Atlantic Narratives Part 5

Bennie came into the kitchen chewing his reward, some very gummy confection. He was obliged to look the pent-up things he wanted to say, until such time as he could clear his clogged talking-gear.

'Teacher,' he began, before he had finished swallowing, 'What for did you say--'

'Bennie!' his mother reproved him, 'You must shame yourself to listen by the door.'

'Well, there wasn't any trade, ma,' he defended himself, 'only Bessie Katz, and she brought back the peppermints she bought this morning, to change them for taffy, but I didn't because they were all dirty, and one was broken--'

Bennie never had a chance to bring his speeches to a voluntary stop: somebody always interrupted. This time it was his father, who came down the stairs, looking so grave that even Bennie was impressed.

'He's awake,' said Mr. Rudinsky. 'I lighted the lamp. Will you please come up, ma'am?'

He showed her to the room where David lay, and closed the door on them both. It was not he, but Miss Ralston, the American teacher, that his boy needed. He went softly down to the kitchen, where his wife smiled at him through unnecessary tears.

Miss Ralston never forgot the next hour, and David never forgot. The woman always remembered how the boy's eyes burned through the dusk of the shadowed corner where he lay. The boy remembered how his teacher's voice palpitated in his heart, how her cool hands rested on his, how the lamplight made a halo out of her hair. To each of them the dim room with its scant furnishings became a spiritual rendezvous.

What did the woman say, that drew the sting of remorse from the child's heart, without robbing him of the bloom of his idealism? What did she tell him that trans.m.u.ted the offense of ages into the marrow and blood of persecuted virtue? How did she weld in the boy's consciousness the sc.r.a.ps of his mixed inheritance, so that he saw his whole experience as an unbroken thing at last? There was n.o.body to report how it was done.

The woman did not know nor the child. It was a secret born of the boy's need and the woman's longing to serve him; just as in nature every want creates its satisfaction.

When she was ready to leave him, Miss Ralston knelt for a moment at David's bedside, and once more took his small hot hands in hers.

'And I have made a discovery, David,' she said, smiling in a way of her own. 'Talking with your parents downstairs I saw why it was that the Russian Jews are so soon at home here in our dear country. In the hearts of men like your father, dear, is the true America.'

BLUE REEFERS

BY ELIZABETH ASHE

'THE child will have to have a new dress if she's to take part in the Christmas entertainment.'

My mother spoke very low, so as not to wake me, but I heard her. I had been too excited to fall asleep.

'Of course,' said my father in his big voice that never could get down to a whisper.

'S-sh,' warned my mother; and then added, 'But we shouldn't get it, George. You know what the last doctor's bill amounted to.'

'Oh, let the little thing have it. It's her first chance to show off.'

'S-sh,' my mother warned again. After a moment I heard her say, 'Well, perhaps it won't cost so very much, and as you say it's the first time.'

I turned over in bed and prayed, 'Dear Lord, please help my mother to get me a new dress.' For a new dress was one of the chief joys of taking part, and I had longed so to take part.

Although I had been a member of our Sunday school in good and regular standing ever since I was three weeks old, and had been put on the Cradle Roll, that being in the eyes of my parents the nearest approach to dedication allowable to Baptists, I was taking part for the first time, and I was seven. There had been numerous occasions in these seven years for taking part: our Sunday school celebrated Easter, Children's Day, Anniversary Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, with quite appropriate exercises. But it was a large school, and I had freckles and what Aunt Emma, my cousin Luella's mother, called 'that child's jaw.'

Aunt Emma meant my front teeth, which were really most dreadfully prominent: in fact they stuck out to such an extent that Aunt Emma seldom failed to see them when she saw me.

Aunt Emma wasn't used to children with jaws. Her little Luella had the prettiest teeth imaginable: she was pretty all over, pretty golden hair, pretty blue eyes, pretty pink cheeks,--not a freckle,--and pretty arms very plump and white. She was just my age, and she was invariably asked to take part. It seemed reasonable that she should, and yet I felt that if they only knew that I had a mind,--a mind was what an uncle once said I had, after hearing me recite the one hundred and third Psalm, the fifty-second chapter of Isaiah, and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, with only one mistake,--they would ask me too. A mind should count for something, I thought, but it didn't seem to with Miss Miriam.

