"Yes," he timidly replied, "I did change my wavering mind—as you call that deficient organ of mine—and so I returned. I hope I don't disturb you!"
"No, not yet. I am sitting with my hands folded in my lap, like the women of your class—ladies, you call them." She accented the title, without bitterness. A cursory estimate of her appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest analysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes. She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless. Her mask, with its high Slavic cheek-bones and sharp Jewish nose, proclaimed her a magnetic woman. In her quarter on the far East Side the children called her "Aunt Yetta." She was a sister of charity in the guise of a revolutionist.
"You sit but you think, and my ladies never think," he answered, in his boyish voice. He seemed proud to be so near this distinguished creature. Had she not been sent to Siberia, driven out of France and Germany, and arrested in New York for her incendiary speeches? She possessed the most extraordinary power over an audience. Once, at Cooper Union, Arthur had seen her control a crazy mob bent on destroying the building because a few stupid police had interfered with the meeting. Among her brethren Yetta Silverman was classed with Louise Michel, Sophia Perowskaia, and Vera Zassoulitch, those valiant women, true guardian angels, veritable martyrs to the cause. He thought of them as he watched the delicate-looking young woman before him.
Arthur was too chilly of blood to fall in love with her; his admiration was purely cerebral. He was unlucky enough to have had for a father a shrewd, visionary man, that curious combination of merchant and dreamer once to be found in New England. A follower of Fourier, a friend of Emerson, the elder Wyartz had gone to Brook Farm and had left it in a few months. Dollars, not dreams, was his true ambition. But he registered his dissatisfaction with this futile attempt by christening his only son, Arthur Schopenhauer; it was old Wyartz's way of getting even with the ideal. Obsessed from the age of spelling by his pessimistic middle name, the boy had grown up in a cloudy compromise of rebellion and the church. For a few years he vacillated; he went to Harvard, studied the Higher Criticism, made a trip abroad, wrote a little book recording the contending impulses of his pale, harassed soul—Oscillations was the title—and returned to Boston a mild anarch. Emerson the mystic, transposed to the key of France, sometimes makes bizarre music.
She arose and, walking over to him, put her hand nonchalantly on his shoulder.
"Arthur, comrade, what do you mean to do with yourself—come, what will all this enthusiasm bring forth?" He fumbled his glasses with his thumb and index finger—a characteristic gesture—and nervously regarded her before answering. Then he smiled at his idea.
"We might marry and fight the great fight together like the Jenkins crowd."
"Marry!" she exclaimed—her guttural Russian accent manifested itself when she became excited—"marry! You are only a baby, Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz—Herrgott, this child bears such a name!—and while I am sure the thin Yankee blood of the Jenkins family needed a Jewish wife, and a Slav, I am not that way of thinking for myself. I am married to the revolution." Her eyes dwelt with reverence on her new Christian saints, those Christs of the gutter, who had sacrificed their lives in the modern arena for the idea of liberty, who were thrown to the wild beasts and slaughtered by the latter-day pagans of wealth, and barbarians in purple. He followed her glance. It lashed him to jerky enthusiasm.
"I am not joking," he earnestly asserted, "so pardon my rashness. Only believe in my sincerity. I am no anarch on paper. I am devoted to your cause and to you, Yetta, to my last heart's blood. Do you need my wealth? It is yours. You can work miracles with millions in America. Take it all."
"It's not money we need, but men," she answered darkly. "Your millions, which came to you innocently enough, represent the misery of—how many? Let the multi-millionnaires give away their money to found theological colleges and libraries—my party will have none of it. Its men are armed by the ideas that we prefer. I don't blame the rich or the political tyrants—the mob has to be educated, the unhappy proletarians, who have so long submitted to the crack of the whip that they wouldn't know what to do with their freedom if they had it. All mobs believe alike in filth and fire, whether antique slaves free for their day's Saturnalia, or the Paris crowds of '93. Their ideas of happiness are pillage, bloodshed, drunkenness, revenge. Every popular uprising sinks the people deeper in their misery. Every bomb thrown discredits the cause of liberty."