"Has she gone?" asked Susan.
"Couple of weeks."
"Where?"
The janitress shrugged her shoulders. The other women shrugged their shoulders. Said the janitress:
"Her feller stopped coming. The cancer got awful bad. I"ve saw a good many--they"re quite plentiful down this way. I never see a worse"n hers. She didn"t have no money. Up to the hospital they tried a new cure on her that made her gallopin" worse. The day before I was going to have to go to work and put her out--she left."
"Can"t you give me any idea?" urged Susan.
"She didn"t take her things," said the janitress meaningly.
"Not a st.i.tch."
"The--the river?"
The janitress shrugged her shoulders. "She always said she would, and I guess----"
Again the fat, stooped shoulders lifted and lowered. "She was most crazy with pain."
There was a moment"s silence, then Susan murmured, "Thank you," and went back to the hall. The house was exhaling a frightful stench--the odor of cheap kerosene, of things that pa.s.sed there for food, of animals human and lower, of death and decay. On her way out she dropped a dollar into the lap of the little girl with the mange. A parrot was shrieking from an upper window. On the topmost fire escape was a row of geraniums blooming st.u.r.dily. Her taxicab had moved up the street, pushed out of place by a hea.r.s.e--a white hea.r.s.e, with polished mountings, the horses caparisoned in white netting, and tossing white plumes. A baby"s funeral--this mockery of a ride in state after a brief life of squalor. It was summer, and the babies were dying like lambs in the shambles. In winter the grown people were slaughtered; in summer the children. Across the street, a few doors up, the city dead wagon was taking away another body--in a plain pine box--to the Potter"s Field where find their way for the final rest one in every ten of the people of the rich and splendid city of New York.
Susan hurried into her cab. "Drive fast," she said.
When she came back to sense of her surroundings she was flying up wide and airy Fifth Avenue with gorgeous sunshine bathing its palaces, with wealth and fashion and ease all about her.
Her dear City of the Sun! But it hurt her now, was hateful to look upon. She closed her eyes; her life in the slums, her life when she was sharing the lot that is really the lot of the human race as a race, pa.s.sed before her--its sights and sounds and odors, its hideous heat, its still more hideous cold, its contacts and a.s.sociations, its dirt and disease and degradation. And through the roar of the city there came to her a sound, faint yet intense--like the still, small voice the prophet heard--but not the voice of G.o.d, rather the voice of the mult.i.tude of aching hearts, aching in hopeless poverty--hearts of men, of women, of children----
The children! The mult.i.tudes of children with hearts that no sooner begin to beat than they begin to ache. She opened her eyes to shut out these sights and that sound of heartache.
She gazed round, drew a long breath of relief. She had almost been afraid to look round lest she should find that her escape had been only a dream. And now the road she had chosen--or, rather, the only road she could take--the road with Freddie Palmer--seemed attractive, even dazzling. What she could not like, she would ignore--and how easily she, after her experience, could do that! What she could not ignore she would tolerate would compel herself to like.
Poor Clara!--Happy Clara!--better off in the dregs of the river than she had ever been in the dregs of New York. She shuddered. Then, as so often, the sense of the grotesque thrust in, as out of place as jester in cap and bells at a bier--and she smiled sardonically. "Why," thought she, "in being squeamish about Freddie I"m showing that I"m more respectable than the respectable women. There"s hardly one of them that doesn"t swallow worse doses with less excuse or no excuse at all--and without so much as a wry face."
CHAPTER XX
IN the ten days on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, as the pa.s.senger list declared them, planned the early stages of their campaign. They must keep to themselves, must make no acquaintances, no social entanglements of any kind, until they had effected the exterior transformation which was to be the first stride--and a very long one, they felt--toward the conquest of the world that commands all the other worlds. Several men aboard knew Palmer slightly--knew him vaguely as a big politician and contractor. They had a hazy notion that he was reputed to have been a thug and a grafter. But New Yorkers have few prejudices except against guilelessness and failure. They are well aware that the wisest of the wise Hebrew race was never more sagacious than when he observed that "he who hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent." They are too well used to unsavory pasts to bother much about that kind of odor; and where in the civilized world--or in that which is not civilized--is there an odor from reputation--or character--whose edge is not taken off by the strong, sweet, hypnotic perfume of money? Also, Palmer"s appearance gave the lie direct to any scandal about him. It could not be--it simply could not be--that a man of such splendid physical build, a man with a countenance so handsome, had ever been a low, wicked fellow! Does not the devil always at once exhibit his hoofs, horns, tail and malevolent smile, that all men may know who and what he is? A frank, manly young leader of men--that was the writing on his countenance.
