To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as savagery is to misuse the word.Every transitional stage is accompanied by a disintegration.Savagery was a settled state in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed position, settled duties and rights.With the downfall of savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with men and men with women, became unsettled.Such social systems as the world has known since have all been makeshift and temporary--like our social systems of today, like the moral and extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in the interval.In the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen thousand years our present time is but a brief second.In that second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift organization which long served the working multitudes fairly well.The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens imposed upon them by the classes.And in that particular part of the human race en route into which fate had flung Susan Lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were prevailing.A large part of the population lived off the unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling classes.And these petty parasites imitated the big parasites in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains.To have a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle Fifth Avenue; and the notions of a "good time" in vogue in the two opposite quarters differed in degree rather than in kind.
Nothing to think about but the appetites and their vices.
Nothing to hope for but the next carouse.Susan had brought down with her from above one desire unknown to her associates and neighbors--the desire to forget.If she could only forget!
If the poison would not wear off at times!
She could not quite forget.And to be unable to forget is to remember--and to remember is to long--and to long is to hope.
Several times she heard of Freddie Palmer.Twice she chanced upon his name in the newspaper--an incidental reference to him in connection with local politics.The other times were when men talking together in the drinking places frequented by both sexes spoke of him as a minor power in the organization.Each time she got a sense of her remoteness, of her security.Once she passed in Grand Street a detective she had often seen with him in Considine's at Broadway and Forty-second.The "bull"looked sharply at her.Her heart stood still.But he went on without recognizing her.The sharp glance had been simply that official expression of see-all and know-all which is mere formality, part of the official livery, otherwise meaningless.
However, it is not to that detective's discredit that he failed to recognize her.She had adapted herself to her changed surroundings.
Because she was of a different and higher class, and because she picked and chose her company, even when drink had beclouded her senses and instinct alone remained on drowsy guard, she prospered despite her indifference.For that region had its aristocracy of rich merchants, tenement-owners, politicians whose sons, close imitators of the uptown aristocracies in manners and dress, spent money freely in the amusements that attract nearly all young men everywhere.Susan made almost as much as she could have made in the more renowned quarters of the town.And presently she was able to move into a tenement which, except for two workingmen's families of a better class, was given over entirely to fast women.It was much better kept, much cleaner, much better furnished than the tenements for workers chiefly; they could not afford decencies, much less luxuries.All that sort of thing was, for the neighborhood, concentrated in the saloons, the dance halls, the fast houses and the fast flats.
Her walks in Grand Street and the Bowery, repelling and capricious though she was with her alternating moods of cold moroseness and sardonic and mocking gayety, were bringing her in a good sum of money for that region.Sometimes as much as twenty dollars a week, rarely less than twelve or fifteen.And despite her drinking and her freehandedness with her fellow-professionals less fortunate and with the street beggars and for tenement charities, she had in her stockings a capital of thirty-one dollars.
She avoided the tough places, the hang-outs of the gangs.She rarely went alone into the streets at night--and the afternoons were, luckily, best for business as well as for safety.She made no friends and therefore no enemies.Without meaning to do so and without realizing that she did so, she held herself aloof without haughtiness through sense of loneliness, not at all through sense of superiority.Had it not been for her scarlet lips, a far more marked sign in that region than anywhere uptown, she would have passed in the street for a more or less respectable woman--not thoroughly respectable; she was too well dressed, too intelligently cared for to seem the good working girl.
On one of the few nights when she lingered in the little back room of the saloon a few doors away at the corner, as she entered the dark passageway of the tenement, strong fingers closed upon her throat and she was borne to the floor.She knew at once that she was in the clutch of one of those terrors of tenement fast women, the lobbygows--men who live by lying in wait in the darkness to seize and rob the lonely, friendless fast woman.She struggled--and she was anything but weak.But not a sound could escape from her tight-pressed throat.Soon she became unconscious.