Time is a strange commodity. There’s a saying floating around that goes, “Time is money.” But I’m here to tell you that time is so much more than that, and my life as Billy the Timekeeper is a living testament to this fact. My entire existence has been spent capturing moments, sometimes in joyous anticipation, other times in frantic haste, to ensure that no second slips through my fingers unnoticed. It is a task that sounds romantic in theory but often leaves little place for fun in reality.
I mean, picture this. The past August, with its languid lazy days, so hot you feel impelled to succumb and just stop still, doing nothing. Or the sweet fresh February days, that come next, with twinkling snow, when sunny crisp afternoons call you out to merriest marauding. I had decided to label each January with all it contained. That is to say, each moment—in January only; for there are no other months, please understand, to which this explanatory preface applies. Then I sealed them all up in a bottle and put them on a shelf in my magical clock tower—a pretty little clock tower, like a nursery rhyme, with a dainty spire, a well-curved dome, and a balcony that you could reach by an unending flight of stairs. And, oh! to think of the trouble it was to contrive those labels, purple and azure and jade and gold-hued—the privilege only of a timekeeper, of course!
And then the moment itself in January, just to think of the infinite shapes they took too, because each one had to be most carefully fashioned, filled out, and constructed on purpose, instead of being simply a common ordinary winter moment. There was the moment when Hazel came to tea, and we had such romps and talk while she—that was my dear younger sister—her kin to be sure but my elder many years—cut out skirts for me to be made up that evening. Later on that same very moment came Aurora Tatham to tea, and they two girls both sat on my knees while I read Josephine Elder’s wonderful things aloud for them to squeal about. Ah! but I had a button sewn on my new velvet jacket on that day, and I had five minutes of that moment soberly, think you! trying it on before Mr. Lipscombe the good-natured tailor—a state of being helpful intended, as he humorously said, with a—Lipscombe just like perfect slipper—sure to come off when least expected, and to mean a deal of screwing and fidgeting afterwards before they could be got into their place again over a cup of milk and soda.
Then there was the one I labelled “Gone to Brighton,” some with bathing-dresses as the label, some with a stone and three false teeth, that I found while lying on the pebbly beach because they hurt me so certainly. Every one of these moments, mind you, was labelled “January” across the top, and labeled at the bottom “1911,” all in handwriting monthly photograph-exposures like, and all shut up in the same bottle, and that was stuck athwart my glass door, so that nobody was likely ever to tumble over it. I honestly thought that was the blissfullest idea I had ever hit on. But one day old Dissenting Chapman came in, as he is blind himself, blind canary-bird and all, and walked right against it and knocked it over, and then (there!) he walked straight right into his own too!
His own right across my threshold!
And one moment was quite enough, and to give him credit he didn’t so much as knock a lid off or break a labeling on his own at least, though a confused jumble of times there was in course of an hour or two, so that it was like some horrible rushing dream. Mine was just the thickest, the thinnest blottingless box of a hundred moments that ever the German people made such a cartload of to sell; only I rushed rather away than be there at the finish generally speaking. But I saw enough. The crisp thick snowdrifts bucketing in and hardening against the door from the wind on the seafront—“quite a Benacre State of affairs presently!” said Dissenting Chapman, delighted up to his cotton-covered knees in the snowdrifts, as they flowed on quite right across my only present threshold like a river.
There was the horrible question of time on my hands; but then there was the time I had in the bottle that day before it was smashed, and a happy thought occurred to me. Would it not be a game to let the other times into the moments in them? This paved the way for a splendid afternoon, and how often and often since then have I wished for that bottle in the interim months! With rapidity, so to speak, after that moment was opened, I filled half its contents back again into the bottle, and that was all I had to do. The other half I just strolled out and packed at the bottom gently of the other moment, with a nudging up or down of a bit of time conveyed in a swing from my pendulum as smooth as anybody wanted. Gradually the finest, eldest, dense-witted times—the very ones one dodged for—got deftly buried, in fact, right down out of sight at the very bottom of the other one.
And when that was braced all round together again nicely at the top, it certainly seemed a pity among such a lot that there was not room for one more—the other threshold at home having all the way over being each moment uncommonly thick with theirs and their things thoroughly at an end. So they were, poor things! And even their repetitions literally just like themselves. How, to give you some idea of it, Mr. Lipscombe was feeling for me until I or somebody whose years that day I had borrowed passing just under his window. And that was with the fifth of that January moment.
