"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 stitch."
"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 passed 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 sturdily. Her taxicab had moved up the street, pushed out of place by a hearse—a white hearse, 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.