Books: Little Citizens
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Myra Kelly >> Little Citizens
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And now they were refusing even to approach the Pierian Spring! "I
guess I don't go," Algernon was persisting. "I guess I plays on the
street."
"Me, too," added Percival. "Patrick Brennan he goes on that school und
he gives me over yesterday, a bloody nose. I don' need I should go on
no school mit somebody what makes like that mit me."
But with the assistance of the neighbours, the policeman on the beat
and the truant officer, they were finally dragged to the halls of
learning and delivered into the hands of Miss Bailey, who installed
them in widely separated seats and seemed blandly unimpressed by their
evident determination to make things unpleasant in Room 18. She met
Leah's anticipatory apologies with:
"Of course they'll be good. I shall see that they behave. Yes, I shall
see, too, that Patrick Brennan does not fight with Percival. You musn't
worry about them any more, but I fear they have made worrying a habit
with you. If you will send them to school at a quarter to nine every
morning, and at ten minutes to one in the afternoon, I shall do the
rest."
And Leah went out into the sunshine free, for the first time in six
years. Free to wander through the streets, to do a little desultory
shopping, to go down to the river and to watch the workmen driving
rivets in the great new bridge. Never had she spent so pleasant a
morning, and her heart was full of gratitude and peace when she
reflected that hours such as these would henceforth be the order of
the day.
The advantages of a free education did not appeal to "them Yonowsky
devils." Leah was forced to drag her reluctant charges twice a day to
the school-house door--sometimes even up the stairs to Room 18--and
the reports with which Miss Bailey met her were not enthusiastic.
Still, Teacher admitted, too much was not to be expected from little
boys coming in contact, for the first time, with authority.
"Only send them regularly," she pleaded, "and perhaps they will learn
to be happy here." And Leah, in spite of countless obstacles and
difficulties, sent them.
They were unusually mutinous one morning, and their dressing had been
one long torment to Leah. They persisted in untying strings and
unbuttoning buttons. They shrieked, they lay upon the floor and kicked,
they spilled coffee upon their "jumpers," and systematically and
deliberately reduced their sister to the verge of distraction and of
tears. They were already late when she dragged them to the corner of
the school, and there they made their last stand by sitting stolidly
down upon the pavement.
Leah could not cope with their two rigid little bodies, and, through
welling tears of weariness and exasperation, she looked blankly up and
down the dingy street for succour. If only her ally, Mr. Brennan, the
policeman on the beat, would come! But Mr. Brennan was guarding a Grand
Street crossing until such time as the last straggling child should
have safely passed the dangers of the horse-cars, and nothing came in
answer to Leah's prayer but a push-cart laden with figs and dates and
propelled by a tall man, long-coated and fur-capped. His first glance
read the tableau, and in an instant he grasped Percival, shook him
into animation, threw him through the big door, and turned to reason
with Algernon. But that rebel had already seen the error of his ways
and was meekly ascending the steps and waving a resigned adieu to his
sister. The heavy door clanged. Leah raised grateful eyes to her knight,
and the thing was done. For the rest of that day Aaron Kastrinsky sold
dates and figs at a reckless discount and dreamed of the fair oval of
a girl's face framed in a shawl no more scarlet than her lips, while
Leah's heart sang of a youth in a fur cap and a long coat who had been
able to "boss them awful boys."
Daily thereafter did Aaron Kastrinsky establish his gay green push-cart
outside the school door set apart for the very little boys and drive
a half hour's bustling trade ere the children were all housed. And
daily two naughty small boys were convoyed to the door by a red-shawled,
dark-eyed sister. Very slowly greetings grew from shy glance to shy
smile, from swift drooping of the lashes to swift rise of colour, from
gentle sweep of eyes to sustained regard, from formal good-morning to
protracted chats. But before this happy stage was reached the twins
decided that they no longer required safe conduct to the fountain of
knowledge, and that Leah's attendance covered them with ridicule in
the eyes of more independent spirits. But she refused to relax her
vigilance, nay, rather she increased it; for she began to force her
mutinous brothers to the synagogue on Sabbath mornings. The twins soon
came to associate the vision of Aaron Kastrinsky with the idea of
restraint and of stern virtue, for on the way to the synagogue he
walked by Leah's side--looking strangely incomplete without his green
push-cart--and drove them by the sheer force of his will to walk
decorously in front. Decorously, too, he marched them back again, and
stood idly talking to Leah at the steps of her tenement while the twins
escaped to their enjoyments.
