"Oh, yes," said the janitress."She had the third floor back, and was always kicking because Mrs.Pfister kept a guinea pig for her rheumatism and the smell came through.""Has she gone?" asked Susan.
"Couple of weeks."
"Where?"
The janitress shrugged her shoulders.The other women shrugged their shoulders.Said the janitress:
"Her feller stopped coming.The cancer got awful bad.I've saw a good many--they're quite plentiful down this way.Inever see a worse'n hers.She didn't have no money.Up to the hospital they tried a new cure on her that made her gallopin' worse.The day before I was going to have to go to work and put her out--she left.""Can't you give me any idea?" urged Susan.
"She didn't take her things," said the janitress meaningly.
"Not a stitch."
"The--the river?"
The janitress shrugged her shoulders."She always said she would, and I guess----"Again the fat, stooped shoulders lifted and lowered."She was most crazy with pain."There was a moment's silence, then Susan murmured, "Thank you," and went back to the hall.The house was exhaling a frightful stench--the odor of cheap kerosene, of things that passed there for food, of animals human and lower, of death and decay.On her way out she dropped a dollar into the lap of the little girl with the mange.A parrot was shrieking from an upper window.On the topmost fire escape was a row of geraniums blooming sturdily.Her taxicab had moved up the street, pushed out of place by a hearse--a white hearse, with polished mountings, the horses caparisoned in white netting, and tossing white plumes.A baby's funeral--this mockery of a ride in state after a brief life of squalor.It was summer, and the babies were dying like lambs in the shambles.In winter the grown people were slaughtered; in summer the children.Across the street, a few doors up, the city dead wagon was taking away another body--in a plain pine box--to the Potter's Field where find their way for the final rest one in every ten of the people of the rich and splendid city of New York.
Susan hurried into her cab."Drive fast," she said.
When she came back to sense of her surroundings she was flying up wide and airy Fifth Avenue with gorgeous sunshine bathing its palaces, with wealth and fashion and ease all about her.
Her dear City of the Sun! But it hurt her now, was hateful to look upon.She closed her eyes; her life in the slums, her life when she was sharing the lot that is really the lot of the human race as a race, passed before her--its sights and sounds and odors, its hideous heat, its still more hideous cold, its contacts and associations, its dirt and disease and degradation.And through the roar of the city there came to her a sound, faint yet intense--like the still, small voice the prophet heard--but not the voice of God, rather the voice of the multitude of aching hearts, aching in hopeless poverty--hearts of men, of women, of children----The children! The multitudes of children with hearts that no sooner begin to beat than they begin to ache.She opened her eyes to shut out these sights and that sound of heartache.
She gazed round, drew a long breath of relief.She had almost been afraid to look round lest she should find that her escape had been only a dream.And now the road she had chosen--or, rather, the only road she could take--the road with Freddie Palmer--seemed attractive, even dazzling.What she could not like, she would ignore--and how easily she, after her experience, could do that! What she could not ignore she would tolerate would compel herself to like.
Poor Clara!--Happy Clara!--better off in the dregs of the river than she had ever been in the dregs of New York.She shuddered.Then, as so often, the sense of the grotesque thrust in, as out of place as jester in cap and bells at a bier--and she smiled sardonically."Why," thought she, "in being squeamish about Freddie I'm showing that I'm more respectable than the respectable women.There's hardly one of them that doesn't swallow worse doses with less excuse or no excuse at all--and without so much as a wry face."
