CHAPTER X
THE W. T. U. L
It was near five in the afternoon when Yetta reached the brown-stone front which held the offices of the Woman's Trade Union League. It had once been a comfortable residence. But Business, ever crowding northward on Manhattan Island, had driven homes away. The house seemed dwarfed between two modern buildings of twelve and eighteen stories.
In what had formerly been the "parlor," Yetta found a rather barren, very businesslike office. Two stenographers were industriously hammering their typewriters, but the chair behind the big roll-top desk was empty.
"Hello," one of the girls greeted her, hardly looking up from her notes. "What do you want?" "I want to see Miss Train."
"Sit down. You'll have to wait. Advisory Council."
She jerked her head to one side to indicate the double doors which in more aristocratic days had led to the dining-room. It was anything but a cordial welcome. To be sure the two girls were "organized." Miss Train had persuaded them to form a union. One was president and the other was secretary, and there were about six other members. They had done it to please her, just as they would have done anything to please her. Nevertheless they felt themselves on a very much higher social plane than mere shop girls.
Yetta sat down disconsolate. She had not expected to have to wait. She did not appreciate the overwhelming importance of an Advisory Council. In fact, she did not know what it was. And she did not think that there could be anything more important than the strike in her shop. In a few minutes her impatience overcame her timidity.
"Say," she said, getting up and coming over to the girl who had spoken to her. "You tell Miss Train that I'm here. It's important – about a strike."
"Humph," the stenographer snorted, "skirt-finisher?"
"No. I ain't a skirt-finisher. I work bei vests. It's a new strike. Miss Train'll want to know about it right away."
"What do you think?" the stenographer asked her companion. "Can't disturb the Advisory Council, can I?"
The two girls cross-questioned Yetta severely, but at last gave in to her insistence. One of them knocked at the double doors. They were opened from the inside a couple of inches and Mabel looked out.
"We've struck," Yetta cried, rushing towards her.
Mabel turned towards the occupants of the inner room and asked to be excused a moment.
"I'm very busy just now," she said as she sat down beside Yetta. "Tell me about it quickly."
The Industrial Conflict is not logical. At least it does not follow any laws of logic known to the so-called "labor leaders." It is connected with, actuated by, a vague something, which for want of a better term we call "human nature." And labor leaders are just as uncertain what "human nature" will do next as the rest of us. They will spend patient years on end organizing a trade, collecting bit by bit a "strike fund," preparing for a battle which never comes off or miserably fizzles out. In the midst of such discouragement, an unprepared strike in an unorganized trade will break out and with no prospect of success will sweep to an inspiring victory. Mabel had seen such surprising things happen a hundred times.
More than once, since her short talk with Yetta at the ball, she had thought over the possibility of organizing the vest-makers. But the project seemed to hold very little promise. The "skirt-finishers" had lost. She, with her hand on the pulse of things, knew it, even if the strikers did not. And here, once more, a new strike had broken out, just as another was collapsing. It might be only a flash in the pan, a quarrel in one shop. It might spread. She listened closely to Yetta.
Her eyes were also busy. She noted the peculiar charm of the young girl, the big deep eyes with their sudden changes from excited hope to melancholy sadness, her cheeks flushed with the impetuous enthusiasm of a new convert.
Mabel thought of the group of well-to-do women in the other room. She had small respect for most of them, none at all for some. It would have been a very complicated matter to analyze the reasons which caused these "ladies" to interest themselves in the cause of working girls. Some few of them had similar – if less forceful – motives to those which had led Mabel to give her life to the work. Some of them liked to be thought odd, and found in labor unions a piquant fad. Two were suffragists and were seriously interested in all organizations of women. There was one at least whose morbid instincts were tickled by the stories of desperate misery which circulated in the League.
Probably all of them had been somewhat influenced to seek election by the fact that Mrs. Van Cleave was on the Board – she might invite them to one of her functions.
She was a mystery to Mabel. She was very fat and very rich and a leader of the inner circle of "Society." She attended the meetings regularly, and never seemed to take the slightest interest in anything. Every January first she mailed a check for ten dollars. Mabel had never succeeded in getting any other money from her. But her social prestige was of unquestioned value – otherwise she was absolute dead-wood.
