Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

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


There was now not a trace of the tenement working girl of a week
and a day before. Here was beauty in bloom, fresh and alluring
from head to narrow, well-booted feet. More than a hint of a
fine color sense--that vital quality, if fashion, the
conventional, is to be refined and individualized into style,
the rare--more than a hint of color sense showed in the harmony
of the pearl gray in the big feather, the pearl gray in the
collar of the blouse, and the pearl white of her skin. Susan had
indeed returned to her own class. She had left it, a small-town
girl with more than a suggestion of the child in eyes and mouth;
she had returned to it, a young woman of the city, with that
look in her face which only experience can give--experience that
has resulted in growth. She locked all her possessions away in
her trunk--all but her money; that she put in her
stockings--seventy-five dollars well down in the right leg, the
rest of the bills well down in the left leg; the two dollars or
so in change was all she intrusted to the pocketbook she
carried. She cast a coquettish glance down at her charmingly
arrayed feet--a harmless glance of coquetry that will be
condemned by those whose physical vanity happens to center
elsewhere. After this glance she dropped her skirts--and was ready.

By this time dusk had fallen, and it was nearly six o'clock. As
she came out of the house she glanced toward the west--the
instinctive gesture of people who live in rainy climates. Her
face brightened; she saw an omen in the long broad streak of
reddened evening sky.




CHAPTER XXIII


SHE went down to Fourth Street, along it to Race, to the
_Commercial_ building. At the entrance to the corridor at the far
side of which were elevator and stairway, she paused and
considered. She turned into the business office.

"Is Mr. Roderick Spenser here?" she asked of a heavily built,
gray-bearded man in the respectable black of the old-fashioned
financial employee, showing the sobriety and stolidity of his
character in his dress.

"He works upstairs," replied the old man, beaming approvingly
upon the pretty, stylish young woman.

"Is he there now?"

"I'll telephone." He went into the rear office, presently
returned with the news that Mr. Spenser had that moment left,
was probably on his way down in the elevator. "And you'll catch
him if you go to the office entrance right away."

Susan, the inexperienced in the city ways of men with women, did
not appreciate what a tribute to her charms and to her
character, as revealed in the honest, grave eyes, was the old
man's unhesitating assumption that Spenser would wish to see
her. She lost no time in retracing her steps. As she reached the
office entrance she saw at the other end of the long hall two
young men coming out of the elevator. After the habit of youth,
she had rehearsed speech and manner for this meeting; but at
sight of him she was straightway trembling so that she feared
she would be unable to speak at all. The entrance light was dim,
but as he glanced at her in passing he saw her looking at him
and his hand moved toward his hat. His face had not changed--the
same frank, careless expression, the same sympathetic,
understanding look out of the eyes. But he was the city man in
dress now--notably the city man.

"Mr. Spenser," said she shyly.

He halted; his companion went on. He lifted his hat, looked
inquiringly at her--the look of the enthusiast and connoisseur
on the subject of pretty women, when he finds a new specimen
worthy of his attention.

"Don't you know me?"

His expression of puzzled and flirtatious politeness gradually
cleared away. The lighting up of his eyes, the smile round his
mouth delighted her; and she grew radiant when he exclaimed
eagerly, "Why, it's the little girl of the rock again! How
you've grown--in a year--less than a year!"

"Yes, I suppose I have," said she, thinking of it for the first
time. Then, to show him at once what a good excuse she had for
intruding again, she hastened to add, "I've come to pay you that
money you loaned me."

He burst out laughing, drew her into the corridor where the
light was brighter. "And you've gone back to your husband," he
said--she noted the quick, sharp change in his voice.

"Why do you think that?" she said.

The way his eyes lingered upon the charming details toilet that
indicated anything but poverty might of a have given her a
simple explanation. He offered another.

"I can't explain. It's your different expression--a kind of
experienced look."

The color flamed and flared in Susan's face.

"You are--happy?" he asked.

"I've not seen--him," evaded she. "Ever since I left Carrollton
I've been wandering about."

"Wandering about?" he repeated absently, his eyes busy with
her appearance.

"And now," she went on, nervous and hurried, "I'm here in
town--for a while."

"Then I may come to see you?"

"I'd be glad. I'm alone in a furnished room I've taken--out near
Lincoln Park."

"Alone! You don't mean you're still wandering?"

"Still wandering."

