“Sara, I am going to give you this jug,” she said solemnly.
Now, Sara had always coveted this particular jug. She stopped crying long enough to clutch it delightedly.
“Oh, Cecily, thank you. But are you sure you won’t want it back if to-morrow isn’t the Judgment Day?”
“No, it’s yours for good,” said Cecily, with the high, remote air of one to whom forget-me-not jugs and all such pomps and vanities of the world were as a tale that is told.
“Are you going to give any one your cherry vase?” asked Felicity, trying to speak indifferently. Felicity had never admired the forget-me-not jug, but she had always hankered after the cherry vase—an affair of white glass, with a cluster of red glass cherries and golden-green glass leaves on its side, which Aunt Olivia had given Cecily one Christmas.
“No, I’m not,” answered Cecily, with a change of tone.
“Oh, well, I don’t care,” said Felicity quickly. “Only, if to-morrow is the last day, the cherry vase won’t be much use to you.”
“I guess it will be as much use to me as to any one else,” said Cecily indignantly. She had sacrificed her dear forget-me-not jug to satisfy some pang of conscience, or propitiate some threatening fate, but surrender her precious cherry vase she could not and would not. Felicity needn’t be giving any hints!
With the gathering shades of night our plight became pitiful. In the daylight, surrounded by homely, familiar sights and sounds, it was not so difficult to fortify our souls with a cheering incredulity. But now, in this time of shadows, dread belief clutched us and wrung us with terror. If there had been one wise older friend to tell us, in serious fashion, that we need not be afraid, that theEnterpriseparagraph was naught save the idle report of a deluded fanatic, it would have been well for us. But there was not. Our grown-ups, instead, considered our terror an exquisite jest. At that very moment, Aunt Olivia, who had recovered from her headache, and Aunt Janet were laughing in the kitchen over the state the children were in because they were afraid the end of the world was close at hand. Aunt Janet’s throaty gurgle and Aunt Olivia’s trilling mirth floated out through the open window.
“Perhaps they’ll laugh on the other side of their faces to-morrow,” said Dan, with gloomy satisfaction.
We were sitting on the cellar hatch, watching what might be our last sunset o’er the dark hills of time. Peter was with us. It was his last Sunday to go home, but he had elected to remain.
“If to-morrow is the Judgment Day I want to be with you fellows,” he said.
Sara Ray had also yearned to stay, but could not because her mother had told her she must be home before dark.
“Never mind, Sara,” comforted Cecily. “It’s not to be till two o’clock to-morrow, so you’ll have plenty of time to get up here before anything happens.”
“But there might be a mistake,” sobbed Sara. “It might be two o’clock to-night instead of to-morrow.”
It might, indeed. This was a new horror, which had not occurred to us.
“I’m sure I won’t sleep a wink to-night,” said Felix.
“The paper SAYS two o’clock to-morrow,” said Dan. “You needn’t worry, Sara.”
But Sara departed, weeping. She did not, however, forget to carry the forget-me-not jug with her. All things considered, her departure was a relief. Such a constantly tearful damsel was not a pleasant companion. Cecily and Felicity and the Story Girl did not cry. They were made of finer, firmer stuff. Dry-eyed, with such courage as they might, they faced whatever might be in store for them.
“I wonder where we’ll all be this time to-morrow night,” said Felix mournfully, as we watched the sunset between the dark fir boughs. It was an ominous sunset. The sun dropped down amid dark, livid clouds, that turned sullen shades of purple and fiery red behind him.
“I hope we’ll be all together, wherever we are,” said Cecily gently. “Nothing can be so very bad then.”
“I’m going to read the Bible all to-morrow forenoon,” said Peter.
When Aunt Olivia came out to go home the Story Girl asked her permission to stay all night with Felicity and Cecily. Aunt Olivia assented lightly, swinging her hat on her arm and including us all in a friendly smile. She looked very pretty, with her big blue eyes and warm-hued golden hair. We loved Aunt Olivia; but just now we resented her having laughed at us with Aunt Janet, and we refused to smile back.
“What a sulky, sulky lot of little people,” said Aunt Olivia, going away across the yard, holding her pretty dress up from the dewy grass.
