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. [pg 110]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.
