But during that first two weeks a continual rush of business made
long days for Maida. All the children in the neighborhood were
curious to see the place. It had been dark and dingy as long as they
could remember. Now it was always bright and pretty—always sweet
with the perfume of flowers, always gay with the music of birds. But
more, the children wanted to see the lame little girl who “tended
store,” who seemed to try so hard to please her customers and who
was so affectionate and respectful with the old, old lady whom she
called “Granny.”
At noon and night the bell sounded a continuous tinkle.
For a week Maida kept rather close to the shop. She wanted to get
acquainted with all her customers. Moreover, she wanted to find out
which of the things she had bought sold quickly and which were
unpopular.
After a day or two her life fell into a regular programme.
Early in the morning she would put the shop to rights for the day’s
sale, dusting, replacing the things she had sold, rearranging them
often according to some pretty new scheme.
About eight o’clock the bell would call her into the shop and it
would be brisk work until nine. Then would come a rest of three
hours, broken only by an occasional customer. In this interval she
often worked in the yard, raking up the leaves that fell from vine
and bush, picking the bravely-blooming dahlias, gathering sprays of
woodbine for the vases, scattering crumbs to the birds.
At twelve the children would begin to flood the shop again and Maida
would be on her feet constantly until two. Between two and four came
another long rest. After school trade started up again. Often it
lasted until six, when she locked the door for the night.
In her leisure moments she used to watch the people coming and going
in Primrose Court. With Rosie’s and Dicky’s help, she soon knew
everybody by name. She discovered by degrees that on the right side
of the court lived the Hales, the Clarks, the Doyles and the Dores;
on the left side, the Duncans, the Brines and the Allisons. In the
big house at the back lived the Lathrops.
Betsy was a great delight to Maida, for the neighborhood brimmed
with stories of her mischief. She had buried her best doll in the
ash-barrel, thrown her mother’s pocketbook down the cesspool, put
all the clean laundry into a tub of water and painted the parlor
fireplace with tomato catsup. In a single afternoon, having become
secretly possessed of a pair of scissors, she cut all the fringe off
the parlor furniture, cut great scallops in the parlor curtains, cut
great patches of fur off the cat’s back. When her mother found her,
she was busy cutting her own hair.
Often Granny would hear the door slam on Maida’s hurried rush from
the shop. Hobbling to the window, she would see the child leading
Betsy by the hand. “Running away again,” was all Maida would say.
Occasionally Maida would call in a vexed tone, “Now _how_ did she
creep past the window without my seeing her?” And outside would be
rosy-cheeked, brass-buttoned Mr. Flanagan, carrying Betsy home. Once
Billy arrived at the shop, bearing Betsy in his arms. “She was
almost to the bridge,” he said, “when I caught sight of her from the
car window. The little tramp!”
Betsy never seemed to mind being caught. For an instant the little
rosebud that was her mouth would part over the tiny pearls that were
her teeth. This roguish smile seemed to say: “You wait until the
next time. You won’t catch me then.”
Sometimes Betsy would come into the shop for an hour’s play. Maida
loved to have her there but it was like entertaining a whirlwind.
Betsy had a strong curiosity to see what the drawers and boxes
contained. Everything had to be put back in its place when she left.
Next to the Hales lived the Clarks. By the end of the first week
Maida was the chief adoration of the Clark twins. Dorothy and Mabel
were just as good as Betsy was naughty. When they came over to see
Maida, they played quietly with whatever she chose to give them. It
was an hour, ordinarily, before they could be made to talk above a
whisper. If they saw Maida coming into the court, they would run to
her side, slipping a hot little hand into each of hers. Attended
always by this roly-poly bodyguard, Maida would limp from group to
group of the playing children. Nobody in Primrose Court could tell
the Clark twins apart. Maida soon learned the difference although
she could never explain it to anybody else. “It’s something you have
to feel,” she said.
Billy Potter enjoyed the twins as much as Maida did. “Good morning,
Dorothy-Mabel,” he always said when he met one of them; “is this you
or your sister?” And he always answered their whispered remarks with
whispers so much softer than theirs that he finally succeeded in
forcing them to raise their shy little voices.
