David Graham Phillips

“ There had been a hopeful Susan, a sad but resolved Susan, a strong Susan, a weak Susan; there had been Susans who could not have shed a tear; there had been Susans who shed many tears—some of them Susans all bitterness, others Susans all humility and self-reproach. Any spectator would have been puzzled by this shifting of personality. Susan herself was completely confused. She sought for her real self among this multitude so contradictory. Each successive one seemed the reality; yet none persisted. When we look in at our own souls, it is like looking into a many-sided room lined with mirrors. ”

“ This physical beauty had as an aureole to illuminate it and to set it off a manner that was wholly devoid of mannerisms—of those that men and women think out and exhibit to give added charm to themselves—tricks of cuteness, as lisp and baby stare; tricks of dignity, as grave brow and body always carried rigidly erect; tricks of sweetness and kindliness, as the ever ready smile and the warm handclasp. Susan, the interested in the world about her, Susan, the self-unconscious, had none of these tricks. She was at all times her own self. Beauty is anything but rare, likewise intelligence. ”

“ Susan's violet-gray eyes, growing grayer when she was thoughtful, growing deeper and clearer and softer shining violet when her emotions were touched—Susan's eyes were undoubtedly unusual even in a race in which homely eyes are the exception.
When it was her turn and she emerged into the glare of the footlights, she came to a full stop and an awful wave of weakness leaped up through legs and body to blind her eyes and crash upon her brain. She shook her head, lifted it high like a swimmer shaking off a wave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But on that day Susan felt as if she were seeing only the broken down and cast-out creatures of the class—the old women, old in body rather than in years, picking in the gutters, fumbling in the garbage barrels, poking and peering everywhere for odds and ends that might pile up into the price of a glass of the poison sold in the barrel houses. The old women—the hideous, lonely old women—and the diseased, crippled children, worse off than the cats and the dogs, for cat and dog were not compelled to wear filth-soaked rags. Prosperous, civilized New York! ”

“ But it is not her dress that most interests me, nor the luxury and perfection of all her surroundings. It is not even her beauty—that is, the whole of her beauty.
Everything and every being that is individual in appearance has some one quality, trait, characteristic, which stands out above all the rest to make a climax of interest and charm. With the rose it is its perfume; with the bird, perhaps the scarlet or snowy feathers upon its breast. Among human beings who have the rare divine dower of clear individuality the crown and cap of distinction differs. ”

“ He rolled his cigar slowly, looking thoughtfully toward the willows thick and green along the Indiana shore. "Say—well, say—Lorna—Lorna—Lorna Sackville! That's a winner. Lorna Sackville!—A stroke of genius! Don't you think so?"
"Yes," said Susan. "It doesn't matter."
"But it does," remonstrated he. "You are an artist, now, and an artist's name should always arouse pleasing and romantic anticipations. It's like the odor that heralds the dish. You must remember, my dear, that you have stepped out of the world of dull reality into the world of ideals, of dreams." ”

“ Even Susan, the most sensitive person there, gazed about with stolid eyes. The nakedness of unsightly bodies, gross with fat or wasted to emaciation, the dirtiness of limbs and torsos long, long unwashed, the foul steam from it all and from the water-soaked rags, the groans of some, the silent, staring misery of others, and, most horrible of all, the laughter of those who yielded like animals to the momentary sense of physical well-being as the heat thawed them out—these sights and sounds together made up a truly infernal picture. ”

“ It was not quite dark yet; the air was almost July hot, as one of those prematurely warm days New York so often has in March. The sky, a soft and delicate blue shading into opal and crimson behind them, displayed a bright crescent moon as it arched over the fairyland in the dusk before them. Straight ahead, across the broad, swift, sparkling river—the broadest water Susan had ever seen—rose the mighty, the majestic city. It rose direct from the water. Endless stretches of ethereal-looking structure, reaching higher and higher, in masses like mountain ranges, in peaks, in towers and domes. ”

“ There is no more describing the effects of a harmonious combination of exquisite dress and exquisite woman than there is reproducing in words the magic and the thrill of sunrise or sunset, of moonlight's fanciful amorous play, or of starry sky. As the girl stood there, her eyes starlike with excitement, her lips crimson and sensuous against the clear old-ivory pallor of her small face in its frame of glorious dark hair, it seemed to him that her soul, more beautiful counterpart of herself, had come from its dwelling place within and was hovering about her body like an aureole. ”

