XXI
Dreamers of Dreams
August went out and September came in. Harvest was ended; and though summer was not yet gone, her face was turned westering. The asters lettered her retreating footsteps in a purple script, and over the hills and valleys hung a faint blue smoke, as if Nature were worshipping at her woodland altar. The apples began to burn red on the bending boughs; crickets sang day and night; squirrels chattered secrets of Polichinelle in the spruces; the sunshine was as thick and yellow as molten gold; school opened, and we small denizens of the hill farms lived happy days of harmless work and necessary play, closing in nights of peaceful, undisturbed slumber under a roof watched over by autumnal stars.
At least, our slumbers were peaceful and undisturbed until our orgy of dreaming began.
“I would really like to know what especial kind of deviltry you young fry are up to this time,” said Uncle Roger one evening, as he passed through the orchard with his gun on his shoulder, bound for the swamp.
We were sitting in a circle before the Pulpit Stone, each writing diligently in an exercise book, and eating the Rev. Mr. Scott’s plums, which always reached their prime of juicy, golden-green flesh and bloomy blue skin in September. The Rev. Mr. Scott was dead and gone, but those plums certainly kept his memory green, as his forgotten sermons could never have done.
“Oh,” said Felicity in a shocked tone, when Uncle Roger had passed by, “Uncle Roger swore.”
“Oh, no, he didn’t,” said the Story Girl quickly. “ ‘Deviltry’ isn’t swearing at all. It only means extra bad mischief.”
“Well, it’s not a very nice word, anyhow,” said Felicity.
“No, it isn’t,” agreed the Story Girl with a regretful sigh. “It’s very expressive, but it isn’t nice. That is the way with so many words. They’re expressive, but they’re not nice, and so a girl can’t use them.”
The Story Girl sighed again. She loved expressive words, and treasured them as some girls might have treasured jewels. To her, they were as lustrous pearls, threaded on the crimson cord of a vivid fancy. When she met with a new one she uttered it over and over to herself in solitude, weighing it, caressing it, infusing it with the radiance of her voice, making it her own in all its possibilities for ever.
“Well, anyhow, it isn’t a suitable word in this case,” insisted Felicity. “We are not up to any dev—any extra bad mischief. Writing down one’s dreams isn’t mischief at all.”
Certainly it wasn’t. Surely not even the straitest sect of the grown-ups could call it so. If writing down your dreams, with agonizing care as to composition and spelling—for who knew that the eyes of generations unborn might not read the record?—were not a harmless amusement, could anything be called so? I trow not.
We had been at it for a fortnight, and during that time we only lived to have dreams and write them down. The Story Girl had originated the idea one evening in the rustling, rain-wet ways of the spruce wood, where we were picking gum after a day of showers. When we had picked enough we sat down on the moss-grown stones at the end of a long arcade, where it opened out on the harvest-golden valley below us, our jaws exercising themselves vigorously on the spoil of our climbings. We were never allowed to chew gum in school or in company, but in wood and field, orchard and hayloft, such rules were in abeyance.
“My Aunt Jane used to say it wasn’t polite to chew gum anywhere,” said Peter rather ruefully.
“I don’t suppose your Aunt Jane knew all the rules of etiquette,” said Felicity, designing to crush Peter with a big word, borrowed from the Family Guide. But Peter was not to be so crushed. He had in him a certain toughness of fibre, that would have been proof against a whole dictionary.
“She did, too,” he retorted. “My Aunt Jane was a real lady, even if she was only a Craig. She knew all those rules and she kept them when there was nobody round to see her, just the same as when any one was. And she was smart. If father had had half her git-up-and-git I wouldn’t be a hired boy to-day.”
“Have you any idea where your father is?” asked Dan.
“No,” said Peter indifferently. “The last we heard of him he was in the Maine lumber woods. But that was three years ago. I don’t know where he is now, and,” added Peter deliberately, taking his gum from his mouth to make his statement more impressive, “I don’t care.”
“Oh, Peter, that sounds dreadful,” said Cecily. “Your own father!”
