Comrade Yetta Part 28

"My father was a 'grainer,' painted the graining on wainscoting and bureaus--fine trade it was, too. He had a nice little house with a garden to it; the old woman had a servant. Some aristocrats we were. He was going to send me to college--he was. Then they invented a machine.

He hit the trail to Colorado, and I went down in the mine when I was thirteen.

"Just think about that machine a minute. It could do the work better than men, so it put the 'grainers' out of business. It ain't got no feet, so it don't use shoes. Kind of hard on the cobblers. It ain't got no head, so it don't wear out three hats a year like my old man did.

Kind of hard on the hat makers. The machine ain't got no belly, it don't eat nothing. That's a jolt for the butcher and baker--and the farmer too. The machine don't get sick. No use for a doctor. The machine"--he paused for his climax--"the machine has no soul--it don't even need a minister.

"The machine is killing the craft unions. It's bringing about the day of the unskilled. The answer is--Industrial Unionism."

The audience was too angry at his attack to applaud. The collection, when it was taken up, was not half what had been expected.

"Perfectly insane," was Mabel's comment as they walked home.

"But what he said sounded true to me," Yetta protested.

"True?" Mabel demanded. "What was the true reason he came? To raise money for the striking miners--who need it. He didn't even come here at his own expense. They sent him--to raise funds. He spouts a lot of his crazy ideas and spoils it all. I don't believe we collected enough to pay his railroad fare. Is that your idea of truth?"

Yetta could not find an answer.

But the effort to solve such problems as this was a big factor in her mental development. It gave her added incentive to study. She sought learning not because "culture" is conventionally considered a good thing, but because she had a vital need for a wider knowledge in her daily life.

As Walter had foretold, she found constant temptation to neglect her study. She resisted it bravely. But when the "knee-pant operatives,"

whom she had organized, went out, she could not find heart for books.

She gave all her time to the strike. It was only a three weeks'

interruption. But the next year the b.u.t.tonhole workers were out for two solid months, the hottest of the year--and lost. It was Yetta's first defeat. The last weeks had been a nightmare. Children had died of hunger. Some older women had hanged themselves. When at last it was over, Yetta dragged herself up to the Woman's Trade Union League and wrote out her resignation.

"What on earth do you mean?" Mabel asked.

"Oh! I'm no good. I can't ever go down on the East Side again. I might see one of them. It's all my fault. I called them out. I promised them so much."

The moment Yetta had left the office Mabel telephoned to Mrs. Karner at her country home at Cos-Cob-on-the-Sound.

Yetta had followed Walter's advice in regard to Mrs. Karner, and a real friendship had grown up between them. Mabel did not understand why this blase society woman, with her carefully groomed flippancy, cared for the very serious-minded young Jewess, but she knew that they frequently lunched together. So she told Mrs. Karner over the telephone how Yetta had broken down.

On the window-seat of her room, Yetta cried herself to sleep,--the troubled, haunted sleep of pure exhaustion. She was waked at last from her nightmare by a pounding on her door. It was Mrs. Karner.

"You poor youngster! I dropped into the office a moment ago to sign some papers for Mabel and she told me about your resignation. I'm so glad!

Now you haven't any excuse not to visit me. I'm lonely out at Cos-Cob.

The motor's at the door. Put on your hat."

Before Yetta knew what was happening to her she was in the motor. In fifteen minutes they were out of the city, and Mrs. Karner put her arm about her.

"It was such a very little they asked for," Yetta muttered. "Not so much as we vest-makers demanded."

Mrs. Karner did not see fit to reply, and Yetta fell back into a sort of doze. At last they turned through a stone gateway into the Karners'

place. She got only a hurried glance at the well-watered lawn and the open stretch of the Sound. She was rushed upstairs and to bed. In the morning Mrs. Karner would not let her get up. It was the first time Yetta had spent a day in bed.

When she was allowed to get up, she found the estate a strange country to be explored. The greenhouses, the tame deer, the spotless stables, the dairy, the kennels, the boat-house, all were endlessly interesting to her. Interesting enough to make her forget for a while the horrors of New York. It was the third day that she made friends with the gardener, and after that she got up with the sun to help him harvest the poppies.

