Comrade Yetta Part 3

"I'm a neighbor of yours," she said. "My name is Miss Brail. I've come to get acquainted."

Mrs. Goldstein looked up hostilely from her sewing. Rosa, surly as usual, went on with her eating. But Yetta offered the intruder her chair. The visitor seemed used to such cold receptions; she sat down placidly and tried violently to establish more friendly relations.

She and some other women had rented the house across the street and were going to live there. It was to be a sort of a school. First of all they were going to start a kindergarten and day nursery for the children of women who worked. Rosa interrupted harshly that there were no children in their household. Miss Brail refused to be rebuffed. They were also going to have a sewing school for young women. Rosa, who had accepted the responsibility of the conversation, although she had not stopped eating, said that she and Yetta sewed all day long and did not need to learn.

"Well," Miss Brail continued bravely, "we will have a cooking-cla.s.s too."

Rosa replied that her mother cooked for them.

"But don't you want to know how to cook yourself? Some day you'll have a home of your own, and it will be worth while to know how to cook good meals cheaply. Why, if the wife only knows how to buy scientifically and understands a little of food values, you can feed the ordinary family on only--"

But once more Rosa interrupted her. She had finished her meal and, emptying her tea-cup with a noisy sip, she stood up in her gaunt, twisted unloveliness.

"Do you think any one's going to marry me?" she asked defiantly.

Miss Brail did not have the heart to answer the question truthfully.

She turned towards Yetta, who--confused by the implication of her look--hung her head and blushed. Rosa laughed scornfully.

"She ain't got no money. n.o.body'd marry a girl for her looks, even if she could cook."

At this blasphemy against Romance, Miss Brail became eloquent. She was very definitely unmarried herself. But not so much an "old maid" as a new woman. It would have been impossible to picture her fondling a cat.

She was almost athletic in her build, her hair was combed to hide the few streaks of gray, her eyes were young and full of fire. Her tailor-made suit was attractive; in a very modern, businesslike way, even coquettish. You could not look at her without feeling that no one was to blame but herself that she was unmarried. She delivered an impa.s.sioned harangue on the subject of men. Of course there were soulless brutes who would marry only for money. But the right sort of a man would just as soon take a poor girl as a rich one if he really loved her. She knew lots of that kind. They were going to have clubs and cla.s.ses for young men in the house across the way--she called it The Neighborhood House. And once a month they would have dances. She invited Rosa and Yetta to come.

At the word "dance," Mrs. Goldstein stopped sewing, and sticking her needle in her wig, got up threateningly. No! Neither her daughter nor her niece would go to a dance. With her bony hand she pointed emphatically at the door. Miss Brail protested that the Neighborhood House dances would be eminently respectable; only the young men and women they knew personally. She tried to say that it was good to give the girls a chance to meet men in clean, orderly surroundings. But she could not resist the old woman's wrath, and at last, shrugging her shoulders in defeat, she went out.

Mr. Goldstein, when he heard of the incident, added his curses to those of his wife. Dances had been the ruin of one daughter, and that was enough disaster for a self-respecting family. Besides, these Goyim were trying to undermine the True Religion. David was hardly a religious man.

But social settlements always took an interest in reform politics.

Tammany Hall had small reason to be friendly with them. And as he could think of no arguments, this religious talk seemed a handy weapon.

But all her uncle's and aunt's denunciations could not persuade Yetta that Miss Brail was evil. Morning and evening, as she went out to work and came home, she stopped a moment on her doorstep to note the progress of rehabilitation in the house across the way. What the East Side calls the "parlor floor" had formerly been a store. Its great plate-gla.s.s window was cleaned and a heavy curtain was stretched across the lower half, so that people on the sidewalk could not look in. White dimity curtains were hung in the upstairs windows. The fine old front door was painted white, the rusted banister of the steps was replaced by a new and graceful one of polished steel. Before long the "residents" moved in. Their arrival coincided with the appearance of beautiful potted plants inside the windows.

Although the screen hid the front parlor from the street, it was not high enough to hide it from the windows of the Goldstein's flat. From that vantage-point Yetta learned the routine of evening work in the Settlement. A bulletin-board beside the door helped her to put names to the things she saw. On Monday nights there were meetings of "The Martha Washington Club." They were young women of her own age, and Miss Brail presided. There was generally some "uptown woman" who spoke or sang to the girls. This part of the evening's entertainment lasted until nine, then they grouped about Miss Brail at the piano and practised some choral music. They ended with half an hour's dancing and went home a little after ten. Tuesday night there was a club of boys. Wednesday night a cla.s.s in sewing. Thursday night "The Abraham Lincoln Debating Club" held forth. Most of them were young men in the early twenties, but a few were older. On Friday there was a "Mothers' Club," and on Sat.u.r.day night a magic-lantern show.

