Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.
The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and
going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original
five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment
visiting this room upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old
scrim sash-curtains, which they had not needed for ages but at last
simply _must_ have, were not lurking there in a chest of general
curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their
main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that
where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York
family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their
friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps
have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the
rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their
old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued
to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man
had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not
feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man
approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen,
and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a
sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should
only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in
_his_ way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes
intent upon the façade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself
in the question which curtain-trunk the scrims might be in, she kept
the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen,
effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She
blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and
she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his
own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help.
She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very
light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face,
clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the
zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the
window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his
store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked
out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there,
off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an
impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.
"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
five-dollar room?"
She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
found and brought home with her.
"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
count up. What makes you ask?"
"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"
"I should say not, decidedly."
"Or recollect a face?"
"Certainly not."
"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
couldn't decide what to give him back?"
"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."
"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.
"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.
"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte
explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness
which her mother's imagination supplied.
"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon?
Did you inquire who he was or where?"
"What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several
impossibilities under one head in her answer.
"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."
"But I didn't _think_ he was the one, and I don't _know_ that he is
now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"
"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've
always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not
ungenerousness."
Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really,
mother!"
Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not
the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you.
The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the
undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or
the young man's identity.
It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with
Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the
inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure
to do so was the more important because the young man had come back
and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The
palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and
as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with
the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a
number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record
to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the
room.
When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he
interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way;
and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got
white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so
conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely
needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong
curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made
way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of
confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was
free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.
"Before I say a word," Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds
in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, "I want to ask something,
and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman's curiosity and not
think it rude."
At the words "old woman's" the young man gave a protesting "Oh!" and
at the word "rude" he said, "Not at all."
"It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because
we've had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I've never seen
your room opened in that whole time."
The young man laughed joyously. "Because it hasn't been opened in that
whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here
when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for
me, but I'm afraid it wasn't for her. I've been told that my
activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things
in them that she's been in ever since, and I'm here now to make what
reparation I can by listing them."
"She'll find it a great blessing," Mrs. Forsyth said. "I wish we had
ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have
been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age."
The young man beamed upon her. "Not so great as now, I'm afraid. The
fact is, I don't remember anything about it. But I've been told that I
embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over
her doll's things."
"Oh, indeed!" Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she turned rather
snubbingly from him and said, coldly, to Charlotte: "I think they are
in that green trunk. Have you the key?" and, stooping as her daughter
stooped, she whispered, "Really!" in condemnation and contempt.
Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could
not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, "No, I
haven't the key, mother," and the young man burst in with, "Oh, do let
me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn't a Yale," Mrs.
Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.
She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said,
"They're not here, mother," and her mother said, "No, I didn't suppose
they were," and began to ask the young man about his mother. It
appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then
his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though
mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go
next or whether they should stay.
"That would never suit my daughter," Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly
because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could
endure, and partly because Charlotte's indecision always amused her.
"She can't bear to choose."
"Really?" the young man said. "I don't know whether I like it or not,
but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn't think, though, that I
chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace
once, and as we couldn't live in it or move it we brought the
furniture here."
"It _is_ magnificent," Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long
stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. "I wish
my husband could see it--I don't believe he remembers it from fourteen
years ago. It looks--excuse me!--very studio."
"Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?"
"Yes," Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know
her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it
and that she had acquired his by like means.
"I like his things so much," he said. "I thought his three portraits
were the best things in the Salon last year."
"Oh, you _saw_ them?" Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and pride.
"Then," as if it necessarily followed, "you must come to us some
Sunday afternoon. You'll find a number of his new portraits and some
of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed." She tried for a
card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she said, "Have you one
of my cards, my dear?" Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a
severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward him. "It's
Mr. _Peter_ Bream?" she smiled upon him, and he beamed back.
"Did you remember it from our first meeting?"
In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, "I don't know whether he's what you
call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I'm not sure that I've been
very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so _glad_ to be asked."
Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the
surface of her mother's consciousness so painfully that it was rather
a relief to have her explode, "Mother, I will thank you not to discuss
my temperament with people."
She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being
able to say, "I won't--your _temper_, my dear," that she could add
with sincere apology: "I'm sorry I vexed you, and I won't do it
again."