第217章

SHE was like one who has fallen bleeding and broken into a cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward and down into a deeper chasm.

Occasionally sheer exhaustion of nerves made it impossible for her to drink herself again into apathy before the effects of the last doses of the poison had worn off.In these intervals of partial awakening--she never permitted them to lengthen out, as such sensation as she had was of one falling--falling--through empty space--with whirling brain and strange sounds in the ears and strange distorted sights or hallucinations before the eyes--falling down--down--whither?--to how great a depth?--or was there no bottom, but simply presently a plunging on down into the black of death's bottomless oblivion?

Drink--always drink.Yet in every other way she took care of her health--a strange mingling of prudence and subtle hope with recklessness and frank despair.All her refinement, baffled in the moral ways, concentrated upon the physical.She would be neat and well dressed; she would not let herself be seized of the diseases on the pariah in those regions--the diseases through dirt and ignorance and indifference.

In the regions she now frequented recklessness was the keynote.

There was the hilarity of the doomed; there was the cynical or stolid indifference to heat or cold, to rain or shine, to rags, to filth, to jail, to ejection for nonpayment of rent, to insult of word or blow.The fire engines--the ambulance--the patrol wagon--the city dead wagon--these were all ever passing and repassing through those swarming streets.It was the vastest, the most populous tenement area of the city.Its inhabitants represented the common lot--for it is the common lot of the overwhelming mass of mankind to live near to nakedness, to shelterlessness, to starvation, without ever being quite naked or quite roofless or quite starved.The masses are eager for the necessities; the classes are eager for the comforts and luxuries.The masses are ignorant; the classes are intelligent--or, at least, shrewd.The unconscious and inevitable exploitation of the masses by the classes automatically and of necessity stops just short of the catastrophe point--for the masses must have enough to give them the strength to work and reproduce.To go down through the social system as had Susan from her original place well up among the classes is like descending from the beautiful dining room of the palace where the meat is served in taste and refinement upon costly dishes by well mannered servants to attractively dressed people--descending along the various stages of the preparation of the meat, at each stage less of refinement and more of coarseness, until one at last arrives at the slaughter pen.The shambles, stinking and reeking blood and filth! The shambles, with hideous groan or shriek, or more hideous silent look of agony! The shambles of society where the beauty and grace and charm of civilization are created out of noisome sweat and savage toil, out of the health and strength of men and women and children, out of their ground up bodies, out of their ground up souls.Susan knew those regions well.She had no theories about them, no resentment against the fortunate classes, no notion that any other or better system might be possible, any other or better life for the masses.She simply accepted life as she found it, lived it as best she could.

Throughout the masses of mankind life is sustained by illusions--illusions of a better lot tomorrow, illusions of a heaven beyond a grave, where the nightmare, life in the body, will end and the reality, life in the spirit, will begin.She could not join the throngs moving toward church and synagogue to indulge in their dream that the present was a dream from which death would be a joyful awakening.She alternately pitied and envied them.She had her own dream that this dream, the present, would end in a joyful awakening to success and freedom and light and beauty.She admitted to herself that the dream was probably an illusion, like that of the pious throngs.

But she was as unreasonably tenacious of her dream as they were of theirs.She dreamed it because she was a human being--and to be human means to hope, and to hope means to dream of a brighter future here or hereafter, or both here and hereafter.

The earth is peopled with dreamers; she was but one of them.

The last thought of despair as the black earth closes is a hope, perhaps the most colossal of hope's delusions, that there will be escape in the grave.

There is the time when we hope and know it and believe in it.

There is the time when we hope and know it but have ceased to believe in it.There is the time when we hope, believing that we have altogether ceased to hope.That time had come for Susan.She seemed to think about the present.She moved about like a sleepwalker.

What women did she know--what men? She only dimly remembered from day to day--from hour to hour.Blurred faces passed before her, blurred voices sounded in her ears, blurred personalities touched hers.It was like the jostling of a huge crowd in night streets.A vague sense of buffetings--of rude contacts--of momentary sensations of pain, of shame, of disgust, all blunted and soon forgotten.

In estimating suffering, physical or mental, to fail to take into account a more important factor--the merciful paralysis or partial paralysis of any center of sensibility--that is insistently assaulted.

She no longer had headaches or nausea after drinking deeply.