Comrade Yetta

CHAPTER XXIII
THE PALACE OF DREAMS

When the cablegram from Teheran had announced that Walter was starting homeward, it became necessary for Yetta to rearrange her attitude towards him. As long as he had been an abstraction she had been perfectly free to love him according to her fancy. Evidently she would have to treat the real person differently.

Of course she was glad that he was coming back, but there was an undercurrent of sadness to the thought. It is very hard to give up habits which have become dear. And she was habituated to his absence. In a more tangible way his rooms had become dear to her. In this setting she had come into life. Almost every memory she valued, except those of her father, were connected with the place. She had read so many books in his great leather chair! She had learned to write at his desk. Even the two oil portraits, of his grandfather in a stiff stock and his grandmother in crinoline, had become in a way personal possessions. She must leave all this, must learn to live in new surroundings.

But this regret was only half conscious. There were more vivid sensations of expectancy. Above all she tremblingly hoped for his approbation. When the Great Jahwe had completed his six days' labor and was looking it over, the Earth must have had a palpitating moment of suspense while it waited His verdict. Yetta felt herself the work of Walter's hands. Would he say, "It is good"?

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.

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.

When Walter reached the head of the stairs and shook hands with her, she had changed from the dimmest of possibilities to a vivid desire.

"Did you have a good passage?"

"Fine. A gale all the way over."

There were a few more banalities.

"Good Lord, Yetta," he exploded. "How you've grown up and changed!"

Yetta had hoped for his approbation of her works. He was admiring her person. He was looking her over with frank pleasure. The blush hurt her cheek. She turned away to hide it.

"Here's a note Mabel gave me for you," she said.

Walter took it mechanically. He ought to have tossed it into the waste-paper basket. But the hope, the fool, the idiot hope grabbed him by the throat. Once more. He tore it open. This would be positively the last concession to the Dream. – Eleanor Mead was decorating a country house out near Stamford, Mabel had gone out to pass the week-end with her. She was glad to hear that Walter was back and looked forward to hearing about his adventures. She judged from the papers that he had had a lot – So! Spending a few days with Eleanor, whom she saw all the time, was more important than staying in town to greet him, whom she had not seen for years. He stuck the letter in his pocket and turned to Yetta, who was watching him closely.

"How's 'Saph' coming on?" he asked lightly.

"I don't see much of her."

"Good," he laughed. "She was never exactly a chum of mine."

"Here are all your business papers," Yetta said, going over to his desk, "receipts and all that."

"Oh! bother the receipts," he said. "I want to talk. How's Isadore's paper getting along?"

"There isn't any money," she said with a grimace. "There's a note on yesterday's editorial page, which says if they can't raise five thousand this week they'll have to stop. I guess one thousand will keep them going. They'll get it. But in a couple of weeks it will be the same thing over again. I guess it's doomed."

"I've been thinking about it," Walter said, "and I've got a scheme. Isadore tackled too much in a daily. That costs such a frightful lot. There isn't yet a big enough Socialist audience to support it. A weekly – a good lively, red-hot weekly – is the thing."

He went on to elaborate his idea. Gradually the constraint which Yetta had felt at first wore off. She curled up on the window-seat and listened to his talk as she had done the first day in his room – as she had done ever since in her dreams. She knew it would be hard work to persuade Isadore to give up the daily, but she felt that sooner or later he would have to. And in Walter's scheme was the promise of collaboration and constant association with him. She could hardly be expected to bring forth any serious criticism.

While he talked, she had the opportunity to look him over. After all he was not a god. The thing which surprised her most was his hair – it was shot through with irregular patches of gray. But this was only a detail. The soft life of the last few months in Paris had not quite killed the tan which the glare of the Persian sun had given him. He looked very rugged and strong – if his hands had been larger, he might have sat as a model for Rodin. And the halo of fame played about his forehead. The newspapers had given some space to him, and two or three lurid "Sunday stories" had been run about "the siege." They had recounted the various honors which had been given him. Yetta knew that the narrow red ribbon in his buttonhole was the Legion of Honor. And he was calmly proposing to give up what seemed to her a great renown for the obscure career of Socialist propaganda. Her love put forth blossoms.

"Gee," he interrupted himself at last. "It's long past lunch-time. Let's go over to the Lafayette. Any of the old waiters still there?"

Although Walter insisted that the cooking had deteriorated, it was a resplendent meal to Yetta. The proprietor came to their table and asked if he might present the French Consul, who was lunching there and who wanted to congratulate Walter on the red ribbon. The Consul made a formal and stilted speech on behalf of the French Colony in New York. Yetta was as much impressed as Walter was bored. When this disturbance was over, he made her talk about herself. The meal was finished before she was half through with her news.

"Come on," he said. "It's too blazing hot to be in town. Let's jump on a ferry and go down to Staten Island."

"I ought to go up to the League."

"Oh! bother the League. One doesn't come home from Persia every day in the year. I want to celebrate."

