It was his half day off, and towards four o’clock—the correct hour for the purpose—Will decided to call on his aunt. He took a tram and as it wound its way out of the busy part of the town towards the wealthy residential suburb where his aunt lived, he was continuously interested in the changing scene. He was looking on something familiar in an oddly double way: the actual scene itself and the same scene as part of the aerial vision of the city which would always now slightly obsess him. His vision gave the actual scene more reality, deepened his interest in a detached, impersonal way.
Several of the ladies wore furs, elderly women whose faces looked clean and fresh through invisible powdering. The characteristic verbal rhythm of the Scots city was not quite lost in the clear enunciation of their words. They would have their private cars, but the tram was handy, and their exercise of economy was an art. Sound sensible women, giving to their completely genteel attitude to life almost an austere warrant. And one of them was gracious, with kind eyes, and a soft attractive voice—that clearly came long ago out of the Highlands.
He turned his face away, lest his eyes betray him, for this was the society in which he had been born and brought up. He could see it more clearly now than ever before—and with an odd sort of warmth. Even its rigid limitations—and these women would fight for their social rights and distinctions more unyieldingly than their men—no longer affected him as they used to do. How they had affected him in those early days when he had first studied the social doctrines of the brotherhood of man! He had wanted to get away from them—away—where and why?
That was a curious thing, now he came to think of it—he had had no definite ambition, or at least no personal urge to become a leader or a reformer or anything of that sort. He had just wanted to get away into the world of men, to be one of the mass who worked and toiled. In that brotherhood he would be freed.
The youthful form of mysticism—and about as ancient as the world’s most ancient religion!
He walked along a quiet street of fine houses, and then round into a crescent where the houses were large and detached, with hedges and a tree or two and the gravelled path going down past the side windows of the basement, where the servants worked and cooked, to the back door and vegetable garden.
He mounted the two broad steps, and rang. The maid appeared, opening the tall wide door as if she were guardian to a temple where quiet and orderliness always reigned.
“William!” His aunt got up slowly.
Quickly he moved towards her and shook her hand. “How are you, Aunt Marion?”
“I am fairly well, thank you. Not too much to complain about—apart from your desertion of me and the awful state of the world. What has happened to you this long while?”
“Blame the state of the world and all those crises. Have pity on the poor life of a journalist.” He made his excuses with an easy assurance.
Her interest in him concentrated. “The newspapers will have to get all the news, day and night.” She nodded. “Have you to sit listening all the time?”
“Some one has to,” he said lightly.
Her face, with its two baby-pink chins, was solemn. Her hair was very white and a little thin in front, showing the pink scalp. She was dressed, as always, in black silk.
“Poor boy!” she said. “I hope you do try to get a little sleep. It is such a terrible time the world has been going through. Does your landlady look after you properly? I think you are thinner than you were. Are you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I am really feeling very well.”
She settled into her chair. “We’ll have tea now—it’s just the time. I do hope no one comes. I don’t expect any one. It’s not my day. Will you please ring that bell? Thank you. Now, tell me: what do you think is going to happen?”
He saw that her interest in the European situation was almost morbid. This was a relief to him, because normally when he called on her she was full of personal complaints and an egotistic gloom that depressed him, or, in any case, made conversation very difficult. He had always felt awkward in her presence before. But to-day—and he had been prepared for it—he knew that he could have dealt with her complaints like her family doctor. The European situation was, so to speak, a gift!
His business was, of course, to reassure her, and to begin with he adopted the wrong tactic of being too sweepingly reassuring. It was too much for her. And then he became genuinely interested, for he saw that she had constructed an extraordinary myth, almost medieval in its grotesque pictures and assumptions.
The Germans were the Vandals and Goths of a schoolgirl’s imagination, strong ruthless fighters who captured and laid waste the Eternal City. Again they were on the march, this time to sweep on to the destruction of the new Eternal City (London) and the conquest of all the world. One could hear the crash of their tanks and their terrifying laughter.
Russia was half-lit and frightful and unholy. Things happened there in cellars and dark woods. The awful thing was that you could not know what was going to happen next; what would come out of the darkness and destroy you—as fire might leap out of a black hole and catch your clothes and burn you to death while you shrieked. Something fiendish in Russia. Will tried here—for the talk went on in anything but a logical way—to discover some realist basis for her fear in the possible loss of her income (dividends and house property), but could not do so directly or in so many words. Possibly, he reflected, the parallel was to the religious woman who desperately feared the victory of anti-Christ, without feeling for a moment that she herself would lose her own belief.
