Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

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


"I've got a trunk full of fairly good clothes and about a
hundred dollars. But I haven't got any play--or any art--or any
trade even. Of course, I'll go." Then she hastily added, "I'll
not be a drag on you. I pay my own way."

"But you mustn't be suspicious in your independence," he warned
her. "You mustn't forget that I'm older than you and more
experienced and that it's far easier for a man to get money than
for a woman."

"To get it without lowering himself?"

"Ah!" he exclaimed, looking strangely at her. "You mean, without
bowing to some boss? Without selling his soul? I had no idea you
were so much of a woman when I met you that day."

"I wasn't--then," replied she. "And I didn't know where I'd got
till we began to talk this evening."

"And you're very young!"

"Oh, but I've been going to a school where they make you learn fast."

"Indeed I do need you." He touched his glass to hers. "On to
Broadway!" he cried.

"Broadway!" echoed she, radiant.

"Together--eh?"

She nodded. But as she drank the toast a tear splashed into her
glass. She was remembering how some mysterious instinct had
restrained her from going with John Redmond, though it seemed
the only sane thing to do. What if she had disobeyed that
instinct! And then--through her mind in swift ghostly march--past
trailed the persons and events of the days just gone--just gone,
yet seeming as far away as a former life in another world.
Redmond and Gulick--Etta--yes, Etta, too--all past and
gone--forever gone----

"What are you thinking about?"

She shook her head and the spectral procession vanished into the
glooms of memory's vistas. "Thinking?--of yesterday. I don't
understand myself--how I shake off and forget what's past.
Nothing seems real to me but the future."

"Not even the present?" said he with a smile.

"Not even the present," she answered with grave candor. "Nothing
seems to touch me--the real me. It's like--like looking out of
the window of the train at the landscape running by. I'm a
traveler passing through. I wonder if it'll always be that way.
I wonder if I'll ever arrive where I'll feel that I belong."

"I think so--and soon."

But she did not respond to his confident smile. "I--I hope so,"
she said with sad, wistful sweetness. "Then again--aren't there
some people who don't belong anywhere--aren't allowed to settle
down and be happy, but have to keep going--on and on--until----"

"Until they pass out into the dark," he finished for her. "Yes."
He looked at her in a wondering uneasy way. "You do suggest that
kind," said he. "But," smilingly, to hide his earnestness, "I'll
try to detain you."

"Please do," she said. "I don't want to go on--alone."

He dropped into silence, puzzled and in a way awed by the
mystery enveloping her--a mystery of aloofness and stoniness, of
complete separation from the contact of the world--the mystery
that incloses all whose real life is lived deep within themselves.




CHAPTER XXIV


LIKE days later, on the Eastern Express, they were not so
confident as they had been over the St. Nicholas champagne. As
confident about the remoter future, it was that annoying little
stretch near at hand which gave them secret uneasiness. There
had been nothing but dreaming and sentimentalizing in those four
days--and that disquietingly suggested the soldier who with an
impressive flourish highly resolves to give battle, then
sheathes his sword and goes away to a revel. Also, like all
idlers, they had spent money--far more money than total net cash
resources of less than five hundred dollars warranted.

"We've spent an awful lot of money," said Susan.

She was quick to see the faint frown, the warning that she was
on dangerous ground. Said he:

"Do you regret?"

"No, indeed--no!" cried she, eager to have that cloud vanish,
but honest too.

She no more than he regretted a single moment of the dreaming
and love-making, a single penny of the eighty and odd dollars
that had enabled them fittingly to embower their romance, to
twine myrtle in their hair and to provide Cupid's torch-bowls
with fragrant incense. Still--with the battle not begun, there
gaped that deep, wide hollow in the war chest.

Spenser's newspaper connection got them passes over one of the
cheaper lines to New York--and he tried to console himself by
setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the
eighty dollars of the debit item. But he couldn't altogether
forget that they would have traveled on passes, anyhow. He was
not regretting that he had indulged in the extravagance of a
stateroom--but he couldn't deny that it was an extravagance.
However, he had only to look at her to feel that he had done
altogether well in providing for her the best, and to believe
that he could face with courage any fate so long as he had her
at his side.

"Yes, I can face anything with you," he said. "What I feel for
you is the real thing. The real thing, at last."