Mrs. Karner, the wife of a millionnaire newspaper owner, was the only one of them all who really helped Mabel. She was an intelligent woman and rendered efficient service along many lines.
It was a hard group to work with. The sincere ones were occupied with many other activities. It was difficult to get any enthusiasm into them. But the League could not exist without their financial support. Now that the "skirt-finishers" strike was ending in disaster, how could she keep up their interest, how could she persuade them further to open their pocket-books? Yetta's radiant face gave her a suggestion.
"Wait a minute," she interrupted her in the middle of a sentence. "There are some other people who ought to hear about this. Come along."
She led Yetta through the double doors into the committee-room. It was one of Eleanor Mead's achievements. The room had been extended to the back of the house. Along the sides were piles of cheap folding chairs. When they were put up, they would accommodate about two hundred. By the windows in the back there was a large flat-topped table and ten easy chairs in which the Advisory Council were comfortably installed. Above the table hung a great mezzatone photograph of the Rouen statue of Jeanne d'Arc. The room, all in brown tones, harmonized with it and the half-dozen similar portraits of famous women.
"Ladies," Mabel said, "this is Yetta Rayefsky. She has just come to tell me of a new strike in her trade – vests. We've finished to-day's business. And if you can spare the time, I am sure you will be interested in her story. Begin at the beginning, Yetta," she went on as the ladies nodded assent, "and tell us all about it."
Yetta was utterly confused. She had never seen so much fine raiment nor so many jewels. No one had ever stared at her through lorgnettes in the insolent way that Mrs. Van Cleave did.
"They are all friends, Yetta," Mabel encouraged her. "And if the strike is to succeed, we will need all the help we can get."
Thus prodded, Yetta began. The many books which she had read to her father as a child had familiarized her with good English. But in the last four years she had fallen into the mixture of Yiddish and slipshod English which is the language of the sweat-shop. Now she felt that she must speak correctly, and the search for words added to her self-consciousness and ruined the effect of her story. Mabel was just beginning to regret that she had brought her in, when in some sudden, inexplicable way all the excitement of the last few days came over Yetta with a rush and stimulated her as the wine had on the night of the ball. She began to speak simply, straight out from her heart. It was not an economic exposition of the industrial conflict; not even a coherent explanation of the strike in her shop. It was a more personal story. She wandered off from her main subject, told them about her father and the book-store. She told them about Rachel and Mrs. Cohen. She told them about Jake Goldfogle and his offer of marriage. Now and then Mabel asked a question about the conditions in her trade. God knows they were bad enough, but to Yetta such things seemed insignificant details; she was concerned with the frightful implications of poverty. Long hours and poor food seemed of small moment to her compared to the miserable meagreness of the life of the girls. To be sure they were hungry, but more awful was the fact that they were starving for sunlight. More than once she came back to Rachel and how she had "wanted to be good." Suddenly she stopped and turned to Mabel.
"Ought I to tell them about Harry Klein?"
The roomful of women – ease-loving, worldly women – also turned to Mabel to catch her answer. They had fallen silent under the spell of Yetta's simple eloquence. Some of them Mabel detested. It seemed almost sacrilegious to let this unsophisticated girl strip her soul naked before them. But she saw that Yetta was moving them more deeply than she ever could.
"It hasn't anything to do with the strike," she said after a slight hesitation. "You don't need to tell it – if you'd rather not."
"Please tell us."
It was Mrs. Karner who had spoken. Yetta had felt that she was the friendliest of all these fine ladies. She had found encouragement in her eyes whenever she had looked at her. So taking a deep breath, she plunged in.
"You see, it was just luck – if it hadn't been for luck, I'd have gone wrong – just like Rachel."