Aunt Marion’s attitude to the Italians was perhaps most interesting of all. She feared the Germans and Russians, but she only disliked the Italians. They had to be watched. You never knew what they would be up to. They were sly—and shameless “with all those bare little statues and pictures and things. To tell the truth, I never cared very much for them at the best of times. It’s a mistake to trust them.”
The muffins were toasted and buttered and delicious; the tea rich and excellent; plates of little home-made scones and crumpets; two cakes; black-currant jam. A few years off her head and in charge of a Soviet institution, wouldn’t she make the dust fly! They’d have to wipe their feet at the door! He helped himself copiously to the jam.
The way the mythology rose in his head from her simple language, he could hardly explain. It was all really intuitive—the reference, for example, to the bare little statues and nude paintings (not that she used the word nude), brought before him her whole girlhood, its schooldays and art lessons and trooping academy visits, its prudish suppressed little shames—inevitable then—and its elaborate system of reticence. How could she forgive the Italians, now that she really knew there was so much vice in the world?
His reassurance was conveyed in delicate ways. He saw her having a picture of him sitting with his ear to the world. She was not going to give up her myth, of course. Her pictures could not be altered. But though things were in fact so—yet they need not sweep on to the débâcle; they need not fulfil themselves; they, so to speak, could be stayed—by the enchantment of our increasing strength. And that’s what was happening.
She nodded. She saw. She agreed.
“I feel I am making a beast of myself by eating so much,” he said.
“If only I had known you were coming, I would have had your special cake, with the cream and nuts. I am so glad you came. I was longing for a real talk with some one. So few understand.”
A suggestion of her more normal gloom, that softly religious personal gloom, touched her mood now. She was all alone in the world and life inhabited places and corridors that went back into the past. Contemplation of it brought a sigh, a sweet sadness, a sad luxury, always of course with a consciousness of rectitude, a certainty that only “the good impulse” had prevailed. What may have been her own small sins were long washed out, forgotten.
He played up here, too, indulging her a little. She had mentioned something that had happened in “the old house”, and he said:
“Curious your mentioning that. I suddenly remembered the garden the other day. It was an incident that you will have forgotten, but it came back to me very clearly. I remembered the thrill I got when Uncle James handed me that stereoscope thing—you know?—that you put a photograph in? It was a photograph of Uncle James bending forward to a child in a go-cart. There was a plot of flowers—tall cups like tulips, and behind there was a hedge——”
She got up, deeply moved, and went to a walnut escritoire. After fumbling with a little bunch of keys, she unlocked a drawer; then she came back and put the photograph in his hands.
He had quite forgotten that it was a double photograph, and the surprise of this held his mind for a moment. But it was the old scene right enough, yellowish now with age, the facial features faded (except perhaps for Uncle James’s heavy black moustache). Will did not look up at her. He knew her eyes were damp. The little figure in the go-cart had been their only child and had died a year or two afterwards.
He had not thought of this tragedy when he had mentioned the photograph, and a month ago the realization of what he had done would have appalled him. But not now. He felt the sorrow fall on her like small rain on arid ground. In fact he had time to think privately of the astounding difference between the faded photographic double-print and the single picture of depth and sun-brightness that had been conjured up in his mind not so long ago. Then he handed it back. “How vividly I remember!”
“Yes. You were seven at the time.” And she went on to detail the family scene and occasion. “We had hoped that you would have a new playmate and companion through life, for your dear mother.… It was not to be.”
He was silent.
The silence caught them both for what seemed a long time. Its awkwardness, that would formerly have been an agony, hardly touched him. He lifted his eyes to the window and passed out into the light. As the one sigh broke itself twice going in with her breath to the far recesses of her body, he stirred. He was afraid he would have to go, he said, and looked at her candidly and kindly. Then he quickly heaved himself to his feet.
“It was good of you to come.”
“It was good of you to entertain me, you mean. But I shan’t be so long in coming again—if I can possibly help it,” he added.
“I wish you would. It is so seldom that I hear any one talk intelligently, who really knows, that——”
“Don’t you worry about that, Aunt Marion. I’ll make a bargain with you. So long as you don’t hear from me, you can take it that there’s no need for worry. Should the international situation throw up any really menacing feature, I’ll communicate with you at once—I’ll come and see you. You needn’t ring. I can find my way out.”