She had no disposition to inquire curiously into this. Her reply
was a flash of a smile that was like a flash of glorious light
upon the crest of a wave surging straight from her happy heart.

They were opposite each other at breakfast in the restaurant
car. He delighted in her frank delight in the novelty of
travel--swift and luxurious travel. He had never been East
before, himself, but he had had experience of sleepers and
diners; she had not, and every moment she was getting some new
sensation. She especially enjoyed this sitting at breakfast
with the express train rushing smoothly along through the
mountains--the first mountains either had seen. At times they
were so intensely happy that they laughed with tears in their
eyes and touched hands across the table to get from physical
contact the reassurances of reality.

"How good to eat everything is!" she exclaimed. "You'll think me
very greedy, I'm afraid. But if you'd eaten the stuff I have
since we dined on the rock!"

They were always going back to the rock, and neither wearied of
recalling and reminding each other of the smallest details. It
seemed to them that everything, even the least happening, at
that sacred spot must be remembered, must be recorded indelibly
in the book of their romance. "I'm glad we were happy together in
such circumstances," she went on. "It was a test--wasn't it, Rod?"

"If two people don't love each other enough to be happy
anywhere, they could be happy nowhere," declared he.

"So, we'll not mind being very, very careful about spending
money in New York," she ventured--for she was again bringing up
the subject she had been privately revolving ever since they had
formed the partnership. In her wanderings with Burlingham, in
her sojourn in the tenements, she had learned a great deal about
the care and spending of money--had developed that instinct for
forehandedness which nature has implanted in all normal women
along with the maternal instinct--and as a necessary supplement
to it. This instinct is more or less futile in most women
because they are more or less ignorant of the realities as to wise
and foolish expenditure. But it is found in the most extravagant
women no less than in the most absurdly and meanly stingy.

"Of course, we must be careful," assented Rod. "But I can't let
you be uncomfortable."

"Now, dear," she remonstrated, "you mustn't treat me that way.
I'm better fitted for hardship than you. I'd mind it less."

He laughed; she looked so fine and delicate, with her
transparent skin and her curves of figure, he felt that anything
so nearly perfect could not but easily be spoiled. And there he
showed how little he appreciated her iron strength, her almost
exhaustless endurance. He fancied he was the stronger because he
could have crushed her in his muscular arms. But exposures,
privations, dissipations that would have done for a muscularly
stronger man than he would have left no trace upon her after a
few days of rest and sleep.

"It's the truth," she insisted. "I could prove it, but I shan't.
I don't want to remember vividly. Rod, we _must_ live cheaply in
New York until you sell a play and I have a place in some company."

"Yes," he conceded. "But, Susie, not too cheap. A cheap way of
living makes a cheap man--gives a man a cheap outlook on life.
Besides, don't forget--if the worst comes to the worst, I can
always get a job on a newspaper."

She would not have let him see how uneasy this remark made her.
However, she could not permit it to pass without notice. Said
she a little nervously:

"But you've made up your mind to devote yourself to plays--to
stand or fall by that."

He remembered how he had thrilled her and himself with brave
talk about the necessity of concentrating, of selecting a goal
and moving relentlessly for it, letting nothing halt him or turn
him aside. For his years Rod Spenser was as wise in the
philosophy of success as Burlingham or Tom Brashear. But he had
done that brave and wise talking before he loved her as he now
did--before he realized how love can be in itself an achievement
and a possession so great that other ambitions dwarf beside it.
True, away back in his facile, fickle mind, behind the region
where self-excuse and somebody-else-always-to-blame reigned
supreme, a something--the something that had set the marks of
success so strongly upon his face--was whispering to him the
real reason for his now revolving a New York newspaper job. Real
reasons as distinguished from alleged reasons and imagined
reasons, from the reasons self-deception invents and vanity
gives out--real reasons are always interesting and worth noting.
What was Rod's? Not his love for her; nothing so superior, so
superhuman as that. No, it was weak and wobbly misgivings as to
his own ability to get on independently, the misgivings that
menace every man who has never worked for himself but has always
drawn pay--the misgivings that paralyze most men and keep them
wage or salary slaves all their lives. Rod was no better pleased
at this sly, unwelcome revelation of his real self to himself
than the next human being is in similar circumstances. The
whispering was hastily suppressed; love for her, desire that she
should be comfortable--those must be the real reasons. But he
must be careful lest she, the sensitive, should begin to brood
over a fear that she was already weakening him and would become
a drag upon him--the fear that, he knew, would take shape in his
own mind if things began to go badly. "You may be sure,
dearest," he said, "I'll do nothing that won't help me on." He
tapped his forehead with his finger. "This is a machine for
making plays. Everything that's put into it will be grist for it."

