"God Almighty, Lorna!" she cried. "What have you got there?
How'd it get in?"
"You've been advising me to take a fellow," said Susan.
"Well—here he is."
Clara looked at her as if she thought her crazed by drink or dope. "I'll call the janitor and have him thrown out."
"No, he's my lover," said Susan. "Will you help me clean him up?"
Clara, looking at Spenser's face now, saw those signs which not
the hardest of the world's hard uses can cut or tear away.
"Oh!" she said, in a tone of sympathy. "He is down, isn't he?
But he'll pull round all right."
She went into her room to take off her street clothes and to get herself into garments as suitable as she possessed for one of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital. When she returned, Susan too was in her chemise and ready to begin the search for the man, if man there was left deep buried in that muck. While Susan took off the stinking and rotten rags, and flung them into the hall, Clara went to the bathroom they and Mollie shared, and filled the tub with water as hot as her hand could bear. With her foot Susan pushed the rags along the hall floor and into the garbage closet. Then she and Clara lifted the emaciated, dirt-streaked, filth-smeared body, carried it to the bathroom, let it down into the water. There were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. With these they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it could be used.
Again and again they let out the water, black, full of dead and dying vermin; again and again they rinsed him, attacked him afresh. Their task grew less and less repulsive as the man gradually appeared, a young man with a soft skin, a well-formed body, unusually good hands and feet, a distinguished face despite its savage wounds from dissipation, hardly the less handsome for the now fair and crisp beard which gave it a look of more years than Spenser had lived.
If Spenser recovered consciousness—and it seems hardly possible that he did not—he was careful to conceal the fact. He remained limp, inert, apparently in a stupor. They gave him one final scrubbing, one final rinsing, one final thorough inspection. "Now, he's all right," declared Clara. "What shall we do with him?"
"Put him to bed," said Susan.
They had already dried him off in the empty tub. They now rubbed him down with a rough towel, lifted him, Susan taking the shoulders, Clara the legs, and put him in Susan's bed. Clara ran to her room, brought one of the two nightshirts she kept for her fellow. When they had him in this and with a sheet over him, they cleaned and straightened the bathroom, then lit cigarettes and sat down to rest and to admire the work of their hands.