Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

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


He looked at her long. "I don't understand," he finally said.
"Come on. Let's go back to the hotel."

She walked beside him, making no attempt to break his gloomy
silence. They went up to their room and she sat on the lounge by
the window. He lit a cigarette and half sat, half lay, upon the
bed. After a long time he said with a bitter laugh, "And I was
so sure you were a good woman!"

"I don't feel bad," she ventured timidly. "Am I?"

"Do you mean to tell me," he cried, sitting up, "that you don't
think anything of those things?"

"Life can be so hard and cruel, can make one do so many----"

"But don't you realize that what you've done is the very worst
thing a woman can do?"

"No," said she. "I don't. . . . I'm sorry you didn't understand.
I thought you did--not the details, but in a general sort of
way. I didn't mean to deceive you. That would have seemed to me
much worse than anything I did."

"I might have known! I might have known!" he cried--rather
theatrically, though sincerely withal--for Mr. Spenser was a
diligent worker with the tools of the play-making trade. "I
learned who you were as soon as I got home the night I left you
in Carrolton. They had been telephoning about you to the
village. So I knew about you."

"About my mother?" asked she. "Is that what you mean?"

"Oh, you need not look so ashamed," said he, graciously, pityingly.

"I am not ashamed," said she. But she did not tell him that her
look came from an awful fear that he was about to make her
ashamed of him.

"No, I suppose you aren't," he went on, incensed by this further
evidence of her lack of a good woman's instincts. "I really
ought not to blame you. You were born wrong--born with the moral
sense left out."

"Yes, I suppose so," said she, wearily.

"If only you had lied to me--told me the one lie!" cried he.
"Then you wouldn't have destroyed my illusion. You wouldn't have
killed my love."

She grew deathly white; that was all.

"I don't mean that I don't love you still," he hurried on. "But
not in the same way. That's killed forever."

"Are there different ways of loving?" she asked.
"How can I give you the love of respect and trust--now?"

"Don't you trust me--any more?"

"I couldn't. I simply couldn't. It was hard enough before on
account of your birth. But now---- Trust a woman who had been
a--a--I can't speak the word. Trust you? You don't understand
a man."

"No, I don't." She looked round drearily. Everything in ruins.
Alone again. Outcast. Nowhere to go but the streets--the life
that seemed the only one for such as she. "I don't understand
people at all. . . . Do you want me to go?"

She had risen as she asked this. He was beside her instantly.
"Go!" he cried. "Why I couldn't get along without you."

"Then you love me as I love you," Said she, putting her arms
round him. "And that's all I want. I don't want what you call
respect. I couldn't ever have hoped to get that, being born as
I was--could I? Anyhow, it doesn't seem to me to amount to much.
I can't help it, Rod--that's the way I feel. So just love me--do
with me whatever you will, so long as it makes you happy. And I
don't need to be trusted. I couldn't think of anybody but you."

He felt sure of her again, reascended to the peak of the moral
mountain. "You understand, we can never get married. We can
never have any children."

"I don't mind. I didn't expect that. We can _love_--can't we?"

He took her face between his hands. "What an exquisite face it
is," he said, "soft and smooth! And what clear, honest eyes!
Where is _it?_ Where _is_ it? It _must_ be there!"

"What, Rod?"

"The--the dirt."

She did not wince, but there came into her young face a deeper
pathos--and a wan, deprecating, pleading smile. She said:

"Maybe love has washed it away--if it was there. It never seemed
to touch me--any more than the dirt when I had to clean up my room."

"You mustn't talk that way. Why you are perfectly calm! You
don't cry or feel repentant. You don't seem to care."

"It's so--so past--and dead. I feel as if it were another
person. And it was, Rod!"

He shook his head, frowning. "Let's not talk about it," he said
harshly. "If only I could stop thinking about it!"