She began with the night when she had watched the Settlement dance from her window. With the wonderful cleverness of self-forgetfulness she made them feel how her heart had hungered for a little happiness; how, although she had wanted very much to be good, she had reached out her hands, pleadingly, toward the dream of joy. She made them understand how the deadening barrenness of the sweat-shop had made it easy for her to believe in Harry Klein, how he had come to her singing the Song of Songs – like a Prince in Shining Armor riding forth to rescue her from the Giant Greed. Even the fat Mrs. Van Cleave was crying behind her lorgnette when Yetta told of her first supper with Harry.
"You see," she ended, "it's mostly against things like that that we girls strike. We may think it's for higher wages or shorter hours, but it's because it's so hard for a poor girl to be happy."
Mrs. Karner jumped up and put her arms around Yetta and kissed her and cried against her cheek. "Ladies," Mabel struck while the iron was hot, "shall we support this strike? Shall we try to organize the vest workers?"
No formal motion was put, but Mrs. Karner, who was chairman, instructed the secretary to enter on the minutes their unanimous decision to aid the vest-makers. Mrs. Van Cleave nodded her head approvingly and volunteered to head a sub-committee in finance. It was the first time she had ever done anything but sit placidly in her chair. Then the meeting adjourned, and when the last of the ladies had left the room, Mabel gave Yetta a great hug.
"Oh, you darling," she said. "You even made Mrs. Van Cleave cry. It was wonderful."
And then without any reason at all, Yetta began to sob. Mabel installed her in one of the big chairs and sat down at her feet. "There," she said, "you cry as much as you want to. You've got a right to cry a week after a speech like that."
Resting her head against Yetta's knee and holding her hand, she lit a cigarette and began to think out the new campaign. Yetta's sobs wore themselves out quickly, and they began to talk. Mabel's grasp of details, her unexpected knowledge of the vest making, amazed Yetta. Mabel knew things about the trade which she had never dreamed of.
The two stenographers were called in. One was set to work on a volume of Factory Reports, preparing a list of vest shops. And Mabel instructed the other one to call up the Forwaertz– the Yiddish Socialist paper.
"What's your address?" she asked Yetta. "I'm going to ask Mr. Braun to come and see you to-night and write up the strike."
The question reminded Yetta of a new complication.
"I forget," she said. "I can't go home. My uncle's fierce against unions. I ain't got no place. I'll have to find one."
"That's all right; you come home with me to-night," Mabel reassured her. And turning to the stenographer, told her to ask Mr. Braun to come to her flat for dinner. She dictated letters to half a dozen different people telling of the new plans and asking them to come to the League rooms on the morrow. It was nearly seven when she and Yetta and the two stenographers left the office.
All the last hour, Harry Klein had stood impatiently in the dark doorway, waiting for Yetta to pass. As the last of the ebb tide flowed by him, he went across the street and told his followers that there was nothing doing. For two more nights he marshalled them, but Yetta did not pass that way any more.
His luck had changed. It was not long before his retainers noticed it. In due time a new president was elected to the James B. O'Rourke Democratic Club. And so he passes out of this story.
CHAPTER XI
MABEL'S FLAT
Yetta had no clear idea of what fairy-land should be like, but when she passed through the door of Mabel's flat, it seemed that she had entered it.
She had never dreamed of such beautiful rooms. Even a more sophisticated observer would have been impressed with Miss Mead's arrangements. Interior decoration was her profession, and she was more proud of her work in this humble apartment than of anything she had done elsewhere. Most of her commissions were for people who were foolishly rich, who were more anxious to have their rooms appear expensive than beautiful. There was nothing in the apartment simply because it had been high-priced. Nothing pleased Eleanor more than to tell how little it had all cost. She could talk by the hour on the absolute lack of relationship between pure æsthetics and money. One of her lectures was on this subject, and she used the apartment as a demonstration room. But to Yetta the forty dollar flat seemed a miracle of luxury.
The room which impressed her most with its appearance of opulence was the white enamelled, large-mirrored bath-room.
Eleanor herself was a vision of loveliness. Yetta had seen very few women with real blonde hair, and those few had not known how to wear it. There was a book she had seen as a child with a picture in it like Eleanor, but she had not thought that such women walked the earth. And her dress! It seemed to the little East-sider fit raiment for a queen. She could not imagine how it could shine so unless it was woven of spun gold. But it was not so costly as she imagined. The only real extravagance which Eleanor permitted herself in her quest for the Beautiful was the purchase of early daffodils.
