Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

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


As it was still fully an hour and a half from dark, Susan hid on
the stage; when it should be time for the curtain to go up she
would retreat to the dressing-room. Through a peephole in the
curtain she admired the auditorium; and it did look surprisingly
well by lamplight, with the smutches and faded spots on its
bright paint softened or concealed. "How many will it hold?" she
asked Mabel, who was walking up and down, carrying her long train.

"A hundred and twenty comfortably," replied Miss Connemora. "A
hundred and fifty crowded. It has held as high as thirty
dollars, but we'll be lucky if we get fifteen tonight."

Susan glanced round at her. She was smoking a cigarette,
handling it like a man. Susan's expression was so curious that
Mabel laughed. Susan, distressed, cried: "I'm sorry if--if I was
impolite."

"Oh, you couldn't be impolite," said Mabel. "You've got that to
learn, too--and mighty important it is. We all smoke. Why not?
We got out of cigarettes, but Bob bought a stock this afternoon."

Susan turned to the peephole. Pat, ready to take tickets, was
"barking" vigorously in the direction of shore, addressing a
crowd which Susan of course could not see. Whenever he paused
for breath, Burlingham leaned from the box and took it up,
pouring out a stream of eulogies of his show in that easy,
lightly cynical voice of his. And the audience straggled
in--young fellows and their girls, roughs from along the river
front, farmers in town for a day's sport. Susan did not see a
single familiar face, and she had supposed she knew, by sight at
least, everyone in Sutherland. From fear lest she should see
someone she knew, her mind changed to longing. At last she was
rewarded. Down the aisle swaggered Redney King, son of the
washerwoman, a big hulking bully who used to tease her by
pulling her hair during recess and by kicking at her shins when
they happened to be next each other in the class standing in
long line against the wall of the schoolroom for recitation.
From her security she smiled at Redney as representative of all
she loved in the old town.

And now the four members of the company on the stage and in the
dressing-room lost their ease and contemptuous indifference.
They had been talking sneeringly about "yokels" and "jays" and
"slum bums." They dropped all that, as there spread over them
the mysterious spell of the crowd. As individuals the
provincials in those seats were ridiculous; as a mass they were
an audience, an object of fear and awe. Mabel was almost in
tears; Violet talked rapidly, with excited gestures and nervous
adjustments of various parts of her toilet. The two men paced
about, Eshwell trembling, Tempest with sheer fright in his
rolling eyes.

They wet their dry lips with dry tongues. Each again and again
asked the other anxiously how he was looking and paced away
without waiting for the answer. The suspense and nervous terror
took hold of Susan; she stood in the corner of the
dressing-room, pressing herself close against the wall, her
fingers tightly interlocked and hot and cold tremors chasing up
and down her body.

Burlingham left the box and combined Pat's duties with his
own--a small matter, as the audience was seated and a guard at
the door was necessary only to keep the loafers on shore from
rushing in free. Pat advanced to the little space reserved
before the stage, sat down and fell to tuning his violin with
all the noise he could make, to create the illusion of a full
orchestra. Miss Anstruther appeared in one of the forward side
doors of the auditorium, very dignified in her black satin
(paper muslin) dress, with many and sparkling hair and neck
ornaments and rings that seemed alight. She bowed to the
audience, pulled a little old cottage organ from under the stage
and seated herself at it.

After the overture, a pause. Susan, peeping through a hole in
the drop, saw the curtain go up, drew a long breath of terror as
the audience was revealed beyond the row of footlights, beyond
the big, befrizzled blond head of Violet and the drink-seared
face of Pat. From the rear of the auditorium came Burlingham's
smooth-flowing, faintly amused voice, announcing the beginning
of the performance "a delightful feast throughout, ladies and
gentlemen, amusing yet elevating, ever moral yet with none of
the depressing sadness of puritanism. For, ladies and gentlemen,
while we are pious, we are not puritan. The first number is a
monologue, 'The Mad Prince,' by that eminent artist, Gregory
Tempest. He has delivered it before vast audiences amid thunders
of applause."

Susan thrilled as Tempest strode forth--Tempest transformed by
the footlights and by her young imagination into a true king
most wonderfully and romantically bereft of reason by the woes
that had assailed him in horrid phalanxes. If anyone had pointed
out to her that Tempest's awful voice was simply cheap ranting,
or that her own woes had been as terrible as any that had ever
visited a king, or that when people go mad it is never from
grief but from insides unromantically addled by foolish eating
and drinking--if anyone had attempted then and there to educate
the girl, how angry it would have made her, how she would have
hated that well-meaning person for spoiling her illusion!

