Immigrant children -- Fiction; Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Teachers -- Fiction
Well, Patrick followed her. It was the first command of hers to which he
had given favorable ear. He even went with alacrity--and the novices in
the Second Reader gazed wildly upon one another. They may not have been
quick to memorize incomprehensible and unexplained "memory gems," or to
carry in their heads long strings of figures unconnected with anything
in sea or sky. But Miss Bailey's training had made them experts in
recognizing cause and effect, and such an epidemic of lawlessness and
mischief swept over Room 19 as even Miss Blake's ten years' experience
had never paralleled. "Bailey's Babies" went suddenly and unanimously to
the dogs. The energy which they had expended in being "'moted" was as
nothing to the delirious determination with which they fought for
retrogradation. They dutifully called to mind all Miss Bailey's
precepts, and then crashed through them, one by one. They fell from
grace, from truth, from cleanliness, from all the moral heights upon
which Teacher had perched them, and, as they fell, they set in motion
the machinery provided by the Board of Education. Mesdames Gonorowsky,
Mowgelewsky and Borrachsohn, and other matrons began to find the tenor
of their days interrupted by incomprehensible post-cards, and a
regrettably comprehensible Truant Officer. "Bailey's Babies" were
running amuck, and their cries as they committed moral hara-kiri echoed
as far as the marble halls of the Board of Education on remote Park
Avenue.
Mrs. Gonorowsky paid the exorbitant price of a cent to have her official
postcard read by an interpreter. Neighbors volunteered for this service,
but she would have none of them. She wanted an authoritative reading,
and having got it, she sat down to await the return of Eva.
"So-o-oh," ran the maternal greeting, "you comes three times late on the
school mit dirty faces." Eva hung her guilty head. "And I wash you every
day the face, und send you on the block plenty time? Hein?" Eva nodded
the guilty head. "Und now comes such a card from off the school sayin'
how you comes late und dirty, und the Principal, he wants he shall see
me to-morrow, quarter after three." A silence followed these thunderous
words. Eva's guilt engulfed her, although hers was the clearest
conscience among all the candidates for return tickets. Her gentle
spirit had been unequal to the orgy in which braver souls were
wallowing.
"I wants," she whispered now, "I wants I shall be put back. I don't
likes it by Miss Blakeses room. I ain't monitors off of nothings, und
Miss Blake she hollers on me, und Patrick he is put back. I likes I
shall be put back too."
"Sooner you feels like that," said Mrs. Gonorowsky with sound logic,
"why aind you stayed back by Miss Bailey's room? Aind you told me how
you wants you shall be 'moted, and learn off a new book?"
"Not 'out Miss Bailey," Eva protested. "I couldn't to learn 'out Miss
Bailey. I want Miss Bailey shall be 'moted too."
"Und why ain't she 'moted?" demanded the voice of reason.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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