Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise Part 96

"You do your little stretch on the Island. When your time's up I send you word where to report to me. We'll say you don't come. The minute you set foot on the streets again alone, back to the Island you go. . . . Now, do you understand, Queenie?" And he laughed and pulled her over and kissed her and smoothed her hair. "You're a very superior article--you are,"

he murmured. "I'm stuck on you."

Susan did not resist. She did not care what happened to her.

The more intelligent a trapped animal is, the less resistance it offers, once it realizes. Helpless--absolutely helpless.

No money--no friends. No escape but death. The sun was s.h.i.+ning. Outside lay the vast world; across the street on a flagpole fluttered the banner of freedom. Freedom! Was there any such thing anywhere? Perhaps if one had plenty of money--or powerful friends. But not for her, any more than for the ma.s.ses whose fate of squalid and stupid slavery she was trying to escape. Not for her; so long as she was helpless she would simply move from one land of slavery to another. Helpless!

To struggle would not be courageous, but merely absurd.

"If you don't believe me, ask Maud," said Freddie. "I don't want you to get into trouble. As I told you, I'm stuck on you." With his cigarette gracefully loose between those almost too beautifully formed lips of his and with one of his strong smooth white arms about his head, he looked at her, an expression of content with himself, of admiration for her in his handsome eyes. "You don't realize your good luck. But you will when you find how many girls are crazy to get on the good side of me. This is a great old town, and n.o.body amounts to anything in it unless he's got a pull or is next to somebody else that has."

Susan's slow reflective nod showed that this statement explained, or seemed to explain, certain mysteries of life that had been puzzling her.

"You've got a lot in you," continued he. "That's my opinion, and I'm a fair judge of yearlings. You're liable to land somewhere some day when you've struck your gait. . . . If I had the mon I'd be tempted to set you up in a flat and keep you all to myself. But I can't afford it. It takes a lot of cash to keep me going. . . . You'll do well. You won't have to bother with any but cla.s.sy gents. I'll see that the cops put you wise when there's anyone round throwing his money away. And I can help you, myself. I've got quite a line of friends among the rich chappies from Fifth Avenue. And I always let my girls get the benefit of it."

My girls! Susan's mind, recovering now from its daze, seized upon this phrase. And soon she had fathomed how these two young men came to be so luxuriously dressed, so well supplied with money. She had heard of this system under which the girls in the streets were exploited as thoroughly as the girls in the houses. In all the earth was there anyone who was suffered to do for himself or herself without there being a powerful idle someone else to take away all the proceeds but a bare living?

Helpless! Helpless!

"How many girls have you?" she asked.

"Jealous already!" And he laughed and blew a cloud of smoke into her face.

She took the quarters he directed--a plain clean room two flights up at seven dollars a week, in a furnished room house on West Forty-third Street near Eighth Avenue. She was but a few blocks from where she and Rod had lived. New York--to a degree unrivaled among the cities of the world--ill.u.s.trates in the isolated lives of its never isolated inhabitants how little relations.h.i.+p there is between s.p.a.ce and actualities of distance. Wherever on earth there are as many as two human beings, one may see an instance of the truth. That an infinity of spiritual solitude can stretch uncrossable even between two locked in each other's loving arms! But New York's solitudes, its separations, extend to the surface things. Susan had no sense of the apparent nearness of her former abode. Her life again lay in the same streets; but there again came the sense of strangeness which only one who has lived in New York could appreciate. The streets were the same; but to her they seemed as the streets of another city, because she was now seeing in them none of the things she used to see, was seeing instead kinds of people, aspects of human beings, modes of feeling and acting and existing of which she used to have not the faintest knowledge. There were as many worlds as kinds of people.

Thus, though we all talk to each other as if about the same world, each of us is thinking of his own kind of world, the only one he sees. And that is why there can never be sympathy and understanding among the children of men until there is some approach to resemblance in their various lots; for the lot determines the man.

The house was filled with women of her own kind. They were allowed all privileges. There was neither bath nor stationary washstand, but the landlady supplied tin tubs on request. "Oh, Mr. Palmer's recommendation," said she; "I'll give you two days to pay. My terms are in advance. But Mr. Palmer's a dear friend of mine."

She was a short woman with a monstrous bust and almost no hips.

Her thin hair was dyed and frizzled, and her voice sounded as if it found its way out of her fat lips after a long struggle to pa.s.s through the fat of her throat and chest. Her second chin lay upon her bosom in a soft swollen bag that seemed to be suspended from her ears. Her eyes were hard and evil, of a brownish gray. She affected suavity and elaborate politeness; but if the least thing disturbed her, she became red and coa.r.s.e of voice and vile of language. The vile language and the nature of her business and her private life aside, she would have compared favorably with anyone in the cla.s.s of those who deal--as merchants, as landlords, as boarding-house keepers--with the desperately different cla.s.ses of uncertain income. She was reputed rich. They said she stayed on in business to avoid lonesomeness and to keep in touch with all that was going on in the life that had been hers from girlhood.

"And she's a mixer," said Maud to Susan. In response to Susan's look of inquiry, she went on to explain, "A mixer's a white woman that keeps a colored man." Maud laughed at Susan's expression of horror. "You are a greenie," she mocked. "Why, it's all the rage. Nearly all the girls do--from the headliners that are kept by the young Fifth Avenue millionaires down to nine out of ten of the girls of our set that you see in Broadway. No, I'm not lying. It's the truth. _I_ don't do it--at least, not yet. I may get round to it."