At last it came time for the monthly dance. Yetta had noticed the announcement on the bill-board several days before. On the eventful night she pretended to be sleepy and went to bed early, but as soon as Rosa began to snore she wrapped herself in her shawl and a blanket and tiptoed out into the front room to watch the ball. The Martha Washington Club had turned out in force, dazzlingly beautiful in their best clothes. The black-suited young men of the debating club also looked very wonderful to the hungry-eyed girl who watched it from afar. As was the strange custom of The Krists, the big window was opened although it was mid-February, and the sound of the four-piece orchestra and the laughter came up, un.o.bstructed, to Yetta's ears.

She had never been so happy in all her life, but most of the time her eyes were filled with tears. She imagined herself first as one of the girls and then as another. There was one whose shirtwaist seemed especially beautiful. Yetta was convinced that if she were a millionnaire, or if a fairy G.o.dmother should offer her one choice, she would choose just such clothes. There was one of the young men, a curly-haired, laughing fellow, whom she had noticed on Thursday nights.

Whenever he took part in the debates, all the other men clapped violently. Generally she imagined herself dancing with him.

After a while the music stopped. Miss Brail and the other settlement women brought in trays loaded with lemonade and sandwiches and cakes.

The curly-haired man sat down beside the girl in the resplendent waist.

Hot little blushes chased themselves all over Yetta's body. It frightened her even to imagine that she was so gayly dressed, that such a man sat close to her and whispered in her ear, looking at her and laughing all the time.

The supper fire had not yet burned down in the Goldstein's sordid kitchen-eating-sitting room. It was stuffy and hot, but Yetta, in spite of her shawl and blanket, shivered when the intermission was over. The curly-haired man nonchalantly put his arm about the gorgeous shirtwaist and, with his face rather close to his partner's, swung off into a dizzy two-step. Yetta felt as if she had been suddenly caressed. She had to grit her teeth to keep them from chattering.

A tremendous storm had broken out in the breast of the little sweat-shop girl. Sometimes she had to close her eyes, the beauty of the vision was so dazzling. For a moment she would tear herself away from the blighting memory of reality, and her soul seemed to float away from her body into the brightly lit room across the way. In the most deeply spiritual sense she became part of that gay scene. She was arrayed in gorgeous clothes. Men--even the wonderful curly-haired man--sought her as a partner. And she could laugh!

But the Blessed Angel of Forgetfulness is--like her sister, the Spirit of Delight--an inconstant hussy. No Wise Man of all the ages has learned the trick of keeping her always at his side.

The memories of the day's stark realities would submerge Yetta. Back of her was the squalid flat, the snores of her loveless relatives. In her dark bedroom her one frayed dress was hung over the back of a chair, waiting for her to put it on and hurry through the dawn to Jake Goldfogle's Vest Shop. Routine--hopeless monotony! A prison tread--from the vitiated air and uneasy sleep of the tenement, so many steps to the cruel speed and inhumanity of the Machine. Then so many steps back to the tenement, and all to do over again.

In front of her--in the room across the street--"Life-as-it-might-be."

Beauty--thrilling excitement--joy!

The eyes of Yetta's soul swung back and forth from one vision to the other. Through the long evening she knelt there by the window, so forgetful of her body that she did not realize how the dirty window ledge was cutting into her elbows, how her knees were being bruised on the unswept floor.

At last the musicians put away their instruments. Every one clapped insistently and crowded about Miss Brail. But she waved her watch in their face. A distant church-bell tolled midnight. Yetta stayed at her post until the last laughing couple had shaken hands with the ladies at the door. For several minutes more she watched the shadows on the upper windows, while the "residents" talked over the success of the dance. She watched till the last light was out, then she crept back to bed and cried herself to sleep.

The tears she shed that night were not the kind that heal. There was acid in them which ate into the quick. For nearly four years her body had been on the rack. Now her soul was being torn. The questionings which had troubled her after Rachel's disappearance became more and more insistent. Was she never to know what joy meant? Was day to crawl along after day in desolate and weary monotony? Was this dull ache of soul-hunger never to be relieved until some indefinite future was to find her--cheated of everything--cast out useless on the human refuse heap? Was this weary plain of uneventfulness never to be broken by any dazzling mountain peaks nor shady valley?

