That stumped him too. He only stared on.
"What's your papa's name?"
That was a worse poser. So was everything else we asked him. Pretty soon
he begun to cry, and that was a language we could all understand. But
when we ask' him, frantic, what it was he wanted, he said words that
sounded like soup with the alphabet stirred in.
"Heavens!" says Mis' Sykes. "He ain't English."
And that's what we all concluded. He wore what we'd never seen, he
spoke what we couldn't speak, he come from nobody knew where.
But while we were a-staring at each other, the Switzerland maid come
a-racing back. Seems she'd been up to the depot, a block away, and
Copper, the baggageman, had noticed a queer-looking kid on the platform
when some folks got off Number 16 that had gone through west an hour or
so back. Copper thought the kid was with them, but he didn't notice it
special. Where the folks went to, nobody knew.
"Down on the Flats somewhere, that's where its folks went," says Mis'
Sykes. "Sure to. Well, then, they'll be looking for it. We must get it
in the papers."
We raced around and advertised that little boy in the _Daily_. The
Friendship Village _Evening Daily_ goes to press almost any time, so if
you happen to hit it right, you can get things in most up to seven
o'clock. Quite often the _Evening Daily_ comes after we're all in bed,
and we get up and read it to go to sleep by. We told the sheriff, and he
come up that evening and clucked at the little boy, without getting a
word out of him, no more than we could. The news flew round town, and
lots of folks come up to see him. It was more exciting than a
night-blooming cereus night.
But not a soul come to claim him. He might have dropped down from inside
the air.
"Well," says Mis' Sykes, "if some of them foreigners down on the Flats
_has_ lost him, it'll be us that'll have to find him. They ain't capable
of nothing."
That was how Mis' Sykes, and Mis' Toplady, and Mame Holcomb and I
hitched up and went down to the Flats and took the baby with us, right
after breakfast next morning, to try our best to locate him.
The Flats are where the Friendship Village ex-foreigners live--ain't it
scandalous the way we keep on calling ex-foreigners foreigners? And
then, of course, nobody's so very foreign after you get acquainted.
Americans, even, ain't so very foreign to Europeans after they get to
know us, they say. I'd been down there often enough to see my
wash-woman, or dicker for a load of wood, or buy new garden truck, or
get somebody to houseclean, but I didn't know anybody down there to
visit--and none of us ladies did. The Flats were like that. The Flats
didn't seem ever to count real regular in real Friendship Village
doings. For instance, the town was just getting in sewerage, but it
wasn't to go in down on the Flats, and nobody seemed surprised. The only
share the Flats seemed to have in sewerage was to house the long, red
line of bunk cars, where the men lived, drawn up on a spur of track by
the gas house.
It was a heavenly day, warm and cool and bright, with a little whiff of
wind, like a sachet bag, thrown in. We had the Sykeses' surrey and old
white horse, and Mis' Toplady and Mame and me squoze on the back seat
so's to let Mis' Sykes, that was driving, have sitting beside her in
plain sight that little boy in his blazing red dress.
We went first to see some folks named Amachi--her husband was up in the
pineries, she said, and so she run their little home-made rug business.
She was a wonderful, motherly soul, and she poored the little boy with
her big, thick hand and listened, with her face up and her hair low in
her neck like some kind of a picture with big, sad eyes. But she hadn't
heard of anybody lost.
"One trouble with these folks," Mis' Sykes says as we drove away, "they
never know anything but their own affairs."
Then we went to some folks named Cardell. They tended the bridge and let
the gypsies camp in their pasture whenever they wanted. She was cutting
the grass with a blunt pair of shears; and she had lots of flowers and
vines and the nicest way of talking off the tip of her tongue. She give
the little boy a cup of warm milk, but she hadn't heard anything about
anybody being lost anywheres.
"Real superior for a foreigner," says Mis' Sykes, so quick after she'd
clucked to her horse I was afraid Mis' Cardell heard her.
Then we saw an old lady named Marchant, that her ancestors had settled
up Friendship Village, but she was so poor now that everybody had kind
of forgot about that, and some folks named Swenson that lived in the
toll-gate house and had a regular hennery of homeless cats. And though
they give the little boy a flower or two and left him stroke a kitty or
more, they hadn't any of them either seen or heard of anybody that was
out trying to locate a son.
It was just a little while after we started that Mis' Sykes had her
great idea. I remember we were just coming out at Mis' Swenson's when
she thought of it, and all the homeless cats were following along behind
us with all their tails sticking up straight.
"Ladies," says Mis' Sykes, "why in under the canopy don't we get some
work out of some of these folks for the peace meeting to-morrow night?"
"I was thinking of that," says Mame Holcomb.
"Some of them would wash the dishes and not charge anything, being it's
for the peace."
"And help clean up next day," says Mis' Sykes. "That's when the
backaching, feet-burning work comes in."
"Costs a sight to pay by the hour," says Mame, "and this way we could
get the whole thing free, for patriotism."