After the talk with Maud about the realities of life as it is lived by several hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island Susan had not the least disposition to test by defiance the truth of Freddie Palmer's plain statement as to his powers and her duties. He had told her to go to work that very Sunday evening, and Jim had ordered Maud to call for her and to initiate her. And at half-past seven Maud came. At once she inspected Susan's swollen face.

"Might be a bit worse," she said. "With a veil on, no one'd notice it."

"But I haven't a veil," said Susan.

"I've got mine with me--pinned to my garter. I haven't been home since this afternoon." And Maud produced it.

"But I can't wear a veil at night," objected Susan.

"Why not?" said Maud. "Lots of the girls do. A veil's a dandy hider. Besides, even where a girl's got nothing to hide and has a face that's all to the good, still it's not a bad idea to wear a veil. Men like what they can't see. One of the ugliest girls I know makes a lot of money--all with her veil. She fixes up her figure something grand. Then she puts on that veil--one of the kind you think you can see a face through but you really can't. And she never lifts it till the 'come on'

has given up his cash. Then----" Maud laughed. "Gee, but she has had some hot run-ins after she hoists her curtain!"

"Why don't you wear a veil all the time?" asked Susan.

Maud tossed her head. "What do you take me for? I've got too good an opinion of my looks for that."

Susan put on the veil. It was not of the kind that is a disguise. Still, diaphanous though it seemed, it concealed astonis.h.i.+ngly the swelling in Susan's face. Obviously, then, it must at least haze the features, would do something toward blurring the marks that go to make ident.i.ty.

"I shall always wear a veil," said Susan.

"Oh, I don't know," deprecated Maud. "I think you're quite pretty--though a little too proper and serious looking to suit some tastes."

Susan had removed veil and hat, was letting down her hair.

"What are you doing that for?" cried Maud impatiently. "We're late now and----"

"I don't like the way my hair's done," cried Susan.

"Why, it was all right--real swell--good as a hairdresser could have done."

But Susan went on at her task. Ever since she came East she had worn it in a braid looped at the back of her head. She proceeded to change this radically. With Maud forgetting to be impatient in admiration of her swift fingers she made a coiffure much more elaborate--wide waves out from her temples and a big round loose knot behind. She was well content with the result--especially when she got the veil on again and it was a.s.sisting in the change.

"What do you think?" she said to Maud when she was ready.

"My, but you look different!" exclaimed Maud. "A lot dressier--and sportier. More--more Broadway."

"That's it--Broadway," said Susan. She had always avoided looking like Broadway. Now, she would take the opposite tack.

Not loud toilets--for they would defeat her purpose. Not loud but--just common.

"But," added Maud, "you do look swell about the feet. Where _do_ you get your shoes? No, I guess it's the feet."

As they sallied forth Maud said, "First, I'll show you our hotel." And they went to a Raines Law hotel in Forty-second Street near Eighth Avenue. "The proprietor's a heeler of Finnegan's. I guess Freddie comes in for some rake-off. He gives us twenty-five cents of every dollar the man spends,"

explained she. "And if the man opens wine we get two dollars on every bottle. The best way is to stay behind when the man goes and collect right away. That avoids rows--though they'd hardly dare cheat you, being as you're on Freddie's staff.

Freddie's got a big pull. He's way up at the top. I wish to G.o.d I had him instead of Jim. Freddie's giving up fast. They say he's got some things a lot better'n this now, and that he's likely to quit this and turn respectable. You ought to treat me mighty white, seeing what I done for you. I've put you in right--and that's everything in this here life."

Susan looked all round--looked along the streets stretching away with their morning suggestion of freedom to fly, freedom to escape--helpless! "Can't I get a drink?" asked she. There was a strained look in her eyes, a significant nervousness of the lips and hands. "I must have a drink."

"Of course. Max has been on a vacation, but I hear he's back.

When I introduce you, he'll probably set 'em up. But I wouldn't drink if I were you till I went off duty."

"I must have a drink," replied Susan.

"It'll get you down. It got me down. I used to have a fine sucker--gave me a hundred a week and paid my flat rent. But I had nothing else to do, so I took to drinking, and I got so reckless that I let him catch me with my lover that time. But I had to have somebody to spend the money on. Anyhow, it's no fun having a John."

"A John?" said Susan. "What's that?"

"You are an innocent----!" laughed Maud. "A John's a sucker--a fellow that keeps a girl. Well, it'd be no fun to have a John unless you fooled him--would it?"

They now entered the side door of the hotel and ascended the stairs. A dyspeptic looking man with a red nose that stood out the more strongly for the sallowness of his skin and the smallness of his sunken brown eyes had his hands spread upon the office desk and was leaning on his stiff arms. "h.e.l.lo, Max," said Maud in a fresh, condescending way. "How's business?"

"Slow. Always slack on Sundays. How goes it with you, Maudie?"

"So--so. I manage to pick up a living in spite of the d.a.m.n chippies. I don't see why the h.e.l.l they don't go into the business regular and make something out of it, instead of loving free. I'm down on a girl that's neither the one thing nor the other. This is my lady friend, Miss Queenie." She turned laughingly to Susan. "I never asked your last name."

"Brown."

"My, what a strange name!" cried Maud. Then, as the proprietor laughed with the heartiness of tradesman at good customer's jest, she said, "Going to set 'em up, Max?"