These people who were always trying to do the poor good--they ought all to be suppressed! If someone could tell them how to cease to be poor, that would indeed be good.But such a thing would be impossible.In Sutherland, where the best off hadn't so painfully much more than the worst off, and where everybody but the idle and the drunken, and even they most of the time, had enough to eat, and a decent place to sleep, and some kind of Sunday clothes--in Sutherland the poverty was less than in Cincinnati, infinitely less than in this vast and incredibly rich New York where in certain districts wealth, enormous wealth, was piled up and up.So evidently the presence of riches did not help poverty but seemed to increase it.No, the disease was miserable, thought Susan.For most of the human race, disease and bad food and vile beds in dingy holes and days of fierce, poorly paid toil--that was the law of this hell of a world.And to escape from that hideous tyranny, you must be hard, you must trample, you must rob, you must cease to be human.
The apostle of discontent insisted that the law could be changed, that the tyranny could be abolished.She listened, but he did not convince her.He sounded vague and dreamy--as fantastically false in his new way as she had found the Sunday school books to be.She passed on.
She continued to pay out a cent each day for the newspaper.
She no longer bothered with the want ads.Pipe dreaming did not attract her; she was too fiercely bent upon escape, actual escape, to waste time in dreaming of ways of escape that she never could realize.She read the paper because, if she could not live in the world but was battered down in its dark and foul and crowded cellar, she at least wished to know what was going on up in the light and air.She found every day news of great doings, of wonderful rises, of rich rewards for industry and thrift, of abounding prosperity and of opportunity fairly forcing itself into acceptance.But all this applied only to the few so strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was rejected.For that mass, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor--squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter.And when she read one day--in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper--that the income of the average American family was less than twelve dollars a week--less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual--she realized that what she was seeing and living was not New York and Cincinnati, but was the common lot, country wide, no doubt world wide.
"_Must_ take hold!" her mind cried incessantly to her shrinking heart."Somehow--anyhow--take hold!--must--must--_must!_"Those tenement houses! Those tenement streets! Everywhere wandering through the crowds the lonely old women--holding up to the girls the mirror of time and saying: "Look at my misery! Look at my disease-blasted body.Look at my toil-bent form and toil-wrecked hands.Look at my masses of wrinkles, at my rags, at my leaky and rotten shoes.Think of my aloneness--not a friend--feared and cast off by my relatives because they are afraid they will have to give me food and lodgings.Look at me--think of my life--and know that I am _you_ as you will be a few years from now whether you work as a slave to the machine or as a slave to the passions of one or of many men.I am _you_.Not one in a hundred thousand escape my fate except by death.""Somehow--anyhow--I must take hold," cried Susan to her swooning heart.
When her capital had dwindled to three dollars Mrs.Tucker appeared.Her face was so beaming bright that Susan, despite her being clad in garments on which a pawnshop would advance nothing, fancied she had come with good news.
"Now that I'm rid of that there house," said she, "I'll begin to perk up.I ain't got nothing left to worry me.I'm ready for whatever blessings the dear Master'll provide.My pastor tells me I'm the finest example of Christian fortitude he ever Saw.But"--and Mrs.Tucker spoke with genuine modesty--"I tell him I don't deserve no credit for leaning on the Lord.If Ican trust Him in death, why not in life?"
"You've got a place? The church has----"
"Bless you, no," cried Mrs.Tucker."Would I burden 'em with myself, when there's so many that has to be looked after? No, I go direct to the Lord.""What are you going to do? What place have you got?""None as yet.But He'll provide something--something better'n I deserve."Susan had to turn away, to hide her pity--and her disappointment.Not only was she not to be helped, but also she must help another."You might get a job at the hat factory," said she.
Mrs.Tucker was delighted."I knew it!" she cried."Don't you see how He looks after me?"Susan persuaded Miss Tuohy to take Mrs.Tucker on.She could truthfully recommend the old woman as a hard worker.They moved into a room in a tenement in South Fifth Avenue.Susan read in the paper about a model tenement and went to try for what was described as real luxury in comfort and cleanliness.
She found that sort of tenements filled with middle-class families on their way down in the world and making their last stand against rising rents and rising prices.The model tenement rents were far, far beyond her ability to pay.She might as well think of moving to the Waldorf.She and Mrs.
