myself--I mean my rill, true regular self," she added, with a manner of
testing me.
I think that we all dream our real, true, regular selves, only we do not
dream us until we come true. I said something of this to Calliope; and
then she told me.
"It was when I was twenty," she said, "an' it was a little while
after--well, things wasn't so very happy for me. But first thing I must
tell you about the picture. We didn't have so very many pictures. But in
my room used to be an old steel engraving of a poet, a man walkin'
'round under some kind o' trees in blossom. He had a beautiful face an'
a look on it like he see heaven. I use' to look at the picture an' look
at it, an' when I did, it seemed almost like I was off somewheres else.
"Then one night I had my dream. I thought I was walkin' down a long
road, green an' shady an' quite wide, an' fields around an' no folks. I
know I was hurryin'--oh, I was in such a hurry to see somebody, seems
though, somebody I was goin' to see when I got to the end o' the road.
An' I was so happy--did you ever dream o' being happy, I mean if you
wasn't so very happy in rill life? It puts you in mind o' havin' a pain
in your side an' then gettin' in one big, deep breath when the pain
don't hurt. In rill life I was lonesome, an' I hated Friendship an' I
wanted to get away--to go to the City to take music, or go anywheres
else. I never had any what you might call rill pleasure excep' walkin'
in the Depot Woods. That was a gully grove beyond the railroad track,
an' I use' to like to sit in there some, by myself. I wasn't ever rill
happy, though, them days, but in the dream--oh, I was happy, like on a
nice mornin', only more so."
Calliope looked at me fleetingly, as if she were measuring my ability to
understand.
"The funny part of it was," she said, "that in the dream I wasn't _me_
at all. Not me, as you know me. I thought somehow _I_ was that poet in
my picture, the man in the steel engravin' with a look like he see
heaven. An' it didn't seem strange to me, but just like it had always
been so. I thought I rilly was that poet that I'd looked at in the
picture all my life. But then I guess after all that part wasn't so
funny as the rest of it. For down at the end o' the road somebody was
waitin' for me under trees all in blossom, like the picture, too. It was
a girl, standin' there. An' I thought I looked at her--I, the poet, you
know--an' I see that the girl was me, Calliope Marsh, lookin' just like
I looked every day, natural as anything. Like you see yourself in the
glass.
"I know I wasn't su'prised at all. We met like we was friends, both
livin' here in the village, an' we walked down the road together like it
had always been that way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with
them you'd rather be with than anybody else. I thought we was goin'
somewhere to see somebody, an' we talked about that:--
"'Will They be home, do you think?' I says.
"An' the girl that was me says: 'Oh, yes. They'll be home. They're
always home,' she told me. An' we both felt pleased, like when you're
sure.
"An' then--oh," Calliope cried, "I wish I could remember what we said. I
wish I could remember. I know it was something that seemed beautiful,
an' the words come all soft. It was like bein' born again, somewheres
else. An' we knew just exactly what each other meant, an' that was best
of all."
She hesitated, seeking to explain that to me.
"When I was twenty," she said, "I use' to want to talk about things that
wasn't commonly mentioned here in Friendship--I mean, well, like little
things I'd read about noted people an' what they said an' done--an' like
that. But when you brought 'em up in the conversation, folks always
thought you was tryin' to show off. An' if you quoted a verse o' poetry
in company, my land, there was a hush like you'd swore. So gradually I'd
got to keepin' still about such things. But in that dream we talked an'
talked--said things about old noted folks right out an' told about 'em
without beginnin' it 'I happened to read the other day.' An' I know I
mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
out, too, without bein' afraid the girl that was me would think I was
affected. An' I said little things about--oh, like about goblins in the
wood an' figgers in the smoke, without bein' scared that mothers would
hear of it an' not let their children come to see me. An' then I made up
things an' said--things I was always wantin' to say--like about
expectin' to meet Summer walkin' down the road, an' so on: things that
if I'd said so's they'd got out around Friendship, folks would 'a'
thought I was queer an' not to be trusted to bring up their mail from
town. I said all those kind o' things, like I was really born to talk
what I thought about. An' the girl that was me understood what I meant.
An' we laughed a good deal--oh, how we laughed together. That was 'most
the best of all.
