Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 13

about time I was picking up that Lockwood story again,” thought Rodman Wyatt, a couple of days later. “I'll just drop around to the garage and see what's doing.”

He dropped around to the garage, found Andrew Todd changing the oil in Lockwood's car, and, by dint of a little persuasion and a two-dollar bill, elicited certain information.

“Yes, sir, the boss is back from the South. Yes, sir, he goes ridin' pretty near every afternoon. I'm fixin' to take him out now, in 'bout half an hour. Yes, sir, him an' that Perfessor Veazie was down to Cha'leston, an' I drove 'em. That there Veazie—say, he's all right! He give me a fine tip, Veazie did. Daughter? Yes, sir, I reckon so; an' granddaughter, too. They're there to the house now; but look a here, mister—you ain't goin' to git me in no trouble, are you? You ain't goin' to put nothin' in no paper, sayin' I told you?”

“Paper? What paper?” Wyatt queried. “What makes you think I'm writing for a paper?”

“Oh, I know dog-goned well you are, mister!” Andrew's tone was accusatory. “Ain't much that chauffeurs don't git to know.”

“I guess that's right! Well—yes, I write; but your name won't appear in this.”

“It better not!” growled the negro with a look of menace. “I was goin' to leave, anyhow, an' so was Irene—that's my lady friend; but we both got a raise, so we're stayin', 'Twouldn't be healthy for you, nor no reporter, to git us in trouble!”

“Don't worry!” Wyatt laughed, and so departed.

During the hour that he let pass before calling at the Lockwood house—an hour to permit the old man, with his daughter and granddaughter, to get away in the car, so that he could interview Miss Grush undisturbed—exultation held him.

“By gad, the story's breaking now!” he rejoiced, as he walked down Beacon Street. “Talk about your scoops!”

He laughed for very joy.

A radiant March sun, such as only Boston can display, laughed with him. It sent snow water plashing, cascading, down the steep gutters. It made the asphalt steam. It coaxed the buds to life. It caused sparrows to chipper and fly with straws and bits of string to window crevices. It flung the pigeons in swooping storms of flight across the elm tops of the Common, soon now to be touched with vivid green. Spring and its magic were abroad in the land.

Self-satisfied, rather chesty, exceedingly well clad, and altogether pleased with the world and with his own cleverness—feeling himself a superior side-line spectator of human life, immune from being caught and spun in its maelstroms—Wyatt whistled and hummed to himself as he approached the Lockwood house.

“Some scoop!” he murmured. “Fine!”

Already he had planned his leading question to Miss Grush, pondering—villainously, after the manner of reporters—how to extract the whole story from her and still keep her sympathetic. He mounted the huge granite steps, youth's galliard self-sufficiency in his heart and a notebook in his pocket.

The perversities of human destiny, however, had unexpected things in store for him.

“No, sir—Miss Grush isn't in,” Irene informed him. “She's down town, shoppin'. Mr. Lockwood's out drivin'. Who shall I tell 'em called?”

At that moment Wyatt grew conscious of music—a piano—being played in the drawing-room. It was being played with a certain light and youthful touch that well accorded with the piece itself—Grieg's “Spring Song”—but was wholly out of keeping with the dignified asceticism of the old mansion.

Something, he could hardly tell what, seemed to have breathed another soul into the house. Somehow, as if by instinct, Wyatt felt that youth had entered there. Fresh life and joy had come to dwell in that sad place, so long a stranger to aught save memories and griefs of bygone years. For a pregnant minute he stood listening, on the threshold.

“Who'll I tell 'em?” Irene interrupted his listening.

Wyatt presented a perfectly correct card.

“Mr. Lockwood's daughter will do just as well,” said he.

“She's out, too—she's drivin' with Mr. Lockwood.”

His perceptions divided between Irene and the “Spring Song,” Wyatt stood pensive for a moment. Then, suddenly, with the timid and retiring manner of reporters the whole world over, he declared:

“I'll wait!”

“No, sir—you better come back again, I reckon,” judged the maid with some asperity. “It might be an hour before they—”

“Oh, I don't mind! I've got all the time there is.” Wyatt's voice was as brazen as the bulls of Colchis, tamed by Jason. “I'll just sit here in the hall and read.”

“You can't do that!” objected Irene, properly scandalized. Visions of sneak-thievery filled her mental vision. “No, sir—you better come back.”

The music ceased, leaving a sudden and immense vacancy in the tall house. A light step sounded, and in the drawing-room door Disney appeared.

“Well, what is it?” she inquired.

Wyatt blinked at her in dumb astonishment. Any girl who can astonish a reporter must possess qualities extraordinary.

“By gad!” he realized. “The granddaughter!”