The Doyles and the Dores lived in one house next to the Clarks,
Molly and Tim on the first floor, Dicky and Delia above. Maida
became very fond of the Doyle children. Like Betsy, they were too
young to go to school and she saw a good deal of them in the lonely
school hours. The puddle was an endless source of amusement to them.
As long as it remained, they entertained themselves playing along
its shores.
“There’s that choild in the water again,” Granny would cry from the
living-room.
Looking out, Maida would see Tim spread out on all fours. Like an
obstinate little pig, he would lie still until Molly picked him up.
She would take him home and in a few moments he would reappear in
fresh, clean clothes again.
“Hello, Tim,” Billy Potter would say whenever they met. “Fallen into
a pud-muddle lately?”
The word _pud-muddle_ always sent Tim off into peals of laughter. It
was the only thing Maida had discovered that could make him laugh,
for he was as serious as Molly was merry. Molly certainly was the
jolliest little girl in the court—Maida had never seen her with
anything but a smiling face.
Dicky’s mother went to work so early and came back so late that
Maida had never seen her. But Dicky soon became an intimate. Maida
had begun the reading lessons and Dicky was so eager to get on that
they were progressing famously.
The Lathrops lived in the big house at the back of the court. Granny
learned from the Misses Allison that, formerly, the whole
neighborhood had belonged to the Lathrop family. But they had sold
all their land, piece by piece, except the one big lot on which the
house stood. Perhaps it was because they had once been so important
that Mrs. Lathrop seemed to feel herself a little better than the
rest of the people in Primrose Court. At any rate, although she
spoke with all, the Misses Allison were the only ones on whom she
condescended to call. Maida caught a glimpse of her occasionally on
the piazza—a tall, thin woman, white-haired and sharp-featured, who
always wore a worsted shawl.
The house was a big, bulky building, a mass of piazzas and
bay-windows, with a hexagonal cupola on the top. It was painted white
with green blinds and trimmed with a great deal of wooden lace. The
wide lawn was well-kept and plots of flowers, here and there, gave
it a gay air.
Laura had a brother named Harold, who was short and fat. Harold
seemed to do nothing all day long but ride a wheel at a tearing pace
over the asphalt paths, and regularly, for two hours every morning,
to draw a shrieking bow across a tortured violin.
The more Maida watched Laura the less she liked her. She could see
that what Rosie said was perfectly true—Laura put on airs. Every
afternoon Laura played on the lawn. Her appearance was the signal
for all the small fry of the neighborhood to gather about the gate.
First would come the Doyles, then Betsy, then, one by one, the
strange children who wandered into the court, until there would be a
row of wistful little faces stuck between the bars of the fence.
They would follow every move that Laura made as she played with the
toys spread in profusion upon the grass.
Laura often pretended not to see them. She would lift her large
family of dolls, one after another, from cradle to bed and from bed
to tiny chair and sofa. She would parade up and down the walk, using
first one doll-carriage, then the other. She would even play a game
of croquet against herself. Occasionally she would call in a
condescending tone, “You may come in for awhile if you wish, little
children.” And when the delighted little throng had scampered to her
side, she would show them all her toy treasures on condition that
they did not touch them.
When the proceedings reached this stage, Maida would be so angry
that she could look no longer. Very often, after Laura had sent the
children away, Maida would call them into the shop. She would let
them play all the rest of the afternoon with anything her stock
afforded.
On the right side of the court lived Arthur Duncan, the Misses
Allison and Rosie Brine. The more Maida saw of Arthur, the more she
disliked him. In fact, she hated to have him come into the shop. It
seemed to her that he went out of his way to be impolite to her,
that he looked at her with a decided expression of contempt in his
big dark eyes. But Rosie and Dicky seemed very fond of him. Billy
Potter had once told her that one good way of judging people was by
the friends they made. If that were true, she had to acknowledge
that there must be something fine about Arthur that she had not
discovered.
Maida guessed that the W.M.N.T.’s met three or four times a week.
Certainly there were very busy doings at Dicky’s or at Arthur’s
house every other day. What it was all about, Maida did not know.
But she fancied that it had much to do with Dicky’s frequent
purchases of colored tissue paper.
