Peace in Friendship Village. Gale Zona
heathen tongue of his.
"Mercy," says Mis' Sykes, "I can't find Berta. He's going," she says, "to yell."
Just then I saw something that excited me more than the baby. There was one car near the middle that was burning hard when the stream of water struck it. And I saw that car had a little rag of lace curtain at its window, and a tin can with a flower in it. And when the blaze died for a minute, and the roof showed all burned, but not the lower part of the car or the steps, I saw somebody in blue overalls jump up the steps, and then an arm tearing down that rag of lace curtain and catching up the tin can.
"Well," I says pitiful, "ain't that funny? Some man down there in a bunk car, with a lace curtain and a posy."
I started down that way, and Mis' Toplady, Mis' Holcomb and the Sykeses come too, the Sykeses more to see if walking wouldn't keep the baby still. It wouldn't. That baby yelled louder than I'd ever heard one, which is saying lots but not too much.
When we all got down nearer, we came on Mis' Swenson and Mis' Amachi, counting up.
"We can take in two," says Mis' Swenson, "by four of the children sleeping on the floor that'll never wake up to know it."
"One can sleep on our lounge," says Mis' Amachi.
"We can put a couple or two in our barn," says a Flats man. "Oh, we'll find 'em room—no trouble to that."
Mis' Toplady and me looked at each other. Always before, in a Friendship Village catastrophe, her and me had been among the planners. But here we were, it seemed, left out, and the whole thing being seen to by the Flats.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady all of a sudden, "it's a woman!"
We were down in front by now, and I saw her too. The blue overalls, as I had called them, were a blue dress. And the woman, a little dark thing with earrings, stood there with her poor, torn lace curtain and her tin can with a geranium all wilted down.
"Mercy!" says Mis' Sykes, shuddering. "A woman down here!"
But I was looking at that woman. And I saw she wasn't listening to what some of the Flat women were saying to her. She had her head up and back as if she was listening to something else. And now she began moving through the crowd, and now she began running, straight to where all of us stood and Mis' Sykes was trying to hush the crying child.
The next second Mis' Sykes was near knocked down by the wildness and the strength of that little dark thing who threw herself on her and grabbed the baby.
Speaking Greek, speaking Hebrew, and Hittite, and Amalekite, and the tongues of Babylon at the confusion and the last day—for all we knew, these were what that woman was speaking. We couldn't make more head nor tail out of what she was saying than we had of the baby. But we could understand without understanding. It was in her throat, it was in her tears, it was in her heart. She cried, she sunk down to the ground, kissing that baby. He put out his hands and went right to her, laughing in the midst of the crying—oh, I've heard a baby laugh in its tears when it saw its mother, but this one was the best. And he snuggled up close, while she poured all over him them barbarous accents. But he knew what she said, and he said them back. Like before our eyes the alphabet of vermicelli had begun spelling words.
Then a man come running—I can see now that open collar, that face covered with stubble, those great eyes under their mass of tangled hair, the huge, rough hands that he laid about the baby's shoulders. And they both began talking to us, first one and then both, asking, looking, waiting for us to reply. Nobody replied. We all looked to Mis' Sykes to see what she could think of, as we always do in a village emergency.
But it wasn't Mis' Sykes that could help us now. It was the Flat folks. It was them that could understand. Half a dozen of them began telling us what it was they said. It seemed so wonderful to see the folks that we had never paid attention to, or thought they knew anything, take those tangled sounds and unravel them for us, easy, into regular, right-down words.
It seems the family had got to Friendship Village night before last, him to work on the sewer and his wife to cook for the men in the bunk cars. There were five other little folks with them—sure enough, there they were now, all flocking about her—and the oldest girl had somehow lost the baby. Poor souls, they had tried to ask. But he knew that he must dig and she must cook, and there was not much time for asking, and eight weeks in this country was all that they had and hardly three words of English. As for asking the law, they knew the law only as something that arrests you.
We were all there in a bunch by that time, everybody making signs to everybody, whether anybody could understand or not. There was something about those two, with our little chap in the midst of them, that sort of loosened us all up. We all of us understood so thorough that we pretty near forgot the fire.
By then it had most died down anyhow, and somebody started to move back up-town.
"The hall, the hall!" says Mis' Toplady to us. "Have 'em all go up to the Post-office Hall. Spread it, spread it!"
We did spread it, to go up there and see what we could do for the burned-out folks, and incidentally finish the peace celebration.
Up there in Post-office Hall the lights were all on, just as we'd left them, and there was kind of a cozy feel of supper in the air.
"Look here," says Mis' Toplady, "there's quarts of coffee hot on the back of the stove and a whole mountain of sandwiches—"
"Let's," I says. And we all begun to do so.
We all begun to do so, and I begun to do something more. I'd learned quite a little from seeing them there in the hall and kitchen that afternoon, the Swensons and Poulakis and Amachis and the rest. And now here were these others, from the bunk cars—big, beautiful eyes they had, and patient looks, and little bobbing curtsies, and white teeth when they smiled. I saw them now, trying to eat and behave the best they knew how, and back of them the Foreign booth, under the Foreign flag. And what I begun to have to do, was to get in over behind that Foreign Booth and wipe up my eyes a little.
Once I peeked out. And I happened to see the sheriff going by. He was needed, like Mis' Sykes told him he might be, but not the same, either. He was passing the sugar and cream.
What brought me out finally was what I heard Mis' Sykes saying:
"Ladies," says she, "let's us set her up there in the middle of the Foreign Booth, with her little boy in her lap. That'll be just the finishing foreign touch," says she, "to our booth."
So we covered a chair with foreign flags, promiscuous, and set her there. Awful pretty and serious she looked.
"If only we could talk to her," says Mis' Sykes, grieving. "Ladies, any of you know any foreign sentences?"
All any of us could get together was terra cotton and delirium tremens. So we left it go, and just stood and looked at her, and smiled at her, and clucked at the little boy, and at all her little folks that come around her in the booth, under the different flags.
"We'll call her Democracy!" says Marne Holcomb, that often blazes up before the match is lit. "Why not call her the Spirit of Democracy, in the newspaper write-up?"
With that Mis' Sykes kind of stopped winking and breathing, in a way she has.
"My land," she says, "but s'pose he's an enemy baby and she's his enemy ma?"
There hadn't one of us thought of that. For all we had made out, they might be anything. We got hold of Mis' Poulaki and Mis' Amachi, hot foot.
"Ast her what she is," we told them. "Ast her what country it is she comes from."
"Oh," says Mis' Poulaki, "that we know already. They're Lithuanians—that is what they are."
Lithuanians. Where was it? Us ladies drew together still more close. Was Lithuanians central power or was it ally? Us ladies ain't so very geographical, and not one of us knew or could make out.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady finally, "shut up, all of us. If it gets around for folks to wonder at—Why,