of a day in January, shortly after school had recovered from the
Christmas holidays, "might I come in for a few moments this afternoon to
observe your children? I suppose I shall be having them next term. Too
bad you first-grade teachers never know what you are going to get down
here! It's different up town, where the kids nearly all go to
kindergarten. Down here they sweep them right in off the street."
Miss Bailey extended a cordial invitation to her colleague and neighbor
to visit Room 18 at any convenient hour. And as she proceeded with her
solitary luncheon, she was conscious of a heaviness in the region of
her heart not due to indigestion. She had committed the folly of growing
fond of that term's crop of little First Readers. Room 18 without
Patrick Brennan, Morris Mowgelewsky, Eva Gonorowsky, and all her other
aide-de-camps and monitors would be a desolate place. And Miss Bailey,
as she munched a chicken sandwich, objected strongly to Miss Blake's
expressive phrase, "sweep them right in off the street." Yet it was
quite true. The children of whom she was now so fond had been swept in
to her in September, and she remembered that a considerable portion of
the street would seem to have been swept in with them. They had since
learned the art of scraping their small shoes on intervening stairs and
through intervening halls, but as recruits they had been all that she
dreaded in their successors. Miss Blake would now reap the benefit of
this and other improvements, while Miss Bailey devoted her energies to
a new invoice of seedlings.
Such, of course, was life. Especially a teacher's life. But Miss Bailey
was new to her trade and had not yet learned the philosophic, impersonal
view-point of the gardener. She loved her little plants individually,
and she shrank from the idea of pulling them out of their places under
the protecting glass of her care, and handing them over to the
ministrations of another.
The promise of new seedlings did not comfort her. She felt outraged by
it, as a man bereaved of a fox terrier may feel toward the friend to
whom a dog is a dog, and who boasts that he knows where he can get
another worth two of the dear departed.
In the afternoon Miss Blake appeared, and the unsuspecting First Readers
were put through their paces. They sang, they marched, they read, and
they wrote. They would have gone gallantly on through all the other
subjects in their curriculum if she had found time to stay, but she had
left Room 19 in charge of a monitor, and that monitor's inability to
preserve order made itself heard through door and wall, so that
presently she declared herself quite satisfied, and retired to her own
kingdom. A deadly silence followed upon her arrival there.
"They has awful 'fraids over her," Sarah Schodsky remarked. "A girl by
her class tells me how she throws rulers once on a boy."
"I'd have a 'fraid over her too," cried Yetta Aaronsohn. "I don't like I
shall have no teachers what is big like that. I have all times 'fraids
over big teachers."
"You've never had one," laughed Miss Bailey, "so don't talk nonsense.
Big teachers are much nicer than little ones."
"They ain't fer me," Yetta maintained. "I ain't never had no teacher
on'y you, and I don't needs I shall never have no teacher on'y you."
From these conversational straws Miss Bailey gathered that it would be
unwise to insist too strongly upon the personal element in "developing
the promotion thought." Promotion had formed no part in the experience
or the vocabulary of the First Readers Class before Miss Bailey somewhat
guilefully introduced it.
The children were delighted. They always loved things vague and looming,
and Miss Bailey--animated by duty--spoke so enthusiastically of
promotion that they all thrilled to experience it. The phrase, "when I'm
'moted," grew very fashionable. No one knew exactly what it meant, but
it was something more imminent than the "when I'm big" of the boys, and
the "when I git married" of the girls. It was something, too, in which
one's prowess as a reader and writer was to count for righteousness;
"For of course," Miss Bailey explained, "we can't expect to be promoted
if we don't know how to read: 'see the leaves fall from the tree.'" (It
was easier to read than to do in January on the lower East Side.)
The First Readers were hardly daunted when they learned that a barrier,
known as "zamnation," was to be stretched between them and the "'moted"
state. "Zamnation," when first Miss Bailey pronounced it, caused
something akin to panic in Room 18. It differed in no perceptible degree
from a word which they all understood to be _taboo_ ever since Ikey
Borrachsohn had addressed it, in the heat of argument, to a classmate.
In the lower grades an examination does not greatly differ from an
ordinary recitation, and so the First Readers, protected from stage
fright by complete ignorance of what they were undergoing, passed the
ordeal in triumph, and fell out at the other side victorious almost to a
man, and First Readers never more.