Something—an emotional bounce that he had never felt before—smote him under the short ribs, a little to the left. He had a prescience of unexpected events impending. His analytical powers deserted him. He knew only that he was—rather stupidly, perhaps—regarding a girl altogether different from any and every other girl.

Dart-straight she stood in the doorway, a study in yellow and black. Black hair—what masses of it!—black eyes, a sheer yellow gown that clung. Wyatt got vague impressions of broad, straight brows, of a vivid mouth that smiled a little, of sensitive nostrils delicately arched, of a sweet young curve of breast; but all were blent in a confusion that he had never known before.

For a long minute he looked at Disney, and she at him. It seemed as if the destinies of worlds—universes—lay in their mutual appraisal.

“I—I came to see Miss Grush—or Mr. Lockwood,” he began; “but—”

“They're out—yes,” nodded Disney. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes, there is,” he affirmed, getting his feet on bottom again, and discovering that he was still alive. “Lots! You can talk to me.”

“Talk to your Why—”

He snicked up his card from the little silver plate of the scandalized Irene, and with considerable impropriety extended it toward the girl. She took it, read it, and—her eyes wondering—asked:

“And you want me to talk to you? What about?”

“Everything. Your motor trip to the North, Boston, yourself—and especially yourself.”

“But—I don't understand!”

Rodman Wyatt laughed, then—a hearty and good laugh that tremendously relieved his plexus—the kind of laugh that breaks all ice.

“I'm a writer,” he explained. “Kind of a reporter—one of the much maligned fraternity that goes about getting the cream of life for the world to have with its breakfast coffee. In other words, it's my business to get the interesting, worth-while facts. Just now I—well, frankly, I'd like some facts about you!”

“About me? Why, what in the world can people want to know about me?”

“Lots!” he assured her, realizing that her voice held a soft Southern quality impossible to analyze, but wholly fascinating. “In the first place—”

“You better come back,” Irene insisted. “Mr. Lockwood, he wouldn't like it—”

“There, Irene, that 'll do!” Disney reproved her. Not in her Charleston world were white folk accustomed to receive unsolicited advice from people of color. “You may go now.”

Slowly, unwillingly, suspiciously, the maid withdrew.

“These here repo'ters!” she muttered.

“Won't you come in, please?” invited Disney. “I reckon it's a whole lot pleasanter in the drawing-room than out here in the hall.”

“It's pleasant anywhere here—now,” Wyatt affirmed, laying off his overcoat.

He thanked whatever gods he worshiped that his suit was freshly pressed, and that his shave dated only from that morning. Luck was playing his hand!

As he followed her into the vast, sunlit room with the purple-paned bay windows, he saw that she was splendidly tall, and that she wore low heels. Of such incongruous details, in life's most critical moments, are men's impressions sometimes compounded. Wyatt decided that high heels and short, blond girls were detestable.

“I'm sorry,” he began, “to have interrupted your music. Won't you please go on playing?”

“Oh, never, before a stranger!” She smiled, and he grew conscious that her mouth was fascinatingly mobile. “You know, really, I'm the merest amateur.”

“But you have quite the professional touch. On my word, you have! You're going to follow music, here in Boston?”

She nodded, waved him to a chair by the small fire, and sat down. He knew immediately that no other girl in all Boston—perhaps in the whole world—could sit down with quite such grace; and yellow was certainly the color of all colors. By contrast he felt gauche and lumbering. Jonquils in the window—yellow, too! He had banal thoughts of her being a spring flower.

What should he say, to begin with? No words came. Usually this unabashed person possessed unlimited floods of language, but now his springs of eloquence had dried at the source.

“What a boob I am!” he thought.

Something new and strange was working in his ego, chastening him, making him feel small and confused.

A moment's awkward silence fell. The clock on the stairs ticked with unusual loudness. A coal fell in the grate. Outside, a boy whistled. The silence continued, half embarrassing, half tingling—the kind of silence that sometimes follows when two human beings, to whom great things are destined, enter that most critical stage of first establishing contacts.

Disney broke the silence.

“Boston's such a splendid place for music! Don't you think so? Last night I heard my first Symphony, and next week it's Heifetz. I'm quite thrilled by it!”

“It's great to be thrilled, when you're thrilled the right way. So you really like Boston?”

“I love it! You know, most of America's so intolerably ugly—that is, most of what I've seen. All the way North, we were driving through such commonplace, ugly towns—all alike. So many wooden houses, mostly drab or brown. I don't see why Americans have to build so many rows of hideous houses everywhere, and paint them drab and brown! But here—especially on Beacon Hill—it's lovely. It's so much like Cha'leston. The old steps, fanlights, and knockers—I don't guess any Cha'lestonian could be homesick here. You know Cha'leston?”

He shook his head.

“No. I've heard, though, that it's a wonderful old city.”

