Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches/Playing Catch

by Algernon Blackwood

Mr. Anthony, a widower, was deeply interested in the big questions of life and death, and in philosophy generally. He liked to wonder where his wife was, what she was doing if she had survived the destruction of her pretty body, and how her spirit was engaged. Was she, for instance, in any way aware of him?⁠ ⁠… Mabel, he remembered, had not been imaginative. Though sympathetic, she had contributed nothing to his mental life. When he referred any of his big questions to her, she would fix her patient eyes upon his own, and say: “I wonder! What do you think, dear?” Her disposition was gentle, but uninspiring.

Mabel apart, however, he pondered over many other things, being distinctly speculative: Why there was anything at all, and what⁠—since there was a beginning⁠—had existed before that beginning? What there might be on the other side of the moon, and whether the other planets were inhabited? The vast number of the heavenly bodies in particular perplexed him⁠—a thousand million suns in the Milky Way alone!⁠—it all seemed so unnecessarily enormous. He often wondered, again, about angels. Were there such beings, and, if so, what was their habit and nature? All races, all religions, all cosmogonies mentioned angels. Were they an invention of primitive imagining, or were they actual?

Dreams, too, interested him immensely. He declared all such enquiries stimulated him.

His speculations, it is seen, were sometimes grandiose, sometimes trivial. He read much, he brooded, he dwelt in an atmosphere of unanswerable questions. It argued, perhaps, a strain of futility in the blood, but his love of the marvellous was ineradicable. That Mabel had not shared his divine curiosity had always been a secret grievance, rather shaking his belief in feminine intuition. She had never answered⁠—anything. Could she answer anything now? By force of habit he still referred all his big questions to her mentally: Did Mabel know?

It was the advent of Mr. Einstein that dragged his anchor and set him sailing upon uncharted seas. Space, Time, Relativity, absorbed his entire thought. The mass of all his reading, knowledge, thinking, converged on this bewildering subject. No sympathy for a discredited Euclid troubled him. Time, as a fourth dimension, delighted him. He mastered the matter as well as any layman could. Though out of his depth, he was not afraid.⁠ ⁠…

Meanwhile, he had no settled home, feeling himself a wanderer physically as well as mentally. He occupied lodgings in Dymchurch at the moment. Large foreign seashells stood, echoless and dismal, on the plush mantelpiece, and a yellow-faced clock, with hands always pointing to 4:20, reposed under a domed glass cover. There was brilliant gas, a horsehair sofa, and a painted fan before the grate. Long green bell-ropes hung against the walls, with two oil-paintings of violent Swiss scenery beside them. A framed photograph of a fat-faced man, wearing Masonic regalia, was perched above the door. The broad windowsills were littered with his books, volumes straggled over the sofa, and an atmosphere of relativity, of astronomy, of the marvellous generally, pervaded the false brightness of the sordid seaside lodgings out of the season.

One warm February evening, when the days were pleasantly lengthening, Mr. Anthony was coming home along the seafront just after sunset, when a thing happened that enthralled him because it proved, as he had long suspected, that there were Beings in the Universe compared to whom the greatest human was the merest microbe. Were they, perhaps, angels? he asked himself. He was uncommonly intrigued.

The afternoon had been strangely warm. He had sat down under a breakwater to rest. The something that happened was as follows:

The moon, clean, bright and tender, and just off the full, stood well above the sea, when, from the western horizon, there rose without the slightest warning a gigantic arm, whose huge hand seized her, as a man might seize a tennis ball, and flung her away into space with a stupendous but quite effortless throw. The vast hand then dropped, as a man’s hand drops after throwing, and the colossal arm, one instant level with the horizon, sank swiftly out of sight below the rim of the sea. The arm, Mr. Anthony noticed, was visible from the elbow only. The figure it belonged to, therefore, was standing in space at least one thousand miles below the spinning earth.

The grandeur of the gesture, magnificent, even godlike, left him breathless, but exhilarated. Yet it caused him no alarm, nor was he conscious of surprise. Such immense proportions, he reflected, must be angelic, surely. Why no head and shoulders were visible puzzled him⁠—for his mind began to work at once⁠—until he realised that, being of the same colour as the golden sunset, they merged into its background, so that the sky revealed no outline. Moreover, the arm, he observed, was slightly richer in red and gold than the tint of the air, and thus showed up nicely. The hand, of a splendid crimson, was fiery rather, and the colossal fingers that gripped the moon in their great curving clutch, stood out, dark-ridged like mountains, against the silver. It was an impressive and inspiring sight.