He laughed. "Well, it certainly is doing you no harm. The
reverse." An embarrassed pause, then he said with returning
politeness: "Maybe you'll dine with me this evening?"

She beamed. "I've been hoping you'd ask me."

"It won't be as good as the one on the rock."

"There never will be another dinner like that," declared she.
"Your leg is well?"

Her question took him by surprise. In his interest and wonder as
to the new mystery of this mysterious young person he had not
recalled the excuses he made for dropping out of the
entanglement in which his impulses had put him. The color poured
into his face. "Ages ago," he replied, hurriedly. "I'd have
forgotten it, if it hadn't been for you. I've never been able to
get you out of my head." And as a matter of truth she had
finally dislodged his cousin Nell--without lingering long or
vividly herself. Young Mr. Spenser was too busy and too
self-absorbed a man to bother long about any one flower in a
world that was one vast field abloom with open-petaled flowers.

"Nor I you," said she, as pleased as he had expected, and
showing it with a candor that made her look almost the child he
had last seen. "You see, I owed you that money, and I wanted to
pay it."

"Oh--_that_ was all!" exclaimed he, half jokingly. "Wait here a
minute." And he went to the door, looked up and down the street,
then darted across it and disappeared into the St. Nicholas
Hotel. He was not gone more than half a minute.

"I had to see Bayne and tell him," he explained when he was with
her again. "I was to have dined with him and some others--over
in the cafe. Instead, you and I will dine upstairs. You won't
mind my not being dressed?"

It seemed to her he was dressed well enough for any occasion.
"I'd rather you had on the flannel trousers rolled up to your
knees," said she. "But I can imagine them."

"What a dinner that was!" cried he. "And the ride afterward,"
with an effort at ease that escaped her bedazzled eyes. "Why
didn't you ever write?"

He expected her to say that she did not know his address, and
was ready with protests and excuses. But she replied:

"I didn't have the money to pay what I owed you." They were
crossing Fourth Street and ascending the steps to the hotel.
"Then, too--afterward--when I got to know a little more about
life I----Oh, no matter. Really, the money was the only reason."

But he had stopped short. In a tone so correctly sincere that a
suspicious person might perhaps have doubted the sincerity of
the man using it, he said:

"What was in your mind? What did you think? What did
you--suspect me of? For I see in that honest, telltale face of
yours that it was a suspicion."

"I didn't blame you," protested the girl, "even if it was so. I
thought maybe you got to thinking it over--and--didn't want to be
bothered with anyone so troublesome as I had made myself."

"How _could_ you suspect _me_ of such a thing?"

"Oh, I really didn't," declared she, with all the earnestness of
a generous nature, for she read into his heightened color and
averted eyes the feelings she herself would have had before an
unjust suspicion. "It was merely an idea. And I didn't blame
you--not in the least. It would have been the sensible----"

Next thing, this child-woman, this mysterious mind of mixed
precocity and innocence, would be showing that she had guessed
a Cousin Nell.

"You are far too modest," interrupted he with a flirtatious
smile. "You didn't realize how strong an impression you made.
No, I really broke my leg. Don't you suppose I knew the
twenty-five in the pocketbook wouldn't carry you far?" He
saw--and naturally misunderstood--her sudden change of
expression as he spoke of the amount. He went on apologetically,
"I intended to bring more when I came. I was afraid to put money
in the note for fear it'd never be delivered, if I did. And
didn't I tell you to write--and didn't I give you my address
here? Would I have done that, if I hadn't meant to stand by you?"

Susan was convinced, was shamed by these smooth, plausible
assertions and explanations. "Your father's house--it's a big
brick, with stone trimmings, standing all alone outside the
little town--isn't it?"

Spenser was again coloring deeply. "Yes," admitted he uneasily.

But Susan didn't notice. "I saw the doctor--and your family--on
the veranda," she said.

He was now so nervous that she could not but observe it. "They
gave out that it was only a sprain," said he, "because I told
them I didn't want it known. I didn't want the people at the
office to know I was going to be laid up so long. I was afraid
I'd lose my job."

"I didn't hear anything about it," said she. "I only saw as I
was going by on a boat."

He looked disconcerted--but not to her eyes. "Well--it's far in
the past now," said he. "Let's forget--all but the fun."

"Yes--all but the fun." Then very sweetly, "But I'll never forget
what I owe you. Not the money--not that, hardly at all--but what
you did for me. It made me able to go on."

