Comrade Yetta Part 29

It was shortly before her visit to Cos-Cob that Isadore Braun asked Yetta to marry him.

In a way he was almost ashamed of himself for doing so. His tempestuous desire for her was something he could not understand, something which forcibly escaped from the control of reason, to which all his life had been submitted.

Yetta had walked into his cold, impersonal life in an utterly disturbing way. It was as if some sudden leak had let a glare of sunlight into a photographer's dark room. All the care which had been expended in fitting that laboratory for a specific--and valuable--piece of work was rendered useless.

With the methodical forethought of his race and the narrow vision of a fanatic, Isadore had arranged his future. He had planned not only each day's work, but his life-work. With dogged singleness of purpose he had trained himself to be an efficient machine. Such an irrational thing as Love had no place in his scheme. To be sure, he believed that marriage was good. Sometime--say at thirty-five--he would look around for a convenient comrade, a woman of similar ideals and purpose, and they would mate without any serious derangement in the life of either. But he condemned Romance. It was irrational.

Romance had accepted the challenge and had worsted him. His first interest in the Yetta of the vest-makers' strike had turned into respect and admiration--and finally into something much more serious and dynamic. It was not until he caught himself neglecting some important work to attend a meeting where nothing called him except the chance for a few words with her that he discovered what was the matter with him.

Again and again he rallied all his intellectual forces for the combat, but always after a short struggle he found himself flat on his back, with Romance performing the dance of victory on his chest.

At first he tried to comfort himself with the thought that after all Yetta was just such a mate as his intellect would have chosen. She also was a Socialist. But he was too honest with himself to admit this sophistry. It was not because of her theories that the flame burned within him. He would have been just as helpless, just as irrationally enslaved, if she had been a chorus girl. She was not reason's choice, for the intellect is colorless and Yetta was resplendent.

To admit the dominance of this irrational emotion was to abandon all his G.o.ds, to turn his back on his only religion. It is hard for most of us to realize the deep tragedy of Isadore's position. Few of us believe ardently in anything. We have a comfortable ability to keep our faith in things we know are false, a lazy credulity for exploded theories. We go on burning our incense at shrines the G.o.ds have deserted. We pretend to a love of liberty we do not feel. We are inclined to laugh at the spectacle of a man nave enough really to care, to rend himself in a pa.s.sionate quest for Truth--and may G.o.d have mercy on such of us.

It was a month or more before Isadore surrendered to unreason. It was a defeat which told on him in shrunken cheeks. There were some who thought he was sick. But he knew better. Absolute reason, the G.o.d on whom he had staked his faith, was crumbling. Longman's talk about the lack of logic in life had seemed to him drivel. But now reason--the all-powerful deity--had gone down before the non-intellectual gleam in a young woman's eye, had turned tail and fled before the curve and color of a cheek.

He tried to propose by letter. Night after night in his dismal, unkempt furnished room, he laid out his writing-paper. Sometimes he scribbled furiously, pouring it all out on paper predestined to be crumpled up and thrown away. More often he chewed the end of his pen in a sort of mechanical tongue-tiedness.

And then one day--to his complete surprise--he proposed to her in the office of the Woman's Trade Union League. They had gone into the committee-room to consult over the "demands" for the Skirt-makers'

Union. Yetta had drawn up a rough copy and Isadore was to put them into more legal shape. They were leaning together over the big table under the great picture of Jeanne d'Arc, when the grace of Yetta's wrist intruded between his consciousness and the troubles of the skirt-makers.

He was always discovering some such new attractiveness about her.

"Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed, straightening up in vexation of spirit.

"What's the matter?" Yetta asked.

Isadore realized that this was neither the time nor the place, that neither of them was in the right mood, but he could not help telling her.

Yetta stopped him as soon as her amazement had given place to understanding. With the simple directness which was her most outstanding characteristic, she refused even to consider his suggestion.

Emphatically she did not love him.

For a moment it seemed tremendously important to Isadore to light a cigarette without letting his hand give way to its insane desire to tremble. When it was lit, he looked Yetta squarely in the eyes and knew there was no use in argument.

"Well," he said, after a few puffs, "let's finish up these demands."

The incident brought their cordial intimacy to an end. Yetta no longer called him by his first name. As before, their work threw them frequently together. Yetta, at first, was afraid of a fresh outbreak--and so was Isadore. He had lost faith in his self-control. But no outsider could have guessed the constraint which underlay their comradely intercourse.

Isadore was as much in love as Walter had been with Mabel, but he was of a more masterful disposition. The Work, to which he and Yetta had dedicated their lives, was more important than personal pain. When the business of the day required him to see her, he did not shirk it, but he no longer sought her out. If she did not love him, that ended it. He did not want the hollow mockery of friendship.

