"How could it?" So great was his private information that he almost added "stupid." But he kept back the word for later. He repeated instead: "However could it?"
"Well, but--" she began.
"Don"t you see, it"s what Daddy always told us," he reminded her with an air. And instantly, with overwhelming certainty, those Wonder Sentences of their father"s, first spoken years ago, crashed in upon their minds: Some day; a day is coming; a day will come.
Tim"s a.s.surance hurt her vanity a little, for it was only fair that she should know something too, however little. But the force of the discovery at once obliterated all lesser personal emotions.
"Tim!" she gasped, overcome with admiration. "Is it really _that_?"
Tim never forgot that moment of proud ascendancy. He felt like a king or something.
"Look out," he whispered quickly. "You"ll spoil it all if _he_ knows we"ve guessed." And he nodded his head towards Uncle Felix in his wicker-chair. "It"s Maria"s adventure, too, remember."
Judy smiled and flushed a little.
"He"s not listening," she whispered back, ignoring Maria"s claim. She was not quite so stupid as her brother thought her. "But how on earth did you know? It"s too wonderful!" She flung the hair out of her eyes and wriggled away some of her suppressed excitement on the gra.s.s. Tim held his breath in agony while he watched her. But the smoke from his Uncle"s pipe rose steadily into the sunny air, and his face was hidden by a paper that he held. The moment of danger pa.s.sed. The boy leaned over towards his sister"s ear.
"Where it comes _from_," he whispered, "is what I want to know," and straightened up again with the air of having delivered an ultimatum that no girl could ever possibly reply to.
"_From?_" she repeated. She seemed a little disappointed. "D"you mean that may stop it coming?"
"Of course not," he said contemptuously. "But everything must come from somewhere, mustn"t it?"
Judy stared at him speechless, while he surveyed her with an air of calm omnipotence. To ask a thing no one could answer was the same as knowing the answer oneself.
"Mustn"t it?" he repeated with triumph.
And, in the inevitable pause that followed, they both instinctively glanced up at Uncle Felix. The same idea had occurred to both of them.
Although direct questions about what was coming were obviously impermissible, an indirect question seemed fairly within the rules. The fact was, neither of them could keep quiet about it any longer. The strain was more than human nature could stand. They simply _must_ find out. They would get at it that way.
"Try him," whispered Judy. And Tim turned recklessly towards his Uncle and drew a long, deep breath.
CHAPTER XIV
MARIA STIRS
"Uncle," he began with a rush lest his courage should forsake him, "where does everything come from? Everything in the world, I mean?"--then waited for an answer that did not come.
Uncle Felix neither moved nor spoke, and the question, like a bomb that fails to explode, produced no result after considerable effort and expense. The boy looked down again at the alarum clock he had been trying to mend, and turned the handle. It was too tightly wound to go.
A stopped clock has the sulkiest face in the world. He stared at it; the handle clicked beneath the pressure of his hand. "It must come from somewhere," he added with decision, half to himself.
"From the East, of course," advanced Judy, and tried to draw her Uncle by putting some b.u.t.tercups against his cheek and mentioning loudly that he liked b.u.t.ter.
Then, since neither sound nor movement issued from the man in the wicker-chair, the children continued the discussion among themselves, but _at_ the man, knowing that sooner or later he must become involved in it. Judy"s answer, moreover, so far as it went, was excellent. The sun rose in the East, and the wind most frequently mentioned came also from that quarter. Easter, when everything rose again, was connected with the same point of the compa.s.s. The East was enormously far away with a kind of fairyland remoteness. The dragon-rugs in Daddy"s study and the twisted weapons in the hall were "Easty" too. According to Tim, it was a "golden, yellow, crimson-sort-of, mysterious, blazing hole of a place" of which no adequate picture had ever been shown to them.
China and j.a.pan were too much photographed, but the East was vague and marvellous, the beginning of all things, "Camel-distant," as they phrased it, with Great Asia upon its magical frontiers. For Asia, being equally unphotographed, still shimmered with uncommon qualities.
But, chiefly, it was a vast hole where travellers disappeared and left no trace; and to leave no trace was simply horrible.
"The easier you go the less chance there is," maintained Judy. She said this straight into the paper that screened her uncle"s face--without the smallest result of any kind whatsoever. Then Tim recalled something that Colonel Stumper had said once, and let fly with it, aiming his voice beneath the paper"s edge.
