Part 1

[Illustration: THE BLUE BEAD WAS A CHARM AGAINST THE EVIL EYE (_page 2_)]

Friends In Strange Garments

BY ANNA MILO UPJOHN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1927

COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY AMERICAN NATIONAL RED CROSS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION, BY ARTHUR W. DUNN vii

IN THE WILDERNESS (Palestine) 1

THE PIGEON MOSQUE (Turkey) 9

THE ROAD TO ARCADIA (Greece) 14

THE CHRISTMAS LANTERNS (Greece) 22

DRAGA’S ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS (Macedonia) 31

THE TRUCE (Albania) 38

THE SKANDERBEG JACKET (Albania) 45

MIRKO AND MARKO (Montenegro) 52

TODOR’S BEST CLOTHES (Bulgaria) 63

KOSSOVO DAY (North Serbia) 73

THE FAIRY RING (Roumania) 81

GREAT AMBER ROAD (Czecho-Slovakia) 92

THE LOST BROOK (Czecho-Slovakia) 109

MICHAEL MAKES UP HIS MIND (Poland) 120

ELENA’S CIAMBELLA (Italy) 130

AN EVERYDAY STORY (France) 138

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE BLUE BEAD WAS A CHARM AGAINST THE EVIL EYE _Colored Frontispiece_

WRITING FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT KNOW HOW 10

FIVE BOYS SAT MATCHING PENNIES ON THE FLOOR OF A TEMPLE 14

HE AND THE DONKEY TROTTED HOME ALONG THE SEA WALL 22

STRINGING PEPPERS 36

RUSTEM AND MARKO 42

AN ALBANIAN STORY-TELLER (_in color_) 46

ZORKA WITH HER PET PIGS 52

TODOR AND THE SQUASHES 70

PETER AND PAVLO 74

SHARED THEIR DINNER OF HOT CORN ON THE COB (_in color_) 86

BEGAN SOFTLY TO PLAY THE HILLSIDE SONG 98

RATHER SHYLY SHE OPENED THE BIG PAINTED CHEST 110

BASIL HERDING GEESE 126

HER MOTHER HAD SENT HER TO DRAW A JAR OF WATER 130

THEY HAD WAVED GOOD-BYE TO HIM (_in color_) 144

INTRODUCTION

When we go into foreign countries we eagerly look for those things that differ from our own, and if we do not find oddities in dress, food, buildings, and customs we are disappointed. But we are also disappointed if we do not meet, in the people, the honesty and kindliness that we expect from friends. We look for differences in surroundings, but for likenesses in people. We wish to find in people the traits that will make us feel at home among strangers in a strange land. We wish to find friends even though they are in strange garments.

The pictures in this book were drawn with the purpose of showing differences in externals among peoples of different nations. The stories were written to bring home to us the likeness in heart among the boys and girls of the world. A young Arab pommels his donkey’s sides for joy because he is going on a holiday in Jerusalem. A girl of Italy shares her Easter cake with a friend who has none. An orphan boy with younger brothers and sisters dependent upon him does his very best for them in Poland as in the United States.

If most of the pictures were made from children in poor circumstances, or from those living in rural districts, it is because the war left the countries of Europe greatly impoverished, and because the beautiful old costumes and habits are rapidly passing from city life and are to be found only in out-of-the-way places. More and more the differences among the children of the world are vanishing, while the likenesses are growing.

The year 1916 found Miss Upjohn, artist of child life and author of these stories, in Europe as a volunteer relief worker. She once remarked that the only time in her life when she had enough children to suit her was when she was daily serving breakfast to four hundred soldier boys in a Red Cross canteen in London. Later she served in France with the Fraternité Américaine and with the Fund for War Devastated Villages. While with the latter, during the German offensive of March, 1918, she helped to evacuate villages in the Canton of Rossières, near Montdidier, Somme. For her service in this connection she was decorated by the French Government. But there are memories which the author treasures even more than this--of the day, for example, when, after two years’ absence, she went back to one of those villages in the Somme and arrived to find the entire population celebrating a requiem for their fallen. Slipping into the church, she took a seat on a bench near the door, but the curé, recognizing her, came forward from the altar and asked her to come up among them because of all that they had been through together. ‘Such things made me feel,’ said Miss Upjohn, ‘that they regarded me as one of themselves, in sympathy at least.’

During the stress of this time, when often the inhabitants left their villages from one side while the opposing forces were entering from the other, she was deeply impressed by the pluck and helpfulness of the French children. A year later, while she was with the Red Cross Commission in Czecho-Slovakia, the same spirit among the Czech children, coupled with an active sympathy on their part for others in distress, revealed to her the latent power for peace in the children of the world, needing only the threads of contact to bring about widespread understanding.

