Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

D >> David Graham Phillips >> Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise



They lay quietly side by side; he fell into a profound sleep. He
was full upon his back, his broad chest heaving in the gray
cotton undershirt, his mouth wide open with its upper fringe of
hair in disarray and agitated by his breath. Soon he began to
snore, a deafening clamor that set some loose object in the dark
part of the room to vibrating with a tapping sound. Susan
stealthily raised herself upon her elbow, looked at him. There
was neither horror nor fear in her haggard face but only
eagerness to be sure he would not awaken. She, inch by inch,
more softly than a cat, climbed over the low footboard, was
standing on the floor. One silent step at a time, with eyes
never from his face so clear in the moonlight, she made her way
toward the door. The snoring stopped--and her heart stopped with
it. He gasped, gurgled, gave a snort, and sat up.

"What--which----" he ejaculated. Then he saw her near the door.
"Hello--whar ye goin'?"

"I thought I'd undress," she lied, calmly and smoothly.

"Oh--that's right." And he lay down.

She stood in the darkness, making now and then a faint sound
suggestive of undressing. The snoring began again--soft, then
deep, then the steady, uproarious intake with the fierce
whistling exhalation. She went into the sitting-room, felt round
in the darkness, swift and noiseless. On the sofa she found her
bundle, tore it open. By feeling alone she snatched her sailor
hat, a few handkerchiefs, two stockings, a collar her fingers
chanced upon and a toothbrush. She darted to the front door, was
outside, was gliding down the path, out through the gate into
the road.

To the left would be the way she had come. She ran to the right,
with never a backward glance--ran with all the speed in her
lithe young body, ran with all the energy of her fear and horror
and resolve to die rather than be taken. For a few hundred yards
the road lay between open fields. But after that it entered a
wood. And in that dimness she felt the first beginnings of a
sense of freedom. Half a mile and open fields again, with a
small house on the right, a road southeastward on the left. That
would be away from her Uncle Zeke's and also away from
Sutherland, which lay twenty miles to the southwest. When she
would be followed Jeb would not think of this direction until he
had exhausted the other two.

She walked, she ran, she rested; she walked and ran and walked
again. The moon ascended to the zenith, crossed the levels of
the upper sky, went down in the west; a long bar of dusky gray
outlined a cloud low upon the horizon in the northeast. She was
on the verge of collapse. Her skin, the inside of her mouth,
were hot and dry. She had to walk along at snail's pace or her
heart would begin to beat as if it were about to burst and the
blood would choke up into the veins of her throat to suffocate
her. A terrible pain came in her side--came and went--came and
stayed. She had passed turning after turning, to the right, to
the left--crossroads leading away in all directions. She had
kept to the main road because she did not wish to lose time,
perhaps return upon her path, in the confusion of the darkness.
Now she began to look about her at the country. It was still the
hills as round Zeke Warham's--the hills of southeastern Indiana.
But they were steeper and higher, for she was moving toward the
river. There was less open ground, more and denser undergrowth
and forest. She felt that she was in a wilderness, was safe.
Night still lay too thick upon the landscape for her to
distinguish anything but outlines. She sat down on the ruined
and crumbling panel of a zigzag fence to rest and to wait for
light. She listened; a profound hush. She was alone, all alone.
How far had she come? She could not guess; but she knew that she
had done well. She would have been amazed if she had known how
well. All the years of her life, thanks to Mrs. Warham's good
sense about health, she had been steadily adding to the vitality
and strength that were hers by inheritance. Thus, the response
to this first demand upon them had been almost inevitable. It
augured well for the future, if the future should draw her into
hardships. She knew she had gone far and in what was left of the
night and with what was left of her strength she would put such
a distance between her and them that they would never believe
she had got so far, even should they seek in this direction. She
was supporting her head upon her hands, her elbows upon her
knees. Her eyes closed, her head nodded; she fought against the
impulse, but she slept.

When she straightened up with a start it was broad day. The
birds must have finished their morning song, for there was only
happy, comfortable chirping in the branches above her. She rose
stiffly. Her legs, her whole body, ached; and her feet were
burning and blistered. But she struck out resolutely.