She effaced herself as far as she could, living in the same room
with him. She avoided the least show of the tenderness she felt,
of the longing to have her wounds soothed. She lay awake the
whole night, suffering, now and then timidly and softly
caressing him when she was sure that he slept. In the morning
she pretended to be asleep, let him call her twice before she
showed that she was awake. A furtive glance at him confirmed the
impression his voice had given. Behind her pale, unrevealing
face there was the agonized throb of an aching heart, but she
had the confidence of her honest, utter love; he would surely
soften, would surely forgive. As for herself--she had, through
loving and feeling that she was loved, almost lost the sense of
the unreality of past and present that made her feel quite
detached and apart from the life she was leading, from the
events in which she was taking part, from the persons most
intimately associated with her. Now that sense of isolation, of
the mere spectator or the traveler gazing from the windows of
the hurrying train--that sense returned. But she fought against
the feeling it gave her.

That evening they went to the theater--to see Modjeska in "Magda."

Susan had never been in a real theater. The only approach to a
playhouse in Sutherland was Masonic Hall. It had a sort of stage
at one end where from time to time wandering players gave poor
performances of poor plays or a minstrel show or a low
vaudeville. But none of the best people of Sutherland went--at
least, none of the women. The notion was strong in Sutherland
that the theater was of the Devil--not so strong as in the days
before they began to tolerate amateur theatricals, but still
vigorous enough to give Susan now, as she sat in the big,
brilliant auditorium, a pleasing sense that she, an outcast, was
at last comfortably at home. Usually the first sight of anything
one has dreamed about is pitifully disappointing. Neither nature
nor life can build so splendidly as a vivid fancy. But Susan, in
some sort prepared for the shortcomings of the stage, was not
disappointed. From rise to fall of curtain she was so
fascinated, so absolutely absorbed, that she quite forgot her
surroundings, even Rod. And between the acts she could not talk
for thinking. Rod, deceived by her silence, was chagrined. He
had been looking forward to a great happiness for himself in
seeing her happy, and much profit from the study of the
viewpoint of an absolutely fresh mind. It wasn't until they were
leaving the theater that he got an inkling of the true state of
affairs with her.

"Let's go to supper," said he.

"If you don't mind," replied she, "I'd rather go home. I'm very tired."

"You were sound asleep this morning. So you must have slept
well," said he sarcastically.

"It's the play," said she.

"_Why_ didn't you like it?" he asked, irritated.

She looked at him in wonder. "Like what? The play?" She drew a
long breath. "I feel as if it had almost killed me."

He understood when they were in their room and she could hardly
undress before falling into a sleep so relaxed, so profound,
that it made him a little uneasy. It seemed to him the
exhaustion of a child worn out with the excitement of a
spectacle. And her failure to go into ecstasies the next day led
him further into the same error. "Modjeska is very good as
_Magda_," said he, carelessly, as one talking without expecting
to be understood. "But they say there's an Italian
woman--Duse--who is the real thing."

Modjeska--Duse--Susan seemed indeed not to understand. "I hated
her father," she said. "He didn't deserve to have such a
wonderful daughter."

Spenser had begun to laugh with her first sentence. At the
second he frowned, said bitterly: "I might have known! You get
it all wrong. I suppose you sympathize with _Magda_?"

"I worshiped her," said Susan, her voice low and tremulous with
the intensity of her feeling.

Roderick laughed bitterly. "Naturally," he said. "You can't
understand."

An obvious case, thought he. She was indeed one of those
instances of absolute lack of moral sense. Just as some people
have the misfortune to be born without arms or without legs, so
others are doomed to live bereft of a moral sense. A sweet
disposition, a beautiful body, but no soul; not a stained soul,
but no soul at all. And his whole mental attitude toward her
changed; or, rather, it was changed by the iron compulsion of
his prejudice. The only change in his physical attitude--that is,
in his treatment of her--was in the direction of bolder passion.
of complete casting aside of all the restraint a conventional
respecter of conventional womanhood feels toward a woman whom he
respects. So, naturally, Susan, eager to love and to be loved,
and easily confusing the not easily distinguished spiritual and
physical, was reassured. Once in a while a look or a phrase from
him gave her vague uneasiness; but on the whole she felt that,
in addition to clear conscience from straightforwardness, she
had a further reason for being glad Chance had forced upon her
the alternative of telling him or lying. She did not inquire
into the realities beneath the surface of their life--neither
into what he thought of her, nor into what she thought of
him--thought in the bottom of her heart. She continued to fight
against, to ignore, her feeling of aloneness, her feeling of
impending departure.