“ Susan's head was whirling. Her spirits were spiraling up and up. Her pale lips were wreathed in a reckless smile. She felt courageous for adventure—any adventure. Her capital had now sunk to three quarters and a five-cent piece. They issued forth, talking without saying anything, laughing without knowing or caring why. Life was a joke—a coarse, broad joke—but amusing if one drank enough to blunt any refinement of sensibility. And what was sensibility but a kind of snobbishness? And what more absurd than snobbishness in an outcast?
"That's good whiskey they had, back there," said Susan. ”

“ They saw men and women with that air which no one can define yet everyone knows on sight—the assurance without impertinence, the politeness without formality, the simplicity that is more complex than the most elaborate ornamentation of dress or speech or manner. Susan and Freddie lingered until the departure of the last couple—a plainly dressed man whose clothes on inspection revealed marvels of fineness and harmonious color; a quietly dressed woman whose costume from tip of plume to tip of suede slipper was a revelation of how fine a fine art the toilet can be made. ”

“ The slender strong white hand he raised and lowered was the hand of an artist. He might be a bad man, a very bad man—his face had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes—and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. ”

“ One glance into that homely wrinkled face was enough to convince anyone of her goodness of heart—and to Susan in those days of aloneness, of uncertainty, of the feeling of hopelessness, goodness of heart seemed the supreme charm. Such a woman as a landlady, and a landlady in New York, was pathetically absurd. Even to still rather simple-minded Susan she seemed an invitation to the swindler, to the sponger with the hard-luck story, to the sinking who clutch about desperately and drag down with them everyone who permits them to get a hold. ”

“ Susan did not resist. She did not care what happened to her. The more intelligent a trapped animal is, the less resistance it offers, once it realizes. Helpless—absolutely helpless. No money—no friends. No escape but death. The sun was shining. Outside lay the vast world; across the street on a flagpole fluttered the banner of freedom. Freedom! Was there any such thing anywhere? Perhaps if one had plenty of money—or powerful friends. But not for her, any more than for the masses whose fate of squalid and stupid slavery she was trying to escape. ”

“ Susan looked at him. And he saw the wound hidden from all the world—the wound she hid from herself as much of the time as she could. He, the doctor, the professional confessor, had seen such wounds often; in all the world there is hardly a heart without one. He said:
"Since sorrow is the common lot, I wonder that men can be so selfish or so unthinking as not to help each other in every way to its consolations. Poor creatures that we are—wandering in the dark, fighting desperately, not knowing friend from foe!" ”

“ No, I don't take the tragic view of life—not at all. And as I've known misery, I don't try to hold to it."
"Leave that," said Clélie, "to those who have known only the comfortable make-believe miseries that rustle in crêpe and shed tears—whenever there's anyone by to see."
"Like the beggars who begin to whine and exhibit their aggravated sores as soon as a possible giver comes into view," said Susan. "I've learned to accept what comes, and to try to make the best of it, whatever it is. . . . I say I've learned. But have I? Does one ever change? I guess I was born that sort of philosopher." ”

“ Susan stood impassive. She had seen again and again how faint the breeze that would throw those shallow waters into commotion and how soon they were tranquil again. It was by observing Mrs. Tucker that she first learned an important unrecognized truth about human nature that amiable, easily sympathetic and habitually good-humored people are invariably hard of heart. In this parting she had no sense of loss, none of the melancholy that often oppresses us when we separate from someone to whom we are indifferent yet feel bound by the tie of misfortunes borne together. ”

“ At sight of them her eyes became a keen and lively gray—never violet for that kind of emotion—and there surged up the love of finery that dwells in every normal woman—and in every normal man—that is put there by a heredity dating back through the ages to the very beginning of conscious life—and does not leave them until life gives up the battle and prepares to vacate before death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What a world!—where a few people such a very few!—lived in health and comfort and cleanliness—and the millions lived in disease and squalor, ignorant, untouched of civilization save to wear its cast-off clothes and to eat its castaway food and to live in its dark noisome cellars!—And to toil unceasingly to make for others the good things of which they had none themselves! ”

