第102章

And merely to keep herself in underclothes that were at least not in tatters she had to spend every cent over and above her board.If she had had to pay carfare ten cents a day, sixty cents a week!--as did many of the girls who lived at home, she would have been ruined.She understood now why every girl without a family back of her, and without good prospect of marriage, was revolving the idea of becoming a streetwalker--not as a hope, but as a fear.As she learned to observe more closely, she found good reasons for suspecting that from time to time the girls who became too hard pressed relieved the tension by taking to the streets on Saturday and Sunday nights.She read in the _Commercial_ one noon--Mr.Matson sometimes left his paper where she could glance through it--she read an article on working girls, how they were seduced to lives of shame--by love of _finery_! Then she read that those who did not fall were restrained by religion and innate purity.There she laughed--bitterly.Fear of disease, fear of maternity, yes.But where was this religion? Who but the dullest fools in the throes of that bare and tortured life ever thought of God? As for the purity--what about the obscene talk that made her shudder because of its sheer filthy stupidity?--what about the frank shamelessness of the efforts to lure their "steadies" into speedy matrimony by using every charm of caress and of person to inflame passion without satisfying it? She had thought she knew about the relations of the sexes when she came to live and work in that tenement quarter.Soon her knowledge had seemed ignorance beside the knowledge of the very babies.

It was a sad, sad puzzle.If one ought to be good--chaste and clean in mind and body--then, why was there the most tremendous pressure on all but a few to make them as foul as the surroundings in which they were compelled to live? If it was wiser to be good, then why were most people imprisoned in a life from which they could escape only by being bad? What was this thing comfortable people had set up as good, anyhow--and what was bad? She found no answer.How could God condemn anyone for anything they did in the torments of the hell that life revealed itself to her as being, after a few weeks of its moral, mental and physical horrors? Etta's father was right; those who realized what life really was and what it might be, those who were sensitive took to drink or went to pieces some other way, if they were gentle, and if they were cruel, committed any brutality, any crime to try to escape.

In former days Susan thought well of charity, as she had been taught.Old Tom Brashear gave her a different point of view.One day he insulted and drove from the tenement some pious charitable people who had come down from the fashionable hilltop to be good and gracious to their "less fashionable fellow-beings." After they had gone he explained his harshness to Susan:

"That's the only way you can make them slickedup brutes feel,"said he, "they're so thick in the hide and satisfied with themselves.What do they come here for! To do good! Yes--to themselves.To make themselves feel how generous and sweet they was.Well, they'd better go home and read their Russia-leather covered Bibles.They'd find out that when God wanted to really do something for man, he didn't have himself created a king, or a plutocrat, or a fat, slimy church deacon in a fashionable church.No, he had himself born a bastard in a manger."Susan shivered, for the truth thus put sounded like sacrilege.

Then a glow--a glow of pride and of hope--swept through her.

"If you ever get up into another class," went on old Tom, "don't come hangin' round the common people you'll be livin' off of and helpin' to grind down; stick to your own class.That's the only place anybody can do any good--any real helpin' and lovin', man to man, and woman to woman.If you want to help anybody that's down, pull him up into your class first.Stick to your class.

You'll find plenty to do there."

"What, for instance?" asked Susan.She understood a little of what he had in mind, but was still puzzled.

"Them stall-fed fakers I just threw out," the old man went on.

"They come here, actin' as if this was the Middle Ages and the lord of the castle was doin' a fine thing when he went down among the low peasants who'd been made by God to work for the lords.But this ain't the Middle Ages.What's the truth about it?""I don't know," confessed Susan.

"Why, the big lower class is poor because the little upper class takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make.

Oh, it ain't the upper class's fault.They do it because they're ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down here is ignorance more'n badness.But they do it, all the same.

And they're ignorant and need to be told.Supposin' you saw a big girl out yonder in the street beatin' her baby sister.What would you do? Would you go and hold out little pieces of candy to the baby and say how sorry you was for her? Or would you first grab hold of that big sister and throw her away from beatin' of the baby?""I see," said Susan.