Comrade Yetta

But in her trade there were frequent rush periods when it was necessary to work after supper. One night she came home unusually late. As soon as she had put out the light and crawled into bed, she woke up the two girls and confided to them in great excitement that she had been to a ball. A girl in her shop had lent her some finery, a shirtwaist, a pair of white shoes, and a hat. Of course one could not go to a dance in a shawl. It had been "something grand." She kept them awake a long time telling of the fine dresses, the "swell" music, and the good-looking men. She was too "mad about it" to sleep. She jumped out of bed and, humming a popular tune, danced a waltz for them in her nightgown. She was very sleepy in the morning, but the music was still in her ears. The other girls were rather dismayed by her rank disobedience. The morose and spiteful Rosa threatened to tell her father. Rachel herself became frightened at this and promised never to do it again.

But not many days passed before Rachel announced at supper that she would have to work late that night. Somehow Yetta knew it was a pretext. She could hardly get to sleep. She woke up the moment Rachel tiptoed into the room.

"You've been again," she said.

"Sure. But don't wake up Rosa."

"It's very wrong."

It may be that Rachel, who was only nineteen and had been brought up blindfolded, did not see anything wrong in the two dances she had attended. There are many perfectly respectable dances on the East Side. Fate may have led her to such. Or perhaps she glossed over dangers she had seen. She denied Yetta's charge. Rosa snored regularly beside them, while the two girls whispered half the night through.

Rachel's defence, although some of it was only half expressed, – she was not used to talking frankly about holy things, – was sound. After all, women do not come into the world to spend their lives in sweat-shops. They ought to marry and bear children. What chance did she have? She saw no men in her factory. It might be all right to leave such things to one's parents – if they were the right kind. But every one knew her father was a penniless, shiftless drunkard. What sort of a match could he arrange for her?

She was going to as many dances as she could. First of all, they were fun, and precious little fun did she get trimming hats for other women to wear. And then – well – she was not ugly. Perhaps some nice young man would marry her. That very evening a "swell fellow" had danced with her four times. He had wanted to walk home with her. But she would not let him do that, till she was sure he was "serious." She would see him again at a dance on Saturday night, and she would find out. What other chance had she? Her father could do nothing for her. Nor her mother. Nor her brother. Well – she was of age, she would do for herself.

"And if I was as swell looking as you are, Yetta," she said, "I'd sure get a winner. Why don't you come to a dance with me?"

The next day at the lunch hour Yetta overheard some of the girls talking about dances. Instead of going off by herself, as she generally did, to consecrate her few minutes of leisure to memories of her father, she sat down and listened to them. Yetta did not know how to dance. But the next time a hurdy-gurdy came by at noon, she began with the help of her shopmates to learn. Although she made rapid progress, although she listened eagerly to Rachel's account of stolen gayeties, she did not give in to her cousin's urgings. Her natural timidity, joined to a habit of obedience, kept her from going to a dance.

But a new element had come into her life. She began to feel that in some shameful way she was being defrauded. Was she to know nothing of Life but the sweat-shop? Was her youth to slip away uselessly? Since Rachel had spoken of her looks, she sometimes lingered before the mirrors in store windows and wondered if her smooth skin was doomed to turn wrinkled and yellow like that of the women at her table. Was she never to have children? The future, which she had never thought about before, began to look dark and fearsome. She did not feel that anything of lasting good could be gained by sneaking out to a ball, but at least, as Rachel said, it must be fun. Was she never to have any fun? Were the years – one after another – to creep by without music or laughter? Sooner or later the craving for a larger life would have forced her out to adventure with Rachel, but the temptress was suddenly removed.

Isaac Goldstein encountered his sister at a dance. He had not been home for more than a week, but he came the next day and told his parents. When Rachel came in from work that evening, the drunken father denounced her as a disgrace to his fair name. Rachel listened in sullen silence to his foul abuse until, enraged by his own eloquence, he struck her. She turned very white and then suddenly laughed.

"Good-by, Yetta and Rosie!" And then, clenching her fist at her father, she cried out: "And you – you go to Hell."

