“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. 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-apple 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 I 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.