The Radio Girl
I have said that I am a dreamer, living more truly in my fancy than
in the world. Perhaps my imagination is abnormally developed. Always
I have had new worlds awaiting me in my dreams, to which I could
retire when life was dull or unattractive. My visions have always had
a singular reality, such a definite concreteness, that it sometimes
seemed to be the truth.
The old wonder stories of Wells and Verne, and of the pseudo-scientific
writers of the first part of this century have always appealed to me. I
had a vast collection of ancient volumes and tattered magazines, full
of those old stories, which I read and reread with passionate interest.
The rest of the world had forgotten them with the passing of the age of
science, but I found in them the priceless food of fancy.
Psychologists say that many children have dream companions of some
kind. They are very real entities of the child's imagination, playmates
of fancy. They usually fade and are forgotten as the adolescent child
becomes absorbed in the activities of life, and the imagination
atrophies.
Since the days of my earliest recollections, I have visited in the
world of my dreams a wonderful playmate. It is a girl, with dark brown
hair, deep, warm violet eyes, and clear skin, so I thought, slightly
tinged with green, though the lips were very red. I have always thought
that she was very beautiful, and she has always been very real to me.
And the vision did not fade as the years went by! Still I visited the
Green Girl, as I called her, in my fancy, and she replaced many of the
normal childhood interests that I might have had. It is because of her
that I have always been happiest when I was silent and alone, it is
because of my dreams that I have been inclined to avoid the society of
others.
The strange world of dreams in which I visited her was very real to
me, a place of weird wonders, sometimes of alien terrors, in which the
Green Girl and I wandered through interminable, astounding adventures.
And I have always had an unaccountable persuasion that it was a real
world, somewhere, through which my mind roamed in such delightful
fancies!
It was twenty years ago, when I was just five years old, that the Green
Girl first came into my dreams. Sam had rigged up, for my edification,
an old fashioned radio set, with headphones. In the long, lonely
silences of the warm Florida nights, when a less indulgent guardian
would have had me in bed, I sat up with those old phones on my ears,
exploring the ether, feeling near the infinite mystery of space. I
listened with childish intentness to the odd noises of the static,
eagerly dreaming of calls from other planets.
It was during one of those long still nights that I first entered that
world of fancy, and found--the Green Girl! It seemed that I heard first
a cry of delight in a silver voice, and then she was with me. She was
but a tiny sprite, smaller than myself. She seemed to stand before
me, smiling at me, tossing her dark curls, with the light of bright
intelligence in her blue-violet eyes. I loved her from the first. She
was very beautiful. Her skin had just a tinge of green, like a tinted
photograph; it did not seem a strange color. The vision was very real
to me.
When she spoke--and I half imagined her words were really coming over
the ether--there was a childish lisp in her voice, but still a ring
of confidence and courage. Her words were strange, but I soon grew to
sense their meaning, almost by intuition. Night after night, when I put
on the phones and tuned in on the strange noises of the ether, that
vision came back. It was not long before I could speak that strange
tongue as fluently as I could speak English.
With childish reserve, I told Sam nothing about my wonderful dream,
until one day he heard me chattering in the language I had learned.
He questioned me eagerly; and I shyly told him all about it, and
even supplied material for a grammar of the language. He took a keen
scientific interest in the matter, when he learned that the vision came
only over the radio, and he began to formulate theories of telepathic
suggestion and mind control by ether waves.
The matter was written up by a prominent psychologist to whom he
reported it. The account appeared in a well known scientific magazine,
with comments upon the strange language, which, oddly enough, bore not
the slightest similarity to any known tongue, and appeared rather too
perfect to be credited to the invention of a five-year-old. The writer
mentioned Sam's ideas, that I had established telepathic contact with
another planet, or perhaps with the far-distant past or future; but
theories of mind reading received little welcome in a day when science
was dormant, and even the suggestion that the language, because of its
simplicity, power, and labial beauty, would become the long-sought
international tongue, was soon completely forgotten.
But I did not forget the Green Girl. The conviction grew upon me that
she was a real living entity. To find her became my ruling passion.
Under Sam's tutelage I poured over geographical accounts, searching in
vain for some clue to a hidden nation. But the fact that the language
seemed to have no sister tongue on earth discouraged that. Between my
tenth and fifteenth years Sam and I restlessly scoured the globe in
search of a clue, but a decade before we had given it up.
I turned to dreams of interplanetary travel with a passionate desire
to explore space and venture to other worlds in search of my dream
girl; but the space flier seemed as far in the future as it had done
a hundred years before. To please me, however, Sam helped design and
construct a model of a machine we called the Omnimobile--because it
should be able to travel in all elements.
But, as the years of my early manhood passed, I slowly relinquished all
hope of finding the Green Girl in fact, and resolved to content myself
with her companionship in fancy. It was then, too, that I developed my
inordinate fondness for scientific romances which I devoured insatiably
to feed my dreams. It was only during the first few years that I
could find her only over the radio. As time went by, she became an
inseparable companion of my mind.
Once, for a time, I tried to lose myself in science. I had Sam teach me
chemistry, but that could not replace my dreams.
Together, the Green Girl and I went through ten thousand fantastic
adventures. It was as if our two minds met in the world of dreams
jointly created by both of us. Certainly it was influenced by the
incidents of my life, and by the wonder tales I read. And the girl told
me stories, strange and thrilling narratives they were, of mythical
heroes of her race that struggled with weird terrors.
She grew up with myself, until she became a princess of incomparable
beauty. Often I have wished that I were a gifted painter, that I might
have tried to record her charms, but even if I had been such, her
perfection would have discouraged my efforts. She was slender, erect,
combining an unconscious dignity of poise with vivacious spriteliness
of manner. Her hair was soft and curly and brown. Her pale green skin
was very soft; her full lips very red. And her sparkling violet eyes
were clear and honest--bright wells of human sympathy.
Could I believe that such a supernal being was merely a dream?