She rang automatically, but ignored the maid, while she herself accompanied him to the door and helped him on with his coat. He could almost feel her lean on him. He was the male head of her tribe (her husband had died many years ago), moving out to the power and mystery of business. “Good-bye, Aunt Marion.” Calmly, as if he had been in the habit of doing it, he kissed her on the forehead.
As he went along the street he turned the involuntary smile into a grimace by putting his hand inside his coat and tugging down the back of his jacket. He heard the tram coming, made a dash for it, and caught it moving. It seemed to bring him back into the heart of the city much more quickly than it had brought him out.
Poor Aunt Marion! Was it weakness to feel a little soft to her? She had at least £50,000. And he realized, as he strolled along the busy thoroughfare, that with very little attention on his part he could hardly help inheriting the greater part of it. Positively too easy.
His thought steadied for a moment. Did he want to? The answer came quite involuntarily: “By God, no!”
It startled him a little, so that he glanced to either side. His mind had cocked its ears like a frightened hare!
What was he afraid of? Dividends and property—that tainted source? Or afraid of losing this freedom which left his shoulders light? Afraid of being caught in the trap?
But he could always give the stuff away. Could hand it to Joe, for example!
Would you? said the cunning inner mind. That’s an old one! I know two better than that!
It had a primordial humour, this inner mind, slyly penetrative, dead and eternally right!
He turned his eyes on the street sights to distract his attention and regain a proper gravity. Offices were emptying.
There was a girl in front of him, in her twenties. Her shoes, with their stylish heels, and her stockings, sheathing up under her smartly cut skirt, came right out of a fashion plate. Her walk was restricted to that merest suggestion of a hobble, with its hardly perceptible stoop forward of the torso, that was nature using the artificial to produce the last word in chic. Her silken legs—very perfect legs—were pure suavity, mannered a trifle. Clever hands had pulled the cloth over shoulders and hips and drawn pins from the mouth to keep the seams together. The hat, an odd little affair, was perched on top of the lot—actually, for his eye was keen, on top of a head of hair that was too rich in golden shadows, he reckoned, to have been artificially coloured.
The whole was taken in at a glance, and before he could stop himself he had the shoes off her and the stockings and the rest—but no, she wouldn’t quite straighten up from her bare heels. She merely became uncomfortably naked. He didn’t pursue the thought. Had no desire to pursue anything. For of all that had happened to him, perhaps the most astonishing thing was that he could enjoy thus walking along a street that he had so often deemed as drab as hell.
It was almost exciting. He did not want to look at things long, particularly not at people, did not want to look too closely; but, that apart, the people and the bustle and the ringing bells of the trams were exhilarating. And why should he look closely? Sheer bad manners. For each must carry his or her integument of concern or fear or hidden disease or hope or lust or what-not—and make the best of it. But only—oh, if only—there was the slightest chance, the remotest possibility, that one day, all of them, would burst their balloons!
Queer, this detached and friendly liking one could get for humanity. Sly dog that he was! for he was all the time keeping the same distance behind the girl in front. The fair neck, disappearing under the simple, fashionable curls, was ravishingly cool. What a boon her very existence conferred on humanity in general! What a distinguished privilege, what a gift from life, to be able to look at her as he was looking, with an inexplicable, amused, lustless, detached, and yet intimate delight!
All he had got to do, of course, was to quicken his step and glance at her face and find that the impersonal body was too gracious for the personal face. She simply couldn’t have a face that would naturally crown that body. So why do it and dispel the illusion? So he did it, and when with a side glance he caught the face, he dropped behind at once, swerving towards what happened to be the window of a book-seller’s shop. “Well, I’m damned!” he muttered, under his breath. He stared at the books without seeing them, his heart in a race.
The girl was Jenny.
And now for the first time in years he deliberately evaded a personal question. He began to concentrate on the books, while this completely absurd and irrational action of the muscle in his breast slowly subsided. Amusing, too, that he should find himself staring at a book on How to Make a Rock Garden. That brought back his normal good humour and he thought suddenly, Why not? and entered the shop before he could think any more.