Mr. Anthony stood spellbound, watching the moon as she flew plunging away into space. Such headlong speed enthralled him. It was thrilling, too, to remember that this outer space, being of ether only, was completely black. Had he been out there himself, he would have appeared as a solitary bright figure amid Egyptian darkness. This reflection, certainly, occurred to him. He would be a shining figure. Mabel, too, occurred to him. Did Mabel, he asked himself, witness what he witnessed? Was his strange privilege shared? ..

He watched the flying moon. Already she was half her usual size. In fifteen seconds, she was no larger than a tangerine orange; in thirty, she resembled a sparkling marble; in forty, a shining pea; in sixty, a glittering bead; in seventy-five, a pinhead; and in ninety, a mere starry point that was barely visible at all against the sunset afterglow. The speed, the distance, the power behind the throw, the possible immediate effect upon the tide, the terror of any human beings who were looking on⁠—all these details filled him with a high sense of happiness that was elation. He felt, to use his own favourite word, stimulated.

Then other points of view began to occur to him, modifying his first emotion of pure enjoyment. The human standpoint struck him. He noticed that the sky looked bare, undressed, naked somewhere, even⁠—he used poetic license⁠—a little lonely. He felt sorry that the moon had gone. He found that he missed her. He experienced regret. He was glad, therefore, to see that the point of light she had now become held stationary, and that no further dwindling occurred. The moon, then, had not completely vanished. Had she done so he would have felt bereft. Only a few days before he had told his landlady’s child that he knew of no reason why the earth should have a moon at all, since not all planets had these pretty, faithful satellites, and the child had asked at once:

“But what would happen at night, then?”

It was this simple human point of view that now modified his first emotion somewhat. He felt precisely as the child felt: “What would happen at night without a moon?”

It was with sincere relief and pleasure, therefore, after the minute and a half had passed, that he noted she was now growing bigger again. She was returning. She was on her way back. He watched her rapidly grow larger, as she approached at appalling speed. The point, bead, pea, marble and orange sizes were reached and passed successively, and ninety seconds later she had almost resumed her normal size and appearance again. Mr. Anthony’s fear that she would grow larger still and come crashing down upon the earth, obliterating perhaps Dymchurch, was hardly born before it was allayed. He watched with beating heart and straining eyes. He saw the gigantic arm and hand again shoot forth. The enormous fingers caught her, clutched her, then placed her with easy accuracy exactly where she would have moved to in these three minutes had her course not been interrupted. The same side as before shone placidly down. She was not a fraction turned. The stupendous arm and hand at once withdrew and sank below the sea. The sky was as it had been. Mr. Anthony, tears of joy in his eyes and wonder in his heart, but outwardly quite calm, resumed his walk home along the seafront towards his lodgings.⁠ ⁠…

The awful occurrence, for most, must have been dislocating, yet Mr. Anthony faced it with equilibrium. His joy was not hysterical. Accustomed to speculations concerning the unknown and unexpected, he maintained his poise quite admirably. He did not, so to speak, fall flat upon his face, prostrate in worship, although both awe and reverence were touched. The experience, he argued, was not merely a vision which could be analysed away next morning, for his mind retained its logical, observant processes, his reason worked as usual. Memory, judgment, imagination, the three great faculties, functioned properly. It was, therefore, no hallucination, in which these faculties are notoriously in abeyance. It was an honest, a genuine phenomenon.

He considered what he had seen, he made justifiable inferences, he drew sound conclusions. It pleased him particularly to find that these held water, as he called it. Thus he was delighted to establish⁠—since the moon had been thrown away and then thrown back again⁠—that two great figures were tossing her to and fro together across outer space, and that a spirit of amusement, even of sheer happy fun, evidently inspired the majestic spectacle. It was, perhaps, a game, a match possibly, a trial of skill at any rate, since one hand only was employed. The two gorgeous players were enjoying themselves. They were playing catch.

It made him happy to think that he had witnessed at least one mighty stroke in their magnificent game, and still more happy⁠—comforted as well⁠—to realise that, at long last, the intolerable quantity of the heavenly bodies, together with their overwhelming speeds and distances, were thus reasonably explained. He weighed his inferences cautiously, he examined his deductions; his logic and premises were sound, he could find no flaw in his reasoning. It was obvious to him that all the heavenly bodies, whose numbers had long dismayed him, as their raison d’être had thwarted him, that all of these⁠—stars, suns, planets, comets⁠—were being similarly thrown from hand to hand, most of them, with century-long, some with age-long tosses, and that the purpose of the colossal Universe was at last made clear.