"Don't speak of it," cried he, flushed and shamefaced. "I didn't
do half what I ought." Like most human beings he was aware of
his more obvious--if less dangerous--faults and weaknesses. He
liked to be called generous, but always had qualms when so
called because he knew he was in fact of the familiar type
classed as generous only because human beings are so artless in
their judgments as to human nature that they cannot see that
quick impulses quickly die. The only deep truth is that there
are no generous natures but just natures--and they are rarely
classed as generous because their slowly formed resolves have
the air of prudence and calculation.

In the hotel she went to the dressing-room, took twenty-five
dollars from the money in her stocking. As soon as they were
seated in the restaurant she handed it to him.

"But this makes it you who are having me to dinner--and more,"
he protested.

"If you knew what a weight it's been on me, you'd not talk that
way," said she.

Her tone compelled him to accept her view of the matter. He
laughed and put the money in his waistcoat pocket, saying: "Then
I'll still owe you a dinner."

During the past week she had been absorbing as only a young
woman with a good mind and a determination to learn the business
of living can absorb. The lessons before her had been the life
that is lived in cities by those who have money to spend and
experience in spending it; she had learned out of all proportion
to opportunity. At a glance she realized that she was now in a
place far superior to the Bohemian resorts which had seemed to
her inexperience the best possible. From earliest childhood she
had shown the delicate sense of good taste and of luxury that
always goes with a practical imagination--practical as
distinguished from the idealistic kind of imagination that is
vague, erratic, and fond of the dreams which neither could nor
should come true. And the reading she had done--the novels, the
memoirs, the books of travel, the fashion and home
magazines--had made deep and distinct impressions upon her, had
prepared her--as they have prepared thousands of Americans in
secluded towns and rural regions where luxury and even comfort
are very crude indeed--for the possible rise of fortune that is
the universal American dream and hope. She felt these new
surroundings exquisitely--the subdued coloring, the softened
lights, the thick carpets, the quiet elegance and comfort of the
furniture. She noted the good manners of the well-trained
waiter; she listened admiringly and memorizingly as Spenser
ordered the dinner--a dinner of French good taste--small but
fine oysters, a thick soup, a guinea hen _en casserole_, a fruit
salad, fresh strawberry ice cream, dry champagne. She saw that
Spenser knew what he was about, and she was delighted with him
and proud to be with him and glad that he had tastes like her
own--that is, tastes such as she proposed to learn to have. Of
the men she had known or known about he seemed to her far and
away the best. It isn't necessary to explain into what an
attitude of mind and heart this feeling of his high superiority
immediately put her--certainly not for the enlightenment of any woman.

"What are you thinking?" he asked--the question that was so
often thrust at her because, when she thought intensely, there
was a curiosity-compelling expression in her eyes.

"Oh--about all this," replied she. "I like this sort of thing so
much. I never had it in my life, yet now that I see it I feel as
if I were part of it, as if it must belong to me." Her eyes met
his sympathetic gaze. "You understand, don't you?" He nodded.
"And I was wondering"--she laughed, as if she expected even him
to laugh at her--"I was wondering how long it would be before I
should possess it. Do you think I'm crazy?"

He shook his head. "I've got that same feeling," said he. "I'm
poor--don't dare do this often--have all I can manage in keeping
myself decently. Yet I have a conviction that I shall--shall
win. Don't think I'm dreaming of being rich--not at all. I--I
don't care much about that if I did go into business. But I want
all my surroundings to be right."

Her eyes gleamed. "And you'll get it. And so shall I. I know it
sounds improbable and absurd for me to say that about myself.
But--I know it."

"I believe you," said he. "You've got the look in your face--in
your eyes. . . . I've never seen anyone improve as you have in
this less than a year."

She smiled as she thought in what surroundings she had
apparently spent practically all that time. "If you could have
seen me!" she said. "Yes, I was learning and I know it. I led a
sort of double life. I----" she hesitated, gave up trying to
explain. She had not the words and phrases, the clear-cut ideas,
to express that inner life led by people who have real
imagination. With most human beings their immediate visible
surroundings determine their life; with the imaginative few
their horizon is always the whole wide world.

She sighed, "But I'm ignorant. I don't know how or where to
take hold."

