"The Origin Of Species"

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Title:     "The Origin Of Species"
Author: Myra Kelly [More Titles by Kelly]

"Say! What you think!" cried Rebecca Einstein to her friend and neighbor Esther Nolan. "What you think we got to our house?"

Esther confessed ignorance.

"A baby," cried the triumphant Rebecca.

"It's mine," said Esther promptly. "I writes such a letter on the Central Park Stork he shall bring me a baby. I tells him I got a crib even. It's too little fer me. I likes I shall lay all longed out on the sofa. Und extra he goes and makes mistakes and leaves it by your house. It's boys, ain't it?"

Rebecca admitted it was a boy.

"And did you write such letters on Storks?"

Again Rebecca admitted that she had not. "We don't got to write no letters over babies," said she with pride. "We gets 'em anyways. My mamma is got thirteen childrens. We ain't all babies now, but we was."

Esther returned crestfallen to her second-floor home, and sought the comforting arms of Mrs. Moriarty, her chaperon and guardian.

"But whatever made you write for a baby?" demanded Mrs. Moriarty, when the Stork's carelessness had been explained to her. "Aren't you and your father and me happy enough in this grand new house without a baby to be botherin' us?"

Unconsciously she had touched the root of Esther's trouble.

"I needs a baby," she wailed, "the whiles my papa he ain't lovin' no more mit me. And I wants somebody shall love me."

"Tut, tut, now!" admonished Mrs. Moriarty, and then again, "Tut, tut! Now Esther, dear," said she, after a pause, "you're getting to be a big girl."

"I'm eight. I will become nine."

"Please God you will. But, anyway, you're big enough to know that your father loves you as much as ever he did, but hasn't time to show it, bein' in heavy trouble, God help him. You know about your auntie, her that was to have the bringing up of you as your father often tells ye."

"She don't never comes," Esther complained. "I waits und I waits und my auntie don't comes, und mine papa ain't lovin', und I needs I shall have a baby out of that Central Park."

The heart loneliness of which Esther complained was real enough. The material prosperity which had recently fallen upon her had deprived her of all the old comfortable joys which had brightened less prosperous days. Chief among these had been her father's light-hearted companionship. Mrs. Moriarty, the brightest feature of the new conditions, did her best to cheer and comfort the motherless child, but she could not hope to take the place of Jacob Morowsky, who had changed in so much more than name since he became John Nolan. Esther had dutifully tried--and failed--to understand why she, who had for so long been Esther Morowsky, was now Esther Nolan. And yet the explanation was sufficiently ordinary, and was the cause of her improved surroundings and the result of her father's preoccupation.

Jacob Morowsky had, upon his first coming to America, found employment with old John Nolan, whose little shop of sacred statues, crucifixes, and holy pictures was the survival of the Irish Catholic era in Henry Street's history. There are not many traces of this era now remaining, but John Nolan's little shop was one of them, and economy overcame racial prejudice on the day he engaged Jacob Morowsky as his assistant. Later he congratulated himself upon this apostasy, calling it interchangeably "an act of charity, no more than that," or "the best bit of business ever I done," for Morowsky was an artist, and the heavenly choir, as represented by John Nolan, soon became separate dainty works of art more like Tanagra figurines than like the stiff and stereotyped figures which John Nolan's six or seven moulds had formerly produced.

Later still, when John Nolan was gathered to his fathers, and afforded, one must presume, the opportunity of judging the accuracy of his portraits, he left his business and his name to Jacob.

"For without the name," said he, "what good would the business be to ye? Who could believe that the likes of a Jacob Morowsky would know the truth about the blessed saints? And you're not to forget what I've taught you. Arrows for Saint Sebastian, flames and a gridiron for Saint Lawrence, a big book for Saint Luke (he was a scholard, you know), and the rosary for Saint Dominick. There's not the call there used to be for Saint Aloysius, but when you're doing him, don't forget to put a skull in his hand. You have your 'Lives of the Saints,' haven't you?"

