And then with many contortions she produced from some inner recess of her kimona a large dill pickle, imperfectly wrapped in moist newspaper. She dissevered a section of this with her own sharp teeth, and put it into the baby's waiting mouth. The cries of the youngest Rashnowsky were supplanted by a chorus of remonstrating Cornelias. "Pickles!" they cried, and shuddered. "Do you often give that baby pickles?"
"I do when I can get 'em," Rosie answered, "but that ain't often."
And then this injudicious but warm-hearted audience drew from her the sordid little story which seemed such a matter of course to her, and such a tragedy to them.
"Und I looks," said Rosie, "all times I looks on cellars und push-carts und fire 'scapes und stores und sidewalks. Und I walks und I walks—all times I walks—mit that baby in mine hand, und I couldn't to find me the papa. Mine poor mamma, she looks too, sooner she goes und comes on the factory, und by night me und mine mamma, we comes by our house und we looks on ourselves und we don't says nothings, on'y makes so"—and Rosie shook a hopeless head—"und so we knows we ain't find him. Sometimes mine mamma cries over it. She is got all times awful sad looks."
By this time the more sentimental among the Cornelias were reduced to tears, and the more practical were surveying such finances as they carried with them, and in a very short time an endowment fund of nearly fifty dollars had been collected. The sang-froid which had throughout the proceedings distinguished Rosie was a little shaken when this extraordinary shower of manna was made clear to her, but it vanished altogether when, upon the suggestion of the practical and bespectacled Cornelia, the assistant janitor was sent for to give safe-conduct to the children and their bequest. And the amazement of Isidore Rashnowsky—summoned from the furnace room for some uncomprehended reason—was hardly less ecstatic when he found himself in the close embrace of his frenzied daughter. For Rosie's joy was nothing less than frenzy.
"It's mine papa! Oh, it's mine papa!" she informed the now jubilant and sympathetic Cornelias, who were quite ready to pass a vote of thanks to their pioneering vice-president, whose plan had afforded them more emotion and more true human sensation than they had experienced for many a day.
Isidore floated toward Clinton Street through clouds and seas of gold. The endowment together with his own first week's wages made a larger sum than he had ever hoped to gather. He wafted the baby through this golden atmosphere, the baby wafted a second section of dill pickle, and Rosie, in her red and golden draperies gyrated around them.
"You shall go on the factory right away," babbled Isidore, "und bring the mamma on the house. She shall never no more work on no factories. She shall stay on the house und take care of the baby und be Jewish ladies."
"She don't needs she shall take care of no baby," Rosie, thus lightly deposed, remonstrated; "ain't I takin' care of her all right?"
"Sure, sure," the placating Isidore made answer; "on'y you won't have no time. You shall go on the school."