"You'll try living with us?"
"If you're quite sure--did you talk to your mother?""Mother'll be crazy about you.She wants anything that'll make me more contented.Oh, I do get so lonesome!"Mrs.Brashear, a spare woman, much bent by monotonous work--which, however, had not bent her courage or her cheerfulness--made Susan feel at home immediately in the little flat.The tenement was of rather a superior class.But to Susan it seemed full of noisome smells, and she was offended by the halls littered with evidences of the uncleanness of the tenants.
She did not then realize that the apparent superior cleanness and neatness of the better-off classes was really in large part only affected, that their secluded back doors and back ways gave them opportunity to hide their uncivilized habits from the world that saw only the front.However, once inside the Brashear flat, she had an instant rise of spirits.
"Isn't this nice?" exclaimed she as Etta showed her, at a glance from the sitting-room, the five small but scrupulously clean rooms."I'll like it here!"Etta reddened, glanced at her for signs of mockery, saw that she was in earnest."I'm afraid it's better to look at than to live in," she began, then decided against saying anything discouraging.
"It seems cramped to us," said she, "after the house we had till a couple of years ago.I guess we'll make out, somehow."The family paid twenty dollars a month for the flat.The restaurant earned twelve to fifteen a week; and the son, Ashbel, stocky, powerful and stupid, had a steady job as porter at ten a week.He gave his mother seven, as he had a room to himself and an enormous appetite.He talked of getting married; if he did marry, the family finances would be in disorder.But his girl had high ideas, being the daughter of a grocer who fancied himself still an independent merchant though he was in fact the even more poorly paid selling agent of the various food products trusts.She had fixed twenty a week as the least on which she would marry; his prospects of any such raise were--luckily for his family--extremely remote; for he had nothing but physical strength to sell, and the price of physical strength alone was going down, under immigrant competition, not only in actual wages like any other form of wage labor, but also in nominal wages.
Altogether, the Brashears were in excellent shape for a tenement family, were better off than upwards of ninety per cent of the families of prosperous and typical Cincinnati.While it was true that old Tom Brashear drank, it was also true that he carefully limited himself to two dollars a week.While it was true that he could not work at his trade and apparently did little but sit round and talk--usually high above his audience--nevertheless he was the actual head of the family and its chief bread-winner.It was his savings that were invested in the restaurant; he bought the supplies and was shrewd and intelligent about that vitally important department of the business--the department whose mismanagement in domestic economy is, next to drink, the main cause of failure and pauperism, of sickness, of premature disability, of those profound discouragements that lead to despair.Also, old Brashear had the sagacity and the nagging habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the mark.He had ideas--practical ideas as well as ideals--far above his station.But for him the housekeeping would have been in the familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the family would have been neat only on Sundays, and only on the surface then.Because he had the habit of speaking of himself as useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of him in that way.Although intelligence, indeed, virtue of every kind, is expected of tenement house people--and is needed by them beyond any other condition of humanity--they are unfortunately merely human, are tainted of all human weaknesses.
They lack, for instance, discrimination.So, it never occurred to them that Tom Brashear was the sole reason why the Brashears lived better than any of the other families and yielded less to the ferocious and incessant downward pressure.
But for one thing the Brashears would have been going up in the world.That thing was old Tom's honesty.The restaurant gave good food and honest measure.Therefore, the margin of profit was narrow--too narrow.He knew what was the matter.He mocked at himself for being "such a weak fool" when everybody else with the opportunity and the intelligence was getting on by yielding to the compulsion of the iron rule of dishonesty in business.
But he remained honest--therefore, remained in the working class, instead of rising among its exploiters.
"If I didn't drink, I'd kill myself," said old Tom to Susan, when he came to know her well and to feel that from her he could get not the mere blind admiration the family gave him but understanding and sympathy."Whenever anybody in the working class has any imagination," he explained, "he either kicks his way out of it into capitalist or into criminal--or else he takes to drink.I ain't mean enough to be either a capitalist or a criminal.So, I've got to drink."Susan only too soon began to appreciate from her own experience what he meant.
In the first few days the novelty pleased her, made her think she was going to be contented.The new friends and acquaintances, different from any she had known, the new sights, the new way of living--all this interested her, even when it shocked one or many of her senses and sensibilities.But the novelty of folding and pasting boxes, of the queer new kind of girls who worked with her, hardly survived into the second week.