Peter resolved to stay all night with us, too, not troubling himself about anybody’s permission. When we went to bed it was settling down for a stormy night, and the rain was streaming wetly on the roof, as if the world, like Sara Ray, were weeping because its end was so near. Nobody forgot or hurried over his prayers that night. We would dearly have loved to leave the candle burning, but Aunt Janet’s decree regarding this was as inexorable as any of Mede and Persia. Out the candle must go; and we lay there, quaking, with the wild rain streaming down on the roof above us, and the voices of the storm wailing through the writhing spruce trees.
Sunday morning broke, dull and gray. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung dark and brooding above a world which, in its windless calm, following the spent storm-throe, seemed to us to be waiting “till judgment spoke the doom of fate.” We were all up early. None of us, it appeared, had slept well, and some of us not at all. The Story Girl had been among the latter, and she looked very pale and wan, with black shadows under her deep-set eyes. Peter, however, had slept soundly enough after twelve o’clock.
“When you’ve been stumping out elderberries all the afternoon it’ll take more than the Judgment Day to keep you awake all night,” he said. “But when I woke up this morning it was just awful. I’d forgot it for a moment, and then it all came back with a rush, and I was worse scared than before.”
Cecily was pale but brave. For the first time in years she had not put her hair up in curlers on Saturday night. It was brushed and braided with Puritan simplicity.
“If it’s the Judgment Day I don’t care whether my hair is curly or not,” she said.
“Well,” said Aunt Janet, when we all descended to the kitchen, “this is the first time you young ones have ever all got up without being called, and that’s a fact.”
At breakfast our appetites were poor. How could the grown-ups eat as they did? After breakfast and the necessary chores there was the forenoon to be lived through. Peter, true to his word, got out his Bible and began to read from the first chapter in Genesis.
“I won’t have time to read it all through, I s’pose,” he said, “but I’ll get along as far as I can.”
There was no preaching in Carlisle that day, and Sunday School was not till the evening. Cecily got out her Lesson Slip and studied the lesson conscientiously. The rest of us did not see how she could do it. We could not, that was very certain.
“If it isn’t the Judgment Day, I want to have the lesson learned,” she said, “and if it is I’ll feel I’ve done what was right. But I never found it so hard to remember the Golden Text before.”
The long dragging hours were hard to endure. We roamed restlessly about, and went to and fro—all save Peter, who still steadily read away at his Bible. He was through Genesis by eleven and beginning on Exodus.
“There’s a good deal of it I don’t understand,” he said, “but I read every word, and that’s the main thing. That story about Joseph and his brother was so int’resting I almost forgot about the Judgment Day.”
But the long drawn out dread was beginning to get on Dan’s nerves.
“If it is the Judgment Day,” he growled, as we went in to dinner, “I wish it’d hurry up and have it over.”
“Oh, Dan!” cried Felicity and Cecily together, in a chorus of horror. But the Story Girl looked as if she rather sympathized with Dan.
If we had eaten little at breakfast we could eat still less at dinner. After dinner the clouds rolled away, and the sun came joyously and gloriously out. This, we thought, was a good omen. Felicity opined that it wouldn’t have cleared up if it was the Judgment Day. Nevertheless, we dressed ourselves carefully, and the girls put on their white dresses.
Sara Ray came up, still crying, of course. She increased our uneasiness by saying that her mother believed theEnterpriseparagraph, and was afraid that the end of the world was really at hand.
“That’s why she let me come up,” she sobbed. “If she hadn’t been afraid I don’t believe she would have let me come up. But I’d have died if I couldn’t have come. And she wasn’t a bit cross when I told her I had gone to the magic lantern show. That’s an awful bad sign. I hadn’t a white dress, but I put on my white muslin apron with the frills.”
“That seems kind of queer,” said Felicity doubtfully. “You wouldn’t put on an apron to go to church, and so it doesn’t seem as if it was proper to put it on for Judgment Day either.”
“Well, it’s the best I could do,” said Sara disconsolately. “I wanted to have something white on. It’s just like a dress only it hasn’t sleeves.”
“Let’s go into the orchard and wait,” said the Story Girl. “It’s one o’clock now, so in another hour we’ll know the worst. We’ll leave the front door open, and we’ll hear the big clock when it strikes two.”
No better plan being suggested, we betook ourselves to the orchard, and sat on the boughs of Uncle Alec’s tree because the grass was wet. The world was beautiful and peaceful and green. Overhead was a dazzling blue sky, spotted with heaps of white cloud.