"Well, the dream dwindled off, like they will. An' when I woke up, I was
nothin' but Calliope Marsh, livin' in Friendship where folks cut a loaf
o' bread on a baker's headstone just because he _was_ a baker. Rill life
didn't get any better, an' I was more an' more lonesome in Friendship.
Somehow, nobody here in town rilly matched me. They all knew what I said
well enough, but when I spoke to 'em about what was rill interestin' to
me, seemed like their minds didn't _click_, with that good little
feelin' o' rilly takin' it in. My _i_-dees didn't seem to fit, quite
ball an' socket, into nobody's mind, but just to slide along over. And
as to _their_ i-dees--I rec'lect thinkin' that the three R's meant to
'em Relations, Recipes, an' the Remains. Yes, all I did have, you might
say, was my walks out in the Depot Woods. An' times like when Elder
Jacob Sykes--that was Silas's father--said in church that God come down
to be Moses's undertaker, I run off there to the woods feelin' all sick
an' skinned in soul, an' it sort o' seemed like the gully understood.
An' still, you can't be friends when they's only one of you. It's like
tryin' to hold a dust-pan an' sweep the dirt in at the same time. It
can't be done--not thorough. An' so settin' out there I used to take a
book an' hunt up nice little things an' learn different verses, in the
hopes that if that dream _should_ come back, I could have 'em to
tell--tell 'em, you know, to the girl that was me. Because it hed got so
by then that it seemed to me I was actually more that poet than I was
Calliope Marsh. An' so it went along till the day I met him--the man,
the poet."
"The man!" I said. "But do you mean _the_ man--the poet--the one that
was you?"
Calliope nodded confidently.
"Yes," she said, in her delicate excitement, "I do. Oh, I'll tell you
an' you'll see for yourself it must 'a' been him. It was one early
afternoon towards the end o' summer, an' I knew him in a minute. I'd
gone up to the depot to mail a postal on the Through, an' he got off the
train an' went into the Telegraph Office. An' the train pulled out an'
left him--it was down to the end o' the platform before he come out. He
didn't act, though, as if the train's leavin' him was much of anything
to notice. He just went up an' commenced talkin' to the baggageman,
Bill. But Bill couldn't understand him--Bill was sort o' crusted over
the mind--you had to say things over an' over again to him, an' even
then he 'most always took it different from what you meant. So I suppose
that was why the man left him an' come towards me.
"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was
young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see
heaven. It wasn't to say he was _exactly_ like my picture," Calliope
said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard,
an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might
say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His
hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was
his only baggage. An' he had a way--well, like what he happened to be
doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly
somewheres else, where everything was better.
"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says--an' it wasn't the way most of
'em talks here in Friendship, you understand--'I've been askin' the
luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at
what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman
there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to
find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad
time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem
to know.'
"An' then all at once I knew--I knew. Why, don't you see," Calliope
cried, "I had to know! That was just the way we'd talked in my
dream--kind of jokin' an' yet meanin' somethin', too--so's you felt all
lifted up an' out o' the ordinary. An' then I knew who he was an' I see
how everything was. Why, the girl that was me an' that was lonesome
there in Friendship _wasn't_ me, very much. Me bein' Calliope Marsh was
the chance part, an' didn't count. But things was rilly the way I'd
dreamed o' their bein.' Somehow, I had another self. An' I had dreamed
o' bein' that self. An' there he stood, on the Friendship depot
platform."
Calliope looked at me wistfully.
"You don't think I sound crazy, do you?" she asked.
And at my answer:--
"Well," she said, brightening, "that was how it was. An' it was like
there hadn't been any first time an' like there wouldn't be any end.
Like they was things bigger than time--an' lots nicer than life. An' I
spoke up like I'd always known him.
"'Why, yes,' I says to him simple, 'you must mean the Depot Woods,' I
said. 'They're always kind o' haunted to me. I guess the little folks
that come in the en-gine smoke live in there,' I told him, smilin'
because I was so glad.
"I remember how su'prised he looked an' how his face lit up, like he was
hearin' English in a heathen land.
"'Upon my word,' he says, still only half believin' in me. 'An' do you
go there often?' he ask' me. 'An' I daresay the little smoke folk talk
to you, now?' he says.
"'I go 'most every day,' I told him, 'but we don't say very much. I
guess they talk an' I listen,' I says.
"An' then the funny part about his askin' Bill for a haunted wood come
over me.