"Mop the hall floor, too," says Mis' Sykes. "Land," she adds, only about
half soft enough, "look at them children! Did you ever see such skinny
sights?"
Awful pindling-looking children, the Swensons were, and there were most
as many of them as there were cats.
When she got to the gate, Mis' Sykes turned round in her grand-lady way,
and she says, "Mis' Swenson, why don't you and your husband come up to
the peace meetin' to-morrow night and help us?"
Mis' Swenson was a peaked little thing, with too much throat in length
and not enough in thickness. "I never heard of it," she says.
Mis' Sykes explained in her commanding way. "Peace, you know," she says,
"is to be celebrated between the different countries. And, of course,
this is your country, too," Mis' Sykes assured her, "and we'd like to
hev you come up and help with the dishes, or like that."
"Is it dress-up?" says Mis' Swenson, not very loud.
"My, no!" we told her, and decided to stick to the usual hooks in our
closets.
"I'd like to," says Mis' Swenson, "if I can get Pete to change his
clothes."
"So do," says Mis' Sykes gracious and clucked her horse along. "My
goodness," she says, "what awful stuff these folks must feed their
children! And how they must bungle 'em when they're sick. And they won't
hardly any of 'em come to-morrow night," she says. "You can not," she
says, "get these folks to take part in nothing."
We went to twenty or thirty houses, and every one of them Mis' Sykes
invited to come and help. But not one of the twenty or thirty houses had
heard of any foreigner whatever having just arrived in Friendship
Village, nor had ever seen or heard of that little boy before. He was
awful good, the little soul, waving his hands so nice that I begun to be
afraid everybody we met would claim foreign and ask for him.
By noon we begun to get pretty excited. And the sheriff, he was excited
too, and he was hunting just as wild as any of us, being arrests was
light. He was hanging on the canal bridge when we crossed it, going home
along toward noon.
"They never had a case of lost child in Friendship Village in twenty
years," he said. "I looked it up."
"Lost child nothing!" I told him. "The child ain't lost. Here he is.
It's the parents," I said, "that's lost on us."
The noon whistle blew just then, and the men that were working on the
sewer threw down their shovels.
"Look at their faces," says Mis' Sykes. "Did you ever see anything so
terrible foreign?"
"Foreign ain't poison," says Mis' Toplady on the back seat.
"I'm going to have Silas put a button on the cellar window," says Mis'
Sykes.
"Shucks, they ain't shaved, that's all," says Mis' Toplady.
Mis' Sykes leaned over to the sheriff. "You better be up around the
peace celebration to-morrow night," she says. "We've been giving out
invitations pretty miscellaneous, and we might need you."
"I'll drop up," says the sheriff. "But I like to watch them bunk cars
pretty close, where the men live."
"Is there much lawlessness?" Mis' Sykes asks, fearful.
Mis' Toplady sings out, laughing, that there would be if she didn't get
home to get Timothy's dinner, and Mis' Sykes come to herself and
groaned.
"But oh, my land," she says, "we ain't found no ma nor pa for this
child. What in time are we going to do? I'm too stiff," she says, "to
adopt one personally."
But the little boy, he just smelled of the flowers the folks on the
Flats had give him, and waved his hand to the sheriff, cute.
Late the next afternoon, us ladies that weren't tending to the supper
were trying to get the Foreign booth to look like something. The Foreign
booth looked kind of slimpsey. We hadn't got enough in it. We just had a
few dishes that come from the old country, and a Swiss dress of Berta's
mother's and a Japanese dress, and like that. But we couldn't seem to
connect up much of Europe with Friendship Village.
At five o'clock the door opened, and in walked Mis' Amachi and Mis'
Swenson from the Flats, with nice black dresses on and big aprons pinned
up in newspapers. Pretty soon in come old Mis' Marchant, that had rode
up on a grocery delivery wagon, she said. Close behind these come some
more of them we had asked. And Mis' Sykes, acting like the personal
hostess to everything, took them around and showed them things, the
Friendship Village booth that was loaded with stuff, and the Foreign
booth that wasn't.
And Mis' Poulaki, one of the Greek women, she looked for a while and
then she says, "We got two nice musics from old country."
She made her hands go like playing strings, and we made out that she
meant two musical instruments.
"Good land!" says Mis' Sykes. "Post right straight home and get them.
Got anything else?"
"A little boy's suit from Norway," says Mis' Swenson. "And my marriage
dress."
"Get it up here!" cries Mis' Sykes. "Ladies, why do you s'pose we never
thought of this before?"
There wasn't hardly one of them that couldn't think of something--a
dish, or a candlestick, or wooden shoes, or an old box, or a kerchief.
Old Mis' Marchant had come wearing a shoulder shawl that come from
Lombardy years back, and we jerked it off her and hung it up, hole and
all.
It made quite some fun for all of us. And all the time our little
strange boy was running around the floor, playing with papers, and when
we weren't talking of anything else, we were talking about him.
"Say," says Mis' Sykes, that never means to say "say" but gets it said
unbeknownst when excited, "I guess he's the foreignest thing we've got."
