第274章

SHE left the taxicab at the corner of Grand Street and the Bowery, and plunged into her former haunts afoot.Once again she had it forced upon her how meaningless in the life history are the words "time" and "space." She was now hardly any distance, as measurements go, from her present world, and she had lived here only a yesterday or so ago.Yet what an infinity yawned between! At the Delancey Street apartment house there was already a new janitress, and the kinds of shops on the ground floor had changed.Only after two hours of going up and down stairs, of knocking at doors, of questioning and cross-questioning, did she discover that Clara had moved to Allen Street, to the tenement in which Susan herself had for a few weeks lived--those vague, besotted weeks of despair.

When we go out into the streets with bereavement in mind, we see nothing but people dressed in mourning.And a similar thing occurs, whatever the emotion that oppresses us.It would not have been strange if Susan, on the way to Allen Street afoot, had seen only women of the streets, for they swarm in every great thoroughfare of our industrial cities.

They used to come out only at night.But with the passing of the feeling against them that existed when they were a rare, unfamiliar, mysteriously terrible minor feature of life, they issue forth boldly by day, like all the other classes, making a living as best they can.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!

A group of these children were playing some rough game, in imitation of their elders, that was causing several to howl with pain.She heard a woman, being shown about by a settlement worker or some such person, say:

"Really, not at all badly dressed--for street games.I must confess I don't see signs of the misery they talk so much about."A wave of fury passed through Susan.She felt like striking the woman full in her vain, supercilious, patronizing face--striking her and saying: "You smug liar! What if you had to wear such clothes on that fat, overfed body of yours!

You'd realize then how filthy they are!"

She gazed in horror at the Allen Street house.Was it possible that _she_ had lived there? In the filthy doorway sat a child eating a dill pickle--a scrawny, ragged little girl with much of her hair eaten out by the mange.She recalled this little girl as the formerly pretty and lively youngster, the daughter of the janitress.She went past the child without disturbing her, knocked at the janitress' door.It presently opened, disclosing in a small and foul room four prematurely old women, all in the family way, two with babies in arms.One of these was the janitress.Though she was not a Jewess, she was wearing one of the wigs assumed by orthodox Jewish women when they marry.She stared at Susan with not a sign of recognition.

"I am looking for Miss Clara," said Susan.

The janitress debated, shifted her baby from one arm to the other, glanced inquiringly at the other women.They shook their heads; she looked at Susan and shook her head."There ain't a Clara," said she."Perhaps she's took another name?""Perhaps," conceded Susan.And she described Clara and the various dresses she had had.At the account of one with flounces on the skirts and lace puffs in the sleeves, the youngest of the women showed a gleam of intelligence."You mean the girl with the cancer of the breast," said she.

Susan remembered.She could not articulate; she nodded.