"What you think we got to our house?""What you think we got to our house?"
"Tut, tut, now!" admonished Mrs. Moriarty, and then again, "Tut, tut! Now Esther, dear," said she, after a pause, "you're getting to be a big girl."
"I'm eight. I will become nine."
"Please God you will. But, anyway, you're big enough to know that your father loves you as much as ever he did, but hasn't time to show it, bein' in heavy trouble, God help him. You know about your auntie, her that was to have the bringing up of you as your father often tells ye."
"She don't never comes," Esther complained. "I waits und I waits und my auntie don't comes, und mine papa ain't lovin', und I needs I shall have a baby out of that Central Park."
The heart loneliness of which Esther complained was real enough. The material prosperity which had recently fallen upon her had deprived her of all the oldcomfortable joys which had brightened less prosperous days. Chief among these had been her father's light-hearted companionship. Mrs. Moriarty, the brightest feature of the new conditions, did her best to cheer and comfort the motherless child, but she could not hope to take the place of Jacob Morowsky, who had changed in so much more than name since he became John Nolan. Esther had dutifully tried—and failed—to understand why she, who had for so long been Esther Morowsky, was now Esther Nolan. And yet the explanation was sufficiently ordinary, and was the cause of her improved surroundings and the result of her father's preoccupation.
Jacob Morowsky had, upon his first coming to America, found employment with old John Nolan, whose little shop of sacred statues, crucifixes, and holy pictures was the survival of the Irish Catholicera in Henry Street's history. There are not many traces of this era now remaining, but John Nolan's little shop was one of them, and economy overcame racial prejudice on the day he engaged Jacob Morowsky as his assistant. Later he congratulated himself upon this apostasy, calling it interchangeably "an act of charity, no more than that," or "the best bit of business ever I done," for Morowsky was an artist, and the heavenly choir, as represented by John Nolan, soon became separate dainty works of art more like Tanagra figurines than like the stiff and stereotyped figures which John Nolan's six or seven moulds had formerly produced.
Later still, when John Nolan was gathered to his fathers, and afforded, one must presume, the opportunity of judging the accuracy of his portraits, he left his business and his name to Jacob.
"For without the name," said he, "what good would the business be to ye? Who could believe that the likes of a Jacob Morowsky would know the truth about the blessed saints? And you're not to forget what I've taught you. Arrows for Saint Sebastian, flames and a gridiron for Saint Lawrence, a big book for Saint Luke (he was a scholard, you know), and the rosary for Saint Dominick. There's not the call there used to be for Saint Aloysius, but when you're doing him, don't forget to put a skull in his hand. You have your 'Lives of the Saints,' haven't you?"
"I have, dear master," answered Jacob.
"Then keep on studyin' it. And ye'll do what ye can for old Biddy Moriarty, that's took care of me ever since me poor wife died."
"She shall be of my household," answered Jacob. And so Esther succeededto the old man's name and the old woman's care.
Jacob Morowsky left his old quarters, and John Nolan took up his residence in the front room of the second floor of a house that had been the residence of an English official when New York was a Colony of the Crown. The house had endured many vicissitudes and degradations. It was, when Esther knew it, a tenement unpopular with the authorities because it could not quite condescend to the laws of the Tenement House Commission; and not too popular with its landlord because its rooms, in proportion to its ground area, were extravagantly few. Its spacious halls and staircase, its high ceilings and wide chimneys were all so many waste spaces according to modern tenement architecture.
Esther and her father slept in the drawing-room behind a red curtain, Esther in her babyhood's crib which, as she had written to the Stork, she had quite outgrown. But no one seemed to notice that. No one, in fact, noticed her very much. She was a good little girl. She was never late or troublesome at school. Every Friday afternoon she brought home a blue ticket, testifying that her application, her deportment, and her progress were satisfactory. From time to time, as she reached new altitudes in the course of study, the teacher's name on these tickets varied. But the tickets were the only link between Esther's two lives of home and school. No reproachful teacher, no truant officer threatening arrest and the Juvenile Court, ever darkened her horizon. No outraged Principal ever summoned her father to an uncomfortable quarter of an hour. She was, as successive teachers noted with amazement, that rara avis in the human family, a normal child. Even her clear dark eyes and her dainty little features were as her ancestry decreed that they should be. And the clear pallor of her skin—which Mrs. Moriarty tried to combat by dressing her much in red—was the normal accompaniment to the fine soft blackness of her hair.
She adored her father. His society was her sunshine, and since he had become John Nolan, Esther's days had been very cloudy. He was always away from home. There was only one little patch of the morning of Saturday, the Sabbath, which Esther could call her own, and even that was broken into by the service at the Synagogue, when he sat upon one side of the aisle, magnificent in black broadcloth and silk hat, and she sat upon the other side among the maids and matrons. In the afternoon he was at work again. She was in my Lady's drawing-room, or marketing with Mrs. Moriarty.
"You're to bide by yourself or along with me," Mrs. Moriarty had often admonished her. "You're to bide by yourself till your auntie comes."
And always to Esther's eager question, "When is she coming?" Mrs. Moriarty's cryptic answer had been, "God knows."
But when she understood that the gloom of the drawing-room had forced Esther into the writing of unsuspected letters, she deemed it wise to go further in enlightenment.
"You're to say naught of this to your poor father. But I'll tell you the meaning of his trouble. Your auntie is lost, my dear."
"Lost!" cried Esther.
"Ay, lost in this cruel hard city. Lost among strangers in her sorrow. She was comin' over to live with the two of ye. I'll never forget the night your father got her letter sayin' she was comin', and for him to meet her at Ellis Island.I went in an' found him sitting with it in his hand, with the look of death on his face. For the letter was two months old when he got it. Some mistake about his two names there was, and the date she set down for him to meet her was six weeks gone when her letter came. Glory be to God, but it's a cruel world! An' her husband just dead on her, and her so lonely, the creature! If she was poor itself we'd have a better chance of finding her, through some of the charities or the hospitals, maybe. But she had money enough to last her a while, and she's gone the same as if the ground had swallied her up."
"Mine papa," commented Esther, "he's got it pretty hard," and she folded her hands in her lap and shook her head in unconscious but triumphant imitation of Mrs. Moriarty.
"Hear you me," Mrs. Moriarty acquiesced. "He has the hardest luck ever I heard of. His sister's husband's name was Cohen, and her Christian name"—Esther looked puzzled, and Mrs. Moriarty politely substituted—"herfirstname was Esther, the same as yours. And when your poor distracted father went to find out did e'er an Esther Cohen land the day she mentioned in the letter, they told him that twenty-five did, and for him to go away with his jokes. You know the world is full of Cohens."
