“Well, I was making the bread there when the wind came in with a bang
and sent the flour in a cloud all over everything--look! You can see
it over my dress still--and with it, sort of behind it, so to speak,
something followed with a rush--oh, an enormous rush and scurry it
was--and I thought I was rising in the air, or going to burn to pieces
by the heat that came in with it. I felt big like--as the sea when
you get out of your depth and feel yourself being carried away. I
screamed--and the three of us were all together in a moment, just as in
the dream, you know--and we were glad, tremendously glad, because we’d
got something we wanted that made us feel as if we could do anything,
oh, anything in the world--a sort of ’eavenly power I think it was--and
then, just as we were going to use our power and do all kinds of things
with it, someone--I don’t know who it was, for I never can see the
face--a man, though--one of those sleeping figures--rose up and came at
us all in a fury, and--well, I don’t know exactly, but it all turned
out a failure somehow--It got terrible then----” She looked like a
flash of lightning into my face, then dropped her eyes again.
“You acted out your dream, as it were?” interrupted Julius a moment.
She looked at him with a touch of wonder. “I suppose so,” she said,
and let go both our hands. “Only this time someone really did come in
and caught me just as I seemed going out of myself--it may have been
fainting, but I don’t think so, for I’m never one to faint--more like
being carried off in a storm, a storm with wind and fire in it----”
“It was the ‘man’ caught you?” I asked quickly.
“The man, yes,” she continued. “I didn’t fall. He caught me just in
time; but my wind was gone--gone clean out of me as though someone had
knocked me down.”
“He said nothing?” Julius asked.
She looked sharply at him. “Nothing,” she answered, “not a single word.
I ran away. He frightened me. For a moment--I was that confused with
remembering my dream, I suppose; so I just pushed him off and ran out
here to find you both. I’d been watching you for a long time while I
was mixing the dough.”
“I’m glad he was close enough to help you,” put in Julius.
“Well,” she explained, “I’ve a sort of idea he was watching me and saw
the thing coming, for he’d been in and out of the kitchen for half an
hour before, asking me silly questions about whether I wanted this or
that, and fussing about”--she laughed at her own description--“just
like an old faithful dog or something.”
We all laughed together then.
“I’m glad I found you so quickly,” she concluded, “because while I was
running up here I felt that something was running with me--something
that was burning and rushing--like a bit of what was in the house.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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