Dearest | Page 3

able to reach for a long time."
"Probably getting into my second childhood," Colonel Hampton grunted.
"Oh, but you mustn't be ashamed of that!" the invisible entity told him. "That's the
beginning of real wisdom--becoming childlike again. One of your religious teachers said
something like that, long ago, and a long time before that, there was a Chinaman whom
people called Venerable Child, because his wisdom had turned back again to a child's

simplicity."
"That was Lao Tze," Colonel Hampton said, a little surprised. "Don't tell me you've been
around that long."
"Oh, but I have! Longer than that; oh, for very long." And yet the voice he seemed to be
hearing was the voice of a young girl. "You don't mind my coming to talk to you?" it
continued. "I get so lonely, so dreadfully lonely, you see."
"Urmh! So do I," Colonel Hampton admitted. "I'm probably going bats, but what the hell?
It's a nice way to go bats, I'll say that.... Stick around; whoever you are, and let's get
acquainted. I sort of like you."
A feeling of warmth suffused him, as though he had been hugged by someone young and
happy and loving.
"Oh, I'm glad. I like you, too; you're nice!"
* * * * *
"Yes, of course." Doctor Vehrner nodded sagely. "That is a schizoid tendency; the flight
from reality into a dream-world peopled by creatures of the imagination. You understand,
there is usually a mixture of psychotic conditions, in cases like this. We will say that this
case begins with simple senile dementia--physical brain degeneration, a result of
advanced age. Then the paranoid symptoms appear; he imagines himself surrounded by
envious enemies, who are conspiring against him. The patient then withdraws into
himself, and in his self-imposed isolation, he conjures up imaginary companionship. I
have no doubt...."
In the beginning, he had suspected that this unseen visitor was no more than a figment of
his own lonely imagination, but as the days passed, this suspicion vanished. Whatever
this entity might be, an entity it was, entirely distinct from his own conscious or
subconscious mind.
At first she--he had early come to think of the being as feminine--had seemed timid,
fearful lest her intrusions into his mind prove a nuisance. It took some time for him to
assure her that she was always welcome. With time, too, his impression of her grew
stronger and more concrete. He found that he was able to visualize her, as he might
visualize something remembered, or conceived of in imagination--a lovely young girl,
slender and clothed in something loose and filmy, with flowers in her honey-colored hair,
and clear blue eyes, a pert, cheerful face, a wide, smiling mouth and an impudently
up-tilted nose. He realized that this image was merely a sort of allegorical representation,
his own private object-abstraction from a reality which his senses could never picture as
it existed.
It was about this time that he had begun to call her Dearest. She had given him no name,
and seemed quite satisfied with that one.

"I've been thinking," she said, "I ought to have a name for you, too. Do you mind if I call
you Popsy?"
"Huh?" He had been really startled at that. If he needed any further proof of Dearest's
independent existence, that was it. Never, in the uttermost depths of his subconscious,
would he have been likely to label himself Popsy. "Know what they used to call me in the
Army?" he asked. "Slaughterhouse Hampton. They claimed I needed a truckload of
sawdust to follow me around and cover up the blood." He chuckled. "Nobody but you
would think of calling me Popsy."
There was a price, he found, that he must pay for Dearest's companionship--the price of
eternal vigilance. He found that he was acquiring the habit of opening doors and then
needlessly standing aside to allow her to precede him. And, although she insisted that he
need not speak aloud to her, that she could understand any thought which he directed to
her, he could not help actually pronouncing the words, if only in a faint whisper. He was
glad that he had learned, before the end of his plebe year at West Point, to speak without
moving his lips.
Besides himself and the kitten, Smokeball, there was one other at "Greyrock" who was
aware, if only faintly, of Dearest's presence. That was old Sergeant Williamson, the
Colonel's Negro servant, a retired first sergeant from the regiment he had last
commanded. With increasing frequency, he would notice the old Negro pause in his work,
as though trying to identify something too subtle for his senses, and then shake his head
in bewilderment.
One afternoon in early October--just about a year ago--he had been reclining in a chair on
the west