Mabel got out one of her own shirt-waists and hurried Yetta into it. While she was changing her own workaday clothes for a fresh outfit, – hardly less gorgeous than Eleanor's, – they heard the maid admitting Isadore Braun.
He was a product of the Social Settlement Movement. Even as a little boy he had been bitten by the desire to know. The poverty of his family had forced him to go to work, but he had continued his studies in the night classes of a Settlement. His boyish precociousness had attracted attention, and some of the University men of the Settlement, impressed by his eagerness to learn, had helped out his family finances so Isadore could return to school. They had helped him through High School and into the City College.
During his sophomore year Isadore had joined the Socialist party. His conversion had been a deep and stormy spiritual experience to him. He knew it would shock and alienate his supporters. Caution, expediency, every prudent consideration had urged him to postpone the issue – at least till he had finished college. But the new vision of life flamed with an impatient glory. He could not wait.
His new political faith separated him from the friends who had made things easy for him. But it brought him new ones a-plenty who, if poorer, were truer. He had been compelled to leave college. But he had already developed a marked talent for the kind of journalism the East Side appreciates, less "newsy," but decidedly more literary than the output of the English papers. He found a place on the Forwaertz where, for a bare living wage, he wrote columns about history and science and the drama. It was an afternoon paper, so he had his evenings free to study. He had taken the night course in the New York Law School. It had been a desperate struggle which he could not have won through except for a talent at reducing work to a routine and for one of those marvellous constitutions – like Yetta's – which seem the special heritage of their race, a physical and nervous endurance, which is probably explained by agelong observance of the strict dietary regulations of Moses.
He was not an attractive person to look at. His face was heavily lined and lumpy. His short, stocky body had been twisted by much application to desk work. His right shoulder was noticeably higher than his left.
Nor was his type of mind attractive. It was too utilitarian to admit of any graces. He was twenty-five years old, and, since the days of enthusiasm when he had become a Socialist, he had imposed on himself an iron rule. He had not given himself a vacation, he had not read any book, had not consciously done anything in these five years, which did not seem to him useful. With the same merciless singleness of purpose which had marked Jake Goldfogle's struggle to become rich, Isadore Braun had driven himself in the acquisition of abilities, which would make him a more forceful weapon in the fight for Socialism.
He had led his classes in the Law School. He had spurred himself on to immense effort, not because he wanted to sit on the Supreme Bench, but because he saw that the workers were in sore need of competent, sympathetic legal representatives. He believed that the Socialists were the most enlightened element in the great army of industrial revolt. He held that they should be a sort of "general staff," guiding and advising the Labor Unions – the rank and file of the army. His only idea in entering the bar was to act as attorney for the unions. If he had been offered a large retainer to settle a will or draw up a business contract, he would have been surprised and would have refused on the ground that he was too busy. He had volunteered his services as legal adviser to the Woman's Trade Union League.
He still drew his meagre salary from the Forwaertz, but he wrote less frequently on general subjects and had specialized on the labor situation. He kept to the newspaper work, not only because it gave him a small income, but even more because it gave him an audience. Almost every Yiddish-speaking workman in the city knew his name. He was a concise and forceful speaker, and now that he no longer attended night school he was on the platform, preaching Socialism, four or five nights a week.
This manner of life had had its inevitable and unwholesome result. For years he had been so intensely occupied with details that he had had no time to think broadly, to criticise, and develop the fundamentals of his faith. At twenty he had accepted the philosophy of Socialism; he had not had time to think about it since. He was rapidly becoming a narrow-minded fanatic. It was a strange, but common paradox. Having spent five years in the fight for Socialism, he could not have given a more coherent, a maturer statement of his beliefs than at first. All his associates held the same creed, but they discussed only its detailed application. Like himself they were – with very few exceptions – slaves to, rather than masters of, the Great Idea.
