Comrade Yetta

by Albert Edwards

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.