She was impressed but not convinced. He had made his point about
concentration too clear to her intelligence. She persisted:

"But you said if you took a place on a newspaper it would make
you fight less hard."

"I say a lot of things," he interrupted laughingly. "Don't be
frightened about me. What I'm most afraid of is that you'll
desert me. _That_ would be a real knock-out blow."

He said this smilingly; but she could not bear jokes on that one
subject.

"What do you mean, Rod?"

"Now, don't look so funereal, Susie. I simply meant that I hate
to think of your going on the stage--or at anything else. I want
you to help _me_. Selfish, isn't it? But, dear heart, if I could
feel that the plays were _ours_, that we were both concentrated
on the one career--darling. To love each other, to work
together--not separately but together--don't you understand?"

Her expression showed that she understood, but was not at all in
sympathy. "I've got to earn my living, Rod," she objected. "I
shan't care anything about what I'll be doing. I'll do it simply
to keep from being a burden to you----"

"A burden, Susie! You! Why, you're my wings that enable me to
fly. It's selfish, but I want all of you. Don't you think, dear,
that if it were possible, it would be better for you to make us
a home and hold the fort while I go out to give battle to
managers--and bind up my wounds when I come back--and send me out
the next day well again? Don't you think we ought to concentrate?"

The picture appealed to her. All she wanted in life now was his
success. "But," she objected, "it's useless to talk of that
until we get on our feet--perfectly useless."

"It's true," he admitted with a sigh.

"And until we do, we must be economical."

"What a persistent lady it is," laughed he. "I wish I were like that."

In the evening's gathering dusk the train steamed into Jersey
City; and Spenser and Susan Lenox, with the adventurer's
mingling hope and dread, confidence and doubt, courage and fear,
followed the crowd down the long platform under the vast train
shed, went through the huge thronged waiting-room and aboard the
giant ferryboat which filled both with astonishment because of
its size and luxuriousness.

"I am a jay!" said she. "I can hardly keep my mouth from
dropping open."

"You haven't any the advantage of me," he assured her. "Are you
trembling all over?"

"Yes," she admitted. "And my heart's like lead. I suppose there
are thousands on thousands like us, from all over the
country--who come here every day--feeling as we do."

"Let's go out on the front deck--where we can see it."

They went out on the upper front deck and, leaning against the
forward gates, with their traveling bags at their feet, they
stood dumb before the most astounding and most splendid scene in
the civilized world. It was not quite dark yet; the air was
almost July hot, as one of those prematurely warm days New York
so often has in March. The sky, a soft and delicate blue shading
into opal and crimson behind them, displayed a bright crescent
moon as it arched over the fairyland in the dusk before them.
Straight ahead, across the broad, swift, sparkling river--the
broadest water Susan had ever seen--rose the mighty, the
majestic city. It rose direct from the water. Endless stretches
of ethereal-looking structure, reaching higher and higher, in
masses like mountain ranges, in peaks, in towers and domes. And
millions of lights, like fairy lamps, like resplendent jewels,
gave the city a glory beyond that of the stars thronging the
heavens on a clear summer night.

They looked toward the north; on and on, to the far horizon's
edge stretched the broad river and the lovely city that seemed
the newborn offspring of the waves; on and on, the myriad
lights, in masses, in festoons, in great gleaming globes of fire
from towers rising higher than Susan's and Rod's native hills.
They looked to the south. There, too, rose city, mile after
mile, and then beyond it the expanse of the bay; and everywhere
the lights, the beautiful, soft, starlike lights, shedding a
radiance as of heaven itself over the whole scene. Majesty and
strength and beauty.

"I love it!" murmured the girl. "Already I love it."

"I never dreamed it was like this," said Roderick, in an awed tone.

"The City of the Stars," said she, in the caressing tone in
which a lover speaks the name of the beloved.

