XVII
THE GREAT BLACK HUSH
On that special night, which somehow I remember with tenderness, I sometimes think now—all these years after—that I should like to have been with those solitary, sleepy little figures, trying so hard to get near to mystery. I should think that a Star Story must have come in anybody’s head to tell them. Like this:—
Once, when it didn’t matter to anybody whether you were late or early, or quick or slow, not only because there wasn’t anybody and there wasn’t any you, but because it was back in the beginning when there were no lates and earlies and quicks and slows, then things began to happen in the middle of the Great Black Hush which was all there was to everything.
The Great Black Hush reached all the way around the Universe and in directions without any names, and it was huge and humble and superior and helpless and mighty and in other ways it was very much indeed like a man. And as there was nothing to do, the Great Black Hush was bored past extinction and almost to creation. For there wasn’t anything else about save only the Wind, and the Wind would have nothing whatever to do with him and always blew right by.
Now, inasmuch as everything that is now was then going to be created, it was all waiting somewhere to be created; and nothing is clearer than that. Lines and colours and musics and tops and blocks and flame and Noah’s arks and mechanical toys and mountains and paints and planets and air and water and alphabets and jumping-jacks, all, all, were waiting to be created, and among them waited people. I cannot tell you where they waited, because there was no where; but they were waiting, as anybody can see, for time to be begun.
Among the people who were waiting about was one special baby, who was just big enough to reach out after everything and to try to put it in his mouth, and they had an awful time with him. He put his little hands on coloured things and on flame things and on air and on water and on musics, and he wanted to know what they all were, and he tried to put them in his mouth. And his mother was perfectly distracted, and she told him so, openly.
