"Oh! I'm no good. I can't ever go down on the East Side again. I might see one of them. It's all my fault. I called them out. I promised them so much."
The moment Yetta had left the office Mabel telephoned to Mrs. Karner at her country home at Cos-Cob-on-the-Sound.
Yetta had followed Walter's advice in regard to Mrs. Karner, and a real friendship had grown up between them. Mabel did not understand why this blasé society woman, with her carefully groomed flippancy, cared for the very serious-minded young Jewess, but she knew that they frequently lunched together. So she told Mrs. Karner over the telephone how Yetta had broken down.
On the window-seat of her room, Yetta cried herself to sleep, – the troubled, haunted sleep of pure exhaustion. She was waked at last from her nightmare by a pounding on her door. It was Mrs. Karner.
"You poor youngster! I dropped into the office a moment ago to sign some papers for Mabel and she told me about your resignation. I'm so glad! Now you haven't any excuse not to visit me. I'm lonely out at Cos-Cob. The motor's at the door. Put on your hat."
Before Yetta knew what was happening to her she was in the motor. In fifteen minutes they were out of the city, and Mrs. Karner put her arm about her.
"It was such a very little they asked for," Yetta muttered. "Not so much as we vest-makers demanded."
Mrs. Karner did not see fit to reply, and Yetta fell back into a sort of doze. At last they turned through a stone gateway into the Karners' place. She got only a hurried glance at the well-watered lawn and the open stretch of the Sound. She was rushed upstairs and to bed. In the morning Mrs. Karner would not let her get up. It was the first time Yetta had spent a day in bed.
When she was allowed to get up, she found the estate a strange country to be explored. The greenhouses, the tame deer, the spotless stables, the dairy, the kennels, the boat-house, all were endlessly interesting to her. Interesting enough to make her forget for a while the horrors of New York. It was the third day that she made friends with the gardener, and after that she got up with the sun to help him harvest the poppies.
On Friday Mr. Karner appeared, with a man and his wife, whose name Yetta never troubled herself to remember, and they all went off for a week-end cruise. Most of the time the older people played bridge. Yetta made friends with the sea and a gray-haired old sailor from the Azores, who could speak nothing but Portuguese. Once while at anchor he helped her catch a fish. She would have enjoyed the cruise more if they had let her eat in the forecastle with the crew. She liked Mrs. Karner very much when they were alone together, but it was unpleasant to see her with these others.
In time the color returned to Yetta's cheeks, and hearing that Mabel had torn up her resignation, she went back to Washington Square and to work.
Except for such crises, Yetta followed rigorously the course of reading which Walter had mapped out for her. The afternoons and evenings belonged to the work of the League, to the very busy life of the real world. The mornings belonged to Walter. Her first thought was always of him. While the coffee was heating, she attended to his mail. After breakfast, with his prospectus spread out before her, she settled herself in one of his chairs and took up one of his books. Following his suggestion she made copious notes, and, when a book was finished, she wrote a thousand words or so on the main ideas she had gained from it. She carefully saved all these notes. When he returned he would see how thoroughly she had followed his directions.
On the other side of the world from Yetta, Longman was leading a rough, exciting tent-life among dangerously fanatic natives. It would have been hard to imagine two more sharply contrasting environments. He never dreamed of the loving devotion which was being offered him, so many thousand miles away. He did not suspect how his occasional letters, in reply to her weekly ones, fanned this flame. He was wholly occupied in racing against time and difficulties to complete his work.
The expedition was not having an easy time of it. The ruins about which they were digging were regarded by the natives with superstitious veneration. The little group of scientists had only a score of unreliable soldiers for defence, so the real men – Le Marquis d'Hauteville, Chef de l'expédition, a wiry, gray-haired veteran of the Algerian Wars; Delanoue, a dandified-looking Parisian, who had carved his name as an explorer in all sorts of outlandish places; Vibert, the photographer, and Walter – had their hands full. They were the rampart, behind which the half-dozen querulous, rather old-maidish specialists measured skulls, gathered fragments of pottery, took rubbings of inscriptions, and collected folk-lore.
It is very much easier to love a person who is absent than to live amicably at close quarters with his daily faults and foibles. As the months passed, Walter Longman – or rather the ghost which Yetta conjured up to that name – took on new graces, was endowed with ever more brilliant characteristics. Yetta hardly knew the real man. In their half-dozen meetings she had seen certain charming traits. He came to typify the kind of life she would like to lead. A life of cleanliness and comfort, but free from the shame of luxury. A life of books, but so close and sympathetic to the struggling mass of humanity as to escape the reproach of pedantry.
Her dreams of him – thanks to his absence – could not be contradicted. If an act in the life about her seemed good, she did not doubt that Walter could and would have done it better. Of the unpleasant pettinesses which she saw among her associates, she was sure that he was free. The authors she read seemed to her very wise, but their attainments could not be compared to Walter's mystic wisdom. It is very easy to laugh at such folly – and so much easier to cry.
The idolatrous incense which she burned at the altar of the Absent One was a great incentive to her study. Knowledge was not only the road to power, but also to his approbation. But his greatest contribution was the memory of his scorn for intellectual ruts, for cut-and-dried formulæ. "You can't crowd life into a definition," he had said. "Beware of simple explanations. Living is a complex business."