She slammed the door behind her and never came back.

David Goldstein did not often trouble to go to the Synagogue, but the next Friday night he put on his old frock-coat and frayed silk hat and in the meeting-house of the men of Kovna, he read the Service for the Dead over his pleasure-loving daughter.

Yetta was surprised to find how much she missed her cousin. To be sure she had not seen much of her – they worked in different shops. But since they had shared this secret together, it had seemed almost like having a friend. It had never been a joyous household, and now with Rachel's occasional laughs gone it was bleak indeed.

But these confidences, short-lived as they were, had – in spite of their tragic ending – done their work with Yetta. They had suddenly opened a window in the wall of the dark room where she lived. Through it she saw, as through a glass darkly, a fair garden, lit with the sunlight of laughter, a garden where blossomed the wondrous flowers of music, of joy – of Romance.

Since the recent development of "Child Study," since grave and erudite professors have written learned volumes on the subject of "Play," many things, which former generations thought lightly of, have taken on importance. In the gurgling of a month-old baby we now see an experimentation with, a training of, the vocal apparatus which may later win the plaudits of a crowded opera or sway the council chamber of a nation. It is no longer senseless and rather disgusting noise. It is part of the profound development of Man. The haphazard muscular reflexes of a five-year-old boy – the running violently to nowhere in particular, the jumping over nothing at all – is no longer, as our grandfathers held, an aimless and sometimes bothersome amusement. A human being is getting acquainted with the intricate system of nerve complexes and motor-muscles which is to carry him through his allotted work in the world. And the little girl with her sawdust doll has become a portentous thing. If she does not learn to hold it properly at seven, her real babies, when she is twenty-seven, are likely to fare badly.

Yetta had never had dolls. There had been no younger children in her household. She had never associated with boys. In a starved, vicarious way, through the confidence of Rachel, she had begun to "play" with the ideas of marriage, of home-making, of babies. An unrest, the cause of which she did not guess, had invaded her. She was just coming into womanhood. Nature was working deep and momentous changes in her being. It is a transition which may be beautiful and joyous if freedom for play is given to the developing organs and nerve-centres. Because of her starved childhood it came to Yetta late and abruptly. She was becoming a woman in an environment where nobody wanted anything but wage-earning "hands." And so to her it meant erratic moods of black despair, of uncontrolled and ludicrous lyricisms, of sudden and senseless timidities, abnormal, insane desires.

Unless something happened, her womanhood was to be wasted. She had sore need of a Prince in Silver Armor. But no Princes go about nowadays rescuing fair damsels from the Ogre Greed. However, Rachel had opened a window on a quasi-fairyland where, if there were no bona fide princes, there were at least some "swell-looking men." And just as she was getting intoxicated with the wonderful vision, the window was slammed shut in her face.

CHAPTER III

THE SWEAT-SHOP

The sudden closing of the window made her prison cell seem darker than before. It needed the contrast of the vision to make her see the sordidness and squalor – the grim reality – of that long dark room, with its chaos of noise, its nerve-destroying "speed."

Scattered through the East Side of New York there are hundreds such "sweat-shops," engaged in the various branches of the "garment trade." Sometimes there will be half a dozen in the same tenement; one above another. Even the factory inspectors are never sure of the exact number. They are running so close a race with bankruptcy, it is hard to keep track of them. Often half a dozen will fail on the same day, and as many new ones will start the next. It is not on record that any one ever found a good word to say for the "sweating system." Such "shops" exist because I and you and the good wife and the priest who married you like to buy our clothes as cheaply as possible.

Yetta's "shop" manufactured vests. The four women at each table formed a "team." With separate operations on the same garment, they had to keep in exact unison. If any one slowed up, they all lost money by the delay. They were paid "by the piece," and long hours, seven days a week, brought them so infinitesimal a margin over the cost of brute necessities that the loss of a few cents a day was a tragedy for the older women with children to feed.

Yetta, the youngest of all, was Number One at her table.

