Little Aliens Part 9

It was at about this time that Miss Bailey in her unofficial capacity accepted an invitation to a costume dance. Looking through old trunks and long-neglected shelves, she came upon a little tight-fitting shoulder cape of prehistoric date and fashion. It was such a cape as you can find in some of Du Maurier's drawings. It pinned the wearer's arms to her side, it gagged her tightly around the throat, it was of velvet, and its color was royal blue.

Constance Bailey, peering back into the dim vista of the years, could remember the pride and happiness which she had felt when her over-indulgent grandmother had given her, then a child of about twelve, this gorgeous garment. She could remember how it had dwarfed and faded the rest of her wardrobe, how she had wept to wear it upon all possible and impossible occasions, and how tragic had been the moment when it refused to meet across her loving breast.

Here, she thought triumphantly, was something before which the Zabrowsky spirit would break down. It did not in any way suggest the useful, serviceable, humiliating, charitable devotion. It was gay and festive, palpably a gift, and Teacher, with many misgivings but some hope, submitted it to Becky's consideration. She represented that she had herself outgrown it, that she had no costume with which it could appropriately be worn, that it was menaced by moths, a prey to creases, and a responsibility under which she could no longer find peace or security. Under the circ.u.mstances, she pleaded, would Becky relieve her of it? And Becky was delighted, translated, enchanted. She would never allow that cape to hang with the ordinary outdoor apparel of the other members of the cla.s.s. It rested in her desk when she was busy, and she lulled it in her arms when she was not. Before coming into this shining fortune she had been rather looked down upon by other members of the cla.s.s, and had avoided publicity in every possible way. She had with chattering teeth and livid lips a.s.sured her more warmly clad cla.s.smates that she was "all times too hot on the skin," and that her mamma considered her Sunday coat too stylish to wear at school. But, girded in blue velvet, she was another child. Once the most retiring of the cla.s.s, she now became the least so. Once the most studious, she now yearned to be sent on outpost duty, on small shopping expeditions for her teacher, to the Princ.i.p.al's office, or to other cla.s.s rooms with notes or with new students. And upon all these expeditions she wore an air of conscious correctness and the royal-blue velvet cape. She had once been the most truthful of small persons, but the glory of the cape tinged everything, and she allowed the other children to infer--nay, she even definitely stated--that this was the Sunday coat earlier referred to, and that she was wearing it to school because it had been superseded by another even more wonderful. Her auditors were too impressed to be unconvinced, and, to cover her very literal nakedness in every other respect, she invented for herself an entirely new disease.

"Say, Becky," one of the little girls in her cla.s.s asked her, "don't you never put yourself on mit underwear nor underclothes? Ain't you scared you should to get cold in your bones? My mamma, she puts me on mit all from wool underwear--costs twenty-seven cents a suit by Grand Street--and I puts them on when the school opens, and I don't takes them off to the fourth of July."

"Oh," retorted Becky, with more truth than she knew, "it ain't so awful healthy you should make like that. My mamma says it is healthy for me the wind shall come on my skin. She says sooner no wind comes outside of your skin, no blood could go inside of your skin. And don't you know how teacher says what somebody what ain't got blood going in them is dead ones?"

"Und you _likes_," marvelled her friend, "you _likes_ the wind shall blow on you?"

"Sure," lied Becky, with a shiver, and she certainly had her wish.

But these appearances were only kept up for the eyes of the common herd.

In the sanctuary of Teacher's confidence she was more unreserved, and whenever she could secure that young lady's kind ear, she bombarded it with grat.i.tude and with reports of the impression made in the neighborhood of her one-roomed home by the shining splendor of that precious gift.

"Sooner I comes on mine house," she reported, "sooner all the ladies opens the doors and rubbers on mine cape. Sooner I walks by my block all the children wants I shall let them wear it. Only I won't let n.o.body wear it the while it is a present off of you."

"That's very nice of you," smiled Miss Bailey, not surprised at this new delicacy of feeling in so small and unfortunate and sorely tried a heart. "Very nice of you indeed."

"Sure I won't let anybody wear it," reiterated Becky, "not 'out they pays me a penny for walkin' up and down the block, and two cents for walkin' all round the block mit mine stylish from-plush cape."

"Of course not," Teacher agreed, hastily adjusting herself to this standard of right dealing.

