Comrade Yetta Part 2

Scattered through the East Side of New York there are hundreds such "sweat-shops," engaged in the various branches of the "garment trade."

Sometimes there will be half a dozen in the same tenement; one above another. Even the factory inspectors are never sure of the exact number.

They are running so close a race with bankruptcy, it is hard to keep track of them. Often half a dozen will fail on the same day, and as many new ones will start the next. It is not on record that any one ever found a good word to say for the "sweating system." Such "shops" exist because I and you and the good wife and the priest who married you like to buy our clothes as cheaply as possible.

Yetta's "shop" manufactured vests. The four women at each table formed a "team." With separate operations on the same garment, they had to keep in exact unison. If any one slowed up, they all lost money by the delay. They were paid "by the piece," and long hours, seven days a week, brought them so infinitesimal a margin over the cost of brute necessities that the loss of a few cents a day was a tragedy for the older women with children to feed.

Yetta, the youngest of all, was Number One at her table.

The name of Number Two was Mrs. Levy. She was anywhere between twenty-five and fifty, bovine in appearance, but her fingers were as agile as a monkey's. She sat stolidly before her machine, her big body, which had lost all form, almost motionless, her arms alone active. Her face was void of any expression. Her washed-out eyes were half closed, for they were inflamed with tracoma. Eight years before she had brought her three children over from Galicia to join her husband and had found him dying of tuberculosis. She had been making vests ever since. She was an ideal sweat-shop worker, reliable--the kind that lasts.

Opposite her Mrs. Weinstein grabbed the vests as they left Mrs. Levy's machine. She also was a large woman, but not much over thirty, and just entering the trade. She was of merry disposition and had kept much of her youthful charm. Her hair, of course, was disordered; the cloth-dust stuck in blotches to her perspiring face. There was a smudge of machine grease over one cheek, but where her blouse--unb.u.t.toned--exposed her throat and the rise of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the skin was still soft and white.

Her husband, of whom she always spoke with fond admiration as a very kind and wise man, had deserted her a few months before. Engaged in another branch of the garment trades, he had become involved in one of the strikes which with increasing frequency were shaking the sweating system. He had been black-listed. After weeks of fruitless search for work, he had disappeared. If he found work elsewhere, he would send for his wife. He could not bear to stay and be supported by her. She had a sister, who had married well and who would not let the babies starve.

Besides, she did not consider herself a regular vest-maker. Some day, soon, her husband would find work, in Boston, Philadelphia--somewhere.

She was always expecting a letter to-morrow. So Mrs. Weinstein could afford to be cheerful.

But if Number Two had an unusually stolid body and phlegmatic brain--the type which suffers least from sweating; and if Number Three had been blessed with a merry, hopeful soul, Mrs. Cohen, at the foot of the table, had none of these advantages. She had been Number One, not so very long before--a marvel of speed. Then she had begun to cough. It is impossible to cough without breaking the regular rhythm which means speed. In a few months she had slipped down to the bottom. She was no older than Mrs. Weinstein, but her skin was as yellow as Mrs. Levy's, and even more unlovely, for the flesh behind it had melted away; the only prominences on her body were where her bones pushed out.

She had begun at twenty-one, when her husband died leaving her with two children. There had been another baby a couple of years later--because she had hoped the man would marry her and take her out of the inferno.

He had not. And there was no hope any more, for who would marry a woman with bad lungs and three children?

Despair, while embittering her, had cleared her vision. She saw the "shop" and the "system"--and understood. She had entered the trade strong and healthy, and had been well-paid at first, when she had the great desideratum--Speed. It had seemed like good pay then. But now she knew better. They had been buying not only her day-by-day ability, they had bought up her future. For the wages of less than ten years they had bought all her life--they had bought even her children! Already the flow of vests had piled up once or twice too swiftly for her. Jake Goldfogle, the present boss, was threatening to discharge her. If she lost this job, it would be the end. The Gerry Society would surely take her babies and put them in "inst.i.tutions." No, she had not been well-paid in the days when they had given her extra wages for the pace that kills. It is small pleasure for a mother to hush the hunger-cry of her children, but that was all the joy that was left to Mrs. Cohen. And if she lost her job, she would lose even this.

Just in proportion as Number Four at the bottom of the table had learned many bitter things from life, so Yetta at the head had almost everything yet to learn. She began the long lesson with a pain in her back.

It came unexpectedly. It was as much the insulting surprise of it, as the hurt itself, which made her cry out sharply and drop her work--throwing the whole team out of rhythm.

"_Wos is dir_, Yetta?" Mrs. Weinstein asked with motherly solicitude.

