EACH girl now had with her at all times everything she possessed
in the world—a toothbrush, a cake of castile soap, the little
money left out of the week's wages, these three items in the
pocket of her one skirt, a cheap dark blue cloth much wrinkled
and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with
a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton
blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade;
an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain
sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of
fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of
worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a
dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's
lacking one button, Etta's lacking three and having a patch
under the right arm.
Yet they often laughed and joked with each other, with their
fellow-workers. You might have said their hearts were light; for
so eager are we to believe our fellow-beings comfortable, a
smile of poverty's face convinces us straightway that it is as
happy as we, if not happier. There would have been to their
mirth a little more than mere surface and youthful ability to
find some jest in the most crushing tragedy if only they could
have kept themselves clean. The lack of sufficient food was a
severe trial, for both had voracious appetites; Etta was
tormented by visions of quantity, Susan by visions of quality as
well as of quantity. But only at meal times, or when they had to
omit a meal entirely, were they keenly distressed by the food
question. The cold was a still severer trial; but it was warm in
the factory and it was warm in Mrs. Cassatt's flat, whose
windows were never opened from closing in of winter until spring
came round. The inability to keep clean was the trial of trials.
From her beginning at the box factory the physical uncleanness
of the other girls had made Susan suffer keenly. And her
suffering can be understood only by a clean person who has been
through the same ordeal. She knew that her fellow-workers were
not to blame. She even envied them the ignorance and the
insensibility that enabled them to bear what, she was convinced,
could never be changed. She wondered sometimes at the strength
and grip of the religious belief among the girls—even, or,
rather, especially, among those who had strayed from virtue into
the path their priests and preachers and rabbis told them was
the most sinful of all strayings. But she also saw many signs
that religion was fast losing its hold. One day a Lutheran girl,
Emma Schmeltz, said during a Monday morning lunch talk:
"Well, anyhow, I believe it's all a probation, and everything'll
be made right hereafter. I believe my religion, I do. Yes,
we'll be rewarded in the hereafter."
Becky—Rebecca Lichtenspiel—laughed, as did most of the girls.
Said Becky:
"And there ain't no hereafter. Did you ever see a corpse? Ain't
they the dead ones! Don't talk to me about no hereafter."
Everybody laughed. But this was a Monday morning conversation,
high above the average of the girls' talk in intelligence and
liveliness. Their minds had been stimulated by the Sunday rest
from the dreary and degenerating drudgery of "honest toil."
It was the physical contacts that most preyed upon Susan. She
was too gentle, too considerate to show her feelings; in her
determined and successful effort to conceal them she at times
went to the opposite extreme and not only endured but even
courted contacts that were little short of loathsome. Tongue
could not tell what she suffered through the persistent
affectionateness of Letty Southard, a sweet and pretty young
girl of wretchedly poor family who developed an enormous liking
for her. Letty, dirty and clad in noisome undergarments beneath
soiled rags and patches, was always hugging and kissing her—and
not to have submitted would have been to stab poor Letty to the
heart and humiliate all the other girls. So no one, not even
Etta, suspected what she was going through.
From her coming to the factory in the morning, to hang her hat
and jacket in the only possible place, along with the soiled and
smelling and often vermin-infected wraps of the others—from
early morning until she left at night she was forced into
contacts to which custom never in the least blunted her.
However, so long as she had a home with the Brashears there was
the nightly respite. But now—
There was little water, and only a cracked and filthy basin to
wash in. There was no chance to do laundry work; for their
underclothes must be used as night clothes also. To wash their
hair was impossible.
"Does my hair smell as bad as yours?" said Etta. "You needn't
think yours is clean because it doesn't show the dirt like mine."
"Does my hair smell as bad as the rest of the girls'?" said Susan.
"Not quite," was Etta's consoling reply.
By making desperate efforts they contrived partially to wash
their bodies once a week, not without interruptions of
privacy—to which, however, they soon grew accustomed. In spite
of efforts which were literally heroic, they could not always
keep free from parasites; for the whole tenement and all persons
and things in it were infected—and how could it be otherwise
where no one had time or money or any effective means whatsoever
to combat nature's inflexible determination to breed wherever
there is a breeding spot? The last traces of civilization were
slipping from the two girls; they were sinking to a state of nature.
Even personal pride, powerful in Susan and strong in Etta
through Susan's example, was deserting them. They no longer
minded Dan's sleeping in their room. They saw him, his father,
the other members of the family in all stages of nudity and at
the most private acts; and they were seen by the Cassatts in the
same way. To avoid this was impossible, as impossible as to
avoid the parasites swarming in the bed, in the woodwork, in
cracks of ceiling, walls, floor.
The Cassatts were an example of how much the people who live in
the sheltered and more or less sunny nooks owe to their shelter
and how little to their own boasted superiority of mind and
soul. They had been a high class artisan family until a few
months before. The hard times struck them a series of quick,
savage blows, such as are commonplace enough under our social
system, intricate because a crude jumble of makeshifts, and
easily disordered because intricate. They were swept without a
breathing pause down to the bottom. Those who have always been
accustomed to prosperity have no reserve of experience or
courage to enable them to recuperate from sudden and extreme
adversity. In an amazingly short time the Cassatts had become
demoralized—a familiar illustration of how civilization is
merely a wafer-thin veneer over most human beings as yet. Over
how many is it more? They fought after a fashion; they fought
valiantly. But how would it have been possible not steadily to
yield ground against such a pitiless, powerful foe as poverty?
The man had taken to drink, to blunt outraged self-respect and
to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's
downfall. Mrs. Cassatt was as poor a manager as the average
woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating
woman in the most slipshod fashion, if at all, in any other part
of the business but sex-trickery. Thus she was helpless before
the tenement conditions. She gave up, went soddenly about in
rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling tail of hair.
"Why don't you tie up that tail, ma?" said the son Dan, who had
ideas about neatness.
"What's the use?" said Mrs. Cassatt. "What's the use of anything?"
"Ma don't want to look stylish and stuck up," said the daughter.
Mrs. Cassatt's haunting terror was lest someone who had known
them in the days of their prosperity with a decently furnished
little house of their own should run into one of the family now.
