Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise

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


"You needn't try to excuse yourself," said he in a tone that
silenced her.

She wished she had not seen the woman who had thus put a cloud
over their afternoon's happiness. But long after she had
forgotten his queerness about what she said, she continued to
remember that "perfect" woman--to see every detail of her
exquisite toilet, so rare in a world where expensive-looking
finery is regarded as the chief factor in the art of dress. How
much she would have to learn before she could hope to dress like
that!--learn not merely about dress but about the whole artistic
side of life. For that woman had happened to cross Susan's
vision at just the right moment--in development and in mood--to
reveal to her clearly a world into which she had never
penetrated--a world of which she had vaguely dreamed as she read
novels of life in the lands beyond the seas, the life of palaces
and pictures and statuary, of opera and theater, of equipages
and servants and food and clothing of rare quality. She had
rather thought such a life did not exist outside of novels and
dreams. What she had seen of New York--the profuse, the gigantic
but also the undiscriminating--had tended to strengthen the
suspicion. But this woman proved her mistaken.

Our great forward strides are made unconsciously, are the
results of apparently trivial, often unnoted impulses. Susan,
like all our race, had always had vague secret dreams of
ambition--so vague thus far that she never thought of them as
impelling purposes in her life. Her first long forward stride
toward changing these dreams from the vague to the definite was
when Rod, before her on the horse on the way to Brooksburg,
talked over his shoulder to her of the stage and made her feel
that it was the life for her, the only life open to her where a
woman could hope to be judged as human being instead of as mere
instrument of sex. Her second long forward movement toward
sharply defined ambition dated from the sight of the woman of
the milliner's window--the woman who epitomized to Susan the
whole art side of life that always gives its highest expression
in some personal achievement--the perfect toilet, the perfect
painting or sculpture, the perfect novel or play.

But Rod saw in her enthusiasm only evidence of a concealed
longing for the money to indulge extravagant whims. With his
narrowing interest in women--narrowed now almost to sex--his
contempt for them as to their minds and their hearts was so far
advancing that he hardly took the trouble to veil it with
remnants of courtesy. If Susan had clearly understood--even if
she had let herself understand what her increasing knowledge
might have enabled her to understand--she would have hated him
in spite of the hold gratitude and habit had given him upon her
loyal nature--and despite the fact that she had, as far as she
could see, no alternative to living with him but the tenements
or the streets.

One day in midsummer she chanced to go into the Hotel Astor to
buy a magazine. As she had not been there before she made a
wrong turning and was forced to cross one of the restaurants. In
a far corner, half hidden by a group of palms, she saw Rod at a
small table with a strikingly pretty woman whose expression and
dress and manner most energetically proclaimed the actress. The
woman was leaning toward him, was touching his hand and looking
into his eyes with that show of enthusiasm which raises doubts
of sincerity in an experienced man and sets him to keeping an
eye or a hand--or both--upon his money. Real emotion, even a
professional expert at display of emotion, is rarely so adept at
exhibiting itself.

It may have been jealousy that guided her to this swift judgment
upon the character of the emotion correctly and charmingly
expressing itself. If so, jealousy was for once a trustworthy
guide. She turned swiftly and escaped unseen. The idea of
trapping him, of confronting him, never occurred to her. She
felt ashamed and self-reproachful that she had seen. Instead of
the anger that fires a vain woman, whether she cares about a man
or not, there came a profound humiliation. She had in some way
fallen short; she had not given him all he needed; it must be
that she hadn't it to give, since she had given him all she had.
He must not know--he must not! For if he knew he might dislike
her, might leave her--and she dared not think what life would be
without him, her only source of companionship and affection, her
only means of support. She was puzzled that her discovery, not
of his treachery--he had so broken her spirit with his
suspicions and his insulting questions that she did not regard
herself as of the rank and dignity that has the right to exact
fidelity--but of his no longer caring enough to be content with
her alone, had not stunned her with amazement. She did not
realize how completely the instinct that he was estranged from
her had prepared her for the thing that always accompanies
estrangement. Between the perfect accord, that is, the never
realized ideal for a man and a woman living together, and the
intolerable discord that means complete repulse there is a vast
range of states of feeling imperceptibly shading into each
other. Most couples constantly move along this range, now toward
the one extreme, now toward the other. As human kings are not
given to self-analysis, and usually wander into grotesque error
whenever they attempt it, no couple knows precisely where it is
upon the range, until something crucial happens to compel them
to know. Susan and Rod had begun as all couples begin--with an
imaginary ideal accord based upon their ignorance of each other
and their misunderstanding of what qualities they thought they
understood in each other. The delusion of accord vanished that
first evening in New York. What remained? What came in the
place? They knew no more about that than does the next couple.
They were simply "living along." A crisis, drawing them close
together or flinging them forever apart or forcing them to live
together, he frankly as keeper and she frankly as kept, might
come any day, any hour. Again it might never come.

After a few weeks the matter that had been out of her mind
accidentally and indirectly came to the surface in a chance
remark. She said:

"Sometimes I half believe a man could be untrue to a woman, even
though he loved her."

She did not appreciate the bearings of her remark until it was
spoken. With a sensation of terror lest the dreaded crisis might
be about to burst, she felt his quick, nervous glance. She
breathed freely again when she felt his reassurance and relief
as she successfully withstood.

"Certainly," he said with elaborate carelessness. "Men are a
rotten, promiscuous lot. That's why it's necessary for a woman
to be good and straight."

All this time his cross-examination had grown in severity.
Evidently he was fearing that she might be having a recurrence
of the moral disease which was fatal in womankind, though only
mild indiscretion in a man, if not positively a virtue, an
evidence of possessing a normal masculine nature. Her mind began
curiously--sadly--to revolve the occasional presents--of money,
of books, of things to wear--which he gave, always quite
unexpectedly. At first unconsciously, but soon consciously, she
began to associate these gifts, given always in an embarrassed,
shamefaced way, with certain small but significant indications
of his having strayed. And it was not long before she
understood; she was receiving his expiations for his
indiscretions. Like an honest man and a loyal--masculinely
loyal--lover he was squaring accounts. She never read the books
she owed to these twinges; it was thus that she got her aversion
to Thackeray--one of his "expiations" was a set of Thackeray.
The things to wear she contrived never to use. The conscience
money she either spent upon him or put back into his pocket a
little at a time, sure that he, the most careless of men about
money, would never detect her.

His work forced him to keep irregular hours; thus she could
pretend to herself that his absences were certainly because of
office duty. Still, whenever he was gone overnight, she became
unhappy--not the crying kind of unhappiness; to that she was
little given--but the kind that lies awake and aches and with
morbid vivid fancy paints the scenes suspicion suggests, and
stares at them not in anger but in despair. She was always
urging herself to content herself with what she was getting. She
recalled and lived again the things she had forgotten while
Roderick was wholly hers--the penalties of the birth brand of
shame--her wedding night--the miseries of the last period of her
wanderings with Burlingham--her tenement days--the dirt, the
nakedness, the brutal degradation, the vermin, the savage cold.
And the instant he returned, no matter how low-spirited she had
been, she was at once gay, often deliriously gay--until soon his
awakened suspicion as to what she had been up to in his absence
quieted her. There was little forcing or pretense in this
gayety; it bubbled and sparkled from the strong swift current of
her healthy passionate young life which, suspended in the icy
clutch of fear when he was away from her, flowed as freely as the
brooks in spring as soon as she realized that she still had him.

Did she really love him? She believed she did. Was she right?
Love is of many degrees--and kinds. And strange and confused
beyond untangling is the mixture of motives and ideas in the
mind of any human being as to any other being with whom his or
her relations are many sided.

