Comrade Yetta Part 45

She sat down to her work.

Isadore found it harder to bring his wits together. But her movement of retreat had been like a blow in the face to him. It steadied him a trifle--but only a trifle. He had kissed Yetta. All these years he had loved her. Suddenly--utterly unexpectedly--the Heavens had opened. He had held her in his arms, he had kissed her.

The foolish idea came to him that he would like to look at his lips, which--after waiting so long--had at last found their goal. As there was no mirror in the office, this was manifestly impossible. But his hand--at least he could look at that--it also had caressed the beloved face. His hand was stained with blood. For an instant he was dazed.

Yetta--her cheeks aflame--was bent over her work. A little stream of blood ran down her neck, where a bit of the broken lamp-shade had cut her in its fall.

"Yetta, Yetta!" he cried, "you're wounded."

"What?" she said in amazement. She had been preparing a crushing answer in case he started to make love again. The emotions that were tearing her were too violent to let her take note of a little cut.

"Look," he said, showing her his hand. "Broken gla.s.s. On your neck. Let me see."

Impressed by the sight of blood, she bent her head for the examination.

But Isadore's ideas of treating such a wound were sentimental rather than scientific.

"Oh, don't. Please!" she protested, agonized by shame. She struggled up to her feet, but somehow she had forgotten the crushing retort she had prepared. "It isn't serious. It doesn't hurt. Please let me finish this work."

Isadore retreated before her distressed eyes.

"Wipe the blood off your lips," she ordered sternly.

Then she sat down again, utterly confused. It seemed such a stupid, inane thing she had said. It was all her fault, she unjustly told herself. If only she had kept her wits that first moment instead of being so childishly frightened. She felt humiliated. It took an extreme effort of will to turn her attention to the garment workers and the article she must correct. It would have helped if she could have heard the scratching of his pen or the rustle of his newspaper. There was not a sound from his desk. She did not dare to look around.

At last the task was finished. She put on her cloak and hat and wrapped the m.u.f.fler about her throat before she found courage to look at Isadore. He was sunk down in his chair, watching her hungrily. She bit her lip at the sight and had trouble speaking.

"Isad--Comrade, here's the copy. I hope you can make an editorial out of it. It's awfully important for Organized Labor.--This convention has finished me. I'm dead tired. I'll take a vacation to-morrow--I mean to-day--and sleep."

Isadore did not reply. He just looked at her, a dumb plea in his eyes--which she did not want to seem to understand.

"So long," she said.

She was almost out of sight before he spoke.

"You'll come back? When you're rested?"

"Why, yes," she said. "Of course."

It was at least half an hour before Isadore pulled himself together and got to work. But the editorial which he wrote on the Federated Garment Trades was very creditable.

Yetta walked home through the dawn. She was very tired, and she tried not to think. But she could not free herself from the insistent question--"Did I really kiss him?" She looked at herself in the gla.s.s, just before she turned out the gas and went to bed. "Did I really kiss him?" she asked her reflected image. She got no answer, and, as though vexed at this silence, she spoke defiantly. "If I did, I'm sorry. I don't love him." This rather comforted her, and she fell asleep at once.

But when she woke up in the early afternoon, she felt worse about the night's adventure than ever. Very emphatically she told herself that she loved Walter. That had been _La grande pa.s.sion_. No. Not "had been"; it "was." It was a treason to think of it as "having been." She had told Walter that love had no tenses, that it was "somehow eternally always and now and for ever and ever." Romance still dominated all her thinking. The books and poems said there could only be one real love.

She was sure that her love for Walter had been real--hence, in strict logic, she loved him still and always would and could never love any one else.

Although she really believed this--wanted to believe it, felt that life would be impossible on any other hypothesis--she was beginning to realize that somehow the Romantic Explanation of Life does not quite explain. For the poets it was beautifully simple--either you loved or you did not love. It was the crudest sort of dualism. Things were black or white. The gray tones were not mentioned.

But while she did not love Isadore as she had loved Walter, he was certainly in a different category from all the other men whom she did not love. The men at the office, for instance. She was the best of chums with them; she respected them, admired them, liked them--and did not love them. But it was different with Isadore.

The hungry look in his eyes haunted her. The memory of his sudden, unexpected ardor--the rough vehemence of his caresses, his stormy outbreak of pa.s.sionate tenderness--disturbed and distressed her. She had never taken him quite seriously before. She had deliberately, but unconsciously, refused to look the matter in the face. It is very hard to be sympathetic and just to a love we do not return. It had not occurred to her that Isadore's love was as painful to him as hers for Walter had been. That startling contact in the dark of the office had opened her eyes to the reality of his pa.s.sion. What a mess it all was!

Isadore loved her. She loved Walter. Walter loved Mabel!