When waiting milk-cans were thrown into cellars, when the wheels of
momentarily deserted wagons were loosened, when pushcarts disappeared,
when children bent on shopping were waylaid and robbed, when cats were
tortured, horses' manes clipped, windows broken, shop-keepers enraged,
babies frightened, and pit-falls set upon the stairs, the cry was
always, "Them Yonowsky devils." Leah could do nothing with them. Mr.
Yonowsky made no effort to control them, and Aaron Kastrinsky was not
always there. Not half, not a quarter as often as he wished, for Leah
promptly turned away from all his attempts to make her understand how
greatly she would gain in peace and comfort if she would but marry
him. They would move to a larger flat and he would manage the boys.
But Leah's view of life and marriage was tinged with no glory of
romance. She had no illusions, no ignorances, and she was afraid, she
told her suitor, afraid.
"But of what?" asked the puzzled Aaron. "Thou canst not be afraid of
me. Thou knowest how dear thou art to me. What canst thou fear?"
"I'm afraid of being married," was her ultimatum. She confessed that
she loved no one else--she had never, poor child, known anyone else
to love; she admitted the allurements of the larger flat and the strong
hand always ready for the twins, was delighted to go with him to
lectures at the Educational Alliance when her father could be aroused
to responsible charge of the twins, rejoiced when he prospered in the
world and exchanged the push-cart for a permanent fruit-stand--she
even assisted at its decoration--but to marry him she was afraid.
Yes, she liked him; yes, she would walk with him--and the twins--along
Grand Street in the early evening. Yes, she would wear her red dress
since he admired it; but to marry him--ah, no! Please, no! she was
afraid of being married.
Aaron was by birth and in his own country one of the learned class,
and he promptly set about supplementing Leah's neglected education.
She had lived so solitary a life that her Russian remained pure and
soft and was quite distinct from the mixture of Yiddish, German, English,
and slang which her neighbours spoke. English, which she read
easily, she spoke rarely and haltingly, and Jewish in a prettily
pedantic manner, learned from her mother, whose father had been a
Rabbi. Aaron lent her books in these three languages, which straightway
carried her into strange and glorious worlds. Occasionally the twins
stole and sold the books, but their enlightenment remained. To
supplement the reading he took her to lectures and to night schools,
and thus one evening they listened to an illustrated "talk" on
"Contagion and Its Causes." There had been an epidemic of smallpox in
the quarter and Panic was abroad. Parents who spoke no English fought
wildly with ambulance surgeons who spoke no Jewish, and refused to
entrust the sufferers to the care of the Board of Health. Many
disturbances resulted and the authorities arranged that, in all the
missions, night schools, and settlements of the East Side, reassuring
lecturers should spread abroad the folly of resistance, the joys of
hospital life, the surety of recovery in the arms of the board, with
a few remarks upon the sources of contagion.
Leah and Aaron listened to one of the most calming of these orators.
The lecturer spoke with such feeling--and such stereopticon slides--that
smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, and diphtheria seemed the "open
sesame" to bliss unutterable, and the source of these talismans rather
to be sought for diligently than shunned. "Didst hear?" Leah asked
Aaron as they went home. "For a redness on the skin one may stay in
bed for a week and rest."
"Ay, but one is sick," said Aaron sagely.
"Not if one goes where the gentleman said. One lies in bed for a
week--three weeks--and there be ladies who wait on one, and one
rests--all days one rests. And there be no twins. Think of it, Aaron!
rest and no twins!"
A few days later she climbed home after a morning's shopping to find
Algernon, heavy of eye and red of face, crouched near the locked door
with a whimper in his voice and a card in his hand.
"I'm got somethin'," he announced, with the pride of the invalid.
"Where didst get it?" asked Leah, automatically; she was accustomed
to brazen admission of guilt.
"Off of a boy at school."
"Thou wilt steal once too often," his sister admonished him. "Go now,
confess to Miss Bailey, and return what thou hast taken."
"The boy has it too," retorted Algernon. "It's a sickness--a taking
sickness; und comes a man und gives me a card und says I should come
by my house; I'm sick."
Leah gazed on the card in despairing envy. She had hopefully searched
her person for rash or redness, thinking thereby to achieve a ticket
to that promised land where beautiful ladies--as the stereopticon had
shown--sat graciously waving fans beside a smooth, white bed whereon
one lay and rested: only rested: quiet day after quiet day. There had
been no twins in her imaginings, yet here was Algernon already set
upon the way; Algernon, who would be naughty in that blissful place,
and who might even "talk sassy" to the beautiful ladies. Slow tears
of disappointment grew under Leah's heavy lids and splashed upon the
coveted ticket. And the doctor from the Board of Health, come to verify
the more superficial examination of his colleague, misguidedly launched
forth upon a resume of the reassuring lectures.