Anyone who had not been roughly seized by destiny and forced to
fight desperately weaponless might have found it difficult to
understand how this intelligent, high-spirited girl could be so
reasonable--coarsely practical, many people would have said. A
brave soul--truly brave with the unconscious courage that lives
heroically without any taint of heroics--such a soul learns to
accept the facts of life, to make the best of things, to be
grateful for whatever sunshine may be and not to shriek and
gesticulate at storm. Suffering had given this sapling of a girl
the strong fiber that enables a tree to push majestically up
toward the open sky. Because she did not cry out was no sign
that she was not hurt; and because she did not wither and die of
her wounds was only proof of her strength of soul. The weak wail
and the weak succumb; the strong persist--and a world of wailers
and weaklings calls them hard, insensible, coarse.

Spenser was fond of exhibiting to his men friends--to some of
them--this treasure to which he always returned the more
enamoured for his vagary and its opportunity of comparison.
Women he would not permit. In general, he held that all women,
the respectable no less than the other kind, put mischief in
each other's heads and egged each other on to carry out the
mischief already there in embryo. In particular, he would have
felt that he was committing a gross breach of the proprieties,
not to say the decencies, had he introduced a woman of Susan's
origin, history and present status to the wives and sisters of
his friends; and, for reasons which it was not necessary even to
pretend to conceal from her, he forbade her having anything to
do with the kinds of woman who would not have minded, had they
known all about her. Thus, her only acquaintances, her only
associates, were certain carefully selected men. He asked to
dinner or to the theater or to supper at Jack's or Rector's only
such men as he could trust. And trustworthy meant physically
unattractive. Having small and dwindling belief in the mentality
of women, and no belief whatever in mentality as a force in the
relations of the sexes, he was satisfied to have about her any
man, however clever, provided he was absolutely devoid of
physical charm.

The friend who came oftenest was Drumley, an editorial writer
who had been his chum at college and had got him the place on
the _Herald_. Drumley he would have trusted alone with her on a
desert island; for several reasons, all of his personal
convenience, it pleased him that Susan liked Drumley and was
glad of his company, no matter how often he came or how long he
stayed. Drumley was an emaciated Kentucky giant with grotesquely
sloping shoulders which not all the ingenious padding of his
tailor could appreciably mitigate. His spare legs were bowed in
the calves. His skin looked rough and tough, like sandpaper and
emery board. The thought of touching his face gave one the same
sensation as a too deeply cut nail. His neck was thin and long,
and he wore a low collar--through that interesting passion of the
vain for seeing a defect in themselves as a charm and calling
attention to it. The lower part of his sallow face suggested
weakness--the weakness so often seen in the faces of
professional men, and explaining why they chose passive instead of
active careers. His forehead was really fine, but the development
of the rest of the cranium above the protuberant little ears was
not altogether satisfying to a claim of mental powers.

Drumley was a good sort--not so much through positive virtue as
through the timidity which too often accounts for goodness, that
is, for the meek conformity which passes as goodness. He was an
insatiable reader, had incredible stores of knowledge; and as he
had a large vocabulary and a ready speech he could dole out of
those reservoirs an agreeable treacle of commonplace philosophy
or comment--thus he had an ideal equipment for editorial
writing. He was absolutely without physical magnetism. The most
he could ever expect from any woman was respect; and that woman
would have had to be foolish enough not to realize that there is
as abysmal a difference between knowledge and mentality as there
is between reputation and character. Susan liked him because he
knew so much. She had developed still further her innate passion
for educating herself. She now wanted to know all about
everything. He told her what to read, set her in the way to
discovering and acquiring the art of reading--an art he was
himself capable of acquiring only in its rudiments--an art the
existence of which is entirely unsuspected by most persons who
regard themselves and are regarded as readers. He knew the
histories and biographies that are most amusing and least
shallow and mendacious. He instructed her in the great
playwrights and novelists and poets, and gave--as his own--the
reasons for their greatness assigned by the world's foremost
critical writers. He showed her what scientific books to
read--those that do not bore and do not hide the simple
fascinating facts about the universe under pretentious,
college-professor phraseology.