His only non-Socialist friends were Mabel Train and Walter Longman. When he first took up the work of the Woman's Trade Union League, he had had a sweeping contempt for "bourgeois reformers." Gradually Mabel had forced him to abandon his hostility and at last to give her a high degree of respect. He was unable to understand her. But it was equally impossible for him to withhold his admiration for her consistency of purpose, her dogged persistence in a far from pleasurable career, her great ability, and her strong, straight intellect. He knew no other woman who was more steadfast than Mabel. But why? What were her motives? She was not a Socialist. She explained casually that she did not have time for more than Labor Unions. He could understand devotion to a great philosophical principle, but he could discover no coherent system of thought back of Mabel's unquestioned devotion.
He was a frequent visitor at the flat. But it never occurred to him to make a social call. For Eleanor he had no manner of use, a feeling which she entirely reciprocated. While he tried to pretend to a polite interest in "interior decoration," she made no pretence at all of caring for Socialism. And as soon as the business, which had caused him to come, was finished he found himself ill at ease, even with Mabel. On the basis of their common work, the organization of labor and the conduct of strikes, they had a delightfully frank and free friendship. But on any other ground he felt constraint. He never discussed Socialism with her, and this was strange, as he was an ardent proselyter. Back of her offhand explanation that she was too busy to occupy herself with the party, he felt the existence of a point of view entirely different from his own. In reality he was afraid to open this subject with her; he was afraid of her brilliant vision and her incisive, railing style of argument. He had gotten out of the habit of discussing the broad foundations of Socialism; he would be off his accustomed ground. He told himself that she was a woman, and if she got the better of him in repartee, she would think that she had demolished Socialism.
Through Mabel, he had met Longman, and if she did not fit into his theory of life, Walter was an even greater exception. His easy-going, rather lazy brilliance was always startling Isadore and making him angry. Here was an exceptionally able man, who was keenly alive to the rottenness of the present order, but who took only a languid interest in righting it. What a power he might be! Instead he spent his time on the deadest of dead pasts and in an inconsequential way dallied – "diddled," Isadore called it – with philosophy. He could not think of Longman's manner of life without raging; it was such despicable waste. He ought to have despised him, but he could not help liking him. Having no bond of common work with Longman, as he had with Mabel, he found himself more often in his rooms than in her flat.
Yetta, somewhat abashed by the glorious clothes of her hostesses, found Isadore's unkempt appearance a decided relief. His hair, black, curly, wiry, looked as if it had not been brushed for a decade. The spotless linen, the gilt shades of the candles, the bewildering assortment of forks and spoons, the white-aproned French maid, all rather dizzied her. It was indeed comforting now and then to glance up at the familiar East Side face across the table.
Eleanor, after a few formal politenesses from the head of the table, fell silent, and Mabel began to tell Isadore about the new strike. Once in a while they asked Yetta a question. When the table was cleared and the maid brought coffee – tiny, tiny cups of black coffee – Eleanor went into the parlor and arranged herself with a book beside a green-shaded lamp. And Isadore, taking out some rough sheets of copy paper, began scribbling notes for the article which should tell the East Side on the morrow that a gigantic, rapidly spreading, and surely victorious revolt had broken out in the vest trade. Once Yetta protested that her shop – twelve women – was the only one which had struck. But they laughed aside her objection. At least it was necessary to make it sound big, perhaps it would grow. Then they began drawing up a set of demands for the strikers to submit to their employers. First of all came the "recognition of the Union," and then a long list of shop reforms. About the only one which would be intelligible to those not familiar with the trade was that for a higher rate of pay per piece; the rest involved such technical considerations as the regulation of speed, ventilation, etc. Yetta wanted them to put in a clause demanding the reinstatement of Mrs. Cohen. But Mabel explained that there would be no sense to the demands unless other shops joined the strike, so they could not put in anything which applied only to one.
"But," Yetta insisted, "I guess there's a Mrs. Cohen in every shop."
They argued against her that the unions could not try to right individual wrongs, they could only hope to win conditions which would stop the production of Mrs. Cohens. Although she was unconvinced, Yetta gave in. Isadore hurried off to a meeting.