And his Italian blood put into his good looks an ancient and aristocratic delicacy that made it incredible that he was of low origin. He spoke good English, he dressed quietly; he did not eat with his knife; he did not retire behind a napkin to pick his teeth, but attended to them openly, if necessity compelled--and splendid teeth they were, set in a wide, clean mouth, notably attractive for a man"s. No, Freddie Palmer"s past would not give him any trouble whatever; in a few years it would be forgotten, would be romanced about as the heroic struggles of a typical American rising from poverty.
"Thank G.o.d," said Freddie, "I had sense enough not to get a jail smell on me!"
Susan colored painfully--and Palmer, the sensitive, colored also. But he had the tact that does not try to repair a blunder by making a worse one; he pretended not to see Susan"s crimson flush.
_Her_ past would not be an easy matter--if it should ever rise to face her publicly. Therefore it must not rise till Freddie and she were within the walls of the world they purposed to enter by stealth, and had got themselves well intrenched.
Then she would be Susan Lenox of Sutherland, Indiana, who had come to New York to study for the stage and, after many trials from all of which she had emerged with unspotted virtue, whatever vicious calumny might in envy say, had captured the heart and the name of the handsome, rich young contractor.
There would be nasty rumors, dreadful stories, perhaps. But in these loose and cynical days, with the women more and more audacious and independent, with the universal craving for luxury beyond the reach of laboriously earned incomes, with marriage decaying in city life among the better cla.s.ses--in these easy-going days, who was not suspected, hinted about, attacked? And the very atrociousness of the stories would prevent their being believed. One glance at Susan would be enough to make doubters laugh at their doubts.
The familiar types of fast women of all degrees come from the poorest kinds of farms and from the tenements. In America, practically not until the panics and collapses of recent years which have tumbled another and better section of the middle cla.s.s into the abyss of the underworld--not until then did there appear in the city streets and houses of ill repute any considerable number of girls from good early surroundings.
Before that time, the clamor for luxury--the luxury that civilization makes as much a necessity as food--had been satisfied more or less by the incomes of the middle cla.s.s; and any girl of that cla.s.s, with physical charm and shrewdness enough to gain a living as outcast woman, was either supported at home or got a husband able to give her at least enough of what her tastes craved to keep her in the ranks of the reputable. Thus Susan"s beauty of refinement, her speech and manner of the lady, made absurd any suggestion that she could ever have been a fallen woman. The crimson splash of her rouged lips did not suggest the _cocotte_, but the lady with a dash of gayety in her temperament. This, because of the sweet, sensitive seriousness of her small, pallid face with its earnest violet-gray eyes and its frame of abundant dark hair, simply and gracefully arranged. She was of the advance guard of a type which the swift downfall of the middle cla.s.s, the increasing intelligence and restlessness and love of luxury among women, and the decay of formal religion with its exactions of chast.i.ty as woman"s one diamond-fine jewel, are now making familiar in every city. The demand for the luxurious comfort which the educated regard as merely decent existence is far outstripping the demand for, and the education of, women in lucrative occupations other than prost.i.tution.
Luckily Susan had not been arrested under her own name; there existed no court record which could be brought forward as proof by some nosing newspaper.
Susan herself marveled that there was not more trace of her underworld experience in her face and in her mind. She could not account for it. Yet the matter was simple enough to one viewing it from the outside. It is what we think, what we feel about ourselves, that makes up our expression of body and soul. And never in her lowest hour had her soul struck its flag and surrendered to the idea that she was a fallen creature. She had a temperament that estimated her acts not as right and wrong but as necessity. Men, all the rest of the world, might regard her as nothing but s.e.x symbol; she regarded herself as an intelligence. And the filth slipped from her and could not soak in to change the texture of her being. She had no more the feeling or air of the _cocotte_ than has the married woman who lives with her husband for a living. Her expression, her way of looking at her fellow beings and of meeting their looks, was that of the woman of the world who is for whatever reason above that slavery to opinion, that fear of being thought bold or forward which causes women of the usual run to be sensitive about staring or being stared at. Sometimes--in _cocottes_, in stage women, in fashionable women--this expression is self-conscious, or supercilious. It was not so with Susan, for she had little self-consciousness and no sn.o.bbishness at all. It merely gave the charm of worldly experience and expertness to a beauty which, without it, might have been too melancholy.
