"No--because I don't intend to.I'm doing the best I can.""You think I'm a good thing.You think I'll take anything off you, because I'm stuck on you--and appreciate that you ain't on the same level with the rest of these heifers.Well--I'll not let any woman con me.I never have.I never will.And I'll make you realize that you're not square with me.I'll let you get a taste of life as it is when a girl hasn't got a friend with a pull.""As you please," said Susan indifferently."I don't in the least care what happens to me.""We'll see about that," cried he, enraged."I'll give you a week to brace up in."The look he shot at her by way of finish to his sentence was menacing enough.But she was not disturbed; these signs of anger tended to confirm her in her sense of security from him.
For it was wholly unlike the Freddie Palmer the rest of the world knew, to act in this irresolute and stormy way.She knew that Palmer, in his fashion, cared for her--better still, liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to show--and to develop--the aspiring side of his interesting, unusual nature for her benefit.
A week passed, during which she did not see him.But she heard that he was losing on both the cards and the horses and was drinking wildly.A week--ten days--then----One night, as she came out of a saloon a block or so down Seventh Avenue from Forty-second, a fly cop seized her by the arm.
"Come along," said he roughly."You're drinking and soliciting.I've got to clear the streets of some of these tarts.It's got so decent people can't move without falling over 'em."Susan had not lived in the tenement districts where the ignorance and the helplessness and the lack of a voice that can make itself heard among the ruling classes make the sway of the police absolute and therefore tyrannical--she had not lived there without getting something of that dread and horror of the police which to people of the upper classes seems childish or evidence of secret criminal hankerings.And this nervousness had latterly been increased to terror by what she had learned from her fellow-outcasts--the hideous tales of oppression, of robbery, of bodily and moral degradation.But all this terror had been purely fanciful, as any emotion not of experience proves to be when experience evokes the reality.At that touch, at the sound of those rough words--at that _reality_ of the terror she had imagined from the days when she went to work at Matson's and to live with the Brashears, she straightway lost consciousness.When her senses returned she was in a cell, lying on a wooden bench.
There must have been some sort of wild struggle; for her clothes were muddy, her hat was crushed into shapelessness, her veil was so torn that she had difficulty in arranging it to act as any sort of concealment.Though she had no mirror at which to discover the consolation, she need have had no fear of being recognized, so distorted were all her features by the frightful paroxysms of grief that swept and ravaged her body that night.
She fainted again when they led her out to put her in the wagon.
She fainted a third time when she heard her name--"Queenie Brown"--bellowed out by the court officer.They shook her into consciousness, led her to the court-room.She was conscious of a stifling heat, of a curious crowd staring at her with eyes which seemed to bore red hot holes into her flesh.As she stood before the judge, with head limp upon her bosom, she heard in her ear a rough voice bawling, "You're discharged.
The judge says don't come here again." And she was pushed through an iron gate.She walked unsteadily up the aisle, between two masses of those burning-eyed human monsters.She felt the cold outside air like a vast drench of icy water flung upon her.If it had been raining, she might have gone toward the river.But than{sic} that day New York had never been more radiantly the City of the Sun.How she got home she never knew, but late in the afternoon she realized that she was in her own room.
Hour after hour she lay upon the bed, body and mind inert.
Helpless--no escape--no courage to live--yet no wish to die.
How much longer would it last? Surely the waking from this dream must come soon.
About noon the next day Freddie came."I let you off easy,"said he, sitting on the bed upon which she was lying dressed as when she came in the day before."Have you been drinking again?""No," she muttered.
"Well--don't.Next time, a week on the Island....Did you hear?""Yes."
"Don't turn me against you.I'd hate to have to make an awful example of you.""I must drink," she repeated in the same stolid way.
He abruptly but without shock lifted her to a sitting position.
His arm held her body up; her head was thrown back and her face was looking calmly at him.She realized that he had been drinking--drinking hard.Her eyes met his terrible eyes without flinching.He kissed her full upon the lips.With her open palm she struck him across the cheek, bringing the red fierily to its smooth fair surface.The devil leaped into his eyes, the devil of cruelty and lust.He smiled softly and wickedly."I see you've forgotten the lesson I gave you three months ago.You've got to be taught to be afraid all over again.""I _am_ not afraid," said she."I _was_ not afraid.You can't make me afraid.""We'll see," murmured he.And his fingers began to caress her round smooth throat.
"If you ever strike me again," she said quietly, "I'll kill you."His eyes flinched for an instant--long enough to let her know his innermost secret."I want you--I want _you_--damn you," he said, between his clinched teeth."You're the first one Icouldn't get.There's something in you I can't get!""That's _me_," she replied.
"You hate me, don't you?"
"No."
"Then you love me?"
"No.I care nothing about you."
He let her drop back to the bed, went to the window, stood looking out moodily.After a while he said without turning:
"My mother kept a book shop--on the lower East Side.She brought me up at home.At home!" And he laughed sardonically.
