in those days time always bothered us. it went fast or it went slow, with no one interfering. it was impossible to hurry it or to hold it back.
“only ten weeks more,” we invariably said glibly, when the spring term began.
“just think! we’ve—got—t-e-n—weeks!” we told one another at the beginning of vacation, what time we came home with our books, chanting it:—
“no more latin,
no more french,
no more sitting on a hard wood bench.”
—both chorally and antiphonally chanting it.
yet, in spite of every encouragement, the spring term lasted immeasurably and the summer vacation melted. it was the kindred difference of experience respectively presented2 by a bowl of hot ginger tea and an equal bulk of ice-cream.
in other ways time was extraordinary. we used to play with it: “now is now. but now that other now is gone and a then is now. how did it do it? how do all the nows begin?”
“when is the party?” we had sometimes inquired.
“to-morrow,” we would be told.
next morning, “now it’s to-morrow!” we would joyfully announce, only to be informed that it was, on the contrary, to-day. but there was no cause for alarm, for now the party, it seemed, had changed too, and that would be to-day. it was frightfully confusing.
“when is to-morrow?” we demanded.
“when to-day stops being,” they said.
but never, never once did to-day stop that much. gradually we understood and humoured the pathetic delusion of the grown-ups: to-day lasted always and yet the poor things kept right on forever waiting for to-morrow.
as for me, i had been born without the time sense. if i was told that we would go to drive in ten minutes, i always assumed that i could finish dressing my doll, tidy my play-house, put3 her in it with all her family disposed about her down to the penny black-rubber baby dressed in yarn, wash my face and hands, smooth my hair (including the protests that these were superfluous), make sure that the kitten was shut in the woodshed ... long before most of which the family was following me, haling me away, chiding me for keeping older folk waiting, and the ten minutes were gone far by. who would have thought it? ten minutes seem so much.
and if i went somewhere with permission to stay an hour! then the hour stretched invitingly before me, a vista lined with crowding possibilities.
“how long can you stay?” we always promptly asked our guests, for there was a feeling that the quality of the game to be entered on depended on the time at our disposal. but when they asked me, it never was conceivable that anything so real as a game should be dependent on anything so hazy as time.
“oh, a whole hour!” i would say royally. “let’s play city.”
with this attitude delia dart, who lived across the street, had no patience. delia was4 definite. her evenly braided hair, her square finger tips, her blunt questions, her sense of what was due to delia—all these were definite.
“city!” she would burst out. “you can’t play city unless you’ve got all afternoon.”
and margaret amelia and betty rodman, who were pretty definite too, would back delia up; but since they usually had permission to stay all afternoon, they would acquiesce when i urged: “oh, well, let’s start in anyhow.” then about the time the outside wall had been laid up in the sand-pile and we had selected our building sites, the town clock would strike my hour, which would be brought home to me only by delia saying:—
“don’t you go. will she care if you’re late?”
on such occasions we never used the substantive, but merely “she.” it is worth being a child to have a sense of values so simple and unassailable as that.
“i’m going to do just this much. i can run all the way home,” i would answer; and i would begin on my house walls. but when these were done, and the rooms defined by moist sand partitions, there was all the fascination of its garden, with walks to be outlined with a5 shingle and sprays of old man and cedar to be stuck in for trees, and single stems of fever-few and sweet alyssum or flowering-currant and bleeding-heart for the beds, and catnip for the borders, and a chick from old-hen-and-chickens for a tropical plant. we would be just begun on the stones for the fountain when some alien consciousness, some plucking at me, would recall the moment. and it would be half an hour past my hour.
“you were to come home at four o’clock,” mother would say, when i reached there panting.
“why did i have to come home at four o’clock?” i would finally give way to the sense of great and arbitrary wrong.
she always told me. i think that never in my life was i bidden to do a thing, or not to do it, “because i tell you to.” but never once did a time-reason seem sufficient. what were company, a nap-because-i-was-to-sit-up-late, or having-to-go-somewhere-else beside the reality of that house which i would never occupy, that garden where i would never walk?
