for it. Guess you"re about as poor at hiving it up as I am. I give it to that loafer I live with. You give it away to anybody that wants a stake.
Well--what"s the diff? It all goes."
"Give me a cigarette," said Susan, sitting up and inspecting the bruises on her bosom and legs. "And get that bottle of whiskey from under the soiled clothes in the bottom of the washstand."
"It _is_ something to celebrate, isn"t it?" said Clara. "My fellow"s gone to his club tonight, so I didn"t go out. I never do any more, unless he"s there to hang round and see that I ain"t done up. You"ll have to get a fellow. You"ll have to come to it, as I"m always telling you. They"re expensive, but they"re company--anybody you can count on for shining up, even if it is for what they can get out of you, is better than not having n.o.body nowhere. And they keep off b.u.ms and lobbygows and scare the bilkers into coughing up."
"Not for me," replied Susan.
The greater the catastrophe, the longer the time before it is fully realized. Susan"s loss of the money that represented so much of savage if momentary horror, and so much of unconscious hope this calamity did not overwhelm her for several days.
Then she yielded for the first time to the lure of opium. She had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked--or took cocaine. But to Clara"s or Gussie"s invitations to join the happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "Not yet. I"m saving that." Now, however, she felt that the time had come.
Hope in this world she had none. Before the black adventure, why not try the world of blissful unreality to which it gave entrance? Why leave life until she had exhausted all it put within her reach?
She went to Gussie"s room at midnight and flung herself down in a wrapper upon a couch opposite a sallow, delicate young man.
His great dark eyes were gazing unseeingly at her, were perhaps using her as an outline sketch from which his imagination could picture a beauty of loveliness beyond human. Gussie taught her how to prepare the little ball of opium, how to put it on the pipe and draw in its fumes. Her system was so well prepared for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the imagination. Opium"s magic transformed the vile, the obscene, into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted. The world she had been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant thing seen in a dream. Her opium world became the vivid reality.
The life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad, shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a thousand mercenary and l.u.s.tful kisses. The opium soon changed all this. Her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop.
Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without ceasing upon an altar to the G.o.d of dreams. Never had she been so beautiful; never had she been so happy--not with the coa.r.s.er happiness of dancing eye and laughing lip, but with the ecstasy of soul that is like the shimmers of a tranquil sea quivering rhythmically under the caresses of moonlight.
In her descent she had now reached that long narrow shelf along which she would walk so long as health and looks should last--unless some accident should topple her off on the one side into suicide or on the other side into the criminal prost.i.tute cla.s.s. And such accidents were likely to happen.
Still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until loss of looks and loss of health--the end of the shelf--should drop her abruptly to the very bottom. She could guess what was there. Every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and most forlorn of its wretched and forlorn things, the solitary old women, bent and twisted, wrapped in rotting rags, picking papers and tobacco from the gutters and burrowing in garbage barrels, seeking somehow to get the drink or the dope that changed h.e.l.l into heaven for them.
Despite liquor and opium and the degradations of the street-woman"s life she walked that narrow ledge with curious steadiness. She was unconscious of the cause. Indeed, self-consciousness had never been one of her traits. The cause is interesting.
In our egotism, in our shame of what we ignorantly regard as the lowliness of our origin we are always seeking alleged lofty spiritual explanations of our doings, and overlook the actual, quite simple real reason. One of the strongest factors in Susan"s holding herself together in face of overwhelming odds, was the nearly seventeen years of early training her Aunt f.a.n.n.y Warham had given her in orderly and systematic ways--a place for everything and everything in its place; a time for everything and everything at its time, neatness, scrupulous cleanliness, no neglecting of any of the small, yet large, matters that conserve the body. Susan had not been so apt a pupil of f.a.n.n.y Warham"s as was Ruth, because Susan had not Ruth"s nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional.
