“To see what running away is really like.”
“Special Baby,” she said to him openly, “I don’t see why every hair in my head is not pure white. And if you don’t stop making so much trouble, I’ll run away.”
“Run away,” thought the Special Baby. “Now what thing is that?”
And he stretched out his little hand to see, but there wasn’t anything there, and he couldn’t put it in his mouth; so without letting anybody know, he started off all by himself to see what running away is really like.
He ran and he ran, past lines and colours and blocks and flame and music and paint and planets, all waiting about to begin, till he began to notice the Great Black Hush, where it lay all humble and important, and bored past extinction and almost to creation.
“What thing is that?” thought the Special Baby, and put out his little hand to get it and put it in his mouth.
So he touched the Great Black Hush, and under the little hand the Great Black Hush felt as never he had felt before. For the Special Baby’s hand was soft and wandering and most clinging—any General Baby’s hand will give you the idea if you care to try. And it made it seem as if there were something to do.
All through his huge, helpless, superior, and mighty being the Great Black Hush was stirred, and when the Special Baby was frightened and would have gone back, the Great Black Hush did the most astonishing things to try to keep him. He plaited the darkness up like a ruffle and waved it like a flag and opened it like a flower and shut it like a door and poured it about like water, all to keep the Special Baby amused. But though the Special Baby tried to put most of these and all the dark in his mouth, still on the whole he was badly frightened and wanted his mother, and he began to cry to show how much he wanted her. And then the Great Black Hush was at his wits’ end.
“Now, who is there to be the mother of this Special Baby?” he cried in despair, for there wasn’t anything else anywhere around, save only the Wind, and the Wind always blew right by. But the blowing by must have been because the Great Black Hush had never spoken before, for these were the first words that ever he had said; and the Wind, on hearing them, stopped still as a stone, and listened.
“Would I do?” the Wind asked, and the Great Black Hush was so astonished that he almost dropped the Special Baby.