Shortly after the Settlement Ball, which Yetta had watched as a starveling beggar peers through a baker's window, Life suddenly opened up. The drab monotony was illumined by a lurid display of fireworks.

Rockets of glaring, appalling red shot up into the night. There was a great white blaze of hope, and all the sky became suffused by the soft caressing colors of unsophisticated Romance.

The sweat-shop motor broke down. Jake Goldfogle cursed and tore his hair. He kept his "hands" waiting in idleness half through the afternoon, until the electricians had come and said that the damage could not be righted till midnight. Then Jake surlily dismissed his women. It was rare that Yetta had such a holiday. There was no reason for her to go to her dreary home. It was a precocious spring day, the sun shone with a heat that made the streets attractive.

Wandering about aimlessly, Yetta came to Hamilton Fish Park. The faint suggestion of rising sap which came to her in that open s.p.a.ce seemed infectious. The questionings which had disturbed her returned with new force. Why? What did it all mean? Was there no escape?

Suddenly her attention was caught by a familiar figure, Rachel, arrayed in cheap finery. Yetta quickened her pace to overtake her and called her. It was a great shock to Rachel when she recognized her. She stared at her in bewilderment, but it was surely Yetta,--Yetta of the old life, of the great sad eyes, with the same old shawl over her head.

"The motor broke in my shop," Yetta explained as they sat down. "I came out for a walk. Where are you working?"

"I ain't working."

Yetta's eyes opened wider.

"Are you married," she asked with awe in her voice.

Shame closed Rachel's lips. How could she explain the grim dirtiness of Life to her ignorant little cousin? She started to get up and go away.

But suddenly the heart-break of it all--the memory of the girlish dreams she had confided to Yetta--overcame her. She threw her arms around her cousin and cried, great sobs which shook them both. A few words came to her lips, the same phrase over and over: "Oh! Yetta. I wanted to be good." When the first burst of her grief was spent, she began to tell how it had all come about.

At first everything had gone smoothly. She had taken a furnished room with the girl from her shop who had lent her the hat and white shoes for her first dance. "She had a crush on me," Rachel explained. They had led a joyous but quite innocent life, working hard all day and two or three nights a week going to dances. As far as they knew how to choose they went to respectable places. Several men had paid court to Rachel. A clerk in a dry-goods store on Sixth Avenue had been in love with her. He was serious. But he was earning very little, had a marriageable sister, and wanted to wait a couple of years. She had even become engaged to one man. At first, she said, she had "been crazy about him." She had let him kiss her and make pretty violent love to her. But after a while she saw he was "a spender," too free with his money--like her father. She did not want a man like that, so she had sent him about his business. Then her room-mate "got a crush" on another girl and had left Rachel alone in the furnished room.

"What can you do?"--she began to cry again--"when you ain't got no place to have your friend call except a furnished room? All alone? A girl ain't got no chance--all alone--like that."

She could not tell Yetta what came next, so she asked about the family.

As Yetta told her meagre store of news, the flood-gates of Rachel's bitter heart opened. She cursed her family. They were to blame for her disaster. Why had not her father made a decent home for his children?

Was it her fault that her brother was a crook? If they had been honest and thrifty, they could have given her a marriage portion. Worse than doing nothing for her, they had even eaten up her wages. If she had been an orphan, she could have put some of her pay in the bank--she could have saved enough money to get married on.

"Don't you let them cheat you, Yetta," she broke out, "the way they cheated me. Perhaps I'm a bad woman, but I never cheated little girls the way they cheated us. I never robbed an orphan like they done to you.

You're a fool to stand for it. Why should you give them your wages?

Haven't they cheated you enough? They made your poor father pay too much board. The funeral never cost like they said it did. And now they're stealing your wages. I tell you what you do. You find some good woman in your shop, who'll take you to board, and put your money in the bank. But don't go to no 'furnished room.' Furnished rooms is h.e.l.l! You--"

"h.e.l.lo, Ray. Introduce me to your friend."

The intruder's voice sent a convulsive shiver through Rachel. He wore a suit of dove-gray, the cuffs and collar of which were bound with silk braid. There was a large diamond in his scarlet tie. As though he did not wish to be outdone by the sun in its premature glory he wore a slightly soiled Panama hat, shaped after the fashion depicted in photographs of the German Crown Prince.

"I say," he insisted, and there was a tw.a.n.g of menace in his soft voice, a more evident threat in his hard domineering eyes, "I say, introduce me to your friend."

"She's my cousin, Yetta Rayefsky," Rachel replied reluctantly.