PAGE 5
A Passport To Paradise
by
“But Patrick Brennan always takes care of the children when I am not in the room.”
“He marches first by the line too. He’s two monitors.”
“He truly is,” agreed Miss Bailey. “Well, I shall let you try that some day.”
It was a most disastrous experiment. The First Reader Class, serenely good under the eye of Patrick Brennan, who wore one of the discarded brass buttons of his sire pinned to the breast of his shirt-waist, found nothing to fear or to obey in his supplanter, and Miss Bailey returned to her kingdom to find it in an uproar and her regent in tears.
“I don’t likes it. I don’t likes it,” Yetta wailed. “All the boys shows a fist on me. All the girls makes a snoot on me. All the childrens say cheek on me. I don’t likes it. I don’t likes it.”
“Then you sha’n’t do it again,” Teacher comforted her. “You needn’t be a monitor if you don’t wish.”
“But I likes I shall be monitors. On’y not that kind from monitors.”
“If you can think of something you would enjoy I shall let you try again. But it must be something, dear, that no one is doing for me.”
But Yetta could think of nothing until one afternoon when she was sitting at Teacher’s desk during a Swedish drill. All about her were Teacher’s things. Her large green blotter, her “from gold” inkstand and pens, her books where Fairies lived. Miss Bailey was standing directly in front of the desk and encouraging the First Reader Class–by command and example–to strenuous waving of arms and bending of bodies.
“Forward bend!” commanded, and bent, Miss Bailey and her buttoned-in-back-waist followed the example of less fashionable models, shed its pearl buttons in a shower upon the smooth blotter and gave Yetta the inspiration for which she had been waiting. She gathered the buttons, extracted numerous pins from posts of trust in her attire, and when Miss Bailey had returned to her chair, gently set about repairing the breach.
“What is it?” asked Miss Bailey. Yetta, her mouth full of pins, exhibited the buttons.
“Dear me! All those off!” exclaimed Teacher. “It was good of you to arrange it for me. And now will you watch it? You’ll tell me if it should open again?”
Yetta had then disposed the pins to the best advantage and was free to voice her triumphant:
“Oh, I knows now how I wants I should be monitors! Teacher, mine dear Teacher, could I be monitors off of the back of your dress?”
“But surely, you may,” laughed Teacher, and Yetta entered straightway into the heaven of fulfilled desire.
None of Eva’s descriptions of the joys of monitorship had done justice to the glad reality. After common mortals had gone home at three o’clock, Room 18 was transformed into a land where only monitors and love abounded. And the new monitor was welcomed by the existing staff, for she had supplanted no one, and was so palpitatingly happy that Patrick Brennan forgave her earlier usurpation of his office and Nathan Spiderwitz bestowed upon her the freedom of the window boxes.
“Ever when you likes you should have a crawley bug from off of the flowers; you tell me und I’ll catch one fer you. I got lots. I don’t need ’em all.”
“I likes I shall have one now,” ventured Yetta, and Nathan ensnared one and put it in her hand where it “crawlied” most pleasingly until Morris Mogilewsky begged it for his Gold-Fish in their gleaming “fish theaytre.” Then Eva shared with her friend and protege the delight of sharpening countless blunted and bitten pencils upon a piece of sand-paper.
“Say,” whispered Yetta as they worked busily and dirtily, “Say, I’m monitors now. On’y I ain’t got no papers.”
“You ask her. She’ll give you one.”
“I’d have a shamed the while she gives me und my mamma whole bunches of things already. She could to think, maybe, I’m a greedy. But I needs that paper awful much. I needs I shall go on the country for see mine papa.”