"'_Bill!_' I says. 'Did you actually ask Bill that?'
"Oh, an' how we laughed--how we laughed. Just the way the dream had
been. It seemed--it seemed such a sort o' _special_ comical," Calliope
said, "an' not like a Sodality laugh. 'Seems though I'd always laughed
at one set o' things all my life--my everyday life. An' this was a new
recipe for Laugh, flavoured different, an' baked in a quick oven, an' et
hot.
"Well, we walked down the road together, like it had always been that
way. An' we talked--like you do when you're with them you'd rather be
with than anybody else. An' he ask' me, grave as grave, about the little
smoke folks.
"'Will They be home, do you think?' he says.
"An' I says: 'Oh, yes. I know They will. They're always home.'
"An' we both felt pleased, like when you're sure.
"We went to walk in the Depot Woods. I remember how much he made me
talk--more than I'd ever talked before, excep' in the dream. I know I
told him the little stories I'd read about noted people, an' I said over
some o' the verses I'd learned an' liked the sound of--I remembered 'em
all for him, an' he listened an' heard 'em all just the way I'd said
'em. That was it--he heard it all just the way I said it. An' I
mentioned the sun on the leaves an' the way the clouds looked, right
out--an' I knew he didn't think I was affected. An' I made up things an'
said, too--things that was always comin' in my head an' that I was
always wantin' to say. An' he'd laugh almost before I was through--oh,
it was like heaven to have him laugh an' not just say, 'What on earth
_are_ you talkin', Calliope Marsh?' like I'd heard. An' he kep' sayin',
'I know, I know,' like he knew what I meant better than anything else in
the world. Then he read to me out o' the book he had an' he told
me--beautiful things. Some of 'em I remember--I've remembered always.
Some of 'em I forgot till I come on 'em, now an' then, in books--long
afterwards; an' then it was like somebody dead spoke up. I'm always
thankful to get hold o' other people's books an' see if mebbe I won't
find somethin' else he said. But a good many o' the things I s'pose I
clear forgot, an' I won't know 'em again till in the next life. Like I
forgot what we said in the dream, till they're both all mixed up an'
shinin'.
"We talked till 'most time for the 4.20 train. An' when it got towards
four o'clock, I told him about my dream. It seemed like he ought to
know, somehow. An' I told him how I dreamed I was him.
"'You don't look like the one I dreamed I was,' I told him, 'but, oh,
you talk the same--an' you pretend, an' you laugh, an' you seem the
same. An' your face looks different from folks here in Friendship, just
like his, an' it seems somehow like you saw things besides with your
eyes,' I told him, 'like the poet in my picture. So I know it's you--it
must be you,' I says.
"He looked at me so queer an' sudden an' long.
"'I'm a poet, too,' he said, 'if it comes to that. A very bad one, you
know--but a kind of poet.'
"An' then of course I was certain sure.
"When he understood all about it, I remember how he looked at me. An' he
says:--
"'Well, an' who knows? Who knows?'
"He sat a long time without sayin' anything. But I wasn't unhappy, even
when he seemed so sad. I couldn't be, because it was so much to know
what I knew.
"'If I can,' he says to me on the depot platform, 'dead or alive, I'll
come back some day to see you. But meanwhile you must forget me. Only
the dream--keep the dream,' he says.
"I tried to dream it again," Calliope told me, "but I never could. An'
dead or alive, he's never been back, all these years. I don't even know
his name--an' I remembered afterwards he hadn't asked me mine. But I
guess all that is the chance part, an' it don't really count. Out o' the
dream I've been, you might say, caught, tied up an' couldn't get
out,--just me, like you know me,--with a big unhappiness, an' like that.
But in the dream I dreamed myself true. An' then God let me meet myself,
just that once, there in the Depot Woods, to show me it's all right, an'
that they's things that's bigger than time an' lots nicer than life."
Calliope sat silent, with her way of sighing and looking by; and it was
as if she had suggested to me delicate things, as a rainbow will suggest
them.
XX
THE HIDINGS OF POWER
I divined the birches, blurred gray and white against the fog-bound
cedars. In the haze the airy trunks, because of their imminence, bore
the reality of thought, but the sterner green sank in the distance to
the faint avail of speech. It was well to be walking on the Plank Road
toward seven o'clock of a June morning, in a mist which might yield
fellowship in the same ease with which it breathed on distinctions.