There came an afternoon when Miss Bailey, somewhat huskily, explained
this to them. "Zamnation" was over. The fair pages of the Second Readers
lay before them. In the morning they would be promoted. She was very
proud of them. One or two children had not worked quite hard enough.
They would have to try again, but the rank and file had achieved
promotion, and she hoped they would be very happy, and they were to
remember that she would always and ever be glad to see them, and glad to
hear that they were good.
The children who had taken their examinations so blandly, took their
promotion in quite a different spirit. Miss Bailey, laboring as best she
could with fifty little new-comers, could not be unaware of the
disturbance--almost the tumult--on the other side of the wall. When
ten-thirty brought the recess hour and she went down to the yard with
her new responsibilities, the tumult met her there.
"I don't likes it, und I don't needs that 'motion," cried Sarah
Schodsky; "I likes I shall be by your room."
"But you can't, honey. You're too big," said Miss Bailey. "You just stop
crying for your lost youth and try to make the best of Room 19."
"But we don't likes that room," cried Morris Mowgelewsky, ex-monitor of
Miss Bailey's Gold Fish Bowl. "It don't stands no fish theaytre in it
nor no flowers. Nathan Spiderwitz, he has awful mads over it" (Nathan
Spiderwitz had been Monitor of Miss Bailey's window-boxes), "und Patrick
Brennan says maybe his papa could to arrest Missis Blake. She says cheek
on him. She calls him Irisher."
"Oh, no!" remonstrated Miss Bailey.
"Teacher, yiss ma'am, she says cheek," Morris maintained. "She says
cheek on all of us; she says we is Bailey's Babies. She says it on Miss
Rosen. Me und Nathan, we hears how she says on her. 'What you think I
got?' she says on Miss Rosen, und Miss Rosen, she says, 'she don't
knows,' und Missis Blake, she says, 'I got a bunch of Bailey's Babies.'"
"Then you _must_ have been bad, Morris," Miss Bailey reproved him; "you
must have been behaving like babies."
"Teacher, no ma'am," Morris answered. "We don't make nothings like
that. She makes Eva Gonorowsky und Yetta Aaronsohn shall stand in
corners the whiles they cries. She says, 'What is mit them?' und they
says, 'They likes they shall look upon your face,' und extra she stands
them in corners. She is awful cross teachers! Und anyway, she's too
big."
Although Miss Bailey appreciated this tribute she could understand Miss
Blake's failure to do so, and she explained to Morris that, upon pain of
being instantly cast out from her heart of hearts, he must learn to love
Miss Blake.
But Morris had had a severe lesson in the perils of unrequited
affection, and at the age of seven had formulated the axiom, "It's a
foolishness you shall make what is lovin' mit somebody sooner somebody
don't makes what is lovin' mit you," and Miss Bailey found it difficult
to induce him to regard Miss Blake with affection.
Other members of the former cabinet and staff were equally refractory,
and at three o'clock every afternoon, save on the regrettably frequent
occasions when Miss Blake was obliged to require their continued
presence in Room 19, they flocked back to their old posts of duty. They
fell upon the window-boxes, the aquarium, the pencils, and the
blackboards with endearments and caresses, and they utterly swept away
and annihilated the slow-footed new-comers whom Miss Bailey was trying
to initiate in their duties. A clumsy boy named David Boskowitz had
succeeded to the portfolio of Gold Fishes. Now a gold fish, even of
eighteen-carat quality, is not warranted to endure the endearments and
refreshments lavished upon it by fifty emotional members of a race whose
ancestors once wandered to adoration of a Golden Calf. During Morris's
tenure of office Miss Bailey had frequently been obliged to renew his
charges. And some mysterious tragedy was played in the fish theatre one
night shortly after David Boskowitz took office. Morris, slipping into
Room 18 before school hours, to bestow a defunct carnation upon Teacher,
found a gold fish floating, wrong side up, among the seaweed in the
shining bowl.
With howls he pointed it out to Miss Bailey. Together they retrieved it.
Then Teacher wrapped it reverently in tissue paper and commissioned
Morris to go forth and give it decent burial in the nearest ash barrel.
But Morris did nothing of the kind. He carried it about with him for
days, and stirred up sentiments of wildest revolution in the hot hearts
of his contemporaries by showing them the limp body of their pet, foully
done to death by "them new kids what Teacher had."
