“Tim!” she gasped, overcome with admiration. “Is it really that?”
Tim never forgot that moment of proud ascendancy. He felt like a king or something.
“Look out,” he whispered quickly. “You’ll spoil it all if he knows we’ve guessed.” And he nodded his head towards Uncle Felix in his wicker-chair. “It’s Maria’s adventure, too, remember.”
Judy smiled and flushed a little.
“He’s not listening,” she whispered back, ignoring Maria’s claim. She was not quite so stupid as her brother thought her. “But how on earth did you know? It’s too wonderful!” She flung the hair out of her eyes and wriggled away some of her suppressed excitement on the grass. Tim held his breath in agony while he watched her. But the smoke from his Uncle’s pipe rose steadily into the sunny air, and his face was hidden by a paper that he held. The moment of danger passed. The boy leaned over towards his sister’s ear.
“Where it comes from,” he whispered, “is what I want to know,” and straightened up again with the air of having delivered an ultimatum that no girl could ever possibly reply to.
“From?” she repeated. She seemed a little disappointed. “D’you mean that may stop it coming?”
“Of course not,” he said contemptuously. “But everything must come from somewhere, mustn’t it?”
Judy stared at him speechless, while he surveyed her with an air of calm omnipotence. To ask a thing no one could answer was the same as knowing the answer oneself.
“Mustn’t it?” he repeated with triumph.
And, in the inevitable pause that followed, they both instinctively glanced up at Uncle Felix. The same idea had occurred to both of them. Although direct questions about what was coming were obviously impermissible, an indirect question seemed fairly within the rules. The fact was, neither of them could keep quiet about it any longer. The strain was more than human nature could stand. They simply must find out. They would get at it that way.
“Try him,” whispered Judy. And Tim turned recklessly towards his Uncle and drew a long, deep breath.
CHAPTER XIV. MARIA STIRS
“Uncle,” he began with a rush lest his courage should forsake him, “where does everything come from? Everything in the world, I mean?” — then waited for an answer that did not come.
Uncle Felix neither moved nor spoke, and the question, like a bomb that fails to explode, produced no result after considerable effort and expense. The boy looked down again at the alarum clock he had been trying to mend, and turned the handle. It was too tightly wound to go. A stopped clock has the sulkiest face in the world. He stared at it; the handle clicked beneath the pressure of his hand. “It must come from somewhere,” he added with decision, half to himself.
“From the East, of course,” advanced Judy, and tried to draw her Uncle by putting some buttercups against his cheek and mentioning loudly that he liked butter.
Then, since neither sound nor movement issued from the man in the wicker-chair, the children continued the discussion among themselves, but at the man, knowing that sooner or later he must become involved in it. Judy’s answer, moreover, so far as it went, was excellent. The sun rose in the East, and the wind most frequently mentioned came also from that quarter. Easter, when everything rose again, was connected with the same point of the compass. The East was enormously far away with a kind of fairyland remoteness. The dragon-rugs in Daddy’s study and the twisted weapons in the hall were “Easty” too. According to Tim, it was a “golden, yellow, crimson-sort-of, mysterious, blazing hole of a place” of which no adequate picture had ever been shown to them. China and Japan were too much photographed, but the East was vague and marvellous, the beginning of all things, “Camel-distant,” as they phrased it, with Great Asia upon its magical frontiers. For Asia, being equally unphotographed, still shimmered with uncommon qualities.
But, chiefly, it was a vast hole where travellers disappeared and left no trace; and to leave no trace was simply horrible.
“The easier you go the less chance there is,” maintained Judy. She said this straight into the paper that screened her uncle’s face — without the smallest result of any kind whatsoever. Then Tim recalled something that Colonel Stumper had said once, and let fly with it, aiming his voice beneath the paper’s edge.
