Comrade Yetta

by Albert Edwards

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.