The Day Book

REGULAR MOVIE PARTY
IN ARCTIC CIRCLE

Lapland Children Eager to See the Big Machine Work.

BY MARY BOYLE O'REILLY

Karungi, Sweden. This tiny hamlet in the far north of Sweden is Russia's only door to the western world. It is the most important point along the war route to Russia, for by using Karungi to get freight and mails in and out of the Russian empire the czar has outwitted Berlin.

I spent four hours here waiting while the sledge drawn by reindeer from Lapland, which was to whirl me to Tornea and the Russian railroad some 30 miles away, was being loaded.

My hostess was a kindly-faced Laplander and her home but a tiny little hut, banked with snow. Inside the huge stove took up most of the floor space.

But it was a home and
children were playing about it.
Let me tell you in this story of the adventure these children and I had.
A squat little samovar (brass tea-pot) bubbled on the hearth as they do throughout the length and breadth of the northland.
The house mother poured tea for us with hands trembling with uncontrollable excitement.
"Barina, we are Lapps from the Northland.
Never until this war did we come south to the Swedish frontier.
Far, far off in Europe men fight.
We do not know why they die. But this we know. Karungi is a new world for the children. These little ones, Barina, her sad eyes glowed with a passion of motherhood which has no nationality.
"Never did we think to have such travels.
The things we have seen since we left Lapland. All is so strange to us, but it seems quite natural to the children!
"They see more in one day than we ever heard in a winter.
Think of it, highborn, already they talk Swedish. Swedish! Ah, how we laugh!
"Every day the father has two rouble ($1) for the sledge, with hay and moss for the deer. Winters before this he slept like a bear in the igloo.
Now he is a man among men.
"All day the father sledges mails for Russia. Every week he puts the government roubles into my hand.
God be with the czar.
Since the ukase the richest prince cannot buy vodka.
"Today is our Pekka's nimipaiva (nameday). This birch bought is his luck tree.
Next years perhaps it will be taller.
Her glance toward the delicate child confessed that long anxiety had become heartaching certainty.
"Pekka, how old are you?"
"Nine, highborn.
"Tell the Barina what you saw last week," prodded his mother.
"I saw. I saw." the little lad leaned forward to whisper.
"I went into the teatteri here in Karungi!"
It is a theater. explained his mother.
"The sledge drivers, having no vodka, drink tea in the kinema.
"Let us go to the kinema, Pekka.
Call all the children to celebrate your nameday! I will give a party for you,"
I said.
No Finn ever hurried himself for anything or anybody, but the children of Karungi scampered.
Fresh from the bath, shining with a cleanliness more southern folk seldom reach. 50 hardy, fur-wrapped youngsters lined up squeaking excitement.
Calm-faced, though his arm trembled with excitement, Pekka Makkonen of Karungi marshaled his nameday party.
Outside the snow was kinema the heat was intense.
Then drifting like a storm.
Within the moving pictures began.
Muffled, but terribly near, a blizzard howled through the frontier forest. In the theater's hot dark a grinning native in Panama hat and loin cloth slashed gigantic fans from a towering palm.
Fifty northland youngsters laughed quick appreciation.
A dozen eager voices demanded to know where in all Russia men were so very warm.
Buz-z.
Onto the screen flashed the interior of a Lapland home. Then a mother, quite like anybody's mother, bathing a Lapp child's inflamed eyes.
Cries from the absorbed women entreated, commanded, "Slowly, more slowly."
The film stopped, commenced again, moving so slowly that all could follow the doll-like motions of the nurse's hands.
One determined mother seized her astonished offspring in the dark and proceeded to experiment.
As the filmed mother unconsciously touched hair or apron the mother in the audience consciously did likewise. Followed lines of Russian print.
"The words are to tell us something,"
whispered Pekka's mother, wistfully, but we cannot spell them.
For me, I have learned a new thing in the theater. Tomorrow, quick, I will spend one rouble. It will buy a book. Our children must learn to read.

Behind the scenes some one was drumming a marching air. To the staccato rhythm brigades of horse, foot and artillery passed to a battle line.

The children watched in puzzled silence.

"Too bad, too bad," whispered Pekka's grave little mother.

"But perhaps the children will not understand. We want our little ones to learn only the good things of this new world."

That was the end.

The smiling mother spread her arms in a gesture that embraced the western world.

"Never, never did any child in Karungi have such a name-day party. Pekka and the other children never will forget. It is so ordained."
It was children like those shown in the photograph above that The Day Book correspondent took to a moving picture theater in Karungi, Sweden, a tiny town almost in the Arctic Circle.