Comrade Yetta Part 20

"Yetta Rayefsky, you admit picketing, which means intimidating honest work-people, before the Crown Vest Company this morning; you admit interfering with Officer Brennan, while he was engaged in the performance of his duty. The Court finds you guilty of disorderly conduct. But the officers inform me that this is the first time you have been brought to court. As is my custom, I will discharge you if you promise not to picket any more. Understand that if you are brought before me again, I will send you to prison. Take my advice and go to work. Idleness always breeds trouble. Will you promise not to picket any more?"

"No."

The judge sat up with a jerk.

"Ten days, workhouse," he thundered.

And as they led her away, he rapped on his desk with his gavel, and the clerk announced adjournment.

"That little Jew girl had more s.p.u.n.k than I gave her credit for," the judge said a few minutes later, in his chambers, to his secretary who was helping him on with his fur-lined coat. "I wonder if she did blackjack Brennan." He had to sit down again to laugh at the idea.

"Don't scold me," Yetta said to Braun, when he came into the prison and spoke to her through the grating. "I was tired of lying."

Braun said to himself as he went away that it was just like a woman to get away with a big lie and stumble over a little one.

CHAPTER XV

THE WORKHOUSE

In the afternoon Yetta was loaded into "the wagon" with a lot of "drunks" and prost.i.tutes and taken up to the Department dock to wait for the ferry across to the Island.

She had not realized how the month's strain had tired her until the excitement was over and she was on the tug in midstream. In sheer weariness, she turned round on her seat and, crossing her arms on its back, buried her face in them. Presently she felt a hand on her shoulder.

"Don't take it so hard, Little One," a not unkindly voice said. "It's fierce at first, but you get used to it." She looked up into a face of stained and faded gaudiness.

"Oh," the woman said, somewhat taken aback. "You're one of them strikers. Did they beat you up?"

"No," Yetta replied, "I got off easy."

The woman stood a moment first on one foot and then on the other--she could not think of anything more to say. She went across the boat and told one of her cronies what kind of a shame she thought it was "to run in a nice girl like that."

Yetta was in a strange state of detachment. It surprised her afterwards to remember how little the discomforts of the prison had troubled her.

She was hardly conscious of the dirty, rough clothes they gave her. The bitter, hard, and useless work of scrubbing the stone flagging seemed to her unreal. She hardly noticed the food they set before her for supper.

She was not hungry. And when they let her go to bed, she plunged so quickly and deeply into the oblivion of sleep that she did not feel the vermin nor hear the sinister whispers of her cell-mates. Her mind, utterly f.a.gged out with all the new thoughts and experiences, was taking a vacation. Even the sense nerves were too tired to record with exact.i.tude their impressions.

Before Yetta fell into this blissful, dreamless sleep her arrest had begun to stir up considerable excitement in New York. When Braun and Longman returned to the strike headquarters from the court-house, they found Mabel preparing to go uptown to the meeting of the Advisory Council. The imprisonment of Yetta seemed to her the crowning outrage of the long list of trivial arrests. She did not dream how nearly the charge came to being true. Dozens of other girls had been sent to the workhouse on perjured evidence. But this seemed different. Yetta was "hers." In the past weeks she had become "her" friend. So are we all const.i.tuted. We read in the morning paper that thousands of Chinese or Russians or Moors are dying of famine. Perhaps we mail a check to the Red Cross. But if we should be hungry or one of our dear friends should starve, it would seem extravagantly unjust.

In this ireful frame of mind, Mabel met the ladies of the Advisory Council. To them also Yetta was a much more real personality than the other girls who had been arrested. Their Yetta, their quiet-mannered, sad-eyed, gentle-voiced Yetta, arrested for a.s.saulting a man? It was impossible! With the tears in her eyes, Mabel a.s.sured them that it was true.

"We can't permit this," Mrs. Van Cleave said, snapping her lorgnette ominously. "It is preposterous! The young lady has been a guest in my house. I have introduced her to my friends. It can't be permitted."

"Well, what can we do about it?" Mabel asked, for once at a loss.

There was a clamor of wild suggestions. It was at last Mrs. Karner, the woman whom Yetta had liked, and at whose request she had told about Harry Klein, who brought out a practical plan.

"We've got to do it through the newspapers," she said. "Stir up the press."

"Oh," Mabel said in despair, "they laugh when I come into their offices.

They're not interested, or they're on the other side."

"They laugh because they're used to you. You haven't any news value,"

Mrs. Karner went on. "But they would not laugh if Mrs. Van Cleave talked to them."

"Hey? What?" Mrs. Van Cleave asked with a start.

"Oh! you won't even have to go to their offices; you can send for them.

I worked on a newspaper once, and I know. You won't have to go to them.

They'll come. The editors will eat out of your hand--do anything for you on the chance that you might invite their wives to dinner. Have your secretary call up the papers, and you'll have a hundred special writers camped on your doorstep."

"Well, well! What an idea!" Mrs. Van Cleave snorted.

All the women, with various degrees of obsequiousness, begged her to do it. But it was not the kind of newspaper notoriety she liked.

"No," she repeated a dozen times. "I could not do that. Preposterous!

Preposterous!"

But she hardly heard the urgings. She was looking away beyond the room at the vision of a little girl who had died many years ago--the only thing which had not been worldly in all her life. And this little daughter of hers had had eyes very much like Yetta's. Yes. Very much like. In fact they were almost exactly the same. And just when the women were giving up hope she suddenly spoke decisively.

"Yes. I'll do it. My secretary is outside in the motor. Call her in."

"Jane," she said when that very businesslike and faded young woman appeared, "two things. One, a list of all the women who met that little working-girl at my house. Two, telephone all the city editors. I want to give out a statement, a personal statement. My house, to-night. Morning papers. You can use the telephone in the front office. That will do."

Yetta and Mrs. Van Cleave divided the first column the next morning. In the two and three cent papers Yetta got most of the s.p.a.ce, in the one cent papers the proportions were reversed. But Yetta's story, more or less diluted with descriptions of Mrs. Van Cleave's drawing-room and gown and diamond tiara--she had given the newspaper men a few minutes as she was leaving for the Opera--was read by almost everybody in Greater New York. Yetta was invariably described as little, in several cases as only thirteen. Pick-Axe was ordinarily spoken of as an ex-prize-fighter--a libel on the profession, which can at least boast of physical courage.

Among others who read the story was the Commissioner of Correction. He called up the warden of the workhouse.

"That jacka.s.s, Cornett, has stirred up h.e.l.l down at Ess.e.x Market. Seen the papers? Well, there'll be fifteen hundred reporters bothering you this morning, trying to interview this Rayefsky girl. Don't let them.

But they'll get at her when she comes out; she'll be telling her impressions of prison life to everybody. Give her some snap. Feed her.

d.a.m.n her soul, don't give her no chance to kick. See?"

It was about nine o'clock when this message crossed the wire. A few minutes later the warden entered the women's wing of the workhouse.

There were about fifty prisoners on their knees, scrubbing the stone floor.

"Yetta Rayefsky."

She got up in surprise and came towards him, wondering what new thing they were going to do to her.

"Know anything about children?" he asked.

Yetta was too much surprised by the question to answer.

"Well," he said, "you don't look like you'd cut their throats. My wife needs a nurse. Come on."

"Ain't you got any clothes that fits her?" he asked the matron at the door. "Clean ones. Don't want things like that in the house. Wash her up. We don't want bugs. And send her over right away."