"You mustn't cry," he remonstrated. "It's only measles and he won't
be very sick. Why, you might keep him here, and I could send you a
nurse to show you how to take care of him if it weren't for that butcher
shop on the ground floor. But he'll be all right. Don't cry."
In a short space the house of Yonowsky was bereft of its more noisy
son, and peace reigned. Percival went lonely and early to bed. Leah
sat late on the steps with Aaron, and, on the next morning, Percival
duplicated the redness, the diagnosis, and the departure of his brother,
and Leah came into her own.
Then were the days wondrous long. There was time for all the pleasures
from which she had been so long debarred. Time to read, time to sew,
time to pay and to receive shy, short morning calls, time to scrub and
polish until her room shone, time for experiments in cookery, time to
stretch her father's wages to undreamed-of lengths, even time so to
cheer and wheedle Mr. Yonowsky that she dared to ask his permission
to bring Aaron up to her spotless domain. And Aaron, with a thumping
of the hearts not due entirely to the height and steepness of the
stairs, came formally to call upon his young divinity. The visit was
a great success. Mr. Yonowsky blossomed under the sun of Aaron's
deference and learning into an expansiveness which amazed his daughter,
and the men discussed the law, the scriptures, the election, the Czar,
nihilism, socialism, the tariff, and the theatre. But here Mr. Yonowsky
lapsed into gloom. He had not visited a theatre for seven years--not
since his wife's death.
"And Miss Leah?" Aaron questioned.
"Never, oh, never!" she breathed resignedly, yet so longingly that
Aaron then and there arranged that he and she and Mr. Yonowsky should
visit the Thalia Theatre on the following night. And Leah, with the
glad and new assurance that the boys were safe, fell into happy
devisings of a suitable array. When young Kastrinsky left after formal
and prescribed adieus to his hostess, he dragged his host out to listen
to a campaign speech.
During the weeks that followed, even Mr. Yonowsky came to see the sweet
uses of the Board of Health and to ponder long and deeply upon the
nature of the "taking sickness." No longer forced to do perpetual,
though ineffective, sentinel duty, he gradually resumed his place in
the world of men and spent placid evenings at the synagogue, the
Educational Alliance, the theatre, and the East Side Democratic Union.
Leah bore him company at the theatre when she might, and Aaron followed
Leah until parental pride swelled high under Mr. Yonowsky's green
Prince Albert coat. For well he saw the looks of admiration which were
turned upon his daughter as she sat by his side and consumed cold pink
lemonade.
He received two of the roundabout proposals which etiquette demands,
and began to gather a dowry for Leah and to recall extraordinary
outstanding securities to that end. But, before these things were
accomplished, his sons and his troubles returned upon him. With renewed
energy, stimulated imagination, and enriched profanity, "them Yonowsky
devils" came home, and their reign of mischief set in afresh.
They had always been unruly; they were utterly unmanageable now. Daily
was Leah summoned to the big red school-house by the long-suffering
Miss Bailey, and nightly was Mr. Yonowsky forced to cancel engagements
at club or synagogue and to stay at home to "explanation them boys"
to outraged neighbours.
Aaron could still control them, but he was never brought upstairs now.
How could Leah expect him to enjoy conversations carried on amid the
yells of Algernon and Percival in freedom, or their shrieks in durance?
The twins came home one noontime full of gossip and excitement. They
clamoured over their cabbage soup that a classmate of theirs, one
Isidore Belchatosky, had "a sickness--a taking sickness, what he took
from off his sister Sadie."
"Is it a bad sickness?" asked the father.
"Somethin' fierce!" Percival assured him. "Pimples stands on his face,
und he _says_ he's got 'em everywheres, but I guess maybe he lies.
He says it's a chicken sickness what he has. Mit pimples everywheres!"
"You don't know no names from sicknesses," Algernon broke in
contemptuously. "It ain't the chicken sickness. It's the chicken puffs."
"Where is his house?" asked Leah eagerly. And she joyously despatched
the twins with kind inquiries and proffers to sit with the sufferer;
for had not the prophesying gentleman explained that there was no surer
way of attaining to hospital tickets than by speech and contact with
one who had already "arrived"? And Algernon and Percival, spurred on
by the allurement of the "pimples everywheres," pressed past all
barriers and outposts until they feasted their eyes upon the neatly
spotted Izzie, who proudly proved his boast of the "everywheres" and
the exceeding puffiness of the chicken puffs.