The spell of the stage seized her with Tempest's first line,
first elegant despairing gesture. It held her through Burlingham
and Anstruther's "sketch" of a matrimonial quarrel, through
Connemora and Eshwell's "delicious symphonic romanticism" of a
lovers' quarrel and making up, through Tempest's recitation of
"Lasca," dying to shield her cowboy lover from the hoofs of the
stampeded herd. How the tears did stream from Susan's eyes, as
Tempest wailed out those last lines:


But I wonder why I do not care for the things that are like the
things that were?

Can it be that half my heart lies buried there, in Texas down by
the Rio Grande?


She saw the little grave in the desert and the vast blue sky and
the buzzard sailing lazily to and fro, and it seemed to her that
Tempest himself had inspired such a love, had lost a sweetheart
in just that way. No wonder he looked gaunt and hollow-eyed and
sallow. The last part of the performance was Holy Land and comic
pictures thrown from the rear on a sheet substituted for the
drop. As Burlingham had to work the magic lantern from the
dressing-room (while Tempest, in a kind of monk's robe, used
his voice and elocutionary powers in describing the pictures,
now lugubriously and now in "lighter vein"), Susan was forced to
retreat to the forward deck and missed that part of the show.
But she watched Burlingham shifting the slides and altering the
forms of the lenses, and was in another way as much thrilled and
spellbound as by the acting.

Nor did the spell vanish when, with the audience gone, they all
sat down to a late supper, and made coarse jests and mocked at
their own doings and at the people who had applauded. Susan did
not hear. She felt proud that she was permitted in so
distinguished a company. Every disagreeable impression vanished.
How could she have thought these geniuses common and cheap! How
had she dared apply to them the standards of the people, the
dull, commonplace people, among whom she had been brought up! If
she could only qualify for membership in this galaxy! The
thought made her feel like a worm aspiring to be a star.
Tempest, whom she had liked least, now filled her with
admiration. She saw the tragedy of his life plain and sad upon
his features. She could not look at him without her heart's
contracting in an ache.

It was not long before Mr. Tempest, who believed himself a
lady-killer, noted the ingenuous look in the young girl's face,
and began to pose. And it was hardly three bites of a ham
sandwich thereafter when Mabel Connemora noted Tempest's
shootings of his cuffs and rumplings of his oily ringlets and
rollings of his hollow eyes. And at the sight Miss Mabel's
bright eyes became bad and her tongue shot satire at him. But
Susan did not observe this.

After supper they went straightway to bed. Burlingham drew the
curtains round the berth let down for Susan. The others indulged
in no such prudery on so hot a night. They put out the lamps and
got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in
through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways
forward. To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage
curtain and drop, and opened the little door forward. Each
sleeper had a small netting suspended over him from the ceiling;
without that netting the dense swarms of savage mosquitoes would
have made sleep impossible. As it was, the loud singing of these
baffled thousands kept Susan awake.

After a while, to calm her brain, excited by the evenings
thronging impressions and by the new--or, rather,
reviewed--ambitions born of them, Susan rose and went softly out
on deck, in her nightgown of calico slip. Because of the breeze
the mosquitoes did not trouble her there, and she stood a long
time watching the town's few faint lights--watching the stars,
the thronging stars of the Milky Way--dreaming--dreaming--dreaming.
Yesterday had almost faded from her, for youth lives only in
tomorrow--youth in tomorrow, age in yesterday, and none of us
in today which is all we really have. And she, with her wonderful
health of body meaning youth as long as it lasted, she would
certainly be young until she was very old--would keep her youth--her
dreams--her living always in tomorrow. She was dreaming of her
first real tomorrow, now. She would work hard at this wonderful
profession--_her_ profession!--would be humble and attentive; and
surely the day must come when she too would feel upon her heart
the intoxicating beat of those magic waves of applause!

Susan, more excited than ever, slipped softly into the cabin and
stole into her curtained berth. Like the soughing of the storm
above the whimper of the tortured leaves the stentorian snorings
of two of the sleepers resounded above the noise of the
mosquitoes. She had hardly extended herself in her close little
bed when she heard a stealthy step, saw one of her curtains
drawn aside.