She was aided in this by her anxiety about their finances. In
his efforts to place his play he was spending what were for them
large sums of money--treating this man and that to dinners, to
suppers--inviting men to lunch with him at expensive Broadway
restaurants. She assumed that all this was necessary; he said
so, and he must know. He was equally open-handed when they were
alone, insisting on ordering the more expensive dishes, on
having suppers they really did not need and drink which she knew
she would be better off without--and, she suspected, he also. It
simply was not in him, she saw, to be careful about money. She
liked it, as a trait, for to her as to all the young and the
unthinking carelessness about money seems a sure, perhaps the
surest, sign of generosity--when in fact the two qualities are
in no way related. Character is not a collection of ignorant
impulses but a solidly woven fabric of deliberate purposes.
Carelessness about anything most often indicates a tendency to
carelessness about everything. She admired his openhanded way of
scattering; she wouldn't have admired it in herself, would have
thought it dishonest and selfish. But Rod was different. _He_ had
the "artistic temperament," while she was a commonplace nobody,
who ought to be--and was--grateful to him for allowing her to
stay on and for making such use of her as he saw fit. Still,
even as she admired, she saw danger, grave danger, a
disturbingly short distance ahead. He described to her the
difficulties he was having in getting to managers, in having his
play read, and the absurdity of the reasons given for turning it
down. He made light of all these; the next manager would see,
would give him a big advance, would put the play on--and then,
Easy Street!

But experience had already killed what little optimism there was
in her temperament--and there had not been much, because George
Warham was a successful man in his line, and successful men do
not create or permit optimistic atmosphere even in their houses.
Nor had she forgotten Burlingham's lectures on the subject with
illustrations from his own spoiled career; she understood it all
now--and everything else he had given her to store up in her
memory that retained everything. With that philippic against
optimism in mind, she felt what Spenser was rushing toward. She
made such inquiries about work for herself as her inexperience
and limited opportunities permitted. She asked, she begged him,
to let her try to get a place. He angrily ordered her to put any
such notion out of her head. After a time she nerved herself
again to speak. Then he frankly showed her why he was refusing.

"No," said he peremptorily, "I couldn't trust you in those
temptations. You must stay where I can guard you."

A woman who had deliberately taken to the streets--why, she
thought nothing of virtue; she would be having lovers with the
utmost indifference; and while she was not a liar yet--"at
least, I think not"--how long would that last? With virtue gone,
virtue the foundation of woman's character--the rest could no
more stand than a house set on sand.

"As long as you want me to love you, you've got to stay with
me," he declared. "If you persist, I'll know you're simply
looking for a chance to go back to your old ways."

And though she continued to think and cautiously to inquire
about work she said no more to him. She spent not a penny,
discouraged him from throwing money away--as much as she could
without irritating him--and waited for the cataclysm. Waited not
in gloom and tears but as normal healthy youth awaits any
adversity not definitely scheduled for an hour close at hand. It
would be far indeed from the truth to picture Susan as ever for
long a melancholy figure to the eye or even wholly melancholy
within. Her intelligence and her too sympathetic heart were
together a strong force for sadness in her life, as they cannot
but be in any life. In this world, to understand and to
sympathize is to be saddened. But there was in her a force
stronger than either or both. She had superb health. It made her
beautiful, strong body happy; and that physical happiness
brought her up quickly out of any depths--made her gay in spite
of herself, caused her to enjoy even when she felt that it was
"almost like hard-heartedness to be happy." She loved the sun
and in this city where the sun shone almost all the days,
sparkling gloriously upon the tiny salt particles filling the
air and making it delicious to breathe and upon the skin--in
this City of the Sun as she called it, she was gay even when she
was heavy-hearted.

Thus, she was no repellent, aggravating companion to Rod as she
awaited the cataclysm.


It came in the third week. He spent the entire day away from her,
toward midnight he returned, flushed with liquor. She had
gone to bed. "Get up and dress," said he with an irritability
toward her which she had no difficulty in seeing was really
directed at himself. "I'm hungry--and thirsty. We're going out
for some supper."

"Come kiss me first," said she, stretching out her arms. Several
times this device had shifted his purpose from spending money on
the needless and expensive suppers.

He laughed. "Not a kiss. We're going to have one final blow-out.
I start to work tomorrow. I've taken a place on the _Herald_--on
space, guaranty of twenty-five a week, good chance to average
fifty or sixty."