All New York's four millions seemed bent on the same errand, but they managed to crowd into the "elevated," and after a breathless scramble at the Battery fought their way to places on the ferry, and at last found a fairly secluded spot on the beach. He listened through the afternoon to the story of how she had spent the three and a half years of his absence. Just as at first, she still found it easy to talk to him. Sure of his quick understanding, she found herself telling him everything. She told him of Isadore's proposal. That disturbed him somewhat.

"Will it interfere with the three of us working together?" he asked.

"Why, no," she said, her eyes opening wider with surprise. "Of course not. I guess he's got over it. It was two years ago. But anyhow we've been working together all the time. He wouldn't let a thing like that interfere with work."

And Walter, judging Isadore by himself, decided that it could not have been very serious. Although Yetta did not know it, she was, in almost every word, showing Walter her love. There was a naïve directness in all her relations with people. It was always hard for her to act a part. She talked to Walter as a woman naturally talks to a man she loves. Even without Beatrice's hint, he would have understood.

It was a new sensation to feel himself loved so simply and wholly. Such love is rare in this world, and no man sees it offered without a deep feeling of awe. What should he do? Should he turn her loyalty into a derision, as had been the fate of his own? His life counted for very little to him. It had been burnt out. That the love of this fine, clean, loyal young woman might be pleasant to him seemed to count relatively little. He did not feel particularly selfish, he was only a fool. He was sorry for her, and thought he could make her happy.

Beatrice, who knew him better than any other woman did, thought he could. Of course he realized that it was not exactly a romantic proposition. He had small use for romance. But if any one had charged him with planning to seduce Yetta into marriage under pretext of love, he would have indignantly denied it. What does love mean? Undoubtedly his feeling and hers were miles apart. But, after all, he was fond of her. Even in a most impersonal way he admired her immensely. He had liked her spirit from the first. He had not listened unmoved to the story of her struggle of these three years. There was nothing he admired more than such capacity for consistent effort. And it took a serious exercise of will power to think about her impersonally. It was so much easier to lie back on the sand and refresh his senses with the charm of her youth.

Some one might have reminded him that emotionally he was very much of a wreck, that her youth had a right to demand its like, that his wearied disillusionment was no match for her fresh, exuberant faith. He would have answered that she was not a child, she was old enough to choose.

He listened and watched her and the sun slipped down among the Jersey hills.

"It's time to be going back," Yetta said.

"I'm quite happy here, and when we get hungry, there are restaurants about."

"I think Isadore will come to see you to-night. I told him you were due to-day."

"Oh, bother Isadore. Bother everything except this delectable breeze and the smell of the sea and you and me and the moon. Look at it, Yetta. It was at its unforgettable best last night – but it will be better to-night. It's going to be very beautiful right here where we are. And much as I like and admire Isadore, he isn't beautiful.

"Life," he went on in a moment, "and its swirl of duties will grab us soon enough, Yetta. We're going to be too busy on that paper, my friend, to hunt out such places as this. Let's sit very, very still and be happy as long as we may."

They both were very still as they watched the twilight fall over the Bay. The little red and green and white lights of the passing boats swayed softly in the gentle swell. A great liner crept up the channel towards the Narrows, row above row of gleaming portholes. Coney Island – section by section – woke to a glare of electricity. The blade of a searchlight at Fort Hamilton cut great slashes in the night. A strident orchestra in a restaurant behind them tried in vain to attract their attention.

Yetta found it easy to be happy; she felt that Walter approved of her.

"Yetta," he said, rolling over closer to where she sat, her back against the rotting beam of a wrecked ship, "Yetta, I didn't expect to find you so good to look at. I wonder if you know how very beautiful you are."

The wreck against which she leaned cast a moon-shadow across her face, and he could not see the desperate blush which flooded her cheeks and neck. Something laid hold of her heart and told it to be quiet, to beat gently and not to make a noise.

"But that's not the way to begin, Yetta. It's hard for me to say what I want to, because – well – I'm past the poetic age. I couldn't sing now – nor play on a lute – if I tried. Perhaps it's just as well to talk prose, because it's all very serious."

"Since I've finished up this Persian job, I've been thinking a lot about what to do next. I could go on with that kind of work very easily. But I want some more concrete kind of usefulness. You'll know what I mean. I want to make my life count at something more than dry scholarship. And the only thing I can think of that seems worth doing is to pitch in and help Isadore on this paper. We'd need you in the combine. And that means thinking about you. I've done a lot of it. Wondering what manner of person you had grown to be. I was sure we'd be able to work well together. But I did not expect to find you so wonderful. Less than four years ago you were only a girl. You've grown amazingly, Yetta, grown in wisdom and in beauty – beauty of soul and face.