“Pshaw, I don’t believe there’s any fear of it being the last day,” said Dan, beginning a whistle out of sheer bravado.
“Well, don’t whistle on Sunday anyhow,” said Felicity severely.
“I don’t see a thing about Methodists or Presbyterians, as far as I’ve gone, and I’m most through Exodus,” said Peter suddenly. “When does it begin to tell about them?”
“There’s nothing about Methodists or Presbyterians in the Bible,” said Felicity scornfully.
Peter looked amazed.
“Well, how did they happen then?” he asked. “When did they begin to be?”
“I’ve often thought it such a strange thing that there isn’t a word about either of them in the Bible,” said Cecily. “Especially when it mentions Baptists—or at least one Baptist.”
“Well, anyhow,” said Peter, “even if it isn’t the Judgment Day I’m going to keep on reading the Bible until I’ve got clean through. I never thought it was such an int’resting book.”
“It sounds simply dreadful to hear you call the Bible an interesting book,” said Felicity, with a shudder at the sacrilege. “Why, you might be talking about ANY common book.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” said Peter, crestfallen.
“The Bible IS an interesting book,” said the Story Girl, coming to Peter’s rescue. “And there are magnificent stories in it—yes, Felicity, MAGNIFICENT. If the world doesn’t come to an end I’ll tell you the story of Ruth next Sunday—or look here! I’ll tell it anyhow. That’s a promise. Wherever we are next Sunday I’ll tell you about Ruth.”
“Why, you wouldn’t tell stories in heaven,” said Cecily, in a very timid voice.
“Why not?” said the Story Girl, with a flash of her eyes. “Indeed I shall. I’ll tell stories as long as I’ve a tongue to talk with, or any one to listen.”
Ay, doubtless. That dauntless spirit would soar triumphantly above the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds, taking with it all its own wild sweetness and daring. Even the young-eyed cherubim, choiring on meadows of asphodel, might cease their harping for a time to listen to a tale of the vanished earth, told by that golden tongue. Some vague thought of this was in our minds as we looked at her; and somehow it comforted us. Not even the Judgment was so greatly to be feared if after it we were the SAME, our own precious little identities unchanged.
“It must be getting handy two,” said Cecily. “It seems as if we’d been waiting here for ever so much longer than an hour.”
Conversation languished. We watched and waited nervously. The moments dragged by, each seeming an hour. Would two o’clock never come and end the suspense? We all became very tense. Even Peter had to stop reading. Any unaccustomed sound or sight in the world about us struck on our taut senses like the trump of doom. A cloud passed over the sun and as the sudden shadow swept across the orchard we turned pale and trembled. A wagon rumbling over a plank bridge in the hollow made Sara Ray start up with a shriek. The slamming of a barn door over at Uncle Roger’s caused the cold perspiration to break out on our faces.
“I don’t believe it’s the Judgment Day,” said Felix, “and I never have believed it. But oh, I wish that clock would strike two.”
“Can’t you tell us a story to pass the time?” I entreated the Story Girl.
She shook her head.
“No, it would be no use to try. But if this isn’t the Judgment Day I’ll have a great one to tell of us being so scared.”
Pat presently came galloping up the orchard, carrying in his mouth a big field mouse, which, sitting down before us, he proceeded to devour, body and bones, afterwards licking his chops with great satisfaction.
“It can’t be the Judgment Day,” said Sara Ray, brightening up. “Paddy would never be eating mice if it was.”
“If that clock doesn’t soon strike two I shall go out of my seven senses,” declared Cecily with unusual vehemence.
“Time always seems long when you’re waiting,” said the Story Girl. “But it does seem as if we had been here more than an hour.”
“Maybe the clock struck and we didn’t hear it,” suggested Dan. “Somebody’d better go and see.”
“I’ll go,” said Cecily. “I suppose, even if anything happens, I’ll have time to get back to you.”
We watched her white-clad figure pass through the gate and enter the front door. A few minutes passed—or a few years—we could not have told which. Then Cecily came running at full speed back to us. But when she reached us she trembled so much that at first she could not speak.
“What is it? Is it past two?” implored the Story Girl.
“It’s—it’s four,” said Cecily with a gasp. “The old clock isn’t going. Mother forgot to wind it up last night and it stopped. But it’s four by the kitchen clock—so it isn’t the Judgment Day—and tea is ready—and mother says to come in.”