He said this hurriedly, carelessly, gayly--guiltily. She showed
then and there what a surpassing wise young woman she was, for
she did not exclaim or remind him of his high resolve to do or
die as a playwright. "I'll be ready in a minute," was all she said.

She dressed swiftly, he lounging on the sofa and watching her.
He loved to watch her dress, she did it so gracefully, and the
motions brought out latent charms of her supple figure. "You're
not so sure-fingered tonight as usual," said he. "I never saw
you make so many blunders--and you've got one stocking on wrong
side out."

She smiled into the glass at him. "The skirt'll cover that. I
guess I was sleepy."

"Never saw your eyes more wide-awake. What're you thinking about?"

"About supper," declared she. "I'm hungry. I didn't feel like
eating alone."

"I can't be here always," said he crossly--and she knew he was
suspecting what she really must be thinking.

"I wasn't complaining," replied she sweetly. "You know I
understand about business."

"Yes, I know," said he, with his air of generosity that always
made her feel grateful. "I always feel perfectly free about you."

"I should say!" laughed she. "You know I don't care what happens
so long as you succeed." Since their talk in Broadway that first
evening in New York she had instinctively never said "we."

When they were at the table at Rector's and he had taken a few
more drinks, he became voluble and plausible on the subject of
the trifling importance of his setback as a playwright. It was
the worst possible time of year; the managers were stocked up;
his play would have to be rewritten to suit some particular
star; a place on a newspaper, especially such an influential
paper as the _Herald_, would be of use to him in interesting
managers. She listened and looked convinced, and strove to
convince herself that she believed. But there was no gray in her
eyes, only the deepest hue of violets.

Next day they took a suite of two rooms and a bath in a
pretentious old house in West Forty-fourth Street near Long Acre
Square. She insisted that she preferred another much sunnier and
quieter suite with no bath but only a stationary washstand; it
was to be had for ten dollars a week. But he laughed at her as
too economical in her ideas, and decided for the eighteen-dollar
rooms. Also he went with her to buy clothes, made her spend
nearly a hundred dollars where she would have spent less than
twenty-five. "I prefer to make most of my things," declared she.
"And I've all the time in the world." He would not have it. In
her leisure time she must read and amuse herself and keep
herself up to the mark, especially physically. "I'm proud of
your looks," said he. "They belong to me, don't they? Well, take
care of my property, Miss."

She looked at him vaguely--a look of distance, of parting, of
pain. Then she flung herself into his arms with a hysterical
cry--and shut her eyes tight against the beckoning figure
calling her away. "No! No!" she murmured. "I belong here--_here!_"

"What are you saying?" he asked.

"Nothing--nothing," she replied.




CHAPTER XXV


AT the hotel they had been Mr. and Mrs. Spenser. When they
moved, he tried to devise some way round this; but it was
necessary that they have his address at the office, and Mrs.
Pershall with the glistening old-fashioned false teeth who kept
the furnished-room house was not one in whose withered bosom it
would be wise to raise a suspicion as to respectability. Only in
a strenuously respectable house would he live; in the other
sort, what might not untrustworthy Susan be up to? So Mr. and
Mrs. Spenser they remained, and the truth was suspected by only
a few of their acquaintances, was known by two or three of his
intimates whom he told in those bursts of confidence to which
voluble, careless men are given--and for which they in resolute
self-excuse unjustly blame strong drink.

One of his favorite remarks to her--sometimes made laughingly,
again ironically, again angrily, again insultingly, was in this strain:

"Your face is demure enough. But you look too damned attractive
about those beautiful feet of yours to be respectable at
heart--and trustable."

That matter of her untrustworthiness had become a fixed idea
with him. The more he concentrated upon her physical loveliness,
the more he revolved the dangers, the possibilities of
unfaithfulness; for a physical infatuation is always jealous.
His work on the _Herald_ made close guarding out of the question.
The best he could do was to pop in unexpectedly upon her from
time to time, to rummage through her belongings, to check up her
statements as to her goings and comings by questioning the
servants and, most important of all, each day to put her through
searching and skillfully planned cross-examination. She had to
tell him everything she did--every little thing--and he
calculated the time, to make sure she had not found half an hour
or so in which to deceive him. If she had sewed, he must look at
the sewing; if she had read, he must know how many pages and
must hear a summary of what those pages contained. As she would
not and could not deceive him in any matter, however small, she
was compelled to give over a plan quietly to look for work and
to fit herself for some occupation that would pay a living
wage--if there were such for a beginning woman worker.

