Little Aliens Part 15

"Well, _good_ afternoon, I _must_ be going."

Her evolution into "American Ladies" had already begun. The manners of the Cornelias had not been lost upon her.

A BENT TWIG

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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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 high honor. She regarded Abraham with suspicion rather than with grat.i.tude. 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," Sarah Schodsky 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 she _says_," 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't so 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 distracted fathers 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 cla.s.s, 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body would let you work. An' she knows as good as you do, too, that c.r.a.ps 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 one until 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 a.s.sist 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 a.s.sure 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 three words 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 Ma.s.sachusetts?" 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 Reader cla.s.s, 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."