“East is east,” he announced with considerable violence, but might as well have declared that it was south for all the response obtained. It was very odd, he thought; his Uncle’s mind must be awfully full of something. For he remembered Come-Back Stumper saying the same thing once to Daddy at the end of a frightful argument about missionaries and idols, and Daddy had been unable to find any reply at all. Yet Uncle Felix did not stir a finger even. Accordingly, he made one more effort. He recited in a loud voice the song that Stumper had made up about it. If that had no effect, they must try other means altogether:
The East is just an endless place
That lies beyond discovery,
Where travellers who leave no trace
Are lost without recovery.
Both North and South have got a pole —
Men stand on the equator;
But the East is just an awful hole —
You’re never heard of later!
It had no effect. Goodness! he thought, the man must be ill. Or, perhaps, like the alarum clock, he was too tightly wound to go, and the burden of the secret he contained so wonderfully up his sleeve half choked him. The boy grew impatient; he nudged Judy and made an odd grimace, and Judy, belonging to the sex that took risks and thought little of personal safety when a big end was to be obtained, stood up and put the buttercups against her own cheek.
“But I like it ever so much more than you do,” she said in a loud voice.
The move was not a bad one; the paper wobbled, sank a quarter of an inch, revealed the bridge of the reader’s nose, then held severely steady again. Whereupon Tim, noticing this sign of weakening, followed his sister’s lead, rose, kicked the tired clock like a ball across the lawn, and exclaimed in a tone of challenge to the universe: “But where did everything come from before that — before the East, I mean?” And he glared at his immobile Uncle through the paper with an air of fearful accusation, as though he distinctly held he was to blame. If that didn’t let the cat out of the bag, nothing would!
The big man, however, rested heavily with his legs crossed, as though still he had not heard. Doubtless he felt as heavy as he looked, for the afternoon was warm, and luncheon — well, at any rate, he remained neutral and inactive. Something might happen to divert philosophical inquiry into other channels; a rat might poke its nose above the pond; a big fish might jump; an awfully rare butterfly come dancing; or Maria, as on rare occasions she had been known to do, might stop discussion with a word of power. The chances were in his favour on the whole. He waited.
But nothing happened. No rat, nor fish, nor butterfly did the things expected of them; they were on the children’s side. Maria sat blocked and motionless against the landscape; and the round world dozed. Yes — but the music of the world was humming. The bees droned by, there was a whisper among the unruffled leaves.
Tim tapped him sharply on the knee. The man shuffled, then looked over the top of his illustrated paper with an air of shocked surprise.
“Eh, Tim,” he asked. “Where we all come from, did you say?”
“Everything, not only us,” was the clean reply.
“That’s it,” Judy supported him.
“Now, then,” Maria added quietly, as if she had done all the work.
Uncle Felix laid down his entertaining pictures of public men in misfit-clothing furiously hitting tiny balls over as much uncultivated land as possible — and sighed. Their violent attitudes had given him a delightful sensation of repose. They were the men who governed England, and this savage hitting was proof of their surplus energy. He resigned himself, but with an air.
“Well,” he said vaguely, “I suppose — it all just — began somehow — of itself.” And he stole a sideways glance
at a picture of a stage Beauty attired like a female Guy Fawkes.
“It was created in six days, of course, us last,” said Tim, regarding him with patient dignity. “We remember all that. But where it came from is what we thought you’d know.” He closed the illustrated paper and moved it out of reach, while the man brushed from his beard the grass and stuff that Judy had arranged there cleverly in a decorative pattern.
“From?” repeated Uncle Felix, as though the word were unfamiliar.
“Your body and mind,” the boy resumed, ignoring the pretence that laziness offered in place of information, “and all that kind of thing; trees and mountains, and birds and caterpillars and people like Aunt Emily, and clergymen and volcanoes and elephants — oh, everything in the world everywhere?”
There was another sigh. And another pause dropped down upon creation, while they watched a looper caterpillar that clung to the edge of the illustrated paper and made futile circles in the air with the knob it called its head. Some one had forgotten to let down the ladder it expected, or perhaps it, too, was asking unanswerable questions of the sun.