He was a pedant, but his pedantry was disguised, therefore
mitigated by his having associated with men of the world instead
of with the pale and pompous capons of the student's closet. His
favorite topic was beauty and ugliness--and his abhorrence for
anyone who was not good to look at. As he talked this subject,
his hearers were nervous and embarrassed. He was a drastic cure
for physical vanity. If this man could so far deceive himself
that he thought himself handsome, who in all the world could be
sure he or she was not the victim of the same incredible
delusion? It was this hallucination of physical beauty that
caused Rod to regard him as the safest of the safe. For it made
him pitiful and ridiculous.

At first he came only with Spenser. Afterward, Spenser used to
send him to dine with Susan and to spend the evenings with her
when he himself had to be--or wished to be elsewhere. When she
was with Drumley he knew she was not "up to any of her old
tricks." Drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his
experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed
even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea
of treachery to his friend about a woman. Whenever Drumley heard
that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables
was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it
as a libel upon the empedestaled sex. If proofs beyond dispute
were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of
the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success. He had
been sought of women, of course, for he had a comfortable and
secure position and money put by. But the serious women who had
set snares for him for the sake of a home had not attracted him;
as for the better looking and livelier women who had come
a-courting with alimony in view, they had unwisely chosen the
method of approach that caused him to set them down as nothing
but professional loose characters. Thus his high ideal of
feminine beauty and his lofty notion of his own deserts, on the
one hand, and his reverence for womanly propriety, on the other
hand, had kept his charms and his income unshared.

Toward the end of Spenser's first year on the _Herald_--it was
early summer--he fell into a melancholy so profound and so
prolonged that Susan became alarmed. She was used to his having
those fits of the blues that are a part of the nervous, morbidly
sensitive nature and in the unhealthfulness of an irregular and
dissipated life recur at brief intervals. He spent more and more
time with her, became as ardent as in their first days together,
with an added desperation of passionate clinging that touched
her to the depths. She had early learned to ignore his moods, to
avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a
vigorous counterirritant of liveliness. After watching the
course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided
that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from
Drumley what the cause was. Perhaps she could cure him if she
were not working in the dark.

One June evening Drumley came to take her to dinner at the
Casino in Central Park. She hesitated. She still liked Drumley's
mind; but latterly he had fallen into the way of gazing
furtively, with a repulsive tremulousness of his loose eyelids,
at her form and at her ankles--especially at her
ankles--especially at her ankles. This furtive debauch gave her
a shivery sense of intrusion. She distinctly liked the candid,
even the not too coarse, glances of the usual man. But not this
shy peeping. However, as there were books she particularly
wished to talk about with him, she accepted.

It was an excursion of which she was fond. They strolled along
Seventh Avenue to the Park, entered and followed the lovely
walk, quiet and green and odorous, to the Mall. They sauntered
in the fading light up the broad Mall, with its roof of boughs
of majestic trees, with its pale blue vistas of well-kept lawns.
At the steps leading to the Casino they paused to delight in the
profusely blooming wistaria and to gaze away northward into and
over what seemed an endless forest with towers and cupolas of
castle and fortress and cathedral rising serene and graceful
here and there above the sea of green. There was the sound of
tinkling fountains, the musical chink-chink of harness chains of
elegant equipages; on the Mall hundreds of children were playing
furiously, to enjoy to the uttermost the last few moments before
being snatched away to bed--and the birds were in the same
hysterical state as they got ready for their evening song. The
air was saturated with the fresh odors of spring and early
summer flowers. Susan, walking beside the homely Drumley, was a
charming and stylish figure of girlish womanhood. The year and
three months in New York had wrought the same transformations in
her that are so noticeable whenever an intelligent and observant
woman with taste for the luxuries is dipped in the magic of city
life. She had grown, was now perhaps a shade above the medium
height for women, looked even taller because of the slenderness
of her arms, of her neck, of the lines of her figure. There was
a deeper melancholy in her violet-gray eyes. Experience had
increased the allure of her wide, beautifully curved mouth.