The Misses Allison had become great friends with Granny. Matilda,
the blind sister, was very slender and sweet-faced. She sat all day
in the window, crocheting the beautiful, fleecy shawls by which she
helped support the household.
Jemima, the older, short, fat and with snapping black eyes, did the
housework, attended to the parrot and waited by inches on her
afflicted sister. Occasionally in the evening they would come to
call on Granny. Billy Potter was very nice to them both. He was
always telling the sisters the long amusing stories of his
adventures. Miss Matilda’s gentle face used positively to beam at
these times, and Miss Jemima laughed so hard that, according to her
own story, his talk put her “in stitches.”
Maida did not see Rosie’s mother often. To tell the truth, she was a
little afraid of her. She was a tall, handsome, black-browed woman—a
grown-up Rosie—with an appearance of great strength and of even
greater temper. “Ah, that choild’s the limb,” Granny would say, when
Maida brought her some new tale of Rosie’s disobedience. And yet, in
the curious way in which Maida divined things that were not told
her, she knew that, next to Dicky, Rosie was Granny’s favorite of
all the children in the neighborhood.
With all these little people to act upon its stage, it is not
surprising that Primrose Court seemed to Maida to be a little
theater of fun—a stage to which her window was the royal box.
Something was going on there from morning to night. Here would be a
little group of little girls playing “house” with numerous families
of dolls. There, it would be boys, gathered in an excited ring,
playing marbles or top. Just before school, games like leap-frog, or
tag or prisoners’ base would prevail. But, later, when there was
more time, hoist-the-sail would fill the air with its strange cries,
or hide-and-seek would make the place boil with excitement. Maida
used to watch these games wistfully, for Granny had decided that
they were all too rough for her. She would not even let Maida play
“London-Bridge-is-falling-down” or “drop the handkerchief”—anything,
in fact, in which she would have to run or pull.
But Granny had no objections to the gentler fun of “Miss
Jennie-I-Jones,” “ring-a-ring-a-rounder,” “water, water wildflower,”
“the farmer in the dell,” “go in and out the windows.” Maida used to
try to pick out the airs of these games on the spinet—she never could
decide which was the sweetest.
Maida soon learned how to play jackstones and, at the end of the
second week, she was almost as proficient as Rosie with the top. The
thing she most wanted to learn, however, was jump-rope. Every little
girl in Primrose Court could jump-rope—even the twins, who were
especially nimble at “pepper.” Maida tried it one night—all alone in
the shop. But suddenly her weak leg gave way under her and she fell
to the floor. Granny, rushing in from the other room, scolded her
violently. She ended by forbidding her to jump again without special
permission. But Maida made up her mind that she was going to learn
sometime, even, as she said with a roguish smile, “if it took a
leg.” She talked it over with Rosie.
“You let her jump just one jump every morning and night, Granny,”
Rosie advised, “and I’m sure it will be all right. That won’t hurt
her any and, after awhile, she’ll find she can jump two, then three
and so on. That’s the way I learned.”
Granny agreed to this. Maida practiced constantly, one jump in her
nightgown, just before going to bed, and another, all dressed, just
after she got up.
“I jumped three jumps this morning without failing, Granny,” she
said one morning at breakfast. Within a few days the record climbed
to five, then to seven, then, at a leap, to ten.
Dr. Pierce called early one morning. His eyes opened wide when they
fell upon her. “Well, well, Pinkwink,” he said. “What do you mean by
bringing me way over here! I thought you were supposed to be a sick
young person. Where’d you get that color?”
A flush like that of a pink sweet-pea blossom had begun to show in
Maida’s cheek. It was faint but it was permanent.
“Why, you’re the worst fraud on my list. If you keep on like this,
young woman, I shan’t have any excuse for calling. You’ve done fine,
Granny.”
Granny looked, as Dr. Pierce afterwards said, “as tickled as Punch.”
“How do you like shop-keeping?” Dr. Pierce went on.
“Like it!” Maida plunged into praise so swift and enthusiastic that
Dr. Pierce told her to go more slowly or he would put a bit in her
mouth. But he listened attentively. “Well, I see you’re not tired of
it,” he commented.
