Mary Rose of Mifflin Part 8

"It's very exciting living in the city," sighed Mary Rose, when she was on the front seat beside him. "I've been here only three days and see all that's happened. Oh, there's the lady who found Jenny Lind--and the enchanted princess, too!" she cried as they pa.s.sed Miss Thorley and Miss Carter. "Isn't that the enchanted princess, Mr. Jerry?" She twisted around so that she could look into his face. He colored and his eyes seemed to darken as he spoke to the two girls. Miss Thorley nodded curtly, but Miss Carter waved a friendly hand. "My," sighed Mary Rose, "if I were a prince I wouldn't let any old witch Independence keep her enchanted."

"I wonder how you would prevent it," muttered Mr. Jerry under his breath. "Saying and doing, Mary Rose, are two very separate and distinct things."

"I know." Mary Rose felt quite capable of discussing the subject.

"Mr. Mann, the Presbyterian minister in Mifflin, preached a whole sermon about that. He said the Lord didn't ever give you what you want right off quick. You had to work for it, and the more precious it was the harder you had to work. I should think that a beautiful princess would be the most precious thing a prince could work for, shouldn't you?"

Mr. Jerry took his hand from the wheel to squeeze Mary Rose's brown fingers. "I should!" he said solemnly. "I do, Mary Rose, I do!"

CHAPTER VII

Strange as the Washington seemed to Mary Rose, it was not very different from any other large city apartment house where people lived side by side for months, for years, sometimes, without becoming acquainted. It was not worth while, some said; neighbors change too often. You don't know who people are, others thought. In such close quarters one cannot afford to know undesirable people. The advantage of an apartment house is that you don't have to know your neighbors, murmured a third group. Consequently the tenants came and went and one could count on a hand and have fingers to spare, the few who exchanged greetings when they met on the stairs.

This was an appalling state of affairs to country-bred Mary Rose, who had been brought up in a friendly atmosphere. In Mifflin everyone knew everyone and was interested in what happened. When joy came to a neighbor there was general rejoicing, and when sorrow touched a family there was a universal sympathy, while the little between pleasures and perplexities lost nothing and gained considerably by the knowledge that they were shared with others. Mary Rose was intensely interested in this new phase of life, if she could not understand it. It amazed her when she counted how many people were over her small head.

"In Mifflin I didn't have anyone but G.o.d and the angels," she told Aunt Kate, "but here there's the Schunemans and the Rawsons and the Blakes and Mr. Jarvis and Miss Adams and Mrs. Matchan and Miss Proctor and Mr.

Wilc.o.x and his friend. In Mifflin we lived side by side, you know, and not up and down. We ought all to be friends when we live so close together, shouldn't we?" wistfully.

Aunt Kate tried her best to tell her that they were all friends, but she couldn't do it.

"What's the good of tellin' her folks are friendly when they don't look friendly? Seems if a body can't frown with her face an' smile with her heart at the same time. An' frowns are just as catchin' as germs. You naturally don't pat a growlin' dog an' so you don't smile at a frownin'

person. I've al'ys seen more frowns 'n smiles in the Washington."

But Mary Rose did her best to make friends, because that was what she had done always and because that was the only way she knew how to live.

And one by one her unconscious little efforts to unlock the gates of reserve that suspicion and indifference and consciousness had placed over the hearts and lips of the people she was thrown with began to make some impression.

Even Mrs. Willoughby, who had wept ever since her mother died, smiled when she saw the little girl in the checked ap.r.o.n that was so much too big for her, with her birdcage in her hand, and forgot to complain of the unusual noise in the hall. Mary Rose smiled, too, and when Mrs.

Willoughby spoke of Jenny Lind, Mary Rose offered to loan her bird.

"She'll make you feel happier," she said. "She did me, when my daddy went to be with my little mother in Heaven. Jenny Lind can't talk,"

she admitted regretfully, "but she can sing and she's--she's so friendly!"

And Mr. Willoughby came down that very night and thanked the Donovans for the loan of Jenny Lind and for what Mary Rose had said and done.

Larry Donovan and his wife looked at each other after he had gone. It was not often that they were thanked by a tenant.

Miss Adams would have died before she would have confessed to anyone but Mary Rose that she hated Waloo, she hated the Washington. Mary Rose looked at her with wide open eyes, too astonished to be shocked that anyone could hate a world that was as beautiful and as full of wonderful surprises as Mary Rose found this world to be.

"I don't see how you can be lonesome when there are people above you and below you and in front of you and behind you and right across from you. Why, you're almost entirely surrounded by neighbors," she cried, as if Miss Adams could not be almost entirely surrounded by anything more desirable. "There are almost as many people in this house as there are in the Presbyterian Church in Mifflin and no one was ever lonely there except on week days. Don't you like your neighbors?"

"I don't know them," confessed Miss Adams, mournfully.

"You don't know the people who live right next door to you!" Mary Rose had never heard of such a situation. "Why, when the Jenkses moved from Prairieville Mrs. Mullins, who'd never set eyes on one of them before, took over a pan of hot gingerbread so she could get acquainted right away. Of course the people here are all moved in, but you could borrow an egg or a cup of mola.s.ses, couldn't you? And take it back right away. That would give you two excuses to call."

"I couldn't do that." Miss Adams shivered at the mere thought. "It isn't that I care to know any of them, Mary Rose, only--it makes me so mad that I don't!" with a sudden burst of honesty.

"Couldn't you ask about a pattern or what to do for a cold in the head or how to get red ants off of a plant? But you haven't any plants.