Kate, the sixteen-year-old had a place as saleslady in a big shop
in Fifth, Street; her six dollars a week was the family's
entire steady income. She had formerly possessed a good
deal of finery for a girl in her position, though really not
much more than the daughter of the average prosperous artisan or
small shopkeeper expects, and is expected, to have. Being at the
shop where finery was all the talk and sight and thought from
opening until closing had developed in her a greedy taste for
luxury. She pilfered from the stocks of goods within her reach
and exchanged her stealings for the stealings of girls who
happened to be able to get things more to her liking or need.
But now that the family savings—bank account was exhausted, all
these pilferings had to go at once to the pawnshop. Kate grew
more and more ill-tempered as the family sank. Formerly she had
been noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased
with a careless compliment from no matter whom—a jocose,
half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart
seat quite as satisfactory as anybody. But poverty was bringing
out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish
instincts—those primal instincts of human nature that
civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of
atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for
example, prehensile toes and a covering of hair.
"Well, I for one don't have to stay in this slop barrel," Kate
was always saying. "Some fine morning I'll turn up missing—and
you'll see me in my own turnout."
She was torturing her mother and father with the dread that she
would leave the family in the lurch and enter a house of
prostitution. She recounted with the utmost detail how the madam
of a house in Longworth Street came from time to time to her
counter in the perfumery and soap department—and urged her to
"stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your
looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." The idea
grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of
tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints—for
modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest. More
and more boldly Kate was announcing that she wasn't going to be
a fool much longer.
Dan, the fourteen-year-old boy, had attracted the attention of
what Cassatt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below
them. She made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week
and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry
stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury. She was
caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly
training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a
professional seducer and "lover."
Said Mrs. Cassatt in one of her noisy wailing appeals to Dan:
"You better keep away from that there soiled dove. They tell me
she's a thief—has done time—has robbed drunken men in dark
hallways."
Dan laughed impudently. "She's a cute one. What diff does it
make how she gets the goods as long as she gets it?"
Mrs. Cassatt confided to everybody that she was afraid the woman
would make a thief of her boy—and there was no disputing the
justice of her forebodings.
Foul smells and sights everywhere, and foul language; no
privacy, no possibility of modesty where all must do all in the
same room: vermin, parasites, bad food vilely cooked—in the
midst of these and a multitude of similar ills how was it
possible to maintain a human standard, even if one had by chance
acquired a knowledge of what constituted a human standard? The
Cassatts were sinking into the slime in which their neighbors
were already wallowing. But there was this difference. For the
Cassatts it was a descent; for many of their neighbors it was an
ascent—for the immigrants notably, who had been worse off in
their European homes; in this land not yet completely in the
grip of the capitalist or wage system they were now getting the
first notions of decency and development, the first views and
hope of rising in the world. The Cassatts, though they had
always lived too near the slime to be nauseated by it, still
found it disagreeable and in spots disgusting. Their neighbors—
One of the chief reasons why these people were rising so slowly
where they were rising at all was that the slime seemed to them
natural, and to try to get clean of it seemed rather a foolish,
finicky waste of time and effort. People who have come up—by
accident, or by their own force, or by the force of some at once
shrewd and brutal member of the family—have to be far and long
from the slums before they lose the sense that in conforming to
the decencies of life they are making absurd effeminate concessions.
When they go to buy a toothbrush they blush and stammer.
"Look at Lorna and Etta," Mrs. Cassatt was always saying to Kate.
"Well, I see 'em," Kate would reply. "And I don't see much."
"Ain't you ashamed of yourself!" cried the mother. "Them two
lives straight and decent. And you're better off than they are."
"Don't preach to me, ma," sneered Kate. "When I get ready
I'll—stop making a damn fool of myself."
But the example of the two girls was not without its effect.
They, struggling on in chastity against appalling odds, became
the models, not only to Mrs. Cassatt, but all the mothers of
that row held up to their daughters. The mothers—all of them by
observation, not a few by experience—knew what the "fancy
lady's" life really meant. And they strove mightily to keep
their daughters from it. Not through religion or moral feeling,
though many pretended—perhaps fancied—that this was their
reason; but through the plainest kind of practical sense—the
kind that in the broad determines the actions of human beings of
whatever class, however lofty the idealistic pretenses may be.
These mothers knew that the profession of the pariah meant a
short life and a wretched one, meant disease, lower and ever
lower wages, the scale swiftly descending, meant all the
miseries of respectability plus a heavy burden of miseries of
its own. There were many other girls besides Susan and Etta
holding up their heads—girls with prospects of matrimony, girls
with fairly good wages, girls with fathers and brothers at work
and able to provide a home. But Susan and Etta were peculiarly
valuable as examples because they were making the fight alone
and unaided.
Thus, they were watched closely. In those neighborhoods everyone
knows everyone's else business down to how the last cent is got
and spent. If either girl had appeared in a new pair of shoes,
a new hat, a new garment of any kind, at once the report would
have sped that the wearer had taken a turn in the streets. And
the scandal would have been justified; for where could either
have respectably got the money for the smallest and cheapest
addition to her toilet? Matson, too, proudly pointed them out as
giving the lie to the talk about working girls not getting
living wages, to the muttering against him and his fellow
employers as practically procurers for the pavement and the
dive, for the charity hospital's most dreadful wards, for the
Morgue's most piteous boxes and slabs.
As their strength declined, as their miseries ate in and in, the
two girls ceased talking together; they used to chatter much of
the time like two birds on a leafy, sunny bough. Now they
walked, ate their scanty, repulsive meals, dressed, worked, all
in silence. When their eyes met both glanced guiltily away, each
fearing the other would discover the thought she was
revolving—the thought of the streets. They slept badly—Etta
sometimes, Susan every night. For a long time after she came to
the tenements she had not slept well, despite her youth and the
dull toil that wore her out each day. But after many months she
had grown somewhat used to the noisiness—to fretting babies, to
wailing children, the mixed ale parties, the quarrelings of the
ill and the drunk, the incessant restlessness wherever people
are huddled so close together that repose is impossible. And she
had gradually acquired the habit of sleeping well—that is, well
for the tenement region where no one ever gets the rest without
which health is impossible. Now sleeplessness came again—hours
on hours of listening to the hateful and maddening discords of
densely crowded humanity, hours on hours of
thinking—thinking—in the hopeless circles like those of a
caged animal, treading with soft swift step round and round,
nose to the iron wall, eyes gleaming with despairing pain.