Last night he had been up in the garden, looking at what was to be seen. To him came his landlady, asking the time. Her clock which usually gained only ten minutes a day had “gone off its rocker altogether” and gained an hour. The little black French clock—as he knew himself—had a quite ungallic habit of suddenly becoming silent. They got chatting about Jenny’s work in the garden. A bank in the top corner was the despair of Jenny’s life, she declared. She really must get one of the farm men to dig it up. “But this is their busy time. It’s bishopweed it is. It invades her, she says, like an army! What she really wants to do, I know fine, is not only to have the place cleaned up, but also to have some stones put in and turn it into a rockery. It’s her secret passion just now!” She laughed. “Oh, I know fine, but I appear not to let on!”
As Will came out of the bookshop he looked along the street. Obviously Jenny had been heading for an appointment and, judging from the pains she must have taken with her outfit, the appointment was with Philip. She knew him! And my word, wouldn’t Philip say just the right thing! Not really say it, not anyway until he had first said it silently with his eyes and acted his admiration, in slight little offhand yet intimate ways!
He didn’t want to run into them. Anything but that! A small ironic gleam shot from his eyes. And there they were, at the corner of the street, waiting to cross! He turned his face to the shop windows. He paused opposite a watchmaker’s shop. She had been facing his way; must have seen him. He went into the shop. Five minutes later, when he came out, they were gone. From their office, they would have come different ways, of course!
When at last he shoved his head round the door of the small back saloon where the boys were gathered, he was greeted variously:
“Come on! What’s kept you? Where you been? What is it?”
“A small one,” said Will against their quizzing eyes. “The Scots are a satiric, ruthless, rowdy crowd of grotesques,” and he sat down.
They shouted the warmest hah-haws—all except Mac, who grinned. Don, Rob, Jackie, and Jackie’s friend Harry from another evening paper—they had consumed their pies and beer, and were now drinking in the merriest mood. The evening was before them, and fun, the warm arguments and entanglements of sheer fun—oh, full of the most profound thought concerning the nature of God, Tamerlane, political ideology or—oh, shut up!
That was the atmosphere and he liked it. It was honest, and no club in the city could provide such complete male freedom, free in its essence, charged with mirth and irony and ribaldry, swift convictions hotly maintained, good-naturedly shied at, hit and counter-hit and come again. Nothing finally mattered but the jet of life that spirted up out of a fellow’s head, with its tumbling coloured ball, and when the ball was knocked off its jet, they tumbled with it into laughter.
“Don’t let any one in here, Dan,” they said to the barman.
“No? Why?” asked satiric Dan.
“Because this is the moment”, said Will solemnly, “in which we burst our balloons.”
It was going to be a good night! For Will was obviously in a serene mood, and that was enough for Mac at any time.
The personal hunt started over a reference by Jackie to original innocence when he meant original sin. Mac, via a farm that he called the Garden of Allah, came down heavily on the side of sin.
“I disagree,” said Will. “For example, most of our present entertaining discourse would be unprintable, but fundamentally it’s innocent; and the natures of most—not all—of those taking part in it are moved to the fun like sportive lambs.”
“So you have started leading yourself up the garden path of wisdom? Huh?”
“That’s clever of you, Mac,” said Will. “Only, tell me—how could you know—unless the garden path is in your own mind? You cannot leave my farm alone. Why? Am I doing what you had not the courage to do? If not, what exactly are you trying to define?”
“Does one require to be a lunatic to define lunacy?”
“No. But one requires to be a poet to define poetry. And the trouble with you would appear to be that you can’t leave poetry alone?”
“As a terrier can’t leave a rat?”
“Or a child its rattle.”
“Hurrah!” cried Jackie. “Here, Don——”
“You’re getting drunk,” said Harry, a slim youth like himself. “Better put on your bowler,” and he stuck Rob’s bowler down over his eyes.
“Very good,” said Jackie, raising the headgear with difficulty to all present. “Mac: you have caught my eye.”
But Mac was not amused; not nearly so amused as he was by Will, whom he now began to hunt with a vindictive malice, laughing harshly when he felt he had scored a point.
Until Don interfered, with the tone of a referee. “Mac, you’re offside. That’s personal.”
“Personal bedamned. Aren’t we all personal? Are you afraid to be personal? Beyond the personal—what is there?”
“Mathematically,” said Don, “everything, every blessed sweet thing, except the personal, thank heaven.”
“You’re merely frightened of the mud,” said Mac, “while all the time it’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that what some of you need is a mud bath. Cakes of it to suck your lovey-dovey clogged pores open. Your so-called innocence is unclean, stinks. There is an innocence that is offensive, that is rank, like a skunk’s smell.”
