"Why, Esther," said Jacob quietly in soft Hungarian, "I've been wondering where you were."

The lady mit the from-gold hair laid her other hand on his, smiled a little wearily, and instantly dropped asleep.

"You ain't asked her whose is that baby," his daughter whispered to him. "You ain't asked her did she write letters on that Stork?"

"I guess it's our baby all right," her father answered. "You just carry it down and put it in the bed that's been waiting for it. Tell Mrs.

Moriarty that your auntie was living here all the time."

"Mine auntie!" cried Esther. "Mine auntie! My, but Storks is smart!" she gasped repentantly.

THE ETIQUETTE OF YETTA

"Stands a girl by our block," Eva Gonorowsky began, as she and her friend Yetta Aaronsohn wended their homeward way through the crowded purlieus of Gouverneur and Monroe Streets, "stands a girl by our block what don't never goes on the school."

Yetta was obediently shocked. She had but recently been rescued from a like benightment, but both she and her friend tactfully ignored this fact.

"Don't the Truant Officer gets her?" the convert questioned, remembering her own means to grace, and the long struggle she had made against it.

"Don't the Truant Officer comes on her house und says cheek on her mamma, und brings her--by the hair, maybe--on the school?"

"He don't comes yet," Eva replied.

"Well, he's comin'," Yetta predicted. "He comes all times."

"I guess," commented Eva, "I guess Rosie Rashnowsky needs somebody shall make somethings like that mit her. In all my world I ain't never see how she makes. She don't know what is polite. She puts her on mit funny clothes und 'fer-ladies-shoes.' She is awful fresh, und"--here Eva dropped her voice to a tone proper to a climax--"she dances on organs even."

Now Yetta Aaronsohn, in the days before the Truant Officer and the Renaissance, would have run breathless blocks at the distant lure of a street organ, and would have footed it merrily up and down the sidewalk in all the apparently spontaneous intricacies which make this kind of dancing so absorbing to the performer, and so charming to the audience.

Now, however, she shuddered under the shock of such depravity. School had taught her many things not laid down in the official course of study.

"Ain't that fierce?" she murmured.

Not all subjects of gossip are as confirmative as Rosie Rashnowsky that day proved herself to be. For as Yetta and Eva turned into Clinton Street, Rosie was discovered dancing madly to the strains of a one-legged hurdy-gurdy, in the midst of an envious but not emulating crowd.

"That's her," said Eva briefly. "Sooner you stands on the stoop you shall see her better."

And when the two friends carried out this suggestion and mounted the nearest steps, Eva pointed to what seemed a bundle of inanimate rags.

"It's her baby," she disapprovingly remarked. "She lays it all times on steps. Somebody could to set on it sometimes."

"It's fierce," repeated Yetta, this time with more conviction. She was herself the guardian of three small and ailing sisters, and she knew that they should not be deposited on cold doorsteps. So she picked up Rosie's abandoned responsibility, and turned to survey that conscienceless Salome.

Rosie was, as a dancer should be, startlingly arrayed. Her long black-stockinged little legs ended in "fer-ladies-shoes" described by Eva. Her hair bobbed wildly in four tight little braids, each tied with a ribbon or a strip of cloth of a different color, and the rest of her visible attire consisted of a dirty kimona dressing-jacket, red with yellow flowers, and outlined with bands of green. The "fer-ladies-shoes"

poised and pointed and twinkled in time to the wheezing of the one-legged hurdy-gurdy. The parti-colored braids waved free. The kimona flapped and fluttered and permitted indiscreet glimpses of a less gorgeous substructure.

Miss Gonorowsky regarded these excesses with a cold and disapproving eye. "She don't know what is _fer_ her," she remarked. "My mamma, she wouldn't to leave me dance by no organs. It ain't fer ladies."

"It's fierce," agreed Miss Aaronsohn, with a gulp, "it's something fierce."

The hurdy-gurdy coughed its way to the end of one tune, held its breath for an asthmatic moment, and then wailed into "The Sidewalks of New York." Fresh and amazing energy possessed the hair ribbons, the kimona, and the "fer-ladies-shoes." Fresh disdain possessed Miss Gonorowsky. The tune would have seemed also to work havoc upon the new propriety of Miss Aaronsohn.

"It's something fierce," she once more remarked, and then casting decorum to the winds, and the abandoned young Rashnowsky to Miss Gonorowsky's care, she sped down the steps, through the crowd and out into the ring.

Rosie, though she had never seen Miss Aaronsohn before, recognized her talent instantly, and welcomed her partnership with an ecstatic combination of the Cake Walk and the Highland Fling. Yetta returned the compliment in a few steps of the Barn Dance flavored with a dash of the Irish Jig. Then eye to eye, and hands on one another's shoulders, they fell to "spieling," with occasional Polka divertis.e.m.e.nts.

A pa.s.sing stranger stopped to watch them and gave the organ-man largesse, so that still he played, and still they danced until called back to duty and reality by the uproar of the baby, now thrice abandoned. For Eva Gonorowsky had gone virtuously home, feeling that her traditions had been outraged, her friendship despised, and that her disciple had disgraced her.