We looked at each other, realizing what our dread had been, now that it was lifted. It was not the Judgment Day. The world and life were still before us, with all their potent lure of years unknown.
“I’ll never believe anything I read in the papers again,” said Dan, rushing to the opposite extreme.
“I told you the Bible was more to be depended on than the newspapers,” said Cecily triumphantly.
Sara Ray and Peter and the Story Girl went home, and we went in to tea with royal appetites. Afterwards, as we dressed for Sunday School upstairs, our spirits carried us away to such an extent that Aunt Janet had to come twice to the foot of the stairs and inquire severely, “Children, have you forgotten what day this is?”
“Isn’t it nice that we’re going to live a spell longer in this nice world?” said Felix, as we walked down the hill.
“Yes, and Felicity and the Story Girl are speaking again,” said Cecily happily.
“And Felicity DID speak first,” I said.
“Yes, but it took the Judgment Day to make her. I wish,” added Cecily with a sigh, “that I hadn’t been in quite such a hurry giving away my forget-me-not jug.”
“And I wish I hadn’t been in such a hurry deciding I’d be a Presbyterian,” said Peter.
“Well, it’s not too late for that,” said Dan. “You can change your mind now.”
“No, sir,” said Peter with a flash of spirit, “I ain’t one of the kind that says they’ll be something just because they’re scared, and when the scare is over go back on it. I said I’d be Presbyterian and I mean to stick to it.”
“You said you knew a story that had something to do with Presbyterians,” I said to the Story Girl. “Tell us it now.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t the right kind of story to tell on Sunday,” she replied. “But I’ll tell it to-morrow morning.”
Accordingly, we heard it the next morning in the orchard.
“Long ago, when Judy Pineau was young,” said the Story Girl, “she was hired with Mrs. Elder Frewen—the first Mrs. Elder Frewen. Mrs. Frewen had been a school-teacher, and she was very particular as to how people talked, and the grammar they used. And she didn’t like anything but refined words. One very hot day she heard Judy Pineau say she was ‘all in a sweat.’ Mrs. Frewen was greatly shocked, and said, ‘Judy, you shouldn’t say that. It’s horses that sweat. You should say you are in a perspiration.’ Well, Judy promised she’d remember, because she liked Mrs. Frewen and was anxious to please her. Not long afterwards Judy was scrubbing the kitchen floor one morning, and when Mrs. Frewen came in Judy looked up and said, quite proud over using the right word, ‘Oh, Mees Frewen, ain’t it awful hot? I declare I’m all in a Presbyterian.’”
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 theFamily 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 theFamily Guidewould think so,” agreed the Story Girl lazily, with some sarcasm in her voice. The Story Girl never held theFamily Guidein 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 anyFamily Guidein 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.”
“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.
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 theFamily Guideinto 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 (——) 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 books 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 occasion 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 excellence. 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?” asked 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.
“What did your Aunt Jane look like?” asked Cecily sympathetically. “Was she pretty?”
“No,” conceded Peter reluctantly, “she wasn’t pretty—but she looked like the woman in that picture the Story Girl’s father sent her last week—the one with the shiny ring round her head and the baby in her lap. I’ve seen Aunt Jane look at me just like that woman looks at her baby. Ma never looks so. Poor ma is too busy washing. I wish I could dream of my Aunt Jane. I never do.”
“‘Dream of the dead, you’ll hear of the living,’” quoted Felix oracularly.
“I dreamed last night that I threw a lighted match into that keg of gunpowder in Mr. Cook’s store at Markdale,” said Peter. “It blew up—and everything blew up—and they fished me out of the mess—but I woke up before I’d time to find out if I was killed or not.”
“One is so apt to wake up just as things get interesting,” remarked the Story Girl discontentedly.
“I dreamed last night that I had really truly curly hair,” said Cecily mournfully. “And oh, I was so happy! It was dreadful to wake up and find it as straight as ever.”
Felix, that sober, solid fellow, dreamed constantly of flying through the air. His descriptions of his aerial flights over the tree-tops of dreamland always filled us with envy. None of the rest of us could ever compass such a dream, not even the Story Girl, who might have been expected to dream of flying if anybody did. Felix had a knack of dreaming anyhow, and his dream book, while suffering somewhat in comparison of literary style, was about the best of the lot when it came to subject matter. Cecily’s might be more dramatic, but Felix’s was more amusing. The dream which we all counted his masterpiece was the one in which a menagerie had camped in the orchard and the rhinoceros chased Aunt Janet around and around the Pulpit Stone, but turned into an inoffensive pig when it was on the point of catching her.