“I presume you mean it is to you?” said Will. “And if so—quite. But it is a considerable assumption to assume that you hold the governing condition for everybody.”
“You think I don’t?”
“I am quite sure you don’t.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You don’t hold it for me, for example.”
They were all listening now, awaiting the explosion.
“By God, you’re a cocksure bastard, aren’t you?”
“Stick to the argument,” said Will. “Don’t run away.”
“Run away!” cried Mac. “Who? From you?”
“No, not from me.”
“You said run away.”
“I said don’t run away.”
“He said you ran away from the argument,” explained Rob.
“We ran and they ran and we a’ ran awa’ man—or how goes it?” asked Jackie.
“Do you mean”, said Mac, with a loose thrust of his lips, “only that I ran away from the argument?”
“I admit”, Will answered quietly, “that I meant more than that.”
“Well?” demanded Mac.
Will met his eyes in a silence that affected them all with a keen discomfort, and yet that none of them could break. There was something new in Will’s quiet penetrating look. And when the words came they were slow and distinct, more penetrating than the eyes, and charged with incredible meaning:
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind.…”
Mac suddenly threw his head back and gave way to raucous laughter. The strings of his throat whipped taut. They had never seen him give way so completely.
Will took up his glass with a slow smile. “I knew that would get him,” he said.
The others were at once released, and Jackie and Harry went noisily to their coats for more cigarettes.
At last Mac gasped, wiping his eyes. “Holy God—kindergarten!” He would have started laughing again if Jackie hadn’t whistled. “Boys, will you look at this?” for he had gone into one of Will’s pockets by mistake and produced a book with a paper jacket and the title, How to Make a Rock Garden. The jacket was a brilliant show of colour supported at one side by the gable end of a cottage with tall hollyhocks.
“Here——” began Will.
“So it’s yours?” said Jackie.
“I move”, said Harry, “that this document lies on the table.”
This was carried, and Mac got hold of it. “Flowers!” he cried. “Hollyhocks! Sweet peas!” His voice was a riot of malice. “She moves amid the hollyhocks and peas.” He could hardly open the book. “Kindergarten, did I say? Infantile bloody paralysis!”
“Please give me that book.”
Mac ignored him. Mac had a demoniac account to settle. But Jackie was now crying to them to shut up. They screwed themselves round to look at him. He was standing, swaying very slightly, and apparently listening.
In an appalled voice, Harry said: “He’s got ’em.” He went to Jackie and asked gently: “What is it, Jackie?”
“Shut up,” said Jackie, “and listen. Do you hear that sort of ticking sound?”
Harry could genuinely hear nothing. “Feeling queer a bit, are you?”
Jackie swiped him with an arm and Harry grabbed at Will’s coat as he was going down and brought it with him. Winded, he sat, head over it; until his head jerked up as if it had been stung. He looked at the coat. “The damn thing’s beating,” he said. “It’s alive.” He began to push it from him. Then, overcoming the instinctive serpent fear, he inserted his hand into a pocket and produced a ball of brown paper, with prongs sticking through. “Hell,” he cried, in real panic, “it’s a time bomb!” He dropped it on the coat and retreated in a rush.
“If you’re quite finished with my coat,” Will began, getting up, when Jackie to cover his own instinctive recoil stooped and lifted a small blue-enamelled alarm-clock from the brown paper that had merely been loosely wrapped round it.
“Please leave that alone,” said Will.
“But, look here——” began Jackie.
Will advanced upon him, and now Harry, anxious to avoid comment on his panic, neatly fielded the clock from Jackie and brought it to the table before Will could grab him.
Mac immediately took possession of it. “Exhibit number two.”
“Give me that clock!” Will demanded.
“Sit down,” ordered Mac.
“Give me that clock!”
“Hold the prisoner at the bar.”
The two boys held him, with Rob ready. “And they brought him”, said Jackie, “before Pontius Pilate.”
“Will you explain”, asked the judge, “why you bought this clock?” and he set it on the table before him.
“I bought it”, said Will, standing calm and straight, “in the hope that it might explain the meaning of time.”
“Haven’t you a landlady?”
“I have.”
“Well?”
“I will tell the whole truth. I have recently attempted to awake in the grey of the dawn to hear the birds sing, but without success. Hence the need for an alarm—to awaken me at that timeless hour.”
They laughed thickly, for they were tired of laughing. Will had a fantastic touch. Lately he had developed the habit of saying impromptu the wildest nonsense with the probability in it of the fairy-story. And they liked it. It appealed to something ungoverned or grotesque in themselves or in their tradition.