"I'm a lonely and rather battered old bachelor, Yetta. And no man really wants to be a bachelor. Sometimes, coming over on the boat, I thought about you – in that connection. But I couldn't help thinking of you as a young girl, lovable and very dear, but very young. And I'm getting old. My hair is turning gray, and many things turn gray inside, Yetta, before the hair turns. You don't seem so painfully young to me now, and the dream doesn't seem ludicrous. We're going to work together, Yetta, be partners and comrades. I've very little to offer you, but it would be a great thing for me if you would also be my wife."

"I thought you were in love with Mabel," she said.

The cool sound of her words startled her. With the heavens opening, could she speak in so commonplace a voice? They sounded so utterly inadequate that she would have given worlds to have them back, unsaid. It was a moment before he sat up and answered her.

"I was."

"I told you, Yetta," he went on in a moment, "that I'm a bit dilapidated, getting gray.

"Yetta," he began again, forgetting that he was going to let her choose freely, "you believe in the reformation even of criminals. Isn't there any hope for me?"

Her arms were about him, her sobs shook him, he could feel the moisture of her tears against his cheek. Except for the sharp rasp of her breath, they were very still. Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself. What did he have to give her in exchange for such vibrant love? But gradually the sense of contact, the pressure of her arms and her soft young body brushed aside this feeling that he was cheating her. Taking her face in his hands he turned it towards the moon and kissed her. When he held back her head so that the light fell on her face, its deep solemnity frightened him.

"Can't you smile a little?" he asked.

The tears welled up in her eyes again, but a smile such as he had never seen came, too. A laugh rippled up her throat and rang out into the night.

"Oh, Walter, Walter, I'm such a little fool to cry. But if I hadn't cried, I'd have died."

They forgot all about the moon they had waited out to see. Like dozens of other lovers on the beach that night, they forgot about supper. They missed the one o'clock boat and sat outside of the ferryhouse in the shadow of some packing-cases till two o'clock. They decided that it would be fun to walk home through the deserted streets. When they could think of no further reason to pass and repass her door, she kissed him "a really truly good night."

"I'll wake you up by telephone in the morning," she said, "and come round and make your coffee."

For half an hour after she had undressed she sat in her window looking up at the moon above the airshaft. She did not want ever to forget how the moon looked that night. But fearing that she might oversleep and lose the chance to breakfast with him, she at last went to bed.

For an hour more Walter paced up and down in Washington Square, between the sleeping figures huddled up on the park benches or stretched uneasily on the hard dry ground. He was ill at ease. He wished he might go to a hotel, some place less saturated with memories of Mabel than his own diggings. Had he lied when he had used the past tense about Mabel? Did he love her still? Was it fair to talk marriage to Yetta with this uncertainty in his mind?

"Morbid scruples!" he told himself disgustedly, and went to bed. But he dreamed about Mabel.

Far away in Stamford, she also was late in falling asleep. That evening she and Eleanor had played together for several hours. But at first the music had gone wrong. Mabel, like Beatrice, like Isadore – like everybody – knew that Yetta was in love with Walter. She was thinking about them, wondering about their meeting, and it had thrown her into discord with Eleanor. They had almost had a quarrel over it, for Eleanor guessed the cause. At last, with an effort of will, Mabel had lost herself in the music, a closer harmony than usual had sprung up between the two friends – it had ended as a very happy evening. But after Eleanor fell asleep, the thought of Walter and Yetta came back again disturbingly. Eleanor, Mabel told herself, was a fool to be jealous. She did not love Walter. She would not have left the city except that she wanted to give Yetta a clear field. She hoped they would marry, for she liked them both. But how she envied Yetta! There was no treasure she could dream of which she would not have sacrificed to feel herself in love as Yetta was.

A little after eight in the morning, Walter was shaken out of sleep by the noisy din of his telephone bell.

"Good morning, Beloved," Yetta's fresh voice came to his sleepy ears. "I couldn't call you up before – not till my room-mate went out. I could get dressed and round to your room in three minutes, but I'll give you ten. Put the water on. You can't have slept much, because a lot of times I felt you kiss me."

"Well, don't waste time talking about it," he interrupted. "Hurry."

"All right," and he heard the click of her receiver.

The scruples of the night before had vanished at the sound of her voice. He jumped into his bath and clothes with a keen thrill of expectancy. He sat in the window-seat and watched for her coming. God! What a queer world it was! He had been thinking over the possible expediency of suicide, and now life was opening up to him in thrilling vistas.

He waved his hand when he caught sight of her, and pinched himself to be sure he was awake when he noticed her quicken her pace.

He pretended to scold her for being slow. A dozen times he interrupted the coffee-making at critical moments to kiss her. She said it would surely be spoiled, and he swore he did not care. Yetta pretended to be in a hurry to finish the dishes and get uptown to work. It was a very meagre pretence. And what wonderful plans they made! With his arm about her they explored the two rooms in the back, which the carriage painter used as a storehouse for his brushes and cans. He would have to vacate. One they would turn into a dining-room. Yetta spoke of the other as the guest-room. But Walter christened it "the nursery."