They moved closer together and clasped hands and gazed as if
they feared the whole thing--river and magic city and their own
selves--would fade away and vanish forever. Susan clutched Rod
in terror as she saw the vision suddenly begin to move, to
advance toward her, like apparitions in a dream before they
vanish. Then she exclaimed, "Why, we are moving!" The big
ferryboat, swift, steady as land, noiseless, had got under way.
Upon them from the direction of the distant and hidden sea blew
a cool, fresh breeze. Never before had either smelled that
perfume, strong and keen and clean, which comes straight from
the unbreathed air of the ocean to bathe New York, to put life
and hope and health into its people. Rod and Susan turned their
faces southward toward this breeze, drank in great draughts of
it. They saw a colossal statue, vivid as life in the dusk, in
the hand at the end of the high-flung arm a torch which sent a
blaze of light streaming out over land and water.

"That must be Liberty," said Roderick.

Susan slipped her arm through his. She was quivering with
excitement and joy. "Rod--Rod!" she murmured. "It's the isles of
freedom. Kiss me."

And he bent and kissed her, and his cheek felt the tears upon
hers. He reached for her hand, with an instinct to strengthen
her. But when he had it within his its firm and vital grasp sent
a thrill of strength through him.

A few minutes, and they paused at the exit from the ferry house.
They almost shrank back, so dazed and helpless did they feel
before the staggering billows of noise that swept savagely down
upon them--roar and crash, shriek and snort; the air was
shuddering with it, the ground quaking. The beauty had
vanished--the beauty that was not the city but a glamour to lure
them into the city's grasp; now that city stood revealed as a
monster about to seize and devour them.

"God!" He shouted in her ear. "Isn't this _frightful!_"

She was recovering more quickly than he. The faces she saw
reassured her. They were human faces; and while they were eager
and restless, as if the souls behind them sought that which
never could be found, they were sane and kind faces, too. Where
others of her own race lived, and lived without fear, she, too,
could hope to survive. And already she, who had loved this
mighty offspring of the sea and the sky at first glance, saw and
felt another magic--the magic of the peopled solitude. In this
vast, this endless solitude she and he would be free. They could
do as they pleased, live as they pleased, without thought of the
opinion of others. Here she could forget the bestial horrors of
marriage; here she would fear no scornful pointing at her
birth-brand of shame. She and Rod could be poor without shame;
they could make their fight in the grateful darkness of obscurity.

"Scared?" he asked.

"Not a bit," was her prompt answer. "I love it more than ever."

"Well, it frightens me a little. I feel helpless--lost in the
noise and the crowd. How can I do anything here!"

"Others have. Others do."

"Yes--yes! That's so. We must take hold!" And he selected a
cabman from the shouting swarm. "We want to go, with two trunks,
to the Hotel St. Denis," said he.

"All right, sir! Gimme the checks, please."

Spenser was about to hand them over when Susan said in an
undertone, "You haven't asked the price."

Spenser hastened to repair this important omission. "Ten
dollars," replied the cabman as if ten dollars were some such
trifle as ten cents.

Spenser laughed at the first experience of the famous New York
habit of talking in a faint careless way of large sums of
money--other people's money. "You did save us a swat," he said
to Susan, and beckoned another man. The upshot of a long and
arduous discussion, noisy and profane, was that they got the
carriage for six dollars--a price which the policeman who had
been drawn into the discussion vouched for as reasonable.
Spenser knew it was too high, knew the policeman would get a
dollar or so of the profit, but he was weary of the wrangle; and
he would not listen to Susan's suggestion that they have the
trunks sent by the express company and themselves go in a street
car for ten cents. At the hotel they got a large comfortable
room and a bath for four dollars a day. Spenser insisted it was
cheap; Susan showed her alarm--less than an hour in New York and
ten dollars gone, not to speak of she did not know how much
change. For Roderick had been scattering tips with what is for
some mysterious reason called "a princely hand," though princes
know too well the value of money and have too many extravagant
tastes ever to go far in sheer throwing away.

