Books › Blue Book v035 n05 [1922-09], 1922 › scan 67
Scan 67
Blue Book v035 n05 [1922-09], 1922
48 lines. Read by computer on 17 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Witchcraft
3time to give him a chance to get it off his chest.
5He told me about the letter he had got from Kate. Evidently she had not mentioned my writing, and I felt rather glad of that.
7"What must she think of me?" he demanded.
9"Who—Kate?" I asked.
11"No—the other—the girl—the Fay," he replied. Kate tells me she has left the island, together with the people with whom she was stopping, who were strangers there, and no one has their address."
13I wondered a little why Kate hadn't told me this too, but that was all right, anyway. She didn't have to tell me anything I hadn't asked about.
15"They knew her, the neighbors around the farm where she was living, only as 'Lady Jean,'" Pete went on. Something else Kate hadn't told me.
17"What are you going to do?" I asked.
19"What can I do?" he countered. "She probably thinks me a scoundrel, and wouldn't speak to me if I found her. And how on earth to go about finding her is something I wish you'd tell me."
21"Why not go over there?" I suggested.
23"That's a bright idea," said Pete. "I think I'll do it."
25He went away the next week, and was gone three months. He called me up when he got back. Hilda answered the phone.
27"Oh, Pete, I'm so glad to hear your voice again," she said. "Did you find her? Come over and tell us all about it."
29I don't know what Pete said, but he came over anyway, quite provoked at me for telling Hilda about his affairs. But my sister Nell dropped in, and as she can wear a number-two shoe and is a wise and seasoned little matron into the bargain, she backed Pete into a corner and wormed the whole story out of him.
31It was simple enough. He had gone to Westray and drawn a perfect blank. The name of the people with whom "Lady Jean" had been stopping was, strangely enough, Smith. If I had been looking up ancestors as well as Pete, we'd have found them, sure, and Pete would have met the girl in the regular way and probably would have been happily married by this time. Anyway, the people were entire strangers to Westray. The three of them had come there—Mr. and Mrs. Smith and the girl—and rented a cottage for the summer. They paid their debts, lived to themselves, and then went away, and that was all that anyone on Westray knew about them.
33Well, that seemed to settle it, but I noticed that Pete didn't show any more interest in other girls than he had before. I noticed it, that is, when I happened to see him, which wasn't very often. Somehow a fellow never realizes before he gets married how much of a man's time his domestic duties take up.
35I heard that Pete had bought a violin. That made me laugh, but I laughed harder when I heard that he found his hands were so big he couldn't play it, and had smashed it over the back of a chair one night. Then he bought a 'cello, and one night when Hilda had gone down the State to visit her mother and taken the baby with her, I dropped in at the old flat and found him fiddling with the thing.
37"I didn't know you could play anything, Pete, as long as I've known you," I said.
39"I can't," he replied, "but there's one thing I'm trying to learn to play. You remember that song—the one where all the Picts and fairies came out of the ground and the water ran down under the ice?"
41"Did you hear all that in it, too?" I asked, though I ought not to have been surprised.
43"Yes—and she sang it for me again the next night," he said.
45Well, he got part of it pretty well. It couldn't be done, I suppose, on anything but a violin or 'cello, unless it was a slide trombone, and there was a lot of it that he couldn't get at all, but I give you my word that just hearing him play the parts he did get gave me that same feeling of growing things coming up out of the ground and the tinkle of a spring brook. It was amazing.
47Next thing I heard, Pete was studying Gaelic and the history of the Picts, with old Magnus Traill, who used to be a professor of some sort at the State university until he retired on a Carnegie pension. Old Traill was an Orcadian himself, it turned out. I met Pete at the club one day, and we had luncheon together. He told me he was learning to read those funny inscriptions on the rocks that looked like the marks on some gigantic yardstick. Couldn't keep his mind away from the Orkneys and the girl. He'd em-
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