Esther knew more than that. She knew that there was a Cohen in the house. She was not supposed to form friendships, but she cherished two or three in secret, and one of them bore the name of Cohen.
To Esther she was always "the lady mit the from-gold hair," but she had heard a neighbor once address her as Mrs. Cohen. She lived in what must have been, in the days of the house's grandeur, the "'tweeny's" room in the servants' quarters, on the top floor. A tiny little room it was, whose one window opened now upon a blank wall, though the 'tweeny may have sat at it and watched the locks and the slow canal-boats where now Canal Street runs. There in the dimness Esther, on her surreptitious way back from a surreptitious visit to the friendly Top Floor Front, had discovered the lady mit the from-gold hair, and the lady was crying.
Esther's heart swelled and almost burst beneath the square breastplate of her apron, and presently the lady, looking up, met two deep wells of sorrow and admiration fixed upon her. And so their friendship began. It persisted, despite Mrs. Moriarty's warnings, and despite, too, the barrier of alien tongue, for the speech of this stranger was greatly different from the Yiddish spoken in that Polish and Russian quarter. In the other wordlessways of love, however, she threw her lonely little heart at the feet of the lonely lady, and knew that another secret must lie between her and the home circle in the drawing-room.
The load of such deceptions upon her conscience was not heavy. There was only the kindly Top Floor Front, the janitor, and Rebecca Einstein, who lived next door, and who was in Esther's class at school, when she was not nursing old and new babies at home.
Mrs. Moriarty disapproved of the Einsteins. Her complaint was that there were too many of them, and that thirteen was an unlucky number for a party, whether family or otherwise. But to Esther their number was their greatest charm, and after a visit to their crowded and uproarious circle, the quiet drawing-room seemed very chill and empty.
When Jacob came home that night,Esther was awake and waiting for him with a proposition.
The Einsteins, she announced, had a superfluous baby. Would not he, out of his loving bounty, buy it for her? It was a boy, and she, Esther, desired beyond all things else a baby brother. She had reason to believe that this one was really hers. She had forwarded an application to the proper quarters.
Jacob took his little girl on his knee and explained the situation to her.
Purchase, so his instructions ran, was not the usual method of acquiring infants. One took them, or did without them, as the big Stork pleased. It is true that babies sometimes were adopted. If, when she grew a little older and he a little richer, she still desired a brother, they might manage to adopt one, but not, as he told her when he restored her to her crib, not until he had found her Aunt Esther.
And when he had eaten his supper he came again to Esther's little bed and told her, as he sometimes did, stories of another little brother and sister who had loved and played together in the long ago. And he told her, too, more graphically than Mrs. Moriarty could, of that brother's desperate search for his sister. Of all the promising clews which led nowhere; of all the high hopes which ended in despair. For two months he had neglected his business and his daughter for this search, and he was beginning to believe that his sister was dead.
Esther caressed and comforted him as best she might, and after holding her silently for a few moments, he carefully tucked her into bed again, and went out into the crowded, sordid streets, to search—hopelessly and doggedly—for the little sister of his childhood.
As the days passed and her father confided more and more in her great love and sympathy, Esther became reconciled to the Stork's mistake, and decided that she could wait until he brought a baby without urging or request. She was very busy. Her lady mit the from-gold hair was ill—very ill, indeed. She lay upon her bed very white and quiet, and the First Floor Front took care of her. There was also occasionally a doctor, and there were always the garrulous, if not over-helpful neighbors. In any other case it is possible that Mrs. Moriarty's known generosity and surmised skill would have been called into requisition, but the lady mit the from-gold hair spoke no English, and Esther entreated that Mrs. Moriarty should not be consulted, as that would mean her own instant banishment to the lonely drawing-room. And so Mrs. Moriarty was allowed toform her own explanation for Esther's long absences, while Esther, light of hand and step, served her golden-haired lady friend.
Mrs. Moriarty's natural supposition had been that Esther was with the baby so carelessly turned over to the Einsteins; and occasionally, of course, she did visit that official error. But as its novelty diminished and its lung power increased Esther became reconciled to the mistake.
"He cried, awful," Rebecca would explain, "und we didn't really need him. We had lots. The old baby ain't yet so big. She couldn't to stand even. Und she needs all her clothes. My poor mamma has it pretty hard."
"Ain't it funny?" mused Esther, all unconscious that she was grappling with a world problem. "Ain't it funny, Becky? You got too many families, und so you gets some more. I ain't got nofamilies, und I loses mine auntie. Ain't it fierce?"
"It sure is fierce," her friend admitted through the howls of the youngest Einstein. "But don't you care, Esther. I guess, maybe, that Stork will get round to your order soon.Onebaby," she spoke from experience and with conviction, "is lots of family."
"I don't know do I needs that kind from baby what you got," Esther objected. "It's an awful loud baby, ain't it?"
"It is," Rebecca admitted. And any one of the fifteen Einsteins or even any neighbor to the fourth or fifth house removed would have corroborated her.
"Und it's got black hair," Esther further objected.
"They all do when they ain't redheaded," retorted the now ruffled Rebecca. "Ain't you got nothin' to doon'y knockin' other people's babies? First off you says he's yours, und now you says he's too loud und too black. Well, he ain't too loud or too black fer me. You wait till your own baby comes. Maybe you'll get somethin' worster, with fish's faces, maybe. How will you like that? You can't never tell what kind they're goin' to be, an' you'vegotto keep 'em."
This haphazard system—or the lack of it—rather alarmed Esther, though the desire for a baby of her own design and choosing was growing stronger every day. For her loneliness was growing, too. Jacob was hardly ever at home. He spent many of his days and all of his evenings in his fruitless, endless search. And Mrs. Moriarty had begun to help him through some subterranean first-cousin-twice-removed channel which connected her with a member of the police force.She was making a canvass of the women's lodging-houses near the Bowery.
So Esther, having much time upon her hands, turned her thoughts again to the upbringing of a brother, and wrote again to the headquarters in Central Park, and impressed upon the authorities—in large round writing upon a sheet of pink paper with two turtle doves embossed upon it—that she was not in a hurry for her baby, and would prefer to wait until they found a really acceptable article. If possible, she would prefer from-gold hair, blue eyes, and a silent tongue. For such an infant her outgrown crib, a warm welcome, and comfortable home were waiting. No others need apply.