One Saturday evening after a supper of scorched cornmeal which
had been none too fresh when they got it at the swindling
grocer's on the street floor, Etta put on the tattered, patched
old skirt at which she had been toiling. "I can't make it fit to
wear," said she. "It's too far gone; I think"—her eyelids
fluttered—"I'll go see some of the girls."
Susan, who was darning—seated on the one chair—yes, it had once
been a chair—did not look up or speak. Etta put on her
hat—slowly. Then, with a stealthy glance at Susan, she moved
slidingly toward the door. As she reached it Susan's hands
dropped to her lap; so tense were Etta's nerves that the gesture
made her startle. "Etta!" said Susan in an appealing voice.
Etta's hand dropped from the knob. "Well—what is it, Lorna?"
she asked in a low, nervous tone.
"Look at me, dear."
Etta tried to obey, could not.
"Don't do it—yet," said Susan. "Wait—a few more days."
"Wait for what?"
"I don't know. But—wait."
"You get four, I get only three—and there's no chance of a
raise. I work slower instead of faster. I'm going to be
discharged soon. I'm in rags underneath. . . . I've got to go
before I get sick—and won't have anything to—to sell."
Susan did not reply. She stared at the remains of a cheap
stocking in her lap. Yes, there was no doubt about it, Etta's
health was going. Etta was strong, but she had no such store of
strength to draw upon as had accumulated for Susan during the
seventeen years of simple, regular life in healthful
surroundings. A little while and Etta would be ill—would,
perhaps—probably—almost certainly—die—
Dan Cassatt came in at the other door, sat on the edge of his
bed and changed his trousers for what he was pleased to imagine
a less disreputable pair. Midway the boy stopped and eyed
Susan's bare leg and foot, a grin of pleasure and amusement on
his precociously and viciously mature face.
"My, but you keep clean," he cried. "And you've got a mighty
pretty foot. Minnie's is ugly as hell."
Minnie was the "fancy lady" on the floor below—"my skirt," he
called her. Susan evidently did not hear his compliment. Dan
completed his "sporting toilet" with a sleeking down of his long
greasy hair, took himself away to his girl. Susan was watching
a bug crawl down the wall toward their bed with its stained and
malodorous covers of rag. Etta was still standing by the door
motionless. She sighed, once more put her hand on the knob.
Susan's voice came again. "You've never been out, have you?"
"No," replied Etta.
Susan began to put on her stocking. "I'll go," said she. "I'll
go—instead."
"No!" cried Etta, sobbing. "It don't matter about me. I'm bound
to be sucked under. You've got a chance to pull through."
"Not a ghost of a chance," answered Susan. "I'll go. You've
never been."
"I know, but——"
"You've never been," continued Susan, fastening her shoe with
its ragged string. "You've never been. Well—I have."
"You!" exclaimed Etta, horrified though unbelieving. "Oh, no,
you haven't."
"Yes," said Susan. "And worse."
"And worse?" repeated Etta. "Is that what the look I sometimes
see in your eyes—when you don't know anyone's seeing—is that
what it means?"
"I suppose so. I'll go. You stay here."
"And you—out there!"
"It doesn't mean much to me."
Etta looked at her with eyes as devoted as a dog's. "Then we'll
go together," she said.
Susan, pinning on her weather-stained hat, reflected. "Very
well," she said finally. "There's nothing lower than this."
They said no more; they went out into the clear, cold winter
night, out under the brilliant stars. Several handsome theater
buses were passing on their way from the fashionable suburb to
the theater. Etta looked at them, at the splendid horses, at the
men in top hats and fur coats—clean looking, fine looking,
amiable looking men—at the beautiful fur wraps of the delicate
women—what complexions!—what lovely hair!—what jewels! Etta,
her heart bursting, her throat choking, glanced at Susan to see
whether she too was observing. But Susan's eyes were on the
tenement they had just left.
"What are you looking at—so queer?" asked Etta.
"I was thinking that we'll not come back here."
Etta started. "Not come back home!"
Susan gave a strange short laugh. "Home!. . . No, we'll not
come back home. There's no use doing things halfway. We've made
the plunge. We'll go—the limit."
Etta shivered. She admired the courage, but it terrified her.
"There's something—something—awful about you, Lorna," she
said. "You've changed till you're like a different person from
what you were when you came to the restaurant. Sometimes—that
look in your eyes—well, it takes my breath away."
"It takes my breath away, too. Come on."
At the foot of the hill they took the shortest route for Vine
Street, the highway of the city's night life.
Though they were so young and walked briskly, their impoverished
blood was not vigorous enough to produce a reaction against the
sharp wind of the zero night which nosed through their few thin
garments and bit into their bodies as if they were naked. They
came to a vast department store. Each of its great show-windows,
flooded with light, was a fascinating display of clothing for
women upon wax models—costly jackets and cloaks of wonderful
furs, white, brown, gray, rich and glossy black; underclothes
fine and soft, with ribbons and flounces and laces; silk
stockings and graceful shoes and slippers; dresses for street,
for ball, for afternoon, dresses with form, with lines, dresses
elegantly plain, dresses richly embroidered. Despite the cold
the two girls lingered, going from window to window, their
freezing faces pinched and purple, their eyes gazing hungrily.
"Now that we've tried 'em all on," said Susan with a short and
bitter laugh, "let's dress in our dirty rags again and go."
"Oh, I couldn't imagine myself in any of those things—could
you?" cried Etta.
"Yes," answered Susan. "And better."
"You were brought up to have those things, I know."
Susan shook her head. "But I'm going to have them."
"When?" said Etta, scenting romance. "Soon?"
"As soon as I learn," was Susan's absent, unsatisfactory reply.
Etta had gone back to her own misery and the contrasts to it. "I
get mad through and through," she cried, "when I think how all
those things go to some women—women that never did work and
never could. And they get them because they happen to belong to
rich fathers and husbands or whoever protects them. It isn't
fair! It makes me crazy!"
Susan gave a disdainful shrug. "What's the use of that kind of
talk!" said she. "No use at all. The thing is, we haven't got
what we want, and we've got to get it—and so we've got to
learn how."
