She had learned to value every charm--hair, teeth, eyes, skin, figure, hands.She watched over them all, because she felt that when her day finally came--and come it would, she never allowed long to doubt--she must be ready to enter fully into her own.Her day! The day when fate should change the life her outward self would be compelled to live, would bring it into harmony with the life of inward self--the self she could control.
Katy had struck up a friendship at once profitable and sentimental with her stage manager.She often stayed out all night.On one of these nights Susan, alone in the tiny room and asleep, was roused by feeling hands upon her.She started up half awake and screamed.
"Sh!" came in Lange's voice."It's me."
Susan had latterly observed sly attempts on his part to make advances without his wife and daughter's suspecting; but she had thought her way of quietly ignoring was effective."You must go," she whispered."Mrs.Lange must have heard.""I had to come," said he hoarsely, a mere voice in the darkness."I can't hold out no longer without you, Lorna.""Go--go," urged Susan.
But it was too late.In the doorway, candle in hand, appeared Mrs.Lange.Despite her efforts at "dressiness" she was in her best hour homely and nearly shapeless.In night dress and released from corsets she was hideous and monstrous."Ithought so!" she shrieked."I thought so!"
"I heard a burglar, mother," whined Lange, an abject and guilty figure.
"Shut your mouth, you loafer!" shrieked Mrs.Lange.And she turned to Susan."You gutter hussy, get on your clothes and clear out!""But--Mrs.Lange----" began Susan.
"Clear out!" she shouted, opening the outer hall."Dress mighty damn quick and clear out!""Mother, you'll wake the people upstairs," pleaded Lange--and Susan had never before realized how afraid of his wife the little man was."For God's sake, listen to sense.""After I've thrown you--into the streets," cried his wife, beside herself with jealous fury."Get dressed, I tell you!"she shouted at Susan.
And the girl hurried into her clothes, making no further attempt to speak.She knew that to plead and to explain would be useless; even if Mrs.Lange believed, still she would drive from the house the temptation to her husband.Lange, in a quaking, cowardly whine, begged his wife to be sensible and believe his burglar story.But with each half-dozen words he uttered, she interrupted to hurl obscene epithets at him or at Susan.The tenants of the upstairs flats came down.She told her wrongs to a dozen half-clad men, women and children; they took her side at once, and with the women leading showered vile insults upon Susan.The uproar was rising, rising.Lange cowered in a corner, crying bitterly like a whipped child.
Susan, only partly dressed, caught up her hat and rushed into the hall.Several women struck at her as she passed.She stumbled on the stairs, almost fell headlong.With the most frightful words in tenement house vocabulary pursuing her she fled into the street, and did not pause until she was within a few yards of the Bowery.There she sat down on a doorstep and, half-crazed by the horror of her sudden downfall, laced her shoes and buttoned her blouse and put on her hat with fumbling, shaking fingers.It had all happened so quickly that she would have thought she was dreaming but for the cold night air and the dingy waste of the Bowery with the streetwalkers and drunken bums strolling along under the elevated tracks.She had trifled with the opportunity too long.It had flown in disgust, dislodging her as it took flight.If she would be over nice and critical, would hesitate to take the only upward path fate saw fit to offer, then--let her seek the bottom!
Susan peered down, and shuddered.
She went into the saloon at the corner, into the little back room.She poured down drink after drink of the frightful poison sold as whiskey with the permission of a government owned by every interest that can make big money out of a race of free men and so can afford to pay big bribes.It is characteristic of this poison of the saloon of the tenement quarter that it produces in anyone who drinks it a species of quick insanity, of immediate degeneration--a desire to commit crime, to do degraded acts.Within an hour of Susan's being thrown into the streets, no one would have recognized her.She had been drinking, had been treating the two faded but young and decently dressed streetwalkers who sat at another table.
The three, fired and maddened by the poison, were amusing themselves and two young men as recklessly intoxicated as they.
Susan, in an attitude she had seen often enough but had never dreamed of taking, was laughing wildly at a coarse song, was standing up, skirts caught high and body swaying in drunken rhythm as she led the chorus.
When the barkeeper announced closing time, one of the young men said to her:
"Which way?"
"To hell," laughed she."I've been thrown out everywhere else.
Want to go along?"
"I'll never desert a perfect lady," replied he.