Abel had told how, on that winter way of his among the hills, the sky
has fallen in the fog and had surrendered to him a fellowship of dreams.
But in Friendship Village, as I had often thought, there are dreams for
every one; how should it be otherwise to us faring up and down Daphne
Street (where Daphne's feet have been)? And yet that morning on the
Plank Road where, if the fancy seized her to walk in beauty, our lady of
the laurels might be met at any moment, her power seemed to me to be as
frail as wings, and I thought that it would not greatly matter if I were
to meet her.
As if my thought of Abel Halsey had brought him, the beat of hoofs won
toward me from the village; and presently Major Mary overtook me, and
there was Abel, driving with his eyes shut. I hailed him, laughed at
him, let him pick me up, and we went on through door after door of the
fog, with now a lintel of boughs and now a wall of wild roses.
"Abel," I remember saying abruptly, "dreams are not enough."
"No," he replied, as simply as if we had been talking of it, "dreams are
just one of the sources of power ... but doing is enough."
I said weakly--perhaps because it was a morning of chill and fog, when a
woman may feel her forlornest, look her plainest, know herself for dust:
"But then--what about everybody's heart?"
"Don't you know?" Abel asked, and even after those months in Friendship
Village I did not know.
"... use it up making some little corner better--better--better by the
width of a hand..." said Abel. "As I could do," he added after a moment,
"if I could get my chapel in the hills. Do you know, I've written to
Mrs. Proudfit about it at last. I couldn't help it--I couldn't help it!"
We came to the rise of the hill, where, but for the fog, we might have
looked back on the village, already long astir. To the left, within its
line of field stone and whitewashed rails and wild roses, the cemetery
lay, like another way of speech. A little before us the mist hid the
tracks, but we heard the whistle of the Fast Mail, coming in from the
end of the earth.
"Ah, well, I want some wild roses," said I--since a woman may always
take certain refuges from life.
"I'm coming back about noon," Abel told me; "I'll bring you a thousand."
He drew up Major Mary, and we sat silent, watching for the train. And
the Something which found in Abel its unfailing channel came
companioning us, and caught me up so that I longed unspeakably to be
about the Business which Abel and Calliope followed, and followed before
all else.
But when I would have said more, I noted on Abel's face some surprise,
and then I myself felt it. For the Fast Mail from the East, having as
usual come roaring through Friendship station with but an instant's
stop, was now slowing at the draw. Through the thick white we perceived
it motionless for a breath, and then we heard it beat away again.
I wonder now, remembering, how I can have known with such singing
confidence what was in store for me. It is certain that I did know, even
though in the mist I saw no one alight. But as if at a summons I bade
Abel let me descend, and somehow I gave him good-by; and I recall that I
cried back to him:--
"Abel! You _said_ the sky can fall and give one dreams."
"Yes," he answered. "Dreams to use in one's corner."
But I knew then and I know now that Abel's dreams flowed in his blood,
and that when he gave them to his corner of the world he gave from his
own veins; and I think that the world is the richer for that.
When he had gone I stood still in the road, waiting. I distinguished a
lintel of elms, a wall of wild roses; I heard a brave little bird
twittering impatient matins, and the sound of nearing footsteps in the
road. And then a voice in the mist said my name.
There in the fog on the Plank Road we met as if there had come a
clearness everywhere--we two, between whom lay that year since my coming
to Friendship. Only, now that he was with me, I observed that the
traitor year had slipped away as if it had never been, and had left us
two alone in a place so sightly that at last I recognized my own
happiness. And I understood--and this way of understanding leaves one a
breathless being--that his happiness was there too.
And yet it was only: "You.... But what an adventure to meet you here!"
And from him: "Me. Here. Please, may we go to your house? I haven't had
an _indication_ of breakfast." At which we laughed somewhat, with my,
"How absurdly like you not to have had breakfast," and his, "How very
shabby of you to feel superior because you happen to have had your
coffee." So we moved back down the road with the clear little space in
the fog following, following....
A kind of passion for detail seized on us both.
He said: "You're wearing brown. I've never seen you wear brown--I'm sure
I haven't. Have I?"
"My fur coat was brown," I escaped into the subject, "but then that
hardly counts."
