第204章

SHE had thought of escape daily, hourly almost, for nearly five months.She had advanced not an inch toward it; but she never for an instant lost hope.She believed in her destiny, felt with all the strength of her health and vitality that she had not yet found her place in the world, that she would find it, and that it would be high.Now--she was compelled to escape, and this with only seventeen dollars and in the little time that would elapse before Palmer returned to consciousness and started in pursuit, bent upon cruel and complete revenge.

She changed to an express train at the Grand Central Subway station, left the express on impulse at Fourteenth Street, took a local to Astor Place, there ascended to the street.

She was far indeed from the Tenderloin, in a region not visited by the people she knew.As for Freddie, he never went below Fourtenth Street, hated the lower East Side, avoided anyone from that region of his early days, now shrouded in a mystery that would not be dispelled with his consent.Freddie would not think of searching for her there; and soon he would believe she was dead--drowned, and at the bottom of river or bay.As she stepped from the exit of the underground, she saw in the square before her, under the Sunset Cox statue, a Salvation Army corps holding a meeting.She heard a cry from the center of the crowd:

"The wages of sin is death!"

She drifted into the fringe of the crowd and glanced at the little group of exhorters and musicians.The woman who was preaching had taken the life of the streets as her text.Well fed and well clad and certain of a clean room to sleep in--certain of a good living, she was painting the moral horrors of the street life.

"The wages of sin is death!" she shouted.

She caught Susan's eye, saw the cynical-bitter smile round her lips.For Susan had the feeling that, unsuspected by the upper classes, animates the masses as to clergy and charity workers of all kinds--much the same feeling one would have toward the robber's messenger who came bringing from his master as a loving gift some worthless trifle from the stolen goods.Not from clergy, not from charity worker, not from the life of the poor as they take what is given them with hypocritical cringe and tear of thanks, will the upper classes get the truth as to what is thought of them by the masses in this day of awakening intelligence and slow heaving of crusts so long firm that they have come to be regarded as bed-rock of social foundation.

Cried the woman, in response to Susan's satirical look:

"You mock at that, my lovely young sister.Your lips are painted, and they sneer.But you know I'm right--yes, you show in your eyes that you know it in your aching heart! The wages of sin is _death!_ Isn't that so, sister?"Susan shook her head.

"Speak the truth, sister! God is watching you.The wages of sin is _death!_""The wages of weakness is death," retorted Susan."But--the wages of sin--well, it's sometimes a house in Fifth Avenue."And then she shrank away before the approving laughter of the little crowd and hurried across into Eighth Street.In the deep shadow of the front of Cooper Union she paused, as the meaning of her own impulsive words came to her.The wages of sin! And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was exactly as Burlingham had explained.He had said that, whether for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong.Strong!

What a good teacher he had been--one of the rare kind that not only said things interestingly but also said them so that you never forgot.How badly she had learned!

She strolled on through Eighth Street, across Third Avenue and into Second Avenue.It was ten o'clock.The effects of the liquor she had drunk had worn away.In so much wandering she had acquired the habit of closing up an episode of life as a traveler puts behind him the railway journey at its end.She was less than half an hour from her life in the Tenderloin; it was as completely in her past as it would ever be.The cards had once more been shuffled; a new deal was on.

A new deal.What? To fly to another city--that meant another Palmer, or the miseries of the unprotected woman of the streets, or slavery to the madman of what the French with cruel irony call a _maison de joie_.To return to work----What was open to her, educated as the comfortable classes educate their women? Work meant the tenements.She loathed the fast life, but not as she loathed vermin-infected tenements.To toil all day at a monotonous task, the same task every day and all day long! To sleep at night with Tucker and the vermin! To her notion the sights and sounds and smells and personal contacts of the tenements were no less vicious;were--for her at least--far more degrading than anything in the Tenderloin and its like.And there she got money to buy whiskey that whirled her almost endurably, sometimes even gayly, over the worst things--money to buy hours, whole days of respite that could be spent in books, in dreams and plannings, in the freedom of a clean and comfortable room, or at the theater or concert.There were degrees in horror; she was paying a hateful price, but not so hateful as she had paid when she worked.The wages of shame were not so hard earned as the wages of toil, were larger, brought her many of the things she craved.The wages of toil brought her nothing but the right to bare existence in filth and depravity and darkness.Also, she felt that if she were tied down to some dull and exhausting employment, she would be settled and done for.In a few years she would be an old woman, with less wages or flung out diseased or maimed--to live on and on like hundreds of wretched old creatures adrift everywhere in the tenement streets.No, work had nothing to offer her except "respectability." And what a mocking was "respectability," in rags and filth!

Besides, what had _she_, the outcast born, to do with this respectability?