"I have, dear master," answered Jacob.

"Then keep on studyin' it. And ye'll do what ye can for old Biddy Moriarty, that's took care of me ever since me poor wife died."

"She shall be of my household," answered Jacob. And so Esther succeeded to the old man's name and the old woman's care.

Jacob Morowsky left his old quarters, and John Nolan took up his residence in the front room of the second floor of a house that had been the residence of an English official when New York was a Colony of the Crown. The house had endured many vicissitudes and degradations. It was, when Esther knew it, a tenement unpopular with the authorities because it could not quite condescend to the laws of the Tenement House Commission; and not too popular with its landlord because its rooms, in proportion to its ground area, were extravagantly few. Its spacious halls and staircase, its high ceilings and wide chimneys were all so many waste spaces according to modern tenement architecture.

Esther and her father slept in the drawing-room behind a red curtain, Esther in her babyhood's crib which, as she had written to the Stork, she had quite outgrown. But no one seemed to notice that. No one, in fact, noticed her very much. She was a good little girl. She was never late or troublesome at school. Every Friday afternoon she brought home a blue ticket, testifying that her application, her deportment, and her progress were satisfactory. From time to time, as she reached new altitudes in the course of study, the teacher's name on these tickets varied. But the tickets were the only link between Esther's two lives of home and school. No reproachful teacher, no truant officer threatening arrest and the Juvenile Court, ever darkened her horizon. No outraged Principal ever summoned her father to an uncomfortable quarter of an hour. She was, as successive teachers noted with amazement, that rara avis in the human family, a normal child. Even her clear dark eyes and her dainty little features were as her ancestry decreed that they should be. And the clear pallor of her skin--which Mrs. Moriarty tried to combat by dressing her much in red--was the normal accompaniment to the fine soft blackness of her hair.

She adored her father. His society was her sunshine, and since he had become John Nolan, Esther's days had been very cloudy. He was always away from home. There was only one little patch of the morning of Saturday, the Sabbath, which Esther could call her own, and even that was broken into by the service at the Synagogue, when he sat upon one side of the aisle, magnificent in black broadcloth and silk hat, and she sat upon the other side among the maids and matrons. In the afternoon he was at work again. She was in my Lady's drawing-room, or marketing with Mrs. Moriarty.

"You're to bide by yourself or along with me," Mrs. Moriarty had often admonished her. "You're to bide by yourself till your auntie comes."

And always to Esther's eager question, "When is she coming?" Mrs. Moriarty's cryptic answer had been, "God knows."

But when she understood that the gloom of the drawing-room had forced Esther into the writing of unsuspected letters, she deemed it wise to go further in enlightenment.

"You're to say naught of this to your poor father. But I'll tell you the meaning of his trouble. Your auntie is lost, my dear."

"Lost!" cried Esther.

"Ay, lost in this cruel hard city. Lost among strangers in her sorrow. She was comin' over to live with the two of ye. I'll never forget the night your father got her letter sayin' she was comin', and for him to meet her at Ellis Island. I went in an' found him sitting with it in his hand, with the look of death on his face. For the letter was two months old when he got it. Some mistake about his two names there was, and the date she set down for him to meet her was six weeks gone when her letter came. Glory be to God, but it's a cruel world! An' her husband just dead on her, and her so lonely, the creature! If she was poor itself we'd have a better chance of finding her, through some of the charities or the hospitals, maybe. But she had money enough to last her a while, and she's gone the same as if the ground had swallied her up."

"Mine papa," commented Esther, "he's got it pretty hard," and she folded her hands in her lap and shook her head in unconscious but triumphant imitation of Mrs. Moriarty.

"Hear you me," Mrs. Moriarty acquiesced. "He has the hardest luck ever I heard of. His sister's husband's name was Cohen, and her Christian name"--Esther looked puzzled, and Mrs. Moriarty politely substituted--"her first name was Esther, the same as yours. And when your poor distracted father went to find out did e'er an Esther Cohen land the day she mentioned in the letter, they told him that twenty-five did, and for him to go away with his jokes. You know the world is full of Cohens."