"Oy-yoy-yoy!" Yetta said, putting her hand to her back--"_Es is schon verbei_."

Mrs. Cohen at the bottom of the table laughed mirthlessly.

"It will come back," she screamed in Yiddish above the din of the machinery. "I know. It begins so. One speeds two, three years--four--with one it is the lungs, with another it is the back, or the eyes." She seized the momentary pause to ease herself with coughs.

Mrs. Levy, who had been long in the trade, had seen many a "speeder"

give in; some slowly, some suddenly. She had seen dozens of them, fighting desperately the fight for food, slip down from the head to the foot and out--out through the door to the street and nowhere. As Mrs.

Cohen had said, it was sometimes the eyes, sometimes the lungs, sometimes the back. She nodded her head in affirmation. Oh yes, she had seen it many times. She could have told the story of one mother who had gone on speeding in spite of back and lungs and eyes, had kept on speeding until one day she had fallen over her machine dead. Her hair had gotten tangled in the cogs, and they had to cut it to take her away.

Mrs. Weinstein tried to comfort Yetta.

"Don't listen to them," she said. "You are yet young--you'll be all right--"

She stopped abruptly, for the office door had opened and Jake Goldfogle came out. His ear, trained to the chaotic noise of the shop, had caught the momentary halt.

"_Ober, mein Gott, wos is der mer?_" he roared.

Mrs. Cohen, who had caught up with her work and was waiting for more, pointed an accusing finger at Yetta.

Jake Goldfogle was twenty-eight. This was his first "shop." The dominant expression of his face--which he tried to cover with an a.s.sumption of masterliness--was worry. The person who has been ground by poverty is never a debonaire gambler. But these ignorant, unimaginative women who slaved for him, whom he lashed with his tongue and sometimes struck, did not understand his situation, did not know of the myriad nightmares which haunted his waking as well as his sleeping hours. They bent low over their machines, hurrying under the eye of the master, holding their breath to catch the torrent of abuse they expected to hear fall on Yetta.

They did not realize--least of all did Yetta--that she was an exception.

Jake swallowed the curses on his tongue and asked her in a constrained and unfamiliar voice what was wrong.

"Nothing," she said. "A pain in my back."

No sort of pain known to women was considered a valid excuse for breaking speed. She wondered with sullen, servile anger how much he would fine her. If any of the women had looked up, they would have seen strange twists on the boss's face. He turned abruptly, without a word, and went back to his office. He sat down at his desk and looked through the little window, by means of which he could, glancing up from his ledger, spy on the roomful of workers. His eyes rested a moment on Yetta's stooped back. Then, grasping his temples, he paced up and down his dingy office, cursing the day he was born. He was in love with Yetta and could not afford to tell her so.

The psychology of the refugees from Russian and Galician Ghettos, who come to live among us, is very hard for us to understand. Above all, the Jew is marked by single-mindedness and consistency of purpose. We have our Anglo-Saxon tradition of compromise and confused issues. We have generally several irons in the fire. We shift easily--often flippantly--from one purpose to another. The Semite, having once accepted a goal is hard to divert.

Coming to us, as most of them do, in abject poverty, it is small wonder that many a Jewish lad decides that the Holy Grail is made of American dollars. The surprising thing is the unswerving fidelity with which they follow the quest--a fidelity which is quite absent in the legends of King Arthur's English Knights. It is the same no matter what ideal they choose. Just as the money grubber will deny himself necessary food and overwork his wife and children to ama.s.s a little capital, so the East Side poet will stick to writing rhymes in Yiddish, although it can never give him a decent living, and the Jewish Socialist will hold fast to his principles through starvation and persecution.

Jake Goldfogle had a vague recollection of a great wave which had washed over the steerage deck of an immigrant steamer and had scared him immensely. All his other memories were set in the scenery of the New York slums. He had "got wise" young, with the wisdom of the gutter, which says that you must be either a hammer or an anvil, preyed upon or preying. For the last fifteen years he and his sister, more recently reenforced by her husband, had been engaged in a desperate struggle to pull up out of the muck.

For years the three of them had been slaves to the machine. Six months before they had put all their miserable savings, all their credit, into buying this "shop." They had accepted a highly speculative contract from which there could be no halfway issue. A dozen weeks more and it would be over--either an immense success or utter ruin. Failure meant the swallowing up in a moment of the results of their long slavery; it meant going back to the machine.

Hundreds of men throughout the city, in the different garment trades, were in exactly the same position. Ground between the gambling nature of their contracts and insufficiently secured credit, the fear of ruin in their hearts, they had been driving the rowels deeper and deeper into the flanks of the animals who worked for them--on whose backs they hoped to win to the gilded goal of success. But revolt from such conditions was inevitable. Strikes were constantly occurring. This fear was the worst of Jake Goldfogle's nightmares.