After she had gone halfway down a long steep hill, she had to
turn back because she had left her only possessions. It was a
weary climb, and her heart quaked with terror. But no one
appeared, and at last she was once more at the ruins of the
fence panel. There lay her sailor hat, the handkerchiefs,
wrapped round the toothbrush, the collar--and two stockings, one
black, the other brown. And where was her purse? Not there,
certainly. She glanced round in swift alarm. No one. Yet she had
been absolutely sure she had taken her purse from the
sitting-room table when she came upon it, feeling about in the
dark. She had forgotten it; she was without a cent!

But she had no time to waste in self-reproaches or forebodings.
Though the stockings would be of no use to her, she took them
along because to leave them was to leave a trail. She hastened
down the hill. At the bottom ran a deep creek--without a bridge.
The road was now a mere cowpath which only the stoutest vehicles
or a horseman would adventure. To her left ran an even wilder
trail, following the downward course of the creek. She turned
out of the road, entered the trail. She came to a place where
the bowlders over which the creek foamed and splashed as it
hurried southeastward were big and numerous enough to make a
crossing. She took it, went slowly on down the other bank.

There was no sign of human intrusion. Steeply on either side
rose a hill, strewn with huge bowlders, many of them large as
large houses. The sun filtered through the foliage to make a
bright pattern upon the carpet of last year's leaves. The birds
twittered and chirped; the creek hummed its drowsy, soothing
melody. She was wretchedly weary, and Oh, so hungry! A little
further, and two of the great bowlders, tumbled down from the
steeps, had cut off part of the creek, had formed a pool which
their seamed and pitted and fern-adorned walls hid from all
observation except that of the birds and the squirrels in the boughs.

At once she thought how refreshed she would be if she could
bathe in those cool waters. She looked round, stepped in between
the bowlders. She peered out; she listened. She was safe; she
drew back into her little inclosure. There was a small dry shelf
of rock. She hurried off her clothes, stood a moment in the
delicious warmth of the sunshine, stepped into the pool. She
would have liked to splash about; but she dared make no sound
that could be heard above the noise of the water. Luckily the
creek was just there rather loud, as it was expressing its
extreme annoyance over the stolid impudence of the interrupting
bowlders. While she was waiting for the sun to dry her she
looked at her underclothes. She simply could not put them on as
they were. She knelt at the edge of the shelf and rinsed them
out as well as she could. Then she spread them on the thick
tufts of overhanging fern where the hot sun would get full swing
at them. The brown stocking of the two mismates she had brought
along almost matched the pair she was wearing. As there was a
hole in the toe of one of them, she discarded it, and so had one
fresh stocking. She dried her feet thoroughly with the stocking
she was discarding. Then she put her corsets and her dress
directly upon her body. She could not afford to wait until the
underclothes dried; she would carry them until she found for
herself a more remote and better hiding place where she could
await nightfall. She stuffed the stocking with the hole deep
into a cleft in the rock and laid a small stone upon it so that
it was concealed. Here where there were no traces, no reminders
of the human race which had cast her out and pursued her with
torture of body and soul, here in the wilderness her spirits
were going up, and her young eyes were looking hopefully round
and forward. The up-piling horrors of those two days and their
hideous climax seemed a dream which the sun had scattered.
Hopefully! That blessed inexperience and sheer imagination of
youth enabling it to hope in a large, vague way when to hope for
any definite and real thing would be impossible.

She cleaned her tan low shoes with branches of fern and grass,
put them on. It is impossible to account for the peculiarities
of physical vanity. Probably no one was ever born who had not
physical vanity of some kind; Susan's was her feet and ankles.
Not her eyes, nor her hair, nor her contour, nor her skin, nor
her figure, though any or all of these might well have been her
pleasure. Of them she never thought in the way of pride or
vanity. But of her feet and ankles she was both proud and
vain--in a reserved, wholly unobtrusive way, be it said, so
quietly that she had passed unsuspected. There was reason for
this shy, secret self-satisfaction, so amusing in one otherwise
self-unconscious. Her feet were beautifully formed and the
curves of her instep and ankle were beautiful. She gave more
attention now to the look of her shoes and of her stockings than
to all the rest of this difficult woodland toilet. She then put
on the sailor hat, fastened the collar to her garter, slipped
the handkerchiefs into the legs of her stockings. Carrying her
underclothes, ready to roll them into a ball should she meet
anyone, she resumed her journey into that rocky wilderness. She
was sore, she had pains that were the memories of the worst
horrors of her hideous dream, but up in her strong, healthy
body, up through her strong young soul, surged joy of freedom
and joy of hope. Compared with what her lot had been until such
a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the
wilderness was dark indeed. But she was comparing it with the
monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. She was almost
happy--and madly hungry.