Miss Blake found "Bailey's Babies" astonishingly unmanageable. The
difficulty lay in the different conception of the art of teaching held
by these two exponents. Miss Bailey, as has been said, was of the garden
school. She regarded the children as plants, knowledge as water; her
part in the scheme of things to understudy the sunshine, and to coax the
plants to absorb the water. Miss Blake was of the carpenter school. She
held that facts were hard and straight; minds not quite so hard, and
never straight; her duty to saw and bore, sand-paper and file the minds
until the facts could be smoothly glued upon them.
"Bailey's Babies" felt this difference though they did not understand
it. In fact life was getting generally incomprehensible. For were not
Hymie Solomon, the greenhorn, who had not yet learned English, Jakey
Fishandler, who was so bad that no teacher except Miss Bailey would
have him in her class, and Becky Zalmanowsky, who--though the First
Readers did not appreciate it--was a perfect type of the criminal idiot,
were not these allowed to bask in Miss Bailey's presence, while
self-respecting, hard-working First Readers were thrown into outer
darkness?
There was, indeed, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and,
contributed by Patrick Brennan, an uninterrupted flow of minor
disturbances and insubordinations, culminating in a heated interview
between Miss Blake and the Principal, in which the lady insisted that
Patrick was making discipline impossible, that his writing was a blot
upon civilization, and that he should be returned whence he came.
[Illustration: Patrick was making discipline impossible]
The beginning of every term is marked by several such falls from grace
on the part of erstwhile model pupils, who do not easily adjust
themselves to their new environment. The Principal was surprised but
complacent, and very formally on the next morning Miss Blake delivered
her ultimatum to that unruly son of the Kings of Ulster and the
policeman on the beat. Its immediate cause was the unoffending but
offensive gold fish. For three days it had preached its silent sermon of
sedition and puzzled the olfactory nerves of Miss Blake, who after ten
years of East Side teaching had flattered herself that she was beyond
any new sensation of that nature. After a heated interview which led to
the disintegration of the venerable corse, Miss Blake gathered her black
serge draperies closely about her and issued her command.
"Take your things," said she; "I won't have you in this room another
minute." Patrick's eyes grew large, he hesitated about returning to the
paternal and official roof-tree with the tidings that he had been
expelled. "Take your hat and everything you own and come with me."
Patrick gathered together a miscellaneous collection, consisting of a
wad of chewing-gum, the soul of a mouth-organ, a cap, and one rubber
overshoe, and prepared to march upon East Broadway.
"You are a disgrace to the school," said Miss Blake loftily, "and I am
going to take you to the only place you are fit for--back to the First
Reader Class. We'll see what Miss Bailey will say to you, young man."
Well, Patrick followed her. It was the first command of hers to which he
had given favorable ear. He even went with alacrity--and the novices in
the Second Reader gazed wildly upon one another. They may not have been
quick to memorize incomprehensible and unexplained "memory gems," or to
carry in their heads long strings of figures unconnected with anything
in sea or sky. But Miss Bailey's training had made them experts in
recognizing cause and effect, and such an epidemic of lawlessness and
mischief swept over Room 19 as even Miss Blake's ten years' experience
had never paralleled. "Bailey's Babies" went suddenly and unanimously to
the dogs. The energy which they had expended in being "'moted" was as
nothing to the delirious determination with which they fought for
retrogradation. They dutifully called to mind all Miss Bailey's
precepts, and then crashed through them, one by one. They fell from
grace, from truth, from cleanliness, from all the moral heights upon
which Teacher had perched them, and, as they fell, they set in motion
the machinery provided by the Board of Education. Mesdames Gonorowsky,
Mowgelewsky and Borrachsohn, and other matrons began to find the tenor
of their days interrupted by incomprehensible post-cards, and a
regrettably comprehensible Truant Officer. "Bailey's Babies" were
running amuck, and their cries as they committed moral hara-kiri echoed
as far as the marble halls of the Board of Education on remote Park
Avenue.
Mrs. Gonorowsky paid the exorbitant price of a cent to have her official
postcard read by an interpreter. Neighbors volunteered for this service,
but she would have none of them. She wanted an authoritative reading,
and having got it, she sat down to await the return of Eva.