Yetta's heart was full to overflowing with her romantic dream of Walter.

Isadore, the real, the daily, had no chance. If some one had asked her about him, she would have described him in glowing terms, with an enthusiastic tribute to his unusual loyalty and ability. Her respect for him was deep. There was no man of her race nor near her own age whom she held in such high esteem. But when it came to loving him,--unfortunately he was real.

His proposal had seemed to her almost preposterous. Not that she felt herself too good for him. On the contrary her love for Walter had increased her very real humility. It was the concreteness of his offer that shocked her.

She rarely looked forward to Walter's return, and when she did, it was with no definite visualizing thought of marriage. The concept of s.e.x was vague to her--and decidedly fearsome. Not even Harry Klein, her first lover--and she always thought of him as an incident in a dim and very remote past--had really stirred her woman's nature. He had appealed to her as an instrument, a key by which to escape from her dungeon. The sentiments, which his meagre caresses had raised, had by the fright of the adventure been driven back in dismay.

Sometimes, to be sure, a sort of sweet dizziness overcame her when she remembered how Walter had kissed her hand. The spot below the middle finger of her left hand which his lips had touched was a holy place. But more often she thought of his words. When in her dreams he seemed nearest, he was halfway across the room, in the big leather chair, while she was curled up on the window-seat. She was not yet twenty-one. Her girlhood had been sacrificed to the machine. Orderly, symmetrical development had been impossible. Now that she was a woman in body, in mind, in work, her imagination was still in the first flower of adolescence.

On the mantelpiece of his old room, where she lived, a snapshot of the white men of the Expedition leaned against the cow-faced G.o.d of the Hakt.i.tes. Like Saul of old, Walter towered head and shoulders above his mates. Khaki and a pith helmet are not exactly silver armor--but to Yetta he seemed the Shining Prince. And Isadore wanted her to live with him in an East Side flat.

If falling in love with her had disturbed Isadore, his inability to put her out of his mind after her emphatic refusal troubled him a thousand times more. He got no ease from his pain except in work. The anxiety of his friends increased. But, brushing aside their protests, he sought out ever new activities. He hated to be idle, he came to fear being alone in his room. But not even the most strenuous endeavor to forget relieved him.

In the beautifully illogical way life has, help came to Isadore from a source he would never have dreamed of. He came home early one night to write an article for the _Forwaertz_. To his dismay he found that he had left his notes in the office. The article would have to wait, and here he was with nothing to do, alone in his room, where of all places he found it hardest to escape from the aching hunger of his heart, the sad confusion of his thoughts.

It was not much of a room--an iron cot, a big deal table, a few cheap chairs and bookcases. It was not even decently clean. In the five years he had lived there he had been quite oblivious to its sordidness. But of late it had become abhorrent to him. He was already half undressed. The bitter summer heat had driven the tenement dwellers out on the street.

The perspiring humanity which crowded the sidewalks offered no comfortable escape.

He turned to his bookcases. But he needed something of more compelling interest than the census and immigration reports to fill the time till sleep would come. Most of his little library were reference books, the rest he had read and reread. On the bottom shelf was a bundle he had never unwrapped. They were books Walter had given him after one of their discussions over the meaning of Life. He had never read them, because he was sure he would find no interest in the hodge-podge, haphazard kind of thinking which Walter seemed to enjoy. He pulled them out now--at least they would offer the interest of novelty. The first book he opened was Henri Bergson's _L'Evolution Creatrice_. Walter, as was his custom, had annotated it copiously. On the fly-page he had written, "A superb discussion of the limitations of Pure Reason." The phrase caught Isadore's eye as he listlessly read the note. Was not this "limitation"

of reason the very thing that was troubling him?

No book that he had read in years seemed to vibrate so compellingly with a sense of actuality. This was partly due no doubt to the master craftsmanship of the author. But very likely it would have made no impression on Isadore if he had read it when Walter had asked him to.

The jar and conflict of the last few months had opened up the compartments of his brain to a long-lost receptivity. The facts of life had shaken his intellectual structure until he was prepared to understand.

This suave and erudite Frenchman was calmly announcing that the Age of Reason was a myth, rationalism a superst.i.tion. From every field of human knowledge Bergson was gathering his evidence, from the microscopic data of biology to the gigantic stellar facts beyond our vision, with merciless logic he was proving that the instrument with which we reason is not divine. "The G.o.d which has failed you," he said to Isadore, "is a false G.o.d. The brain, with which you created it, is only a faulty animal instrument, as liable to error as your eyes, for which you have been compelled to buy rectifying gla.s.ses."