An enormous bowlder, high above her and firmly fixed in the
spine of the hill, invited as a place where she could see
without being seen, could hide securely until darkness came
again. She climbed to the base of it, found that she might reach
the top by stepping from ledge to ledge with the aid of the
trees growing so close around it that some of their boughs
seemed rooted in its weather-dented cliffs. She dragged herself
upward the fifty or sixty feet, glad of the difficulties because
they would make any pursuer feel certain she had not gone that
way. After perhaps an hour she came upon a flat surface where
soil had formed, where grass and wild flowers and several little
trees gave shade and a place to sleep. And from her eyrie she
commanded a vast sweep of country--hills and valleys, fields,
creeks, here and there lonely farmhouses, and far away to the
east the glint of the river!

To the river! That was her destination. And somehow it would be
kind, would take her where she would never, never dream those
frightful dreams again!

She went to the side of the bowlder opposite that which she had
climbed. She drew back hastily, ready to cry with vexation. It
was not nearly so high or so steep; and on the slope of the hill
a short distance away was set a little farmhouse, with smoke
curling up from its rough stone chimney. She dropped to all
fours in the tall grass and moved cautiously toward the edge.
Flat upon her breast, she worked her way to the edge and looked
down. A faintly lined path led from the house through a gate in
a zigzag fence and up to the base of her fortress. The rock had
so crumbled on that side that a sort of path extended clear up
to the top. But her alarm quieted somewhat when she noted how
the path was grass-grown.

As nearly as she could judge it was about five o'clock. So that
smoke meant breakfast! Her eyes fixed hungrily upon the thin
column of violet vapor mounting straight into the still morning
air. When smoke rose in that fashion, she remembered, it was
sure sign of clear weather. And then the thought came, "What if
it had been raining!" She simply could not have got away.

As she interestedly watched the little house and its yard she
saw hurrying through the burdock and dog fennel toward the base
of her rock a determined looking hen. Susan laughed silently, it
was so obvious that the hen was on a pressing and secret
business errand. But almost immediately her attention was
distracted to observing the movements of a human being she could
obscurely make out through one of the windows just back of the
chimney. Soon she saw that it was a woman, cleaning up a kitchen
after breakfast--the early breakfast of the farmhouse in summer.

What had they had for breakfast? She sniffed the air. "I think
I can smell ham and cornbread," she said aloud, and laughed,
partly at the absurdity of her fancy, chiefly at the idea of
such attractive food. She aggravated her hunger by letting her
imagination loose upon the glorious possibilities. A stealthy
fluttering brought her glance back to the point where the hen
had disappeared. The hen reappeared, hastened down the path and
through the weeds, and rejoined the flock in the yard with an
air which seemed to say, "No, indeed, I've been right here all
the time."

"Now, what was she up to?" wondered Susan, and the answer came to
her. Eggs! A nest hidden somewhere near or in the base of the rock!

Could she get down to that nest without being seen from the
house or from any other part of the region below? She drew back
from the edge, crawled through the grass to the place where the
path, if path it could be called, reached the top. She was
delighted to find that it made the ascent through a wide cleft
and not along the outside. She let herself down cautiously as
the footway was crumbling and rotten and slippery with grass. At
the lower end of the cleft she peered out. Trees and
bushes--plenty of them, a thick shield between her and the
valleys. She moved slowly downward; a misstep might send her
through the boughs to the hillside forty feet below. She had
gone up and down several times before her hunger-sharpened eyes
caught the gleam of white through the ferns growing thickly out
of the moist mossy cracks which everywhere seamed the wall. She
pushed the ferns aside. There was the nest, the length of her
forearm into the dim seclusion of a deep hole. She felt round,
found the egg that was warm. And as she drew it out she laughed
softly and said half aloud: "Breakfast is ready!"

