But now I have my one friend to love and to worship.
I have named my friend the “anemone lady,” a name beautifully
appropriate.
The anemone lady used to teach me literature in the Butte High
School. She used to read poetry in the class-room in a clear, sweet
voice that made one wish one might sit there forever and listen
to it.
But now I have left the high school, and the dear anemone lady has
gone from Butte. Before she went she told me she would be my friend.
Think of it--to live and have a friend!
My friend does not fully understand me; she thinks much too well
of me. She has not a correct idea of my soul’s depths and shallows.
But if she did know them she would still be my friend. She knows
the heavy weight of my unrest and unhappiness. She is tenderly
sympathetic. She is the one in all the world who is dear to me.
Often I think, if only I could have my anemone lady and go and live
with her in some little out-of-the-world place high up on the side
of a mountain for the rest of my life--what more would I desire? My
friendship would constitute my life. The unrest, the dreariness,
the Nothingness of my existence now is so dull and gray by contrast
that there would be Happiness for me in that life, Happiness softly
radiant, if quiet--redolent of the fresh, thin fragrance of the
dear blue anemone that grows in the winds and rains of spring.
But Miss Corbin would doubtless look somewhat askance at the idea
of spending the rest of her life with me on a mountain. She is
very fond of me, but her feeling for me is not like mine for
her, which indeed is natural. And her life is made up mostly of
sacrifices--doing for her fellow-creatures, giving of herself. She
never would leave this.
And so, then, the mountainside and the solitude and the friend with
me are, like every good thing, but a vision.
“Thy friend is always thy friend; not to have, nor to hold, nor to
love, nor to rejoice in: but to remember.”
And so do I remember my one friend, the anemone lady--and think
often about her with passionate love.
January 21.
Happiness, don’t you know, is of three kinds--and all are transitory.
It never stays, but it comes and goes.
There is that happiness that comes from newly-washed feet, for
instance, and a pair of clean stockings on them, particularly
after one has been upon a tramp into the country. Always I have
identified this kind of happiness with a Maltese cat, dipping a
hungry, stealthy, sensual tongue into a bowl of fresh, thick cream.
There is that still happiness that has come to me at rare times
when I have been with my one friend--and which does very well for
people whose feelings are moderate. They need wish for nothing
beyond it. They could not appreciate anything deeper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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