Miss Miriam was the a.s.sistant superintendent. She was a tall, thin, youngish-looking woman, with fair hair and a sweet, rather white face.

She always wore very black dresses and a little gold cross, which one of the Big Girls told us was left to her by her mother, who was an Episcopalian. Miss Miriam got up all the entertainments, and it was she who made out the list of the people who were to take part in them. Three or four Sundays before an entertainment was to be given, Miss Miriam would come from the Big Room to our Primary Department with a lot of little white slips in her hand and a pad and pencil. While we were having the closing exercises, she would walk very quietly from cla.s.s to cla.s.s distributing the little white slips. The slips said, 'Please meet me after Sunday school in the Ladies' Parlor.' If you were given a slip, it meant you were chosen to take part.

Once I confided my longing to my mother.

'What makes you want to so much, Martha? You're not a forward little girl, I hope.'

Forwardness in my elders' opinion was the Eighth Deadly Sin, to be abhorred by all little girls, especially those who had heard it said that they had a mind. Little girls who had heard that might so easily, from sheer pride of intellect, become 'forward.'

'I'm not forward,' I a.s.sured her. 'I--I, oh, mother, it's so nice to be in things.'

And now at last I was in things. I could still feel the touch of the white slip which had been put into my hand only that afternoon; and I turned over in my bed on my other side and prayed with even more fervor.

'O Lord, please help my mother to get me a new dress.'

He did. A week later my mother went to town. She brought back white Persian lawn, the softest, sheerest stuff I had ever felt. I could see the pink of my skin through it when I laid it over my hand.

'I'm going to have a new dress for the entertainment,' I told Luella on my way to rehearsal. 'Are you?'

'Why, of course. I always do. Mine's going to have five rows of lace insertion in the skirt and tiny tucks too.'

'Mine's to have tucks, but it won't have but one row of lace in the skirt. Mother says little girls' dresses don't need much lace.'

'I like lots of lace,' said Luella; but her tone of finality did not disturb my happiness. I was disturbed only when, at another rehearsal, Luella told me that her mother was making a blue-silk slip to wear under her white dress. Almost everyone wore slips when they spoke pieces.

I gave my mother this information.

'Isn't the white dress pretty enough, Martha?'

I fingered the soft material she was sewing. 'It's beautiful,' I said, hiding my face in her neck. Then I whispered, 'I don't mind if Luella has a slip, mother.'

I did mind, but I knew I oughtn't.

My mother raised my head and adjusted the bow on one of my skimpy little pigtails. She looked as she did sometimes after my Aunt Emma had just gone.

'We'll see if you can have a slip. What color would you like--supposing you can?'

'Pink,' I answered promptly, 'like my best hair-ribbons.'

Pink china silk was bought. When I tried it under the Persian lawn it matched the ribbons exactly. I jiggled up and down on my toes--my only way of expressing great joy.

The dress, when my mother was not working on it, lay in the spare room on the bed. I made countless pilgrimages to the spare room. Once I slipped the dress on by myself. I wanted to see how I looked. But the mirror of the spare-room bureau was very small; so I inserted a hair-brush. With the mirror tipped I could see quite all of me--only I didn't see quite all. I didn't see my freckles, or my jaw, or my very thin legs. I saw a glory of pink and white, and I grinned from sheer rapture.

The spare room had no heat: there was a register, but unless we had company the register was closed. My mother found me one day kneeling by the bed, shivering, but in ecstatic contemplation of my dress, which I had not dared to try on a second time. She gave me ginger tea. I gulped it down meekly. I felt even then that as a punishment ginger tea is exquisitely relevant. It chastens the soul but at the same time it warms the stomach you've allowed to get cold.

I had been very much afraid that before the night of the entertainment,--it was to be given the twenty-third of December,--something would surely happen to my dress or to me; but the night arrived and both were in a perfect state of preservation. To expedite matters, as the Sunday school was to a.s.semble at a quarter past seven, my mother dressed me before supper. Just as the last b.u.t.ton was fastened, we heard footsteps on the front porch.

'There, Martha! Go show your father.'