Comrade Yetta

by Albert Edwards

Her love had made her foolishly humble. An objective observer would have doubted if Walter was worthy to unlace her shoes. The fairies had been generous at his christening. They had given him health and wealth and brains. He himself would have admitted that most of his talents had lain idle, wrapped in a napkin. Yetta had not been so richly endowed. At fifteen, with hardly any education, the Fates had put her in a sweat-shop. But she had been given one priceless talent—a keen hunger for an ever larger life. No slightest opportunity for growth had she let slip. Walter was a pitiful example of wasted opportunities compared to this young woman of twenty-two.

There was a more subtle disparity between them.

Yetta's beliefs were passionate faiths, Walter's were intellectual convictions. The dozen odd years' difference in age might have explained this, but it went deeper. Walter had never had the knack of being an intimate part of activity. He was an observer rather than a participant in life. He never got closer to the stage than the wings. And more often he sat in a box. Between her ardent faith and his tired disillusionment lay a chasm which was more than a matter of years. But she, being in love with him, and hardly knowing him at all—at most she had had a dozen talks with him—could not see this.

Would he give her more than approbation? As long as she could, Yetta tried to avoid a definite answer to this question. But it became insistent. She knew he had been in love with Mabel. Eleanor Mead's gossip had supplemented her own conviction. At first it had seemed the inevitable that he should love the wonderful Miss Train. But the last year had seen almost a quarrel between Yetta and Mabel. There were constant disagreements as to the policy of the Woman's Trade Union League. Mabel did not want it to become avowedly Socialist and Yetta did. Mabel felt that she had a discoverer's right to Yetta and was provoked whenever her protégée showed a will of her own. It is hard enough for men to keep friends in the face of serious and long-continued difference of opinion. Women, with lesser experience in the world of affairs, with a more personal tradition, find it harder. It had come to a climax over Yetta's resignation from The Star. Mabel had been very indignant and had called it a piece of stupid Quixotism. It had shown Yetta very clearly the fundamental gap between their points of view. They still called each other by their first names and professed undying affection. But it was hard nowadays for Yetta to realize how the wonderful Walter had ever loved this rather narrow-minded woman. She knew where Mabel bought her false hair. Surely Walter would get over his infatuation. Vague hopes inevitably mingled with her thoughts of the future. But she was almost relieved by his unexpectedly long stay in Paris.

Walter had hardly seen the lights of Le Havre sink below the horizon before he began to regret his decision to go to New York. Once more hope had made a fool of him. What chance was there that Mabel would have changed her mind in these six months? Certainly she had not loved him when she had written that miserably cold note of welcome. His escapade with Beatrice would hardly help matters. What perversity was it that drove him home to receive a new humiliation?

Two days out they ran into a gale, and Walter, who was a good sailor, had the promenade deck almost to himself. Standing up forward, an arm round a stanchion for a brace, the spray in his face, it seemed as if the cobwebs which had been smothering him were blown away. He could look at himself calmly, objectively. One question after another posed itself, and he sought the answers, not as an infatuated fool, but as a man who has "suffered unto wisdom."

What was there for him to hope for from Mabel? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even if she relented, it was a sorry prospect. If now, after six years, after her youth had passed, she suddenly decided to pick up what she had so long despised, it would be in discouragement. He had more disillusions than enough of his own. And Mabel in slippers was a revolting idea. The romantic thing for him to do, now that romance was dead, was to kill himself on the lady's front doorstep. But the age of romance had passed for him.

For the first time in six years he looked out upon a future in which Mabel played no part. Beatrice had said he must find some useful work. There was the Oxford offer. Of course every acquisition to the museum of human knowledge is worth while. But it was very hard for him to apply this theory to his specialty. What good did it do any one to have him piece together the broken fragments of a semicivilization, so long dead? He could think of no branch of study which more truly deserved Carlyle's jibe of "dry-as-dust." It was perhaps better than suicide, but was there no more human sort of utility for him? As Beatrice had said, the "social conscience" was keen in him. He wanted to serve the people of his day and generation.

The one activity he could think of was suggested by the news in Yetta's letters of the English Socialist newspaper which Isadore Braun was editing and to which she was occasionally contributing. His surplus money, quite a lot of it had piled up in the last three years, would help immensely. Even if they could not raise enough to maintain a daily, his income would suffice for a weekly. The three of them would be a strong editorial combination. More and more the idea attracted him. They could make a representative publication of it. Isadore with his faith in the political party, Yetta in close touch with the trade-unions, and he to furnish a broader, more philosophical expression of the movement of revolt. They were three able, intelligent people who were not afraid. What better thing could he do with the remnant of his life than to weld them into an organized force? Gradually they would attract other brains to their group. Just such an intellectual centre was what the movement needed. The idea at least had the virtue of stirring a wave of true enthusiasm in him.