XIX
HERSELF
After all, it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then had been shown a rainbow. For presently Calliope herself said something to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always reticent. I have known them suggest infinite things.
In June she spent a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I was tying on my trees in the garden directly the original blossoms fell off.
Calliope nodded in entire acceptance.
"But that wasn't so queer as my dream," she said. "My dream about 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.