Such phrases – sticking in her memory like illuminated mottoes – held her back from joining the Socialist party. Sooner or later it was inevitable that she should do so. She was a logical Socialist, with the logic of events. It would have been difficult to erect any other structure on the foundations life had laid for her. She was a machine worker who had revolted before the grinding monotony had killed her faith and vision. She could still hope. She had the insight to see beyond the personal pettiness of squabbling dogmatists to the great principles of Justice and Brotherhood, which their heated advocacy sometimes obscures. Her life would have been poorer in any other setting.
But it was a real gain to her that she did not join the party hurriedly. She might have resisted the urgings of Braun longer – even after she had read largely pro and con, even after she had familiarized herself with the traditional theoretical "objections to Socialism," and, weighing them against the facts of life, which she saw about her, the bent and aged women of thirty, the young men smitten with tuberculosis, the thousands of babies that never grow up, had found them light indeed – she might still have held back longer from the personal and entirely illogical reason that Walter had never joined if it had not been for a dramatic meeting with her old boss – Jake Goldfogle.
His shop had failed in her first strike. She had lost all track of him.
About nine o'clock one bitter winter night she was walking home along Canal Street. The row of pushcarts, lit by flaring oil lamps, were doing a scant business. It was too cold for sidewalk bargaining. She was moved by a deep pity for these men and women, who were forced out on such a night, to hawk their wares. It was not only the victims of the sweat-shop who find living a hard matter. Suddenly her notice fell on a dilapidated pedler, who was holding out a meagre tray of notions. He did not have even a pushcart. A heavy black patch hid one side of his face, but she recognized Jake at once. Her first impulse was to hurry past with averted face. But his shivering poverty – he had no overcoat – checked her.
"Hello, Mr. Goldfogle."
He turned his unbandaged eye on her in bewilderment. His frost-bitten face flushed with resentment.
"Come on and have a cup of coffee," she said. "I want to talk with you."
The idea of coffee stopped the curses which were gathering on his tongue, and, ashamed of his lack of spirit, he followed her. They sat down opposite each other at a dingy little tea-room table. Jake remembered Yetta as a frightened shop-girl. The last time she had seen him, he had threatened her with arrest. He had solemnly sworn that he would never give her back her job. And now she was giving him a cup of coffee. He drank it in silence. Once upon a time he had dreamed of marrying her as though it would be a great condescension.
The coffee warmed him so that he told his story. The failure had been complete. He and his sister and brother-in-law had gone back to the machine. The sister had given out first with the East Side commonplace – a cough. For a while the two men had stuck together, once more a little money had begun to pile up. Then a belt broke; the flying end had caught Jake in the face. He lifted up the black patch and showed Yetta the horrible scar where his eye had been. When he had come out of the hospital, his brother-in-law had disappeared. For a while Jake had hoped to get some compensation out of his employer, but he had fallen into the clutches of a "shyster lawyer," who compromised the case out of court for a hundred dollars and kept seventy-five for his fee. This had happened about a month before. Jake had been dragging out a miserable existence, sleeping in the lowest doss-houses, and of the stock he had bought with his twenty-five dollars, the half-filled tray was all that remained. And if Yetta had not started the strike, he would have been a rich man. "Und I vas in luv wit you, Yetta," he ended.
It happened that she had just received her month's pay, so she was able to buy Jake an overcoat and give him a few dollars for meals and lodging. And the next day she found work for him as a night watchman.
But although his gratitude for this job was voluminous it did not ease Yetta's conscience in the matter. There was something sardonically grotesque in the encounter. It convinced her, more surely than books could ever have done, of the Socialist doctrine that all life is knit into one whole; that Jake, just as much as Mrs. Cohen, had been a victim of a vicious system.
"As long as this bitter industrial competition continues," she wrote to Walter, "there are bound to be such pitiful specimens as Jake. You see a lot in the papers nowadays about how the trusts are eliminating competition. The more I think about that the more horrible it seems. They are eliminating competition in the sales departments, in the distribution of the product, because there the waste is in dollars and cents. But in production – where the competitive waste is only human beings – the struggle is as bitter as ever. The high-salaried, 'gentlemanly' managers of the different plants of a trust coöperate in selling and in buying raw material, but in the actual work of the mills they have to compete to see who can exploit the workers hardest – just as Jake was driven to overwork us girls. I don't see any possible cure except Socialism, and I'm going to join the party."
Many months later, when the courier brought this letter into the camp among the ancient ruins, the exile opened it with feverish hands, ran his fingers down page after page until he came to Mabel's name. It was not until he had read this part several times that he gave any attention to the fact that Yetta had become a Socialist.
CHAPTER XX
ISADORE BRAUN
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 gods, 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 gods have deserted. We pretend to a love of liberty we do not feel. We are inclined to laugh at the spectacle of a man naïve enough really to care, to rend himself in a passionate quest for Truth – and may God 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 god 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 God!" 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 sex 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 god of the Haktites. 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 Créatrice. 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 superstition. 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 God which has failed you," he said to Isadore, "is a false god. 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 glasses."
While the message of Bergson is iconoclastic, a titanic warfare against the formal gods, 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 attitude. 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 cocksure, 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 attitude 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.