No, not quite ready. Hooking one arm round the bough of a tree
that shot up from the hillside to the height of the rock and
beyond, she pressed her foot firmly against the protecting root
of an ancient vine of poison ivy. Thus ensconced, she had free
hands; and she proceeded to remove the thin shell of the egg
piece by piece. She had difficulty in restraining herself until
the end. At last she put the whole egg into her mouth. And never
had she tasted anything so good.

But one egg was only an appetizer. She reached in again. She did
not wish to despoil the meritorious hen unnecessarily, so she
held the egg up in her inclosing fingers and looked through it,
as she had often seen the cook do at home. She was not sure, but
the inside seemed muddy. She laid it to one side, tried another.
It was clear and she ate it as she had eaten the first. She laid
aside the third, the fourth, and the fifth. The sixth seemed all
right--but was not. Fortunately she had not been certain enough
to feel justified in putting the whole egg into her mouth before
tasting it. The taste, however, was enough to make her reflect
that perhaps on the whole two eggs were sufficient for
breakfast, especially as there would be at least dinner and
supper before she could go further. As she did not wish to risk
another descent, she continued to sort out the eggs. She found
four that were, or seemed to be, all right. The thirteen that
looked doubtful or worse when tested by the light she restored
with the greatest care. It was an interesting illustration of
the rare quality of consideration which at that period of her
life dominated her character.

She put the four eggs in the bosom of her blouse and climbed up
to her eyrie. All at once she felt the delicious languor of body
and mind which is Nature's forewarning that she is about to put
us to sleep, whether we will or no. She lost all anxiety about
safety, looked hastily around for a bed. She found just the
place in a corner of the little tableland where the grass grew
tall and thick. She took from her bosom the four eggs--her
dinner and supper--and put them between the roots of a tree with
a cover of broad leaves over them to keep them cool. She pulled
grass to make a pillow, took off her collar and laid herself
down to sleep. And that day's sun did not shine upon a prettier
sight than this soundly and sweetly sleeping girl, with her oval
face suffused by a gentle flush, with her rounded young
shoulders just moving the bosom of her gray silk blouse, with
her slim, graceful legs curled up to the edge of her carefully
smoothed blue serge skirt. You would have said never a care,
much less a sorrow, had shadowed her dawning life. And that is
what it means to be young--and free from the curse of self-pity,
and ignorant of life's saddest truth, that future and past are
not two contrasts; one is surely bright and the other is sober,
but they are parts of a continuous fabric woven of the same
threads and into the same patterns from beginning to end.

When she awoke, beautifully rested, her eyes clear and soft, the
shadows which had been long toward the southwest were long,
though not so long, toward the southeast. She sat up and smiled;
it was so fine to be free! And her woes had not in the least
shaken that serene optimism which is youth's most delightful if
most dangerous possession. She crawled through the grass to the
edge of the rock and looked out through the screening leaves of
the dense undergrowth. There was no smoke from the chimney of
the house. The woman, in a blue calico, was sitting on the back
doorstep knitting. Farther away, in fields here and there, a few
men--not a dozen in all--were at work. From a barnyard at the
far edge of the western horizon came the faint sound of a steam
thresher, and she thought she could see the men at work around
it, but this might have been illusion. It was a serene and
lovely panorama of summer and country. Last of all her eyes
sought the glimpse of distant river.

She ate two of her four eggs, put on the underclothes which were
now thoroughly sun-dried, shook out and rebraided her hair. Then
she cast about for some way to pass the time.

She explored the whole top of the rock, but that did not use up
more than fifteen minutes, as it was so small that every part
was visible from every other part. However, she found a great
many wild flowers and gathered a huge bouquet of the audacious
colors of nature's gardens, so common yet so effective. She did
a little botanizing--anything to occupy her mind and keep it
from the ugly visions and fears. But all too soon she had
exhausted the resources of her hiding place. She looked down
into the valley to the north--the valley through which she had
come. She might go down there and roam; it would be something to
do, and her young impatience of restraint was making her so
restless that she felt she could not endure the confines of that
little rock. It had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom,
a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and
it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell. Surely she would run no
risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need
not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek
in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it to
the river. The river!

