Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 66, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1918 — THE BLUE TRIANGLE AT RUSSIA’S FRONT [ARTICLE]

THE BLUE TRIANGLE AT RUSSIA’S FRONT

The Blue Triangle clubrooms in Petrograd were in half shadow. A few scattered candles flung gleams as persistent and as vague as Russia’s hope of liberty. A hundred Russian girls and six young men were guests of the first Young Women’s Christian association in all Russia. It was a gala afternoon tea but It was dark because the winter days end at three o’clock and there is a restriction on the use of candles and kerosene as well as of electricity. The girls were making merry even in the gloom of winter, the twilight and the tragedy of war. One slender white-faced girl with purple-shadowed eyes was merrier than all the rest. Iler wit and ringing laugh were contagious. “Sonya is wonderful tonight,” one girl whispered to another as she stirred gently into her tea the one lump of sugar doled out carefully for the party. The Y. W. C. A, secretaries had been saving the sugar for months —putting aside at each meal one of the two lumps served with the coffee in the restaurant, that there might be a bit of sweet for this first party. There was no bread. “Sonya Is not drinking her tea,” her pale little admirer went on, “yet she fainted this morning at the factory and the forewoman said she wai hungry.” “We’re all hungry,” was the monotonous reply. “It wasn’t that” Something stopped* the laughter and talk suddenly but the hush that fell In the dimly lit room was as joyous as the gaiety. One of Russia’s greatest singers stood by the piano and lifted up her glorious voice filled with the tears and heartbreak that people at peace call thrills. They went away early when the music was done —these sad-eyed, halfstarved little guests of the Blue Triangle—for danger lurks In the dark Of Petrograd streets, robberies and murders—sharp little by-products of a nation’s chaos and a world at war. Sonya lingered after the others were gone. She was standing close by the secretary-hostess’ chair when she turned from saying good-night to the last one of the other girls. The laughter had died out of the girl’s eyes and the gaiety from her voice. “Will you give me a note to the factory superintendent,” she asked, “telHng him I’m attending classes here at night?” She spoke in French, for she knew no English, and the secretary, no Russian. “Yes, If It will help you.” The secretary was glad to give her such a note but she was curious. "Tell me why.” “If he knows the girls are going to night classes he won’t put us on the night shift He will let us work days so we can come. Yesterday I asked for the night shift Today I have changed my mind.” The secretary wondered. Sonya had not been in any of the classes. Had the bright little party given her an Interest in the work of the association? Had the friendliness of the American secretaries reached her?

Whs it the music that had given her nn impetus to study toward something beyond a factory? “What is it that Interests you?” the secretary asked her. “You are not in any of the classes now, are you? What is it you want to take up?” “This morning 1 looked out the factory window," and Sonya’s voice reminded the secretary of the call of a night bird before a storm. “Down in the courtyard was a crowd and three men were killed. Killed by the police—the bolshevik police, while I stood there and watched. They said they were anarchists. One was my brother. Another was my sweetheart. I came here tonight to forget. But I cannot forget. Always I will remember. I want nothing now but to carry on their work, and to do that I must study and learn—l must learn English and many other things. I want to go In all the classes. If the foreman at the factory knows I do that, he will help. He will let me work days.” In the dark, the hunger, the cold, and the terror of Petrograd, the Blue Triangle is sending out its shining invitation to the bewildered women and young girls of Russia. It is offering a little oasis in the midst of the chaos where they may come and rest and relax, play games, listen to music, study English, French, stenography, bookkeeping, or music, and as one tired girl expressed it, forget for the moment that they are in Petrograd. Most of the girls who gather at the sign of the Blue Triangle are bookkeepers and stenographers, but scattered among them are factory girls, domestics, and girls who never have worked. “In Petrograd and elsewhere tn Russia,” says Miss Clarissa Spencer, world secretary of the Y. W. C. A. who started the work in Russia, “girls formerly employed In government offices come to us who have struck against the bolshevlsts. They’re out of jobs. They’re hungry. One girt told me she couldn't take gymnasium work. It gave her such an appetite. But they refuse to return to work for the bolshevlsts.” Miss Helen Ogden, one of the Y. W. IC. A. secretaries who was forced tn leave Petrograd on account of the GerIman advance, writes home that: "It’s like living on the screen of a melodrama to be tn Russia. Bullets and are almost as familiar street sounds here as the clang of the street Icar and the honk of the automobile at home. Here we learn to live and work under frequent shooting and street 'battles and. to flee when we are told by the authorities that we must.** A curious method of catchins turtles in the West Indies consists of attaching a ring and a line to the tail of a species of suckerfish known as the remora. The live fish is then thrown overboard and immediately makes for the turtle It can spy, to which it Attaches Itself very firmly by means of a sucking apparatus on the top of the head. Once attached to the turtle, so firm is the grip that fishermen on drawing in the line bring home both turtle and the sucker.