"I can't think of anything but the cold," said Etta. "My God,
how cold I am! There isn't anything I wouldn't do to get warm.
There isn't anything anybody wouldn't do to get warm, if they
were as cold as this. It's all very well for warm people to
talk——"
"Oh, I'm sick of all the lying and faking, anyhow. Do you
believe in hell, Lorna?"
"Not in a hot one," said Susan.
Soon they struck into Vine Street, bright as day almost, and
lined with beer halls, concert gardens, restaurants. Through the
glass fronts crowds of men and women were visible—contented
faces, well-fed bodies, food on the tables or inviting-looking
drink. Along the sidewalk poured an eager throng, all the
conspicuous faces in it notable for the expectancy of pleasure
in the eyes.
"Isn't this different!" exclaimed Etta. "My God, how cold I
am—and how warm everybody else is but us!"
The sights, the sounds of laughter, of gay music, acted upon her
like an intoxicant. She tossed her head in a reckless gesture.
"I don't care what becomes of me," said she. "I'm ready for
anything except dirt and starvation."
Nevertheless, they hurried down Vine Street, avoiding the
glances of the men and behaving as if they were two working
girls in a rush to get home. As they walked, Susan, to delude
herself into believing that she was not hesitating, with
fainting courage talked incessantly to Etta—told her the things
Mabel Connemora had explained to her—about how a woman could,
and must, take care of her health, if she were not to be swept
under like the great mass of the ignorant, careless women of the
pariah class. Susan was astonished that she remembered all the
actress had told her—remembered it easily, as if she had often
thought of it, had used the knowledge habitually.
They arrived at Fountain Square, tired from the long walk. They
were both relieved and depressed that nothing had happened. "We
might go round the fountain and then back," suggested Susan.
They made the tour less rapidly but still keeping their heads
and their glances timidly down. They were numb with the cold
now. To the sharp agony had succeeded an ache like the steady
grinding pain of rheumatism. Etta broke the silence with, "Maybe
we ought to go into a house."
"A house! Oh—you mean a—a sporting house." At that time
professional prostitution had not become widespread among the
working class; stationary or falling wages, advancing cost of
food and developing demand for comfort and luxury had as yet
only begun to produce their inevitable results. Thus,
prostitution as an industry was in the main segregated in
certain streets and certain houses and the prostitutes were a
distinct class.
"You haven't been?" inquired Etta.
"No," said Susan.
"Dan Cassatt and Kate told me about those places," Etta went on.
"Kate says they're fine and the girls make fifty and sometimes
a hundred dollars a week, and have everything—servants to wait
on them, good food, bathrooms, lovely clothes, and can drive
out. But I—I think I'd stay in the house."
"I want to be my own boss," said Susan.
"There's another side than what Kate says," continued Etta as
consecutively as her chattering teeth would permit. "She heard
from a madam that wants her to come. But Dan heard from
Minnie—she used to be in one—and she says the girls are
slaves, that they're treated like dogs and have to take
anything. She says it's something dreadful the way men act—even
the gentlemen. She says the madam fixes things so that every
girl always owes her money and don't own a stitch to her back,
and so couldn't leave if she wanted to."
"That sounds more like the truth," said Susan.
"But we may have to go," pleaded Etta. "It's awful cold—and if
we went, at least we'd have a warm place. If we wanted to leave,
why, we couldn't be any worse off for clothes than we are."
Susan had no answer for this argument. They went several squares
up Vine Street in silence. Then Etta burst out again:
"I'm frozen through and through, Lorna, and I'm dead tired—and
hungry. The wind's cutting the flesh off my bones. What in the
hell does it matter what becomes of us? Let's get warm, for
God's sake. Let's go to a house. They're in Longworth
Street—the best ones."
And she came to a halt, forcing Susan to halt also. It happened
to be the corner of Eighth Street. Susan saw the iron fence, the
leafless trees of Garfield Place. "Let's go down this way," said
she. "I had luck here once."
"Luck!" said Etta, her curiosity triumphant over all.
Susan's answer was a strange laugh. Ahead of them, a woman
warmly and showily dressed was sauntering along. "That's one of
them," said Etta. "Let's see how she does it. We've got to
learn quick. I can't stand this cold much longer."
The two girls, their rags fluttering about their miserable
bodies, kept a few feet behind the woman, watched her with
hollow eyes of envy and fear. Tears of anguish from the cold
were streaming down their cheeks. Soon a man alone—a youngish
man with a lurching step—came along. They heard the woman say,
"Hello, dear. Don't be in a hurry."
He tried to lurch past her, but she seized him by the lapel of
his overcoat. "Lemme go," said he. "You're old enough to be a
grandmother, you old hag."
Susan and Etta halted and, watching so interestedly that they
forgot themselves, heard her laugh at his insult, heard her say
wheedlingly, "Come along, dearie, I'll treat you right. You're
the kind of a lively, joky fellow I like."
"Go to hell, gran'ma," said the man, roughly shaking her off and
lurching on toward the two girls. He stopped before them, eyed
them by the light of the big electric lamp, grinned
good-naturedly. "What've we got here?" said he. "This looks better."
The woman rushed toward the girls, pouring out a stream of
vileness. "You git out of here!" she shrilled. "You chippies git
off my beat. I'll have you pinched—I will!"
"Shut up!" cried the drunken man, lifting his fist. "I'll have
you pinched. Let these ladies alone, they're friends of mine.
Do you want me to call the cop?"
The woman glanced toward the corner where a policeman was
standing, twirling his club. She turned away, cursing horribly.
The man laughed. "Dirty old hag—isn't she?" said he. "Don't
look so scared, birdies." He caught them each by an arm, stared
woozily at Etta. "You're a good little looker, you are. Come
along with me. There's three in it."
"I—I can't leave my lady friend," Etta succeeded in chattering.
"Please really I can't."
"Your lady friend?" He turned his drunken head in Susan's
direction, squinted at her. He was rather good-looking. "Oh—she
means you. Fact is, I'm so soused I thought I was seein'
double. Why, you're a peach. I'll take you." And he released his
hold on Etta to seize her. "Come right along, my lovey-dovey dear."
