第196章

BUT she did not "look out about the booze." Each morning she awoke in a state of depression so horrible that she wondered why she could not bring herself to plan suicide.Why was it?

Her marriage? Yes--and she paid it its customary tribute of a shudder.Yes, her marriage had made all things thereafter possible.But what else? Lack of courage? Lack of self-respect? Was it not always assumed that a woman in her position, if she had a grain of decent instinct, would rush eagerly upon death? Was she so much worse than others? Or was what everybody said about these things--everybody who had experience--was it false, like nearly everything else she had been taught? She did not understand; she only knew that hope was as strong within her as health itself--and that she did not want to die--and that at present she was helpless.

One evening the man she was with--a good-looking and unusually interesting young chap--suddenly said:

"What a heart action you have got! Let me listen to that again.""Is it all wrong?" asked Susan, as he pressed his ear against her chest.

"You ask that as if you rather hoped it was.""I do--and I don't."

"Well," said he, after listening for a third time, "you'll never die of heart trouble.I never heard a heart with such a grand action--like a big, powerful pump, built to last forever.

You're never ill, are you?"

"Not thus far."

"And you'll have a hard time making yourself ill.

Health? Why, your health must be perfect.Let me see." And he proceeded to thump and press upon her chest with an expertness that proclaimed the student of medicine.He was all interest and enthusiasm, took a pencil and, spreading a sheet upon her chest over her heart, drew its outlines."There!" he cried.

"What is it?" asked Susan."I don't understand."The young man drew a second and much smaller heart within the outline of hers."This," he explained, "is about the size of an ordinary heart.You can see for yourself that yours is fully one-fourth bigger than the normal.""What of it?" said Susan.

"Why, health and strength--and vitality--courage--hope--all one-fourth above the ordinary allowance.Yes, more than a fourth.I envy you.You ought to live long, stay young until you're very old--and get pretty much anything you please.You don't belong to this life.Some accident, I guess.Every once in a while I run across a case something like yours.You'll go back where you belong.This is a dip, not a drop.""You sound like a fortune-teller." She was smiling mockingly.

But in truth she had never in all her life heard words that thrilled her so, that heartened her so.

"I am.A scientific fortune-teller.And what that kind says comes true, barring accidents.As you're not ignorant and careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad.On the contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get the splended exercise of walking--a much more healthful life, in the essential ways, than respectable women lead.They're always stuffing, and rumping it.They never move if they can help.No, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less intelligent than you look.Oh, yes--death and one other thing.""Drink." And he looked shrewdly at her.

But drink she must.And each day, as soon as she dressed and was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities.There is a stage in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect.But she was far from this advanced stage.Her disposition was, if anything, more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of liquor.The whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to accustom.With these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety asserted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning.

By observation and practice she was soon able to measure the exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." That gayety of hers was of the surface only.Behind it her real self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to her mood of the day.And she had the sense of being in the grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged through some dreadful probation from which she would presently emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her desperate fortitude.The past--unreal.The present--a waking dream.But the future--ah, the future!