"Who is it?" she whispered, unsuspiciously, for she could see
only a vague form darkening the space between the parted curtains.

The answer came in a hoarse undertone: "Ye dainty little
darling!" She sat up, struck out madly, screamed at the top of
her lungs. The curtains fell back into place, the snoring
stopped. Susan, all in a sweat and a shiver, lay quiet. Hoarse
whispering; then in Burlingham's voice stern and gruff--"Get
back to your bed and let her alone, you rolling-eyed----" The
sentence ended with as foul a spatter of filth as man can fling
at man. Silence again, and after a few minutes the two snores
resumed their bass accompaniment to the falsetto of the mosquito
chorus.

Susan got a little troubled sleep, was wide awake when Violet
came saying, "If you want to bathe, I'll bring you a bucket of
water and you can put up your berth and do it behind your curtains."

Susan thanked her and got a most refreshing bath. When she
looked out the men were on deck, Violet was getting breakfast,
and Connemora was combing her short, thinning, yellow hair
before a mirror hung up near one of the forward doors. In the
mirror Connemora saw her, smiled and nodded.

"You can fix your hair here," said she. "I'm about done. You can
use my brush."

And when Susan was busy at the mirror, Mabel lounged on a seat
near by smoking a before-breakfast cigarette. "I wish to God
I had your hair," said she. "I never did have such a wonderful
crop of grass on the knoll, and the way it up and drops out in
bunches every now and then sets me crazy. It won't be long
before I'll be down to Vi's three hairs and a half. You haven't
seen her without her wigs? Well, don't, if you happen to be
feeling a bit off. How Burlingham can--" There she stopped, blew
out a volume of smoke, grinned half amusedly, half in sympathy
with the innocence she was protecting--or, rather, was
initiating by cautious degrees. "Who was it raised the row last
night?" she inquired.

"I don't know," said Susan, her face hid by the mass of wavy
hair she was brushing forward from roots to ends.

"You don't? I guess you've got a kind of idea, though."

No answer from the girl.

"Well, it doesn't matter. It isn't your fault." Mabel smoked
reflectively. "I'm not jealous of _him_--a woman never is. It's
the idea of another woman's getting away with her property,
whether she wants it or not--_that's_ what sets her mad-spot to
humming. No, I don't give a--a cigarette butt--for that greasy
bum actor. But I've always got to have somebody." She laughed.
"The idea of his thinking _you'd_ have _him_! What peacocks men are!"

Susan understood. The fact of this sort of thing was no longer
a mystery to her. But the why of the fact--that seemed more
amazing than ever. Now that she had discovered that her notion
of love being incorporeal was as fanciful as Santa Claus, she
could not conceive why it should be at all. As she was bringing
round the braids for the new coiffure she had adopted she said
to Mabel:

"You--love him?"

"I?" Mabel laughed immoderately. "You can have him, if you want him."

Susan shuddered. "Oh, no," she said. "I suppose he's very
nice--and really he's quite a wonderful actor. But I--I don't
care for men."

Mabel laughed again--curt, bitter. "Wait," she said.

Susan shook her head, with youth's positiveness.

"What's caring got to do with it?" pursued Mabel, ignoring the
headshake. "I've been about quite a bit, and I've yet to see
anybody that really cared for anybody else. We care for
ourselves. But a man needs a woman, and a woman needs a man. They
call it loving. They might as well call eating loving. Ask Burly."




CHAPTER XIV


AT breakfast Tempest was precisely as usual, and so were the
others. Nor was there effort or any sort of pretense in this. We
understand only that to which we are accustomed; the man of
peace is amazed by the veteran's nonchalance in presence of
danger and horror, of wound and death. To these river wanderers,
veterans in the unconventional life, where the unusual is the
usual, the unexpected the expected, whatever might happen was
the matter of course, to be dealt with and dismissed. Susan
naturally took her cue from them. When Tempest said something to
her in the course of the careless conversation round the
breakfast table, she answered--and had no sense of constraint.
Thus, an incident that in other surroundings would have been in
some way harmful through receiving the exaggeration of undue
emphasis, caused less stir than the five huge and fiery mosquito
bites Eshwell had got in the night. And Susan unconsciously
absorbed one of those lessons in the science and art of living
that have decisive weight in shaping our destinies. For
intelligent living is in large part learning to ignore the
unprofitable that one may concentrate upon the profitable.

