FullReads

“Und she says,” he would report, “that nobody dasn’t to steal nothings off of somebody.”

“Then how does she think we shall ever get anything?”

“Somebody shall give it to us.”

“Who?”

“Teacher ain’t said.”

“No, I guess she ain’t. I’d like to see her gettin’ along on just what was give to her.”

“Well,” Isidore remembered, “she says we shall ‘work-un-strive.'”

“She does, does she? An’ git pinched by the Gerry Society? She knows as good as you do that nobody would let you work. An’ she knows as good as you do, too, that craps ain’t safe round here no more; an’ that you just can’t git nothin’ unless you take it. She’s actin’ crazy just to fool you.”

“No, she ain’t,” Isidore maintained, “she don’t know nothings over them things.”

“An’ her grown up,” sneered Hymie; “say, but you’re easy!”

This faith in and affection for Miss Bailey were not confined to the little First Readers who inhabited Room 18 from nine until twelve, and again from one until three. These were Miss Bailey’s official responsibilities, but Gertie Armusheffsky’s education was a private affair, though her devotion was no less wholehearted. Her instruction was carried on sometimes amid the canaries and fern baskets of Room 18, and sometimes at Miss Bailey’s home.

For Gertie, though nearly fifteen years old, was allowed but rare and scanty freedom for the pursuit of learning. The grandfather with whom she lived had imported her from Poland to assist him in the conduct of his little shop in Goerck Street.

He was a miserly old man. The shop was little and mean, and Gertie’s life in it was little and miserly and mean. These things she bore with the wonderful patience or stoicism of her race. She bore, too, bad air, long hours, and uncongenial toil, but she could not bring any resignation to bear on the lovelessness of her life, the squalor, the ugliness.

“I ain’t puttin’ up no kick,” she would assure Miss Bailey, in her newly acquired and strictly modern vernacular, “about doin’ all the woik in the store, an’ in the back room too. Didn’t I know I was comin’ over to cook an’ sew an’ see to everything for him? What gits on my noives is his everlasting grouch.”

“It must be hard,” Miss Bailey acquiesced, “especially as you have no one else, no friends.”

Gertie shook her head. “Ain’t got a friend in the world only you,” said she. “How could I have any one come to see me with him carryin’ on like he does? An’ I can’t get away from him. He paid my way over, an’ if I did git a job the Gerry Society would give me back to him.”

“But you’re nearly old enough now,” Miss Bailey encouraged her, “to do as you please, and you’re getting on so nicely with your reading and writing that you will be able to get a very good position.”

“Not ’til he’s dead,” the girl answered. “I guess you wouldn’t learn me no more if you knew how often I wish he’d choke himself, or fall down cellar, or go out an’ git run over. But he don’t never go out. He says he’s afraid something would happen to the store. But that’s a pipe! What bothers him is the cash he’s got tucked around in crazy places. Every once in a while I fall into some of it, and then he ‘most has a fit explaining how it’s change a customer is comin’ back for. Last year it wasn’t quite so bad. He went to night school one term. You would have died laughing to see him all folded up at a kid’s desk tryin’ to write in a copy book. They learned him to write three words that term, but when he found out that he couldn’t read them in print, it sort of discouraged him, and he stayed home.”

“It’s awfully hard for you,” Miss Bailey repeated, “but you mustn’t let yourself say such things or think such things–about his getting killed, I mean–it’s not”–she found herself on the verge of saying “Christian,” but remembered that Gertie made no pretence to the Christian virtues–“not loving,” she ended, and felt that the meaning of the two words was very much the same.