No wonder, then, that when, in 1920, she was asked to enter the service of the American Junior Red Cross, she accepted. She was commissioned first to portray child life in those European countries which had been beneficiaries of the service of the children of America. She has since remained continuously with this organization, traveling widely, indeed encircling the globe, in behalf of world-wide understanding among children. The work of her pen and brush has been an important factor in the development of that children’s ‘league of friendship’ which now includes in its membership ten million boys and girls in the schools of forty nations.

The stories in this book do not tell of children’s sufferings. They bring before our eyes the children of many nations in their everyday surroundings, everywhere bravely and hopefully living and learning. Some of the stories are quite true; and all of them have a kernel of truth around which the artist-author, with the help of very real children, has built them.

Wherever it was known that the drawings were to take some message or story to the children of America, there was a scramble to get into the picture. Often a poor child would refuse to take payment for posing: ‘No, no, I want to do it for _Them_!’ Perhaps a boy had received a Christmas box or a letter; perhaps a girl had known the unfamiliar comfort of hot food or warm shoes during the pinched days of the war; or perhaps they had simply heard that other children of their country, poorer than themselves, had been helped.

‘It was a stirring thing to find,’ said Miss Upjohn, ‘that even in remote spots of the Balkans there existed an image of American school-children as something bright, kind, and companionable. In the heart of many a growing boy and girl in Albania or France or Czecho-Slovakia the sympathy of American children is being repaid a thousandfold in the golden gift of Friendship.’

ARTHUR W. DUNN _National Director_ _American Junior Red Cross_

Friends in Strange Garments

∵

IN THE WILDERNESS

Rahmeh’s mother brought the smoking dish of mutton and cauliflower from the clay brazier where it had been cooking over a fire of thorns, and placed it in the middle of the rug, on a large round straw tray. Then she laid a little flat loaf of bread at each place and clapped her hands to call the family to their meal.

Yussef and his father came in quickly, but Rahmeh stayed outside to feed Nib, the camel, with the cauliflower leaves that she had saved for him.

Nib was Rahmeh’s pet, and the great awkward beast followed the little girl about like a lamb. He was on his knees now, tied down to a peg in the ground to prevent his wandering away. His melancholy, drooping eyes watched the little figure coming toward him with hands full of green; his loose gray lips trembled wistfully and his teeth slid slowly back and forth as he moved his jaws in anticipation. Close on Rahmeh’s heels came Jeida, her little donkey, thrusting his nose over her shoulder and sniffing enviously at the fresh leaves which Nib tucked under his long lips. He looked on sulkily as Rahmeh tied a blue bead to Nib’s collar and patted his head, which felt like a mat of spongy moss. The blue bead was a charm against the evil eye in the great city, where so many strange and perhaps envious people might look at Nib as he threaded his way through the crowded streets; for he was about to make a journey up to Jerusalem with his master and Yussef.

Rahmeh and Jeida longed for a real adventure like going to Jerusalem. Sometimes they made short trips to the orange groves of Jericho, or, with a load of vegetables, to the British soldiers encamped on the shore of the Dead Sea; but usually they herded sheep in the gullies.

Now Rahmeh helped her brother Yussef prepare for the journey. She brought a long coat to put over his white cotton garment. It was of striped black and yellow and reached to his heels; a girdle of wine-colored wool fastened it at the waist.

‘You must take your _abyah_, too, Yussef,’ said his mother, ‘it will be snowing, up in Jerusalem.’

Yussef, looking up at the hot, blue sky, which stretched over the Jordan Valley, laughed incredulously. But he took the _abyah_, or woolen cloak, from its peg, hoping that his mother might be right about the snow. It would add another excitement to the trip.

His father was already loading Nib with sacks of fruit and nuts. From the saddle hung beautiful bags richly woven by the children’s mother. Into these she now stuffed bread and cheese and figs for the journey. At last they were off over the white road that slipped away among the folded hills, ashen gray, dun and blue, soft as the wings of a dove.

Diab, the children’s father, was a rich man. Besides the orange grove on the Plain of Jericho, he owned large flocks of sheep and goats. In his house were fine rugs and great bins for grain, reaching nearly to the ceiling. The grain was poured in at the top and taken out through a round hole near the bottom. Diab had rings of silver and of gold, and his wife, the children’s mother, had such a weight of coins on her headdress that it made her head ache. On ordinary days she laid it aside and wore imitation ornaments, which were lighter. Rahmeh, too, had a string of coins across her forehead, and chains of silver, which, fastened to her cap in front of her ears, swung down under her chin.

Her mother had made her a little jacket of purple velvet embroidered with orange, and her skirt was worked with bands of flowers.

That night Ismail, the big brother, said: ‘Rahmeh, you will have to go with me to the hills to-morrow. There are too many little lambs for me to look after them alone.’