Burlingham announced that they would cast off and float down to
Bethlehem. There was a chorus of protests. "Why, we ought to
stay here a week!" cried Miss Anstruther. "We certainly caught
on last night."

"Didn't we take in seventeen dollars?" demanded Eshwell. "We
can't do better than that anywhere."

"Who's managing this show?" asked Burlingham in his suave but
effective way. "I think I know what I'm about."

He met their grumblings with the utmost good-humor and remained
inflexible. Susan listened with eyes down and burning cheeks.
She knew Burlingham was "leaving the best cow unmilked," as
Connemora put it, because he wished to protect her. She told him
so when they were alone on the forward deck a little later, as
the boat was floating round the bend below Sutherland.

"Yes," he admitted. "I've great hopes from your ballads. I want
to get you on." He looked round casually, saw that no one was
looking, drew a peculiarly folded copy of the _Sutherland
Courier_ from his pocket. "Besides"--said he, holding out the
paper--"read that."

Susan read:


George Warham, Esq., requests us to announce that he has
increased the reward for information as to the whereabouts of
Mrs. Susan Ferguson, his young niece, nee Susan Lenox, to one
thousand dollars. There are grave fears that the estimable and
lovely young lady, who disappeared from her husband's farm the
night of her marriage, has, doubtless in a moment of insanity,
ended her life. We hope not.


Susan lifted her gaze from this paragraph, after she had read it
until the words ran together in a blur. She found Burlingham
looking at her. Said he: "As I told you before, I don't want to
know anything. But when I read that, it occurred to me, if some
of the others saw it they might think it was you--and might do
a dirty trick." He sighed, with a cynical little smile. "I was
tempted, myself. A thousand is quite a bunch. You don't
know--not yet--how a chance to make some money--any old
way--compels a man--or a woman--when money's as scarce and as
useful as it is in this world. As you get along, you'll notice,
my dear, that the people who get moral goose flesh at the shady
doings of others are always people who haven't ever really been
up against it. I don't know why I didn't----" He shrugged his
shoulders. "Now, my dear, you're in on the secret of why I
haven't got up in the world." He smiled cheerfully. "But I may
yet. The game's far from over."

She realized that he had indeed made an enormous sacrifice for
her; for, though very ignorant about money, a thousand dollars
seemed a fortune. She had no words; she looked away toward the
emerald shore, and her eyes filled and her lip quivered. How
much goodness there was in the world--how much generosity and
affection!

"I'm not sure," he went on, "that you oughtn't to go back. But
it's your own business. I've a kind of feeling you know what
you're about."

"No matter what happens to me," said she, "I'll never regret
what I've done. I'd kill myself before I'd spend another day
with the man they made me marry."

"Well--I'm not fond of dying," observed Burlingham, in the
light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation,
"but I think I'd take my chances with the worms rather than with
the dry rot of a backwoods farm. You may not get your meals so
regular out in the world, but you certainly do live. Yes--that
backwoods life, for anybody with a spark of spunk, is simply
being dead and knowing it." He tore the _Courier_ into six
pieces, flung them over the side. "None of the others saw the
paper," said he. "So--Miss Lorna Sackville is perfectly safe."
He patted her on the shoulder. "And she owes me a thousand and
two dollars."

"I'll pay--if you'll be patient," said the girl, taking his jest gravely.

"It's a good gamble," said he. Then he laughed. "I guess that
had something to do with my virtue. There's always a practical
reason--always."

But the girl was not hearing his philosophies. Once more she was
overwhelmed and stupefied by the events that had dashed in,
upon, and over her like swift succeeding billows that give the
swimmer no pause for breath or for clearing the eyes.

"No--you're not dreaming," said Burlingham, laughing at her
expression. "At least, no more than we all are. Sometimes I
suspect the whole damn shooting-match is nothing but a dream.
Well, it's a pretty good one eh?"

And she agreed with him, as she thought how smoothly and
agreeably they were drifting into the unknown, full of the most
fascinating possibilities. How attractive this life was, how
much at home she felt among these people, and if anyone should
tell him about her birth or about how she had been degraded by
Ferguson, it wouldn't in the least affect their feeling toward
her, she was sure. "When do--do you--try me?" she asked.