Susan drew away; she was looking at him with terror and
repulsion. The icy blast swept down the street, sawed into her
flesh savagely.
"I'll give you five," said the drunken man. "Come along." He
grabbed her arm, waved his other hand at Etta. "So long,
blondie. 'Nother time. Good luck."
Susan heard Etta's gasp of horror. She wrenched herself free
again. "I guess I'd better go with him," said she to Etta.
Etta began to sob. "Oh, Lorna!" she moaned. "It's awful."
"You go into the restaurant on the corner and get something to
eat, and wait for me. We can afford to spend the money. And
you'll be warm there."
"Here! Here!" cried the tipsy man. "What're you two whispering
about? Come along, skinny. No offense. I like 'em slim." And he
made coarse and pointed remarks about the sluggishness of fat
women, laughing loudly at his own wit.
The two girls did not hear. The wind straight from the Arctic
was plying its hideous lash upon their defenseless bodies.
"Come on, lovey!" cried the man. "Let's go in out of the cold."
"Oh, Lorna! You can't go with a drunken man! I'll—I'll take
him. I can stand it better'n you. You can go when there's a
gentleman——"
"You don't know," said Susan. "Didn't I tell you I'd been
through the worst?"
"Are you coming?" broke in the man, shaking his head to scatter
the clouds over his sight.
The cold was lashing Susan's body; and she was seeing the
tenement she had left—the vermin crawling, the filth
everywhere, the meal bugs in the rotting corn meal—and Jeb
Ferguson. "Wait in the restaurant," said she to Etta. "Didn't I
tell you I'm a nobody. This is what's expected of me." The wind
clawed and tore at her quivering flesh. "It's cold, Etta. Go get
warm. Good-by."
She yielded to the tipsy man's tugging at her arm. Etta stood as
if paralyzed, watching the two move slowly westward. But cold
soon triumphed over horror. She retraced her steps toward Vine
Street. At the corner stood an elderly man with an iron-gray
beard. She merely glanced at him in passing, and so was startled
when he said in a low voice:
"Go back the way you came. I'll join you." She glanced at him
again, saw a gleam in his eyes that assured her she had not
imagined the request. Trembling and all at once hot, she kept on
across the street. But instead of going into the restaurant she
walked past it and east through dark Eighth Street. A few yards,
and she heard a quiet step behind her. A few yards more, and the
lights of Vine Street threw a man's shadow upon the sidewalk
beside her. From sheer fright she halted. The man faced her—a
man old enough to be her father, a most respectable, clean
looking man with a certain churchly though hardly clerical air
about him. "Good evening, miss," said he.
"Good evening," she faltered.
"I'm a stranger—in town to buy goods and have a little fun,"
stammered he with a grotesque attempt to be easy and familiar.
"I thought maybe you could help me."
A little fun! Etta's lips opened, but no words came. The cold
was digging its needle-knives into flesh, into bone, into nerve.
Through the man's thick beard and mustache came the gleam of
large teeth, the twisting of thick raw lips. A little fun!
"Would it," continued the man, nervously, "would it be very dear?"
"I—I don't know," faltered Etta.
"I could afford—say—" he looked at her dress—"say—two dollars."
"I—I" And again Etta could get no further.
"The room'd be a dollar," pleaded the man. "That'd make it three."
"I—I—can't," burst out Etta, hysterical. "Oh, please let me
alone. I—I'm a good girl, but I do need money. But I—I can't.
Oh, for God's sake—I'm so cold—so cold!"
The man was much embarrassed. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said
feelingly. "That's right—keep your virtue. Go home to your
parents." He was at ease now; his voice was greasy and his words
sleek with the unction of an elder. "I thought you were a soiled
dove. I'm glad you spoke out—glad for my sake as well as your
own. I've got a daughter about your age. Go home, my dear, and
stay a good girl. I know it's hard sometimes; but never give up
your purity—never!" And he lifted his square-topped hard hat
and turned away.
Suddenly Etta felt again the fury of the winter night and icy
wind. As that wind flapped her thin skirt and tortured her
flesh, she cried, "Wait—please. I was just—just fooling."
The man had halted, but he was looking at her uncertainly. Etta
put her hand on his arm and smiled pertly up at him—smiled as
she had seen other street girls smile in the days when she
despised them. "I'll go—if you'll give me three."
"I—I don't think I care to go now. You sort of put me out of
the humor."
"Well—two, then." She gave a reckless laugh. "God, how cold it
is! Anybody'd go to hell to get warm a night like this."
"You are a very pretty girl," said the man. He was warmly
dressed; his was not the thin blood of poverty. He could not
have appreciated what she was feeling. "You're sure you want to
go? You're sure it's your—your business?"
"Yes. I'm strange in this part of town. Do you know a place?"
An hour later Etta went into the appointed restaurant. Her eyes
searched anxiously for Susan, but did not find her. She inquired
at the counter. No one had asked there for a young lady. This
both relieved her and increased her nervousness; Susan had not
come and gone—but would she come? Etta was so hungry that she
could hold out no longer. She sat at a table near the door and
took up the large sheet on which was printed the bill of fare.
She was almost alone in the place, as it was between dinner and
supper. She read the bill thoroughly, then ordered black bean
soup, a sirloin steak and German fried potatoes. This, she had
calculated, would cost altogether a dollar; undoubtedly an
extravagance, but everything at that restaurant seemed dear in
comparison with the prices to which she had been used, and she
felt horribly empty. She ordered the soup, to stay her while the
steak was broiling.
As soon as the waiter set down bread and butter she began upon
it greedily. As the soup came, in walked Susan—calm and
self-possessed, Etta saw at first glance. "I've been so
frightened. You'll have a plate of soup?" asked Etta, trying to
look and speak in unconcerned fashion.
"No, thank you," replied Susan, seating herself opposite.
"There's a steak coming—a good-sized one, the waiter said it'd be."
"Very well."
Susan spoke indifferently.
"Aren't you hungry?"
"I don't know. I'll see." Susan was gazing straight ahead. Her
eyes were distinctly gray—gray and as hard as Susan Lenox's
eyes could be.
"What're you thinking about?"
"I don't know," she laughed queerly.
"Was—it—dreadful?"
A pause, then: "Nothing is going to be dreadful to me any more.
It's all in the game, as Mr. Burlingham used to say."
