Peace in Friendship Village

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?"

THE STORY OF JEFFRO[3 - Copyright, Everybody's Magazine, 1915.]

When I have told this story of Jeffro, the alien, some one has always said:

"Yes, but there's another side to that. They aren't all Jeffros."

When stories are told of American gentleness, childlike faith, sensitiveness to duty, love of freedom, I do not remember to have heard any one rejoin:

"Yes, but Americans are not all like that."

So I wonder why this comment should be made about Jeffro.

I

When Jeffro first came knocking at my door that Spring morning, he said that which surprised me more than anything that had been said to me in years. He said:

"Madam, if you have a house for rent – a house for rent. Have you?"

For years nobody had said that to me; and the little house which I own on the Red Barns road, not far from the schoolhouse, was falling in pieces because I never could get enough ahead to mend it up. In the road in front of it there was a big hole that had never been filled in. And the house only had two rooms anyway – and a piece of ground about as big as a rug; and the house was pretty near as old as the ground was.

"Land," I says, "man, you don't want to rent that house?"

He smiled, nice and wrinkled and gentle, and said yes, he did; and nothing that I, as my own real estate agent, could say discouraged him. Even when I'd whipped off my kitchen apron and found the key to the little house in my button-box, and had gone down the road with him to look the house over, and let him see what it was like, he insisted that he wanted to rent it. And so in the end he done: at four dollars a month, which wasn't much more than, by rights, the sale price should have been.

"I do little things to this house," said Jeffro. "I make little change for good. I have some handy with a hammer."

I remember turning back a ways from the house, and seeing him standing there, with his hands behind him, looking at the house as if it was something, and something of his.

When I got home and was up in the garret hunting up the three green paper shades for his windows, it come to me that I hadn't asked him for any references, and that for all I knew he might be going to counterfeit money or whisky or something there on the premises. But anybody'd known better than that just to look at Jeffro's face. A wonderful surprised face he had; surprised, but believing it all too, and trusting the good. A brown face, with big, brown eyes, and that wrinkled smile of his. I like to think about him.

After a few days I went over with the shades, and he'd got a few pieces of furniture there, setting round, loose and unattached. And on a big basket of stuff was sitting a little boy, about eight years old.

"That's Joseph," says Jeffro, simple. "We are the two that came."

Then he told me. In "the old country" his wife and two little ones were waiting till he could earn money to send back for them.

"I thought when I had thes' little follow here," he said, "I could work then more easy. He don't eat but little," he added.

"But how," says I, "are you expecting to earn all that money out of Friendship Village – where folks saves for years to put on a new stoop?"

At this he smiled, sort of knowing. And he pointed to a poster over his wood-box. It was printed in Yiddish, all but the words "United States"; but the picture – that was plain enough. It showed a mill on one side of the street, and a bank on the other. And from the mill a stream of workingmen, with bags of money on their backs, were streaming over toward the bank.

"That was put up on my cow-shed at home," said Jeffro. "I have brought it. But I have no trade – I can not earn money fast like those. I make the toys."

He threw open the door into the only other room of the house. In it was piled dozens of boxes, and some broad shelves to be put up, and a table was covered with colored stuff. "Then I go up to the city and sell," said he. "It is only five miles. But I can not live there – not with thes' boy. I say, 'I vill find some little cheap place out in the country for us two.' So then I come here. I am now in America five weeks," he added, proud.

"Five weeks!" says I. "Then where'd you learn to talk American?"

"I have study and save' for six-seven years, to be ready," said Jeffro, simple. "Now I come. Next year I think I send for them."

All day long those words of his kept coming and ringing in my ears. And it kind of seemed to me that in them was a great chorus – a chorus of thousands going up that minute, and this minute, and all the time, all over America:

"Now I come. Next year I think I send for them."

And I says to myself: "What's America going to do for him? What's America going to do to him? What are we going to do to him? And what is he going to do for us?"

Well, the story of the first few weeks of Jeffro's in Friendship Village is for me a kind of window set in the side-wall of the way things are.

One morning, a little before nine o'clock, I had to go to the schoolhouse to see Miss Mayhew. When I went by Jeffro's I didn't see anything of him, but when I got along by the schoolhouse grounds, there I saw him, leaning on the fence under the locust-tree.

"Good morning, Mr. Jeffro," I says. "Do the children bother you down to your house with their noise? That's one reason my house used to be so hard to rent, it was so close by the schoolhouse."