The Book of Small
Time
Father was a stern straight man. Straight legs and shoulders; straight side-trim to his beard, the ends of which were straight-cut across his chest. From under heavy eyebrows his look was direct, though once in a rare while a little twinkle forced its way through. Then something was likely to happen.
Our family had to whiz around Father like a top round its peg.
It was Sunday. Father was carving the saddle of mutton. Everybody was helped. Father’s plate had gone up for vegetables. Uncle and Auntie Hays were visiting us from San Francisco.
Father’s twinkle ran up the table to Mother and zig-zagged back, skipping Auntie, who was fixing her napkin over her large front with a diamond pin.
Father said, “What about a picnic on Saturday, Mother? We will have the omnibus and go to Mill Stream.”
The two big sisters, we three little girls and the small brother were glad. Mother beamed on us all. Auntie attended to her mutton. Uncle never did have anything to say. He was like the long cushion in the church pew—made to be sat on.
All week we stared at the clock, but, for all she ticked, her hands stuck; it took ages for her to register even a minute. But Saturday did come at last and with it, sharp at ten, the yellow bus.
Uncle Hays made a nest of cushions in one corner of the bus for Auntie. Pies and cakes, white-wrapped and tucked into baskets like babies, the tea-billy wrapped in a newspaper petticoat—all were loaded in and we took our places and rattled away.
The bus had two horses and carpet seats. Its wheels were iron-bound and made a terrible racket over the stones.
Only the very middle of our town was paved and sprinkled; beyond the town was dust and bumps.
The seats of the bus were high. We three little girls discovered that we bumped less if we did not dangle, so we knelt on the seat and rested our arms on the open window ledges, till Auntie told Uncle he must shut all the windows except one, or the dust would ruin her new dust coat. After that we dangled and bumped.
Auntie grumbled all the way about Victoria’s poor little blue water-barrel cart, that could only do the middle of the town, and told us of the splendid water-wagons of San Francisco.
At last we drove through a gate and down a lane and stopped. The driver opened the door and we all spilled out onto the grass beside a beautiful stream.
Uncle built a new nest for Auntie. There were pine boughs as well as pillows to it now, and she looked like a great fat bird sitting there peeping and cooing at uncle over the edge.
The table-cloth was spread on the grass close to Auntie’s nest. As soon as lunch was over Mother said, “Now children, run along. Don’t go into the thick woods, keep by the stream.”
Father looked at his watch and said, “It’s now one o’clock—you have till five.”
Downwards the stream broadened into a meadow; upstream it bored a green tunnel through the forest, a tunnel crooked as a bed-spring. It curled round and round because there were so many boulders and trees and dams in the way. The sides of the tunnel were forest, the top overhanging trees, the floor racing water.
We could not have squeezed into the woods had we tried because they were so thick, and we could not have seen where to put our feet, nor could we have seen over the top, because the undergrowth was so high.
Every twist the stream took it sang a different tune and kept different time. It would rush around the corner of a great boulder and pour bubbling into a still pool, lie there pretending it had come to be still, but all the time it was going round and round as if it was learning to write “O’s”; then it would pour itself smoothly over a wedged log and go purling over the pebbles, quiet and dreamy. Suddenly it would rush for another turn, and roar into a rocky basin trickling out of that again into a wide singing place. It had to do all these queer things and use force and roughness to get by some of the obstacles. But sometimes the stream was very gentle, and its round stones were covered with a fine brown moss. When the moss was wet it looked just like babies’ hair. You could pretend the stones were babies in their bath and the stream was sponging water over their heads.
Five-finger maidenhair ferns grew all along the banks. Some of them spread their thin black arms over the edge and, dipping their fingers in the water, washed them gently to and fro. Then the wind lifted them and tossed them in the air like thousands of waving hands. All kinds of mosses grew by the stream—tufty, flat, ferny, and curly, green, yellow and a whitish kind that was tipped with scarlet sealing wax.
Yellow eyes of musk blossoms peeped from crannies. They had a thick, soft smell. The smell of the earth was rich. The pines and the cedars smelled spicy. The wind mixed all the smells into a great, grand smell that made you love everything. There were immense sober pines whose tops you could not see, and little pines, fluffed out ready to dance. The drooping boughs of the cedars formed a thatch so thick and tight that creatures could shelter under it no matter how hard it rained. The bushes did not grow tight to the cedars because it was too dry and dark under them. Even their own lower limbs were red-brown and the earth bare underneath.
The wind sauntered up the stream bumping into everything. It was not strong enough to sweep boldly up the tunnel, but quivered along, giving bluffs and boulders playful little whacks before turning the next corner and crumpling the surface of that pool.
There was much to see as we went up the river, and we went slowly because there were so many things to get over and under. Sometimes there were little rims of muddy beach, pocked with the dent of deer hooves. Except for the stream the place was very quiet. It was like the stillness of a bird held in the hand with just its heart throbbing.
Sometimes a kingfisher screamed or a squirrel scolded and made you jump. I heard a plop down at my feet—it was a great golden-brown toad. I took him in my hands.
One sister said, “Ugh!” The other said, “Warts”.
I put him in a tin and weighted it with a stone and hid it under a skunk-cabbage.
We were very, very far up the stream, though it had not seemed a long way at all, when our big sister came around the bend behind us.
“Come children,” she called. “It is time to go home.”
We looked at each other. What did she mean? Time to go home? We had only just come.
I faced about.
“It is not,” I said rudely, and received a smart box on the ear. But it was not our sister’s word we doubted, it was Time.
I lagged behind to pick up the toad, wondering deeply about Time. What was Time anyway, that things could play such tricks with it? A stream could squeeze a whole afternoon into one minute. A clock could spread one week out into a whole year.
The baskets were packed. Uncle was building another nest for Auntie. Mother was seated in the bus looking very tired. Dick was asleep on the seat with his head in Mother’s lap and his toy watch dangling out of his pocket.
I stared at the watch hard. The hands were at the same place they were when we started in the morning. Play things were always truer than real.
The bus started bumping along and the dust rolled behind. I sat opposite Auntie. I had draped a skunk-cabbage leaf over the toad’s tin.
“See dear, you will have to throw that leaf out of the window; the smell of it upsets Auntie.” She detested me, and always tacked on that hypocritical “dear”.
The leaf fluttered out of the window. I put my hand over the top of the tin.
“What have you got in the tin, dear? Let Auntie see.”
I shot it under her nose, hoping it would scare her. It did. She gave a regular parrot-screech. The big sister reached across, seized the tin, looked, and flung tin, golden toad and all, out of the window.
Then suddenly those gone hours pulled out and out like taffy. It was late. The bus wheels started to roll quietly because we were in town now and under Mr. Redfern’s big clock, which gave six slow sad strikes.
Father pulled out his big silver watch. Uncle pulled out a gold one. Auntie fussed with a fancy thing all wound up in lace and gold chains.
They all said “Correct”, snapped the cases shut and put them back in their pockets.
I leaned against Father and shut my eyes.
Throb-throb-throb—was that Father’s watch eating up minutes or was it hop-hop-hop, my golden toad, making his patient way down the long dusty road, back to the lovely stream where there was no time?