THE Susan Lenox who left Delancey Street at half past two that afternoon to call upon Robert Brent was not the Susan Lenox who returned to Delancey Street at half-past five.A man is wandering, lost in a cave, is groping this way and that in absolute darkness, with flagging hope and fainting strength--has reached the point where he wonders at his own folly in keeping on moving--is persuading himself that the sensible thing would be to lie down and give up.He sees a gleam of light.Is it a reality? Is it an illusion--one more of the illusions that have lured him on and on? He does not know; but instantly a fire sweeps through him, warming his dying strength into vigor.
So it was with Susan.
The pariah class--the real pariah class--does not consist of merely the women formally put beyond the pale for violations of conventional morality and the men with the brand of thief or gambler upon them.Our social, our industrial system has made it far vaster.It includes almost the whole population--all those who sell body or brain or soul in an uncertain market for uncertain hire, to gain the day's food and clothing, the night's shelter.This vast mass floats hither and yon on the tides and currents of destiny.Now it halts, resting sluggishly in a dead calm; again it moves, sometimes slowly, sometimes under the lash of tempest.But it is ever the same vast inertia, with no particle of it possessing an aim beyond keeping afloat and alive.Susan had been an atom, a spray of weed, in this Sargasso Sea.
If you observe a huge, unwieldy crowd so closely packed that nothing can be done with it and it can do nothing with itself, you will note three different types.There are the entirely inert--and they make up most of the crowd.They do not resist; they helplessly move this way and that as the chance waves of motion prompt.Of this type is the overwhelming majority of the human race.Here and there in the mass you will see examples of a second type.These are individuals who are restive and resentful under the sense of helplessness and impotence.They struggle now gently, now furiously.They thrust backward or forward or to one side.They thresh about.
But nothing comes of their efforts beyond a brief agitation, soon dying away in ripples.The inertia of the mass and their own lack of purpose conquer them.Occasionally one of these grows so angry and so violent that the surrounding inertia quickens into purpose--the purpose of making an end of this agitation which is serving only to increase the general discomfort.And the agitator is trampled down, disappears, perhaps silently, perhaps with groan or shriek.Continue to look at this crowd, so pitiful, so terrible, such a melancholy waste of incalculable power--continue to observe and you may chance upon an example of the third type.You are likely at first to confuse the third type with the second, for they seem to be much alike.Here and there, of the resentful strugglers, will be one whose resentment is intelligent.He struggles, but it is not aimless struggle.He has seen or suspected in a definite direction a point where he would be more or less free, perhaps entirely free.He realizes how he is hemmed in, realizes how difficult, how dangerous, will be his endeavor to get to that point.And he proceeds to try to minimize or overcome the difficulties, the dangers.He struggles now gently, now earnestly, now violently--but always toward his fixed objective.He is driven back, to one side, is almost overwhelmed.He causes commotions that threaten to engulf him, and must pause or retreat until they have calmed.
You may have to watch him long before you discover that, where other strugglers have been aimless, he aims and resolves.And little by little he gains, makes progress toward his goal--and once in a long while one such reaches that goal.It is triumph, success.
Susan, young, inexperienced, dazed; now too despondent, now too hopeful; now too gentle and again too infuriated--Susan had been alternating between inertia and purposeless struggle.
Brent had given her the thing she lacked--had given her a definite, concrete, tangible purpose.He had shown her the place where, if she should arrive, she might be free of that hideous slavery of the miserable mass; and he had inspired her with the hope that she could reach it.
And that was the Susan Lenox who came back to the little room in Delancey Street at half-past five.
Curiously, while she was thinking much about Brent, she was thinking even more about Burlingham--about their long talks on the show boat and in their wanderings in Louisville and Cincinnati.His philosophy, his teachings--the wisdom he had, but was unable to apply--began to come back to her.It was not strange that she should remember it, for she had admired him intensely and had listened to his every word, and she was then at the time when the memory takes its clearest and strongest impressions.The strangeness lay in the suddenness with which Burlingham, so long dead, suddenly came to life, changed from a sad and tender memory to a vivid possibility, advising her, helping her, urging her on.
