Comrade Yetta. Edwards Albert
But he did not use such phrases as "ultimate reality," "the categorical imperative." He did not ask his subject if his idea of God was anthropomorphic. Very few of the people whose faith he analyzed would have understood such terms.
It was the essence of his proposition that he should tabulate the convictions of all sorts and conditions of men. And in his quest for varied points of view he had come into very close contact with a strange mixture of people. Into his "operating room," as Mabel Train derisively called his study, he had enticed college professors and policemen, well-bred young matrons and street-walkers. One of his sheets recorded the intimate convictions of the man downstairs who painted carriages; another, those of a famous opera singer. The Catholic Bishop of New York had undergone the ordeal and a Salvation Army lassie, who had knocked at his door to sell a War-cry, had come in to try to convert him. She had been very much distressed by his perplexing questions, but like all the rest had quickly fallen captive to his gentle manners and understanding eyes. She had dropped her missionary pose and had talked freely to him, not only of her beliefs, but also of her doubts.
Almost every one who had gone through the ordeal remembered it with a strange, awed sort of pleasure. It is so very rarely that we find any one to whom we can tell the truth.
There was a wreck of a man, an habitué of cheap lodging-houses and gin-mills, who would tell you the story on the slightest provocation. One cold October night when he had no money for a bed and was trying to live through the night on a park bench with a morning paper for a blanket, a man had asked him if he wanted a drink. Not suspecting the good fortune which had befallen him, he had followed Longman to the "operating room." First there had been a stiff bracer of whiskey – "good Scotch whiskey, sir," – and then a plentiful cold supper of bread and cheese and sardines and a steaming cup of coffee – "as much as I could eat, sir" – and a cigar – "as long as yer foot, sir. He was a real gentleman, sir, and he talked to me like I was a gentleman."
There was a young wife of an elderly professor. Some of the ladies of the faculty raised their eyebrows when her name was mentioned and did not go to her teas. She had been smitten by Longman's broad shoulders and gentle bearishness and had quite eagerly consented to come to his study. She did not tell anybody about it, but she cried when she thought about it – cried that he had not asked her again.
Whether or not Longman's book promised any great usefulness to humanity, the preparing of it was of undoubted use to him. He had seen life at close quarters, with what Mirabeau called "terrible intimacy." His heart had grown very large there in his "operating room." As well as he could he hid his ever ready sympathy under a surface joviality and flippancy. There were very few people beside Mabel who realized what a sentimentalist he was. He was a brother to Abou ben Adhem. And that love of his fellow-men necessarily brought him into bitter revolt against things as they are. But he had no collective sense; he loved his fellow men individually. He had no feeling for mass movements. Intellectually he realized the need of united activity, he believed in trade-unions and socialism. But the sight of a crowd always made him angry. He was an ardent apostle of the Social Revolution. But he could not work harmoniously with an organization. So the socialists called him an Anarchist. He did not care what he was called. But most of the difference between his very small living expenses and his liberal income found its way unobtrusively into some socialist or labor organization.
But for three years now Mabel Train had been the "Cause" to which he gave his devotion.
She was also of the class of those who, never having had to work, had volunteered in the cause of those who must. But she had done so in a more intense, thoroughgoing, and practical way than had Longman. She had given not only what money she could spare, but herself.
She was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and having come under the influence of the able and daring group of economists on that faculty had been educated to a position in labor matters which is very nearly as radical as that of the socialists. One of her professors had told her that in all his experience in coeducation he had never encountered a woman with a more masculine brain. At the time she had felt complimented. She had, at twenty, been proud that she did not have hysterics, that her mind did not have "fainting fits," that she could tackle the problems of the class-room in the same graceless, uninspired, direct way that men did. At twenty-seven she was beginning to realize that life was not a class-room exercise and that there were certain inevitable problems of womanhood which could not be solved man-fashion. She felt herself cold in comparison to other women. The romances of the girls in college had rather disgusted her. At twenty-seven she would have given her right hand for the ability to lose her head like some of the shop-girls among whom she worked.
As a matter of fact the professor had been quite wrong in calling her intellect masculine – it was only a remarkably good one. It had the fearlessness to look the folly of our industrial system in the face and understand it. She had a deep womanliness which made it impossible for her to accept a manner of life which was in contradiction to her intellectual convictions. Thinking as she did that the relations between capital and labor were basically unjust, it was necessary for her to spend her life in the fight for justice.
What might be called "the normal mother instinct" had been denied her. Her woman's nature had turned into an ardent desire to "mother" the race. The babes who die unborn, those who are poisoned by bad milk, who wither up from bad air, whose growth is stunted by bad food – all the sad little children of the poor – were her own brood. She wrote rarely to her two blood sisters – she was the big sister of all the girls who are alone.
Her parents were entirely out of sympathy with her interest in working people. Principally to escape their ceaseless nagging, she had come East. For several years she had been the head of the Woman's Trade Union League. Her gentle breeding made her successful with the wealthy ladies on whom the League depended for support, the working girls idolized her, the rather rough men of the Central Federated Union had come to recognize that she never got up in meeting unless she had something to say. And the bosses complimented her ability by hating her cordially.
Most of the young men who tried to court her – and there was a constant stream of them, for she was a very attractive woman – fared badly. She was distressingly illusive. Her intellect was so lively that it was hard to admire her manifold charms. She wanted the people who talked to her to think. And she checked sentimentality with scornful laughter.
Things were further complicated for her would-be suitors by the fact that Mabel, when she was not very busy, was always accompanied by her room-mate Eleanor Mead. Eleanor did not look like a formidable duenna. She was of a pure pre-Raphaelite type. By profession she was an interior decorator, and her business card said, "Formerly with Liberty – Avenue de l'Opera, Paris." She carefully cultivated the appearance of an Esthete. She nearly always dressed in rich greens and old golds and was never truly happy except during the limited season when she could wear fresh daffodils in her girdle. She was clever at her work and gained a very good income, which she augmented by fashionable entertainments where she lectured in French on subjects of Art and sometimes gave mildly dramatic readings of Maeterlinck and other French mystics.
Most men found her style of beauty too watery. But one of the "Younger Choir" had taken her as his Muse and had dedicated a string of Petrarchian sonnets to her. Eleanor had been rather flattered by the tribute until the unlucky bard had been forced by the exigencies of his rhyme to say that she had "eyes of sapphire." People had begun to make sport of her "sapphire" eyes – they did have a rather washed-out look – and had begun to call her "Sapphire." Most of Mabel's lovers shortened it disrespectfully to "Saph." She had given this aspiring versifier the sack, and his long hair was no longer to be seen in the highly decorated apartment on Washington Square, South.
Although her appearance was not at all dreadful, she was feared and hated by all Mabel's admirers. It was impossible to call on Miss Train – it was necessary to call on both of them. Without any open discourtesy, with a well-bred effort to hide her jealousy, Eleanor made the courting of her friend a hideous ordeal. Most aspirants dropped out of the race after a very few calls. But for three years Longman had held on. It had not taken him long to know what was the matter with him, and after two unsuccessful efforts to see Mabel alone and tell her about it, he went one night to the flat with grim resolution.
"Miss Mead," he said abruptly on entering, "I've got something very important