One of the workingmen, returning drunk from the meeting of the union, in the corner saloon, stumbled over her, gave her a kick in his anger.This roused her; she uttered a faint cry.
"Thought it was a man," mumbled he, dragging her to a sitting position.He struck a match."Oh--it's you! Don't make any noise.If my old woman came out, she'd kill us both.""Never mind me," said Susan."I was only stunned.""Oh, I thought it was the booze.They say you hit it something fierce.""No--a lobbygow." And she felt for her stockings.They were torn away from her garters.Her bosom also was bare, for the lobbygow had searched there, also.
"How much did he get?"
"About thirty-five."
"The hell he did! Want me to call a cop?"
"No," replied Susan, who was on her feet again."What's the use?""Those damn cops!" cursed the workingman."They'd probably pinch you--or both of us.Ten to one the lobbygows divide with them.""I didn't mean that," said Susan.The police were most friendly and most kind to her.She was understanding the ways of the world better now, and appreciated that the police themselves were part of the same vast system of tyranny and robbery that was compelling her.The police made her pay because they dared not refuse to be collectors.They bound whom the mysterious invisible power compelled them to bind;they loosed whom that same power bade them loose.She had no quarrel with the police, who protected her from far worse oppressions and oppressors than that to which they subjected her.And if they tolerated lobbygows and divided with them, it was because the overshadowing power ordained it so.
"Needn't be afraid I'll blow to the cop," said the drunken artisan."You can damn the cops all you please to me.They make New York worse than Russia.""I guess they do the best they can--like everybody else," said the girl wearily.
"I'll help you upstairs."
"No, thank you," said she.Not that she did not need help; but she wished no disagreeable scene with the workingman's wife who might open the door as they passed his family's flat.
She went upstairs, the man waiting below until she should be safe--and out of the way.She staggered into her room, tottered to the bed, fell upon it.A girl named Clara, who lived across the hall, was sitting in a rocking-chair in a nightgown, reading a Bertha Clay novel and smoking a cigarette.
She glanced up, was arrested by the strange look in Susan's eyes.
"Hello--been hitting the pipe, I see," said she."Down in Gussie's room?""No.A lobbygow," said Susan.
"Did he get much?"
"About thirty-five."
"The----!" cried Clara."I'll bet it was Gussie's fellow.
I've suspected him.Him and her stay in, hitting the pipe all the time.That costs money, and she hasn't been out for Idon't know how long.Let's go down there and raise hell.""What's the use?" said Susan.
"You ought to 'a' put it in the savings bank.That's what Ido--when I have anything.Then, when I'm robbed, they only get what I've just made.Last time, they didn't get nothing--but me." And she laughed.Her teeth were good in front, but out on one side and beginning to be discolored on the other."How long had you been saving?""Nearly six months."
"Gee! _Isn't_ that hell!" Presently she laughed."Six months'
work and only thirty-five to show for it.Guess you're about as poor at hiving it up as I am.I give it to that loafer Ilive with.You give it away to anybody that wants a stake.
Well--what's the diff? It all goes."
"Give me a cigarette," said Susan, sitting up and inspecting the bruises on her bosom and legs."And get that bottle of whiskey from under the soiled clothes in the bottom of the washstand.""It _is_ something to celebrate, isn't it?" said Clara."My fellow's gone to his club tonight, so I didn't go out.I never do any more, unless he's there to hang round and see that Iain't done up.You'll have to get a fellow.You'll have to come to it, as I'm always telling you.They're expensive, but they're company--anybody you can count on for shining up, even if it is for what they can get out of you, is better than not having nobody nowhere.And they keep off bums and lobbygows and scare the bilkers into coughing up.""Not for me," replied Susan.
The greater the catastrophe, the longer the time before it is fully realized.Susan's loss of the money that represented so much of savage if momentary horror, and so much of unconscious hope this calamity did not overwhelm her for several days.
Then she yielded for the first time to the lure of opium.She had listened longingly to the descriptions of the delights as girls and men told; for practically all of them smoked--or took cocaine.But to Clara's or Gussie's invitations to join the happy band of dreamers, she had always replied, "Not yet.I'm saving that." Now, however, she felt that the time had come.
Hope in this world she had none.Before the black adventure, why not try the world of blissful unreality to which it gave entrance? Why leave life until she had exhausted all it put within her reach?
She went to Gussie's room at midnight and flung herself down in a wrapper upon a couch opposite a sallow, delicate young man.
His great dark eyes were gazing unseeingly at her, were perhaps using her as an outline sketch from which his imagination could picture a beauty of loveliness beyond human.Gussie taught her how to prepare the little ball of opium, how to put it on the pipe and draw in its fumes.Her system was so well prepared for it by the poisons she had drunk that she had satisfactory results from the outset.And she entered upon the happiest period of her life thus far.All the hideousness of her profession disappeared under the gorgeous draperies of the imagination.Opium's magic transformed the vile, the obscene, into the lofty, the romantic, the exalted.The world she had been accustomed to regard as real ceased to be even the blur the poisonous liquors had made of it, became a vague, distant thing seen in a dream.Her opium world became the vivid reality.
