“Oh, shut up, Blackie,” I said, happily. “How in the world did you do it?”
“Never you mind. The question is, what you goin’ t’ do with him, now you’ve got him? Goin’ t’ have a French bunny for him, or fetch him up by hand? Wheeling appointed a probation skirt to look after the crowd of us, and we got t’ toe the mark.”
“Glory be!” I ejaculated. “I don’t know what I shall do with him. I shall have to bring him down with me every morning, and perhaps you can make a sporting editor out of him.”
“Nix. Not with that forehead. He’s a high-brow. We’ll make him dramatic critic. In the meantime, I’ll be little fairy godmother, an’ if you’ll get on your bonnet I’ll stake you and the young ’un to strawberry shortcake an’ chocolate ice cream.”
So it happened that a wondering Frau Knapf and a sympathetic Frau Nirlanger were called in for consultation an hour later. Bennie was ensconced in my room, very wide-eyed and wondering, but quite content. With the entrance of Frau Nirlanger the consultation was somewhat disturbed. She made a quick rush at him and gathered him in her hungry arms.
“Du baby du!” she cried. “Du Kleiner! And she was down on her knees, and somehow her figure had melted into delicious mother-curves, with Bennie’s head just fitting into that most gracious one between her shoulder and breast. She cooed to him in a babble of French and German and English, calling him her lee-tel Oscar. Bennie seemed miraculously to understand. Perhaps he was becoming accustomed to having strange ladies snatch him to their breasts.
“So,” said Frau Nirlanger, looking up at us. “Is he not sweet? He shall be my lee-tel boy, nicht? For one small year he shall be my own boy. Ach, I am but lonely all the long day here in this strange land. You will let me care for him, nicht? And Konrad, he will be very angry, but that shall make no bit of difference. Eh, Oscar?”
And so the thing was settled, and an hour later three anxious-browed women were debating the weighty question of eggs or bread-and-milk for Bennie’s supper. Frau Nirlanger was for soft-boiled eggs as being none too heavy after orphan asylum fare; I was for bread-and-milk, that being the prescribed supper dish for all the orphans and waifs that I had ever read about, from “The Wide, Wide World” to “Helen’s Babies,” and back again. Frau Knapf was for both eggs and bread-and-milk with a dash of meat and potatoes thrown in for good measure, and a slice or so of Kuchen on the side. We compromised on one egg, one glass of milk, and a slice of lavishly buttered bread, and jelly. It was a clean, sweet, sleepy-eyed Bennie that we tucked between the sheets. We three women stood looking down at him as he lay there in the quaint old blue-painted bed that had once held the plump little Knapfs.
“You think anyway he had enough supper? mused the anxious-browed Frau Knapf.
“To school he will have to go, yes?” murmured Frau Nirlanger, regretfully.