Esther knew more than that. She knew that there was a Cohen in the house. She was not supposed to form friendships, but she cherished two or three in secret, and one of them bore the name of Cohen.

To Esther she was always "the lady mit the from-gold hair," but she had heard a neighbor once address her as Mrs. Cohen. She lived in what must have been, in the days of the house's grandeur, the "'tweeny's" room in the servants' quarters, on the top floor. A tiny little room it was, whose one window opened now upon a blank wall, though the 'tweeny may have sat at it and watched the locks and the slow canal-boats where now Canal Street runs. There in the dimness Esther, on her surreptitious way back from a surreptitious visit to the friendly Top Floor Front, had discovered the lady mit the from-gold hair, and the lady was crying.

Esther's heart swelled and almost burst beneath the square breastplate of her apron, and presently the lady, looking up, met two deep wells of sorrow and admiration fixed upon her. And so their friendship began. It persisted, despite Mrs. Moriarty's warnings, and despite, too, the barrier of alien tongue, for the speech of this stranger was greatly different from the Yiddish spoken in that Polish and Russian quarter. In the other wordless ways of love, however, she threw her lonely little heart at the feet of the lonely lady, and knew that another secret must lie between her and the home circle in the drawing-room.

The load of such deceptions upon her conscience was not heavy. There was only the kindly Top Floor Front, the janitor, and Rebecca Einstein, who lived next door, and who was in Esther's class at school, when she was not nursing old and new babies at home.

Mrs. Moriarty disapproved of the Einsteins. Her complaint was that there were too many of them, and that thirteen was an unlucky number for a party, whether family or otherwise. But to Esther their number was their greatest charm, and after a visit to their crowded and uproarious circle, the quiet drawing-room seemed very chill and empty.

When Jacob came home that night, Esther was awake and waiting for him with a proposition.

The Einsteins, she announced, had a superfluous baby. Would not he, out of his loving bounty, buy it for her? It was a boy, and she, Esther, desired beyond all things else a baby brother. She had reason to believe that this one was really hers. She had forwarded an application to the proper quarters.

Jacob took his little girl on his knee and explained the situation to her.

Purchase, so his instructions ran, was not the usual method of acquiring infants. One took them, or did without them, as the big Stork pleased. It is true that babies sometimes were adopted. If, when she grew a little older and he a little richer, she still desired a brother, they might manage to adopt one, but not, as he told her when he restored her to her crib, not until he had found her Aunt Esther.

And when he had eaten his supper he came again to Esther's little bed and told her, as he sometimes did, stories of another little brother and sister who had loved and played together in the long ago. And he told her, too, more graphically than Mrs. Moriarty could, of that brother's desperate search for his sister. Of all the promising clews which led nowhere; of all the high hopes which ended in despair. For two months he had neglected his business and his daughter for this search, and he was beginning to believe that his sister was dead.

Esther caressed and comforted him as best she might, and after holding her silently for a few moments, he carefully tucked her into bed again, and went out into the crowded, sordid streets, to search--hopelessly and doggedly--for the little sister of his childhood.

As the days passed and her father confided more and more in her great love and sympathy, Esther became reconciled to the Stork's mistake, and decided that she could wait until he brought a baby without urging or request. She was very busy. Her lady mit the from-gold hair was ill--very ill, indeed. She lay upon her bed very white and quiet, and the First Floor Front took care of her. There was also occasionally a doctor, and there were always the garrulous, if not over-helpful neighbors. In any other case it is possible that Mrs. Moriarty's known generosity and surmised skill would have been called into requisition, but the lady mit the from-gold hair spoke no English, and Esther entreated that Mrs. Moriarty should not be consulted, as that would mean her own instant banishment to the lonely drawing-room. And so Mrs. Moriarty was allowed to form her own explanation for Esther's long absences, while Esther, light of hand and step, served her golden-haired lady friend.

