第114章

Foul smells and sights everywhere, and foul language; no privacy, no possibility of modesty where all must do all in the same room: vermin, parasites, bad food vilely cooked--in the midst of these and a multitude of similar ills how was it possible to maintain a human standard, even if one had by chance acquired a knowledge of what constituted a human standard? The Cassatts were sinking into the slime in which their neighbors were already wallowing.But there was this difference.For the Cassatts it was a descent; for many of their neighbors it was an ascent--for the immigrants notably, who had been worse off in their European homes; in this land not yet completely in the grip of the capitalist or wage system they were now getting the first notions of decency and development, the first views and hope of rising in the world.The Cassatts, though they had always lived too near the slime to be nauseated by it, still found it disagreeable and in spots disgusting.Their neighbors--One of the chief reasons why these people were rising so slowly where they were rising at all was that the slime seemed to them natural, and to try to get clean of it seemed rather a foolish, finicky waste of time and effort.People who have come up--by accident, or by their own force, or by the force of some at once shrewd and brutal member of the family--have to be far and long from the slums before they lose the sense that in conforming to the decencies of life they are making absurd effeminate concessions.

When they go to buy a toothbrush they blush and stammer.

"Look at Lorna and Etta," Mrs.Cassatt was always saying to Kate.

"Well, I see 'em," Kate would reply."And I don't see much.""Ain't you ashamed of yourself!" cried the mother."Them two lives straight and decent.And you're better off than they are.""Don't preach to me, ma," sneered Kate."When I get ready I'll--stop making a damn fool of myself."But the example of the two girls was not without its effect.

They, struggling on in chastity against appalling odds, became the models, not only to Mrs.Cassatt, but all the mothers of that row held up to their daughters.The mothers--all of them by observation, not a few by experience--knew what the "fancy lady's" life really meant.And they strove mightily to keep their daughters from it.Not through religion or moral feeling, though many pretended--perhaps fancied--that this was their reason; but through the plainest kind of practical sense--the kind that in the broad determines the actions of human beings of whatever class, however lofty the idealistic pretenses may be.

These mothers knew that the profession of the pariah meant a short life and a wretched one, meant disease, lower and ever lower wages, the scale swiftly descending, meant all the miseries of respectability plus a heavy burden of miseries of its own.There were many other girls besides Susan and Etta holding up their heads--girls with prospects of matrimony, girls with fairly good wages, girls with fathers and brothers at work and able to provide a home.But Susan and Etta were peculiarly valuable as examples because they were making the fight alone and unaided.

Thus, they were watched closely.In those neighborhoods everyone knows everyone's else business down to how the last cent is got and spent.If either girl had appeared in a new pair of shoes, a new hat, a new garment of any kind, at once the report would have sped that the wearer had taken a turn in the streets.And the scandal would have been justified; for where could either have respectably got the money for the smallest and cheapest addition to her toilet? Matson, too, proudly pointed them out as giving the lie to the talk about working girls not getting living wages, to the muttering against him and his fellow employers as practically procurers for the pavement and the dive, for the charity hospital's most dreadful wards, for the Morgue's most piteous boxes and slabs.

As their strength declined, as their miseries ate in and in, the two girls ceased talking together; they used to chatter much of the time like two birds on a leafy, sunny bough.Now they walked, ate their scanty, repulsive meals, dressed, worked, all in silence.When their eyes met both glanced guiltily away, each fearing the other would discover the thought she was revolving--the thought of the streets.They slept badly--Etta sometimes, Susan every night.For a long time after she came to the tenements she had not slept well, despite her youth and the dull toil that wore her out each day.But after many months she had grown somewhat used to the noisiness--to fretting babies, to wailing children, the mixed ale parties, the quarrelings of the ill and the drunk, the incessant restlessness wherever people are huddled so close together that repose is impossible.And she had gradually acquired the habit of sleeping well--that is, well for the tenement region where no one ever gets the rest without which health is impossible.Now sleeplessness came again--hours on hours of listening to the hateful and maddening discords of densely crowded humanity, hours on hours of thinking--thinking--in the hopeless circles like those of a caged animal, treading with soft swift step round and round, nose to the iron wall, eyes gleaming with despairing pain.

One Saturday evening after a supper of scorched cornmeal which had been none too fresh when they got it at the swindling grocer's on the street floor, Etta put on the tattered, patched old skirt at which she had been toiling."I can't make it fit to wear," said she."It's too far gone; I think"--her eyelids fluttered--"I'll go see some of the girls."Susan, who was darning--seated on the one chair--yes, it had once been a chair--did not look up or speak.Etta put on her hat--slowly.Then, with a stealthy glance at Susan, she moved slidingly toward the door.As she reached it Susan's hands dropped to her lap; so tense were Etta's nerves that the gesture made her startle."Etta!" said Susan in an appealing voice.