They took a table under the trees, with beds of blooming flowers
on either hand. Drumley ordered the sort of dinner she liked,
and a bottle of champagne and a bottle of fine burgundy to make
his favorite drink--champagne and burgundy, half and half. He
was running to poetry that evening--Keats and Swinburne.
Finally, after some hesitation, he produced a poem by Dowson--"I
ran across it today. It's the only thing of his worth while, I
believe--and it's so fine that Swinburne must have been sore
when he read it because he hadn't thought to write it himself.
Its moral tone is not high, but it's so beautiful, Mrs. Susan,
that I'll venture to show it to you. It comes nearer to
expressing what men mean by the man sort of constancy than
anything I ever read. Listen to this:


"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished, and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara!--the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion."


Susan took the paper, read the four stanzas several times,
handed it back to him without a word. "Don't you think it fine?"
asked he, a little uneasily--he was always uneasy with a woman
when the conversation touched the relations of the sexes--uneasy
lest he might say or might have said something to send a shiver
through her delicate modesty.

"Fine," Susan echoed absently. "And true. . . . I suppose it is
the best a woman can expect--to be the one he returns to.
And--isn't that enough?"

"You are very different from any woman I ever met," said
Drumley. "Very different from what you were last
fall--wonderfully different. But you were different then, too."

"I'd have been a strange sort of person if it weren't so. I've
led a different life. I've learned--because I've had to learn."

"You've been through a great deal--suffered a great deal for one
of your age?"

Susan shrugged her shoulders slightly. She had her impulses to
confide, but she had yet to meet the person who seriously
tempted her to yield to them. Not even Rod; no, least of all Rod.

"You are--happy?"

"Happy--and more. I'm content."

The reply was the truth, as she saw the truth. Perhaps it was
also the absolute truth; for when a woman has the best she has
ever actually possessed, and when she knows there is nowhere
else on earth for her, she is likely to be content. Their
destiny of subordination has made philosophers of women.

Drumley seemed to be debating how to disclose something he had
in mind. But after several glances at the sweet, delicate face
of the girl, he gave it over. In the subdued light from the
shaded candles on their table, she looked more child-like than
he had ever seen. Perhaps her big pale-blue hat and graceful
pale-blue summer dress had something to do with it, also. "How
old are you?" he asked abruptly.

"Nearly nineteen."

"I feel like saying, 'So much!'--and also 'So little!' How long
have you been married?"

"Why all these questions?" demanded she, smiling.

He colored with embarrassment. "I didn't mean to be
impertinent," said he.

"It isn't impertinence--is it?--to ask a woman how long she's
been married."

But she did not go on to tell him; instead, she pretended to
have her attention distracted by a very old man and a very young
girl behaving in most lover-like fashion, the girl outdoing the
man in enthusiastic determination to convince. She was elegantly
and badly dressed in new clothes--and she seemed as new to that
kind of clothes as those particular clothes were new to her.
After dinner they walked down through the Park by the way they
had come; it did not look like the same scene now, with the
moonlight upon it, with soft shadows everywhere and in every
shadow a pair of lovers. They had nearly reached the entrance
when Drumley said: "Let's sit on this bench here. I want to have
a serious talk with you."

Susan seated herself and waited. He lit a cigar with the
deliberation of one who is striving to gain time. The bench
happened to be one of those that are divided by iron arms into
individual seats. He sat with a compartment between them. The
moonbeams struck across his profile as he turned it toward her;
they shone full upon her face. He looked, hastily glanced away.
With a gruffness as if the evening mist had got into his throat
he said:

"Let's take another bench."

"Why?" objected she. "I like this beautiful light."

He rose. "Please let me have my way." And he led her to a bench
across which a tree threw a deep shadow; as they sat there,
neither could see the other's face except in dimmest outline.
After a brief silence he began:

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

She laughed happily.

"Above everything on earth?"

"Or in heaven."

"You'd do anything to have him succeed?"

"No one could prevent his succeeding. He's got it in him. It's
bound to come out."