Rahmeh was delighted. She rode her own little donkey, Jeida, and carried a pocketful of dates and bread. Jeida was chubby and serious; like his mistress, he went unshod, and, like her, he wore gorgeous raiment, for his saddlebags were hung with tassels of orange and crimson and blue. He had, too, a necklace of large blue beads, and a silver and blue ornament was hung over his shaggy forelock for luck.

Ismail led the flock; and Rahmeh, mounted on Jeida, rounded up the straying sheep from behind. Wherever she saw a clump of thorns thick with Dead Sea apples, she slid from Jeida’s back and gingerly plucked them from the prickly mass. They looked like great beads of amber. But they were filled with pith, and, strung on a long strand of wool, would make a magnificent necklace for Nib on his return. There was not a tree in sight--only the pale sagebrush and the tangle of thorns and a great waste of sandy hills dipping down to the Dead Sea, which lay in its bowl of blue hills, a quiet, sunshiny lake with hardly a ripple. Along the roadside, patches of salt cropped to the surface and lay on the brown earth as white as hoar frost.

Ismail led the flock back into the hills away from the Dead Sea. He separated the little lambs from the rest of the flock and left them behind with Rahmeh in a hidden ravine, which ran like a streak of life across the immense gray wilderness. Rahmeh sat tossing and counting her lapful of Dead Sea apples, wondering whether father and Yussef had yet reached Jerusalem, that great walled city nearly four thousand feet above her, which to her imagination seemed to touch the sky. Was the ground up there covered with that white mysterious thing called snow, which never came to them in the Jordan Valley?

Suddenly over the edge of the ravine the wind swept a flock of small quail, all whirring and chirping, and dropped them into the warm hollow. There they lay, fluttering and bewildered, but so tame that Rahmeh could easily have caught them. She looked up at the sky. The wind must be blowing up there, she thought, and then she heard Ismail calling. He was coming over the top of the hill carrying three little long-legged black lambs, and behind him trooped the rest of the flock, black, white, and brown, tinkling and bleating and nibbling at the shrubs as they passed.

‘Rahmeh,’ said Ismail, ‘there’s a storm coming. You had better start ahead on Jeida and take these three little fellows who are too weak to walk. I can bring in the rest.’ Ismail dropped two of the lambs into the bags attached to Jeida’s saddle and gave the third one to Rahmeh to carry across her lap. ‘Take the Dead Sea road,’ he called after her.

Jeida chose a sheep track to the top of the ravine and from there a stony way, like the bed of a torrent, which ran down into the valley. He dropped nimbly from boulder to boulder until they came down to the sand-dunes which lie about the end of the Dead Sea, now dark as slate between its rocky shores.

The sky was heavy with gray clouds. As they came over a hill that was like a great bare dune, Rahmeh felt Jeida suddenly quiver under her; then snorting with terror he plunged down the hill, and, not stopping to pick his way, made straight for the valley road. Casting a swift glance backward, Rahmeh saw what seemed to be a large fierce dog just over the brow of the next sand-dune. He was following them in a crooked, skulking way, his head down, but his evil yellow eyes turned upward. He was striped with bands of yellow across his shoulders. A mane of coarse, bristling hair stood upright.

Rahmeh’s heart gave a great thump of fright, for she realized that this was a hyena and that he was after the lambs; after Jeida, too, perhaps; for though hyenas are great cowards, they do sometimes attack donkeys and other animals that cannot fight. Jeida, sweating and trembling and galloping wildly toward the valley road, was not more frightened than Rahmeh. All the dark stories she had ever heard about hyenas came back to her--that they stole lambs from the fold and babies from the cradle; that they even stole your _mind_, until you were forced to follow wherever they went. Rahmeh tightened her hold on the lamb in her lap until its little round head pressed tightly against her chest, and leaning over caught Jeida’s neckband with both hands. It is probable that if she had not been an Arab child she would not have held on at all. Of course if she had dropped the lamb on the road the hyena would have stopped following, in order to devour it; but Rahmeh was too good a shepherdess even to think of such a thing. Her one idea was to protect and save the lamb.

Until now Jeida had kept ahead, but he was winded and trembling, and suddenly stumbling, he came down on his knees, almost throwing Rahmeh over his head.

At the same time the hyena, leaving the shelter of the sand-dunes, circled about to head them off. He was very near now, humping his shoulders in an ugly fashion, and showing his fangs. The lambs bleated with terror.

Then, as Rahmeh shut her eyes in a spasm of fright, and Jeida, regaining his feet, jerked backward on quivering flanks, there came the sharp crack of a rifle, and with a yelp the hyena rolled over in a cloud of dust.

A man in khaki came running over the dunes, rifle in hand. He was an English soldier who, on his way to camp, had seen the peril of the little shepherdess.

‘All right,’ he cried, ‘don’t be afraid!’ But Rahmeh and Jeida were already fleeing toward the gray house where there were sheltering walls, a well of cold water, and mother.

