day proved herself to be. For as Yetta and Eva turned into Clinton
Street, Rosie was discovered dancing madly to the strains of a
one-legged hurdy-gurdy, in the midst of an envious but not emulating
crowd.
"That's her," said Eva briefly. "Sooner you stands on the stoop you
shall see her better."
And when the two friends carried out this suggestion and mounted the
nearest steps, Eva pointed to what seemed a bundle of inanimate rags.
"It's her baby," she disapprovingly remarked. "She lays it all times on
steps. Somebody could to set on it sometimes."
"It's fierce," repeated Yetta, this time with more conviction. She was
herself the guardian of three small and ailing sisters, and she knew
that they should not be deposited on cold doorsteps. So she picked up
Rosie's abandoned responsibility, and turned to survey that
conscienceless Salome.
Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long
black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by
Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with
a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her
visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with
yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes"
poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the
one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimona
flapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less
gorgeous substructure.
Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving
eye. "She don't know what is _fer_ her," she remarked. "My mamma, she
wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."
"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something
fierce."
The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath
for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New
York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona,
and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The
tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss
Aaronsohn.
"It's something fierce," she once more remarked, and then casting
decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss
Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out
into the ring.
Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her
talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic
combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the
compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the
Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they
fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertisements.
A passing stranger stopped to watch them and gave the organ-man
largesse, so that still he played, and still they danced until called
back to duty and reality by the uproar of the baby, now thrice
abandoned. For Eva Gonorowsky had gone virtuously home, feeling that
her traditions had been outraged, her friendship despised, and that her
disciple had disgraced her.
Yetta and Rosie with the heavy-headed baby followed the organ for
several blocks. They might have gone on forever like the Pied Piper's
rats, had not the howls of the youngest Rashnowsky anchored and steadied
them. When at last they had recovered breath and the proprieties, they
sat amicably down upon an alien doorstep, and went back to the
early--and in their case neglected--preliminaries of friendship.
They exchanged names, ages, addresses, the numbers of their family, and
their own places in the scale. The baby had obligingly gone to sleep,
and these amenities were carried out in due form. It seemed that they
were bound by many similarities of circumstance and fate: each was the
eldest of a family, but whereas Rosie could boast but one baby, Yetta's
mother had three. Both mothers worked at low and ill-paid branches of
the tailor's art. And both children were fatherless to all daily intents
and purposes.
"Mine papa," Yetta told her new little friend, "is pedlar-mans on the
country. Me und mine mamma don't know where he is even. From long we
ain't got no letters off of him, und no money. My mamma, she has awful
sads over it."
"Does she cry?" questioned the sympathetic Rosie, drawing her kimona
closely about her in the enjoyment of this new and promising gossip.
Yetta shook her head. "She ain't got no time she shall cry. So my papa
don't comes, und letters mit money off of him don't comes. My mamma, she
ain't got time for nothings on'y sewing. She has it pretty hard."
"My mamma is got it hard too," cried Rosie, not to be outdone. "She
don't know where my papa is neither. She don't know is he on the country
even. She don't know _nothings_ over him. Me und my mamma we looks all
times on blocks und streets und stores. On'y we couldn't to find him.
Und my mamma, she works all day by factories, und by night she comes on
the house und brings more work. She ain't got time for nothings neither,
on'y sewing und looking fer my poor papa."
"Then your papa ain't dead?" queried Yetta.
"No, he ain't dead; on'y he loses him the job." Rosie's voice as she
made this statement, and Yetta's manner as she received it, would seem
to say that if this were not death, it was very little better.
To Isidore Rashnowsky it had been the "sudden and unprovided death" of
which the Prayer Book speaks. It had meant the destruction of the very
delicate equilibrium by which he and his wife maintained their tiny but
peaceful household. It threw the whole burden of four lives upon Mrs.
Rashnowsky's thin and twisted shoulders. It drove him, after three weeks
of unsuccessful quest for work, to cut himself off from all he cared
for. Starvation was very close to them. He could contribute nothing, and
he determined to take nothing: to increase the niggardly supply by
diminishing the hungry demand. Mrs. Rashnowsky's earnings--even when
augmented by the home work which the law forbids but life demands--was
scant indeed for the maintenance of the mother and the two children. All
these things Isidore explained to her patiently, resignedly, and with
what bravery he could muster. And she agreed, nodding wearily over her
sewing. But from his conclusion, from his determination to remove
himself and his hunger from her charge, she persistently dissented.
Rather, she insisted, would she take the babies to the Children's Court
and get them committed to some institution. Then he and she could face
the world together. She could find courage for that. But not to live
without him. Never for that.
"It is but for a time," he hopefully remonstrated, "and if we give the
children we cannot easily get them back. Children such as ours are not
often found. They would be adopted by some rich man before, maybe, I
could find a job."
This consideration had not occurred to Mrs. Rashnowsky, but when it was
pointed out to her she was forced to admit its weight. The physical
charm of Rosie, kimona clad and dirty, might not have appealed as
insistently as her father feared to the rich adopter, and the
rag-wrapped baby would have been equally safe. But to Mrs. Rashnowsky's
fear and pride, to see these infants was to covet them.
And so, tearfully, fearfully, she promised to think again of Isidore's
proposal. She thought all night, and all through the hurried, steaming,
driven day at the factory. When at last she was free she toiled home to
tell him that she could not do without him, and found that he had gone.
All these things had happened, as Rosie told her new friend, three
months before. The mother had been forced into smaller, darker, cheaper
quarters, and it was this transition which had so far saved Rosie from
the Truant Officer. They had moved from one school district to another,
and the authorities of their new habitat had not yet tracked the
light-falling "fer-ladies-shoes."
"But that Truant Officer will get you sure," warned Yetta. "He comes in
my house and he gets me, und makes me I shall go on the school."
"He can go on mine house all he likes," responded the lawless Rosie,
making careful inventory of her hair ribbons the while, "all he likes he
can go. There ain't never nobody there. My mamma she is all times on
factories, und me und the baby is all times by the street. I don't needs
I shall go on no school. I ain't got time."
"He'll get you on a rainy day," maintained Cassandra.
But the dread official never did discover Rosie. She was sufficiently
wise to avoid any public display of her red and yellow charms until
after school hours, unless she were well out of her own district. She
would follow street organs and behave like any other member of a
decorous audience until she was well out of the path of the ravening
Truant Officer. Then she would abandon the baby to the cold stones, and
herself to the enchantment of the music. Thus she achieved that freedom
of which her adopted country boasts, and for which Yetta
Aaronsohn--though basking in the rays of a free education, with lunches,
medical attendance, and spectacles thrown in--still yearned.
There had been a time when life had been to Yetta, even as it now was to
Rosie, a simple matter of loving and helping her mother, taking care of
the babies, and dancing to the organs in the street. Then entered the
Truant Officer, and life became a complicated affair of manners, dress,
books, washing, and friendships, with every day new laws to be met, new
ideas to be assimilated, old pleasures and employments to be thrown
aside.
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 Saturday he was to receive his first week's wages as
janitor's assistant 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," ejaculated
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 passed 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.
[Illustration: 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 amusement to the well-trained servants
of her Cornelia associates, 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 snatched this one from its embarrassed 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 advertisements."
"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 snatched 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 practitioner 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 assistant 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 pass 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 fashionable 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:
"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 class, 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?