The name of Number Two was Mrs. Levy. She was anywhere between twenty-five and fifty, bovine in appearance, but her fingers were as agile as a monkey's. She sat stolidly before her machine, her big body, which had lost all form, almost motionless, her arms alone active. Her face was void of any expression. Her washed-out eyes were half closed, for they were inflamed with tracoma. Eight years before she had brought her three children over from Galicia to join her husband and had found him dying of tuberculosis. She had been making vests ever since. She was an ideal sweat-shop worker, reliable – the kind that lasts.

Opposite her Mrs. Weinstein grabbed the vests as they left Mrs. Levy's machine. She also was a large woman, but not much over thirty, and just entering the trade. She was of merry disposition and had kept much of her youthful charm. Her hair, of course, was disordered; the cloth-dust stuck in blotches to her perspiring face. There was a smudge of machine grease over one cheek, but where her blouse – unbuttoned – exposed her throat and the rise of her breasts, the skin was still soft and white. Her husband, of whom she always spoke with fond admiration as a very kind and wise man, had deserted her a few months before. Engaged in another branch of the garment trades, he had become involved in one of the strikes which with increasing frequency were shaking the sweating system. He had been black-listed. After weeks of fruitless search for work, he had disappeared. If he found work elsewhere, he would send for his wife. He could not bear to stay and be supported by her. She had a sister, who had married well and who would not let the babies starve. Besides, she did not consider herself a regular vest-maker. Some day, soon, her husband would find work, in Boston, Philadelphia – somewhere. She was always expecting a letter to-morrow. So Mrs. Weinstein could afford to be cheerful.

But if Number Two had an unusually stolid body and phlegmatic brain – the type which suffers least from sweating; and if Number Three had been blessed with a merry, hopeful soul, Mrs. Cohen, at the foot of the table, had none of these advantages. She had been Number One, not so very long before – a marvel of speed. Then she had begun to cough. It is impossible to cough without breaking the regular rhythm which means speed. In a few months she had slipped down to the bottom. She was no older than Mrs. Weinstein, but her skin was as yellow as Mrs. Levy's, and even more unlovely, for the flesh behind it had melted away; the only prominences on her body were where her bones pushed out.

She had begun at twenty-one, when her husband died leaving her with two children. There had been another baby a couple of years later – because she had hoped the man would marry her and take her out of the inferno. He had not. And there was no hope any more, for who would marry a woman with bad lungs and three children?

Despair, while embittering her, had cleared her vision. She saw the "shop" and the "system" – and understood. She had entered the trade strong and healthy, and had been well-paid at first, when she had the great desideratum – Speed. It had seemed like good pay then. But now she knew better. They had been buying not only her day-by-day ability, they had bought up her future. For the wages of less than ten years they had bought all her life – they had bought even her children! Already the flow of vests had piled up once or twice too swiftly for her. Jake Goldfogle, the present boss, was threatening to discharge her. If she lost this job, it would be the end. The Gerry Society would surely take her babies and put them in "institutions." No, she had not been well-paid in the days when they had given her extra wages for the pace that kills. It is small pleasure for a mother to hush the hunger-cry of her children, but that was all the joy that was left to Mrs. Cohen. And if she lost her job, she would lose even this.

Just in proportion as Number Four at the bottom of the table had learned many bitter things from life, so Yetta at the head had almost everything yet to learn. She began the long lesson with a pain in her back.

It came unexpectedly. It was as much the insulting surprise of it, as the hurt itself, which made her cry out sharply and drop her work – throwing the whole team out of rhythm.

"Wos is dir, Yetta?" Mrs. Weinstein asked with motherly solicitude.

"Oy-yoy-yoy!" Yetta said, putting her hand to her back – "Es is schon verbei."

Mrs. Cohen at the bottom of the table laughed mirthlessly.

"It will come back," she screamed in Yiddish above the din of the machinery. "I know. It begins so. One speeds two, three years – four – with one it is the lungs, with another it is the back, or the eyes." She seized the momentary pause to ease herself with coughs.

