第168章

At two dollars a week, double what her income justified--she rented a room in a tenement flat in Bleecker street.It was a closet of a room whose thin, dirt-adorned walls were no protection against sound or vermin, not giving even privacy from prying eyes.She might have done a little better had she been willing to share room and bed with one or more girls, but not enough better to compensate for what that would have meant.

The young Jew with the nose so impossible that it elevated his countenance from commonplace ugliness to weird distinction had taken a friendly fancy to her.He was Julius Bam, nephew of the proprietor.In her third week he offered her the forewoman's place."You've got a few brains in your head,"said he."Miss Tuohy's a boob.Take the job and you'll push up.We'll start you at five per."Susan thanked him but declined."What's the use of my taking a job I couldn't keep more than a day or two?" explained she.

"I haven't it in me to boss people."

"Then you've got to get it, or you're done for," said he.

"Nobody ever gets anywhere until he's making others work for him."It was the advice she had got from Matson, the paper box manufacturer in Cincinnati.It was the lesson she found in all prosperity on every hand.Make others work for you--and the harder you made them work the more prosperous you were--provided, of course, you kept all or nearly all the profits of their harder toil.Obvious common sense.But how could she goad these unfortunates, force their clumsy fingers to move faster, make their long and weary day longer and wearier--with nothing for them as the result but duller brain, clumsier fingers, more wretched bodies? She realized why those above lost all patience with them, treated them with contempt.

Only as one of them could any intelligent, energetic human being have any sympathy for them, stupid and incompetent from birth, made ever more and more stupid and incapable by the degrading lives they led.She could scarcely conceal her repulsion for their dirty bodies, their stained and rotting clothing saturated with stale sweat, their coarse flesh reeking coarse food smells.She could not listen to their conversation, so vulgar, so inane.Yet she felt herself--for the time--one of them, and her heart bled for them.And while she knew that only their dullness of wit and ignorance kept them from climbing up and stamping and trampling full as savagely and cruelly as did those on top, still the fact remained that they were not stamping and trampling.

As she was turning in some work, Miss Tuohy said abruptly:

"You don't belong here.You ought to go back."Susan started, and her heart beat wildly.She was going to lose her job!

The forelady saw, and instantly understood."I don't mean that," she said."You can stay as long as you like--as long as your health lasts.But isn't there somebody somewhere--_anybody_--you can go to and ask them to help you out of this?""No--there's no one," said she.

"That can't be true," insisted the forelady."Everybody has somebody--or can get somebody--that is, anyone who looks like you.I wouldn't suggest such a thing to a fool.But _you_could keep your head.There isn't any other way, and you might as well make up your mind to it."To confide is one of the all but universal longings--perhaps needs--of human nature.Susan's honest, sympathetic eyes, her look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding Miss Tuohy.Susan was not much surprised when Miss Tuohy went on to say:

"I was spoiled when I was still a kid--by getting to know well a man who was above my class.I had tastes that way, and he appealed to them.After him I couldn't marry the sort of man that wanted me.Then my looks went--like a flash--it often happens that way with us Irish girls.But I can get on.Iknow how to deal with these people--and _you_ never could learn.

You'd treat 'em like ladies and they'd treat you as easy fruit.

Yes, I get along all right, and I'm happy--away from here."Susan's sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary encouragement."It's a baby," Miss Tuohy explained--and Susan knew it was for the baby's sake that this good heart had hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady.Her eyes shifted as she said, "A child of my sister's--dead in Ireland.

How I do love that baby----"

They were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence was never resumed and finished.But Miss Tuohy had made her point with Susan--had set her to thinking less indefinitely.

"I _must_ take hold!" Susan kept saying to herself.The phrase was always echoing in her brain.But how?--_how?_ And to that question she could find no answer.

Every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation was in large part due to its want ads--its daily section of closely printed columns of advertisements of help wanted and situations wanted.Susan read the columns diligently.At first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would be in a situation where the pay was good and the work agreeable, or at least not disagreeable.But after a few weeks she ceased from reading.