"East is east," he announced with considerable violence, but might as well have declared that it was south for all the response obtained. It was very odd, he thought; his Uncle"s mind must be awfully full of something. For he remembered Come-Back Stumper saying the same thing once to Daddy at the end of a frightful argument about missionaries and idols, and Daddy had been unable to find any reply at all. Yet Uncle Felix did not stir a finger even. Accordingly, he made one more effort.
He recited in a loud voice the song that Stumper had made up about it.
If that had no effect, they must try other means altogether:
The East is just an endless place That lies beyond discovery, Where travellers who leave no trace Are lost without recovery.
Both North and South have got a pole-- Men stand on the equator; But the East is just an awful hole-- You"re never heard of later!
It had no effect. Goodness! he thought, the man must be ill. Or, perhaps, like the alarum clock, he was too tightly wound to go, and the burden of the secret he contained so wonderfully up his sleeve half choked him. The boy grew impatient; he nudged Judy and made an odd grimace, and Judy, belonging to the s.e.x that took risks and thought little of personal safety when a big end was to be obtained, stood up and put the b.u.t.tercups against her own cheek.
"But I like it ever so much more than _you_ do," she said in a loud voice.
The move was not a bad one; the paper wobbled, sank a quarter of an inch, revealed the bridge of the reader"s nose, then held severely steady again. Whereupon Tim, noticing this sign of weakening, followed his sister"s lead, rose, kicked the tired clock like a ball across the lawn, and exclaimed in a tone of challenge to the universe: "But where did everything come from before that--before the East, I mean?" And he glared at his immobile Uncle through the paper with an air of fearful accusation, as though he distinctly held he was to blame. If that didn"t let the cat out of the bag, nothing would!
The big man, however, rested heavily with his legs crossed, as though still he had not heard. Doubtless he felt as heavy as he looked, for the afternoon was warm, and luncheon--well, at any rate, he remained neutral and inactive. Something might happen to divert philosophical inquiry into other channels; a rat might poke its nose above the pond; a big fish might jump; an awfully rare b.u.t.terfly come dancing; or Maria, as on rare occasions she had been known to do, might stop discussion with a word of power. The chances were in his favour on the whole. He waited.
But nothing happened. No rat, nor fish, nor b.u.t.terfly did the things expected of them; they were on the children"s side. Maria sat blocked and motionless against the landscape; and the round world dozed.
Yes--but the music of the world was humming. The bees droned by, there was a whisper among the unruffled leaves.
Tim tapped him sharply on the knee. The man shuffled, then looked over the top of his ill.u.s.trated paper with an air of shocked surprise.
"Eh, Tim," he asked. "Where we all come from, did you say?"
"Everything, not only us," was the clean reply.
"That"s it," Judy supported him.
"Now, then," Maria added quietly, as if she had done all the work.
Uncle Felix laid down his entertaining pictures of public men in misfit-clothing furiously hitting tiny b.a.l.l.s over as much uncultivated land as possible--and sighed. Their violent att.i.tudes had given him a delightful sensation of repose. They were the men who governed England, and this savage hitting was proof of their surplus energy. He resigned himself, but with an air.
"Well," he said vaguely, "I suppose--it all just--began somehow--of itself." And he stole a sideways glance at a picture of a stage Beauty attired like a female Guy Fawkes.
"It was created in six days, of course, us last," said Tim, regarding him with patient dignity. "We remember all that. But where it came _from_ is what we thought _you"d_ know." He closed the ill.u.s.trated paper and moved it out of reach, while the man brushed from his beard the gra.s.s and stuff that Judy had arranged there cleverly in a decorative pattern.
"From?" repeated Uncle Felix, as though the word were unfamiliar.
"Your body and mind," the boy resumed, ignoring the pretence that laziness offered in place of information, "and all that kind of thing; trees and mountains, and birds and caterpillars and people like Aunt Emily, and clergymen and volcanoes and elephants--oh, everything in the world everywhere?"
There was another sigh. And another pause dropped down upon creation, while they watched a looper caterpillar that clung to the edge of the ill.u.s.trated paper and made futile circles in the air with the k.n.o.b it called its head. Some one had forgotten to let down the ladder it expected, or perhaps it, too, was asking unanswerable questions of the sun.
"I believe," announced Judy, still smarting under a sense of recent neglect, "it just came from nowhere. It"s all in a great huge circle.
And we go round and round and rounder," she went on, as no one met her challenge, "till we"re finished!"
She avoided her brother"s eye, but glanced winningly at Uncle Felix, remembering that she had gained support from him before by a similar device. At Maria she looked down. "You know nothing anyhow," her expression said, "so you _must_ agree."