"I can't help you there, yet," said he. "When we know each other
better, then I'll know. Not that you need me to tell you. You'll
find out for yourself. One always does."

She glanced round the attractive room again, then looked at him
with narrowed eyelids. "Only a few hours ago I was thinking of
suicide. How absurd it seems now!--I'll never do that again. At
least, I've learned how to profit by a lesson. Mr. Burlingham
taught me that."

"Who's he?"

"That's a long story. I don't feel like telling about it now."

But the mere suggestion had opened certain doors in her memory
and crowds of sad and bitter thoughts came trooping in.

"Are you in some sort of trouble?" said he, instantly leaning
toward her across the table and all aglow with the impulsive
sympathy that kindles in impressionable natures as quickly as
fire in dry grass. Such natures are as perfect conductors of
emotion as platinum is of heat--instantly absorbing it,
instantly throwing it off, to return to their normal and
metallic chill--and capacity for receptiveness. "Anything you
can tell me about?"

"Oh, no--nothing especial," replied she. "Just loneliness and a
feeling of--of discouragement." Strongly, "Just a mood. I'm
never really discouraged. Something always turns up."

"Please tell me what happened after I left you at that wretched hotel."

"I can't," she said. "At least, not now."

"There is----" He looked sympathetically at her, as if to assure
her that he would understand, no matter what she might confess.
"There is--someone?"

"No. I'm all alone. I'm--free." It was not in the least degree an
instinct for deception that made her then convey an impression
of there having been no one. She was simply obeying her innate
reticence that was part of her unusual self-unconsciousness.

"And you're not worried about--about money matters?" he asked.
"You see, I'm enough older and more experienced to give me
excuse for asking. Besides, unless a woman has money, she
doesn't find it easy to get on."

"I've enough for the present," she assured him, and the stimulus
of the champagne made her look--and feel--much more
self-confident than she really was. "More than I've ever had
before. So I'm not worried. When anyone has been through what I
have they aren't so scared about the future."

He looked the admiration he felt--and there was not a little of
the enthusiasm of the champagne both in the look and in the
admiration--"I see you've already learned to play the game
without losing your nerve."

"I begin to hope so," said she.

"Yes--you've got the signs of success in your face. Curious
about those signs. Once you learn to know them, you never miss
in sizing up people."

The dinner had come. Both were hungry, and it was as good a
dinner as the discussion about it between Spenser and the waiter
had forecast. As they ate the well-cooked, well-served food and
drank the delicately flavored champagne, mellow as the gorgeous
autumn its color suggested, there diffused through them an
extraordinary feeling of quiet intense happiness--happiness of
mind and body. Her face took on a new and finer beauty; into his
face came a tenderness that was most becoming to its rather
rugged features. And he had not talked with her long before he
discovered that he was facing not a child, not a child-woman, but
a woman grown, one who could understand and appreciate the
things men and women of experience say and do.

"I've always been expecting to hear from you every day since we
separated," he said--and he was honestly believing it now. "I've
had a feeling that you hadn't forgotten me. It didn't seem
possible I could feel so strongly unless there was real sympathy
between us."

"I came as soon as I could."

He reflected in silence a moment, then in a tone that made her
heart leap and her blood tingle, he said: "You say you're free?"

"Free as air. Only--I couldn't fly far."

He hesitated on an instinct of prudence, then ventured. "Far as
New York?"

"What is the railroad fare?"

"Oh, about twenty-five dollars--with sleeper."

"Yes--I can fly that far."

"Do you mean to say you've no ties of any kind?"

"None. Not one." Her eyes opened wide and her nostrils dilated. "Free!"

"You love it--don't you?"

"Don't you?"

"Above everything!" he exclaimed. "Only the free _live_."

She lifted her head higher in a graceful, attractive gesture of
confidence and happiness. "Well--I am ready to live."

"I'm afraid you don't realize," he said hesitatingly. "People
wouldn't understand. You've your reputation to think of, you know."

She looked straight at him. "No--not even that. I'm even free
from reputation." Then, as his face saddened and his eyes
glistened with sympathy, "You needn't pity me. See where it's
brought me."

"You're a strong swimmer--aren't you?" he said tenderly. "But
then there isn't any safe and easy crossing to the isles of
freedom. It's no wonder most people don't get further than
gazing and longing."

"Probably I shouldn't," confessed Susan, "if I hadn't been
thrown into the water. It was a case of swim or drown."

