“I’m glad,” she said; “it’s a long time since I’ve had an evening like this. It makes me feel clean.”
For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.
The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature, undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the town.
“There wasn’t any use wasting words when I found he didn’t care for me or for the baby and wouldn’t support us, so I left him,” she said in a level, businesslike way.
When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was seven dollars a week.
“And so,” she said, “I began going on the street. I knew no one and there was nothing else to do. I couldn’t do that in the town where the boy lived, so I came away. I’ve gone from city to city, working mostly for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the streets. I’m not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of them care about me. I don’t like to have them touch me with their hands. I can’t drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn’t have married. Not that I minded my husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found there wasn’t anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn’t the strength, and when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about myself—any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.
“It hasn’t been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me I walk along the street praying that I won’t shudder and draw away when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won’t get any money.
“And then they talk and lie about themselves. I’ve had them try to work off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That’s the hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these others lying to me.”
She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and sat looking into the fire.
“My mother,” she began again, “didn’t always wear a clean dress. She couldn’t. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I’m losing it all. All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn’t clean. Most of the time I don’t care. Being clean doesn’t go with what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don’t go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I don’t seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets.”