“Well,” said Peter defiantly, “if your own father had run away when you was a baby, and left your mother to earn her living by washing and working out, I guess you wouldn’t care much about him either.”
“Perhaps your father may come home some of these days with a huge fortune,” suggested the Story Girl.
“Perhaps pigs may whistle, but they’ve poor mouths for it,” was all the answer Peter deigned to this charming suggestion.
“There goes Mr. Campbell down the road,” said Dan. “That’s his new mare. Isn’t she a dandy? She’s got a skin like black satin. He calls her Betty Sherman.”
“I don’t think it’s very nice to call a horse after your own grandmother,” said Felicity.
“Betty Sherman would have thought it a compliment,” said the Story Girl.
“Maybe she would. She couldn’t have been very nice herself, or she would never have gone and asked a man to marry her,” said Felicity.
“Why not?”
“Goodness me, it was dreadful! Would you do such a thing yourself?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the Story Girl, her eyes gleaming with impish laughter. “If I wanted him dreadfully, and he wouldn’t do the asking, perhaps I would.”
“I’d rather die an old maid forty times over,” exclaimed Felicity.
“Nobody as pretty as you will ever be an old maid, Felicity,” said Peter, who never put too fine an edge on his compliments.
Felicity tossed her golden tressed head and tried to look angry, but made a dismal failure of it.
“It wouldn’t be ladylike to ask any one to marry you, you know,” argued Cecily.
“I don’t suppose the Family Guide would think so,” agreed the Story Girl lazily, with some sarcasm in her voice. The Story Girl never held the Family Guide in such reverence as did Felicity and Cecily. They pored over the “etiquette column” every week, and could have told you on demand, just exactly what kind of gloves should be worn at a wedding, what you should say when introducing or being introduced, and how you ought to look when your best young man came to see you.
“They say Mrs. Richard Cook asked her husband to marry her,” said Dan.
“Uncle Roger says she didn’t exactly ask him, but she helped the lame dog over the stile so slick that Richard was engaged to her before he knew what had happened to him,” said the Story Girl. “I know a story about Mrs. Richard Cook’s grandmother. She was one of those women who are always saying ‘I told you so—’ ”
“Take notice, Felicity,” said Dan aside.
“—And she was very stubborn. Soon after she was married she and her husband quarrelled about an apple tree they had planted in their orchard. The label was lost. He said it was a Fameuse and she declared it was a Yellow Transparent. They fought over it till the neighbours came out to listen. Finally he got so angry that he told her to shut up. They didn’t have any Family Guides in those days, so he didn’t know it wasn’t polite to say shut up to your wife. I suppose she thought she would teach him manners, for would you believe it? That woman did shut up, and never spoke one single word to her husband for five years. And then, in five years’ time, the tree bore apples, and they were Yellow Transparents. And then she spoke at last. She said, ‘I told you so!’ ”
“And did she talk to him after that as usual?” asked Sara Ray.
“Oh, yes, she was just the same as she used to be,” said the Story Girl wearily. “But that doesn’t belong to the story. It stops when she spoke at last. You’re never satisfied to leave a story where it should stop, Sara Ray.”
&
nbsp; “Well, I always like to know what happens afterwards,” said Sara Ray.
“Uncle Roger says he wouldn’t want a wife he could never quarrel with,” remarked Dan. “He says it would be too tame a life for him.”
“I wonder if Uncle Roger will always stay a bachelor,” said Cecily.
“He seems real happy,” observed Peter.
“Ma says that it’s all right as long as he is a bachelor because he won’t take any one,” said Felicity, “but if he wakes up some day and finds he is an old bachelor because he can’t get any one it’ll have a very different flavour.”
“If your Aunt Olivia was to up and get married what would your Uncle Roger do for a housekeeper?” asked Peter.
“Oh, but Aunt Olivia will never be married now,” said Felicity. “Why, she’ll be twenty-nine next January.”
“Well, o’ course, that’s pretty old,” admitted Peter, “but she might find some one who wouldn’t mind that, seeing she’s so pretty.”