"But most who try are drowned--nearly all the women."

"Oh, I guess there are more survive than is generally supposed.
So much lying is done about that sort of thing."

"What a shrewd young lady it is! At any rate, you have reached
the islands."

"But I'm not queen of them yet," she reminded him. "I'm only a
poor, naked, out-of-breath castaway lying on the beach."

He laughed appreciatively. Very clever, this extremely pretty
young woman. "Yes--you'll win. You'll be queen." He lifted his
champagne glass and watched the little bubbles pushing gayly and
swiftly upward. "So--you've cast over your reputation."

"I told you I had reached the beach naked." A reckless light in
her eyes now. "Fact is, I had none to start with. Anybody has a
reason for starting--or for being started. That was mine, I guess."

"I've often thought about that matter of reputation--in a man or
a woman--if they're trying to make the bold, strong swim. To
care about one's reputation means fear of what the world says.
It's important to care about one's character--for without
character no one ever got anywhere worth getting to. But it's
very, very dangerous to be afraid for one's reputation. And--I
hate to admit it, because I'm hopelessly conventional at bottom,
but it's true--reputation--fear of what the world says--has sunk
more swimmers, has wrecked more characters than it ever helped.
So--the strongest and best swimmers swim naked."

Susan was looking thoughtfully at him over the rim of her glass.
She took a sip of the champagne, said: "If I hadn't been quite
naked, I'd have sunk--I'd have been at the bottom--with the
fishes----"

"Don't!" he cried. "Thank God, you did whatever you've
done--yes, I mean that--whatever you've done, since it enabled
you to swim on." He added, "And I know it wasn't anything
bad--anything unwomanly."

"I did the best I could--nothing I'm ashamed of--or proud of
either. Just--what I had to do."

"But you ought to be proud that you arrived."

"No--only glad," said she. "So--so _frightfully_ glad!"

In any event, their friendship was bound to flourish; aided by
that dinner and that wine it sprang up into an intimacy, a
feeling of mutual trust and of sympathy at every point. Like all
women she admired strength in a man above everything else. She
delighted in the thick obstinate growth of his fair hair, in the
breadth of the line of his eyebrows, in the aggressive thrust of
his large nose and long jawbone. She saw in the way his mouth
closed evidence of a will against which opposition would dash
about as dangerously as an egg against a stone wall. There was
no question of his having those birthmarks of success about
which he talked. She saw them--saw nothing of the less
obtrusive--but not less important--marks of weakness which might
have enabled an expert in the reading of faces to reach some
rather depressing conclusion as to the nature and the degree of
that success.

Finally, he burst out with, "Yes, I've made up my mind. I'll do
it! I'm going to New York. I've been fooling away the last five
years here learning a lot, but still idling--drinking--amusing
myself in all kinds of ways. And about a month ago--one night,
as I was rolling home toward dawn--through a driving sleet
storm--do you remember a line in 'Paradise Lost'"

"I never read it," interrupted Susan.

"Well--it's where the devils have been kicked out of Heaven and
are lying in agony flat on the burning lake--and Satan rises
up--and marches haughtily out among them--and calls out, 'Awake!
Arise! Or forever more be damned!' That's what has happened to
me several times in my life. When I was a boy, idling about the
farm and wasting myself, that voice came to me--'Awake! Arise!
Or forever more be damned!' And I got a move on me, and insisted
on going to college. Again--at college--I became a
dawdler--poker--drink--dances--all the rest of it. And suddenly
that voice roared in my ears, made me jump like a rabbit when a
gun goes off. And last month it came again. I went to
work--finished a play I've been pottering over for three years.
But somehow I couldn't find the--the--whatever I needed--to make
me break away. Well--_you've_ given me that. I'll resign from the
_Commercial_ and with all I've got in the world--three hundred
dollars and a trunk full of good clothes, I'll break into Broadway."

Susan had listened with bright eyes and quickened breath, as
intoxicated and as convinced as was he by his eloquence.
"Isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed in a low voice.

"And you?" he said meaningly.

"I?" she replied, fearing she was misunderstanding.

"Will you go?"

"Do you want me?" she asked, low and breathlessly.

With a reluctance which suggested--but not to her--that his
generosity was winning a hard-fought battle with his vanity, he
replied: "I need you. I doubt if I'd dare, without you to back
me up."