They had dinner in the restaurant of the hotel and set out to
explore the land they purposed to subdue and to possess. They
walked up Broadway to Fourteenth, missed their way in the dazzle
and glare of south Union Square, discovered the wandering
highway again after some searching. After the long, rather quiet
stretch between Union Square and Thirty-fourth Street they found
themselves at the very heart of the city's night life. They
gazed in wonder upon the elevated road with its trains
thundering by high above them. They crossed Greeley Square and
stood entranced before the spectacle--a street bright as day
with electric signs of every color, shape and size; sidewalks
jammed with people, most of them dressed with as much pretense
to fashion as the few best in Cincinnati; one theater after
another, and at Forty-second Street theaters in every direction.
Surely--surely--there would be small difficulty in placing his
play when there were so many theaters, all eager for plays.

They debated going to the theater, decided against it, as they
were tired from the journey and the excitement of crowding new
sensations. "I've never been to a real theater in my life," said
Susan. "I want to be fresh the first time I go."

"Yes," cried Rod. "That's right. Tomorrow night. That _will_ be
an experience!" And they read the illuminated signs, inspected
the show windows, and slowly strolled back toward the hotel. As
they were recrossing Union Square, Spenser said, "Have you
noticed how many street girls there are? We must have passed a
thousand. Isn't it frightful?"

"Yes," said Susan.

Rod made a gesture of disgust, and said with feeling, "How low
a woman must have sunk before she could take to that life!"

"Yes," said Susan.

"So low that there couldn't possibly be left any shred of
feeling or decency anywhere in her." Susan did not reply.

"It's not a question of morals, but of sensibility," pursued he.
"Some day I'm going to write a play or a story about it. A woman
with anything to her, who had to choose between that life and
death, wouldn't hesitate an instant. She couldn't. A
streetwalker!" And again he made that gesture of disgust.

"Before you write," said Susan, in a queer, quiet voice, "you'll
find out all about it. Maybe some of these girls--most of
them--all of them--are still human beings. It's not fair to
judge people unless you know. And it's so easy to say that
someone else ought to die rather than do this or that."

"You can't imagine yourself doing such a thing," urged he.

Susan hesitated, then--"Yes," she said.

Her tone irritated him. "Oh, nonsense! You don't know what
you're talking about."

"Yes," said Susan.

"Susie!" he exclaimed, looking reprovingly at her.

She met his eyes without flinching. "Yes," she said. "I have."

He stopped short and his expression set her bosom to heaving.
But her gaze was steady upon his. "Why did you tell me!" he
cried. "Oh, it isn't so--it can't be. You don't mean exactly that."

"Yes, I do," said she.

"Don't tell me! I don't want to know." And he strode on, she
keeping beside him.

"I can't let you believe me different from what I am," replied
she. "Not you. I supposed you guessed."

"Now I'll always think of it--whenever I look at you. . . . I
simply can't believe it. . . . You spoke of it as if you
weren't ashamed."

"I'm not ashamed," she said. "Not before you. There isn't
anything I've done that I wouldn't be willing to have you know.
I'd have told you, except that I didn't want to recall it. You
know that nobody can live without getting dirty. The thing is to
want to be clean--and to try to get clean afterward--isn't it?"

"Yes," he admitted, as if he had not been hearing. "I wish you
hadn't told me. I'll always see it and feel it when I look at you."

"I want you to," said she. "I couldn't love you as I do if I
hadn't gone through a great deal."

"But it must have left its stains upon you," said he. Again he
stopped short in the street, faced her at the curb, with the
crowd hurrying by and jostling them. "Tell me about it!" he
commanded.

She shook her head. "I couldn't." To have told would have been
like tearing open closed and healed wounds. Also it would have
seemed whining--and she had utter contempt for whining. "I'll
answer any question, but I can't just go on and tell."

"You deliberately went and did--that?"

"Yes."

"Haven't you any excuse, any defense?"

She might have told him about Burlingham dying and the need of
money to save him. She might have told him about Etta--her
health going--her mind made up to take to the streets, with no
one to look after her. She might have made it all a moving and
a true tale--of self-sacrifice for the two people who had done
most for her. But it was not in her simple honest nature to try
to shift blame. So all she said was:

"No, Rod."

"And you didn't want to kill yourself first?"

"No. I wanted to live. I was dirty--and I wanted to be clean. I
was hungry--and I wanted food. I was cold--that was the worst.
I was cold, and I wanted to get warm. And--I had been
married--but I couldn't tell even you about that--except--after
a woman's been through what I went through then, nothing in life
has any real terror or horror for her."