Tucker had to be content with a dark room on the fifth floor, opening on a damp air shaft whose odor was so foul that in comparison the Clinton Place shaft was as the pure breath of the open sky.For this shelter--more than one-half the free and proud citizens of prosperous America dwelling in cities occupy its like, or worse they paid three dollars a week--a dollar and a half apiece.They washed their underclothing at night, slept while it was drying.And Susan, who could not bring herself to imitate the other girls and wear a blouse of dark color that was not to be washed, rose at four to do the necessary ironing.They did their own cooking.It was no longer possible for Susan to buy quality and content herself with small quantity.However small the quantity of food she could get along on, it must be of poor quality--for good quality was beyond her means.
It maddened her to see the better class of working girls.
Their fairly good clothing, their evidences of some comfort at home, seemed to mock at her as a poor fool who was being beaten down because she had not wit enough to get on.She knew these girls were either supporting themselves in part by prostitution or were held up by their families, by the pooling of the earnings of several persons.Left to themselves, to their own earnings at work, they would be no better off than she, or at best so little better off that the difference was unimportant.
If to live decently in New York took an income of fifteen dollars a week, what did it matter whether one got five or ten or twelve? Any wages below fifteen meant a steady downward drag--meant exposure to the dirt and poison of poverty tenements--meant the steady decline of the power of resistance, the steady oozing away of self-respect, of the courage and hope that give the power to rise.To have less than the fifteen dollars absolutely necessary for decent surroundings, decent clothing, decent food--that meant one was drowning.What matter whether the death of the soul was quick, or slow, whether the waters of destruction were twenty feet deep or twenty thousand?
Mrs.Reardon, the servant woman on the top floor, was evicted and Susan and Mrs.Tucker took her in.She protested that she could sleep on the floor, that she had done so a large part of her life--that she preferred it to most beds.But Susan made her up a kind of bed in the corner.They would not let her pay anything.She had rheumatism horribly, some kind of lung trouble, and the almost universal and repulsive catarrh that preys upon working people.Her hair had dwindled to a meager wisp.This she wound into a hard little knot and fastened with an imitation tortoise-shell comb, huge, high, and broken, set with large pieces of glass cut like diamonds.Her teeth were all gone and her cheeks almost met in her mouth.
One day, when Mrs.Tucker and Mrs.Reardon were exchanging eulogies upon the goodness of God to them, Susan shocked them by harshly ordering them to be silent."If God hears you," she said, "He'll think you're mocking Him.Anyhow, I can't stand any more of it.Hereafter do your talking of that kind when I'm not here."Another day Mrs.Reardon told about her sister.The sister had worked in a factory where some sort of poison that had a rotting effect on the human body was used in the manufacture.
Like a series of others the sister caught the disease.But instead of rotting out a spot, a few fingers, or part of the face, it had eaten away the whole of her lower jaw so that she had to prepare her food for swallowing by first pressing it with her fingers against her upper teeth.Used as Susan was to hearing horrors in this region where disease and accident preyed upon every family, she fled from the room and walked shuddering about the streets--the streets with their incessant march past of blighted and blasted, of maimed and crippled and worm-eaten.Until that day Susan had been about as unobservant of the obvious things as is the rest of the race.On that day she for the first time noticed the crowd in the street, with mind alert to signs of the ravages of accident and disease.
Hardly a sound body, hardly one that was not piteously and hideously marked.
When she returned--and she did not stay out long--Mrs.Tucker was alone.Said she:
"Mrs.Reardon says the rotten jaw was sent on her sister as a punishment for marrying a Protestant, she being a Catholic.
How ignorant some people is! Of course, the good Lord sent the judgment on her for being a Catholic at all.""Mrs.Tucker," said Susan, "did you ever hear of Nero?""He burned up Rome--and he burned up the Christian martyrs,"said Mrs.Tucker."I had a good schooling.Besides, sermons is highly educating.""Well," said Susan, "if I had a choice of living under Nero or of living under that God you and Mrs.Reardon talk about, I'd take Nero and be thankful and happy."Mrs.Tucker would have fled if she could have afforded it.As it was all she ventured was a sigh and lips moving in prayer.
