A Bent Twig
by
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?
Strolling through Gouverneur Street upon a Friday afternoon when the whole East Side is in a panic of shopping, he had seen a bewigged and beshawled matron shed a purse and pass on her way unheeding. Promptly Abraham set his foot upon it, carefully and casually he picked it up, and then, all inconveniently, he remembered Miss Bailey and her admonitions! Miss Bailey and her anecdotes of boys who, in circumstances identical with his, had chosen the path of honor, and had found it to lead to riches, approbation, glory, and self-righteousness.
Abraham opened the purse. It contained fifteen cents. He appropriated the nickel as a first instalment of the reward so soon to be his, and then sped fleetly–as Miss Bailey’s heroes had ever done–after the brown-shawled matron and glory. But the matron had evidently not been trained in the school of high honor. She regarded Abraham with suspicion rather than with gratitude. She examined the purse in the same spirit, and her investigations led to loud outcries upon her part, and to swift flight upon Abraham’s.
Abraham Wishnewsky was so ill-advised as to confide the details of this adventure to a young gentleman who rejoiced in a rabbit face, close-set lashless eyes, and the name of Isidore Cohen. Isidore was new to Room 18, and new to his place beside the gentle Abraham. Miss Bailey and her applied ethics were startlingly new to him. And he never reported to Abraham any effort to experiment in revolutionary doctrines.
Some of the more credulous among the feminine First Readers also weighed these precepts in the balance and found them wanting.
“You know how Teacher says,” Sarah Schodsky remarked to Bertha Binderwitz, as the two friends, arms intertwined, heads close together, walked and talked in the yard at the recess hour. “You know how she says we dasen’t never to tell no lies.”
Bertha nodded. “That’s how she says,” she agreed.
“Well,” resumed Sarah, “you see how Mamie Untermeyer don’t comes no more on the school?”
Bertha had remarked this absence.
“Well, Mamie she lives by her auntie. She is got a awful auntie. Und she asks her auntie for a penny for buy hokey pokey. Und her auntie makes a mean laugh und says, ‘What you think I am, anyway?’ und Mamie, she tells it right out what she thinks over her auntie, like Teacher says, ‘We shall all times tell what we thinks.’ She lays on the bed now mit bangages on the head. It ain’t so awful healthy you shall tell truths on aunties.”
This report also reached the rabbit ears of Isidore Cohen. And again he wondered that Miss Bailey should waste her time–and his–in folly.
And then he made an amazing discovery. Teacher actually believed what she taught. She was ready to meet confidence with trust, and to practise what she preached.
“I never seen nothing like it,” he reported to his friend, Hymie Solomon. “She looks like she knew a awful lot, but she don’t know nothings ‘tall.”
“What do you suppose is the matter with her?” demanded Hymie. “Miss Blake, she don’t act crazy. She don’t give us no talk ‘out no sense.”
Now Hymie and Isidore were old friends and cronies. In the days before a Truant Officer and their distracted fathers had consigned them to school, Hymie and he had trod the ways which might have led them to the Children’s Court and the Reformatory; but the Board of Education chanced to be the first power that laid hands upon them, and Hymie, who was a year older than his friend, and who had once undergone some intermittent education, was put in Miss Blake’s class, while Isidore, virgin soil where prescribed learning was concerned, joined the First Readers. Miss Bailey’s teachings as reported by Isidore formed amazing subjects for conversation.