"No, ma'am," said Becky. "I should never leave n.o.body have nothings what you gives me 'out they pays me good. The lady of our floor, she goes on a dancing-ball over yesterday, and she wants I shall leave her put her on mit mine cape--she's a awful little lady--only she don't wants she shall pay me. Und so I ain't let her take it, the while you gives it to me, and I am loving much mit you."

A teacher who gains the confidence of her small charges, even to a slight degree, is sure to be made familiar with their family history unto the third or fourth generation. And so Teacher knew that the poverty of Becky's home life was embittered and made even harder to bear by the contrasting elegance of an aunt, who lived, amid rank and fashion, in the "tony" purlieus of Cherry Street. Her abode consisted, according to her smarting small relative, of "a room and a closet," a lavish and extravagant area for a household as small as hers.

"Why," Becky informed Miss Bailey, with upturned palms, upscrewed shoulders, and upturned eyes, "my aunt, she ain't got only five children and three boarders!"

It had been the habit of this rich and fashionable dame to pay visits of state and ceremony to her less fortunate sister-in-law, whose abode differed from hers only by the subtraction of the room. There, in the chaste consciousness of an incredible wig and an impenetrable shawl, she would monopolize many hundreds of cubic feet of s.p.a.ce and air; indulge in conversations of the elegant and fashionable kind, which, so Becky reported to her teacher, "makes the tears in my mamma's eyes, and gives my papa shamed feelings," and caused an epidemic of ill-temper, with resulting slaps and kicks and yelling among her nephews and nieces.

"And what you think?" Becky had sadly added; "she says like that all times on my mamma, out of Jewish, she says: 'Why don't you never come over for see me?' Und my mamma, she says all times, mit more tears in the eyes--bend down your head, Teacher. I likes I shall whisper mit you in your ear--she couldn't come the whiles she ain't got nothing she could wear on the block. My papa has fierce feelings over it. He says like that, his sister--that's my aunt--is awful nosy."

Teacher often pondered as to whether it were possible, or even desirable, to provide the means to more frequent intercourse between the two families. She knew that this would mean shopping; that any article of her own apparel, or that of any of her friends, would be inadequate to enshroud the matronly form of Becky's mother, for years of confinement to the house, years of sedentary occupation, and years of ill-considered and ill-adapted diet had co-operated to produce almost geographical outlines in Mrs. Zabrowsky. Mountains, valleys, promontories, and plains seemed the terms most suitable to describe her, and she looked about as movable as these natural formations. Teacher thought of waiting until Christmas time, and of then doing something anonymously. Meanwhile the episode of the cape occurred, and some weeks later Becky reported with triumph:

"Teacher, what you think?" this was always her opening phrase; "my stylish aunt by Cherry Street, she goes and has a party, und my papa he goes on the party, und my mamma, she goes by my papa's side."

"Then she bought a shawl," cried Teacher. "I am ever and ever so glad."

Becky shook her head.

"No, ma'am, she don't needs she shall buy no shawl. She puts her on mit mine blue from-plush cape."

A vision of Becky's mother rose before Teacher's eyes, flanked by another of the tiny cape, and she laughed.

"But that is impossible, my dear. She couldn't."

"Teacher, she does."

"But, Becky," cried Teacher, "how could she? You know that the cape is too small for me, and it is only the right size for you, and you know your mamma is twice as big as both of us. So how could she wear it, dear? It never could have hooked up the front."

"No, ma'am, it didn't hook," Becky admitted. "My mamma's back needs the most of it, und in front it don't fits very good, only that makes mit my mamma nothings. She goes on my nosy auntie's party mit proud feelings, the while she knows how her back is stylish. Und in the front where the cape don't goes, my mamma, she wears my little sister."

"What!" gasped my friend. "What did you say she wore in the front?"

"She wears the baby," Becky repeated. "Und my nosy auntie's awful fresh.

She says like that on my mamma: 'Don't you likes you shall lay the baby down by the bed?' She says like that, the while she knows my mamma ain't got capes only in back, und she wants my mamma shall have shamed feelings before all the peoples what is on the party. Und my mamma, she says like that, just as smart, she says: 'No, I guess I don't likes I shall lay my baby on no strange beds. It ain't healthy, maybe.' And she holds the baby, and n.o.body knows how the front from that cape is, und my mamma enjoyed a pleasant time, and my papa had a proud."

"BAILEY'S BABIES"

"Miss Bailey," said Miss Blake, entering Room 18 during the lunch hour 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 gla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 cla.s.smate.

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, pa.s.sed 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."