DEAR MADAM:
Herewith I send you a check for forty dollars for the first week's salary under your arrangement with Mr. Brent. No receipt is necessary. Until further notice a check for the same amount will be mailed you each Thursday. Unless you receive notice to the contrary, please call as before, at three o'clock next Wednesday.
It made her nervous to think of those five days before she should see Brent. He had assured her he would expect nothing from her; but she felt she must be able to show him that she had not been wasting her time—his time, the time for which he was paying nearly six dollars a day. She must work every waking hour, except the two hours each day at the hospital. She recalled what Brent had said about the advantage of being contented alone—and how everything worth doing must be done in solitude. She had never thought about her own feelings as to company and solitude, as it was not her habit to think about herself. But now she realized how solitary she had been, and how it had bred in her habits of thinking and reading—and how valuable these habits would be to her in her work. There was Rod, for example. He hated being alone, must have someone around even when he was writing; and he had no taste for order or system. She understood why it was so hard for him to stick at anything, to put anything through to the finish. With her fondness for being alone, with her passion for reading and thinking about what she read, surely she ought soon to begin to accomplish something—if there was any ability in her.
She found Rod in higher spirits. Several ideas for his play had come to him; he already saw it acted, successful, drawing crowded houses, bringing him in anywhere from five hundred to a thousand a week. She was not troubled hunting for things to talk about with him—she, who could think of but one thing and that a secret from him. He talked his play, a steady stream with not a seeing glance at her or a question about her. She watched the little clock at the side of the bed. At the end of an hour to the minute, she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence. "I must go now," said she, rising.
"Sit down," he cried. "You can stay all day. The doctor says it will do me good to have you to talk with. And Sperry isn't coming until tomorrow."
"I can't do it," said she. "I must go."
He misunderstood her avoiding glance. "Now, Susie—sit down there," commanded he. "We've got plenty of money. You—you needn't bother about it any more."
"We're not settled yet," said she. "Until we are, I'd not dare take the risk." She was subtly adroit by chance, not by design.
"Risk!" exclaimed he angrily. "There's no risk. I've as good as got the advance money. Sit down."
She hesitated. "Don't be angry," pleaded she in a voice that faltered. "But I must go."
Into his eyes came the gleam of distrust and jealousy. "Look at me," he ordered.
With some difficulty she forced her eyes to meet his.
"Have you got a lover?"
"No."
"Then where do you get the money we're living on?" He counted on her being too humiliated to answer in words. Instead of the hanging head and burning cheeks he saw clear, steady eyes, heard a calm, gentle and dignified voice say:
"In the streets."
His eyes dropped and a look of abject shame made his face pitiable. "Good Heavens," he muttered.
"How low we are!"
"We've been doing the best we could," said she simply.
"Isn't there any decency anywhere in you?" he flashed out, eagerly seizing the chance to forget his own shame in contemplating her greater degradation.
She looked out of the window. There was something terrible in the calmness of her profile. She finally said in an even, pensive voice:
"You have been intimate with a great many women, Rod. But you have never got acquainted with a single one."
He laughed good-humoredly. "Oh, yes, I have. I've learned that 'every woman is at heart a rake,' as Mr. Jingle Pope says."
She looked at him again, her face now curiously lighted by her slow faint smile. "Perhaps they showed you only what they thought you'd be able to appreciate," she suggested.
He took this as evidence of her being jealous of him. "Tell me, Susan, did you leave me—in Forty-fourth Street—because you thought or heard I wasn't true to you?"
"What did Drumley tell you?"
"I asked him, as you said in your note. He told me he knew no reason."
So Drumley had decided it was best Rod should not know why she left. Well, perhaps—probably—Drumley was right. But there was no reason why he shouldn't know the truth now. "I left," said she, "because I saw we were bad for each other."
This amused him. She saw that he did not believe. It wounded her, but she smiled carelessly. Her smile encouraged him to say: "I couldn't quite make up my mind whether the reason was jealousy or because you had the soul of a shameless woman. You see, I know human nature, and I know that a woman who once crosses the line never crosses back. I'll always have to watch you, my dear. But somehow I like it. I guess you have—you and I have—a rotten streak in us. We were brought up too strictly. That always makes one either too firm or too loose. I used to think I liked good women. But I don't. They bore me. That shows I'm rotten."
"Or that your idea of what's good is—is mistaken."
"You don't pretend that you haven't done wrong?" cried Rod.
"I might have done worse," replied she. "I might have wronged others. No, Rod, I can't honestly say I've ever felt wicked."
"Why, what brought you here?"
She reflected a moment, then smiled. "Two things brought me down," said she. "In the first place, I wasn't raised right. I was raised as a lady instead of as a human being. So I didn't know how to meet the conditions of life. In the second place—" her smile returned, broadened—"I was too—too what's called 'good.'"
"Pity about you!" mocked he.