"No," he agreed, "fur isn't a colour. Fur is just fur. No, I've never
seen you in brown."
"How did they let you off at the draw? How did you know about getting
off at the draw?" I demanded.
"You said something of your getting off there--in that one letter, you
know...."
"Yes, yes...."
"You said something about getting off there on a night when you left the
train with a girl who was coming home to the village--you know the
letter?" he broke off, "I think it was that letter that finally gave me
courage to come. Because in that I saw in you something new
and--understanding. Well, and I remembered about the draw. I always
meant to get off there, when I came."
"You always meant ... but then how did you make them stop?"
"I told the man I had to, and then he had to, too. There were four
others who got off and went across the tracks, but we are not obliged to
consider them."
"From that," I said, "I would think it _is_ you, if I didn't know it
couldn't possibly be!"
Then I hurried into some recital about the Topladys, whose big barn and
little house were lined faintly out as if something were making them
feel hushed; and about Friendship, hidden in the valley as if it were
suddenly of lesser import--how strange that these things should be there
as they were an hour ago. And so we came to Oldmoxon House and went up
the walk in silence save that, at the steps, "How long shall I tell them
to boil your eggs?" I asked desperately, to still the quite ridiculous
singing of the known world. But then the singing took one voice, a voice
whose firmness made it almost hard, save that deep within it something
was beating....
"You know," said the voice simply, "if I come in now, I come to stay.
You _do_ know?"
"You come to breakfast...." I tried it.
"I come to stay."
"You mean--"
"I come to stay."
I rather hoped to affirm something gracious, and masterful of
myself--not to say of him; but suddenly that whole lonely year was back
again, most of it in my throat. And though I gave up saying anything at
all, I cannot have been unintelligible. Indeed, I know that I was not
unintelligible, for when, in a little while, Calliope, who was still
with me, opened my front door and emerged briskly to the veranda, she
seems to have understood in a minute.
"Well said!" Calliope cried, and made a little swoop down from the
threshold and stood before us, one hand in mine and one outstretched for
his; "I knew, as soon as I woke up this morning, I felt special. I
thought it was my soul, sittin' up in my chest, an' wantin' me to spry
round with it some, like it does. But I guess now it was this. Oh,
this!" she said. "Oh, I sp'ose I'd rilly ought to hev an introduction
before I jump up an' down, hadn't I?"
"No need in the world, Calliope," he told her; "come on. I'll jump,
too."
And that was an added joy--that he had read and re-read that one
Friendship letter of mine, written on the night of Delia More's return,
until it was as if he, too, knew Calliope. But before all things was the
wonder of the justice and the grace which had made the letter of that
night, when I, too, "took stock," yield such return.
It was Calliope who led the way indoors at last, and he and I who
followed like her guests. From the edges of consciousness I finally drew
some discernment of the place of coffee and rolls in a beneficent
universe, and presently we three sat at his breakfast table. And not
until then did Calliope remember her other news.
"Land, land," she said, "I like to forgot. Who do you s'pose I had a
telephone from just before you come? Delia. She'd just got home this
morning on the Fast Mail. An' the Proudfits'll be here, noon train."
Delia indeed had come on the same glorified train that Abel and I had
seen stop at the draw, only she had alighted at Friendship station and
had hurried up to the Proudfits' to make ready for their home-coming.
And since those whom we know best never come to Friendship without a
welcome, it was instantly incumbent on us all to be what Calliope called
"up in arms an' flyin' round."
As soon as we were alone:--
"I've planned noon lunch for 'em," Calliope told me; "I'm goin' to see
to the meat--leg o' lamb, sissin' hot, an' a big bowl o' mint. Mis'
Holcomb's got to freeze a freezer o' her lemon ice--she gets it smooth
as a mud pie. Mis' Toplady, she'll come in on the baked stuff--raised
rolls an' a big devil's food. An'--I'd kind o' meant to look to you for
the salad, but I s'pose you won't want to bother now...." And when I had
hastened to assume the salad, "Well, I _am_ glad," she owned, with a
relieved sigh. "The Proudfit salads they can't a soul tell what
ingredients is in 'em, chew high though we may. I know you know about
them queer organs an' canned sea reptiles they use now in cookin'. I've
come to the solemn conclusion I ain't studied physiology an' the animal
sciences close enough myself to make a rill up-to-date salad."