“you can make it the next time you go to delia’s,” mother would say. but i knew that this was impossible. i might build another6 house, adventure in another garden; this one was forever lost to me.
“... only,” mother would add, “you can not go to delia’s for ...” she would name a period that yawned to me as black as the abyss. “... because you did not come home to-day when you were told.” and still time seemed to me indefinite. for now it appeared that i should never go to delia’s again.
i thought about it more and more. what was this time that was laid on us so heavy? why did i have to get up because it was seven o’clock, go to school because it was nine, come home from delia’s because the clock struck something else ... above all, why did i have to go to bed because it was eight o’clock?
i laid it before my little council.
“why do we have to go to bed because it’s bed-time?” i asked them. “which started first—bed-time or us?”
none of us could tell. margaret amelia rodman, however, was of opinion that bed-time started first.
“nearly everything was here before we were,” she said gloomily. “we haven’t got anything in the house but the piano and the rabbits that7 wasn’t first before us. mother told father this morning that we’d had our stair-carpet fifteen years.”
we faced that. fifteen years. nearly twice as long as we had lived. if a stair-carpet had lasted like that, what was the use of thinking that we could find anything to control on the ground of our having been here first?
delia dart, however, was a free soul. “i think we begun before bed-time did,” she said decidedly. “because when we were babies, we didn’t have any bed-time. look at babies now. they don’t have bed-times. they sleep all the while.”
it was true. bed-time must have started after we did. besides, we remembered that it was movable. once it had been half past seven. now it was eight. delia often sat up, according to her own accounts, much later even than this.
“grown-ups don’t have any bed-time either,” betty took it up. “they’re like babies.”
this was a new thought. how strange that grown-ups and babies should share this immunity, and only we be bound.
“who made bed-time?” i inquired irritably.
8 “s-h-h!” said delia. “god did.”
“i don’t believe it,” i announced flatly.
“well,” said delia, “anyway, he makes us sleepy.”
this i also challenged. “then why am i sleepier when i go to church evenings than when i play hide-and-go-seek in the brice’s barn evenings?” i submitted.
this was getting into theology, and delia used the ancient method.
“we aren’t supposed to know all those things,” she said with superiority, and the council broke up.
that night i brought my revolt into the open. at eight o’clock i was disposing the articles in my play-house so that they all touched, in order that they might be able to talk during the night. it was well-known to me that inanimate objects must touch if they would carry on conversation. the little red chair and the table, the blue paper-weight with a little trembling figure inside, the silver vase, the mug with “remember me” in blue letters, the china goat, all must be safely settled so that they might while away the long night in talk. the blue-glass paper weight with the horse and9 rider within, however, was uncertain what he wanted to companion. i tried him with the china horse and with the treeful of birds and with the duck in a boat, but somehow he would not group. while he was still hesitating, it came:—
“bed-time, dear,” they said.
i faced them at last. i had often objected, but i had never reasoned it out.
“i’m not sleepy,” i announced serenely.
“but it’s bed-time,” they pressed it mildly.
“bed-time is when you’re sleepy,” i explained. “i’m not sleepy. so it can’t be bed-time.”
“bed-time is eight o’clock,” they said with a hint of firmness, and picked me up strongly and carried me off; and to my expostulation that the horse and his rider in the blue paper-weight would have nobody to talk to all night, they said that he wouldn’t care about that; and when i wept, they said i was cross, and that proved it was bed-time.
there seemed no escape. but once—once i came near to understanding. once the door into unknown-about things nearly opened for me, and just for a moment i caught a glimpse.
i had been told to tidy my top bureau drawer.10 i have always loathed tidying my top bureau drawer. it is so unlike a real task. it is made up of odds and ends of tasks that ought to have been despatched long ago and gradually, by process of throwing away, folding, putting in boxes, hanging up, and other utterly uninteresting operations. i can create a thing, i can destroy a thing, i can keep a thing as it was; but to face a top bureau drawer is none of these things. it is a motley task, unclassified, without honour, a very tag-end and bobtail of a task, fit for nobody.