Susan, become by sheer compulsion philosopher about the vagaries of fat, did not fret over possible future dangers.
She dismissed them and put all her intelligence and energy to the business in hand--to learning and to helping Palmer learn the ways of that world which includes all worlds.
Toward the end of the voyage she said to him:
"About my salary--or allowance--or whatever it is---- I"ve been thinking things over. I"ve made up my mind to save some money. My only chance is that salary. Have you any objection to my saving it--as much of it as I can?"
He laughed. "Tuck away anything and everything you can lay your hands on," said he. "I"m not one of those fools who try to hold women by being close and small with them.
I"d not want you about if you were of the sort that could be held that way."
"No--I"ll put by only from my salary," said she. "I admit I"ve no right to do that. But I"ve become sensible enough to realize that I mustn"t ever risk being out again with no money. It has got on my mind so that I"d not be able to think of much else for worrying--unless I had at least a little."
"Do you want me to make you independent?"
"No," replied she. "Whatever you gave me I"d have to give back if we separated."
"_That_ isn"t the way to get on, my dear," said he.
"It"s the best I can do--as yet," replied she. "And it"s quite an advance on what I was. Yes, I _am_ learning--slowly."
"Save all your salary, then," said Freddie. "When you buy anything charge it, and I"ll attend to the bill."
Her expression told him that he had never made a shrewder move in his life. He knew he had made himself secure against losing her; for he knew what a force grat.i.tude was in her character.
Her mind was now free--free for the educational business in hand. She appreciated that he had less to learn than she.
Civilization, the science and art of living, of extracting all possible good from the few swift years of life, has been--since the downfall of woman from hardship, ten or fifteen thousand years ago--the creation of the man almost entirely. Until recently among the higher races such small development of the intelligence of woman as her seclusion and servitude permitted was sporadic and exotic. Nothing intelligent was expected of her--and it is only under the compulsion of peremptory demand that any human being ever is roused from the natural sluggishness. But civilization, created _by_ man, was created _for_ woman. Woman has to learn how to be the civilized being which man has ordained that she shall be--how to use for man"s comfort and pleasure the ingenuities and the graces he has invented.
It is easy for a man to pick up the habits, tastes, manners and dress of male citizens of the world, if he has as keen eyes and as discriminating taste as had Palmer, clever descendant of the supple Italian. But to become a female citizen of the world is not so easy. For Susan to learn to be an example of the highest civilization, from her inmost thoughts to the outermost penumbra of her surroundings--that would be for her a labor of love, but still a labor. As her vanity was of the kind that centers on the advantages she actually had, instead of being the more familiar kind that centers upon non-existent charms of mind and person, her task was possible of accomplishment--for those who are sincerely willing to learn, who sincerely know wherein they lack, can learn, can be taught. As she had given these matters of civilization intelligent thought she knew where to begin--at the humble, material foundation, despised and neglected by those who talk most loudly about civilization, art, culture, and so on. They aspire to the clouds and the stars at once--and arrive nowhere except in talk and pretense and flaunting of ill-fitting borrowed plumage. They flap their gaudy artificial wings; there is motion, but no ascent. Susan wished to build--and build solidly. She began with the so-called trifles.
When they had been at Naples a week Palmer said:
"Don"t you think we"d better push on to Paris?"
"I can"t go before Sat.u.r.day," replied she. "I"ve got several fittings yet."
"It"s pretty dull here for me--with you spending so much time in the shops. I suppose the women"s shops are good"--hesitatingly--"but I"ve heard those in Paris are better."
"The shops here are rotten. Italian women have no taste in dress. And the Paris shops are the best in the world."
"Then let"s clear out," cried he. "I"m bored to death. But I didn"t like to say anything, you seemed so busy."