Part 5 (1/2)

Bennie came into the kitchen chewing his reward, some very gummy confection. He was obliged to look the pent-up things he wanted to say, until such time as he could clear his clogged talking-gear.

'Teacher,' he began, before he had finished swallowing, 'What for did you say--'

'Bennie!' his mother reproved him, 'You must shame yourself to listen by the door.'

'Well, there wasn't any trade, ma,' he defended himself, 'only Bessie Katz, and she brought back the peppermints she bought this morning, to change them for taffy, but I didn't because they were all dirty, and one was broken--'

Bennie never had a chance to bring his speeches to a voluntary stop: somebody always interrupted. This time it was his father, who came down the stairs, looking so grave that even Bennie was impressed.

'He's awake,' said Mr. Rudinsky. 'I lighted the lamp. Will you please come up, ma'am?'

He showed her to the room where David lay, and closed the door on them both. It was not he, but Miss Ralston, the American teacher, that his boy needed. He went softly down to the kitchen, where his wife smiled at him through unnecessary tears.

Miss Ralston never forgot the next hour, and David never forgot. The woman always remembered how the boy's eyes burned through the dusk of the shadowed corner where he lay. The boy remembered how his teacher's voice palpitated in his heart, how her cool hands rested on his, how the lamplight made a halo out of her hair. To each of them the dim room with its scant furnis.h.i.+ngs became a spiritual rendezvous.

What did the woman say, that drew the sting of remorse from the child's heart, without robbing him of the bloom of his idealism? What did she tell him that trans.m.u.ted the offense of ages into the marrow and blood of persecuted virtue? How did she weld in the boy's consciousness the sc.r.a.ps of his mixed inheritance, so that he saw his whole experience as an unbroken thing at last? There was n.o.body to report how it was done.

The woman did not know nor the child. It was a secret born of the boy's need and the woman's longing to serve him; just as in nature every want creates its satisfaction.

When she was ready to leave him, Miss Ralston knelt for a moment at David's bedside, and once more took his small hot hands in hers.

'And I have made a discovery, David,' she said, smiling in a way of her own. 'Talking with your parents downstairs I saw why it was that the Russian Jews are so soon at home here in our dear country. In the hearts of men like your father, dear, is the true America.'

BLUE REEFERS

BY ELIZABETH ASHE

'THE child will have to have a new dress if she's to take part in the Christmas entertainment.'

My mother spoke very low, so as not to wake me, but I heard her. I had been too excited to fall asleep.

'Of course,' said my father in his big voice that never could get down to a whisper.

'S-sh,' warned my mother; and then added, 'But we shouldn't get it, George. You know what the last doctor's bill amounted to.'

'Oh, let the little thing have it. It's her first chance to show off.'

'S-sh,' my mother warned again. After a moment I heard her say, 'Well, perhaps it won't cost so very much, and as you say it's the first time.'

I turned over in bed and prayed, 'Dear Lord, please help my mother to get me a new dress.' For a new dress was one of the chief joys of taking part, and I had longed so to take part.

Although I had been a member of our Sunday school in good and regular standing ever since I was three weeks old, and had been put on the Cradle Roll, that being in the eyes of my parents the nearest approach to dedication allowable to Baptists, I was taking part for the first time, and I was seven. There had been numerous occasions in these seven years for taking part: our Sunday school celebrated Easter, Children's Day, Anniversary Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, with quite appropriate exercises. But it was a large school, and I had freckles and what Aunt Emma, my cousin Luella's mother, called 'that child's jaw.'

Aunt Emma meant my front teeth, which were really most dreadfully prominent: in fact they stuck out to such an extent that Aunt Emma seldom failed to see them when she saw me.

Aunt Emma wasn't used to children with jaws. Her little Luella had the prettiest teeth imaginable: she was pretty all over, pretty golden hair, pretty blue eyes, pretty pink cheeks,--not a freckle,--and pretty arms very plump and white. She was just my age, and she was invariably asked to take part. It seemed reasonable that she should, and yet I felt that if they only knew that I had a mind,--a mind was what an uncle once said I had, after hearing me recite the one hundred and third Psalm, the fifty-second chapter of Isaiah, and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, with only one mistake,--they would ask me too. A mind should count for something, I thought, but it didn't seem to with Miss Miriam.

Miss Miriam was the a.s.sistant superintendent. She was a tall, thin, youngish-looking woman, with fair hair and a sweet, rather white face.