The sun was resplendent, and Yetta--having promised herself a holiday--walked over to Washington Square and took a bus up to Riverside Drive. It was zero weather, the sun shone dazzlingly on the blanket of snow, which had given an unwonted beauty to the Jersey sh.o.r.e. Yetta walked up and down the Drive till the sinking sun had reddened the West with an added glory. It was not often that she had such outings. The crisp air stimulated her. She was happy with the pure joy of being alive and outdoors in a way she had not known since Walter went away. To be sure her mood was tinged with melancholy. She was sorry for Isadore. But less sorry than usual for herself. Somehow she felt less bitterly the appalling loneliness.

As she was going downtown in the dusk she noticed a poster of the Russian Symphony Orchestra. It offered a programme from Tchaikovsky. She had some neglected work she ought to finish up. She had barely enough money in her pocket for a ticket--and a hundred things she ought to use it for. But in a sudden daredevil expansiveness, she dropped off the bus, got a sc.r.a.p of supper at a Childs' restaurant, and went to the concert.

Under the spell of the music she forgot all her preoccupations. Her intellect dropped down into subconsciousness. She did not think--she felt.

Music can be the most decorative of all the Arts--or the most intellectual. The trained musician, who knows the meaning of "theme" and "development," who can recite glibly all the arguments for or against "programme" music, who will tell you offhand in what year this Symphony was written, whether it is a production of the composer's "first period"

or a mature work, cannot avoid bringing a large a.s.sortment of purely intellectual considerations--historical and technical--to the appreciation of music. But to the nave listener, like Yetta, music is decorative. It appeals solely to the emotions. It is never interesting--it is either pleasing or displeasing. Yetta sat dreamily through the concert--half the time with closed eyes--and found it wonderful. There was too little chance for the play of sentiments in her life. Every waking hour she had to think. Tchaikovsky laid a caressing hand over the tired eyes of her intellect and showed beautiful things to her heart.

The next morning as Yetta went to the office she thought with some uneasiness of meeting Isadore. As usual in such matters she decided to face the affair frankly.

"Good morning," she said, going at once to his desk; "I'm sorry about what happened the other night. I was startled and bewildered."

Isadore knew that she had been taken unawares--that the kiss did not belong to him by rights.

"If there's any apology necessary," he said, "I'm the one to make it. I was as much startled and bewildered as you were. I'm sorry if you feel bad about it."

"We'll forget it," Yetta said.

Isadore did not look as if he were certain on this point.

They fell again into the accustomed rut of comradeship. Neither of them spoke again of the outburst. No one in the office noticed any change in their relationship.

But there was a change. Isadore could never forget that wonderful moment; he could never be quite the same. And Yetta--when in time the memory of it lost its element of excitement, when she got over being afraid that Isadore might begin again--found that she also had changed.

The fact that Isadore loved her pa.s.sionately had taken a definite place in her consciousness. She could not ignore this any more, as she had done before. In a way it made him more interesting. She did not for a moment think of marrying him--she loved Walter. But she was sorry for Isadore. They had this added thing in common--the pain of a hopeless love.

It seemed wildly unjust to her that she might not in any way show her sympathy to him without encouraging his love--making him "hope." She knew when he was tired and discouraged; she would have liked to cheer him. She sometimes sewed on a b.u.t.ton for Harry Smith. She ordered Levine about severely. She did not like either of them half as much as she did Isadore, but she must not show him any of these womanly attentions. It was stupid and vexatious that just because Isadore loved her, she must be carefully and particularly unfriendly to him.

Paulding was raising Yetta's salary among his personal friends, and his check came to her directly without pa.s.sing through the general treasury.

Her work kept her out of the office most of the time, and it was not until her second year that she chanced to be at her desk on a Sat.u.r.day morning. About twelve-thirty Harry Moore came in from the composing-room, where he had been attending to the lock-up. He leaned back in his chair and stretched wearily.

"About time for the 'ghost' to walk," he said.

"Not much of a ghost this week," the pessimistic Levine growled.

A few minutes later Mary Ames, the treasurer, bustled in. Her face was round and unattractive; she was short and had been fat, but her clothes hung about her loosely as though she had lost much flesh.

"It's a bad week, Comrades," she announced cheerfully. "Thought I wasn't going to be able to meet the union pay-roll to-day. Six dollars short.

But the ten o'clock mail brought in twenty. Isadore went out and touched Mrs. Wainwright for fifty, and Branch 3 just sent in eleven from a special collection. So I've seventy-five for you. Who comes first?"

"Locke's wife is sick," Levine said mournfully.

"That's twenty dollars, isn't it?" Mary said, counting off the bills.

"And you know Isadore hasn't had full pay for months. We must be a hundred and fifty back on his salary."

"Twenty-five to him," the stenographer said. "It'll give him a surprise."