I lay down at noonday on my green couch and I had a quaint dream.
I have just awakened from it in a flush of languor and comfort.
And the dream is vivid in my mind. I dreamed I was married and it
was pink-and-pearl dawn in my married bed-room. And in the bed one
inch away from mine was not my married husband but ‘another man.’
It was no man I can recall having seen. As I look back into the
dream he seems of the nowhere, a stranger. But in the dream he was
no stranger. I had crudely admitted him to my night. And I had just
awakened in the pink-and-white dawn and was sitting silk-gowned and
ruffle-haired in my bed, cross-legged like a tailor with my elbows
on my knees and my chin on my palms, idly contemplating him. And
he was lying in the other narrow bed contemplating me and smiling
a little. He had nice teeth and yellowish hair. The crux of the
dream was the sound ‘off-stage’ of the approaching footsteps of
monsieur-the-husband. As it always is in the psychology of dreams
the insistent thing in the situation was not the footsteps, nor even
that they were approaching, but the sound: the elusive threat of
their sound. He would presently discover us. Nobody appeared to care:
not ‘another man’ smiling so tranquilly: not I sitting musingly
overlooking him who had overnight ‘enjoyed me’: not the husband,
because he never knew it--before he could open the guilty door I
awoke.
A short-cut gently headlong dream. I was at once married, mixed
adulterantly with an imperfect stranger and awaiting in pleasant mild
anticipation, to match the pink-and-pearl of the summer dawn, the
climax in the approaching sound of my husband’s footsteps. It was
humorous and artistic. Unseemly preliminaries were done away with in
that dream. I was given at once the one exciting worthwhile moment
in it.
Having no data as to what were my husband’s temper and tenor, what
he looked like or who he was, I could not in the dream or out of it
surmise what he would say or how he would act when he opened the door.
--a theme for idling speculation in a summer’s day--
Also I wonder whence came that dream: so Unexpected: so Irrelevant to
any thought in me: so Artistically Right: so Disgusting: so Dramatic:
so quaintly Vulgar.
A question: to which the one answer is that unanswerable answer to
all questions, propounded by Mr. F.’s Aunt--‘There’s milestones on
the Dover road.’
_The harp of worn strings_