"Tomorrow night, at Bethlehem--a bum little town for us. We'll
stay there a couple of days. I want you to get used to
appearing." He nodded at her encouragingly. "You've got stuff in
you, real stuff. Don't you doubt it. Get self-confidence--conceit,
if you please. Nobody arrives anywhere without it. You want to
feel that you can do what you want to do. A fool's conceit is
that he's it already. A sensible man's conceit is that he can be
it, if he'll only work hard and in the right way. See?"

"I--I think I do," said the girl. "I'm not sure."

Burlingham smoked his cigar in silence. When he spoke, it was
with eyes carefully averted. "There's another subject the spirit
moves me to talk to you about. That's the one Miss Connemora
opened up with you yesterday." As Susan moved uneasily, "Now,
don't get scared. I'm not letting the woman business bother me
much nowadays. All I think of is how to get on my feet again. I
want to have a theater on Broadway before the old black-flagger
overtakes my craft and makes me walk the plank and jump out into
the Big Guess. So you needn't think I'm going to worry you. I'm not."

"Oh, I didn't think----"

"You ought to have, though," interrupted he. "A man like me is
a rare exception. I'm a rare exception to my ordinary self, to
be quite honest. It'll be best for you always to assume that every
man you run across is looking for just one thing. You know what?"

Susan, the flush gone from her cheeks, nodded.

"I suppose Connemora has put you wise. But there are some things
even she don't know about that subject. Now, I want you to
listen to your grandfather. Remember what he says. And think it
over until you understand it."

"I will," said Susan.

"In the life you've come out of, virtue in a woman's everything.
She's got to be virtuous, or at least to have the reputation of
it--or she's nothing. You understand that?"

"Yes," said Susan. "I understand that--now."

"Very well. Now in the life you're going into, virtue in a woman
is nothing--no more than it is in a man anywhere. The woman who
makes a career becomes like the man who makes a career. How is
it with a man? Some are virtuous, others are not. But no man
lets virtue bother him and nobody bothers about his virtue.
That's the way it is with a woman who cuts loose from the
conventional life of society and home and all that. She is
virtuous or not, as she happens to incline. Her real interest in
herself, her real value, lies in another direction. If it
doesn't, if she continues to be agitated about her virtue as if
it were all there is to her--then the sooner she hikes back to
respectability, to the conventional routine, why the better for
her. She'll never make a career, any more than she could drive
an automobile through a crowded street and at the same time keep
a big picture hat on straight. Do you follow me?"

"I'm not sure," said the girl. "I'll have to think about it."

"That's right. Don't misunderstand. I'm not talking for or
against virtue. I'm simply talking practical life, and all I
mean is that you won't get on there by your virtue, and you
won't get on by your lack of virtue. Now for my advice."

Susan's look of unconscious admiration and attention was the
subtlest flattery. Its frank, ingenuous showing of her implicit
trust in him so impressed him with his responsibility that he
hesitated before he said:

"Never forget this, and don't stop thinking about it until you
understand it: Make men _as_ men incidental in your life, precisely
as men who amount to anything make women _as_ women incidental."

Her first sensation was obviously disappointing. She had
expected something far more impressive. Said she:

"I don't care anything about men."

"Be sensible! How are you to know now what you care about and
what you don't?" was Burlingham's laughing rebuke. "And in the
line you've taken--the stage--with your emotions always being
stirred up, with your thoughts always hovering round the
relations of men and women--for that's the only subject of plays
and music, and with opportunity thrusting at you as it never
thrusts at conventional people you'll probably soon find you
care a great deal about men. But don't ever let your emotions
hinder or hurt or destroy you. Use them to help you. I guess I'm
shooting pretty far over that young head of yours, ain't I?"

"Not so very far," said the girl. "Anyhow, I'll remember."

"If you live big enough and long enough, you'll go through three
stages. The first is the one you're in now. They've always
taught you without realizing it, and so you think that only the
strong can afford to do right. You think doing right makes the
ordinary person, like yourself, easy prey for those who do
wrong. You think that good people--if they're really good--have
to wait until they get to Heaven before they get a chance."

"Isn't that so?"

"No. But you'll not realize it until you pass into the second
stage. There, you'll think you see that only the strong can
afford to do wrong. You'll think that everyone, except the
strong, gets it in the neck if he or she does anything out of
the way. You'll think you're being punished for your sins, and
that, if you had behaved yourself, you'd have got on much
better. That's the stage that's coming; and what you go through
with there--how you come out of the fight--will decide your
fate--show whether or not you've got the real stuff in you. Do
you understand?"