Mrs. Levy, who had been long in the trade, had seen many a "speeder" give in; some slowly, some suddenly. She had seen dozens of them, fighting desperately the fight for food, slip down from the head to the foot and out – out through the door to the street and nowhere. As Mrs. Cohen had said, it was sometimes the eyes, sometimes the lungs, sometimes the back. She nodded her head in affirmation. Oh yes, she had seen it many times. She could have told the story of one mother who had gone on speeding in spite of back and lungs and eyes, had kept on speeding until one day she had fallen over her machine dead. Her hair had gotten tangled in the cogs, and they had to cut it to take her away.

Mrs. Weinstein tried to comfort Yetta.

"Don't listen to them," she said. "You are yet young – you'll be all right – "

She stopped abruptly, for the office door had opened and Jake Goldfogle came out. His ear, trained to the chaotic noise of the shop, had caught the momentary halt.

"Ober, mein Gott, wos is der mer?" he roared.

Mrs. Cohen, who had caught up with her work and was waiting for more, pointed an accusing finger at Yetta.

Jake Goldfogle was twenty-eight. This was his first "shop." The dominant expression of his face – which he tried to cover with an assumption of masterliness – was worry. The person who has been ground by poverty is never a debonaire gambler. But these ignorant, unimaginative women who slaved for him, whom he lashed with his tongue and sometimes struck, did not understand his situation, did not know of the myriad nightmares which haunted his waking as well as his sleeping hours. They bent low over their machines, hurrying under the eye of the master, holding their breath to catch the torrent of abuse they expected to hear fall on Yetta.

They did not realize – least of all did Yetta – that she was an exception. Jake swallowed the curses on his tongue and asked her in a constrained and unfamiliar voice what was wrong.

"Nothing," she said. "A pain in my back."

No sort of pain known to women was considered a valid excuse for breaking speed. She wondered with sullen, servile anger how much he would fine her. If any of the women had looked up, they would have seen strange twists on the boss's face. He turned abruptly, without a word, and went back to his office. He sat down at his desk and looked through the little window, by means of which he could, glancing up from his ledger, spy on the roomful of workers. His eyes rested a moment on Yetta's stooped back. Then, grasping his temples, he paced up and down his dingy office, cursing the day he was born. He was in love with Yetta and could not afford to tell her so.

The psychology of the refugees from Russian and Galician Ghettos, who come to live among us, is very hard for us to understand. Above all, the Jew is marked by single-mindedness and consistency of purpose. We have our Anglo-Saxon tradition of compromise and confused issues. We have generally several irons in the fire. We shift easily – often flippantly – from one purpose to another. The Semite, having once accepted a goal is hard to divert.

Coming to us, as most of them do, in abject poverty, it is small wonder that many a Jewish lad decides that the Holy Grail is made of American dollars. The surprising thing is the unswerving fidelity with which they follow the quest – a fidelity which is quite absent in the legends of King Arthur's English Knights. It is the same no matter what ideal they choose. Just as the money grubber will deny himself necessary food and overwork his wife and children to amass a little capital, so the East Side poet will stick to writing rhymes in Yiddish, although it can never give him a decent living, and the Jewish Socialist will hold fast to his principles through starvation and persecution.

Jake Goldfogle had a vague recollection of a great wave which had washed over the steerage deck of an immigrant steamer and had scared him immensely. All his other memories were set in the scenery of the New York slums. He had "got wise" young, with the wisdom of the gutter, which says that you must be either a hammer or an anvil, preyed upon or preying. For the last fifteen years he and his sister, more recently reënforced by her husband, had been engaged in a desperate struggle to pull up out of the muck.

For years the three of them had been slaves to the machine. Six months before they had put all their miserable savings, all their credit, into buying this "shop." They had accepted a highly speculative contract from which there could be no halfway issue. A dozen weeks more and it would be over – either an immense success or utter ruin. Failure meant the swallowing up in a moment of the results of their long slavery; it meant going back to the machine.

