FullReads

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 pronounced 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 classmate. 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, passed 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.”

“But you can’t, honey. You’re too big,” said Miss Bailey. “You just stop crying for your lost youth and try to make the best of Room 19.”

“But we don’t likes that room,” cried Morris Mowgelewsky, ex-monitor of Miss Bailey’s Gold Fish Bowl. “It don’t stands no fish theaytre in it nor no flowers. Nathan Spiderwitz, he has awful mads over it” (Nathan Spiderwitz had been Monitor of Miss Bailey’s window-boxes), “und Patrick Brennan says maybe his papa could to arrest Missis Blake. She says cheek on him. She calls him Irisher.”

“Oh, no!” remonstrated Miss Bailey.

“Teacher, yiss ma’am, she says cheek,” Morris maintained. “She says cheek on all of us; she says we is Bailey’s Babies. She says it on Miss Rosen. Me und Nathan, we hears how she says on her. ‘What you think I got?’ she says on Miss Rosen, und Miss Rosen, she says, ‘she don’t knows,’ und Missis Blake, she says, ‘I got a bunch of Bailey’s Babies.'”

“Then you must have been bad, Morris,” Miss Bailey reproved him; “you must have been behaving like babies.”

“Teacher, no ma’am,” Morris answered. “We don’t make nothings like that. She makes Eva Gonorowsky und Yetta Aaronsohn shall stand in corners the whiles they cries. She says, ‘What is mit them?’ und they says, ‘They likes they shall look upon your face,’ und extra she stands them in corners. She is awful cross teachers! Und anyway, she’s too big.”

Although Miss Bailey appreciated this tribute she could understand Miss Blake’s failure to do so, and she explained to Morris that, upon pain of being instantly cast out from her heart of hearts, he must learn to love Miss Blake.

But Morris had had a severe lesson in the perils of unrequited affection, and at the age of seven had formulated the axiom, “It’s a foolishness you shall make what is lovin’ mit somebody sooner somebody don’t makes what is lovin’ mit you,” and Miss Bailey found it difficult to induce him to regard Miss Blake with affection.

Other members of the former cabinet and staff were equally refractory, and at three o’clock every afternoon, save on the regrettably frequent occasions when Miss Blake was obliged to require their continued presence in Room 19, they flocked back to their old posts of duty. They fell upon the window-boxes, the aquarium, the pencils, and the blackboards with endearments and caresses, and they utterly swept away and annihilated the slow-footed new-comers whom Miss Bailey was trying to initiate in their duties. A clumsy boy named David Boskowitz had succeeded to the portfolio of Gold Fishes. Now a gold fish, even of eighteen-carat quality, is not warranted to endure the endearments and refreshments lavished upon it by fifty emotional members of a race whose ancestors once wandered to adoration of a Golden Calf. During Morris’s tenure of office Miss Bailey had frequently been obliged to renew his charges. And some mysterious tragedy was played in the fish theatre one night shortly after David Boskowitz took office. Morris, slipping into Room 18 before school hours, to bestow a defunct carnation upon Teacher, found a gold fish floating, wrong side up, among the seaweed in the shining bowl.