Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

by David Graham Phillips

How far she had fallen! But swift descent or gradual, she had adapted herself—had, in fact, learned by much experience of disaster to mitigate the calamities, to have something to keep a certain deep-lying self of selfs intact—unaffected by what she had been forced to undergo. It seemed to her that if she could get the chance—or could cure herself of the blindness which was always preventing her from seeing and seizing the chance that doubtless offered again and again—she could shed the surface her mode of life had formed over her and would find underneath a new real surface, stronger, sightly, better able to bear—like the skin that forms beneath the healing wound.

In these tenements, as in all tenements of all degrees, she and the others of her class were fiercely resented by the heads of families where there was any hope left to impel a striving upward. She had the best furnished room in the tenement. She was the best dressed woman—a marked and instantly recognizable figure because of her neat and finer clothes. Her profession kept alive and active the instincts for care of the person that either did not exist or were momentary and feeble in the respectable women. The slovenliness, the scurrilousness of even the wives and daughters of the well-to-do and the rich of that region would not have been tolerated in any but the lowest strata of her profession, hardly even in those sought by men of the laboring class. Also, the deep horror of disease, which her intelligence never for an instant permitted to relax its hold, made her particular and careful when in other circumstances drink might have reduced her to squalor. She spent all her leisure time—for she no longer read—in the care of her person.

She was watched with frightened, yet longing and curious, eyes by all the girls who were at work. The mothers hated her; many of them spat upon the ground after she had passed. It was a heart-breaking struggle, that of these mothers to save their daughters, not from prostitution, not from living with men outside marriage, not from moral danger, but from the practical danger, the danger of bringing into the world children with no father to help feed and clothe them. In the opinion of these people—an opinion often frankly expressed, rarely concealed with any but the thinnest hypocrisy—the life of prostitution was not so bad. Did the life of virtue offer any attractive alternative? Whether a woman was "bad" or "good," she must live in travail and die in squalor to be buried in or near the Potter's Field. But if the girl still living at home were not "good," that would mean a baby to be taken care of, would mean the girl herself not a contributor to the family support but a double burden. And if she went into prostitution, would her family get the benefit? No.

The mothers made little effort to save their sons; they concentrated on the daughters. It was pitiful to see how in their ignorance they were unaware of the strongest forces working against them. The talk of all this motley humanity—of "good" no less than "bad" women, of steady workingmen, of political heelers, thieves and bums and runners for dives—was frankly, often hideously, obscene. The jammed together way of living made modesty impossible, or scantest decency—made the pictures of it among the aspiring few, usually for the benefit of religion or charitable visitors, a pitiful, grotesque hypocrisy. Indeed, the prostitute class was the highest in this respect. The streetwalkers, those who prospered, had better masters, learned something about the pleasures and charms of privacy, also had more leisure in which to think, in however crude a way, about the refinements of life, and more money with which to practice those refinements. The boys from the earliest age were on terms of licentious freedom with the girls. The favorite children's games, often played in the open street with the elders looking on and laughing, were sex games. The very babies used foul language—that is, used the language they learned both at home and in the street. It was primitive man; Susan was at the foundation of the world.

To speak of the conditions there as a product of civilization is to show ignorance of the history of our race, is to fancy that we are civilized today, when in fact we are—historically—in a turbulent and painful period of transition from a better yesterday toward a tomorrow in which life will be worth living as it never has been before in all the ages of duration. In this today of movement toward civilization which began with the discovery of iron and will end when we shall have discovered how to use for the benefit of all the main forces of nature—in this today of agitation incident to journeying, we are in some respects better off, in other respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen thousand years ago. We have lost much of the freedom that was ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have gained much—not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and the uneducated imagine, but still much. In the end we which means the masses of us—will gain infinitely. But gain or loss has not been in so-called morality. There is not a virtue that has not existed from time ages before record. Not a vice which is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of over-civilization," but originated before man was man.

To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as savagery is to misuse the word. Every transitional stage is accompanied by a disintegration. Savagery was a settled state in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed position, settled duties and rights. With the downfall of savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with men and men with women, became unsettled. Such social systems as the world has known since have all been makeshift and temporary—like our social systems of today, like the moral and extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in the interval. In the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen thousand years our present time is but a brief second. In that second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift organization which long served the working multitudes fairly well. The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens imposed upon them by the classes. And in that particular part of the human race en route into which fate had flung Susan Lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were prevailing. A large part of the population lived off the unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling classes. And these petty parasites imitated the big parasites in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains. To have a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle Fifth Avenue; and the notions of a "good time" in vogue in the two opposite quarters differed in degree rather than in kind.

Nothing to think about but the appetites and their vices. Nothing to hope for but the next carouse. Susan had brought down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates and neighbors—the desire to forget. If she could only forget! If the poison would not wear off at times!

She could not quite forget. And to be unable to forget is to remember—and to remember is to long—and to long is to hope.

Several times she heard of Freddie Palmer. Twice she chanced upon his name in the newspaper—an incidental reference to him in connection with local politics. The other times were when men talking together in the drinking places frequented by both sexes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization. Each time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security. Once she passed in Grand Street a detective she had often seen with him in Considine's at Broadway and Forty-second. The "bull" looked sharply at her. Her heart stood still. But he went on without recognizing her. The sharp glance had been simply that official expression of see-all and know-all which is mere formality, part of the official livery, otherwise meaningless. However, it is not to that detective's discredit that he failed to recognize her. She had adapted herself to her changed surroundings.

Because she was of a different and higher class, and because she picked and chose her company, even when drink had beclouded her senses and instinct alone remained on drowsy guard, she prospered despite her indifference. For that region had its aristocracy of rich merchants, tenement-owners, politicians whose sons, close imitators of the uptown aristocracies in manners and dress, spent money freely in the amusements that attract nearly all young men everywhere. Susan made almost as much as she could have made in the more renowned quarters of the town. And presently she was able to move into a tenement which, except for two workingmen's families of a better class, was given over entirely to fast women. It was much better kept, much cleaner, much better furnished than the tenements for workers chiefly; they could not afford decencies, much less luxuries. All that sort of thing was, for the neighborhood, concentrated in the saloons, the dance halls, the fast houses and the fast flats.