But Mac was looking at him, trying to fathom him.
And Will, looking back at Mac with a gentle expression, shook his head. “It’s no use, Mac.”
“What’s no use?”
“Trying to escape.”
“Escape?”
“The poet, who fled God down the arches of the years——”
“Christ and him crucified!” cried Mac. He lifted the book and brought it down with such violence on the table that it slid forward and shot the little blue clock on to the floor. The glass face smashed and the small bell tinkled.
There was a startled silence. But Will, the gentle expression on his face, stooped and lifted the clock and listened to it.
“It’s still going,” he said, and placed it carefully on the table. Then he picked up the book. The coloured wrapper was sopping with beer. He dropped it on the floor and wiped the covers of the book with his handkerchief. “She’ll never know”, he said, “that it knocked time sideways.”
They cheered him for his good nature. And at that instant the alarm bell of the little clock joined in with such a ringing triumphant loudness that they lost their balance completely and Dan came in to see what was wrong.
Later, after parting, Will turned and looked back and saw Mac pursuing his solitary way down the arches of the streets.
Where am I now? he asked as he pursued his own country road, and whither am I going? The arch of the dark was lit by the stars. One cannot look long at stars, he decided. Not too long.
Laughter was inside him, and occasionally it came out to have a look around.
This liberation that came with the drug of drink! This irresponsibility! This starry freedom!
The drunkenness that was not drunk; that was sober as the lidless stars—that winked at him!
Let the mole come and the owl, the weasel and the bat.…
The cool night air washed fantasy from his mind in a shiver of clarity.
For there was a tremendous difference between the abandon of the old drunken Dionysian revel and this strange exquisite abandon of his “vision”. True, there was kinship; up to a point, there was bodily warmth, fusion; but ah how profound, how unbridgeable, the essential difference! For in the Dionysian revel, the self, the ego, whirled unrestricted in its desires into a state of frenzy; but in the “vision” the ego was lost in the calm uprising of the second self, the deeper self, into conscious freedom.
Extraordinary to think there had been times that night when he had got not only an extreme detachment from his fellows but an affection for them, an understanding that had something akin to the understanding of saints! What possibilities of complacency are there! Shut up! he said, poked in the ribs by himself.
He sat down. What was time anyway?
For there was one happy circumstance, he felt, fixed now fairly securely in his mind, helping him at the difficult moment, giving him an odd resiliency and power. He knew he could not command this “vision”—what an appalling word for so simple a reality!—but it did induce its own aftermath; just as a body that has been sunbathing feels the sun-warmth on its skin—even along the bones, in the marrow—long after it has been dressed, so that it seems to walk in airy naked freedom under its clothes.
Presumably there must be the penalty of the old polarity: where there is height there is depth; where there is ecstasy there must be despair. And, by degree, despair that becomes that terrible “dark night of the soul”.…
Well, a fellow must pay all due penalties. That was adventure. Meantime he had not got quite that length, thank God!
He looked about him. Even Jenny and Philip were detached from him. He could admire their physical beauty and aptitude one for the other. More than that, he could feel an affection for them.
His thought stopped abruptly.
He took out his book, smoothed it with his palms, smiled, and laid it on the grass. Then very carefully he took out the clock, whose glass was broken, and felt for the hands with his finger-tips. Bare, but intact! He nodded. Only our glass face is broken.
Tik-tik-tik-tik…it went. He listened to it as to a magic toy. Talk of overtones in meanings! and he glanced conspiratorially at the stars.
But this time the stars remained aloof and, embarrassed, he became a cheapjack at a fair. Now there is the book of the flowers, he said. See? There. Her book of the flowers. Very well, I will place it under the circle of eternal time and we’ll see what happens. Watch!
Immediately he placed the short metal legs of the little clock on the hard cover of the book, the tik-tik-tik-tik…became much louder and firmer.
Now I wonder, he said, forgetting the people at the fair, what that means? He was prepared to challenge the stars, who had withdrawn from him at the moment of the abrupt stop in his thoughts. But there seemed a greater radiance in the heavens, coming surely from behind him. He turned his head. The moon had risen above the horizon, but now one side of it was half eaten away. The gibbous moon. He stared at it, then his head drooped.
After a time, the impatient little clock drew his eyes.
“Very well,” he said slowly, “let’s all go home together.”