When this letter was despatched she felt greatly relieved, and set about the nursing of the lady mit the from-gold hair with renewed energy. And the lady needed her little friend and welcomedher always with a gentle smile, though a large and unwonted female was now regularly established in the room, from which she relentlessly barred more disturbing and autobiographical visitors.
All through her illness, indeed ever since her first coming into that house, she had kept the door open, and she lay so that she could watch the stairs. Whom she was waiting for she never told, but she was always listening. She knew the step of every fellow lodger, of the doctor, of any one who had ever once climbed those stairs. And at the approach of any new footstep she would sit up rigidly among her pillows, staring and listening so intently that when the new-comer appeared and brought disappointment, she would sink back gasping and exhausted.
"What does she says?" Esther once asked the imposing nurse, when a visitor for the Top Floor Front had precipitatedone of these attacks. "What does she says when she cries?"
"She says," interpreted the nurse, "'He is dead. It must be that he is dead.' Yet weknowthat her husband is dead. She still expects some one."
"Maybe," said Esther, arguing from her own state of mind to that of her friend, "maybe she expects a Stork mit babies."
The woman caught Esther by the shoulders and peered down into her eyes. "So they have been talking to you," she said with immense scorn. "Oh, those women!"
"Nobody ain't told me nothings," Esther answered. "I don'tknownothings. Only I thinks it in mine heart. And anyway, the first baby what comes here is mine. I writes on the Central Park a letter over it. It's going to be a boy mit from-gold hair."
"Well," snorted the nurse with someprofessional pique, "it's good you gotthatsettled."
Late that night Esther awoke in her little outgrown crib. A familiar series of sounds had disturbed her: the arrival of the doctor. So the lady mit the from-gold hair was presumably worse. The doctor's steps mounted into the darkness and silence of the sleeping house, and the clock in Mrs. Moriarty's room struck two. Esther lay wide-eyed in the dark and waited for the sound of the doctor's return, but she heard nothing except the far-away clang and shriek of an occasional cable-car and the sound of stealthy, hurrying feet upon the sidewalk. She sat up, and in the dim reflection from the electric light on the street corner she distinguished the shapeless bulk that was her sleeping father. Jacob had only recently come in from his quest, and he slept the sleep of exhaustion.
Cold had no terrors for her; she was clad, feet and all, in an Esquimaux garment of brilliant pink flannel of Mrs. Moriarty's contriving.
And still the doctor did not come down. Esther climbed to the floor and noiselessly unlocked the door. In the hall a deadly quiet served as a background for Mr. Finkelstein's snoring. And then Esther's summons came. Shrill and clear from the darkness above dropped the cry of a new-born child. Hers! The Stork had blundered again.
"Oh, my!" wailed Esther, "ain't Storks the fools? In all my world I ain't never seen how he makes mistakes. I told him just as plain: Second Floor Front. Und extra he goes und maybe wakes up the lady mit the from-gold hair over it. She's got it hard enough 'out no babies yelling."
As Esther toiled toward the sound, sherealized that yet another mistake had been made, it was 'a loud one.' Now what would her father say—and Mrs. Moriarty? But this was no time for such questioning. Her plain duty was to collect her property and prevent its disturbing the whole house.
When she reached her friend's room she found that the disturbance had taken place and was still in progress. The nurse, the doctor, and the Top Floor Front were gathered about the bed, presumably reassuring their patient, and upon a pillow thrown into a rocking-chair the Stork had left Esther's gold-haired brother.
Oh! it was easy, fatally easy, to recognize the answer to her petition! The noise subsided as Esther noiselessly pattered over to it, and from an end of its roll of flannel a bright head projected. Esther picked it up and beat a hastyretreat unobserved by the workers at the bedside. Down the dark stairs she passed with her burden, and into the drawing-room again. She snuggled down beside it in her crib and for a few ecstatic moments held it in her arms. The clock struck four, and, as Esther quivered and listened still for the descent of the doctor, the baby raised up its voice again in one prolonged and breathless yell. Jacob was beside the crib in an instant and had his daughter in his arms.
"What is it?" he questioned wildly. "Where is it? What hurt thee?" And then his heart too skipped a beat, for he found that though he had Esther in his arms he had left her voice in the crib.
"It ain't me," she finally managed to assure him. "It's mine little brother what I gets out of the Central Park."
Lights, Mrs. Moriarty, explanations, and expostulations followed.
"I tells that Stork," Esther ended, "I tells him I ain't got no families und no aunties, und I needs a baby, und I has a bed ready. Itismine baby. Storks is crazy fools!"
But the inexorable John Nolan set out upon his mission of restitution. Esther, puzzled, heart-broken, argumentative, sped on before, and reached, not without some skirmishing, the side of the golden-haired lady, while her father was still struggling with the darkness and his unaccustomed burden.
And then the miracles began. The lady heard a step upon the stairs and a great radiance fell upon her. Wonder, incredulity, and joy shone in her lovely eyes. The doctor's hand was on her wrist. The nurse's admonitions were in her ears. But she raised herself amongher pillows and watched the turn of the stairs where a shaft of light streamed through the open door.
Esther's father came out of the darkness, and the lady wrenched her hand from the doctor and stretched both her arms toward the oncoming figure, and "Jacob," said she, and quite gently fainted into the doctor's arms.
"No excitement, no fuss," commanded that authority. "She's all right, coming round in a minute. Here, stand there. Speak naturally to her. There, she's coming now."
"Why, Esther," said Jacob quietly in soft Hungarian, "I've been wondering where you were."
The lady mit the from-gold hair laid her other hand on his, smiled a little wearily, and instantly dropped asleep.
"You ain't asked her whose is that baby," his daughter whispered to him."You ain't asked her did she write letters on that Stork?"
"I guess it's our baby all right," her father answered. "You just carry it down and put it in the bed that's been waiting for it. Tell Mrs. Moriarty that your auntie was living here all the time."
"Mine auntie!" cried Esther. "Mine auntie! My, but Storks is smart!" she gasped repentantly
.
"Stands a girl by our block," Eva Gonorowsky began, as she and her friend Yetta Aaronsohn wended their homeward way through the crowded purlieus of Gouverneur and Monroe Streets, "stands a girl by our block what don't never goes on the school."
Yetta was obediently shocked. She had but recently been rescued from a like benightment, but both she and her friend tactfully ignored this fact.
"Don't the Truant Officer gets her?" the convert questioned, remembering her own means to grace, and the long struggle she had made against it. "Don't the Truant Officer comes on her house und says cheek on her mamma, und brings her—by the hair, maybe—on the school?"
"He don't comes yet," Eva replied.
