"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 old comfortable 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 Catholic era 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 succeeded
to 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--"her _first_ name 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 wordless ways 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 to form 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 no families, 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. _One_ baby," 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 do on'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've _got_ to 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 welcomed her 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 precipitated one 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 we _know_ that 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't _know_
nothings. 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 some professional pique, "it's good you
got _that_ settled."
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, she realized 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 hasty retreat 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. It _is_ mine
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 among her 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.
THE ETIQUETTE OF YETTA
"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.