"So-o-oh," ran the maternal greeting, "you comes three times late on the
school mit dirty faces." Eva hung her guilty head. "And I wash you every
day the face, und send you on the block plenty time? Hein?" Eva nodded
the guilty head. "Und now comes such a card from off the school sayin'
how you comes late und dirty, und the Principal, he wants he shall see
me to-morrow, quarter after three." A silence followed these thunderous
words. Eva's guilt engulfed her, although hers was the clearest
conscience among all the candidates for return tickets. Her gentle
spirit had been unequal to the orgy in which braver souls were
wallowing.
"I wants," she whispered now, "I wants I shall be put back. I don't
likes it by Miss Blakeses room. I ain't monitors off of nothings, und
Miss Blake she hollers on me, und Patrick he is put back. I likes I
shall be put back too."
"Sooner you feels like that," said Mrs. Gonorowsky with sound logic,
"why aind you stayed back by Miss Bailey's room? Aind you told me how
you wants you shall be 'moted, and learn off a new book?"
"Not 'out Miss Bailey," Eva protested. "I couldn't to learn 'out Miss
Bailey. I want Miss Bailey shall be 'moted too."
"Und why ain't she 'moted?" demanded the voice of reason.
At this question--its answer had long been torture to her loyal little
heart--Eva broke into wild tears. Changing over to the voice of love,
Mrs. Gonorowsky soothed and cuddled and petted her until Eva found
speech again.
"It's somethin' fierce," she whispered. "In all my world I ain't never
seen how it is fierce. I shall better, maybe, whisper mit you in the
ear. It's like this: She ain't smart enough. Becky Zalmanowsky, she
ain't smart enough, und Hymie Solomon, he ain't smart enough, und Jakey
Fishandler, he is a greeney, und Teacher, she gets left back mit them."
"Gott!" cried Mrs. Gonorowsky, "who says she ain't smart enough?"
"The Principal, maybe," wailed Eva.
"All right," said her mother, whose admiration for Miss Bailey was great
and of long standing. "I goes on the school to-morrow for see him at
quarter after three."
When Mrs. Gonorowsky reached the big school-house, she found that her
audience with the Principal was not to be a private one, for a dozen or
more mothers were gathered in the yard. A regular investigation was on
foot. Every one concerned had recognized that there was some
organization about Room 19's sedition, and Miss Blake had first
repudiated the acquaintance and friendship of Miss Bailey, and had then
gone on to repudiate all responsibility for what she now termed
"Bailey's Brats."
"I refuse--I must refuse--to teach that class," said she to the
harassed Principal. "If you can't arrange to exchange me with some other
teacher, I shall apply for a transfer to an up-town school. If that Miss
Bailey is so crazy about these children, why don't you let her keep them
for another term? Every one seems to think she's a crackerjack teacher,
so I guess she can get along in second term work, and I can take that
new class of hers."
"I'll think of it," said the Principal, as the janitor came to tell him
that the mothers were overflowing his office.
Before his interview with them, he turned into Room 18, and there he
found the ringleaders of Room 19's rebellion. Though beatified they wore
a chastened, propitiatory air, for Miss Bailey had just been lecturing
them. She looked as distressed as she was by the whole situation.
"I just stepped in," the Principal explained, "to see how many of them
were still chained to their oars. Rather a luxurious galley this, don't
you think?"
"I can't think at all," answered Constance Bailey. "They were a fine
class, and Miss Blake is a fine teacher."
"These misunderstandings happen," said the Principal, "in schools just
as they do in marriages. I'm going down now to interview the mothers of
most of these young people here. Do you mind staying and keeping the
children for a few moments? I must get this thing straightened out."
"We shall all be here when you come back," Miss Bailey promised.
Eva Gonorowsky had but reflected the general opinion when she told her
mother that Miss Bailey had been left back "because she wasn't smart
enough," and the Principal found himself in the midst of an indignation
meeting. In Yiddish, in English, in all grades and dialects between the
two, the mothers protested against this ruling.
There was hardly one of them who did not owe Miss Bailey some meed of
gratitude--and they were of a race which still practises that virtue.
So they made ovation, fervid, gesticulatory, and obscure. But through
much harping on one theme they made their meaning clear.
"So you think," said the Principal, "that Miss Bailey is still teaching
the smallest children because she is not as clever as the other
teachers. You never were more mistaken in your lives. The hardest child
to teach and manage, as all of you very well know, is the smallest
child. The very best teaching should come at the very beginning."