While the message of Bergson is iconoclastic, a t.i.tanic warfare against the formal G.o.ds, it is by no means destructive. It holds a more magnificent, a more humanly satisfying optimism than metaphysics has dared, a promise of greater intimacy with the living truth than cold reason ever formulated. Above all it offered to Isadore to restore his self-respect.

He had to refill his lamp before he finished the book. And when he had reached the end, he could not sleep. A strange bodily unrest seized him.

He wanted to get away. When the heavens opened and a great light shone upon Saul of Tarsus, he felt at once the need of going out to some distant desert place to rearrange his life in accordance with the new light. Isadore also had need of an Arabia.

Some time before he had received an invitation to visit a Socialist magazine writer named Paulding at his lake-side camp in the Adirondacks.

Although Isadore knew the invitation had been sincere, that he would be welcome, he had refused it, because in his troubled frame of mind he had been frightened by the bare idea of idleness. He had been afraid to leave the rush of work. Now there was nothing he wanted more. So as dawn was breaking over the city, he packed his bag, putting in with care the books Walter had given him, and telegraphing that he had changed his mind, set out.

It was the first real vacation he had ever taken. All the "country" he had seen had been from car windows and the crumpled patches one encounters on labor-union picnics. The camp was the barest of log-cabins. Mrs. Paulding was also a writer, and all the mornings his hosts were busy over their typewriters. So Isadore was much by himself.

It was an entirely new experience for him to chop firewood. It took a week or more before he lost his diffidence before the pine trees. It was even longer before he became sufficiently familiar with the canoe to enjoy being out of sight of the landing. Paulding was an enthusiastic nature lover, and the struggles and adventures of the myriad animals of the forest and the lake which he pointed out were like enchanting fairy stories. Isadore had read such things in books, but it was endlessly strange for him to watch them in process. And all this strangeness helped him to the rest which, in spite of his denials, he desperately needed.

Gradually, as the weeks slipped by, he fought his way to a new outlook on life. Bergson and the pragmatists had shaken him out of his intellectual rut. His dogmatism had resulted from his manner of life. He had begun to think about social problems before he had come into intimate contact with social facts. His development had been the opposite of Yetta's. She had begun with facts and had judged all theories by them. He, having accepted a philosophy while still in the cloistered life of college, had been too busy preaching it to have much time to observe the complex reality of life. Bergson and his love for Yetta had jolted him out of this att.i.tude. He was man enough to see his error and correct it.

When he returned to the city in the fall, his comrades noticed the change in him. His former domineering conviction that he was right had given place to a gentler, more tolerant, and smiling self-confidence. He was no longer a doctrinaire. He was less c.o.c.ksure, but more certain. His native sympathy with suffering humanity, which had been the real motive of his Socialism and which for years he had suppressed as sentimental, came to life again. It was in his public speaking that the new man showed clearest. He no longer made his appeal solely to reason; there was more red blood in his discourse, more pulsing life in his words. He had come to see that his hearers must feel as well as think. His Socialism had lost some of its sharp definitions, some of its logical simplicity, but it had come to bear a closer similitude to life.

One day, shortly after his return, while walking, down the Bowery with a friend, he stopped and gave a nickel to an alcoholic-looking tramp. His friend expostulated. Such erratic almsgiving was worse than useless. It encouraged vagrancy; it was unscientific, unreasonable. Suddenly Isadore realized the change which had come over him. He grinned defiantly. "The poor devil," he explained, "looked as if he wanted a drink." His friend was scandalized. But if Walter had heard of the incident, he would have rejoiced as the Angels in Heaven rejoice when a lost lamb finds the fold.

The change in Isadore had been more concrete than the acceptation of a new outlook on life. Up in the mountains he had questioned not only his metaphysics, but his habits. He had pondered over the practical tactics of Socialism as well as its philosophy. The loosening of his fundamental concepts had solidified his att.i.tude towards practical problems. The rather diffuse propaganda work he had been doing no longer satisfied him. He wanted to concentrate on one tangible thing. And it seemed to him that what the movement needed more than anything else was a daily English paper. Back in New York, with a new and unconquerable enthusiasm, he set himself to this task.

But if his new point of view had healed his intellectual humiliation, it in no wise softened the torture of Yetta's indifference. Day after day, month after month, he lived with the ache of his love. But he came to laugh more readily, became less of a machine and more of a man.

It was several months after Yetta's refusal before he reopened the subject. He did it by a letter--so worded that it required no reply. He would not bother her, he wrote, with repeated urgings. He could not see the use of pleading. They were grown up, too serious-minded to act such a comedy. But he wanted her to know that he was steadfast. If in the future her regard for him grew into the love he hungered for, he trusted that she would tell him. And so the matter rested.

Other suitors sprang up a-plenty, and their noisy importunity made Yetta very thankful to Isadore for his dignified reserve.

CHAPTER XXI

_THE STAR_