Little Aliens Part 14

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 Sat.u.r.day he was to receive his first week's wages as janitor's a.s.sistant 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 blasphemous chauffeurs thronged 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 her reception 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," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. She was 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 amus.e.m.e.nt to the well-trained servants of her Cornelia a.s.sociates, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed this one from its embarra.s.sed 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 touched and quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done, and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself on the _milieu_ of 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts."

"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 leave her 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pract.i.tioner 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 times I 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. The _sang-froid_ which had throughout the proceedings distinguished Rosie 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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.s 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. "_Me_ on 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 complicated _pas-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 the school. 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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: