Little Citizens | Page 8

of his will to walk
decorously in front. Decorously, too, he marched them back again, and
stood idly talking to Leah at the steps of her tenement while the twins
escaped to their enjoyments.
When waiting milk-cans were thrown into cellars, when the wheels of
momentarily deserted wagons were loosened, when pushcarts
disappeared, when children bent on shopping were waylaid and robbed,
when cats were tortured, horses' manes clipped, windows broken,
shop-keepers enraged, babies frightened, and pit-falls set upon the
stairs, the cry was always, "Them Yonowsky devils." Leah could do
nothing with them. Mr. Yonowsky made no effort to control them, and
Aaron Kastrinsky was not always there. Not half, not a quarter as often
as he wished, for Leah promptly turned away from all his attempts to
make her understand how greatly she would gain in peace and comfort
if she would but marry him. They would move to a larger flat and he

would manage the boys. But Leah's view of life and marriage was
tinged with no glory of romance. She had no illusions, no ignorances,
and she was afraid, she told her suitor, afraid.
"But of what?" asked the puzzled Aaron. "Thou canst not be afraid of
me. Thou knowest how dear thou art to me. What canst thou fear?"
"I'm afraid of being married," was her ultimatum. She confessed that
she loved no one else--she had never, poor child, known anyone else to
love; she admitted the allurements of the larger flat and the strong hand
always ready for the twins, was delighted to go with him to lectures at
the Educational Alliance when her father could be aroused to
responsible charge of the twins, rejoiced when he prospered in the
world and exchanged the push-cart for a permanent fruit-stand--she
even assisted at its decoration--but to marry him she was afraid. Yes,
she liked him; yes, she would walk with him--and the twins--along
Grand Street in the early evening. Yes, she would wear her red dress
since he admired it; but to marry him--ah, no! Please, no! she was
afraid of being married.
Aaron was by birth and in his own country one of the learned class, and
he promptly set about supplementing Leah's neglected education. She
had lived so solitary a life that her Russian remained pure and soft and
was quite distinct from the mixture of Yiddish, German, English, and
slang which her neighbours spoke. English, which she read easily, she
spoke rarely and haltingly, and Jewish in a prettily pedantic manner,
learned from her mother, whose father had been a Rabbi. Aaron lent
her books in these three languages, which straightway carried her into
strange and glorious worlds. Occasionally the twins stole and sold the
books, but their enlightenment remained. To supplement the reading he
took her to lectures and to night schools, and thus one evening they
listened to an illustrated "talk" on "Contagion and Its Causes." There
had been an epidemic of smallpox in the quarter and Panic was abroad.
Parents who spoke no English fought wildly with ambulance surgeons
who spoke no Jewish, and refused to entrust the sufferers to the care of
the Board of Health. Many disturbances resulted and the authorities
arranged that, in all the missions, night schools, and settlements of the

East Side, reassuring lecturers should spread abroad the folly of
resistance, the joys of hospital life, the surety of recovery in the arms of
the board, with a few remarks upon the sources of contagion.
Leah and Aaron listened to one of the most calming of these orators.
The lecturer spoke with such feeling--and such stereopticon slides--that
smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, and diphtheria seemed the "open
sesame" to bliss unutterable, and the source of these talismans rather to
be sought for diligently than shunned. "Didst hear?" Leah asked Aaron
as they went home. "For a redness on the skin one may stay in bed for a
week and rest."
"Ay, but one is sick," said Aaron sagely.
"Not if one goes where the gentleman said. One lies in bed for a
week--three weeks--and there be ladies who wait on one, and one
rests--all days one rests. And there be no twins. Think of it, Aaron! rest
and no twins!"
A few days later she climbed home after a morning's shopping to find
Algernon, heavy of eye and red of face, crouched near the locked door
with a whimper in his voice and a card in his hand.
"I'm got somethin'," he announced, with the pride of the invalid.
"Where didst get it?" asked Leah, automatically; she was accustomed to
brazen admission of guilt.
"Off of a boy at school."
"Thou wilt steal once too often," his sister admonished him. "Go now,
confess to Miss Bailey, and return what thou hast taken."
"The boy has it