Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 49

She sighed regretfully. "I simply can't," she said. "How much is what I've had?"

Her friend frowned. "Vot you take me for--hey?" demanded he, with a terrible frown--so terrible he felt it to be that, fearing he had frightened her, he burst out laughing, to rea.s.sure.

"Oh, but I must pay," she pleaded. "I didn't come begging."

"Not a cent!" said her friend firmly. "I'm the boss. I won't take it."

She insisted until she saw she was hurting his feelings. Then she tried to thank him; but he would not listen to that, either.

"Good-by--good-by," he said gruffly. "I must get to work once."

But she understood, and went with a light heart up into the world again. He stood waist deep in the cellar, she hesitated upon the sidewalk. "Good-by," she said, with swimming eyes.

"You don't know how good you've been to me."

"All right. Luck!" He waved his hand, half turned his back on her and looked intently up the street, his eyes blinking.

She went down the street, turned the first corner, dropped on a doorstep and sobbed and cried, out of the fullness of her heart.

When she rose to go on again, she felt stronger and gentler than she had felt since her troubles began with the quarrel over Sam Wright. A little further on she came upon a florist's shop in front of which a wagon was unloading the supply of flowers for the day's trade. She paused to look at the roses and carnations, the lilies and dahlias, the violets and verbenas and geraniums.

The fast brightening air was scented with delicate odors. She was attracted to a small geranium with many buds and two full-blown crimson flowers.

"How much for that?" she asked a young man who seemed to be in charge.

He eyed her shrewdly. "Well, I reckon about fifteen cents,"

replied he.

She took from her bosom the dollar bill wrapped round the eighty cents, gave him what he had asked. "No, you needn't tie it up,"

said she, as he moved to take it into the store. She went back to the bakeshop. The cellar door was open, but no one was in sight. Stooping down, she called: "Mr. Baker! Mr. Baker!"

The big smooth face appeared below.

She set the plant down on the top step. "For you," she said, and hurried away.

On a pa.s.sing street car she saw the sign "Eden Park." She had heard of it--of its beauties, of the wonderful museum there. She took the next car of the same line. A few minutes, and it was being drawn up the inclined plane toward the lofty hilltops. She had thought the air pure below. She was suddenly lifted through a dense vapor--the cloud that always lies over the lower part of the city. A moment, and she was above the cloud, was being carried through the wide, clean tree-lined avenue of a beautiful suburb. On either side, lawns and gardens and charming houses, a hush brooding over them. Behind these walls, in comfortable beds, amid the surroundings that come to mind with the word "home," lay many girls such as she--happy, secure, sheltered.

Girls like herself. A wave of homesickness swept over her, daunting her for a little while. But she fought it down, watched what was going on around her. "I mustn't look back--I mustn't!

Nothing there for me." At the main gateway of the park she descended. There indeed was the, to her, vast building containing the treasures of art; but she had not come for that.

She struck into the first by-path, sought out a gra.s.sy slope thickly studded with bushes, and laid herself down. She spread her skirts carefully so as not to muss them. She put her bundle under her head.

When she awoke the moon was s.h.i.+ning upon her face--s.h.i.+ning from a starry sky!

She sat up, looked round in wonder. Yes--it was night again--very still, very beautiful, and warm, with the air fragrant and soft. She felt intensely awake, entirely rested--and full of hope. It was as if during that long dreamless sleep her whole being had been renewed and magically borne away from the lands of shadow and pain where it had been wandering, to a land of bright promise. Oh, youth, youth, that bears so lightly the burden of the past, that faces so confidently the mystery of the future! She listened--heard a faint sound that moved her to investigate. Peering through the dense bushes, she discovered on the gra.s.s in the shadow of the next clump, a ragged, dirty man and woman, both sound asleep and snoring gently. She watched them spellbound. The man's face was deeply shaded by his battered straw hat. But she could see the woman's face plainly--the thin, white hair, the sunken eyes and mouth, the skeleton look of old features over which the dry skin of age is tightly drawn. She gazed until the man, moving in his sleep, kicked out furiously and uttered a curse. She drew back, crawled away until she had put several clumps of bushes between her and the pair. Then she sped down and up the slopes and did not stop until she was where she could see, far below, the friendly lights of the city blinking at her through the smoky mist.

She had forgotten her bundle! She did not know how to find the place where she had left it; and, had she known, she would not have dared return. This loss, however, troubled her little. Not in vain had she dwelt with the philosopher Burlingham.

She seated herself on a bench and made herself comfortable. But she no longer needed sleep. She was awake--wide awake--in every atom of her vigorous young body. The minutes dragged. She was impatient for the dawn to give the signal for the future to roll up its curtain. She would have gone down into the city to walk about but she was now afraid the police would take her in--and that probably would mean going to a reformatory, for she could not give a satisfactory account of herself. True, her older way of wearing her hair and some slight but telling changes in her dress had made her look less the child. But she could not hope to pa.s.s for a woman full grown. The moon set; the starlight was after a long, long time succeeded by the dawn of waking birds, and of waking city, too--for up from below rose an ever louder roar like a rising storm. In her restless rovings, she came upon a fountain; she joined the birds making a toilet in its basin, and patterned after them--washed her face and hands, dried them on a handkerchief she by great good luck had put into her stocking, smoothed her hair, her dress.

And still the sense of unreality persisted, cast its friendly spell over this child-woman suddenly caught up from the quietest of quiet lives and whirled into a dizzy vortex of strange events without parallel, or similitude even, in anything she had ever known. If anyone had suddenly asked her who she was and she had tried to recall, she would have felt as if trying to remember a dream. Sutherland--a faint, faint dream, and the show boat also.

