THE STRANGER WHO IS WONDER
II
And Uncle Felix moved forward into the pool of sunlight that blazedupon the faded carpet pattern. It was composed of round, fat trees,this pattern, with birds like goblin peacocks flying in mid-air betweenthem. The sunshine somehow lifted them, so that they floated upon thequivering atmosphere; the pattern seemed to hover between him and thecarpet. And he too felt himself lifted--in mid-air--part of the day andsunshine.
He closed his eyes; he tried to realise who and where he was; all hecould remember, however, went into a single sentence and kept repeatingitself on the waves of his singing, dancing blood: "Clock's stopped,clock's stopped,--stopped clocks, stopped clocks...!" till it soundedlike a puzzle sentence--then lost all meaning.
He sat down in a chair, but the chair was next to the "empty" one, andfrom it something poured into him, over him, round him, as wind poursabout a bird or tree. He became enveloped by it; his mind began torush, yet rushed in a circle, so that he never entirely lost sight ofit. Another set of words replaced the first ones: "Behind Time, behindTime," jostling on each other's heels, tearing round and round like aCatherine Wheel, shining and dancing as they spun.
He opened his eyes and looked about him. The room was full of wonder.It glistened, sparkled, shone. A million things, screened hitherto fromsight by thick clouds of rushing minutes, paused and offeredthemselves; things that were commonplace before stood still, revealedin startling glory. They no longer raced past at headlong speed.Visible at last, unmasked, they showed themselves as they really were,in naked beauty. This beauty settled on everything in golden rain, itsettled on himself as well. All that his eyes rested onlooked--distinguished....
And, like snow-flakes, words and thoughts came thickly crowding, likeflakes of fire too. He snatched at them, caught them in bunches, triedto sort them into sentences. They were everywhere about him, showeringdown as from a box of cardboard letters overturned in the sky. Thereality he sought hid among them as a whole--he knew that--but no meresequence of words and letters could quite capture this reality.
He plunged his hands among the flying symbols....
In a flash a number of things--an enormous number of things--becameextraordinarily clear and simple; they became one single thing. Then,while reason and vision still fluttered to and fro, like a pair ofbutterflies, first one and then the other leading, he dashed in betweenthem. He seized handfuls of the flying letters and made the queerestsentences out of them, longer and faster-moving than the first ones.
"Time _is_ the arch-deceiver. It drives things past us in a hurryingflock. We snatch at them. And those we miss seem lost for ever becausesome one calls out, in a foolish voice of terror and regret, 'Toolate!' Yet, in reality, _we_ stand still; the rush of the hours is asham. We see things out of proportion, like trees from the window of atrain, their beauty hidden in a long, thick smudge. _We_ do not move;it is the train that hurries us along: the trees are always steadilythere--and beautiful. There is enough of everything for everybody--noneed to try and get there first. To hurry is to chase your tail, whichsome one has suggested does not belong to you. It can never be capturedby pursuit. But pause--stand still--it instantly presents itself,twitches its tip, and laughs: 'I've been here all the time. I'm part ofyou!'"
He turned towards the empty chair and smiled. The smile, he felt, camemarvellously back to him from the sunshine and the open world of skyand trees beyond. There was some one there who smiled--invisibly.
"You're real, quite real," the letters danced instantly into newsentences. "But you are so awfully close to me--so close I cannot seeyou."
He felt the invisible Stranger suddenly as real as that. There was onlyone thing to see--only one thing everywhere. The beauty of thediscovery put reason utterly and finally to flight. But that one thingwas hiding. The Stranger concealed himself--he hid on purpose. Hewanted to be looked for--found. And the heart grew "warm" or "cold"accordingly: when it was warm that mysterious anticipationstirred--"Some one is coming!"
And Uncle Felix, sitting in the sunlight of that breakfast-room,understood that the entire universe formed a conspiracy to hide "him."Some one, indeed, had come, slipped into the gorgeous and detailedclothing of the entire world as easily as birds and trees slip intotheir own particular clothing, planning with Time to hide him, wantingto play a little--to play at Hide-and-Seek. "Let them all look for me!I'm hiding!..."
Yet so few would play! Instead of coming out to find him where he hidso simply in the open, they built severe and gloomy edifices; inventedRules of the game by which each could prove himself right and all theothers wrong.... Oh, dear!... And all the time, _he_ hid there in theopen before their very eyes--in the wind, the stream, the grass, in thesunlight and the song of birds, and especially behind little carelessthings that took no thought ... waiting to play and let himself befound... while songs and poems and fairy-tales, even religious too,cried endlessly across the world, "Look and you'll find him." There_was_ only one thing to say: "Search in the open; he hides there!"