Yetta and Rosie with the heavy-headed baby followed the organ for several blocks. They might have gone on forever like the Pied Piper's rats, had not the howls of the youngest Rashnowsky anch.o.r.ed and steadied them. When at last they had recovered breath and the proprieties, they sat amicably down upon an alien doorstep, and went back to the early--and in their case neglected--preliminaries of friendship.

They exchanged names, ages, addresses, the numbers of their family, and their own places in the scale. The baby had obligingly gone to sleep, and these amenities were carried out in due form. It seemed that they were bound by many similarities of circ.u.mstance and fate: each was the eldest of a family, but whereas Rosie could boast but one baby, Yetta's mother had three. Both mothers worked at low and ill-paid branches of the tailor's art. And both children were fatherless to all daily intents and purposes.

"Mine papa," Yetta told her new little friend, "is pedlar-mans on the country. Me und mine mamma don't know where he is even. From long we ain't got no letters off of him, und no money. My mamma, she has awful sads over it."

"Does she cry?" questioned the sympathetic Rosie, drawing her kimona closely about her in the enjoyment of this new and promising gossip.

Yetta shook her head. "She ain't got no time she shall cry. So my papa don't comes, und letters mit money off of him don't comes. My mamma, she ain't got time for nothings on'y sewing. She has it pretty hard."

"My mamma is got it hard too," cried Rosie, not to be outdone. "She don't know where my papa is neither. She don't know is he on the country even. She don't know _nothings_ over him. Me und my mamma we looks all times on blocks und streets und stores. On'y we couldn't to find him.

Und my mamma, she works all day by factories, und by night she comes on the house und brings more work. She ain't got time for nothings neither, on'y sewing und looking fer my poor papa."

"Then your papa ain't dead?" queried Yetta.

"No, he ain't dead; on'y he loses him the job." Rosie's voice as she made this statement, and Yetta's manner as she received it, would seem to say that if this were not death, it was very little better.

To Isidore Rashnowsky it had been the "sudden and unprovided death" of which the Prayer Book speaks. It had meant the destruction of the very delicate equilibrium by which he and his wife maintained their tiny but peaceful household. It threw the whole burden of four lives upon Mrs.

Rashnowsky's thin and twisted shoulders. It drove him, after three weeks of unsuccessful quest for work, to cut himself off from all he cared for. Starvation was very close to them. He could contribute nothing, and he determined to take nothing: to increase the n.i.g.g.ardly supply by diminishing the hungry demand. Mrs. Rashnowsky's earnings--even when augmented by the home work which the law forbids but life demands--was scant indeed for the maintenance of the mother and the two children. All these things Isidore explained to her patiently, resignedly, and with what bravery he could muster. And she agreed, nodding wearily over her sewing. But from his conclusion, from his determination to remove himself and his hunger from her charge, she persistently dissented.

Rather, she insisted, would she take the babies to the Children's Court and get them committed to some inst.i.tution. Then he and she could face the world together. She could find courage for that. But not to live without him. Never for that.

"It is but for a time," he hopefully remonstrated, "and if we give the children we cannot easily get them back. Children such as ours are not often found. They would be adopted by some rich man before, maybe, I could find a job."

This consideration had not occurred to Mrs. Rashnowsky, but when it was pointed out to her she was forced to admit its weight. The physical charm of Rosie, kimona clad and dirty, might not have appealed as insistently as her father feared to the rich adopter, and the rag-wrapped baby would have been equally safe. But to Mrs. Rashnowsky's fear and pride, to see these infants was to covet them.

And so, tearfully, fearfully, she promised to think again of Isidore's proposal. She thought all night, and all through the hurried, steaming, driven day at the factory. When at last she was free she toiled home to tell him that she could not do without him, and found that he had gone.

All these things had happened, as Rosie told her new friend, three months before. The mother had been forced into smaller, darker, cheaper quarters, and it was this transition which had so far saved Rosie from the Truant Officer. They had moved from one school district to another, and the authorities of their new habitat had not yet tracked the light-falling "fer-ladies-shoes."

"But that Truant Officer will get you sure," warned Yetta. "He comes in my house and he gets me, und makes me I shall go on the school."

"He can go on mine house all he likes," responded the lawless Rosie, making careful inventory of her hair ribbons the while, "all he likes he can go. There ain't never n.o.body there. My mamma she is all times on factories, und me und the baby is all times by the street. I don't needs I shall go on no school. I ain't got time."

"He'll get you on a rainy day," maintained Ca.s.sandra.

But the dread official never did discover Rosie. She was sufficiently wise to avoid any public display of her red and yellow charms until after school hours, unless she were well out of her own district. She would follow street organs and behave like any other member of a decorous audience until she was well out of the path of the ravening Truant Officer. Then she would abandon the baby to the cold stones, and herself to the enchantment of the music. Thus she achieved that freedom of which her adopted country boasts, and for which Yetta Aaronsohn--though basking in the rays of a free education, with lunches, medical attendance, and spectacles thrown in--still yearned.

There had been a time when life had been to Yetta, even as it now was to Rosie, a simple matter of loving and helping her mother, taking care of the babies, and dancing to the organs in the street. Then entered the Truant Officer, and life became a complicated affair of manners, dress, books, washing, and friendships, with every day new laws to be met, new ideas to be a.s.similated, old pleasures and employments to be thrown aside.