Two weeks later the little emissaries of love were in sorry case. The
"pimples everywheres" appeared, the ambulance reappeared, the twins
disappeared. The cleaning and polishing were resumed, Aaron invited
to supper, Mr. Yonowsky pledged to deliver a lecture on "The Southern
Negro and the Ballot," and a stew of the strongest elements set to
simmer on the stove.
Leah had learned the path to freedom and trod it with a light heart.
Algernon and Percival enjoyed a long succession of diseases, contagious
and infectious, and each attack meant a holiday of varying but always
of considerable length. Under ordinary conditions Leah might have been
forced to nurse her brothers through their less serious disorders, but
there was a butcher shop on the ground floor of the Yonowsky tenement,
and the by-laws of the Board of Health decreed that, such being the
case, the children should be removed for nearly all the ills to which
young and ill-nourished flesh is heir.
"Them Yonowsky devils" became only visitors to their native block, but
since they returned after each retirement more unruly and outrageous,
they were not deeply mourned. Only the butcher objected, because his
store was occasionally quarantined when Leah had achieved some very
virulent excuse for summoning the ambulance and shipping her
responsibilities. Mr. Yonowsky was puzzled but grateful, and Aaron was
grateful too.
Month after month went by and the twins had exhausted the lists of the
lecturer and had enjoyed several other ailments, when Leah and her
father went to bring them home from their typhoid-fever holiday.
"You've been having a hard time with these boys," the man at the desk
said kindly. "The worst luck I ever knew in the many years I've been
here. But they're all right now. They've had everything on the list
except water on the brain and elephantiasis, and they can't get them."
"But some what they had they could some more get," Leah suggested in
the English she so rarely used.
"I think not," the official answered cheeringly. "They hardly ever do.
No, I guess you'll be able to keep them at home now. Good luck to you!"
But it was bad luck, the worst of luck. Mr. Yonowsky's public spirit
died within his breast; Leah's coquetry vanished before a future
unrelieved by visits from the black and friendly ambulance, and when
Aaron climbed the well-known stairs that evening he heard, while he
was yet two floors short of his destination, the shrieks of the twins,
the smashing of crockery, and the grumbling of the neighbours. Suddenly
a little figure darted upon him and Leah was in his arms.
"Aaron," she sobbed. "Oh, Aaron, mine heart it breaks. There ain't no
more taking sicknesses in all the world. So says the gentleman."
"My golden one," said Aaron, who was a bit of a philosopher; "all good
things come to an end except only Love. And the twins have had taking
sicknesses in great and unheard-of numbers."
"But now they are more than ever bad. I can do nothing with them and
I am afraid of them. In hospitals, where one is very happy, one grows
very big, and the twins are no longer little boys."
"If you marry me--" Aaron began.
"You will love me always?"
"Yea, mine gold."
"And for me you will boss them twins?"
"Yea, verily, for thee I will boss the twins."
And the betrothal of Leah Yonowsky to Aaron Kastrinsky was signed and
sealed immediately.
A CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR A LADY
It was the week before Christmas, and the First-Reader Class had,
almost to a man, decided on the gifts to be lavished on "Teacher." She
was quite unprepared for any such observance on the part of her small
adherents, for her first study of the roll-book had shown her that its
numerous Jacobs, Isidores, and Rachels belonged to a class to which
Christmas Day was much as other days. And so she went serenely on her
way, all unconscious of the swift and strict relation between her
manner and her chances. She was, for instance, the only person in the
room who did not know that her criticism of Isidore Belchatosky's hands
and face cost her a tall "three for ten cents" candlestick and a plump
box of candy.
But Morris Mogilewsky, whose love for Teacher was far greater than the
combined loves of all the other children, had as yet no present to
bestow. That his "kind feeling" should be without proof when the lesser
loves of Isidore Wishnewsky, Sadie Gonorowsky, and Bertha Binderwitz
were taking the tangible but surprising forms which were daily exhibited
to his confidential gaze, was more than he could bear. The knowledge
saddened all his hours and was the more maddening because it could in
no wise be shared by Teacher, who noticed his altered bearing and tried
with all sorts of artful beguilements to make him happy and at ease.
But her efforts served only to increase his unhappiness and his love.
And he loved her! Oh, how he loved her! Since first his dreading eyes
had clung for a breath's space to her "like man's shoes" and had then
crept timidly upward past a black skirt, a "from silk" apron, a
red "jumper," and "from gold" chain to her "light face," she had been
mistress of his heart of hearts. That was more than three months ago.
And well he remembered the day!
His mother had washed him horribly, and had taken him into the big,
red school-house, so familiar from the outside, but so full of unknown
terrors within. After his dusty little shoes had stumbled over the
threshold he had passed from ordeal to ordeal until at last he was
torn in mute and white-faced despair from his mother's skirts.