"Well, he's comin'," Yetta predicted. "He comes all times."
"I guess," commented Eva, "I guess Rosie Rashnowsky needs somebody shall make somethings like that mit her. In all my world I ain't never see how she makes. She don't know what is polite. She puts her on mit funny clothes und 'fer-ladies-shoes.' She is awful fresh, und"—here Eva dropped her voice to a tone proper to a climax—"she dances on organs even."
Now Yetta Aaronsohn, in the days before the Truant Officer and the Renaissance, would have run breathless blocks at the distant lure of a street organ, and would have footed it merrily up and down the sidewalk in all the apparently spontaneous intricacies which make this kind of dancing so absorbing to the performer, and so charming to the audience. Now,however, she shuddered under the shock of such depravity. School had taught her many things not laid down in the official course of study.
"Ain't that fierce?" she murmured.
Not all subjects of gossip are as confirmative as Rosie Rashnowsky that day proved herself to be. For as Yetta and Eva turned into Clinton Street, Rosie was discovered dancing madly to the strains of a one-legged hurdy-gurdy, in the midst of an envious but not emulating crowd.
"That's her," said Eva briefly. "Sooner you stands on the stoop you shall see her better."
And when the two friends carried out this suggestion and mounted the nearest steps, Eva pointed to what seemed a bundle of inanimate rags.
"It's her baby," she disapprovingly remarked. "She lays it all times on steps. Somebody could to set on it sometimes."
"It's fierce," repeated Yetta, this time with more conviction. She was herself the guardian of three small and ailing sisters, and she knew that they should not be deposited on cold doorsteps. So she picked up Rosie's abandoned responsibility, and turned to survey that conscienceless Salome.
Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes" poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimonaflapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less gorgeous substructure.
Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving eye. "She don't know what isferher," she remarked. "My mamma, she wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."
"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something fierce."
The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona, and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss Aaronsohn.
"It's something fierce," she once moreremarked, and then casting decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out into the ring.
Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertisements.
A passing stranger stopped to watch them and gave the organ-man largesse, so that still he played, and still they danced until called back to duty and reality by the uproar of the baby, now thrice abandoned. For Eva Gonorowsky had gonevirtuously home, feeling that her traditions had been outraged, her friendship despised, and that her disciple had disgraced her.
Yetta and Rosie with the heavy-headed baby followed the organ for several blocks. They might have gone on forever like the Pied Piper's rats, had not the howls of the youngest Rashnowsky anchored and steadied them. When at last they had recovered breath and the proprieties, they sat amicably down upon an alien doorstep, and went back to the early—and in their case neglected—preliminaries of friendship.
They exchanged names, ages, addresses, the numbers of their family, and their own places in the scale. The baby had obligingly gone to sleep, and these amenities were carried out in due form. It seemed that they were bound by many similarities of circumstance and fate: each wasthe eldest of a family, but whereas Rosie could boast but one baby, Yetta's mother had three. Both mothers worked at low and ill-paid branches of the tailor's art. And both children were fatherless to all daily intents and purposes.
"Mine papa," Yetta told her new little friend, "is pedlar-mans on the country. Me und mine mamma don't know where he is even. From long we ain't got no letters off of him, und no money. My mamma, she has awful sads over it."
"Does she cry?" questioned the sympathetic Rosie, drawing her kimona closely about her in the enjoyment of this new and promising gossip.
Yetta shook her head. "She ain't got no time she shall cry. So my papa don't comes, und letters mit money off of him don't comes. My mamma, she ain't got time for nothings on'y sewing. She has it pretty hard."
"My mamma is got it hard too," cried Rosie, not to be outdone. "She don't know where my papa is neither. She don't know is he on the country even. She don't knownothingsover him. Me und my mamma we looks all times on blocks und streets und stores. On'y we couldn't to find him. Und my mamma, she works all day by factories, und by night she comes on the house und brings more work. She ain't got time for nothings neither, on'y sewing und looking fer my poor papa."
"Then your papa ain't dead?" queried Yetta.
"No, he ain't dead; on'y he loses him the job." Rosie's voice as she made this statement, and Yetta's manner as she received it, would seem to say that if this were not death, it was very little better.
To Isidore Rashnowsky it had been the "sudden and unprovided death" ofwhich the Prayer Book speaks. It had meant the destruction of the very delicate equilibrium by which he and his wife maintained their tiny but peaceful household. It threw the whole burden of four lives upon Mrs. Rashnowsky's thin and twisted shoulders. It drove him, after three weeks of unsuccessful quest for work, to cut himself off from all he cared for. Starvation was very close to them. He could contribute nothing, and he determined to take nothing: to increase the niggardly supply by diminishing the hungry demand. Mrs. Rashnowsky's earnings—even when augmented by the home work which the law forbids but life demands—was scant indeed for the maintenance of the mother and the two children. All these things Isidore explained to her patiently, resignedly, and with what bravery he could muster. And she agreed, nodding wearily over her sewing.But from his conclusion, from his determination to remove himself and his hunger from her charge, she persistently dissented. Rather, she insisted, would she take the babies to the Children's Court and get them committed to some institution. Then he and she could face the world together. She could find courage for that. But not to live without him. Never for that.
"It is but for a time," he hopefully remonstrated, "and if we give the children we cannot easily get them back. Children such as ours are not often found. They would be adopted by some rich man before, maybe, I could find a job."
This consideration had not occurred to Mrs. Rashnowsky, but when it was pointed out to her she was forced to admit its weight. The physical charm of Rosie, kimona clad and dirty, might not have appealed as insistently as her fatherfeared to the rich adopter, and the rag-wrapped baby would have been equally safe. But to Mrs. Rashnowsky's fear and pride, to see these infants was to covet them.
And so, tearfully, fearfully, she promised to think again of Isidore's proposal. She thought all night, and all through the hurried, steaming, driven day at the factory. When at last she was free she toiled home to tell him that she could not do without him, and found that he had gone.
All these things had happened, as Rosie told her new friend, three months before. The mother had been forced into smaller, darker, cheaper quarters, and it was this transition which had so far saved Rosie from the Truant Officer. They had moved from one school district to another, and the authorities of their new habitat had not yet tracked the light-falling "fer-ladies-shoes."
"But that Truant Officer will get you sure," warned Yetta. "He comes in my house and he gets me, und makes me I shall go on the school."
"He can go on mine house all he likes," responded the lawless Rosie, making careful inventory of her hair ribbons the while, "all he likes he can go. There ain't never nobody there. My mamma she is all times on factories, und me und the baby is all times by the street. I don't needs I shall go on no school. I ain't got time."
"He'll get you on a rainy day," maintained Cassandra.
But the dread official never did discover Rosie. She was sufficiently wise to avoid any public display of her red and yellow charms until after school hours, unless she were well out of her own district. She would follow street organs and behave like any other memberof a decorous audience until she was well out of the path of the ravening Truant Officer. Then she would abandon the baby to the cold stones, and herself to the enchantment of the music. Thus she achieved that freedom of which her adopted country boasts, and for which Yetta Aaronsohn—though basking in the rays of a free education, with lunches, medical attendance, and spectacles thrown in—still yearned.
There had been a time when life had been to Yetta, even as it now was to Rosie, a simple matter of loving and helping her mother, taking care of the babies, and dancing to the organs in the street. Then entered the Truant Officer, and life became a complicated affair of manners, dress, books, washing, and friendships, with every day new laws to be met, new ideas to be assimilated, old pleasures and employments to be thrown aside.
That the end of his three months of wandering found Isidore alive bordered on the miraculous; that the end of these three months found him in congenial employment was altogether a miracle. Yet these things had occurred, and Isidore's long loneliness and self-imposed exile were nearly over, when his daughter and Miss Aaronsohn melted their souls together in the langorous solvent of "Silver Threads Among the Gold." On the ensuing Saturday he was to receive his first week's wages as janitor's assistant in a combination of restaurant, hall, and Masonic lodge, much patronized by small and earnest clubs or societies, having no permanent stamping ground of their own. On the Friday afternoon the large hall was occupied by "The Cornelia Aid Society for the Instruction of Ignorant Parents Among the Poor." It had been the happy idea of one of the vice-presidents to hold the meeting within the citadel as it were of poor and ignorant parenthood, so that the members coming gingerly through unimagined streets and evidences of parenthood appallingly ignorant, might derive—the vice-president was fond of the vernacular—some idea of what the society was "up against." Automobiles, victorias, disgusted footmen, and blasphemouschauffeursthronged the unaccustomed street, and the children of Israel thronged about them.
A genius for opportunity drew Giusseppi Pagamini and his new piano organ to this sensational business opening, and the sweet strains of the piano organ drew Rosie Rashnowsky after him. They had drawn her for many blocks, and the meeting of the Cornelias was in full swing when her kimona and hair ribbons came into play upon the sidewalk. She laid the baby upon the steps, swept clean for herreception by Isidore the conscientious, who had little idea—as he plied his broom and scrubbing-brush earlier in the day—that he was strewing the couch of his own small daughter's siesta.
Then to an audience composed of glorified gentlemen in silk hats and top-boots, and the quieter but still sumptuous chauffeur livery, Rosie threw herself into a very ecstasy of her art. Louder thrilled Giusseppi, quicker flew the "fer-ladies-shoes," wilder waved ribbons and dressing jacket. "Out o' sight," commented the footmen. "Bravissimo," ejaculated the chauffeurs, and Rosie reached the climax of her career in a pirouette which brought her, madly whirring, under the aristocratic noses of a pair of chestnut cobs, whose terrified plunges would have ended her gyrations forever and a day if a footman had not interfered. Then Giusseppi passed his battered hat, and the audience,naturally inferring that the black-eyed child belonged to the black-eyed musician, threw him such encouragement as a week of ordinary days would not have brought him.
Rosie threw herself into a very ecstasy of her art.Rosie threw herself into a very ecstasy of her art.
In a reckless moment he gave Rosie a nickel, and this wealth, combined with her recent danger and escape, and with the intoxicating quality of her audience, made Rosie follow Giusseppi to the other end of the line of carriages which trailed round the corner and half-way down the next block. Here fresh triumphs awaited her, while from the steps of Fraternity Hall her infant sister called aloud for instant speech with her. The infant was still making these inarticulate demands, when Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown, holding her skirts well above her shoe tops with one hand, while with the other she applied a bottle of lavender salts to her nose, approached the meeting. Shewas late but unflurried. Her horses, somewhat racked by the elevated trains in Allen Street, had been entirely unnerved by the children, the push-carts, the dogs, and the flying papers, which beset them from all sides and sprang up under their nervous feet. So the philanthropic Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had alighted from her carriage, secured a small though knowing-looking guide, and walked to her destination. Presently she reached the hall, rewarded her guide, and stopped in her surge up the steps by the yells of the youngest Rashnowsky, which had broken free of its mummy clothes, and was battling for breath with two arms like slate-pencils—as cold, as thin, as gray, and seemingly as brittle.
"Whose child is this?" she demanded of a near and large chauffeur. It was not the lady's fault that much philanthropic activity had so formed her manner that these simple words, as she said them, seemed to infer that the large green-clad chauffeur was a Rousseau among parents, that the child was his, starved that he might grow fat, and abandoned that he might go free. His reply was all that her manner demanded. And when she repeated the question to other waiting men, she was hardly answered at all.
Meanwhile the youngest Rashnowsky banged its hairless head upon the cold stone, and reiterated its demands for its guardian sister. Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown was puzzled, and she did not enjoy the sensation. She picked up the child before she had planned any further step for its disposition. She could not well drop it on the stone again, and there was no one to whom she could give it. Realizing with a sudden sense of outrage that she was affording amusement to the well-trainedservants of her Cornelia associates, she retreated into the building and into the hall with the screaming Gracchus in her arms.
Her advent and the clamor of her burden interrupted the reading of a paper upon "Nursery Emergencies, and How to Meet Them," by a young lady who had exhausted the family physician, and such books as he could be persuaded to lend her. Her remarks, though interesting and authoritative, could not prevail against the howling presence of a real nursery emergency, and the attention of the audience stampeded to Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown and her contribution to the meeting. That practised and disgusted philanthropist relinquished the youngest Rashnowsky to the first pair of pitying arms extended in its direction. But pity was not what the sufferer craved, and she repudiated it eloquently.
"What shall I do with it?" cried this young Cornelia, looking helplessly around upon her fellows. "Whenever my Jimmie behaved like this I used simply to ring for Louise. I never knew what she used to do with him."
Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown snorted. "A nurse!" said she, "a hireling! You relegate a mother's sacred responsibilities to a servant." Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had never enjoyed these responsibilities, and so was eloquent and authoritative upon them.
Other Cornelias fluttered about suggesting that the Gracchus was suffering from hunger, colic, or misdirected pins. The expert upon emergencies snatched this one from its embarrassed guardian, inverted it across her knee, and patted it manfully upon the back. The dirtiness of it, the thinness, the squalled wrappings, and the blue little hands and feet touchedand quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done, and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself on themilieuof the meeting.
