Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

himself together and crawls toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly se

akening-she never permitted them to lengthen out, as such sensation as she had was of one falling-falling-through empty space-with whirling brain and strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted

and frank despair. All her refinement, baffled in the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical. She would be neat and well dressed; sh

essities; the classes are eager for the comforts and luxuries. The masses are ignorant; the classes are intelligent-or, at least, shrewd. The unconscious and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes automatically and of necessity stops just short of the catastrophe point-for the masses must have enough to give them the strength to work and reproduce. To go down through the social system as had Susan from her original place well up among the classes is like descending from the beautiful dining room of the palace where the meat is served in taste and refinement upon costly dishes by well mannered servants to attractively dressed people-descending along the various stages of the preparation of the meat, at each stage less of r

uld be a joyful awakening. She alternately pitied and envied them. She had her own dream that this dream, the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and freedom and light and beauty. She admitted to herself that the dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs. But she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were of theirs. She dre

have ceased to believe in it. There is the time when we hope, believing that we have altogether ceased to h

urred voices sounded in her ears, blurred personalities touched hers. It was like the jostling of a huge crowd in night streets. A

ccount a more important factor-the merciful paralysis or partial pa

klessness or of indifference, she was now able to put herself into the mood in which life was endurable with two or three drinks, often with only one. T

ct-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

thes. 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 professi

he 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"

mpossible, 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 refinement

hich 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 hav

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 rou

ouse. Susan had brought down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates and neig

able to forget is to remember-and to rem

rganization. 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. Th

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

inging her in a good sum of money for that region. Sometimes as much as twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen. And despite her drinking and her free

thout meaning to do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at all through sense of superiority. Had it not been for her scarlet lips, a far more marke

n her throat and she was borne to the floor. She knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors of tenement fast women, the lobbygows-men who live by lying in wait in the da

r a kick in his anger. This roused her; she uttered a faint cry. "Thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a

said Susan. "I

he booze. They say you

ey were torn away from her garters. Her bosom also

ch did

thirt

did! Want me

who was on her feet a

"They'd probably pinch you-or both of us.

robbery that was compelling her. The police made her pay because they dared not refuse to be collectors. They bound whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind; they loosed whom that same power bade them loose. She had

drunken artisan. "You can damn the cops all you p

they can-like everybody el

lp you u

ut she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wi

red to the bed, fell upon it. A girl named Clara, who lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a nightgo

g the pipe, I see,

e's r

bbygow,"

e get

thirt

im and her stay in, hitting the pipe all the time. That costs money, and she h

he use?"

ey only get what I've just made. Last time, they didn't get nothing-but me." And she laughed. Her teeth were g

y six

ow for it. Guess you're about as poor at hiving it up as I am. I give it to that loafer I l

e bruises on her bosom and legs. "And get that bottle of whiske

hat I ain't done up. You'll have to get a fellow. You'll have to come to it, as I'm always telling you. They're expensive, but they're company-anybody you can count on for shi

me," repl

first time to the lure of opium. She had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked-or took cocaine. But to Clara's or Gussie's invitations to join the happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "

are the little ball of opium, how to put it on the pipe and draw in its fumes. Her system was so well prepared for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory results from the outset. And she entered upon the happiest period of her life thus far. All the hideousness of her profession disappeared under the gorgeou

llor, became of the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop. Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without ceasing upon an

ere likely to happen. Still there was a fair chance of her keeping her balance until loss of looks and loss of health-the end of the shelf-should drop her abruptly to the very bottom. She could guess what was there. Every day she saw about the streets, most wretched and mos

d that narrow ledge with curious steadiness. She was unconscious of the cause. Ind

o apt a pupil of Fanny Warham's as was Ruth, because Susan had not Ruth's nature of the old-maidish, cut-and-dried conventional. But during the whole fundamentally formative period of her life Susan Lenox had been trained to order and system, and they had become part of her being, beyond the power of drink and opium and prostitution to disintegrate them until the general break-up should come. In all her wanderings every man or woman or girl she had met who was not rapidly breaking up, but was offering more or less resistance to the assaults of bad habits, was one who like herself had acquired in childhood strong good habits to oppose the bad habits an

herever she could, had an enormous advantage over the mass of the girls, both respectable and fast. And while t

been poured into it by facetious drunkards. At the keyboard sat an old hunchback, broken-jawed, dressed in slimy rags, his one eye instantly fixed upon her with a lecherous expression that made her shiver as it compelled her to imagine the embrace he was evidently imagining. His filthy fingers were pounding out a waltz. About the floor were tottering in the measure of the waltz a score of dreadful old women. They were in calico. They had each a little biscuit knot of white hair firmly upon the crown of the head. From their bleached, seamed old faces gleamed the longings or the torments of all the passions they could no longer either inspire or satisfy. They were one time prostitutes, one time young, perhaps pret

at the hands of degenerate oriental sailors to get a few pennies for the privileges of this dance hall. And she would laugh, as did these, would enjoy as did these, would revel in the filth her senses had been trained to find sweet. "No! No!" she protested. "I'd kill

; her teeth chattered. She tried in vain to tear her gaze from the spectacle; some invisible p

and greasy as one sometimes sees upon the top of a filled garbage barrel to add its horrors of odor of long unwashed humanity to the stenches from vegetable decay. His wreck of a hard hat had fallen

he cried

was turned stupidly toward her. Into his gray eyes slowly came a gleam of recognition.

him. "Rod!

t," he mumbled.

said. "I see the co

n't be asham

fingers pressing upon his shou

you to come along with me. I

tween the precipices of shame to the black floor of the slum's abyss. Spenser, stooped and shaking, rose abruptly, thrust Susan aside with a sweep of the arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. She recovered he

n of the disgust they must have felt at the contact, they lifted up the sot, in such fantastic contrast to Susan's clean and even stylish appearance, and bore him along, trying to make him seem less the helpless whiskey-soaked d

a!" she cried. "Wha

it g

ing me to take a f

here h

her crazed by drink or dope. "I'll cal

said Susan. "Will you

nser's face now, saw

world's hard uses c

tone of sympathy. "

pull round

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, carri

d 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 despi

the fact. He remained limp, inert, apparently in a stupor. They gave him one final scrubbing, one final

to bed,"

egs, 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

he?" ask

with a real story to tell, she never told about her past self. Never

the more a woman loves him. It's the other way with men. But then men don't kn

ove him,"

wave of the bare arm at the end of which smoked

now," conf

hin her, found its slow and painful way upward, shaking her whole body and coming from between her clenched teeth in a groan. She forgot all she had suffered from Rod-forgot the truth about him which she had slowly puzzled out after she left him and as experience enabled her to understand actions she had not understood at the time.

nna è

nna al

ed the old Arabian philosopher. If a woman die, shall she live again?. . . Shall not that which dies in weakness live again in strength?. . . Looking at him, as he lay there sleeping so quietly, her being surged with the heaving of high longings and hopes. If they could only live agai

nto her eyes came a new light; into her soul came peace