"Burlingham—who's he?" It was Etta's first faint clew toward
that mysterious past of Susan's into which she longed to peer.
"Oh—a man I knew. He's dead."
A long pause, Etta watching Susan's unreadable face. At last she said:
"You don't seem a bit excited."
Susan came back to the present. "Don't I? Your soup's getting cold."
Etta ate several spoonfuls, then said with an embarrassed
attempt at a laugh, "I—I went, too."
Susan slowly turned upon Etta her gaze—the gaze of eyes
softening, becoming violet. Etta's eyes dropped and the color
flooded into her fair skin. "He was an old man—forty or maybe
fifty," she explained nervously. "He gave me two dollars. I
nearly didn't get him. I lost my nerve and told him I was good
and was only starting because I needed money."
"Never whine," said Susan. "It's no use. Take what comes, and
wait for a winning hand."
Etta looked at her in a puzzled way. "How queer you talk! Not a
bit like yourself. You sound so much older. . . . And your
eyes—they don't look natural at all."
Indeed they looked supernatural. The last trace of gray was
gone. They were of the purest, deepest violet, luminous,
mysterious, with that awe-inspiring expression of utter
aloneness. But as Etta spoke the expression changed. The gray
came back and with it a glance of irony. Said she:
"Oh—nonsense! I'm all right."
"I didn't mind nearly as much as I thought I would. Yes, I'll
get used to it."
"You mustn't," said Susan.
"But I've got to."
"We've got to do it, but we haven't got to get used to it,"
replied Susan.
Etta was still puzzling at this when the dinner now came—a
fine, thick broiled steak, the best steak Susan had ever seen,
and the best food Etta had ever seen.
They had happened upon one of those famous Cincinnati chop
houses where in plain surroundings the highest quality of plain
food is served. "You are hungry, aren't you, Lorna?" said Etta.
"Yes—I'm hungry," declared Susan. "Cut it—quick."
"Draught beer or bottled?" asked the waiter.
"Bring us draught beer," said Etta. "I haven't tasted beer since
our restaurant burned."
"I never tasted it," said Susan. "But I'll try it tonight."
Etta cut two thick slices from the steak, put them on Susan's
plate with some of the beautifully browned fried potatoes.
"Gracious, they have good things to eat here!" she exclaimed.
Then she cut two thick slices for herself, and filled her mouth.
Her eyes glistened, the color came into her pale cheeks. "Isn't
it grand!" she cried, when there was room for words to pass out.
"Grand," agreed Susan, a marvelous change of expression in her
face also.
The beer came. Etta drank a quarter of the tall glass at once.
Susan tasted, rather liked the fresh bitter-sweet odor and
flavor. "Is it—very intoxicating?" she inquired.
"If you drink enough," said Etta. "But not one glass."
Susan took quite a drink. "I feel a lot less tired already,"
declared she.
"Me too," said Etta. "My, what a meal! I never had anything like
this in my life. When I think what we've been through! Lorna,
will it last?"
"We mustn't think about that," said Susan.
"Tell me what happened to you."
"Nothing. He gave me the money, that was all."
"Then we've got seven dollars—seven dollars and twenty cents,
with what we brought away from home with us."
"Seven dollars—and twenty cents," repeated Susan thoughtfully.
Then a queer smile played around the corners of her mouth.
"Seven dollars—that's a week's wages for both of us at Matson's."
"But I'd go back to honest work tomorrow—if I could find a good
job," Etta said eagerly—too eagerly. "Wouldn't you, Lorna?"
"I don't know," replied Susan. She had the inability to make
pretenses, either to others or to herself, which characterizes
stupid people and also the large, simple natures.
"Oh, you can't mean that!" protested Etta. Instead of replying
Susan began to talk of what to do next. "We must find a place to
sleep, and we must buy a few things to make a better appearance."
"I don't dare spend anything yet," said Etta. "I've got only my
two dollars. Not that when this meal's paid for."
"We're going to share even," said Susan. "As long as either has
anything, it belongs to both."
The tears welled from Etta's eyes. "You are too good, Lorna!
You mustn't be. It isn't the way to get on. Anyhow, I can't
accept anything from you. You wouldn't take anything from me."
"We've got to help each other up," insisted Susan. "We share
even—and let's not talk any more about it. Now, what shall we
get? How much ought we to lay out?"
The waiter here interrupted. "Beg pardon, young ladies," said
he. "Over yonder, at the table four down, there's a couple of
gents that'd like to join you. I seen one of 'em flash quite a
roll, and they acts too like easy spenders."
As Susan was facing that way, she examined them. They were young
men, rather blond, with smooth faces, good-natured eyes and
mouths; they were well dressed—one, the handsomer, notably so.
Susan merely glanced; both men at once smiled at her with an
unimpertinent audacity that probably came out of the champagne
bottle in a silver bucket of ice on their table.
"Shall I tell 'em to come over?" said the waiter.
"Yes," replied Susan.
She was calm, but Etta twitched with nervousness, saying, "I
wish I'd had your experience. I wish we didn't look so
dreadful—me especially. I'm not pretty enough to stand out
against these awful clothes."
The two men were pushing eagerly toward them, the taller and
less handsome slightly in advance. He said, his eyes upon Susan,
"We were lonesome, and you looked a little that way too. We're much
obliged." He glanced at the waiter. "Another bottle of the same."
"I don't want anything to drink," said Susan.
"Nor I," chimed in Etta. "No, thank you."
The young man waved the waiter away with, "Get it for my friend
and me, then." He smiled agreeably at Susan. "You won't mind my
friend and me drinking?"
"Oh, no."
"And maybe you'll change your mind," said the shorter man to
Etta. "You see, if we all drink, we'll get acquainted faster.
Don't you like champagne?"
"I never tasted it," Etta confessed.
"Neither did I," admitted Susan.
"You're sure to like it," said the taller man to Susan—his
friend presently addressed him as John. "Nothing equal to
it for making friends. I like it for itself, and I like it for
the friends it has made me."
Champagne was not one of the commonplaces of that modest chop
house. So the waiter opened the bottle with much ceremony. Susan
and Etta startled when the cork popped ceilingward in the way
that in such places is still regarded as fashionable. They
watched with interested eyes the pouring of the beautiful pale
amber liquid, were fascinated when they saw how the bubbles
surged upward incessantly, imprisoned joys thronging to escape.