But by six o'clock she was ready to take that back, about him being the
foreignest. The women from the Flats had all come back, bringing all
they had, and by the time we put it up the Foreign booth looked like
Europe personified. And that wasn't all. Full three quarters of the
folks that we'd asked from down there had showed up, and most of them
says they'd got their husbands to come too. So we held off the supper a
little bit for them--a fifteen-cent supper it was, coffee and sandwiches
and baked beans and doughnuts--and it was funny, when you think of it,
for us to be waiting for them, for most of us had never spoken to any of
these folks before. The women weren't planning to eat, they said; they'd
help, but their men would buy the fifteen-cent supper, they added,
proud. Isn't it kind of sad and dear and _motherly_, the way, whenever
there isn't food enough, it's always the woman who manages to go
without and not let on, just exactly like her husband was her little
boy?
By and by in they all come, dressed up clean but awful heavy-handed and
big-footed and kind of wishing they hadn't come. But I liked to see them
with our little lost red boy. They all picked him up and played with him
like here was something they knew how to do.
The supper was to come first, and the peace part afterward, in some set
speeches by the town orators; and we were just ready to pour out the
coffee, I recollect, when the fire-bell rang. Us ladies didn't think
much of that. Compared with getting supper onto the table, what was a
fire? But the men all jumped up excitable, being fires are more in their
line.
Then there was a scramble and rush and push outside, and the door of the
hall was shoved open, and there stood a man I'd never seen before, white
and shaking and shouting.
"The bunk cars!" he cried. "They're burning. Come!"
The bunk cars--the ten or twelve cars drawn up on a spur track below the
gas house....
All of us ran out of the hall. It didn't occur to us till afterward that
of course the man at the door was calling the men from the Flats, some
of whom worked on the sewer too. I don't suppose it would ever have
entered his head to come up to call us if the Flat folks hadn't been
there. And it was they who rushed to the door first, and then the rest
of us followed.
It was still dusk, with a smell of the ground in the air. And a little
new moon was dropping down to bed. It didn't seem as if there ought to
be a fire on such a night. Everything seemed too usual and casual.
But there was. When we got in sight of the gas house, we could see the
red glare on the round wall. When we got nearer, we could see the
raggedy flames eating up into the black air.
The men that lived in the cars were trying to scrabble out their poor
belongings. They were shouting queer, throaty cries that we didn't
understand, but some of the folks from the Flats were answering them. I
think that it seemed queer to some of us that those men of the bunk cars
should be having a fire right there in our town.
"Don't let's get too near," says somebody. "They might have small-pox or
something."
It was Mis' Sykes, with Silas, her husband, and him carrying that bright
red little boy. And the baby, kind of scared at all the noise and the
difference, was beginning to straighten out and cry words in that
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, my land," she says, "their bunk car's
burned up anyhow, ain't it? Let's us shut up."
And so we done. And everybody was up around the Foreign Booth. And the
Friendship Village booth was most forgot.
All of a sudden, somebody started up "America." I don't know where
they'd learned it. There aren't so very many chances for such as these
to learn it very good. Some of them couldn't say a word of it, but they
could all keep in tune. I saw the side faces of the Flats folks and the
bunk car folks, while they hummed away, broken, at that tune that they
knew about. Oh, if you want to know what to do next with your life, go
somewhere and look at a foreigner in this country singing "America,"
when he doesn't know you're looking. I don't see how we rest till we get
our land a little more like what he thinks it is. And while I was
listening, it seemed as if Europe was there in the room.
It was while they were singing that the magic began to work in us all. I
remember how it started.
"Oh," says Mis' Toplady, "ladies! Think of that little boy, and the
other folks, living in those bunk cars. Don't it seem as if, while
they're here, us ladies could--"
"Don't it?" I says.
"And the little skinny ones down on the Flats," Mis' Toplady whispers
pretty soon. "Can't some of us teach them women how to feed them better
and cost no more?"
"And take care of them when they're sick," says Mame Holcomb. "I
shouldn't wonder if they die when they don't need to, all day long."
We see ideas gathering back of one another's eyes. And all of a sudden I
thought of something else. "Ladies," I says, "and get sewerage down
there on the Flats! Don't it belong there just exactly as much as in the
residence part?"
Us ladies all looked at each other. We'd just taken it for granted the
Flats shouldn't have sewerage and should have the skeptic tank.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady, "it don't look to me like we'd have a very
hard time knowing what to do with ourselves, now this war is over."
"The mornings," says Mame Holcomb, "when we use' to wake up, crazy to
start in on something--it looks to me like they ain't all through with
yet!"
"The meetings," says Mis' Toplady, "when Baptists and Catholics and
Elks--"
Mis' Sykes was listening. It ain't very often that she comes down off
her high horse, but when she does, I tell you she lands hard.
"Ladies!" she says. "It was me that was talking about beginning to knit
for another war. Why didn't you shut me up and bolt the door?"