FullReads

With howls he pointed it out to Miss Bailey. Together they retrieved it. Then Teacher wrapped it reverently in tissue paper and commissioned Morris to go forth and give it decent burial in the nearest ash barrel.

But Morris did nothing of the kind. He carried it about with him for days, and stirred up sentiments of wildest revolution in the hot hearts of his contemporaries by showing them the limp body of their pet, foully done to death by “them new kids what Teacher had.”

Miss Blake found “Bailey’s Babies” astonishingly unmanageable. The difficulty lay in the different conception of the art of teaching held by these two exponents. Miss Bailey, as has been said, was of the garden school. She regarded the children as plants, knowledge as water; her part in the scheme of things to understudy the sunshine, and to coax the plants to absorb the water. Miss Blake was of the carpenter school. She held that facts were hard and straight; minds not quite so hard, and never straight; her duty to saw and bore, sand-paper and file the minds until the facts could be smoothly glued upon them.

“Bailey’s Babies” felt this difference though they did not understand it. In fact life was getting generally incomprehensible. For were not Hymie Solomon, the greenhorn, who had not yet learned English, Jakey Fishandler, who was so bad that no teacher except Miss Bailey would have him in her class, and Becky Zalmanowsky, who–though the First Readers did not appreciate it–was a perfect type of the criminal idiot, were not these allowed to bask in Miss Bailey’s presence, while self-respecting, hard-working First Readers were thrown into outer darkness?

There was, indeed, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and, contributed by Patrick Brennan, an uninterrupted flow of minor disturbances and insubordinations, culminating in a heated interview between Miss Blake and the Principal, in which the lady insisted that Patrick was making discipline impossible, that his writing was a blot upon civilization, and that he should be returned whence he came.

The beginning of every term is marked by several such falls from grace on the part of erstwhile model pupils, who do not easily adjust themselves to their new environment. The Principal was surprised but complacent, and very formally on the next morning Miss Blake delivered her ultimatum to that unruly son of the Kings of Ulster and the policeman on the beat. Its immediate cause was the unoffending but offensive gold fish. For three days it had preached its silent sermon of sedition and puzzled the olfactory nerves of Miss Blake, who after ten years of East Side teaching had flattered herself that she was beyond any new sensation of that nature. After a heated interview which led to the disintegration of the venerable corse, Miss Blake gathered her black serge draperies closely about her and issued her command.

“Take your things,” said she; “I won’t have you in this room another minute.” Patrick’s eyes grew large, he hesitated about returning to the paternal and official roof-tree with the tidings that he had been expelled. “Take your hat and everything you own and come with me.”

Patrick gathered together a miscellaneous collection, consisting of a wad of chewing-gum, the soul of a mouth-organ, a cap, and one rubber overshoe, and prepared to march upon East Broadway.

“You are a disgrace to the school,” said Miss Blake loftily, “and I am going to take you to the only place you are fit for–back to the First Reader Class. We’ll see what Miss Bailey will say to you, young man.”

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.