"If we knew," said a bespectacled Cornelia sensibly and practically, "what food they were giving it, we could easily send out and get a meal for it."
"It hardly looks," interrupted another, "like the Mellin's Food and Nestle's Milk Babies one sees in the advertisements."
"And yet," said the practical member, "we can't do anything until we know what it's accustomed to. With so young a child——"
Here the door opened and an unenrolled Cornelia was added to the gathering. Her red and yellow kimona rose and fell with her quick breathing. Defiance shone in her black eyes.
"You got mine baby," declared Rosie Rashnowsky. "Why couldn't you leaveher be where I put her, you old Miss Fix-its? You scared me most to death until I heard her yellin'."
With these ungrateful remarks she advanced upon the ministering group and snatched the inverted infant from the colic theorist.
"This is the top of her," she pointed out. "I guess you didn't look very hard."
Before the discredited practitioner had formed a reply the Cornelia in spectacles was ready to remark:
"We think your baby is hungry."
"Sure is she," Rosie concurred; "ain't babies always hungry?"
"And if you will tell us what you feed her on," the lady continued, "we will send out for some of it before you take her home."
Rosie was by this time established in a chair with the now only whimpering baby upon her lap.
"Don't you bother," she genially remonstrated. "I just bought her something."
And then with many contortions she produced from some inner recess of her kimona a large dill pickle, imperfectly wrapped in moist newspaper. She dissevered a section of this with her own sharp teeth, and put it into the baby's waiting mouth. The cries of the youngest Rashnowsky were supplanted by a chorus of remonstrating Cornelias. "Pickles!" they cried, and shuddered. "Do you often give that baby pickles?"
"I do when I can get 'em," Rosie answered, "but that ain't often."
And then this injudicious but warm-hearted audience drew from her the sordid little story which seemed such a matter of course to her, and such a tragedy to them.
"Und I looks," said Rosie, "all timesI looks on cellars und push-carts und fire 'scapes und stores und sidewalks. Und I walks und I walks—all times I walks—mit that baby in mine hand, und I couldn't to find me the papa. Mine poor mamma, she looks too, sooner she goes und comes on the factory, und by night me und mine mamma, we comes by our house und we looks on ourselves und we don't says nothings, on'y makes so"—and Rosie shook a hopeless head—"und so we knows we ain't find him. Sometimes mine mamma cries over it. She is got all times awful sad looks."
By this time the more sentimental among the Cornelias were reduced to tears, and the more practical were surveying such finances as they carried with them, and in a very short time an endowment fund of nearly fifty dollars had been collected. Thesang-froidwhich had throughout the proceedings distinguishedRosie was a little shaken when this extraordinary shower of manna was made clear to her, but it vanished altogether when, upon the suggestion of the practical and bespectacled Cornelia, the assistant janitor was sent for to give safe-conduct to the children and their bequest. And the amazement of Isidore Rashnowsky—summoned from the furnace room for some uncomprehended reason—was hardly less ecstatic when he found himself in the close embrace of his frenzied daughter. For Rosie's joy was nothing less than frenzy.
"It's mine papa! Oh, it's mine papa!" she informed the now jubilant and sympathetic Cornelias, who were quite ready to pass a vote of thanks to their pioneering vice-president, whose plan had afforded them more emotion and more true human sensation than they had experienced for many a day.
Isidore floated toward Clinton Street through clouds and seas of gold. The endowment together with his own first week's wages made a larger sum than he had ever hoped to gather. He wafted the baby through this golden atmosphere, the baby wafted a second section of dill pickle, and Rosie, in her red and golden draperies gyrated around them.
"You shall go on the factory right away," babbled Isidore, "und bring the mamma on the house. She shall never no more work on no factories. She shall stay on the house und take care of the baby und be Jewish ladies."
"She don't needs she shall take care of no baby," Rosie, thus lightly deposed, remonstrated; "ain't I takin' care of her all right?"
"Sure, sure," the placating Isidore made answer; "on'y you won't have no time. You shall go on the school."
This last sinister word broke through all Rosie's golden dreams. "School?" she repeated in dismay. "Meon the school?"
"For learn," Isidore happily acquiesced, "all them things what makes American ladies."
Rosie's sentiments almost detached her from the triumphal procession, so rebellious were they, so helpless, so baffled and outraged. And in that moment of brainstorm they turned into Grand Street, and came upon a piano organ, and Yetta Aaronsohn, the erstwhile censorious Yetta, in the enjoyment of a complicatedpas-seul.
"For von things," Isidore ambled on, "American ladies they don't never dance by streets on organs. You shall that on the school learn, und the reading, und the writing, und all things what is fer ladies. Monday you shall go on theschool. Your mamma shall go by your side. She won't," he broke out ecstatically, "have nothings else to do. You shall go now on the factory for tell her."
Rosie paused but an instant on this mission of joy. She overtook Yetta Aaronsohn homeward bound.
"I guess," said Rosie with fashionable langour, "I guess maybe I goes on the school Monday."
Yetta stared, then smiled. "Ain't I told you from long," said she, "that that Truant Officer could to make like that mit you?"
"I ain't never seen no Truant Officer," retorted Rosie. "In all my world I ain't never seen one. I don't know what are they even. On'y I finds me the papa mit bunches from money, und a hall, und he says I shall go on the school so somebody can learn me all things what American ladies makes."
"Come on my school," entreated Yetta. "You und me could to set beside ourselves."
Rosie pondered. She counted her four hair ribbons. She wrapped her kimona toga wise about her and pondered.
"I don't know," she finally answered, "do I needs I shall set by side somebody what dances on streets mit organs," and added, as Yetta's expression seemed to hint at instant parting:
"Well,goodafternoon, Imustbe going."
Her evolution into "American Ladies" had already begun. The manners of the Cornelias had not been lost upon her.
In season and out of season Constance Bailey, that earnest young educator, preached of the value of honesty. And fifty little children of Israel who formed the First Reader class, and the one little son of Erin who led it, hearkened to her: always with politeness, and sometimes with surprise.
To some of the boys it seemed incredible that a person of mature years, and—upon other subjects—common sense, should cling to a theory which the most simple experiment must prove both mischievous and false. Had not Abraham Wishnewsky, a spineless person, misled by her heresies, but narrowly escaped the Children's Court and the Reformatory?