"Being what's called good is all very well if you're independent or if you've got a husband or a father to do life's dirty work for you—or, perhaps, if you happen to be in some profession like preaching or teaching—though I don't believe the so-called 'goodness' would let you get very far even as a preacher. In most lines, to practice what we're taught as children would be to go to the bottom like a stone. You know this is a hard world, Rod. It's full of men and women fighting desperately for food and clothes and a roof to cover them—fighting each other. And to get on you've got to have the courage and the indifference to your fellow beings that'll enable you to do it."
"There's a lot of truth in that," admitted Spenser. "If I'd not been such a 'good fellow,' as they call it—a fellow everybody liked—if I'd been like Brent, for instance—Brent, who never would have any friends, who never would do anything for anybody but himself, who hadn't a thought except for his career—why, I'd be where he is."
It was at the tip of Susan's tongue to say, "Yes—strong—able to help others—able to do things worth while." But she did not speak.
Rod went on: "I'm not going to be a fool any longer. I'm going to be too busy to have friends or to help people or to do anything but push my own interests."
Susan, indifferent to being thus wholly misunderstood, was again moving toward the door. "I'll be back this evening, as usual," said she.
Spenser's face became hard and lowering: "You're going to stay here now, or you're not coming back," said he. "You can take your choice. Do you want me to know you've got the soul of a streetwalker?"
She stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at the wall above his head. "I must earn our expenses until we're safe," said she, once more telling a literal truth that was yet a complete deception.
"Why do you fret me?" exclaimed he. "Do you want me to be sick again?"
"Suppose you didn't get the advance right away," urged she.
"I tell you I shall get it! And I won't have you—do as you are doing. If you go, you go for keeps."
She seated herself. "Do you want me to read or take dictation?"
His face expressed the satisfaction small people find in small successes at asserting authority. "Don't be angry," said he. "I'm acting for your good. I'm saving you from yourself."
"I'm not angry," replied she, her strange eyes resting upon him.
He shifted uncomfortably. "Now what does that look mean?" he demanded with an uneasy laugh.
She smiled, shrugged her shoulders.
Sperry—small and thin, a weather-beaten, wooden face suggesting Mr. Punch, sly keen eyes, theater in every tone and gesture Sperry pushed the scenario hastily to completion and was so successful with Fitzalan that on Sunday afternoon he brought two hundred and fifty dollars, Spenser's half of the advance money.
"Didn't I tell you!" said Spenser to Susan, in triumph. "We'll move at once. Go pack your traps and put them in a carriage, and by the time you're back here Sperry and the nurses will have me ready."
It was about three when Susan got to her room. Clara heard her come in and soon appeared, bare feet in mules, hair hanging every which way. Despite the softening effect of the white nightdress and of the framing of abundant hair, her face was hard and coarse. She had been drunk on liquor and on opium the night before, and the effects were wearing off. As she was only twenty years old, the hard coarse look would withdraw before youth in a few hours; it was there only temporarily as a foreshadowing of what Clara would look like in five years or so.
"Hello, Lorna," said she. "Gee, what a bun my fellow and I had on last night! Did you hear us scrapping when we came in about five o'clock?"
"No," replied Susan. "I was up late and had a lot to do, and was kept at the hospital all day. I guess I must have fallen asleep."
"He gave me an awful beating," pursued Clara. "But I got one good crack at him with a bottle." She laughed. "I don't think he'll be doing much flirting till his cheek heals up. He looks a sight!" She opened her nightdress and showed Susan a deep blue-black mark on her left breast. "I wonder if I'll get cancer from that?" said she. "It'd be just my rotten luck. I've heard of several cases of it lately, and my father kicked my mother there, and she got cancer. Lord, how she did suffer!"
Susan shivered, turned her eyes away. Her blood surged with joy that she had once more climbed up out of this deep, dark wallow where the masses of her fellow beings weltered in darkness and drunkenness and disease—was up among the favored ones who, while they could not entirely escape the great ills of life, at least had the intelligence and the means to mitigate them. How fortunate that few of these unhappy ones had the imagination to realize their own wretchedness! "I don't care what becomes of me," Clara was saying. "What is there in it for me? I can have a good time only as long as my looks last—and that's true of every woman, ain't it? What's a woman but a body? Ain't I right?"
"That's why I'm going to stop being a woman as soon as ever I can," said Susan.
"Why, you're packing up!" cried Clara.
"Yes. My friend's well enough to be moved. We're going to live uptown."
"Right away?"
"This afternoon."
Clara dropped into a chair and began to weep. "I'll miss you something fierce!" sobbed she. "You're the only friend in the world I give a damn for, or that gives a damn for me. I wish to God I was like you. You don't need anybody."
"Oh, yes, I do, dear," cried Susan.
"But, I mean, you don't lean on anybody. I don't mean you're hard-hearted—for you ain't. You've pulled me and a dozen other girls out of the hole lots of times. But you're independent. Can't you take me along? I can drop that bum across the hall. I don't give a hoot for him. But a girl's got to make believe she cares for somebody or she'd blow her brains out."
"I can't take you along, but I'm going to come for you as soon as I'm on my feet," said Susan. "I've got to get up myself first. I've learned at least that much."