Mrs. Moriarty's natural supposition had been that Esther was with the baby so carelessly turned over to the Einsteins; and occasionally, of course, she did visit that official error. But as its novelty diminished and its lung power increased Esther became reconciled to the mistake.

"He cried, awful," Rebecca would explain, "und we didn't really need him. We had lots. The old baby ain't yet so big. She couldn't to stand even. Und she needs all her clothes. My poor mamma has it pretty hard."

"Ain't it funny?" mused Esther, all unconscious that she was grappling with a world problem. "Ain't it funny, Becky? You got too many families, und so you gets some more. I ain't got no families, und I loses mine auntie. Ain't it fierce?"

"It sure is fierce," her friend admitted through the howls of the youngest Einstein. "But don't you care, Esther. I guess, maybe, that Stork will get round to your order soon. One baby," she spoke from experience and with conviction, "is lots of family."

"I don't know do I needs that kind from baby what you got," Esther objected. "It's an awful loud baby, ain't it?"

"It is," Rebecca admitted. And any one of the fifteen Einsteins or even any neighbor to the fourth or fifth house removed would have corroborated her.

"Und it's got black hair," Esther further objected.

"They all do when they ain't redheaded," retorted the now ruffled Rebecca. "Ain't you got nothin' to do on'y knockin' other people's babies? First off you says he's yours, und now you says he's too loud und too black. Well, he ain't too loud or too black fer me. You wait till your own baby comes. Maybe you'll get somethin' worster, with fish's faces, maybe. How will you like that? You can't never tell what kind they're goin' to be, an' you've got to keep 'em."

This haphazard system--or the lack of it--rather alarmed Esther, though the desire for a baby of her own design and choosing was growing stronger every day. For her loneliness was growing, too. Jacob was hardly ever at home. He spent many of his days and all of his evenings in his fruitless, endless search. And Mrs. Moriarty had begun to help him through some subterranean first-cousin-twice-removed channel which connected her with a member of the police force. She was making a canvass of the women's lodging-houses near the Bowery.

So Esther, having much time upon her hands, turned her thoughts again to the upbringing of a brother, and wrote again to the headquarters in Central Park, and impressed upon the authorities--in large round writing upon a sheet of pink paper with two turtle doves embossed upon it--that she was not in a hurry for her baby, and would prefer to wait until they found a really acceptable article. If possible, she would prefer from-gold hair, blue eyes, and a silent tongue. For such an infant her outgrown crib, a warm welcome, and comfortable home were waiting. No others need apply.

When this letter was despatched she felt greatly relieved, and set about the nursing of the lady mit the from-gold hair with renewed energy. And the lady needed her little friend and welcomed her always with a gentle smile, though a large and unwonted female was now regularly established in the room, from which she relentlessly barred more disturbing and autobiographical visitors.

All through her illness, indeed ever since her first coming into that house, she had kept the door open, and she lay so that she could watch the stairs. Whom she was waiting for she never told, but she was always listening. She knew the step of every fellow lodger, of the doctor, of any one who had ever once climbed those stairs. And at the approach of any new footstep she would sit up rigidly among her pillows, staring and listening so intently that when the new-comer appeared and brought disappointment, she would sink back gasping and exhausted.

"What does she says?" Esther once asked the imposing nurse, when a visitor for the Top Floor Front had precipitated one of these attacks. "What does she says when she cries?"

"She says," interpreted the nurse, "'He is dead. It must be that he is dead.' Yet we know that her husband is dead. She still expects some one."

"Maybe," said Esther, arguing from her own state of mind to that of her friend, "maybe she expects a Stork mit babies."

The woman caught Esther by the shoulders and peered down into her eyes. "So they have been talking to you," she said with immense scorn. "Oh, those women!"

"Nobody ain't told me nothings," Esther answered. "I don't know nothings. Only I thinks it in mine heart. And anyway, the first baby what comes here is mine. I writes on the Central Park a letter over it. It's going to be a boy mit from-gold hair."

"Well," snorted the nurse with some professional pique, "it's good you got that settled."