“Tired!” Maida’s indignation was so intense that Dr. Pierce shook
until every curl bobbed.
“And I get so hungry,” she went on. “You see I have to wait until
two o’clock sometimes before I can get my lunch, because from twelve
to two are my busy hours. Those days it seems as if the school bell
would never ring.”
“Sure, tis a foine little pig OI’m growing now,” Granny said.
“And as for sleeping—” Maida stopped as if there were no words
anywhere to describe her condition.
Granny finished it for her. “The choild sleeps like a top.”
Billy Potter came at least every day and sometimes oftener. Every
child in Primrose Court knew him by the end of the first week and
every child loved him by the end of the second. And they all called
him Billy. He would not let them call him Mr. Potter or even Uncle
Billy because, he said, he was a child when he was with them and he
wanted to be treated like a child. He played all their games with a
skill that they thought no mere grown-up could possess. Like Rosie,
he seemed to be bubbling over with life and spirits. He was always
running, leaping, jumping, climbing, turning cartwheels and
somersaults, vaulting fences and “chinning” himself unexpectedly
whenever he came to a doorway.
“Oh, Masther Billy, ’tis the choild that you are!” Granny would say,
twinkling.
“Yes, ma’am,” Billy would answer.
At the end of the first fortnight, the neighborhood had accepted
Granny and Maida as the mother-in-law and daughter of a “traveling
man.” From the beginning Granny had seemed one of them, but Maida
was a puzzle. The children could not understand how a little girl
could be grown-up and babyish at the same time. And if you stop to
think it over, perhaps you can understand how they felt.
Here was a child who had never played,
“London-Bridge-is-falling-down” or jackstones or jump-rope or
hop-scotch. Yet she talked familiarly of automobiles, yachts and horses.
She knew nothing about geography and yet, her conversation was full of
such phrases as “The spring we were in Paris” or “The winter we spent
in Rome.” She knew nothing about nouns and verbs but she talked Italian
fluently with the hand-organ man who came every week and many of her books
were in French. She knew nothing about fractions or decimals, yet she
referred familiarly to “drawing checks,” to gold eagles and to Wall
Street. Her writing was so bad that the children made fun of it, yet
she could spin off a letter of eight pages in a flash. And she told
the most wonderful fairy-tales that had ever been heard in Primrose
Court.
Because of all these things the children had a kind of contempt for
her mingled with a curious awe.
She was so polite with grown people that it was fairly embarrassing.
She always arose from her chair when they entered the room, always
picked up the things they dropped and never interrupted. And yet she
could carry on a long conversation with them. She never said, “Yes,
ma’am,” or “No, ma’am.” Instead, she said, “Yes, Mrs. Brine,” or
“No, Miss Allison,” and she looked whomever she was talking with
straight in the eye.
She would play with the little children as willingly as with the
bigger ones. Often when the older girls and boys were in school, she
would bring out a lapful of toys and spend the whole morning with
the little ones. When Granny called her, she would give all the toys
away, dividing them with a careful justice. And, yet, whenever
children bought things of her in the shop, she always expected them
to pay the whole price. You can see how the neighborhood would
fairly buzz with talk about her.
As for Maida—with all this newness of friend-making and out-of-doors
games, it is not to be wondered that her head was a jumble at the
end of each day. In that delicious, dozy interval before she fell
asleep at night, all kinds of pretty pictures seemed to paint
themselves on her eyelids.
Now it was Rose-Red swaying like a great overgrown scarlet flower
from the bars of a lamp-post. Now it was Dicky hoisting himself
along on his crutches, his face alight with his radiant smile. Now
it was a line of laughing, rosy-cheeked children, as long as the
tail of a kite, pelting to goal at the magic cry “Liberty poles are
bending!” Or it was a group of little girls, setting out rows and
rows of bright-colored paper-dolls among the shadows of one of the
deep old doorways. But always in a few moments came the sweetest
kind of sleep. And always through her dreams flowed the plaintive
music of “Go in and out the windows.” Often she seemed to wake in
the morning to the Clarion cry, “Hoist the sail!”
It did not seem to Maida that the days were long enough to do all
the things she wanted to do.