She was about to get the two remaining eggs and abandon her
stronghold when it occurred to her that she would do well to
take a last look all around. She went back to the side of the
rock facing the house.

The woman had suspended knitting and was gazing intently across
the hollow to the west, where the road from the north entered
the landscape. Susan turned her eyes in that direction. Two
horsemen at a gallop were moving southward. The girl was well
screened, but instinctively she drew still further back behind
the bushes--but not so far that the two on horseback, riding so
eagerly, were out of her view. The road dipped into the hollow.
the galloping horsemen disappeared with it. Susan shifted her
gaze to the point on the brow of the hill where the road
reappeared. She was quivering in every nerve. When they came
into view again she would know.

The place she was watching swam before her eyes. Suddenly the
two, still at a gallop, rose upon the crest of the hill. Jeb and
her Uncle Zeke! Her vision cleared, her nerve steadied.

They did not draw rein until they were at the road gate of the
little house. The woman rose, put down her knitting in the seat
of her stiff, rush-bottomed rocker, advanced to the fence. The
air was still, but Susan could not hear a sound, though she
craned forward and strained her ears to the uttermost. She
shrank as if she had been struck when the three began to gaze up
at the rock--to gaze, it seemed to her, at the very spot where
she was standing. Was her screen less thick than she thought?
Had they seen--if not her, perhaps part of her dress?

Wildly her heart beat as Jeb dismounted from his horse the mare
behind which she had made her wedding journey--and stood in the
gateway, talking with the woman and looking toward the top of
the rock. Zeke Warham turned his horse and began to ride slowly
away. He got as far as the brow of the hill, with Jeb still in
the gateway, hesitating. Then Susan heard:

"Hold on, Mr. Warham. I reckon you're right."

Warham halted his horse, Jeb remounted and joined him. As the
woman returned toward the back doorstep, the two men rode at a
walk down into the hollow. When they reappeared it was on the
road by which they had come. And the girl knew the pursuit in
that direction--the right direction--was over. Trembling and
with a fluttering in her breast like the flapping of a bird's
wings, she sank to the ground. Presently she burst into a
passion of tears. Without knowing why, she tore off the wedding
ring which until then she had forgotten, and flung it out among
the treetops. A few minutes, and she dried her eyes and stood
up. The two horsemen were leaving the landscape at the point at
which they had entered it. The girl would not have known, would
have been frightened by, her own face had she seen it as she
watched them go out of her sight--out of her life. She did not
understand herself, for she was at that age when one is no more
conscious of the forces locked up within his unexplored and
untested character than the dynamite cartridge is of its secrets
of power and terror.




CHAPTER XI


SHE felt free to go now. She walked toward the place where she
had left the eggs. It was on the side of the rock overlooking
the creek. As she knelt to remove the leaves, she heard from far
below a man's voice singing. She leaned forward and glanced down
at the creek. In a moment appeared a young man with a fishing
rod and a bag slung over his shoulder. His gray and white striped
flannel trousers were rolled to his knees. His fair skin and the
fair hair waving about his forehead were exposed by the
flapping-brimmed straw hat set upon the back of his head. His
voice, a strong and manly tenor, was sending up those steeps a
song she had never heard before--a song in Italian. She had not
seen what he looked like when she remembered herself and hastily
fell back from view. She dropped to the grass and crawled out
toward the ledge. When she showed her face it so happened that
he was looking straight at her.

"Hello!" he shouted. "That you, Nell?"

Susan drew back, her blood in a tumult. From below, after a
brief silence, came a burst of laughter.

She waited a long time, then through a shield of bunches of
grass looked again. The young man was gone. She wished that he
had resumed his song, for she thought she had never heard one so
beautiful. Because she did not feel safe in descending until he
was well out of the way, and because she was so comfortable
lying there in the afternoon sunshine watching the birds and
listening to them, she continued on there, glancing now and then
at where the creek entered and where it left her range of
vision, to make sure that no one else should come and catch her.
Suddenly sounded a voice from somewhere behind her: