Comrade Yetta Part 48

"Well, I guess the best medicine we can give him," Yetta said, sticking the pin in her hat decisively, "is to report every week that the circulation has jumped."

The accustomed streets were a blur as she walked home. The idea that Isadore was sick, helpless, was as disturbing as if the paper had announced that the Rock of Gibraltar had escaped from its moorings and was floating away.

In the dining-room she found her aunt, with Jewish gloominess, predicting the worst. Yetta went down the hall and knocked lightly at the parlor door. It was opened by a nurse. The room was darkened, but she caught a glimpse--which was to stick in her memory--of Isadore's haggard face above the sheets. The nurse put her finger to her lips and came out into the hall.

"It's typhoid, all right," she said.

"Dangerous?"

"It's always dangerous. But there isn't a better doctor in the city for typhoid than Liebovitz. He'll be in again in a few minutes. I'll go back now."

Yetta stood there in the dim hallway, appalled, looking more closely into the face of Death than she had ever done before. There was something unbelievable in the thought that Isadore might die. All the fibres of her strong young body revolted at the idea. But beyond the closed door the dread fight was in progress. The pale face she had glimpsed was unconscious of it all. As far as Isadore was concerned Death had already won. Liebovitz and the nurse would have to do his fighting for him.

She heard her aunt admitting the doctor. She had never seen him when he was working before. With a curt greeting he strode past her and entered the sick-room. She stood in the doorway unnoticed.

"What's the temperature?"

"105."

There was a string of questions and answers given in an unemotional tone. They seemed almost flippant to Yetta, impious, in the face of the great tragedy. She felt hurt that he did not do something at once.

At last Liebovitz took off his hat and turned abruptly to the bed. After a moment's scrutiny of the patient's face, he turned down the covers. It seemed to Yetta that he was suddenly transformed into a pair of Hands.

The rest of him melted away. His half-shut eyes were fixed blankly on the wall as his wonderful, infinitely sensitive hands played about Isadore's heart. Then he knelt down and became an Ear. His eyes were quite shut now, as he listened, listened--the intense strain of it showing on his rigid face--to the almost inaudible rumble of the battle raging within the sick man's chest. Then he straightened up, the mystic appearance left him; he became once more the ordinary, cold-blooded professional man.

"You've a telephone?" he asked the nurse. "Good. You can get Ripley any time this afternoon if you need some one quick. Call me up at the Post Graduate at five minutes to four. I've a lecture--till five. I can leave it if necessary. I'll come down right afterwards, anyhow."

Yetta tried to detain him in the hall to ask about the chances.

"Too busy to talk," he said. "Anyhow I'm no wizard. I can't prophesy.

He's pretty sick. But he'll have to get a lot sicker before we let go.

Really, I can't stop now. I've got a confinement, a T. B. test, and an operation before four."

Yetta went out into the kitchen and set her aunt to work getting supper for the nurse. Then, feeling suddenly very tired, she went to her room.

But she could not sleep. The wonder of a doctor's life had caught her imagination. It dizzied her to try to realize what it must mean to rush, as Liebovitz was doing, from a desperate struggle with death to a childbirth.

Again and again the vision came back to her of Isadore's shrunken, pallid face.

When the doctor came down after his lecture, Yetta asked if she could be of any help in the sick-room.

"No," he replied shortly. "You'd only use up good air."

She had never felt so useless before in her life. The next few days pa.s.sed--in dread. Most of the time she spent at the office. She had taken on Isadore's editorial work. There was some comfort in that. His other tasks had been divided between Locke and Moore and Levine. A big strike broke out in the Allied Building Trades; it meant extra work--but also increased circulation. After the day's grind, Yetta came back to the hushed home where the great battle was being fought out and where she was perforce a non-combatant.

There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask the doctor, but he was generally too busy to talk. One night after Isadore had been sick more than a week Liebovitz came down from a lecture in a genial mood.

"I hope your aunt has cooked a big supper," he said. "Nothing to eat at home. The good wife is house cleaning."

"Well. How's it going?" Yetta asked, as he came out of the sick-room and sat down to a plate of steaming noodle-soup.

"We've done our part. It's up to him now. We've pulled him through the regular crisis. If he don't take it into his head to relapse and if he really wants to get well, I guess he will."

He answered her questions in monosyllables until he had stowed away the last of Mrs. Goldstein's cooking. Then, lighting a cigarette and putting three lumps of sugar in his coffee, he began joking with the old woman in Yiddish. But Yetta kept interrupting him with more questions.

"You want to know what I think?" he said, turning to her severely.

"Well, listen. I think Isadore will get well. I hope so. It wouldn't do any good to have him die. None of you people would read the lesson. But he don't deserve to. For ten years he's been violating all the rules of health regularly. You're all intelligent enough to understand some of Nature's laws, but you're too utterly light-minded to obey them! Isadore started out with a wonderful const.i.tution and now is so run-down that an insignificant little typhoid germ gets into his mouth and nearly kills him. Good G.o.d. You all want to blame the germ. But they can't do any harm unless you're already sick--made yourself sick, as Isadore has.

I'm not afraid of them--my business takes me right where they live. I'm as hard as nails. And you ought to see my kids. They're as sound as I am."

"What do you mean by his making himself sick? Overwork?"

"Overwork? Thunder! I don't get as much undisturbed sleep as he did.

I've been 'overworking' longer than he has. Work doesn't hurt people--not if they are living sensibly. You people--all of you--are abnormal, almost hysterical, in your att.i.tude towards life. You take the little jobs of life too seriously and aren't serious enough about the big job of living.

"Isadore doesn't realize--never has--that a man needs rest and relaxation. He doesn't know what play means. Treats his body as a machine. He ought to be married. Ought to have a wife and children to think about besides his work--some one to play with. Some one to beat him over the head, if necessary, to distract his attention from the rut his mind has fallen into. He thinks too much over the generations of the future, not enough over this one and the next. And then he just naturally ought to have a wife, as every man who wants to be normally healthy does. Living like a monk and trying to do a real man's work! But what's the use of talking? You won't listen. It'll get you, too--just as sure as sunrise. Then you'll come yelping to me to help you out."

"Why, I'm well," Yetta protested. "I don't know any one in better condition than I am."

"Humph," he snorted.

He finished his coffee, and getting up, stamped about the room impatiently.

"Yetta, why do you suppose Nature divided the race into male and female?

For more millions of years than we can count Nature has been at work making women, shaping their bodies by minute steps, forming intricate organs within them--for a special task. Back of you are myriad generations of females. You wouldn't be alive to-day, you'd never have been born, if a single one of them had neglected her woman's work. Do you think that all of a sudden you can break this age-old habit? That you can waste all the pain and travail of your myriad mothers with impunity? You're twenty-four now. For more than five years now you've been thwarting life, rendering barren all the vast time, the appalling agony, the ceaseless struggle, it has cost Nature to produce you--with your chance to pa.s.s on the flame of life. Out of all these millions of mothers, thousands and thousands have given their life that the line might be preserved. It doesn't matter at all what reason you can give for not having had children. I admit there are a few good reasons. But Nature is insistent in this matter of the next generation--as cold as a sword's edge. It seems almost like human spite. But you can't blame her.

It's such appalling waste to throw away all the toiling, suffering generations back of us. You can't expect Nature to be indifferent; it has cost her so much. And she's got this advantage over G.o.d, her punishments come in this life. Four, five, perhaps ten years, you can go along without noticing it. Then you'll come to me. 'I have headaches, backaches. I'm irritable. I don't sleep." I can give you drugs to deaden the headache, dope which will make you seem to sleep. I can ward off a little of Nature's revenge--but I can't cure you. There are plenty of accidents and some kinds of sickness that you can't blame a person for, but drying up into barren, unlovely old maidhood ought to be forbidden by law.

"Lord," he exclaimed, looking at his watch, "it's late. I promised to speak at a Socialist meeting up in the Bronx, but I've got to look in at two cases first. So long."

For a moment Yetta sat still, pondering over what the doctor had said.

The thing which impressed her most was the stupendous idea of the unbroken line of mothers which stretched back of her to that dim epoch when the new element of life first appeared on the sh.o.r.es of the primordial sea.

But in thinking back about it in after years, it did not seem to her that the doctor's talk had influenced her very much. She was a fearless person and the threat of personal ill-health would not have daunted her.

Her feeling towards Isadore had already changed.

It was the long months of common work and mutual aspirations which had drawn her closer and closer to him. The change in their relationship had been so gradual that it needed some shock to open her eyes. The sudden realization, the day he had fallen sick, of the sharp contrast between his former strength and his utter weakness, had been the beginning. At first, when she saw that she had come to love him, it had been hard to believe. But the day after the crisis, while helping the nurse to change the bed linen, she had had to lift him. His emaciation had appalled her.

And in his delirium, he had called her name. It was then that she saw clearly.

One night, not long after he had given her the lecture, Liebovitz came out of the sick-room.

"He's clear-headed now, and he's worrying about the paper. Go in and talk to him. Give him good news if you have to lie, and get him to sleep."

Isadore opened his eyes as she leaned over him and smiled when he recognized her. He had forgotten all about _The Clarion_. But she had to say something to keep back the tears; it was so painfully wonderful to mean so much to another.

"The circulation has gone up to 20,000."

But he had already dropped back to sleep at the bare sight of her.

It had not been a lie. The circulation was growing steadily. Isadore's sickness had seemed a spur to the energy of every one connected with the paper. The news that he was recovering had given them all a new hope, a new determination to put it on a firmer basis against his return.

Isadore gradually fought his way back to life. But it was a long and dreary convalescence. There was snow on the ground when he fell sick.

Summer had begun in earnest before he was able to walk across the room.