i was thinking things that meant this, and hanging out the window. it was a gentle day, like a perfectly natural human being who wants to make friends and will not pretend one iota in order to be your friend. i remember that it was a still day, that i loved, not as i loved uncle linas and aunt frances, who always played with me and gave me things, but as i loved mother and father when they took me somewhere with them, on sunday afternoons.... i had a row of daffodils coming up in the garden. i began pretending that they were marching down the border, down the border, down the border to the big rock by the cooking-apple11 tree—why of course! i had never thought of it, but that rock was where they got their gold....
a house-wren came out of a niche in the porch and flew down to the platform in the boxalder, where father was accustomed to feed the birds. the platform was spread with muffin crumbs. the little wren ate, and flew to the clothes-line and poured forth his thankful exquisite song. i had always felt regret that we had no clothes reel that would whirl like a witch in the wind, but instead merely a system of clothes-lines, duly put up on mondays; but the little wren evidently did not know the difference.
“abracadabra, make me sing like that....” i told him. but i hadn’t said the right thing, and he flew away and left me not singing. i began thinking what if he had made me sing, and what if i had put back my head and gone downstairs singing like a wren, and gone to arithmetic class singing like a wren, and nobody could have stopped me, and nobody would have wanted to stop me....
... i leaned over the sill, holding both arms down and feeling the blood flow down and weight my fingers like a pulse. what if i12 should fall out the window and instead of striking the ground hard, as folk do when they fall out of windows, i should go softly through the earth, and feel it pressing back from my head and closing together behind my heels, and pretty soon i should come out, plump ... before the root of everything and sit there for a long time and watch it grow....
... i looked up at the blue, glad that i was so near to it, and thought how much pleasanter it would be to fly right away through the blue and see what colour it was lined with. pink, maybe—rose-pink, which showed through at sunset when the sun leaped at last through the blue and it closed behind him. rose-pink, like my best sash and hair-ribbons....
that brought me back. my best sash and hair-ribbons were in my top drawer. moreover, there were foot-steps on the stairs and at the very door.
“have you finished?” mother asked.
i had not even opened the drawer.
“you have been up here one hour,” mother said, and came and stood beside me. “what have you been doing?”
i began to tell her. i do not envy her her13 quandary. she knew that i was not to be too heavily chided and yet—the top drawers of this world must be tidied.
“think!” she said. “that hour has gone out the window without its work being done. and now this hour, that was meant for play, has got to work. but not you! you’ve lost your turn. now it’s mother’s turn.”
she made me sit by the window while she tidied the drawer. i was not to touch it—i had lost my turn. while she worked, she talked to me about the things she knew i liked to talk about. but i could not listen. it is the only time in my life that i have ever really frantically wanted to tidy a top bureau drawer of anybody’s.
“now,” she said when she had done, “this last hour will meet the hour-before-the-last, and each of them will look the way the other ought to have looked, and they will be all mixed up. and all day i think they will keep trying to come back to you to straighten them out. but you can’t do it. and they’ll have to be each other forever and ever and ever.”
she went away again, and i was left face to face with the very heart of this whole perplexing time business: those two hours that would14 always be somewhere trying to be each other, forever and ever, and always trying to come back for me to straighten them out.
were there hours out in the world that were sick hours, sick because we had treated them badly, and always trying to come back for folk to make them well?
and were there hours that were busy and happy somewhere because they had been well used and they didn’t have to try to come back for us to patch them up?
were hours like that? was time like that?
when i told delia of the incident, she at once characteristically settled it.
“why, if they wasn’t any time,” she said, “we’d all just wait and wait and wait. they couldn’t have that. so they set something going to get us going to keep things going.”
sometimes, in later life, when i have seen folk lunch because it is one o’clock, worship because it is the seventh day, go to europe because it is summer, and marry because it is high time, i wonder whether delia was not right. often and often i have been convinced that what mother told me about the hours trying to come back to get one to straighten them out is true15 with truth undying. and i wish, that morning by the window, and at those grim, inevitable bed-times, that i, as i am now, might have told that little me this story about how, just possibly, they first noticed time and about what, just possibly, it is.
