The Cassatts were an example of how much the people who live in the sheltered and more or less sunny nooks owe to their shelter and how little to their own boasted superiority of mind and soul.They had been a high class artisan family until a few months before.The hard times struck them a series of quick, savage blows, such as are commonplace enough under our social system, intricate because a crude jumble of makeshifts, and easily disordered because intricate.They were swept without a breathing pause down to the bottom.Those who have always been accustomed to prosperity have no reserve of experience or courage to enable them to recuperate from sudden and extreme adversity.In an amazingly short time the Cassatts had become demoralized--a familiar illustration of how civilization is merely a wafer-thin veneer over most human beings as yet.Over how many is it more? They fought after a fashion; they fought valiantly.But how would it have been possible not steadily to yield ground against such a pitiless, powerful foe as poverty?
The man had taken to drink, to blunt outraged self-respect and to numb his despair before the spectacle of his family's downfall.Mrs.Cassatt was as poor a manager as the average woman in whatever walk of life, thanks to the habit of educating woman in the most slipshod fashion, if at all, in any other part of the business but sex-trickery.Thus she was helpless before the tenement conditions.She gave up, went soddenly about in rags with an incredibly greasy and usually dangling tail of hair.
"Why don't you tie up that tail, ma?" said the son Dan, who had ideas about neatness.
"What's the use?" said Mrs.Cassatt."What's the use of _anything_?""Ma don't want to look stylish and stuck up," said the daughter.
Mrs.Cassatt's haunting terror was lest someone who had known them in the days of their prosperity with a decently furnished little house of their own should run into one of the family now.
Kate, the sixteen-year-old had a place as saleslady in a big shop in Fifth, Street; her six dollars a week was the family's entire steady income.She had formerly possessed a good deal of finery for a girl in her position, though really not much more than the daughter of the average prosperous artisan or small shopkeeper expects, and is expected, to have.Being at the shop where finery was all the talk and sight and thought from opening until closing had developed in her a greedy taste for luxury.She pilfered from the stocks of goods within her reach and exchanged her stealings for the stealings of girls who happened to be able to get things more to her liking or need.
But now that the family savings--bank account was exhausted, all these pilferings had to go at once to the pawnshop.Kate grew more and more ill-tempered as the family sank.Formerly she had been noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased with a careless compliment from no matter whom--a jocose, half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart seat quite as satisfactory as anybody.But poverty was bringing out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish instincts--those primal instincts of human nature that civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for example, prehensile toes and a covering of hair.
"Well, I for one don't have to stay in this slop barrel," Kate was always saying."Some fine morning I'll turn up missing--and you'll see me in my own turnout."She was torturing her mother and father with the dread that she would leave the family in the lurch and enter a house of prostitution.She recounted with the utmost detail how the madam of a house in Longworth Street came from time to time to her counter in the perfumery and soap department--and urged her to "stop making a fool of yourself and come get good money for your looks before you lose 'em drudging behind a counter." The idea grew less abhorrent, took on allurement as the degradation of tenement life ate out respect for conventional restraints--for modesty, for virtue, for cleanness of speech, and the rest.More and more boldly Kate was announcing that she wasn't going to be a fool much longer.
Dan, the fourteen-year-old boy, had attracted the attention of what Cassatt called "a fancy lady" who lived two floors below them.She made sometimes as much as nine or ten dollars a week and slept all day or lounged comfortably about in showy, tawdry stuff that in those surroundings seemed elegant luxury.She was caught by the boy's young beauty and strength, and was rapidly training him in every vice and was fitting him to become a professional seducer and "lover."Said Mrs.Cassatt in one of her noisy wailing appeals to Dan:
"You better keep away from that there soiled dove.They tell me she's a thief--has done time--has robbed drunken men in dark hallways."Dan laughed impudently."She's a cute one.What diff does it make how she gets the goods as long as she gets it?"Mrs.Cassatt confided to everybody that she was afraid the woman would make a thief of her boy--and there was no disputing the justice of her forebodings.
