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.