Comrade Yetta. Edwards Albert
noticeable interruption in the day's routine. Yetta gritted her teeth and kept the pace – if anything, increased it. But while her fingers flew back and forth over the accustomed work, her thoughts soared far afield. If there had been persuasiveness in Harry's words, there was ten times as much eloquence in that sudden clutch of pain. As Mrs. Cohen had prophesied, it had come back. How soon would she feel it again?
At last the motor stopped its crazy rattle, the roar of the belts turned to a sob, the day's work was done. Yetta arranged her shawl with trembling fingers and hurried down the stairs. But she hesitated a moment inside the doorway before plunging out into the pack of workers who were hurrying eastward.
The ebb and flow of this tide of tenement dwellers is one of the momentous sights of Manhattan. At five in the morning the cross-town streets are almost deserted. On the Bowery the milk wagons and occasional trucks rattle northward in the false dawn. The intervals between the elevated trains are long. But the side streets are even more lifeless. Now and then shadows flit eastward – women, night workers, who scrub out the great Broadway office buildings. They would be shadows even in broad daylight. Towards six one begins to hear sharper, hurrying footfalls – coming westward. The tide has begun to flow. It grows in volume with the increasing light. The congested tenements have awakened; by six the flood is at its height. So dense is the rush that it is hard to make way against it, eastward. So fast the flow that the observer can scarcely note the faces. It is the backs which catch the eye and leave an impress on the memory. A man who walked like a soldier – upright – in that crowd would seem a monstrosity. Even the backs of the little children are bent. They seem to be carrying portly persons on their shoulders.
Then for close to twelve hours these side streets are almost deserted again – till the ebb begins. It is hard to decide which sight is the more awesome: the flow of humanity hurrying to its inhuman labor or the same crowd ebbing, hurrying to their inhuman, bestial homes.
But Yetta was not thinking of her fellow-workers. With the egoism of youth she was thinking of herself and the pain in her back. Harry had been right – the sweat-shop was killing her. There was a chance of escape and Life might never offer her another. She had come to the now-or-never place. Yetta was not a coward, she was only timid. And the bravery of timid people is sublime. For only a moment she hesitated in the dark hallway, below Goldfogle's Vest Company, and then with a smile – a fearless smile – on her lips she stepped out into the glare of the arc-light. Harry was waiting for her. She slipped her hand confidently into his arm.
"Say, Harry, to-morrow night, let's go to a ball."
"What?" he said, stopping short, to the surprise and discomfort of the home-rushing workers. "What?"
"Sure. I want some fun."
At last she had swallowed the bait! He could hardly believe his ears. But he was afraid to seem too eager. They were swept along by the hurrying crowd almost a block before he spoke.
"How about clothes?"
"I got some," she said. "I'll bring 'em to the shop and put 'em on there."
"Why not to-night."
"No. To-morrow."
They hurriedly talked over the details of her escape. She would tell her aunt the "rush-work story." When the shop closed, Harry could take her somewhere to supper and afterwards to a dance.
"To-morrow night? Sure?" he said when they separated at her corner.
"Sure," she called back.
She ran upstairs and told her aunt that there was a rush order in her shop and she must hurry back; she only had time for a glass of tea and a piece of bread. To-morrow she would take a bigger lunch and not come home for supper. In a few minutes she out was again on the brightly lit streets. From her scant store of savings she bought a hat, a blouse, a pair of stockings and white shoes. She left her bundles at a store near her home, and then started on a pilgrimage.
The shrine she set out to visit was the little second-hand book-store on East Broadway, where she had been so happy with her father. It had hardly changed at all. Only the man who sat on the high stool behind the desk did not look like her father. She stood there aimlessly for a few minutes, and then her eye fell on the first two volumes of Les Miserables. It was the set she had read to her father. The last volume was in her room.
"One volume is gone," the man told her; "you can have them for seventy-five cents."
"I ain't got more'n half a dollar," she said.
"The complete set is worth five dollars."
"I only got fifty cents."
"All right. Take them."
She turned away from him to pull the last of her little horde out of her blouse. When she faced him, there were tears in her eyes.
"What's the matter?" he asked kindly.
"Nothin'. My father used to keep this store. These were the last books I read to him."
"Oh! Is your name Rayefsky? I knew your father – he was a good man. And I guess I used to know you, when you were about so high. Let's see – what was your name?"
"Yetta."
"Oh, yes, little Yetta Rayefsky, grown up into a big woman. I suppose you'll be getting married soon."
"Say, can I sit down here fer a while," she asked, to change the subject.
"Of course you can," he said cordially, bringing her a chair.
She pulled it back into the obscurity and sat there all the evening, watching through wet eyes the old familiar scene, the people who came to buy, and the people who came to talk. One or two she recognized. When she had been a little girl, she used to sit up there behind the desk on a high stool beside her father and fall asleep against his shoulder. There was no one now to lean her head against when she was tired – except Harry. He promised to take care of her.
Memories of her father seemed to crowd the dingy old store. Why were there not more men like him in the world? He would not have wanted her to kill herself over the machine. How glad he would have been that she had found a lover to rescue her. She recalled the sermon he had preached about the wedding across the way. She did not remember many of the words; much of it had been above her childish understanding. But she remembered how he had told her that she must love and trust and cherish her man. She recalled the Vow of Ruth which he had taught her. And now at last the lover had come. The old sad, drab life had ended; she was about to enter into the glory. When it was time to close, the bookseller insisted on giving back her fifty cents.
"You take the books," he said. "And when you get married, you can call them a wedding present from a man who knew your father, and never knew a better man."
Hugging the two volumes of Les Miserables against her breast, she walked home more light hearted because of this evening with ghosts – more light hearted than she had ever been before.
The next morning Yetta left home earlier than usual, so that she could pick up her bundles on her way to work. All the long morning the noisy machinery of the shop seemed to be playing the music of The Song of Songs.
But suddenly The Fates seemed to become ashamed of the way they were treating her. Perhaps Yetta's dreams of her father the night before had pierced through the adamantine walls and stirred him out of the drowsy bliss of Paradise; he may have thrown himself at the feet of The Most High to plead his daughter's cause. Perhaps it was her Guardian Angel which intervened. Or perhaps it was just chance.
When Yetta went down on the sidewalk during the noon rest to get a breath of air, – with the Song ringing in her heart, – her attention was attracted by a group of people about a woman who was speaking. She joined the listening crowd. The woman was talking about a strike of "The Skirt Finishers." The girls had been out now for weeks and were on the point of starvation. The Woman's Trade Union League, to which the speaker belonged, had arranged a ball for that night in behalf of the "skirt finishers."
"Every garment worker ought to come," she said. "It's your fight they are fighting. The garment trades are all 'sweated' – you've got to rise or die together. And every cent from the tickets goes to help the strike. The hall, the orchestra, everything has been donated