At first he was covert in this detective work, being ashamed of
his own suspicions. But as he drank, as he associated again with
the same sort of people who had wasted his time in Cincinnati,
he rapidly became franker and more inquisitorial. And she
dreaded to see the look she knew would come into his eyes, the
cruel tightening of his mouth, if in her confusion and eagerness
she should happen not instantly to satisfy the doubt behind each
question. He tormented her; he tormented himself. She suffered
from humiliation; but she suffered more because she saw how his
suspicions were torturing him. And in her humility and
helplessness and inexperience, she felt no sense of right to
resist, no impulse to resist.

And she forced herself to look on his spasms of jealousy as the
occasional storms which occur even in the best climates. She
reminded herself that she was secure of his love, secure in his
love; and in her sad mood she reproached herself for not being
content when at bottom everything was all right. After what she
had been through, to be sad because the man she loved loved her
too well! It was absurd, ungrateful.

He pried into every nook and corner of her being with that
ingenious and tireless persistence human beings reserve for
searches for what they do not wish to find. At last he contrived
to find, or to imagine he had found, something that justified
his labors and vindicated his disbelief in her.

They were walking in Fifth Avenue one afternoon, at the hour
when there is the greatest press of equipages whose expensively
and showily dressed occupants are industriously engaged in the
occupation of imagining they are doing something when in fact
they are doing nothing. What a world! What a grotesque confusing
of motion and progress! What fantastic delusions that one is
busy when one is merely occupied! They were between Forty-sixth
Street and Forty-seventh, on the west side, when a small
victoria drew up at the curb and a woman descended and crossed
the sidewalk before them to look at the display in a milliner's
window. Susan gave her the swift, seeing glance which one woman
always gives another--the glance of competitors at each other's
offerings. Instead of glancing away, Susan stopped short and
gazed. Forgetting Rod, she herself went up to the millinery
display that she might have a fuller view of the woman who had
fascinated her.

"What's the matter?" cried Spenser. "Come on. You don't want any
of those hats."

But Susan insisted that she must see, made him linger until the
woman returned to her carriage and drove away. She said to Rod:

"Did you see her?"

"Yes. Rather pretty--nothing to scream about."

"But her _style!_" cried Susan.

"Oh, she was nicely dressed--in a quiet way. You'll see
thousands a lot more exciting after you've been about in this
town a while."

"I've seen scores of beautifully dressed women here--and in
Cincinnati, too," replied Susan. "But that woman--she was
_perfect_. And that's a thing I've never seen before."
"I'm glad you have such quiet tastes--quiet and inexpensive."

"Inexpensive!" exclaimed Susan. "I don't dare think how much
that woman's clothes cost. You only glanced at her, Rod, you
didn't _look_. If you had, you'd have seen. Everything she wore
was just right." Susan's eyes were brilliant. "Oh, it was
wonderful! The colors--the fit--the style--the making--every big
and little thing. She was a work of art, Rod! That's the first
woman I've seen in my life that I through and through envied."

Rod's look was interested now. "You like that sort of thing a
lot?" he inquired with affected carelessness.

"Every woman does," replied she, unsuspicious. "But I
care--well, not for merely fine clothes. But for the--the kind
that show what sort of person is in them." She sighed. "I wonder
if I'll ever learn--and have money enough to carry out. It'll
take so much--so much!" She laughed. "I've got terribly
extravagant ideas. But don't be alarmed--I keep them chained up."

He was eying her unpleasantly. Suddenly she became confused. He
thought it was because she was seeing and understanding his look
and was frightened at his having caught her at last. In fact, it
was because it all at once struck her that what she had
innocently and carelessly said sounded like a hint or a reproach
to him. He sneered:

"So you're crazy about finery--eh?"

"Oh, Rod!" she cried. "You know I didn't mean it that way. I
long for and dream about a whole lot of beautiful things, but
nothing else in the world's in the same class with--with what
we've got."