“ And evidently he cared nothing about it but lived entirely in that wonderful world which so awed Susan—the world he had created within himself, the world of which she had alluring glimpses through his eyes, through his tones and gestures even. Small people strive to make, and do make, impression of themselves by laboring to show what they know and think. But the person of the larger kind makes no such effort. In everything Brent said and did and wore, in all his movements, gestures, expressions, there was the unmistakable hallmark of the man worth while. ”

“ She saw that to be a contented working girl, to look forward to the prospect of being a workingman's wife, a tenement housekeeper and mother, a woman must have been born to it—and born with little brains—must have been educated for it, and for nothing else. Etta was bitterly discontented; yet after all it was a vague endurable discontent. She had simply heard of and dreamed of and from afar off—chiefly through novels and poems and the theater—had glimpsed a life that was broader, that had comfort and luxury, people with refined habits and manners. Susan had not merely heard of such a life ”

“ Every cent the three had was needed to keep from starving and freezing. Also—though she did not realize it—her young enthusiasm was steadily being sapped by the life she was leading. It may have been this rather than natural gentleness—or perhaps it was as much the one as the other—that kept Susan from taking Matson's advice and hardening herself into a forelady. The ruddy glow under her skin had given place to, the roundness of her form had gone, and its pallor; beauty remained only because she had a figure which not even emaciation could have deprived of lines of alluring grace. ”

“ The grandiose New York hotels and restaurants were more showy and more pretentious far than this interior of Brent's. But her unerring instinct of those born with good taste knew at first view of them that they were simply costly; there were beautiful things in them, fine carvings and paintings and tapestries, but personality was lacking. And without personality there can be no unity; without unity there can be no harmony—and without harmony, no beauty.
Looking round her now, she had her first deep draught of esthetic delight in interior decoration. ”

“ Susan lingered, fascinated by this exhibit of the price to the many of civilization for the few. Work? Never! Not any more than she would. "Work" in a dive! Work—either branch of it, factory and shop or dive meant the sale of all the body and all the soul; her profession—at least as she practiced it—meant that perhaps she could buy with part of body and part of soul the privilege of keeping the rest of both for her own self. If she had stayed on at work from the beginning in Cincinnati, where would she be now? Living in some stinking tenement hole, with hope dead. And how would she be looking? ”

“ What the working class is condemned to by capitalism is not work but toil."
"The toil of a slave," said Susan.
"It's shallow twaddle or sheer want to talk about the dignity and beauty of labor under this system," he went on. "It is ugly and degrading. The fools or hypocrites who talk that way ought to be forced to join the gangs of slaves at their tasks in factory and mine and shop, in the fields and the streets. And even the easier and better paid tasks, even what the capitalists themselves do—those things aren't dignified and beautiful. ”

“ Only those who live exposed to life's buffetings ever learn to enjoy to the full the great little pleasures of life—the halcyon pauses in the storms—the few bright rays through the break in the clouds, the joy of food after hunger, of a bath after days of privation, of a jest or a smiling face or a kind word or deed after darkness and bitterness and contempt. She saw the restaurant man's eyes on her, a curious expression in them. ”

“ A human being's face is a summary of his career. No man can realize at a thought what he is, can epitomize in just proportion what has been made of him by experience of the multitude of moments of which life is composed. But in some moods and in some lights we do get such an all-comprehending view of ourselves in looking at our own faces. As she had instinctively felt, there was a world of meaning in the contrast between her pensive brow above melancholy eyes and the blood-red line of her rouged lips.
The butler descended. "Mr. Brent is in his library, on the fourth floor," said he. ”

“ The life she had been leading had made her extremely thin, had hardened and dulled her eyes, had given her that sad, shuddering expression of the face upon which have beaten a thousand mercenary and lustful kisses. The opium soon changed all this. Her skin, always tending toward pallor, became of the dead amber-white of old ivory. Her thinness took on an ethereal transparency that gave charm even to her slight stoop. Her face became dreamy, exalted, rapt; and her violet-gray eyes looked from it like the vents of poetical fires burning without ceasing upon an altar to the god of dreams. ”

“ But Susan's fascination did not lie in any or in all of her charms, but in that subtlety of magnetism which account for all the sensational phenomena of the relations of men and women. She was a clever girl—clever beyond her years, perhaps—though in this day seventeen is not far from fully developed womanhood. But even had she been silly, men would have been glad to linger on and on under the spell of the sex call which nature had subtly woven into the texture of her voice, into the glance of her eyes, into the delicate emanations of her skin. ”