On Friday Mr. Karner appeared, with a man and his wife, whose name Yetta never troubled herself to remember, and they all went off for a week-end cruise. Most of the time the older people played bridge. Yetta made friends with the sea and a gray-haired old sailor from the Azores, who could speak nothing but Portuguese. Once while at anchor he helped her catch a fish. She would have enjoyed the cruise more if they had let her eat in the forecastle with the crew. She liked Mrs. Karner very much when they were alone together, but it was unpleasant to see her with these others.

In time the color returned to Yetta's cheeks, and hearing that Mabel had torn up her resignation, she went back to Washington Square and to work.

Except for such crises, Yetta followed rigorously the course of reading which Walter had mapped out for her. The afternoons and evenings belonged to the work of the League, to the very busy life of the real world. The mornings belonged to Walter. Her first thought was always of him. While the coffee was heating, she attended to his mail. After breakfast, with his prospectus spread out before her, she settled herself in one of his chairs and took up one of his books. Following his suggestion she made copious notes, and, when a book was finished, she wrote a thousand words or so on the main ideas she had gained from it.

She carefully saved all these notes. When he returned he would see how thoroughly she had followed his directions.

On the other side of the world from Yetta, Longman was leading a rough, exciting tent-life among dangerously fanatic natives. It would have been hard to imagine two more sharply contrasting environments. He never dreamed of the loving devotion which was being offered him, so many thousand miles away. He did not suspect how his occasional letters, in reply to her weekly ones, fanned this flame. He was wholly occupied in racing against time and difficulties to complete his work.

The expedition was not having an easy time of it. The ruins about which they were digging were regarded by the natives with superst.i.tious veneration. The little group of scientists had only a score of unreliable soldiers for defence, so the real men--Le Marquis d'Hauteville, _Chef de l'expedition_, a wiry, gray-haired veteran of the Algerian Wars; Delanoue, a dandified-looking Parisian, who had carved his name as an explorer in all sorts of outlandish places; Vibert, the photographer, and Walter--had their hands full. They were the rampart, behind which the half-dozen querulous, rather old-maidish specialists measured skulls, gathered fragments of pottery, took rubbings of inscriptions, and collected folk-lore.

It is very much easier to love a person who is absent than to live amicably at close quarters with his daily faults and foibles. As the months pa.s.sed, Walter Longman--or rather the ghost which Yetta conjured up to that name--took on new graces, was endowed with ever more brilliant characteristics. Yetta hardly knew the real man. In their half-dozen meetings she had seen certain charming traits. He came to typify the kind of life she would like to lead. A life of cleanliness and comfort, but free from the shame of luxury. A life of books, but so close and sympathetic to the struggling ma.s.s of humanity as to escape the reproach of pedantry.

Her dreams of him--thanks to his absence--could not be contradicted. If an act in the life about her seemed good, she did not doubt that Walter could and would have done it better. Of the unpleasant pettinesses which she saw among her a.s.sociates, she was sure that he was free. The authors she read seemed to her very wise, but their attainments could not be compared to Walter's mystic wisdom. It is very easy to laugh at such folly--and so much easier to cry.

The idolatrous incense which she burned at the altar of the Absent One was a great incentive to her study. Knowledge was not only the road to power, but also to his approbation. But his greatest contribution was the memory of his scorn for intellectual ruts, for cut-and-dried formulae. "You can't crowd life into a definition," he had said. "Beware of simple explanations. Living is a complex business."

Such phrases--sticking in her memory like illuminated mottoes--held her back from joining the Socialist party. Sooner or later it was inevitable that she should do so. She was a logical Socialist, with the logic of events. It would have been difficult to erect any other structure on the foundations life had laid for her. She was a machine worker who had revolted before the grinding monotony had killed her faith and vision.

She could still hope. She had the insight to see beyond the personal pettiness of squabbling dogmatists to the great principles of Justice and Brotherhood, which their heated advocacy sometimes obscures. Her life would have been poorer in any other setting.

But it was a real gain to her that she did not join the party hurriedly.