Wouldn't you feel more friendly if you had a beautiful pink geranium growing in your window?"

"There isn't sun enough in this flat to keep a geranium alive,"

grumbled Miss Adams, who seemed determined to be lonely and faultfinding.

Mary Rose sighed. "Of course, no one can have the sun all the time,"

she said gently, as if to excuse old Sol for not lingering longer in Miss Adams' small apartment. "I'll let you have Jenny Lind for a while tomorrow," she suggested after a moment of frowning thought. "She'll cheer you up."

Miss Adams wanted to refuse to be cheered by Jenny Lind, but she had not the courage, and when Mary Rose brought the bird the next morning she brought also a small gla.s.s dish filled with pebbles on which rested a little green bulb.

"Inside it is a j.a.panese lily," she said, and there was both pride and awe in her voice. "Don't you wonder how G.o.d ever folded it up in such a small package? Mr. Jerry's Aunt Mary was going to throw it away.

She said it was too late, that it ought to have been planted months ago, but I said wouldn't she please give it a chance. My daddy used to say that was all people needed, just a chance. Mrs. Mullins had one in Mifflin, I mean a lily, and it didn't need hardly any sun. It just grew and grew. You can sit beside it in the window and pretend you're a j.a.panese queen. Don't you think it's fun to pretend? And imagine?

It's almost the same as having everything you want. I've imagined I was a queen on a throne and the whale that swallowed Jonah--he must have been so surprised--and a circus rider and an angel with a harp and a p.u.s.s.y willow. I don't know which I liked the best. It helps a lot when things go wrong to imagine they're right. You'll like to see the j.a.panese lily come out of its bulb, won't you?"

Miss Adams was polite enough to say she would, although she frowned at the gla.s.s dish as she set it in the window. If Mary Rose had seen as much of the world as she had, she wouldn't think that to imagine a thing was the same as having it.

"I'll tell Mr. Jerry's Aunt Mary you're much obliged," Mary Rose suggested when she left.

Another day Miss Proctor found her leaning against the door of the apartment she shared with Mrs. Matchan, listening entranced to the music that Mrs. Matchan was making with her ten fingers and her piano.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Mary Rose looked up with shining eyes, not at all abashed at being discovered listening. "It's better than any circus band I ever heard. It's like Jenny Lind when the sun is shining and she has had a leaf of fresh lettuce. It makes me feel in my heart like soda water feels in my nose, all p.r.i.c.kly and light," vaguely.

"It's--it's wonderful! Take this place," she moved generously away from the crack that Miss Proctor might put her ear to it. "You can hear better. When I grow up I want to play just like that." Mary Rose always wanted to do what other people could do.

"Do you?" Miss Proctor looked at her and forgot that she had considered children unmitigated nuisances. She actually opened the door. "Come in," she said, "and tell Mrs. Matchan that you like her music."

And the result of Mary Rose's attempt to put in words the feeling she had in her heart that was like soda water in her nose, was that Mrs.

Matchan went down to the Donovans' and asked if she might be permitted--permitted--to give Mary Rose music lessons.

"You could have knocked me down with the pin feather of a chicken,"

Aunt Kate told Uncle Larry. "I supposed, of course, she'd come tearin'

down to find fault with Mrs. Rawson for runnin' her sewin' machine last night an' I was all ready to tell her that each of us has some rights, but no, it was to offer to give Mary Rose lessons on her piano. She says the child's got talent an' feelin' an' she'd like to see how she'd express them. She had to tell me twice before I could take it in. It isn't often that folks come down here to give a favor. Seems if they only find the way when they want to complain. I never knew Mrs.

Matchan to do anythin' for anybody before an' we've lived under the same roof for most two years now."

She had another surprise when Bob Strahan tramped down the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs with a big box of Annie Keller chocolates under his arm. He solemnly presented the candy to Mary Rose.

"In payment of a debt," he explained gravely when Aunt Kate and Uncle Larry stared and Mary Rose giggled. "She helped me with a very important bit of work," he added, although the addition did not make the matter any clearer to the Donovans nor to Mary Rose.

"You bet she helped me," he told Miss Carter when he went up and met her in the lower hall. They had encountered each other on the stairs several times since the day of Jenny Lind's adventure and had made the amazing discovery that they had formerly lived within fifteen miles of each other and had many mutual friends. "If it hadn't been for Mary Rose, I wouldn't be on the staff of the Waloo _Gazette_ today. They're cutting off heads down there, and I'm sure mine was slated to go, but the chief's strong for human interest stuff, especially kid stuff. He says that every living being, however hard his outside sh.e.l.l is now, was once a kid, and sometime the kid stuff will get to him for the sake of old times. Mary Rose and the cat she's boarding out saved my neck and I'm still a man with a job."

"That's splendid." Miss Carter tried to speak with enthusiasm, but she could not look enthusiastic. She was tired and discontented with life; all the sparkle had gone out of her face.

Bob Strahan saw it and was sorry. "Say," he said impulsively. "I've two tickets for a show in my pocket this minute. You've known me over forty-eight hours. Is that long enough to make it proper for you to go with me? I'll give you the names of the banker and the minister in my old home town and you can call them up on the long distance for references."

"The idea!" A bit of sparkle crept back into Miss Carter's face and she laughed. "Louis Blodgett's chum doesn't need any reference. Louis has told me quite a little about you," significantly. "It seems perfectly ridiculous that you were living right next door and I never knew it."

"And you might not know it now if it hadn't been for Mary Rose and that canary of hers. Gee! I'm glad I took her that box of chocolates."

CHAPTER VIII