Late that night Esther awoke in her little outgrown crib. A familiar series of sounds had disturbed her: the arrival of the doctor. So the lady mit the from-gold hair was presumably worse. The doctor's steps mounted into the darkness and silence of the sleeping house, and the clock in Mrs. Moriarty's room struck two. Esther lay wide-eyed in the dark and waited for the sound of the doctor's return, but she heard nothing except the far-away clang and shriek of an occasional cable-car and the sound of stealthy, hurrying feet upon the sidewalk. She sat up, and in the dim reflection from the electric light on the street corner she distinguished the shapeless bulk that was her sleeping father. Jacob had only recently come in from his quest, and he slept the sleep of exhaustion.

Cold had no terrors for her; she was clad, feet and all, in an Esquimaux garment of brilliant pink flannel of Mrs. Moriarty's contriving.

And still the doctor did not come down. Esther climbed to the floor and noiselessly unlocked the door. In the hall a deadly quiet served as a background for Mr. Finkelstein's snoring. And then Esther's summons came. Shrill and clear from the darkness above dropped the cry of a new-born child. Hers! The Stork had blundered again.

"Oh, my!" wailed Esther, "ain't Storks the fools? In all my world I ain't never seen how he makes mistakes. I told him just as plain: Second Floor Front. Und extra he goes und maybe wakes up the lady mit the from-gold hair over it. She's got it hard enough 'out no babies yelling."

As Esther toiled toward the sound, she realized that yet another mistake had been made, it was 'a loud one.' Now what would her father say--and Mrs. Moriarty? But this was no time for such questioning. Her plain duty was to collect her property and prevent its disturbing the whole house.

When she reached her friend's room she found that the disturbance had taken place and was still in progress. The nurse, the doctor, and the Top Floor Front were gathered about the bed, presumably reassuring their patient, and upon a pillow thrown into a rocking-chair the Stork had left Esther's gold-haired brother.

Oh! it was easy, fatally easy, to recognize the answer to her petition! The noise subsided as Esther noiselessly pattered over to it, and from an end of its roll of flannel a bright head projected. Esther picked it up and beat a hasty retreat unobserved by the workers at the bedside. Down the dark stairs she passed with her burden, and into the drawing-room again. She snuggled down beside it in her crib and for a few ecstatic moments held it in her arms. The clock struck four, and, as Esther quivered and listened still for the descent of the doctor, the baby raised up its voice again in one prolonged and breathless yell. Jacob was beside the crib in an instant and had his daughter in his arms.

"What is it?" he questioned wildly. "Where is it? What hurt thee?" And then his heart too skipped a beat, for he found that though he had Esther in his arms he had left her voice in the crib.

"It ain't me," she finally managed to assure him. "It's mine little brother what I gets out of the Central Park."

Lights, Mrs. Moriarty, explanations, and expostulations followed.

"I tells that Stork," Esther ended, "I tells him I ain't got no families und no aunties, und I needs a baby, und I has a bed ready. It is mine baby. Storks is crazy fools!"

But the inexorable John Nolan set out upon his mission of restitution. Esther, puzzled, heart-broken, argumentative, sped on before, and reached, not without some skirmishing, the side of the golden-haired lady, while her father was still struggling with the darkness and his unaccustomed burden.

And then the miracles began. The lady heard a step upon the stairs and a great radiance fell upon her. Wonder, incredulity, and joy shone in her lovely eyes. The doctor's hand was on her wrist. The nurse's admonitions were in her ears. But she raised herself among her pillows and watched the turn of the stairs where a shaft of light streamed through the open door.

Esther's father came out of the darkness, and the lady wrenched her hand from the doctor and stretched both her arms toward the oncoming figure, and "Jacob," said she, and quite gently fainted into the doctor's arms.

"No excitement, no fuss," commanded that authority. "She's all right, coming round in a minute. Here, stand there. Speak naturally to her. There, she's coming now."

"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 end]
Myra Kelly's short story: "The Origin Of Species"

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