Strolling through Gouverneur Street upon a Friday afternoon when the whole East Side is in a panic of shopping, he had seen a bewigged and beshawled matron shed a purse and pass on her way unheeding. Promptly Abraham set his foot upon it, carefully and casually he picked it up, and then, all inconveniently, he remembered Miss Bailey and her admonitions! Miss Bailey and her anecdotes of boys who, in circumstances identical with his, had chosen the path of honor, and had found it to lead to riches, approbation, glory, and self-righteousness.
Abraham opened the purse. It contained fifteen cents. He appropriated the nickel as a first instalment of the reward so soon to be his, and then sped fleetly—as Miss Bailey's heroes had ever done—after the brown-shawled matron and glory. But the matron had evidently not been trained in the school of highhonor. She regarded Abraham with suspicion rather than with gratitude. She examined the purse in the same spirit, and her investigations led to loud outcries upon her part, and to swift flight upon Abraham's.
Abraham Wishnewsky was so ill-advised as to confide the details of this adventure to a young gentleman who rejoiced in a rabbit face, close-set lashless eyes, and the name of Isidore Cohen. Isidore was new to Room 18, and new to his place beside the gentle Abraham. Miss Bailey and her applied ethics were startlingly new to him. And he never reported to Abraham any effort to experiment in revolutionary doctrines.
Some of the more credulous among the feminine First Readers also weighed these precepts in the balance and found them wanting.
"You know how Teacher says," SarahSchodsky remarked to Bertha Binderwitz, as the two friends, arms intertwined, heads close together, walked and talked in the yard at the recess hour. "You know how she says we dasen't never to tell no lies."
Bertha nodded. "That's how shesays," she agreed.
"Well," resumed Sarah, "you see how Mamie Untermeyer don't comes no more on the school?"
Bertha had remarked this absence.
"Well, Mamie she lives by her auntie. She is got a awful auntie. Und she asks her auntie for a penny for buy hokey pokey. Und her auntie makes a mean laugh und says, 'What you think I am, anyway?' und Mamie, she tells it right out what she thinks over her auntie, like Teacher says, 'We shall all times tell what we thinks.' She lays on the bed now mit bangages on the head. It ain'tso awful healthy you shall tell truths on aunties."
This report also reached the rabbit ears of Isidore Cohen. And again he wondered that Miss Bailey should waste her time—and his—in folly.
And then he made an amazing discovery. Teacher actually believed what she taught. She was ready to meet confidence with trust, and to practise what she preached.
"I never seen nothing like it," he reported to his friend, Hymie Solomon. "She looks like she knew a awful lot, but she don't know nothings 'tall."
"What do you suppose is the matter with her?" demanded Hymie. "Miss Blake, she don't act crazy. She don't give us no talk 'out no sense."
Now Hymie and Isidore were old friends and cronies. In the days before a Truant Officer and their distractedfathers had consigned them to school, Hymie and he had trod the ways which might have led them to the Children's Court and the Reformatory; but the Board of Education chanced to be the first power that laid hands upon them, and Hymie, who was a year older than his friend, and who had once undergone some intermittent education, was put in Miss Blake's class, while Isidore, virgin soil where prescribed learning was concerned, joined the First Readers. Miss Bailey's teachings as reported by Isidore formed amazing subjects for conversation.
"Und she says," he would report, "that nobody dasn't to steal nothings off of somebody."
"Then how does she think we shall ever get anything?"
"Somebody shall give it to us."
"Who?"
"Teacher ain't said."
"No, I guess she ain't. I'd like to see her gettin' along on just what was give to her."
"Well," Isidore remembered, "she says we shall 'work-un-strive.'"
"She does, does she? An' git pinched by the Gerry Society? She knows as good as you do that nobody would let you work. An' she knows as good as you do, too, that craps ain't safe round here no more; an' that you just can't git nothin' unless you take it. She's actin' crazy just to fool you."
"No, she ain't," Isidore maintained, "she don't know nothings over them things."
"An' her grown up," sneered Hymie; "say, but you're easy!"
This faith in and affection for Miss Bailey were not confined to the little First Readers who inhabited Room 18 from nine until twelve, and again from oneuntil three. These were Miss Bailey's official responsibilities, but Gertie Armusheffsky's education was a private affair, though her devotion was no less wholehearted. Her instruction was carried on sometimes amid the canaries and fern baskets of Room 18, and sometimes at Miss Bailey's home.
For Gertie, though nearly fifteen years old, was allowed but rare and scanty freedom for the pursuit of learning. The grandfather with whom she lived had imported her from Poland to assist him in the conduct of his little shop in Goerck Street.
He was a miserly old man. The shop was little and mean, and Gertie's life in it was little and miserly and mean. These things she bore with the wonderful patience or stoicism of her race. She bore, too, bad air, long hours, and uncongenial toil, but she could not bring any resignation to bear on the lovelessness of her life, the squalor, the ugliness.
"I ain't puttin' up no kick," she would assure Miss Bailey, in her newly acquired and strictly modern vernacular, "about doin' all the woik in the store, an' in the back room too. Didn't I know I was comin' over to cook an' sew an' see to everything for him? What gits on my noives is his everlasting grouch."
"It must be hard," Miss Bailey acquiesced, "especially as you have no one else, no friends."
Gertie shook her head. "Ain't got a friend in the world only you," said she. "How could I have any one come to see me with him carryin' on like he does? An' I can't get away from him. He paid my way over, an' if I did git a job the Gerry Society would give me back to him."
"But you're nearly old enough now,"Miss Bailey encouraged her, "to do as you please, and you're getting on so nicely with your reading and writing that you will be able to get a very good position."
"Not 'til he's dead," the girl answered. "I guess you wouldn't learn me no more if you knew how often I wish he'd choke himself, or fall down cellar, or go out an' git run over. But he don't never go out. He says he's afraid something would happen to the store. But that's a pipe! What bothers him is the cash he's got tucked around in crazy places. Every once in a while I fall into some of it, and then he 'most has a fit explaining how it's change a customer is comin' back for. Last year it wasn't quite so bad. He went to night school one term. You would have died laughing to see him all folded up at a kid's desk tryin' to write in a copy book. They learned him to write threewords that term, but when he found out that he couldn't read them in print, it sort of discouraged him, and he stayed home."
"It's awfully hard for you," Miss Bailey repeated, "but you mustn't let yourself say such things or think such things—about his getting killed, I mean—it's not"—she found herself on the verge of saying "Christian," but remembered that Gertie made no pretence to the Christian virtues—"not loving," she ended, and felt that the meaning of the two words was very much the same.