“It would be awful splendid and exciting to have a wedding in the family, wouldn’t it?” said Cecily. “I’ve never seen any one married, and I’d just love to. I’ve been to four funerals, but not to one single wedding.”
“I’ve never even got to a funeral,” said Sara Ray gloomily.
“There’s the wedding veil of the proud princess,” said Cecily, pointing to a long drift of filmy vapour in the southwestern sky.
“And look at that sweet pink cloud below it,” added Felicity.
“Maybe that little pink cloud is a dream, getting all ready to float down into somebody’s sleep,” suggested the Story Girl.
“I had a perfectly awful dream last night,” said Cecily, with a shudder of remembrance. “I dreamed I was on a desert island inhabited by tigers and natives with two heads.”
“Oh!” the Story Girl looked at Cecily half reproachfully. “Why couldn’t you tell it better than that? If I had such a dream I could tell it so that everybody else would feel as if they had dreamed it, too.”
“Well, I’m not you,” countered Cecily, “and I wouldn’t want to frighten any one as I was frightened. It was an awful dream—but it was kind of interesting, too.”
“I’ve had some real int’resting dreams,” said Peter, “but I can’t remember them long. I wish I could.”
“Why don’t you write them down?” suggested the Story Girl. “Oh—” she turned upon us a face illuminated with a sudden inspiration. “I’ve an idea. Let us each get an exercise book and write down all our dreams, just as we dream them. We’ll see who’ll have the most interesting collection. And we’ll have them to read and laugh over when we’re old and gray.”
Instantly we all saw ourselves and each other by inner vision, old and gray—all but the Story Girl. We could not picture her as old. Always, as long as she lived, so it seemed to us, must she have sleek brown curls, a voice like the sound of a harpstring in the wind, and eyes that were stars of eternal youth.
XXII
The Dream Books
The next day the Story Girl coaxed Uncle Roger to take her to Markdale, and there she bought our dream books. They were ten cents apiece, with ruled pages and mottled green covers. My own lies open beside me as I write, its yellowed pages inscribed with the visions that haunted my childish slumbers on those nights of long ago.
On the cover is pasted a lady’s visiting card, on which is written, “The Dream Book of Beverley King.” Cecily had a packet of visiting cards which she was hoarding against the day when she would be grown up and could put the calling etiquette of the Family Guide into practice; but she generously gave us all one apiece for the covers of our dream books.
As I turn the pages and glance over the naive records, each one beginning, “Last night I dreamed,” the past comes very vividly back to me. I see that bowery orchard, shining in memory with a soft glow of beauty—“the light that never was on land or sea,”—where we sat on those September evenings and wrote down our dreams, when the cares of the day were over and there was nothing to interfere with the pleasing throes of composition. Peter—Dan—Felix—Cecily—Felicity—Sara Ray—the Story Girl—they are all around me once more, in the sweet-scented, fading grasses, each with open dream book and pencil in hand, now writing busily, now staring fixedly into space in search of some elusive word or phrase which might best describe the indescribable. I hear their laughing voices, I see their bright, unclouded eyes. In this little, old book, filled with cramped, boyish writing, there is a spell of white magic that sets the years at naught. Beverley King is a boy once more, writing down his dreams in the old King orchard on the homestead hill, blown over by musky winds.
Opposite to him sits the Story Girl, with her scarlet rosetted head, her beautiful bare feet crossed before her, one slender hand propping her high, white brow, on either side of which fall her glossy curls.
There, to the right, is sweet Cecily of the dear, brown eyes, with a little bloated dictionary beside her—for you dream of so many things you can’t spell, or be expected to spell, when you are only eleven. Next to her sits Felicity, beautiful, and conscious that she is beautiful, with hair of spun sunshine, and sea-blue eyes, and all the roses of that vanished summer abloom in her cheeks.
