Comrade Yetta Part 47

"It's the place for you," he said decisively. "To-morrow I'll rent the cottage next to mine--it's bigger. I noticed a 'To Let' sign on it this morning. It's a love of a place. And quiet! There isn't a corner of Philadelphia that's as quiet Sunday morning as Oxford is."

But Beatrice refused to consider his suggestion.

"I'm doing very well as I am, thank you. Having just got on my feet at last--no more entanglements for me!"

But two days after the summer recess began, Walter dropped off the train in her little Norman village.

"It's no use struggling, Beatrice," he said, before she had recovered from her surprise at his invasion. "You're going to write your next novel in Oxford. I've rented the larger house, and as soon as the French law allows we'll get married."

"Nonsense!" she said.

He came over and stood in front of her chair and talked to her in a quiet third personal tone--as if he were the family lawyer.

"B., here we are, two unattached and lonely individuals of the opposite s.e.xes. You said that morning in Paris that we were a sorry couple who had messed things up frightfully and wanted to cry. Well, we've got a bit more used to the mess, don't want to cry as much as we did--but--well, we want to live.

"I was a fool to ask Yetta to marry me, and she was very wise to run away. After all, she and I were strangers. She did not understand me any more than I did her. She was in love with a very nebulous sort of a dream--which I didn't resemble at all.

"It's different with us. At least we've 'the mess' in common. I don't know whether you've tried to forget our--escapade. I haven't. It seems to me, when I think of it, an immensely solemn thing--a memory I want to treasure. Somehow out of our misery a sudden understanding and sympathy was born. I'm inclined to think it was the most fundamental, the most spontaneous and real thing that ever happened to me. I'd chatted with you half a dozen times, had had only one real talk with you back in New York. There in Paris, in two minutes--no, it was a matter of seconds--we knew each other better than--well--it's hard to say what I mean, because I'm not much of a mystic. But never before or since have I experienced a deeper feeling of nearness. Two years pa.s.s without a word exchanged, and, in a tawdry hotel parlor in London, with a string of people walking past the open doors, I find the same sudden understanding.

"I don't need to tell you that there in London I wished the people were not walking past the door, that right now I wish your _bonne_ would disappear, so I could--

"But I don't want to talk about that. I'd like to get over something a lot deeper. It's this fundamental and immensely worth-while agreement and sympathy.

"And just because I have this conviction of understanding, I'm sure you're lonely, too--just as lonely as I am. We both of us have a desire for 'the accustomed'--for Lares and Penates. Even an escapade as delightful as the last one wouldn't quite satisfy either of us any more.

'The Other Solution' is the big house in Oxford--with a work-room for you, a study for me, and the other rooms for us."

He shook his shoulders as though to shrug off his seriousness.

"You say you don't want to get married again. That's idiotic. Haven't you lived long enough to escape from fear of this 'marriage bond'

bugaboo? With all your talk of emanc.i.p.ation, you're still as conventional as Mrs. Grundy. Marriage will save us from tiresome ructions with the neighbors, but as far as being afraid of the ceremony--why--I'd just as lief marry a person as lend her ten dollars.

"Where does the _Maire_ live? I'll go down and tell him to dust his tricolor sash."

"No."

"B., _il faut de l'audace_."

"It would be foolish after Paris."

"_Et encore de l'audace_--"

"Besides I've leased this cottage for two years."

"_Et toujours de l'audace._"

"Well," she said, "if you're as flippant about it as all that, I don't suppose it matters much."

CHAPTER x.x.x

EVALUATION

The first two years on _The Clarion_ were a desperate struggle for Yetta. But after all, struggle is the surest sign of life. To herself she seemed dead. The collapse of her romance had left a hollow place in her spirit, which could not be filled by work--not even the frenzy of work by which each issue of _The Clarion_ was achieved. But all this time life was gathering force within her, preparing to a.s.sert itself once more.

Our literature is full of the idea of Man, the Protector--a proposition which crumbles before the slightest criticism. The protective element in life is overwhelmingly feminine. No one of us would have survived the grim dangers of childhood except for mothering. Adult men--even though unconscious of it--are pretty generally dependent on their womenfolk.

A function unused surely turns into an ache. Because Yetta felt no one dependent on her, life seemed barren and painful. The outer wrapper of herself--the hands with which she banged out copy on her typewriter, the feet which carried her about, the eyes and ears with which she watched and listened to the conflict of labor, the tongue with which she argued and pleaded for money, the brain with which she pondered and planned--all were busy. But this hurrying activity did not touch the subtle inner substance of herself. For this there was only the barren, empty ache.

Coming downtown one night from a union meeting in the Bronx, Yetta's eye caught a paragraph in the paper which told that David Goldstein, proprietor of the Sioux Hotel, who had been shot two days before in a gang fight, had died in the City Hospital.

It was the first Yetta had heard of her relatives since she had left them. She stayed on the car until she had reached the centre of the Ghetto. A policeman, who was standing outside the Sioux Hotel, went inside for her and found her aunt's address. It was not far off, and in a few minutes Yetta found herself in the dismalest of three-room flats.

Half a dozen dumb, miserable old women sat in the kitchen. It was with some difficulty that Yetta made out which was Mrs. Goldstein.

"Aunt Martha, don't you remember me?" she asked in Yiddish.

But Mrs. Goldstein was too dazed to reply. From the other women, Yetta learned that her aunt was entirely alone and penniless. The son had not been seen for several years. Rosa had disappeared. As soon as might be Yetta drove out the Kovna _lands leit_, and when they were gone, she knelt down beside the old woman.

"Don't you understand, Auntie Martha? It's little Yetta come back to take care of you. You won't ever have to worry any more. I'll take care of you."

Tears came suddenly to the old woman, the first in a long, long time, and Yetta got her to bed. Two decidedly noisy young men lodged in the front room. Yetta was rather frightened; it took her a long time to fall asleep in the stuffy bedroom beside her aunt.

It was easy to reconstruct the process by which the Goldstein family had disintegrated. Isaac was in prison. Rosa had probably gone off to live by herself--tired of bringing home wages for her father to guzzle. She would be living alone in some dismal furnished room. She had been too poorly endowed by Nature to "go wrong."

But despite the squalor of the flat and the heavy air of the dark bedroom, Yetta woke up with a new and firmer grip on life. She had found some one who needed her. The first of the next month she moved her aunt to a flat nearer _The Clarion_ office. There were four rooms and a bath.

The parlor she rented to Moore and Levine. It was a great improvement for them, and Mrs. Goldstein's cooking was less expensive and more nourishing than the restaurant fare on which they had been subsisting.

Yetta shared the bedroom with her aunt.

The metamorphosis in the old woman was startling. Yetta remembered her as a very unlovely person, hardened and bitter. It had been a reflection of her environment. Now in clean and decent surroundings, in the midst of those who treated her with respect, under the sunshine of her niece's affection, she changed completely. Yetta was continually surprised to find how much her aunt reminded her of her father.

The struggle in the office was as intense as ever, but now Yetta had a home. Her wounds were healing rapidly.

Some months after her new establishment had been founded, Yetta came into _The Clarion_ office and found confusion. Every one talked at once, and it took some minutes to get a connected story. Isadore had caved in.

For several days he had been rather surly--excusing himself on the ground of a headache. That morning about nine o'clock he had tumbled out of his chair, unconscious. Dr. Liebovitz--the Comrade whom Yetta had heard speak at her first labor-meeting--had been called in. He had p.r.o.nounced it typhoid fever.

"We had him taken up to our room," Harry Moore said; "Levine and I will take his. It's no place for a sick man. And besides, when the nurse goes, your aunt can take care of him."'

A sort of helplessness had fallen on the little group, now that their leader was stricken. But Levine in this crisis changed his character--or let his true character shine through his crust of pessimism. He pushed every one back into their places and set the wheels going again.

When the forms were locked up and the next day's a.s.signment made, the office force was loath to separate. It is regrettable that the virtues of our friends are like our kidneys--we never notice them till something goes wrong. For the first time they were realizing what a tower of strength Isadore had been. As the days had pa.s.sed they had more often been impressed by his occasional bursts of nervous irascibility, his unaccountable stubbornnesses. He had walked about among them, with his bent shoulder, his wrinkled, lumpy face, as far removed from Mary Ames'

sentimentality, or Harry Moore's flippant optimism, as from Levine's ingrowing surliness. His most salient characteristic seemed to have been that he was "always there." Now he was gone.

"He's so modest and simple," Harry said, "that we never noticed how strong he was."

"I wish there was something I could do for him," Nell sniffled.