And after the first glass, the four began to have the kindliest
feelings for each other. Sorrow and shame, poverty and
foreboding, took wings unto themselves and flew away. The girls
felt deliciously warm and contented, and thought the young men
charming—a splendid change from the coarse, badly dressed
youths of the tenement, with their ignorant speech and rough,
misshapen hands. They were ashamed of their own hands, were
painfully self-conscious whenever lifting the glass to the lips
brought them into view. Etta's hands in fact were not so badly
spoiled as might have been expected, considering her long years
of rough work; the nails were in fairly good condition and the
skin was rougher to the touch than to the sight. Susan's hands
had not really been spoiled as yet. She had been proud of them
and had taken care of them; still, they were not the hands of a
lady, but of a working girl. The young men had gentlemen's
hands—strong, evidently exercised only at sports, not at
degrading and deforming toil.
The shorter and handsomer youth, who answered to the name of
Fatty, for obvious but not too obvious reasons, addressed
himself to Etta. John—who, it came out, was a Chicagoan,
visiting Fatty—fell to Susan. The champagne made him voluble;
he was soon telling all about himself—a senior at Ann Arbor, as
was Fatty also; he intended to be a lawyer; he was fond of a
good, time was fond of the girls—liked girls who were gay
rather than respectable ones—"because with the prim girls you
have to quit just as the fun ought really to begin."
After two glasses Susan, warned by a slight dizziness, stopped
drinking; Etta followed her example. But the boys kept on,
ordered a second bottle. "This is the fourth we've had tonight,"
said Fatty proudly when it came.
"Don't it make you dizzy?" asked Etta.
"Not a bit," Fatty assured her. But she noticed that his tongue
now swung trippingly loose.
"You haven't been at—at this—long, have you?" inquired John
of Susan.
"Not long," replied she.
Etta, somewhat giddied, overheard and put in, "We began tonight.
We got tired of starving and freezing."
John looked deepest sympathy into Susan's calm violet-gray eyes.
"I don't blame you," said he. "A woman does have a—a hades of
a time!"
"We were going out to buy some clothes when you came," proceeded
Etta. "We're in an awful state."
"I wondered how two girls with faces like yours," said John,
"came to be dressed so—so differently. That was what first
attracted us." Then, as Etta and Fatty were absorbed in each
other, he went on to Susan: "And your eyes—I mustn't forget
them. You certainly have got a beautiful face. And your mouth—so
sweet and sad—but, what a lovely, lovely smile!"
At this Susan smiled still more broadly with pleasure. "I'm glad
you're pleased," said she.
"Why, if you were dressed up——
"You're not a working girl by birth, are you?"
"I wish I had been," said Susan.
"Oh, I think a girl's got as good a right as a man to have a
good time," lied John.
"Don't say things you don't believe," said Susan. "It isn't necessary."
"I can hand that back to you. You weren't frank, yourself, when
you said you wished you'd been born in the class of your
friend—and of my friend Fatty, too."
Susan's laugh was confession. The champagne was dancing in her
blood. She said with a reckless toss of the head:
"I was born nothing. So I'm free to become anything I
please—anything except respectable."
Here Fatty broke in. "I'll tell you what let's do. Let's all go
shopping. We can help you girls select your things."
Susan laughed. "We're going to buy about three dollars' worth.
There won't be any selecting. We'll simply take the cheapest."
"Then—let's go shopping," said John, "and you two girls can
help Fatty and me select clothes for you."
"That's the talk!" cried Fatty. And he summoned the waiter. "The
bill," said he in the manner of a man who likes to enjoy the
servility of servants.
"We hadn't paid for our supper," said Susan. "How much was it, Etta?"
"A dollar twenty-five."
"We're going to pay for that," said Fatty. "What d'ye take us for?"
"Oh, no. We must pay it," said Susan.
"Don't be foolish. Of course I'll pay."
"No," said Susan quietly, ignoring Etta's wink. And from her
bosom she took a crumpled five-dollar bill.
"I should say you were new," laughed John. "You don't even know
where to carry your money yet." And they all laughed, Susan and
Etta because they felt gay and assumed the joke whatever it was
must be a good one. Then John laid his hand over hers and said,
"Put your money away."
Susan looked straight at him. "I can't allow it," she said. "I'm
not that poor—yet."
John colored. "I beg your pardon," he said. And when the bill
came he compelled Fatty to let her pay a dollar and a quarter of
it out of her crumpled five. The two girls were fascinated by
the large roll of bills—fives, tens, twenties—which Fatty took
from his trousers pocket. They stared open-eyed when he laid a
twenty on the waiter's plate along with Susan's five. And it
frightened them when he, after handing Susan her change, had
left only a two-dollar bill, four silver quarters and a dime. He
gave the silver to the waiter.
"Was that for a tip?" asked Susan.
"Yes," said Fatty. "I always give about ten per cent of the bill
unless it runs over ten dollars. In that case—a quarter a
person as a rule. Of course, if the bill was very large, I'd
give more." He was showing his amusement at her inquisitiveness.
"I wanted to know," explained she. "I'm very ignorant, and I've
got to learn."
"That's right," said John, admiringly—with a touch of
condescension. "Don't be afraid to confess ignorance."
"I'm not," replied Susan. "I used to be afraid of not being
respectable and that was all. Now, I haven't any fear at all."
"You are a queer one!" exclaimed John. "You oughtn't to be in
this life."
"Where then?" asked she.
"I don't know," he confessed.
"Neither do I." Her expression suddenly was absent, with a
quaint, slight smile hovering about her lips. She looked at him
merrily. "You see, it's got to be something that isn't respectable."
"What do you mean?" demanded he.
Her answer was a laugh.
Fatty declared it too cold to chase about afoot—"Anyhow, it's
late—nearly eleven, and unless we're quick all the stores'll be
closed." The waiter called them a carriage; its driver promised
to take them to a shop that didn't close till midnight on
Saturdays. Said Fatty, as they drove away:
"Well, I suppose, Etta, you'll say you've never been in a
carriage before."
"Oh, yes, I have," cried Etta. "Twice—at funerals."