Peter is beside her, of course, sprawled flat on his stomach among the grasses, one hand clutching his black curls, with his dream book on a small, round stone before him—for only so can Peter compose at all, and even then he finds it hard work. He can handle a hoe more deftly than a pencil, and his spelling, even with all his frequent appeals to Cecily, is a fearful and wonderful thing. As for punctuation, he never attempts it, beyond an occasional period, jotted down whenever he happens to think of it, whether in the right place or not. The Story Girl goes over his dreams after he has written them out, and puts in the commas and semicolons, and straightens out the sentences.
Felix sits on the right of the Story Girl, fat and stodgy, grimly in earnest even over dreams. He writes with his knees stuck up to form a writing-desk, and he always frowns fiercely the whole time.
Dan, like Peter, writes lying down flat, but with his back towards us; and he has a dismal habit of groaning aloud, writhing his whole body, and digging his toes into the grass, when he cannot turn a sentence to suit him.
Sara Ray is at his left. There is seldom anything to be said of Sara except to tell where she is. Like Tennyson’s Maud, in one respect at least, Sara is splendidly null.
Well, there we sit and write in our dream books, and Uncle Roger passes by and accuses us of being up to dev—to very bad mischief.
Each of us was very anxious to possess the most exciting record; but we were an honourable little crew, and I do not think anything was ever written down in those dream books which had not really been dreamed. We had expected that the Story Girl would eclipse us all in the matter of dreams; but, at least in the beginning, her dreams were no more remarkable than those of the rest of us. In dreamland we were all equal. Cecily, indeed, seemed to have the most decided talent for dramatic dreams. That meekest and mildest of girls was in the habit of dreaming truly terrible things. Almost every night battle, murder, or sudden death played some part in her visions. On the other hand, Dan, who was a somewhat truculent fellow, addicted to the perusal of lurid dime novels which he borrowed from the other boys in school, dreamed dreams of such a peaceful and pastoral character that he was quite disgusted with the resulting tame pages of his dream book.
But if the Story Girl could not dream anything more wonderful than the rest of us, she scored when it came to the telling. To hear her tell a dream was as good—or as bad—as dreaming it yourself.
As far as writing them down was concerned, I believe that I, Beverley King, carried off the palm. I was considered to possess a pretty knack of composition. But the Story Girl went me one better even there, because, having inherited something of her father’s talent for drawing, she illustrated her dreams with sketches that certainly caught the spirit of them, whatever might be said of their technical excelle
nce. She had an especial knack for drawing monstrosities; and I vividly recall the picture of an enormous and hideous lizard, looking like a reptile of the pterodactyl period, which she had dreamed of seeing crawl across the roof of the house. On another occasion she had a frightful dream—at least, it seemed frightful while she told us and described the dreadful feeling it had given her—of being chased around the parlour by the ottoman, which made faces at her. She drew a picture of the grimacing ottoman on the margin of her dream book which so scared Sara Ray when she beheld it that she cried all the way home, and insisted on sleeping that night with Judy Pineau lest the furniture take to pursuing her also.
Sara Ray’s own dreams never amounted to much. She was always in trouble of some sort—couldn’t get her hair braided, or her shoes on the right feet. Consequently, her dream book was very monotonous. The only thing worth mentioning in the way of dreams that Sara Ray ever achieved was when she dreamed that she went up in a balloon and fell out.
“I expected to come down with an awful thud,” she said shuddering, “but I lit as light as a feather and woke right up.”
“If you hadn’t woke up you’d have died,” said Peter with a dark significance. “If you dream of falling and don’t wake you do land with a thud and it kills you. That’s what happens to people who die in their sleep.”
“How do you know?” said Dan skeptically. “Nobody who died in his sleep could ever tell it.”
“My Aunt Jane told me so,” said Peter.
“I suppose that settles it,” said Felicity disagreeably.
“You always say something nasty when I mention my Aunt Jane,” said Peter reproachfully.
“What did I say that was nasty?” cried Felicity. “I didn’t say a single thing.”
“Well, it sounded nasty,” said Peter, who knew that it is the tone that makes the music.
The Story Girl Page 17