Hundreds of men throughout the city, in the different garment trades, were in exactly the same position. Ground between the gambling nature of their contracts and insufficiently secured credit, the fear of ruin in their hearts, they had been driving the rowels deeper and deeper into the flanks of the animals who worked for them – on whose backs they hoped to win to the gilded goal of success. But revolt from such conditions was inevitable. Strikes were constantly occurring. This fear was the worst of Jake Goldfogle's nightmares.

The revolt of the garment workers was as yet unorganized and chaotic. There were a dozen odd unions, but few of them were strong or well disciplined. Too many of those in the trade were immigrants from southeastern Europe and the Russian Pale – where only a few of the men are literate. Most of them were women – mothers. When the long hours in the shops were over, they hurried home to their children. It was very hard to get them to meetings.

But in spite of all these handicaps the workers were gradually organizing. Such strikes as had already occurred had had little effect except to ruin the smaller bosses. The large manufacturers could afford to wait until their "hands" were starved back to the machines. But so close was the contest, – it mattered little whether the trade was vests or shirtwaists or overalls, – that a few days' interruption was enough to ruin the weaker bosses. The small fry, like Jake, echoed the sentiments of Le Grand Monarque– The Deluge might come after, if only they could speed their contracts to completion. And so, with ever increasing viciousness, the rowels were driven deeper and deeper.

It had been a surprising sensation to Jake Goldfogle to discover that it was more pleasant to look through his spying window at the curve of Yetta's neck and the wild little curls of rich brown hair that clustered about it than to add up columns of figures. Even the unhealthy, stooped curve of her spine as she leaned forward to the machine seemed gracious to him. He looked forward eagerly to the times, every half hour, when he went out into the shop on a tour of inspection, for then he could catch glimpses of her face. To be sure she never looked up from her work while he was watching. But there was one place where he could stand unnoticed and see her in profile. It was a marvellously regular face for the East Side. The dark curve of her eyebrows was perfect, and sometimes he could catch the gleam of her eyes. The skin of her throat was whiter even than Mrs. Weinstein's. She was a trifle thinner than Jake's ideal – but he told himself she would fill out. All this added color to his dream of success, a deeper shade to his fear of ruin.

A man of another race would probably have lost his head and asked her to marry him. But Jake had a deep-seated habit of planning for success. Long before he had noticed the grace of her body and face he had realized that she was the best worker in his shop, "the pace-maker" for the whole establishment. If success was to be won, it would be by just that very narrow margin, which the breaking in of a new "speeder" would jeopardize. So he had tried to put her out of his mind till the "rush season" was over. Intent on his main purpose he had not thought of her physical well-being. She was young and healthy looking. It had not occurred to him that a few weeks more or less would matter. The pain in her back surprised him.

If the incident had occurred in the morning, he might have called her into his office then and there and asked her to marry him. Things had looked brighter in the morning. But at lunch – a frugal affair, two sweet buns and a glass of tea – he had heard disquieting talk of the "skirt-finishers" strike. It had been more serious than most. Half a dozen shops had been already wiped out. And his informant – a hated competitor – had gloomily foretold trouble in their own trade. If strikes broke out among the "vest-makers," it would tighten credit. The call of a couple of loans would be the end of Jake. No! He could not afford to take Yetta out now. Any one who came to take her place might be infected with the virus of Unionism. His own women did not know what a strike was. No. He could not risk it. If Pincus & Company paid promptly on the next delivery, he could take up those dangerous loans and then – perhaps —

He put his face close to the spying window and looked out at Yetta's back. He wondered just where the pain had been and whether it still hurt.

"Poor little girl," he said.

But Yetta knew nothing of her boss's intention. She could see no outlet. The future stretched before her, so barren that it hurt to think of it. But she could not escape the thought. Was she to get fat and ugly like Mrs. Levy? Would the pain come again and would she slip down – as Mrs. Cohen prophesied – coughing herself to uselessness?

CHAPTER IV

LIFE CALLS

In the months that followed Rachel's departure Yetta began to lose hope. She could see no promise of escape, and lethargic time gradually faded the colors of her dream. The flame of holy discontent which had blazed for a while in her soul threatened to go out. Sometimes she wondered what had happened to Rachel. But "Speed" eats up a person's power of wondering.