The next day Rahmeh stayed at home and strung the Dead Sea apples into a magnificent necklace, not for big Nib, but for brave little Jeida.

THE PIGEON MOSQUE

‘If I could write like that,’ thought Omar enviously, ‘I’d send a letter to my brother in America, telling him how I went out on the Bosphorus in a boat and caught seven fish.’

He was watching the spectacled old Turk, who sat all day in the court of the Pigeon Mosque, writing for those who did not know how. Omar had been to school, where, sitting on straw mats with the other boys, weaving his body to and fro as they recited in unison, he had learned parts of the Koran by heart; but he had never learned to write. If the fat merchant who was dictating to the scribe could not write his own letters, why should Omar? And if every one knew this art, how would the old man earn his living?

Fatima, Omar’s sister, did not worry about such things. None of the girls whom she knew ever went to school. She sat feeding the pigeons, glad of every day before her mother should make her hang a thick black veil across her face when she went for water. But the big brother who had gone to Chicago wrote home that there all the children could read and write, even the little ones. He was shocked at Omar’s ignorance. That was why Omar hung about the old Turk every day, watching him make the quick little marks that meant words.

When the merchant in the red fez had paid his money and gone, Omar ventured timidly. ‘I think I could make those letters,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know what they mean.’

‘Boy,’ answered the Turk, ‘you must not come here to pick up crumbs like the pigeons. If you wish to learn, I will teach you; but you must work.’

After that, every day for months Omar might have been seen sitting on the step at the feet of the scribe, laboriously penning quirls and dots and dashes, and learning to form them into words. Gradually he came to know the meaning of the texts written in white and gold on the green and blue tiles of the mosque, and to love the place as he never had before.

It was a pleasant school, under the sky. In the center was a beautiful covered fountain with a tiled roof resting on white columns. The doors of the mosque were of dull green bronze, and its walls were a blend of ivory and apricot-tinted marbles, with rich tiles let into them. Beyond the gateway of the court a white minaret shot toward the turquoise sky, and an old plane tree covered with button balls harbored hundreds of pigeons which drifted down to the court in search of food.

[Illustration: WRITING FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT KNOW HOW]

The mosque had a quaint story, too. The Sultan Bajesid, who built it to be buried in, was a stingy man, and although he wished the mosque to be very beautiful, the money gave out long before it was finished; so the people of Constantinople were asked to contribute. One poor widow, who had nothing to give but a pair of pigeons, brought them as her offering. The Sultan was pleased, and ordered that the birds be left in the court as an example of generosity. That was four hundred years ago, and now the gray pigeons, descendants of the original pair, hover in clouds about the mosque and give it its name. But though the old Sultan was a miser, he was no coward. In token of that, when he was at last buried in his mosque, his people placed under his arm a brick made of the dust shaken from his garments--a sign that he had been no slacker, but had fought in the dust of battle.

‘That was Bajesid’s idea of playing the game,’ said the scribe. ‘Now, your battle is to learn to read and write, and you must not be a slacker either if you use Bajesid’s mosque as a schoolhouse.’

When Omar was not learning these things from the old Turk, he was studying the signs on the shops and the numbers on the street cars. He had no paper or books, but he copied letters and figures on bits of brick and plaster, and worked hard.

One day he saw a man, poorly dressed and carrying a package, looking anxiously at the signs over the bazaars. Now and then he stopped people to show them a written paper, but they shook their heads and hurried on, for they could not read. Omar approached the man shyly.

‘Let me see if I can read it,’ he said. As he looked at the characters they seemed alive, for he had studied the same words and numbers on a signboard in another part of the city.

‘Yes, I know what it means and will take you to the place,’ said Omar.

The man was so grateful that when he delivered the package to the merchant to whom it belonged, he said, ‘Had it not been for this boy, who can read, I should not have found you.’

‘Ah, you can read, can you?’ said the merchant thoughtfully. ‘That is good. If you wish a job with me I can give you one.’

Omar replied that he did not yet know enough to stop studying. ‘But,’ he added, ‘if you will employ me half a day I will study the other half.’

‘Very well,’ said the merchant, ‘the more you know, the greater value you will have for me.’

So at last Omar could write proudly to his brother in Chicago, ‘See! I have begun, and now I do not intend to let those American boys get ahead of me!’

THE ROAD TO ARCADIA

Five boys sat matching pennies on the floor of a temple--the ruined temple of Hera in the ancient Greek city of Olympia. They were little boys, all in short trousers, and Theo and Alexander in the long-sleeved blue aprons worn by boys in the primary grades of school. Spiro and Andreas, a little older, wore brown woolen capes and little caps with tassels. Adoni, the oldest, had finished the primary school and wore a _fustanella_, that is, a full white kilt, which stood out like a ballet dancer’s skirt. On his shoes were black pompons like his father’s.