Children -- Fiction; Fairy tales; Girls -- Fiction; Play -- Fiction
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.
“Would I do?” asked the Wind again, and made the dark like blown
garments and like long, blown hair and tender motions, such as women
make. And she took the Special Baby in her arms and rocked him as
gently as boughs, so that he laughed with delight and tried to put the
wind in his mouth and finally went to sleep, with his beads on.
“_Now_ what’ll we do?” said the Great Black Hush, hanging about, all
helpless and mighty.
“We can get along without a cradle,” said the Wind, “because I will
rock him to sleep in my arms.” (This was before time began and before
they laid them down to go to sleep alone in a dark room.) “But we
ought, we _ought_,” she added, “to have something for him to play with
when he wakes up.” (This was before time began and before anybody ate.
But they always played. That came first.)
“If he had something to play with, what would that look like?” asked
the Great Black Hush, all helpless.
“It musn’t have points like scissors, or ends like string, and the
paint mustn’t come off. I think,” said the Wind, “it ought to look like
a shining ball.”
“By my distance,” said the Great Black Hush, all mighty, “that’s what
it shall look like.”
Then he began to make a plaything, and he worked all over him and all
over everywhere at the fashioning. I don’t know how he did it, because
I wasn’t there, and I can’t reckon how long it took him, because there
wasn’t any time, but I know some things about it all, and one is that
he finally got it done.
“Look!” the Great Black Hush cried to the Wind,--for she paid more
attention to the Special Baby now than she did to him. And when she
looked, there hung in the sky, a great, enormous, shining ball.
“That’s big enough so he can’t get it in his mouth,” she said
approvingly. “It’s really ginginatic.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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