Comrade Yetta

by Albert Edwards

This line of thought brought Yetta to his mind—and Beatrice's advice. He smiled at the idea. Intellectually he might admit that it would be well for him to marry. But the Yetta he remembered was a frightened little East Side girl, who had not enough sense to keep out of the clutches of a cadet. Of course she had grown up, her letters showed that. And she had been a pretty youngster. If, as Beatrice believed, she was in love with him, it might possibly work out that way in time. But he was in no mood for romance. Hunger for a life of activity kept his mind on his project of work. The few times his thoughts touched on Yetta, he wrenched them back to what the three of them might accomplish with the paper.

As the ship slipped into its berth, Walter leaned over the rail and eagerly scanned the upturned faces of the welcoming crowd on the dock. When at last he convinced himself that there was no one there whom he knew, he suddenly realized that once more the hope had tripped him up. He had been looking for Mabel. He went back to the smoking-room and tried to regain his self-respect by a glass of whiskey. As the cab took him through the familiar streets, he was grimly telling himself that it would never happen again; Mabel did not exist any more.

Yetta was waiting for him in his rooms. She had spent her last night there, and at eight in the morning had carried her valise—the trunk had gone before—to her new quarters on Waverly Place. She could not afford a place to herself and had gone in with another Socialist girl, Sadie Michelson, in joint control of a small flat. While she was waiting through the morning hours, she rearranged his business papers for the fiftieth time. There was a pile of receipts, year by year, each one numbered to correspond to its check. There were the check-books, each voucher pinned to its stub. The bank-book had just been balanced.

It was about eleven when the cab rattled up to the door. From her seat in the window she saw him get out. Casting a quick glance over the room to reassure herself that everything was exactly as he had left it, she opened the door and went out on the landing. "Welcome home," she called down to him.

It did not occur to her that what she was doing was dramatic. But the lonely hearted man who was struggling up the narrow stairs with his two grips was deeply moved by her words and the vision which greeted his upturned eyes. A flood of light came out through the door of his room and illumined her as she stood above him on the landing.

"Hello," he said out loud. But to himself he said, "My God!"

Yetta's girlish promise of beauty had been richly fulfilled. Her figure had become more definite. There had been a sort of precociousness about the sweat-shop girl he remembered. The Yetta who greeted him now was a fully developed symmetrical woman. Her face, her arms, her neck had caught up with the rest of her body. There was nothing fragile about her any more. One no longer feared that she might be suddenly snuffed out and leave nothing but the haunting memory of her eyes. More striking, and at the same time more subtle, was the transformation from self-conscious awkwardness to the assured grace of a personage who has found a place in life. The Yetta he remembered had been impulsive—a creature of extremes—one moment lost in a childish abandon of enthusiasm, the next embarrassed and gauche. This woman was calm, restrained, and while perfectly conscious of herself was not self-conscious.

He had remembered her as pretty. Good food and a healthy life had taken from her the exotic, orchid-like charm of her girlhood. Yet she had grown greatly in beauty. Her face had gained immensely in "range"—to borrow a musical term. It held the capacity of a whole gamut of expressions it had before lacked. Her eyes were as beautiful as ever, and they had looked on many things. Her mouth had always been well-proportioned. Now any one could see that it was a perfected instrument. There were thousands of things it could say. Her cheeks had flushed or paled with a myriad of emotions and had grown more beautiful. And yet the mass of rich brown hair, which had always been the crown of her beauty, had not begun to lose its lustre.