This statement, when it was translated by those who understood it to
those who did not, met with a cordial rumble of approval.
"Your children," he went on, "are old enough now to be taught by an
ordinary teacher. Miss Blake is much more than that."
This translated was not very well received. Stout inarticulate mothers
drew their shawls more closely about them and grunted dissent.
"But although they are old enough they haven't been proving themselves
good enough, and so I have decided--as you express it--to promote Miss
Bailey too, and to let her have charge of them until the end of the
year. I shall notify Miss Blake to-morrow. Meanwhile, if you ladies will
go up to Room 18 I think you will find your children there, and I know
you will find Miss Bailey. Perhaps," he added with a smile, "she would
be glad to receive your congratulations upon her promotion."
The mothers steamed and streamed away, led by Mrs. Mowgelewsky whose wig
was very much awry, and by Mrs. Gonorowsky, whose mind was in a
triumphant flame, while far in the rear there pattered the grandmother
of Isidore Applebaum, whose mind was quite unchanged by the events of
the afternoon.
Isidore had managed to explain Miss Bailey's disabilities to her, but
her almost complete deafness left her quite unmoved by the Principal's
eloquence in either original or translated form. She only knew that Miss
Bailey had been at last allowed to retain the guardianship of Isidore.
Fifteen unintelligible congratulations are rather overwhelming, and Miss
Bailey was accordingly overwhelmed by the inrush.
The mothers fell upon her bodily and pinned her to her chair. They
kissed her hands. They kissed her gown. They patted her back. They
embraced or chastised their offspring with equal violence. They admired
the pictures, stood enraptured before the aquarium, touched the flowers
with hungry appreciation, and enjoyed themselves immensely.
Mrs. Gonorowsky was a very champion among the hosts. She put Eva's
misconduct upon the basis of etiquette. Surely it was not polite, she
pointed out, that Eva should allow herself to be exalted over her
teacher. As Mrs. Gonorowsky lucidly phrased it:
"Eva, she gets put back the whiles she don't wants you shall think she
shows off that she iss smarter als Teacher--somethin's like that aind
polite. Und anyway now the Pincipal says Eva aind smarter."
"That's very kind of him," remarked Miss Bailey, trying to understand
for the third time a whispered communication from Isidore Applebaum's
grandmother. The speech, whatever it meant, was clearly of a cheerful
and encouraging nature, and at the close of each repetition the old lady
patted Teacher encouragingly upon the shoulder, and winked and nodded to
an amazing extent.
Isidore was dragged from his lair and pressed into service as
interpreter.
"She says like this out of Jewish," he began, "she says you don't have
to care what nobody says over how you is smart or how you ain't smart.
She says that don't makes nothings mit her the whiles you is lovin' mit
childrens."
Again the old lady patted Teacher's shoulder, nodding and smiling the
while with a knowing and encouraging air.
"Und she says," Isidore went on translating the hint with some
delicacy, "she says we got a boarder by our house what ain't so awful
smart, und"--here Isidore whispered--"_he studies nights_."
Miss Bailey took the old lady's hand and shook it gratefully.
"THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES"
"Say! What you think!" cried Rebecca Einstein to her friend and neighbor
Esther Nolan. "What you think we got to our house?"
Esther confessed ignorance.
"A baby," cried the triumphant Rebecca.
"It's mine," said Esther promptly. "I writes such a letter on the
Central Park Stork he shall bring me a baby. I tells him I got a crib
even. It's too little fer me. I likes I shall lay all longed out on the
sofa. Und extra he goes and makes mistakes and leaves it by your house.
It's boys, ain't it?"
Rebecca admitted it was a boy.
"And did you write such letters on Storks?"
Again Rebecca admitted that she had not. "We don't got to write no
letters over babies," said she with pride. "We gets 'em anyways. My
mamma is got thirteen childrens. We ain't all babies now, but we was."
Esther returned crestfallen to her second-floor home, and sought the
comforting arms of Mrs. Moriarty, her chaperon and guardian.
"But whatever made you write for a baby?" demanded Mrs. Moriarty, when
the Stork's carelessness had been explained to her. "Aren't you and your
father and me happy enough in this grand new house without a baby to be
botherin' us?"
Unconsciously she had touched the root of Esther's trouble.
"I needs a baby," she wailed, "the whiles my papa he ain't lovin' no
more mit me. And I wants somebody shall love me."