Eleanor gave him a perfunctory good night without looking up from her book, and Mabel walked down the hallway with him. Yetta felt suddenly forlorn. Eleanor went on reading, ignoring her existence, and Mabel lingered to talk with Isadore at the door.
When Mabel came back, Eleanor looked up from her book and spoke querulously in French.
"I should think you might at least say you are sorry for spoiling our evening."
"It isn't spoilt yet," Mabel replied. "It's only begun."
"Not spoilt for you, perhaps. You never think of me. You solemnly promised to keep this evening free for some music. And at six your stenographer casually calls me up to say that there will be people for dinner. You can't even find time to telephone yourself."
"Now, Nell, don't be cross. If you listened to our talk, you must have seen how important – "
"Oh, everything is more important than I."
"We'll have our music all right. I'll send the little one to bed."
And then changing into English, Mabel told Yetta that she must be very tired after so much excitement, that they had a hard day before them, and that she had best take a piping-hot bath to make her sleep and turn in at once. Yetta did not understand French, but from Eleanor's tone she had guessed the meaning of "de trop." She wanted very much to stay up and talk with Miss Train, but with a pang in her heart, she followed her docilely into a bedroom, watched her lay out a nightgown and bath-robe, and as docilely followed her into the dazzling bath-room.
"Take it just as hot as you can stand it, and then jump right into bed," Mabel said, and kissed her good night.
Before she was half through with her bath, she began to hear the sound of music. And when she had put on the nightgown and wrapped herself in the bath-robe, – her skin had never felt such soft fabrics, – she opened the door noiselessly and stood a moment unobserved in the hallway. In the front room Mabel was sitting at the piano and Eleanor stood beside her, with closed eyes, a violin tucked lovingly under her chin, and swayed gently to the rhythm of the music. It was one of Chopin's Nocturnes. Yetta did not know what a Nocturne was; the best music she had ever heard had been the cheap orchestras at the Settlement and at the Skirt-Finishers' Ball. Neither Eleanor nor Mabel were great musicians; it would have seemed a commonplace performance to most of us, but to the girl in the bath-robe it sounded beautiful beyond words, the most wondrous thing of all the wonderful new world she had so suddenly entered.
She listened a moment and then tiptoed down the hall to her bedroom. She carefully closed the window, which Mabel had as carefully opened, left her door ajar, so she could hear the music, and climbed in between the soft white sheets. She was very tired, the hot bath had quieted her nerves, and it was while they were playing the third piece, something by Grieg, that she fell asleep. Her last conscious thought was a dreamy, wistful wonder if she could ever become a part, have a real share in so gorgeous a life.
For more than an hour they kept at their music. The people who wondered why two so different personalities lived together had never seen them as they played. Neither of them was expert enough to perform in public, but they both passionately loved to make music. Eleanor's ridiculous posing, her querulous jealousy, very often jarred on Mabel's nerves. She sometimes thought of breaking up the household. But there were precious moments when their differences melted away and they enjoyed a rare and perfect harmony. Now and then Mabel escaped from her manifold engagements, and they went together to a concert or the Opera. Even more intense became their intimacy of emotion on the more frequent occasions when – as this evening – they played together. Such moments more than compensated for the daily frictions. To the jealous Eleanor they meant that Mabel's mind was cleansed of all preoccupations, when no one, no fancied duty came between them, when they could forget everything – everything – and be together. To Mabel such intimacies meant escape from all the heart-breaking routine of misery and struggle which was her daily life; they were interludes of unalloyed happiness, white moments in the sad business of living. Somehow the magic of the music soothed and lulled to sleep the great ache of social consciousness. She knew no other way to win forgetfulness from the overwhelming melancholy of Life.
"Nell," Mabel said, putting her arms around Eleanor when at last they were going to bed, "do you want to be nice to me? Try to like this little Yetta. She interests me. And I'd like to have her stay here for a while, if you don't mind."
"At least," Eleanor replied, "she's more decorative than most of your protégées."