This made everyone laugh—this and the champagne and the air
which no longer seemed cruel to the girls but stimulating, a
grateful change from the close warmth of the room. As the boys
were smoking cigarettes, they had the windows down. The faces of
both girls were flushed and lively, and their cheeks seemed
already to have filled out. The four made so much noise that the
crowds on the sidewalk were looking at them—looking smilingly,
delighted by the sight of such gayety. Susan was even gayer than
Etta. She sang, she took a puff at John's cigarette; then
laughed loudly when he seized and kissed her, laughed again as
she kissed him; and she and John fell into each other's arms and
laughed uproariously as they saw Fatty and Etta embracing.
The driver kept his promise; eleven o'clock found them bursting
into Sternberg's, over the Rhine—a famous department store for
Germans of all classes. They had an hour, and they made good use
of it. Etta was for yielding to Fatty's generous urgings and
buying right and left. But Susan would not have it. She told the
men what she and Etta would take—a simple complete outfit, and
no more. Etta wanted furs and finery. Susan kept her to plain,
serviceable things. Only once did she yield. When Etta and Fatty
begged to be allowed a big showy hat, Susan yielded—but gave
John leave to buy her only the simplest of simple hats. "You
needn't tell me any yarns about your birth and breeding," said
he in a low tone so that Etta should not hear.
But that subject did not interest Susan. "Let's forget it,"
said she, almost curtly. "I've cut out the past—and the future.
Today's enough for me."
"And for me, too," protested he. "I hope you're having as good
fun as I am."
"This is the first time I've really laughed in nearly a year,"
said she. "You don't know what it means to be poor and hungry
and cold—worst of all, cold."
"You unhappy child," said John tenderly.
But Susan was laughing again, and making jokes about a wonderful
German party dress all covered with beads and lace and ruffles
and embroidery. When they reached the shoe department, Susan
asked John to take Fatty away. He understood that she was
ashamed of their patched and holed stockings, and hastened to
obey. They were making these their last purchases when the big
bell rang for the closing. "I'm glad these poor tired shopgirls
and clerks are set free," said John.
It was one of those well-meaning but worthless commonplaces of
word-kindness that get for their utterance perhaps exaggerated
credit for "good heart." Susan, conscience-stricken, halted.
"And I never once thought of them!" she exclaimed. "It just shows."
"Shows what?"
"Oh, nothing. Come on. I must forget that, for I can't be happy
again till I do. I understand now why the comfortable people can
be happy. They keep from knowing or they make themselves forget."
"Why not?" said John. "What's the use in being miserable about
things that can't be helped?"
"No use at all," replied the girl. She laughed. "I've forgotten."
The carriage was so filled with their bundles that they had some
difficulty in making room for themselves—finally accomplished
it by each girl sitting on her young man's lap. They drove to a
quietly placed, scrupulously clean little hotel overlooking
Lincoln Park. "We're going to take rooms here and dress,"
explained Fatty. "Then we'll wander out and have some supper."
By this time Susan and Etta had lost all sense of strangeness.
The spirit of adventure was rampant in them as in a dreaming
child. And the life they had been living—what they had seen and
heard and grown accustomed to—made it easy for them to strike
out at once and briskly in the new road, so different from the
dreary and cruel path along which they had been plodding. They
stood laughing and joking in the parlor while the boys
registered; then the four went up to two small but comfortable
and fascinatingly clean rooms with a large bathroom between.
"Fatty and I will go down to the bar while you two dress," said John.
"Not on your life!" exclaimed Fatty. "We'll have the bar brought
up to us."
But John, fortified by Susan's look of gratitude for his
tactfulness, whispered to his friend—what Susan could easily
guess. And Fatty said, "Oh, I never thought of it. Yes, we'll
give 'em a chance. Don't be long, girls."
"Thank you," said Susan to John.
"That's all right. Take your time."
Susan locked the hall door behind the two men. She rushed to the
bathroom, turned on the hot water. "Oh, Etta!" she cried, tears
in her eyes, a hysterical sob in her throat. "A bathtub again!"
Etta too was enthusiastic; but she had not that intense
hysterical joy which Susan felt—a joy that can be appreciated
only by a person who, clean by instinct and by lifelong habit,
has been shut out from thorough cleanliness for long months of
dirt and foul odors and cold. It was no easy matter to become
clean again after all those months. But there was plenty of soap
and brushes and towels, and at last the thing was accomplished.
Then they tore open the bundles and arrayed themselves in the
fresh new underclothes, in the simple attractive costumes of
jacket, blouse and skirt. Susan had returned to her class, and
had brought Etta with her.
"What shall we do with these?" asked Etta, pointing disdainfully
with the toe of her new boot to the scatter of the garments they
had cast off.
Susan looked down at it in horror. She could not believe that
she had been wearing such stuff—that it was the clothing of
all her associates of the past six months—was the kind of
attire in which most of her fellow-beings went about the
beautiful earth, She shuddered. "Isn't life dreadful?" she
cried. And she kicked together the tattered, patched, stained
trash, kicked it on to a large piece of heavy wrapping paper she
had spread out upon the floor. Thus, without touching her
discarded self, she got it wrapped up and bound with a strong
string. She rang for the maid, gave her a quarter and pointed to
the bundle. "Please take that and throw it away," she said.
When the maid was gone Etta said: "I'm mighty glad to have it
out of the room."
"Out of the room?" cried Susan. "Out of my heart. Out of my life."
They put on their hats, admired themselves in the mirror, and
descended—Susan remembering halfway that they had left the
lights on and going back to turn them off. The door boy summoned
the two young men to the parlor. They entered and exclaimed in
real amazement. For they were facing two extremely pretty young
women, one dark, the other fair. The two faces were wreathed in
pleased and grateful smiles.
"Don't we look nice?" demanded Etta.
"Nice!" cried Fatty. "We sure did draw a pair of first
prizes—didn't we, Johnny?"
John did not reply. He was gazing at Susan. Etta had young
beauty but it was of the commonplace kind. In Susan's face and
carriage there was far more than beauty. "Where did you come
from?" said John to her in an undertone. "And where are you going?"
"Out to supper, I hope," laughed she.
"Your eyes change—don't they? I thought they were violet. Now
I see they're gray—gray as can be."