“Yes, it is—it's right wonderful. That's because it's so foreign, I reckon—Spanish and French. The Huguenots built so much of it.” Wyatt wondered if her black eyes and hair were French or Spanish. “Everywhere old, tall, plastered houses with wrought-iron balconies and gates; and garden walls, plastered, too, with vines and flowers and palms over them; and mocking birds, and Spanish moss—that long, traily stuff, you know.”

“M-m-m-m—huh?”

“And the plaster all such lovely colors—old rose and maroon and everything, painted by the best painter in the world.”

“Oh, he's down there, is he?”

“I mean Father Time.”

“Oh!”

They both laughed.

“I know I'd be awfully homesick in any modern, spick-and-span, machine-made city.” Her look contemned all strictly modern cities. “But Boston—well, it's so much like home!”

“Gad, I must remember this!” something far back in Wyatt's subjectivity was whispering. “Here's a stranger with something to say, and she knows how to say it. She's a wonder!”

But the young man's objectivity wasn't reporting, at all. It was just looking, listening, admiring.

Disney was worth admiring, right enough, as she sat by the fire in that big old chair, with the light behind her. It threw the most adorable shadow across her finely molded cheek bones and her almost too lovely throat and chin. It cast a glossy, raven's-wing glint upon her masses of black hair.

“Thank God,” thought Wyatt, “here's one girl, anyhow, that's not bobbed!”

And, studying her, he thought she looked fascinatingly unmodern. Oh, in this world of flapperish ultra-modernity, how welcome a relief!

“'She looks like a family portrait,” he half mused. “An old, old portrait of a very young, young woman. She's a wonderful girl!”

Disney still talked, and he answered; but just what it was all about he hardly knew. His mental processes grew vague, confused. He wanted to remember it all, and couldn't. Take notes? Never! To have hauled out that well worn notebook would have been about as appropriate as to address a K. K. K. meeting in Gaelic. Wyatt would as soon have tried to take notes from a seraph.

Something of the professional instinct, however, still survived. His story—that must be had, even though the heavens fell.

“It's really extraordinary, isn't it,” he asked, wording a disingenuous thought, “how your grandfather found you, after so long?”

“It's marvelous!” She clasped her fine, slender hands; he saw a tinge of heightened color in her cheek. Were there different tints of black? Wyatt felt positive that her eyes had deepened in hue. “Such things simply don't happen—and yet this happened. To think that the skull of an African witch doctor should have guided grandfather to us! Doesn't it seem fantastic? And yet—”

“Skull?”

“Yes.” While Wyatt listened in amaze, she told what she knew of the story, ending: “So you see, miracles aren't over yet!”

“I should say not!” he agreed, hot at heart in realization of the lie that she so trustfully believed, and marveling at the professor's Machiavellian knavery.

“But then, when you come to think of it,” the girl continued, “everything's a miracle. I've always thought that. Why, even a pebble is a miracle, or a butterfly, or a sunset, or a piano, or even a—”

“Even a reporter?” he laughed.

“I suppose even a reporter, too, if you look at him right. The very fact of their being anything at all, I reckon that's a miracle, don't you? If we only knew where things came from, and how, and why, they'd all be miracles. It's only because we're so used to things, and take them as matters of course, that—”

“That makes them matters of course—yes, that's so!”

“Naturally, though, some things are more wonderful than others; and the way mother and I happen to be here is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of. It was all through Professor Veazie. I feel just like Cinderella; and isn't he kind of a fairy godmother—godfather, I mean? Oh, I'd hate to have the clock strike midnight, and wake up!”

“That would be tough,” Wyatt admitted, with a vague ache somewhere in the deeps of his soul.

“Yes, because this is all so marvelous—Boston, and a grandfather like this, and music—study—everything!”

She sat pensive for a moment, with a vague smile on her lips.

“What a rotter I am!” thought Wyatt.

Half an hour later—it seemed barely five minutes—he took his leave of her. His journalistic instincts told him that he ought to wait for the return of her mother and of Mr. Lockwood. With the interview, so far, as an opening wedge, what a story he could get! But now something more powerful than journalistic instincts had gripped him—as sometimes happens to young men, especially in the spring o' the year.

Walking up Beacon Street under the gay March sunshine—a trifle dazed, not quite knowing whither bound—he still felt Disney's presence. Still he saw the glossy blackness of her hair, the magic of her smile. Traffic, pedestrians, sparrows, pigeons, the Common—none of them existed for him.

Quite suddenly, in front of the State House with its sacred golden dome aglitter, he stopped—stopped short, with eyes that saw not.

“Wonder when I can see her again!” he said, to nothing in particular, to the whole universe in general. “My God, this is terrible! This is awful! Damned if I don't think—don't think I'm in love!”