Little Aliens Part 11

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 Pinc.i.p.al 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 repet.i.tion 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 n.o.body 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "What you think we got to our house?"]

"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 G.o.d 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, G.o.d 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 a.s.sistant.

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 s.p.a.cious halls and staircase, its high ceilings and wide chimneys were all so many waste s.p.a.ces 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 alt.i.tudes 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 Princ.i.p.al 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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, "G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 subst.i.tuted--"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."