The revolt of the garment workers was as yet unorganized and chaotic.

There were a dozen odd unions, but few of them were strong or well disciplined. Too many of those in the trade were immigrants from southeastern Europe and the Russian Pale--where only a few of the men are literate. Most of them were women--mothers. When the long hours in the shops were over, they hurried home to their children. It was very hard to get them to meetings.

But in spite of all these handicaps the workers were gradually organizing. Such strikes as had already occurred had had little effect except to ruin the smaller bosses. The large manufacturers could afford to wait until their "hands" were starved back to the machines. But so close was the contest,--it mattered little whether the trade was vests or shirtwaists or overalls,--that a few days' interruption was enough to ruin the weaker bosses. The small fry, like Jake, echoed the sentiments of _Le Grand Monarque_--The Deluge might come after, if only they could speed their contracts to completion. And so, with ever increasing viciousness, the rowels were driven deeper and deeper.

It had been a surprising sensation to Jake Goldfogle to discover that it was more pleasant to look through his spying window at the curve of Yetta's neck and the wild little curls of rich brown hair that cl.u.s.tered about it than to add up columns of figures. Even the unhealthy, stooped curve of her spine as she leaned forward to the machine seemed gracious to him. He looked forward eagerly to the times, every half hour, when he went out into the shop on a tour of inspection, for then he could catch glimpses of her face. To be sure she never looked up from her work while he was watching. But there was one place where he could stand unnoticed and see her in profile. It was a marvellously regular face for the East Side. The dark curve of her eyebrows was perfect, and sometimes he could catch the gleam of her eyes. The skin of her throat was whiter even than Mrs. Weinstein's. She was a trifle thinner than Jake's ideal--but he told himself she would fill out. All this added color to his dream of success, a deeper shade to his fear of ruin.

A man of another race would probably have lost his head and asked her to marry him. But Jake had a deep-seated habit of planning for success.

Long before he had noticed the grace of her body and face he had realized that she was the best worker in his shop, "the pace-maker" for the whole establishment. If success was to be won, it would be by just that very narrow margin, which the breaking in of a new "speeder" would jeopardize. So he had tried to put her out of his mind till the "rush season" was over. Intent on his main purpose he had not thought of her physical well-being. She was young and healthy looking. It had not occurred to him that a few weeks more or less would matter. The pain in her back surprised him.

If the incident had occurred in the morning, he might have called her into his office then and there and asked her to marry him. Things had looked brighter in the morning. But at lunch--a frugal affair, two sweet buns and a gla.s.s of tea--he had heard disquieting talk of the "skirt-finishers" strike. It had been more serious than most. Half a dozen shops had been already wiped out. And his informant--a hated compet.i.tor--had gloomily foretold trouble in their own trade. If strikes broke out among the "vest-makers," it would tighten credit. The call of a couple of loans would be the end of Jake. No! He could not afford to take Yetta out now. Any one who came to take her place might be infected with the virus of Unionism. His own women did not know what a strike was. No. He could not risk it. If Pincus & Company paid promptly on the next delivery, he could take up those dangerous loans and then--perhaps--

He put his face close to the spying window and looked out at Yetta's back. He wondered just where the pain had been and whether it still hurt.

"Poor little girl," he said.

But Yetta knew nothing of her boss's intention. She could see no outlet. The future stretched before her, so barren that it hurt to think of it. But she could not escape the thought. Was she to get fat and ugly like Mrs. Levy? Would the pain come again and would she slip down--as Mrs. Cohen prophesied--coughing herself to uselessness?

CHAPTER IV

LIFE CALLS

In the months that followed Rachel's departure Yetta began to lose hope.

She could see no promise of escape, and lethargic time gradually faded the colors of her dream. The flame of holy discontent which had blazed for a while in her soul threatened to go out. Sometimes she wondered what had happened to Rachel. But "Speed" eats up a person's power of wondering.

Yetta had been at the machine for a long time now. Her muscles had become hardened. She did not often suffer from weariness any more, but she had, without knowing it, commenced to go downhill. The immense reserve of vitality, which is the blessing of so many of her race, was running low. It was amazing how her strong young body had resisted the strain. But any doctor would have shaken his head over the future. After all there is a limit, beyond which the nerves and muscles of a woman cannot compete with electricity and steel.

One night, a few days after the pain had come in her back, an American woman knocked at the door of the Goldstein flat while Yetta and Rosa were eating supper.