第176章

"Anyhow, I reckon Mrs.Reardon's taking-off was a mercy.""She's better dead," said Susan.She had abhorred the old woman, even as she pitied and sheltered her.She had a way of fawning and cringing and flattering--no doubt in well meaning attempt to show gratitude--but it was unendurable to Susan.

And now that she was dead and gone, there was no call for further pretenses.

"You ain't going right away?" said Mrs.Tucker.

"Yes," said Susan.

"You ought to stay to supper."

Supper! That revolting food! "No, I must go right away,"replied Susan.

"Well, you'll come to see me.And maybe you'll be back with us.You might go farther and do worse.On my way from the morgue I dropped in to see a lady friend on the East Side.Iguess the good Lord has abandoned the East Side, there being nothing there but Catholics and Jews, and no true religion.

It's dreadful the way things is over there--the girls are taking to the streets in droves.My lady friend was telling me that some of the mothers is sending their little girls out streetwalking, and some's even taking out them that's too young to be trusted to go alone.And no money in it, at that.And food and clothing prices going up and up.Meat and vegetables two and three times what they was a few years ago.And rents!"Mrs.Tucker threw up her hands.

"I must be going," said Susan."Good-by."

She put out her hand, but Mrs.Tucker insisted on kissing her.

She crossed Washington Square, beautiful in the soft evening light, and went up Fifth Avenue.She felt that she was breathing the air of a different world as she walked along the broad clean sidewalk with the handsome old houses on either side, with carriages and automobiles speeding past, with clean, happy-faced, well dressed human beings in sight everywhere.It was like coming out of the dank darkness of Dismal Swamp into smiling fields with a pure, star-spangled sky above.She was free--free! It might be for but a moment; still it was freedom, infinitely sweet because of past slavery and because of the fear of slavery closing in again.She had abandoned the old toilet articles.She had only the clothes she was wearing, the thirty-one dollars divided between her stockings, and the two-dollar bill stuffed into the palm of her left glove.

She had walked but a few hundred feet.She had advanced into a region no more prosperous to the eye than that she had been working in every day.Yet she had changed her world--because she had changed her point of view.The strata that form society lie in roughly parallel lines one above the other.The flow of all forms of the currents of life is horizontally along these strata, never vertically from one stratum to another.

These strata, lying apparently in contact, one upon another, are in fact abysmally separated.There is not--and in the nature of things never can be any genuine human sympathy between any two strata.We _sympathize_ in our own stratum, or class; toward other strata--other classes--our attitude is necessarily a looking up or a looking down.Susan, a bit of flotsam, ascending, descending, ascending across the social layers--belonging nowhere having attachments, not sympathies, a real settled lot nowhere--Susan was once more upward bound.

At the corner of Fourteenth Street there was a shop with large mirrors in the show windows.She paused to examine herself.

She found she had no reason to be disturbed about her appearance.Her dress and hat looked well; her hair was satisfactory; the sharp air had brought some life to the pallor of her cheeks, and the release from the slums had restored some of the light to her eyes."Why did I stay there so long?" she demanded of herself.Then, "How have I suddenly got the courage to leave?" She had no answer to either question.Nor did she care for an answer.She was not even especially interested in what was about to happen to her.

The moment she found herself above Twenty-third Street and in the old familiar surroundings, she felt an irresistible longing to hear about Rod Spenser.She was like one who has been on a far journey, leaving behind him everything that has been life to him; he dismisses it all because he must, until he finds himself again in his own country, in his old surroundings.

She went into the Hoffman House and at the public telephone got the _Herald_ office."Is Mr.Drumley there?""No," was the reply."He's gone to Europe."

"Did Mr.Spenser go with him?"

"Mr.Spenser isn't here--hasn't been for a long time.

He's abroad too.Who is this?"

"Thank you," said Susan, hanging up the receiver.

She drew a deep breath of relief.

She left the hotel by the women's entrance in Broadway.It was six o'clock.The sky was clear--a typical New York sky with air that intoxicated blowing from it--air of the sea--air of the depths of heaven.A crescent moon glittered above the Diana on the Garden tower.It was Saturday night and Broadway was thronged--with men eager to spend in pleasure part of the week's wages or salary they had just drawn; with women sparkling-eyed and odorous of perfumes and eager to help the men.The air was sharp--was the ocean air of New York at its delicious best.And the slim, slightly stooped girl with the earnest violet-gray eyes and the sad bitter mouth from whose lips the once brilliant color had now fled was ready for whatever might come.She paused at the corner, and gazed up brilliantly lighted Broadway.

"Now!" she said half aloud and, like an expert swimmer adventuring the rapids, she advanced into the swift-moving crowd of the highway of New York's gayety.