But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium and prost.i.tution to disintegrate them until the general break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman or girl she had met who was not rapidly breaking up, but was offering more or less resistance to the a.s.saults of bad habits, was one who like herself had acquired in childhood strong good habits to oppose the bad habits and to fight them with. An enemy must be met with his own weapons or stronger. The strongest weapons that can be given a human animal for combating the destructive forces of the struggle for existence are not good sentiments or good principles or even pious or moral practices--for, bad habits can make short work of all these--but are good habits in the practical, material matters of life. They operate automatically, they apply to all the mult.i.tude of small, every day; semi-unconscious actions of the daily routine. They preserve the _morale_. And not morality but morals is the warp of character--the part which, once destroyed or even frayed, cannot be restored.
Susan, unconsciously and tenaciously practicing her early training in order and system whenever she could and wherever she could, had an enormous advantage over the ma.s.s of the girls, both respectable and fast. And while their evidence was always toward "going to pieces" her tendency was always to repair and to put off the break-up.
One June evening she was looking through the better cla.s.s of dance halls and drinking resorts for Clara, to get her to go up to Gussie"s for a smoke. She opened a door she had never happened to enter before--a dingy door with the gla.s.s frosted.
Just inside there was a fetid little bar; view of the rest of the room was cut off by a screen from behind which came the sound of a tuneless old piano. She knew Clara would not be in such a den, but out of curiosity she glanced round the screen.
She was seeing a low-ceilinged room, the walls almost dripping with the dirt of many and many a hard year. In a corner was the piano, battered, about to fall to pieces, its ancient and horrid voice cracked by the liquor which had been poured into it by facetious drunkards. At the keyboard sat an old hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was evidently imagining. His filthy fingers were pounding out a waltz. About the floor were tottering in the measure of the waltz a score of dreadful old women. They were in calico.
They had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon the crown of the head. From their bleached, seamed old faces gleamed the longings or the torments of all the pa.s.sions they could no longer either inspire or satisfy. They were one time prost.i.tutes, one time young, perhaps pretty women, now descending to death--still prost.i.tutes in heart and mind but compelled to live as scrub women, cleaners of all manner of loathsome messes in dives after the drunkards had pa.s.sed on.
They were now enjoying the reward of their toil, the pleasures of which they dreamed and to which they looked forward as they dragged their stiff old knees along the floors in the wake of the brush and the cloth. They were drinking biting poisons from tin cups--for those hands quivering with palsy could not be trusted with gla.s.s-dancing with drunken, disease-swollen or twisted legs--venting from ghastly toothless mouths strange cries of merriment that sounded like shrieks of d.a.m.ned souls at the licking of quenchless flames.
Susan stood rooted to the threshold of that frightful scene--that vision of the future toward which she was hurrying.
A few years--a very few years--and, unless she should have pa.s.sed through the Morgue, here she would be, abandoning her body to abominations beyond belief at the hands of degenerate oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of this dance hall. And she would laugh, as did these, would enjoy as did these, would revel in the filth her senses had been trained to find sweet. "No! No!" she protested. "I"d kill myself first!" And then she cowered again, as the thought came that she probably would not, any more than these had killed themselves. The descent would be gradual--no matter how swift, still gradual. Only the insane put an end to life.
Yes--she would come here some day.
She leaned against the wall, her throat contracting in a fit of nausea. She grew cold all over; her teeth chattered. She tried in vain to tear her gaze from the spectacle; some invisible power seemed to be holding her head in a vise, thrusting her struggling eyelids violently open.
There were several men, dead drunk, asleep in old wooden chairs against the wall. One of these men was so near her that she could have touched him. His clothing was such an a.s.sortment of rags slimy and greasy as one sometimes sees upon the top of a filled garbage barrel to add its horrors of odor of long unwashed humanity to the stenches from vegetable decay. His wreck of a hard hat had fallen from his head as it dropped forward in drunken sleep. Something in the shape of the head made her concentrate upon this man. She gave a sharp cry, stretched out her hand, touched the man"s shoulder.
"Rod!" she cried. "Rod!"
The head slowly lifted, and the bleary, blowsy wreck of Roderick Spenser"s handsome face was turned stupidly toward her. Into his gray eyes slowly came a gleam of recognition.
Then she saw the red of shame burst into his hollow cheeks, and the head quickly drooped.
She shook him. "Rod! It"s _you!_"
"Get the h.e.l.l out," he mumbled. "I want to sleep."