"Oh, you'll forget all about me."
"No," said Susan.
And Clara knew that she would not. Moaned Clara, "I'm not fit to go. I'm only a common streetwalker. You belong up there. You're going back to your own. But I belong here. I wish to God I was like most of the people down here, and didn't have any sense. No wonder you used to drink so! I'm getting that way, too. The only people that don't hit the booze hard down here are the muttonheads who don't know nothing and can't learn nothing. . . . I used to be contented. But somehow, being with you so much has made me dissatisfied."
"That means you're on your way up," said Susan, busy with her packing.
"It would, if I had sense enough. Oh, it's torment to have sense enough to see, and not sense enough to do!"
"I'll come for you soon," said Susan. "You're going up with me."
Clara watched her for some time in silence. "You're sure you're going to win?" said she, at last.
"Sure," replied Susan.
"Oh, you can't be as sure as that."
"Yes, but I can," laughed she. "I'm done with foolishness. I've made up my mind to get up in the world—with my self-respect if possible; if not, then without it. I'm going to have everything—money, comfort, luxury, pleasure. Everything!" And she dropped a folded skirt emphatically upon the pile she had been making, and gave a short, sharp nod. "I was taught a lot of things when I was little—things about being sweet and unselfish and all that. They'd be fine, if the world was Heaven. But it isn't."
"Not exactly," said Clara.
"Maybe they're fine, if you want to get to Heaven," continued Susan. "But I'm not trying to get to Heaven. I'm trying to live on earth. I don't like the game, and I don't like its rules. But—it's the only game, and I can't change the rules. So I'm going to follow them—at least, until I get what I want."
"Do you mean to say you've got any respect for yourself?" said Clara. "I haven't. And I don't see how any girl in our line can have."
"I thought I hadn't," was Susan's reply, "until I talked with—with someone I met the other day. If you slipped and fell in the mud—or were thrown into it—you wouldn't say, 'I'm dirty through and through. I can never get clean again'—would you?"
"But that's different," objected Clara.
"Not a bit," declared Susan. "If you look around this world, you'll see that everybody who ever moved about at all has slipped and fallen in the mud—or has been pushed in."
"Mostly pushed in."
"Mostly pushed in," assented Susan. "And those that have good sense get up as soon as they can, and wash as much of the mud off as'll come off—maybe all—and go on. The fools—they worry about the mud. But not I—not any more!. . . And not you, my dear—when I get you uptown."
Clara was now looking on Susan's departure as a dawn of good luck for herself. She took a headache powder, telephoned for a carriage, and helped carry down the two big packages that contained all Susan's possessions worth moving. And they kissed each other good-by with smiling faces. Susan did not give Clara, the loose-tongued, her new address; nor did Clara, conscious of her own weakness, ask for it.
"Don't put yourself out about me," cried Clara in farewell.
"Get a good tight grip yourself, first."
"That's advice I need," answered Susan. "Good-by.
Soon—soon!"
The carriage had to move slowly through those narrow tenement streets, so thronged were they with the people swarmed from hot little rooms into the open to try to get a little air that did not threaten to burn and choke as it entered the lungs. Susan's nostrils were filled with the stenches of animal and vegetable decay—stenches descending in heavy clouds from the open windows of the flats and from the fire escapes crowded with all manner of rubbish; stenches from the rotting, brimful garbage cans; stenches from the groceries and butcher shops and bakeries where the poorest qualities of food were exposed to the contamination of swarms of disgusting fat flies, of mangy, vermin-harassed children and cats and dogs; stenches from the never washed human bodies, clad in filthy garments and drawn out of shape by disease and toil. Sore eyes, scrofula, withered arm or leg, sagged shoulder, hip out of joint—There, crawling along the sidewalk, was the boy whose legs had been cut off by the street car; and the stumps were horribly ulcered. And there at the basement window drooled and cackled the fat idiot girl whose mother sacrificed everything always to dress her freshly in pink. What a world!—where a few people such a very few!—lived in health and comfort and cleanliness—and the millions lived in disease and squalor, ignorant, untouched of civilization save to wear its cast-off clothes and to eat its castaway food and to live in its dark noisome cellars!—And to toil unceasingly to make for others the good things of which they had none themselves! It made her heartsick—the sadder because nothing could be done about it. Stay and help? As well stay to put out a conflagration barehanded and alone.
As the carriage reached wider Second Avenue, the horses broke into a trot. Susan drew a long breath of the purer air—then shuddered as she saw the corner where the dive into which the cadet had lured her flaunted its telltale awnings. Lower still her spirits sank when she was passing, a few blocks further on, the music hall. There, too, she had had a chance, had let hope blaze high. And she was going forward—into—the region where she had been a slave to Freddie Palmer—no, to the system of which he was a slave no less than she——
"I must be strong! I must!" Susan said to herself, and there was desperation in the gleam of her eyes, in the set of her chin. "This time I will fight! And I feel at last that I can."
But her spirits soared no more that day.