City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was
young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see
heaven. It wasn't to say he was _exactly_ like my picture," Calliope
said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard,
an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might
say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His
hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was
his only baggage. An' he had a way--well, like what he happened to be
doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly
somewheres else, where everything was better.
"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says--an' it wasn't the way most of
'em talks here in Friendship, you understand--'I've been askin' the
luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at
what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman
there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to
find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad
time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem
to know.'
"An' then all at once I knew--I knew. Why, don't you see," Calliope
cried, "I had to know! That was just the way we'd talked in my
dream--kind of jokin' an' yet meanin' somethin', too--so's you felt all
lifted up an' out o' the ordinary. An' then I knew who he was an' I see
how everything was. Why, the girl that was me an' that was lonesome
there in Friendship _wasn't_ me, very much. Me bein' Calliope Marsh was
the chance part, an' didn't count. But things was rilly the way I'd
dreamed o' their bein.' Somehow, I had another self. An' I had dreamed
o' bein' that self. An' there he stood, on the Friendship depot
platform."
Calliope looked at me wistfully.
"You don't think I sound crazy, do you?" she asked.
And at my answer:--
"Well," she said, brightening, "that was how it was. An' it was like
there hadn't been any first time an' like there wouldn't be any end.
Like they was things bigger than time--an' lots nicer than life. An' I
spoke up like I'd always known him.
"'Why, yes,' I says to him simple, 'you must mean the Depot Woods,' I
said. 'They're always kind o' haunted to me. I guess the little folks
that come in the en-gine smoke live in there,' I told him, smilin'
because I was so glad.
"I remember how su'prised he looked an' how his face lit up, like he was
hearin' English in a heathen land.
"'Upon my word,' he says, still only half believin' in me. 'An' do you
go there often?' he ask' me. 'An' I daresay the little smoke folk talk
to you, now?' he says.
"'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?'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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