“I believe,” announced Judy, still smarting under a sense of recent neglect, “it just came from nowhere. It’s all in a great huge circle. And we go round and round and rounder,” she went on, as no one met her challenge, “till we’re finished!”
She avoided her brother’s eye, but glanced winningly at Uncle Felix, remembering that she had gained support from him before by a similar device. At Maria she looked down. “You know nothing anyhow,” her expression said, “so you must agree.”
“I don’t finish,” said Maria quietly, whereupon Tim, feeling that the original question was being shelved, made preparation to obliterate her — when Uncle Felix intervened with a longer observation of his own.
“It’s not such a bad idea,” he said, glancing sideways at Maria with approval, “that circle business. Everything certainly goes round. The earth is round, and the sun is round, and, as Maria says, a circle never finishes.” He paused, reflecting deeply.
“But who made the circle,” demanded Tim.
“That is the point,” agreed Uncle Felix, nodding his head. “Some one must have made it — some day — mustn’t they?”
They stared at him, as probably the animals stared at Adam, wondering what their splendid names were going to be. The yearning in their eyes was enough to make a rock produce sweet-scented thyme. Even the looper steadied its pin-point head to listen. But nothing happened. Uncle Felix looked dumber than the clock. He looked hot, confused, and muddled too. He kept his eyes upon the grass. He fumbled in his pockets for a match. He spoke no word.
“What?” asked Tim abruptly, by way of a hint that something further was expected of him.
Uncle Felix looked up with a start. Like Proteus who changed his shape to save himself the trouble of prophesying, he swiftly changed the key to save himself providing accurate information that he didn’t possess.
“It wasn’t a circle, exactly,” he said slowly; “it was a thought, a great, white, wonderful, shining thought. That’s what started the whole business first,” and he looked round hopefully at the eager faces. “Somebody thought it all,” he went on, recklessly, “and it all came true that way. See?”
They waited in silence for particulars.
“Somebody thought it all out first,” he elaborated, “and so it simply had to happen.”
There was an interval of some thirty seconds, and then Tim asked:
“But who thought him?” He said it with much emphasis.
Uncle Felix sat up with energy and lit his pipe. His listeners drew closer, with the exception of Maria, whose life seemed concentrated in her fixed and steady eyes.
“It’s like this, you see,” the man explained between the puffs; “if you go into the schoolroom, you find a lot of things lying about everywhere — blocks, toys, engines, and all sorts of things — don’t you?”
“Yes,” they agreed, without enthusiasm.
“Well,” he continued, “what’s the good of them until you think something about them — think them into something — some game or meaning or other? They’re nothing but a lot of useless stuff just lying untidily upon the floor. See what I mean?”
They nodded, but again without enthusiasm.
“With our End of the World place,” he went on, seeing that they listened attentively, “it’s the same again. It was nothing but a rubbish-heap until we thought it into something wonderful — which, of course, it is,” he hastened to add. “But by thinking about it, we discovered — we created it!”
They nodded again. Somebody grunted. Maria watched the caterpillar crawling up his sleeve.
“The things — the place and the toys,” he resumed hopefully, “were there all the time, but they meant nothing — they weren’t alive — until we thought about them.” He blew a cloud of smoke. “So, you see,” he continued with an effort, “if we could only think out what everything meant, we could — er — find out what — what everything meant — and where it came from. Everything would be all right, don’t you see?”
Judy’s expression was distraught and puzzled. Maria’s eyes were closed so tightly that her entire face seemed closed. The pause drew out.
“Yes, but where does everything come from?” inquired Tim calmly.
He valued the lengthy explanation at just exactly — nothing!
“Because there simply must be a beginning somewhere,” added Judy.
They were at the starting-point again. They had merely made a circle.
And Uncle Felix found himself in difficulties of his own creating. Where everything came from puzzled him as much as it puzzled the children, or the looper caterpillar that was now crawling from his flannel collar to his neck and contemplating the thicket of his dense back hair. Why ask these terrible questions? he thought, as he looked around at the sunshine and the trees. Life would be no happier if he knew. Since everything was already here, going along quite pleasantly and usefully, it really couldn’t help matters much to know precisely where it all came from. Possibly not. But it would have helped him enormously in his relations with the children — his particular world at the moment — if he could have provided them with a satisfactory explanation. And he knew quite well what they expected from him. That dreadful “Some Day” hung in the balance between success and failure.
And it was then that assistance came from a most unlikely quarter — from Maria. There was no movement in the stolid head. The eyes merely rolled round like small blue moons upon the expanse of the expressionless face. But the lips parted and she spoke. She asked a question. And her question shifted the universe back upon its ultimate foundations. It set a problem deeper far than the mere origin of everything. It touched the cause.
“Why?” she inquired blandly.
It seemed a bomb-shell had fallen among them. Maria had closed her eyes again. Her face was calm as a cabbage, still as a mushroom in a storm. She claimed the entire discussion somehow as her own. Yet she had merely exercised her prerogative of being herself. Having gone into the root of the matter with a monosyllable, she retired again into her eternal centre. She had nothing more to offer — at the moment.
Why?
They had never thought of Why there should be anything. It was far more interesting than Where. Why was a deeper question than whence. It made them feel more important, for one thing. Somebody — but Somebody who was not there — owed them a proper explanation about it. The burden of apology or excuse was lifted instantly from Uncle Felix’s shoulders, for, obviously, he had nothing to do with the reason for their being in the world.
Without a moment’s hesitation he flung his arms out, let the pipe fall from his lips, and — burst into song:
Why should there be anything?
Why should we be here?
It isn’t where we come from,
But why should we appear?
It’s really inexplicable,
Extr’ordinary, queer:
Why should we come and talk a bit,
And then — just disappear?
“Why, why, why?” shouted the two elder children. The air was filled with flying “whys.” They tried to sing the verse.
“Let’s dance it,” cried Judy, leaping to her feet. “Give us the words
again, please.” She picked up the clock and plumped it down into
Maria’s uncertain lap. “You beat time,” she ordered. “It’s the tune of
‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”
Maria, disinclined to budge unless obliged to, did nothing.
“It’s a beastly tune,” Tim supported her. “I hate those Sunday hymn tunes. They’re not real a bit.”
He watched Judy and his Uncle capering hand in hand among the flower-beds. He didn’t feel like dancing himself. He looked at the clock that, like Maria and himself, refused to go. He looked at Maria, fastened immovably upon the lawn. The clock lay glittering in the sunshine. Maria sat like a shining ball beside it. He felt the afternoon was a failure somewhere. Things weren’t going quite as he wanted, the clock wasn’t going either. And when they did go they went of their own accord, independent of himself, of his direction, guidance, wishes. He was out of it. This was not the time to dance. What was the meaning of it all? It had to do somehow with the clock that wouldn’t go. It had to do with Maria, who wouldn’t budge. The clock had stopped of its own accord. That lay at the bottom of it all, he felt. Some day things would be different, more satisfactory — more real…. Some day!
And strange, new ideas, very vague and dim, very far away, very queer, and very wonderful, poured through his searching, questioning little mind.
“Beat time!” shouted Judy to her motionless sister. “I told you to beat time. You’re doing nothing. You never do!”
Tim stood watching them, while the words rang on in his head: “You are doing nothing! You never do!” How wonderful it was! Maria never did anything, yet was always there in everything. And the others — how funny they were, too! They looked like an elephant and a bird, he thought, for Judy hopped and fluttered, while his Uncle moved heavily, making holes in the soft lawn with his great feet. “Beat time, beat time!” cried Judy at intervals.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 273