Everything became clear and simple--one thing, Life was a game ofHide-and-Seek. There were obstacles placed in the way on purpose tomake it more interesting. One of them was Time. But everything was onething, and one thing only; a peacock and a policeman were the same, sowere an elephant and a violet, an uncle and a bee, a Purple Emperor anda child like Tim or Judy: all did, said, lived one and the same thingonly. They looked different--because one looked _at_ them differently.
Smiling happily to himself again as the letters grouped themselvesswiftly into these curious sentences, he heard the birds singing in theclean, great sky... and it seemed to him that the Stranger blew softlyupon his eyes and hair. The sentences instantly telescoped: "Come, lookfor me! There is no hurry; life has just begun...." And he barely hadtime to realise that the entire complicated mass of them had, afterall, only this one thing to say... when the returning children burstinginto the room scattered his long reverie, and the last cardboard letterdisappeared like magic into empty space.
"Where is he?" cried Tim at once, staring impatiently about him. Therewas rebuke and disappointment in his eyes. "Uncle, you've been arguing.He's gone!"
Judy was equally quick to seize the position of affairs. "You'vefrightened him away!" she declared with energy. "Quick! We must go outand look!"
"Yes," muttered their uncle a little guiltily, and was about to addsomething by way of explanation when he felt Judy pull his sleeve."Look!" she whispered. "He can't have gone so _very_ far!"
She pointed to the plate with the sugar, honey, cream, and crumbs uponit; a bird was picking up the crumbs, a wasp was on the lump of sugar,a bee beside it, standing on its head, was drinking at the drop ofhoney; all were unafraid, and very leisurely about it; there seemed nohurry; there was enough for every one. Then, as the trio of humansstared with delight, they saw another guest arrive and dance up gailyto the feast. A gorgeous butterfly sailed in, hovered above the crowdedplate a moment, then settled comfortably beside its companions andexamined the blob of cream. The others moved a little to make room forit. It was a Purple Emperor, the rarest butterfly in all England, whosehome was normally high above the trees.
"Of course," Judy whispered to her brother, as she watched the bee makeroom for its larger neighbour; "they belong to him--"
"He sent them," replied Tim below his breath, "just to let us know--"
"Yes," mumbled Uncle Felix for the second time, a soft amazementstealing over him. "He brought them. And they're all the same thingreally."
There was the perfume of a thousand flowers in the room. A faint breezefloated through the open window and touched his eyes. He heard theworld outside singing in the sunshine. "Come along," he said in a low,hushed whisper; "let's go and look." And he moved eagerly--over thetree-and-peacock pattern.
They tiptoed out together, while the bird cocked up its head to watchthem go; the bee, still drinking, raised its eyes; and all fourfluttered their wings as though they laughed. They seemed to say "There
is no hurry! We're all alive together! There's enough for all; no needto get there first!" _They_ knew. The golden day lay waiting outsidewith overflowing beauty, and he who had brought them in stood justbehind this beauty that hid and covered them. When they had eaten anddrunk, they, too, would come and join the search. Exceedingly beautifulthey were--the shy grace of the dainty bird, the brilliant wasp inblack and gold, the soft brown bee, the magnificent Purple Emperor,fresh from the open spaces above the windy forest: all said the samebig, joyful thing, "We are alive!... No hurry!..."
The trio flew down the passage, took the stairs in leaps and bounds,raced across the hall where the back-door, standing open, framed thelawn and garden in a blaze of sunshine.
And as Uncle Felix followed, half dancing like the other two, he saw alittle thing that vaguely reminded him of--another little thing. Thememory was vague and far away; there was a curious distance in it, likethe distance of a dream recalled in the day-light, no longer what iscalled quite real. For his eye caught something gleaming on theside-table below the presentation clock, and the odd, ridiculous wordthat sprang into his mind was "salver." It was the silver salver onwhich Thompson brought in visitors' cards. But it was a plate as well;and, being a plate, he remembered vaguely something about a collection.The association of ideas worked itself out in a remote and dreamlikeway; he felt in his pocket for a shilling, a sixpence, or a threepennybit, and wondered for a second where the big, dark building was towhich all this belonged. Something was changed, it seemed. His clothes,this dancing sunshine, joy and laughter. The world was new. What did itmean?...
"No bells are ringing," flashed back the flying letters in a spray.
He was on the point of catching something by the tail... when he sawthe children waiting for him on the sunny lawn outside. He ran outinstantly to join them. They had noticed nothing odd, apparently. Ithad never even occurred to them. And in himself the memory dived away,its very trail obliterated as though it had not been.
For this was Sunday morning, yet Sunday had not--happened.