Spenser--a romantic dream--or a first installment of a love-story read in some stray magazine. Burlingham--the theatrical agent--the young man of the previous afternoon--the news of the death that left her quite alone--all a dream, a tumbled, jumbled dream, all pa.s.sed with the night and the awakening. In her youth and perfect health, refreshed by the long sleep, gladdened by the bright new day, she was as irresponsible as the merry birds chattering and flinging the water about at the opposite side of the fountain's basin. She was now glad she had lost her bundle.

Without it her hands were free both hands free to take whatever might offer next. And she was eager to see what that would be, and hopeful about it--no--more than hopeful, confident.

Burlingham, aided by those highly favorable surroundings of the show boat, and of the vagabond life thereafter, had developed in her that gambler's spirit which had enabled him to play year after year of losing hands with unabating courage--the spirit that animates all the brave souls whose deeds awe the docile, conventional, craven ma.s.ses of mankind.

Leisurely as a truant she tramped back toward the city, pausing to observe anything that chanced to catch her eye. At the moment of her discovery of the difference between her and most girls there had begun a cleavage between her and the social system.

And now she felt as if she were of one race and the rest of the world of another and hostile race. She did not realize it, but she had taken the first great step along the path that leads to distinction or destruction. For the world either obeys or tramples into dust those who, in whatever way, have a lot apart from the common. She was free from the bonds of convention--free to soar or to sink.

Her way toward the city lay along a slowly descending street that had been, not so very long before, a country road. Block after block there were gra.s.sy fields intersected by streets, as if city had attempted a conquest of country and had abandoned it. Again the vacant lots were disfigured with the ruins of a shanty or by dreary dump heaps. For long stretches the way was built up only on one side. The houses were for the most part tenement with small and unprosperous shops or saloons on the ground floor. Toward the foot of the hill, where the line of tenements was continuous on either side, she saw a sign "Restaurant" projecting over the sidewalk. When she reached it, she paused and looked in. A narrow window and a narrow open door gave a full view of the tiny room with its two rows of plain tables. Near the window was a small counter with a case containing cakes and pies and rolls. With back to the window sat a pretty towheaded girl of about her own age, reading. Susan, close to the window, saw that the book was Owen Meredith's "Lucile," one of her own favorites. She could even read the words:

The ways they are many and wide, and seldom are two ways the same.

She entered. The girl glanced up, with eyes slowly changing from far-away dreaminess to present and practical--pleasant blue eyes with lashes and brows of the same color as the thick, neatly done yellowish hair.

"Could I get a gla.s.s of milk and a roll?" asked Susan, a modest demand, indeed, on behalf of a growing girl's appet.i.te twenty-four hours unsatisfied.

The blonde girl smiled, showing a clean mouth with excellent teeth.

"We sell the milk for five cents, the rolls three for a nickel."

"Then I'll take milk and three rolls," said Susan. "May I sit at a table? I'll not spoil it."

"Sure. Sit down. That's what the tables are for." And the girl closed the book, putting a chromo card in it to mark her place, and stirred about to serve the customer. Susan took the table nearest the door, took the seat facing the light. The girl set before her a plate, a knife and fork, a little form of b.u.t.ter, a tall gla.s.s of milk, and three small rolls in a large saucer.

"You're up and out early?" she said to Susan.

On one of those inexplicable impulses of frankness Susan replied: "I've been sleeping in the park."

The girl had made the remark merely to be polite and was turning away. As Susan's reply penetrated to her inattentive mind she looked sharply at her, eyes opening wonderingly. "Did you get lost? Are you a stranger in town? Why didn't you ask someone to take you in?"

The girl reflected, realized. "That's so," said she. "I never thought of it before. . . . Yes, that is so! It must be dreadful not to have any place to go." She gazed at Susan with admiring eyes. "Weren't you afraid--up in the park?"

"No," replied Susan. "I hadn't anything anybody'd want to steal."

"But some man might have----" The girl left it to Susan's imagination to finish the sentence.

"I hadn't anything to steal," repeated Susan, with a kind of cynical melancholy remotely suggestive of Mabel Connemora.

The restaurant girl retired behind the counter to reflect, while Susan began upon her meager breakfast with the deliberation of one who must coax a little to go a great ways. Presently the girl said:

"Where are you going to sleep tonight?"

"Oh, that's a long ways off," replied the apt pupil of the happy-go-lucky houseboat show. "I'll find a place, I guess."

The girl looked thoughtfully toward the street. "I was wondering," she said after a while, "what I'd do if I was to find myself out in the street, with no money and nowhere to go. . . .

Are you looking for something to do?"

"Do you know of anything?" asked Susan interested at once.

"Nothing worth while. There's a box factory down on the next square. But only a girl that lives at home can work there. Pa says the day's coming when women'll be like men--work at everything and get the same wages. But it isn't so now. A girl's got to get married."

Such a strange expression came over Susan's face that the waitress looked apologetic and hastened to explain herself: "I don't much mind the idea of getting married," said she.

"Only--I'm afraid I can never get the kind of a man I'd want.

The boys round here leave school before the girls, so the girls are better educated. And then they feel above the boys of their own cla.s.s--except those boys that're beginning to get up in the world--and those kind of boys want some girl who's above them and can help them up. It's dreadful to be above the people you know and not good enough for the people you'd like to know."

Susan was not impressed; she could not understand why the waitress spoke with so much feeling. "Well," said she, pausing before beginning on the last roll, "I don't care so long as I find something to do."