He was then dragged through long halls and up tall stairs by a large
boy, who spoke to him disdainfully as "greenie," and cautioned him as
to the laying down softly and taking up gently of those poor dusty
shoes, so that his spirit was quite broken and his nerves were all
unstrung when he was pushed into a room full of bright sunshine and
of children who laughed at his frightened little face. The sunshine
smote his timid eyes, the laughter smote his timid heart, and he turned
to flee. But the door was shut, the large boy gone, and despair took
him for its own.
[Illustration: "MY POOR LITTLE CHAP, YOU MUSTN'T CRY LIKE, THAT"]
[Illustration: DISMISSED WITH THE COMMON HERD AT THREE O'CLOCK]
Down upon the floor he dropped, and wailed, and wept, and kicked. It
was then that he heard, for the first time the voice which now he
loved. A hand was forced between his aching body and the floor, and
the voice said: "Why, my dear little chap, you mustn't cry like that.
What's the matter?"
The hand was gentle and the question kind, and these, combined with
a faint perfume suggestive of drug stores and barber shops--but nicer
than either--made him uncover his hot little face. Kneeling beside him
was a lady, and he forced his eyes to that perilous ascent; from shoes
to skirt, from skirt to jumper, from jumper to face, they trailed in
dread uncertainty, but at the face they stopped. They had found--rest.
Morris allowed himself to be gathered into the lady's arms and held
upon her knee, and when his sobs no longer rent the very foundations
of his pink and wide-spread tie, he answered her question in a voice
as soft as his eyes, and as gently sad.
"I ain't so big, und I don't know where is my mamma."
So, having cast his troubles on the shoulders of the lady, he had added
his throbbing head to the burden, and from that safe retreat had enjoyed
his first day at school immensely.
Thereafter he had been the first to arrive every morning, and the last
to leave every afternoon; and under the care of Teacher, his liege
lady, he had grown in wisdom and love and happiness. But the greatest
of these was love. And now, when the other boys and girls were planning
surprises and gifts of price for Teacher, his hands were as empty as
his heart was full. Appeal to his mother met with denial prompt and
energetic.
"For what you go und make, over Christmas, presents? You ain't no
Krisht; you should better have no kind feelings over Krishts, neither;
your papa could to have a mad."
"Teacher ain't no Krisht," said Morris stoutly; "all the other fellows
buys her presents, und I'm loving mit her too; it's polite I gives her
presents the while I'm got such a kind feeling over her."
"Well, we ain't got no money for buy nothings," said Mrs. Mogilewsky
sadly. "No money, und your papa, he has all times a scare he shouldn't
to get no more, the while the boss"--and here followed incomprehensible,
but depressing, financial details, until the end of the interview found
Morris and his mother sobbing and rocking in one another's arms. So
Morris was helpless, his mother poor, and Teacher all unknowing.
And the great day, the Friday before Christmas came, and the school
was, for the first half hour, quite mad. Doors opened suddenly and
softly to admit small persons, clad in wondrous ways and bearing
wondrous parcels. Room 18, generally so placid and so peaceful, was
a howling wilderness full of brightly coloured, quickly changing groups
of children, all whispering, all gurgling, and all hiding queer bundles.
A newcomer invariably caused a diversion; the assembled multitude,
athirst for novelty, fell upon him and clamoured for a glimpse of his
bundle and a statement of its price.
Teacher watched in dumb amaze. What could be the matter with the
children, she wondered. They could not have guessed the shrouded
something in the corner to be a Christmas-tree. What made them behave
so queerly, and why did they look so strange? They seemed to have grown
stout in a single night, and Teacher, as she noted this, marvelled
greatly. The explanation was simple, though it came in alarming form.
The sounds of revelry were pierced by a long, shrill yell, and a pair
of agitated legs sprang suddenly into view between two desks. Teacher,
rushing to the rescue, noted that the legs formed the unsteady stem
of an upturned mushroom of brown flannel and green braid, which she
recognized as the outward seeming of her cherished Bertha Binderwitz;
and yet, when the desks were forced to disgorge their prey, the legs
restored to their normal position were found to support a fat child--and
Bertha was best described as "skinny"--in a dress of the Stuart tartan
tastefully trimmed with purple. Investigation proved that Bertha's
accumulative taste in dress was an established custom. In nearly all
cases the glory of holiday attire was hung upon the solid foundation
of every-day clothes as bunting is hung upon a building. The habit was
economical of time, and produced a charming embonpoint.
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