Friendship Village

"'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."