She might have resisted the urgings of Braun longer--even after she had read largely pro and con, even after she had familiarized herself with the traditional theoretical "objections to Socialism," and, weighing them against the facts of life, which she saw about her, the bent and aged women of thirty, the young men smitten with tuberculosis, the thousands of babies that never grow up, had found them light indeed--she might still have held back longer from the personal and entirely illogical reason that Walter had never joined if it had not been for a dramatic meeting with her old boss--Jake Goldfogle.

His shop had failed in her first strike. She had lost all track of him.

About nine o'clock one bitter winter night she was walking home along Ca.n.a.l Street. The row of pushcarts, lit by flaring oil lamps, were doing a scant business. It was too cold for sidewalk bargaining. She was moved by a deep pity for these men and women, who were forced out on such a night, to hawk their wares. It was not only the victims of the sweat-shop who find living a hard matter. Suddenly her notice fell on a dilapidated pedler, who was holding out a meagre tray of notions. He did not have even a pushcart. A heavy black patch hid one side of his face, but she recognized Jake at once. Her first impulse was to hurry past with averted face. But his shivering poverty--he had no overcoat--checked her.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Goldfogle."

He turned his unbandaged eye on her in bewilderment. His frost-bitten face flushed with resentment.

"Come on and have a cup of coffee," she said. "I want to talk with you."

The idea of coffee stopped the curses which were gathering on his tongue, and, ashamed of his lack of spirit, he followed her. They sat down opposite each other at a dingy little tea-room table. Jake remembered Yetta as a frightened shop-girl. The last time she had seen him, he had threatened her with arrest. He had solemnly sworn that he would never give her back her job. And now she was giving him a cup of coffee. He drank it in silence. Once upon a time he had dreamed of marrying her as though it would be a great condescension.

The coffee warmed him so that he told his story. The failure had been complete. He and his sister and brother-in-law had gone back to the machine. The sister had given out first with the East Side commonplace--a cough. For a while the two men had stuck together, once more a little money had begun to pile up. Then a belt broke; the flying end had caught Jake in the face. He lifted up the black patch and showed Yetta the horrible scar where his eye had been. When he had come out of the hospital, his brother-in-law had disappeared. For a while Jake had hoped to get some compensation out of his employer, but he had fallen into the clutches of a "shyster lawyer," who compromised the case out of court for a hundred dollars and kept seventy-five for his fee. This had happened about a month before. Jake had been dragging out a miserable existence, sleeping in the lowest doss-houses, and of the stock he had bought with his twenty-five dollars, the half-filled tray was all that remained. And if Yetta had not started the strike, he would have been a rich man. "Und I vas in luv wit you, Yetta," he ended.

It happened that she had just received her month's pay, so she was able to buy Jake an overcoat and give him a few dollars for meals and lodging. And the next day she found work for him as a night watchman.

But although his grat.i.tude for this job was voluminous it did not ease Yetta's conscience in the matter. There was something sardonically grotesque in the encounter. It convinced her, more surely than books could ever have done, of the Socialist doctrine that all life is knit into one whole; that Jake, just as much as Mrs. Cohen, had been a victim of a vicious system.

"As long as this bitter industrial compet.i.tion continues," she wrote to Walter, "there are bound to be such pitiful specimens as Jake. You see a lot in the papers nowadays about how the trusts are eliminating compet.i.tion. The more I think about that the more horrible it seems.

They are eliminating compet.i.tion in the sales departments, in the distribution of the product, because there the waste is in dollars and cents. But in production--where the compet.i.tive waste is only human beings--the struggle is as bitter as ever. The high-salaried, 'gentlemanly' managers of the different plants of a trust cooperate in selling and in buying raw material, but in the actual work of the mills they have to compete to see who can exploit the workers hardest--just as Jake was driven to overwork us girls. I don't see any possible cure except Socialism, and I'm going to join the party."

Many months later, when the courier brought this letter into the camp among the ancient ruins, the exile opened it with feverish hands, ran his fingers down page after page until he came to Mabel's name. It was not until he had read this part several times that he gave any attention to the fact that Yetta had become a Socialist.

CHAPTER XX

ISADORE BRAUN