Felix had a sick spell soon after we began our dream books, and Aunt Janet essayed to cure him by administering a dose of liver pills which Elder Frewen had assured her were a cure-all for every disease the flesh is heir to. But Felix flatly refused to take liver pills; Mexican Tea he would drink, but liver pills he would not take, in spite of his own suffering and Aunt Janet’s commands and entreaties. I could not understand his antipathy to the insignificant little white pellets, which were so easy to swallow; but he explained the matter to us in the orchard when he had recovered his usual health and spirits.
“I was afraid to take the liver pills for fear they’d prevent me from dreaming,” he said. “Don’t you remember old Miss Baxter in Toronto, Bev? And how she told Mrs. McLaren that she was subject to terrible dreams, and finally she took two liver pills and never had any more dreams after that. I’d rather have died than risk it,” concluded Felix solemnly.
“I’d an exciting dream last night for once,” said Dan triumphantly. “I dreamt old Peg Bowen chased me. I thought I was up to her house and she took after me. You bet I scooted. And she caught me—yes, sir! I felt her skinny hand reach out and clutch my shoulder. I let out a screech—and woke up.”
“I should think you did screech,” said Felicity. “We heard you clean over into our room.”
“I hate to dream of being chased because I can never run,” said Sara Ray with a shiver. “I just stand rooted to the ground—and see it coming—and can’t stir. It don’t sound much written out, but it’s awful to go through. I’m sure I hope I’ll never dream Peg Bowen chases me. I’ll die if I do.”
“I wonder what Peg Bowen would really do to a fellow if she caught him,” speculated Dan.
“Peg Bowen doesn’t need to catch you to do things to you,” said Peter ominously. “She can put ill-luck on you just by looking at you—and she will if you offend her.”
“I don’t believe that,” said the Story Girl airily.
“Don’t you? All right, then! Last summer she called at Lem Hill’s in Markdale, and he told her to clear out or he’d set the dog on her. Peg cleared out, and she went across his pasture, muttering to herself and throwing her arms round. And next day his very best cow took sick and died. How do you account for that?”
“It might have happened anyhow,” said the Story Girl—somewhat less assuredly, though.
“It might. But I’d just as soon Peg Bowen didn’t look at MY cows,” said Peter.
“As if you had any cows!” giggled Felicity.
“I’m going to have cows some day,” said Peter, flushing. “I don’t mean to be a hired boy all my life. I’ll have a farm of my own and cows and everything. You’ll see if I won’t.”
“I dreamed last night that we opened the blue chest,” said the Story Girl, “and all the things were there—the blue china candlestick—only it was brass in the dream—and the fruit basket with the apple on it, and the wedding dress, and the embroidered petticoat. And we were laughing, and trying the things on, and having such fun. And Rachel Ward herself came and looked at us—so sad and reproachful—and we all felt ashamed, and I began to cry, and woke up crying.”
“I dreamed last night that Felix was thin,” said Peter, laughing. “He did look so queer. His clothes just hung loose, and he was going round trying to hold them on.”
Everybody thought this was funny, except Felix. He would not speak to Peter for two days because of it. Felicity also got into trouble because of her dreams. One night she woke up, having just had a very exciting dream; but she went to sleep again, and in the morning she could not remember the dream at all. Felicity determined she would never let another dream get away from her in such a fashion; and the next time she wakened in the night—having dreamed that she was dead and buried—she promptly arose, lighted a candle, and proceeded to write the dream down then and there. While so employed she contrived to upset the candle and set fire to her nightgown—a brand-new one, trimmed with any quantity of crocheted lace. A huge hole was burned in it, and when Aunt Janet discovered it she lifted up her voice with no uncertain sound. Felicity had never received a sharper scolding. But she took it very philosophically. She was used to her mother’s bitter tongue, and she was not unduly sensitive.
“Anyhow, I saved my dream,” she said placidly.
And that, of course, was all that really mattered. Grown people were so strangely oblivious to the truly important things of life. Material for new garments, of night or day, could be bought in any shop for a trifling sum and made up out of hand. But if a dream escape you, in what market-place the wide world over can you hope to regain it? What coin of earthly minting will ever buy back for you that lost and lovely vision?