"Well, I don't love him," said Gertie shortly, "I hate him!"
"That's another thing you mustn't say."
"All right, I won't say it. I do it all the time."
"What's the capital of Massachusetts?" demanded Miss Bailey, changing the subject with a jerk.
"It's Grandpa's capital that's bothering me," laughed Gertie, but she allowed herself to be led away from the trials and problems of Goerck Street into the cool groves of learning.
A few mornings later Miss Blake, whose kingdom, Room 17, bordered upon Miss Bailey's territory, bustled into Room 18 with a fat and elaborate purse in her hand.
"You know that wicked little Hymie Abrahams who seems to be always getting into trouble," she began, when the First Readers had stiffened to straight "attention" and sat, each in his little place, like some extraordinary form of tin soldiers.
Miss Bailey nodded. She had indeed for many days been haunted by the fear that Hymie Abrahams would perpetrate some too flagrant breach of discipline, and be degraded to the First Readerclass, and she naturally dreaded the advent of such a wolf among her little lambs.
"Well," said Miss Blake, "he can't be all bad. I guess he has some human feelings. He brought me this bag this morning. Says his mother doesn't need it any more, and wants me to have it. It's almost new, you see, and really very handsome. Just let me show you the fittings. I guess his mother wouldn't find much use for powder puffs and mirrors and smelling-salts. Not if I know anything about the women of the East Side, she wouldn't."
She spread the glittering useless things upon Miss Bailey's desk, and the force with which this bribe carried away her earlier dislike showed that Hymie Solomon had mastered the art of character reading. And Miss Bailey, as she reviewed the dainty paraphernalia spread before her,found herself wondering how soon Madame Solomon would miss her treasures and come storming in pursuit of them. And beside Miss Bailey's desk sat Isidore Cohen in an agony of doubt and disillusionment. His one childish attribute was that of believing that all he knew must be common knowledge. Therefore he argued that the powers before him knew as well as he did that Hymie Solomon was motherless, and that Miss Blake would be most unwise to look her gift purse in the pedigree. And so, as Miss Blake exhibited and Miss Bailey admired, the work of weeks was undone. One teacher was acting as a "fence," and another was cheering and encouraging her. He had doubted this "honesty the best policy" propaganda from the first. But he had believed in the sincerity of its prophet.
Yet he might have been prepared. Had not his father, wise and experiencedin the ways of the world, armed him with the formula: "Krists is fakes"? His own adventures had corroborated this, and Miss Bailey from the very first had made no attempt to conceal her connection with that despised sect. Of course she was a fake. No more than half an hour ago she had thrilled her audience with misinformation, and manufactured biography all going to prove the nobleness—even the expediency—of honesty; and now she was purring delightedly over the fruits of Hymie's sleight-of-hand.
Isidore's was not a sentimental nature. Idealism was not his forte. And yet he could not help wishing that, if only for the confusion of Hymie and his father, Miss Bailey had proved to be "on the level."
Mr. Cohenpèrebelieved in nothing but the rights of man, though his opinion of man was so low as to preclude his having any rights at all. He was especially opprobrious toward all those in authority, and he made no exception in the case of his son's teacher. "She belongs to the machine," he would asseverate with warmth. "Run by the machine, paid by the machine, a part of the machine. Policemen, firemen, teachers, inspectors, they are all the same. All parts of the big machine. And what is it chewing? Us. What does it live on? Us again. Don't you try to fool me about that teacher of yours."
Isidore had been making no such attempt, and he repudiated the idea with scorn. He was accustomed to vehement paternal outbreaks, for Mr. Cohen was a popular orator in his social club, and he often rehearsed his eloquence in the home circle. Not often, however, did Isidore understand or remember the fervid periods. This attack upon Miss Bailey he did remember, though he did notunderstand. To him a machine was a sewing-machine, and his father, though he evidently meant something, could not have meant to associate her with that most useful member of the family.
"Just like all the rest of them," his father had said. "A grafter," and now that Miss Blake had fallen from honesty, what proof was there that Miss Bailey was not equally approachable?
And certainly Miss Blake played the game with the promptness and surety of an old understanding. Influence or income are the counters in the game, and she dealt both cheerily. Three days after the presentation of the purse the post of Monitor of Supplies in Room 17 fell vacant, and Hymie Solomon received it. That was the influence, he was "holding down a job." Two days later he discovered a market for surplus textbooks and other school supplies. Thuswas the income assured. No one could doubt Miss Blake was familiar with the rules.
"You'd never believe," said she to her neighbor in fond and unfounded pride, "what a little responsibility will do for an almost incorrigible boy. You wouldn't know Hymie. He stays behind almost every afternoon when I go home, getting things straightened out."
"They all have their good points," said Constance Bailey. "I am thinking of doing something of the same kind about Isidore Cohen. We must hold their interest, you know."
It was about a week later. Miss Bailey and her monitors were putting Room 18 to rights after the stress and storm of the day. Gold-fish, window-boxes, canaries, and pencil points were all being ministered to by their respective supervisors, and the door opened andGertie Armusheffsky appeared. Such a distracted, tear-stained, white-lipped Gertie that Miss Bailey swept her monitors into their weird wrappings and dismissed them with all speed.
"I can't go home," cried Gertie in desperation. "Honest, Miss Bailey, he'd kill me if I did."
And after listening to the girl's story, Miss Bailey congratulated herself that she had no other charges old enough to be caught in trouble as difficult.
Old Mr. Armusheffsky had read of a fire in a Brooklyn glove factory: hundreds of pairs of damaged gloves were spoken of. Now Mr. Armusheffsky kept his store very dark, and only the most fatal damages could be detected in its dim light. Catastrophes such as this of the glove factory were his opportunities. He always—he never left the store—sent Gertie to negotiate with the bereavedmanufacturers, the insurance agents, or whoever chanced to be in authority over the débris. Upon this day there chanced to be no débris: the fire and the firemen had done their work. There was no one even to interview. And Gertie, somewhat apprehensive as to her grandfather's displeasure and disappointment, set out for home. She enlivened her homeward way by a visit to a big department store, where she envied the be-pompadoured damsels behind the counters; plunged into the squirming crowd around a bargain table and secured a jabot of real German Mechlin lace for thirteen cents. After this transaction she had in her purse the twelve cents left of her quarter dollar, and the jabot, the check showing its cost and the date, an unused trolley transfer, and the five dollars deposit which she was to have paid on the purchase of gloves. The purse was of the hand-bag variety,showy yet strong. It had been given to her as a reward and an encouragement by Miss Bailey.