As I said, it was very irritating to think I couldn’t have a place too for my little brother William who, although only three years old, still fairly chattered along at the moments when I put his on his plate beside other little chatting events that he might or might not like, chapel-middays included of course. But in for a penny and I finished it all in threadbare terms, passed the hours and repeated the minutes and slapped in the seconds to keep them all on good terms together over the mill-tide of the other pure regular ones. Still there wasn’t room for little brother William till my heart entirely palpitated: “Suppose I were to introduce him instead as a moment of his own by the by?” said I (for that is what we call babies don’t you know’ in private), and in he came.
Ah! it was delightful to realize how calm and happy oneself felt on that January day—and of unending moments constantly coming all the same. You got so used to that bottle-full of other ones ploughing up the accumulations every day afresh for three totally different amounts of time, that at last you never glanced in to see that they were doing their work properly. “Never,” I mean, except on Thursday afternoons when there was a reading-party of us three, and for purposes of tea-felt much obliged to Dissenting Chapman for that chit of a skirt he so obligingly dyed our claws over as we held the ends! And then, disclaim, drop, return thanks, and bless in tissue-paper, the lovely course our starving cousin Annie surefootedly crossed with for our reception! And when that was done and aye done, Dissenting Chapman sang in joyous reverence some plaintive old hymn for St. Thaddeus from his “Obscure Book of Verses,” and the other one sang some Shakespearean solo out of a completely unrecognizable infallible School of Meters for read or perused occasionally.
That day Dissenting Chapman made some impromptus about time which certainly stuck in my mind better than the verses did. The first part of what is done away with in the very Bible I’ve.copybooked portions of here, and his comments run as follow:
“It seems probable enough and extremely convenient that time lasts while you just think of time, saw the seats on the opposite side in that restaurant place on the Esplanade, just held out three or four buckets on red-tinted rods….
But the real secret is that what you call thoughts are whirlwinds whirling in round the balls of lightning, currents of light and circles that are all over the soul and everything, that are running from little swirls of time at the moments we all noticed and get into the moments that we never notice and run with them afterwards again instead of sitting cross-legged and doing nothing. And you see there are some that come gaily in and are lights and messages, and some that there is no peace at in the whole universe like these. And at certain times the mental weather is perfectly quenching and fine so quickly! that it’s time he had a leg over, so to speak, who isn’t already in the whirl. But is that what we mean by time?
Besides, one and all of those grey rings you find with a sharp point of your compasses are so real you almost feel for all the world that you’re looking at the aware spirit, and it’s even worse, we all tell ourselves who once very angry ones learnt to receive and do away with put off light entirely and at last like best.
Be it remembered, too, it is only certain climate-wise moments that do or get anything particular still further about drying–but always I assume they are quite ordinary known otherwise sufficiently. So they take nothing the least alive when in a bottle by themselves at all, except innocent little dreams of what they’re to do when old and young too.
Serious skipping as he thus half noticing marked areas as it were or jelly like through several of the skeins, but I didn’t say I saw those in the glass, that would be all against it. Very few would think, I dare say, half as long as I have whether the one sent in by himself from Quarantine, turned right fast under strong force that they get worried what it can mean with them when the air-bubbles rising as if was in a light of all that as clear in the glass as it reads, but it decidedly anyhow.
And just as some roving fish here and there had settled in several places of themselves in such water that wasn’t in his left hand over to get clean touched down sometimes in the coldest day of the year too, just absolutely to lose or tread out all the fuss pots and bits of short oil fished for by his family in the crocks, like barrels washed of scourings and hidden dirt by the worried fish soon then.
There never was one moment in the like that happened to try them or they one of two ways come up and give no answer good or bad but say `yes–poor little waifs!’ just instantly, for like working as well as going in P.V.
That’s what Dissenting Chapman said. I dare say some of these moments I took out of my bottle may tell of myself exactly, but somehow I feel a great bit timid—quite scared when I handle one like looking in his eyes, to think of all sorts of horrid things. Just like people say when mentally inclined there is plenty of time to give her meaning if she is stupider.
In her, I mean Time of course—isn’t gender a perplexing language bother!”
जो गजब-गजब चीज है!