He wondered if Mabel also knew; he hoped she did. To his boldest speculations her contribution had been invariably “But why bother, dear? What can it matter to us?” Did she now share the relief and wonder of his superb discovery that all the heavenly bodies were used by angels for the purposes of⁠—happy play?

---

His mind, it is seen, worked admirably, his faculties retained their normal sharpness, the clarity of his thought was unimpaired. How, why, by what happy chance, he had witnessed only one stroke in the game, this, too, was quite clear to him at the moment, though he had difficulty in setting it down later in his written account of the occurrence. Relativity, of course, helped in the first easy stages of the explanation. Four measurements, he remembered, one of which is Time, are necessary to locate a point in space; and until that point is thus located and in position, it has not become an event⁠—it has not “happened.” Clearly, then, he had witnessed an occurrence in four-dimensional space. It was an event, it had happened, though not necessarily now.

This fourth measurement of Time troubled him for a moment, but for a moment only. He looked at his watch, he began to make elaborate calculations at the back of his head, and then confusion overtook him.⁠ ⁠… What remained, however, was the positive assurance that this playing catch with the moon filled him with the joy of a comfortable understanding. One of his big questions, at least, was satisfactorily answered.

He resumed his walk along the seafront, therefore, at a steady gait, stimulated, though not unduly so, and by no means shaken. That his mental balance held true is proved by the fact that, as he turned homewards, his mind dealt with commonplace things quite naturally. He thought of his lodgings, remembering that he liked them because baths were included in the terms, that early morning tea was only three pence, and that he could turn the light out from his bed. Also, he once more remembered Mabel. And again he asked himself: was she aware of him in this magnificent moment? For Mabel, he suddenly realised with a qualm of peculiar distress, was involved somewhere in the entire business. This realisation, coming abruptly, caused an odd uneasiness, and the uneasiness spread, till it was established in his whole being. Mabel, it flashed through him, though involved, was not involved⁠—quite openly. There was an unpleasant touch of subterfuge, a hint of plan, of purpose, almost of plot: his original idea of Mabel, his fond, admiring, yet rather stupid wife, had undergone a disagreeable change. It was as though she now stood mysteriously behind the scenes, unpleasantly concealed⁠—secreted.

The confused conviction that Mabel played this hidden role began to trouble him.⁠ ⁠…

Meanwhile, the splendour he had witnessed brought a touch of soberness in its train. The after-effect of splendour is invariably of a sedative description, and this reaction now set in, accompanied by a feeling of disappointment that just stopped short of distress and yet held the seed of faint alarm. The breath of uneasiness blew through him. It was slight, impossible to seize. He noticed it, no more than that, yet its presence lurked, if not definite enough yet to cause acute disturbance. It remained a vague sinking of the heart, due to something that was not fully explained. Mabel, however, he felt sure, would explain it⁠—if she could. Here, at last, was something Mabel really knew. Here was a contribution she could make⁠—if she would.

Confusion grew upon him. He had after all been privileged, perhaps, beyond what a man can bear with equanimity⁠—this occurred to him as a solution of his distress. Being wise, therefore, he turned his thoughts deliberately upon more familiar things. He felt hungry. He hoped there might be a fried Dover sole for supper. Mabel, too, he remembered, was fond of that dish. He felt happier again. The wind had grown chilly, and he drew his light-blue dressing-gown more closely about him. The dark blue bathing-suit underneath looked a trifle tight, he thought, but there was no need to bother about that at the moment. The thought did not detain him. He must get home quickly now and change. He hurried.

In this frame of mind, therefore, Mr. Anthony made his way along the deserted front, and in so doing had to pass the row of bathing-sheds that stood high and dry upon the sandy ridge. The coarse grass went ruffled and whistling in the wind. It was too early in the year for bathers, and the sheds were unoccupied. Rather dreary and melancholy it appeared, but this was all exactly as it should be, and his mind observed the fact, offering no comment on it. At the same time something about those whitewashed bathing-sheds began to draw his attention. His mind was first arrested, then startled. There was a difference somewhere. Why, for instance, did it take so long to pass them? Why did they stretch into such an interminable distance? Why did the endless row of familiar ugliness now seem queer and ominous?⁠ ⁠… He found himself counting them automatically. And his interest, on a sudden, became intense. He had discovered where the difference lay; there was an increase in their number. Multiplied by thousands, the row of sheds stretched horribly, hundreds upon hundreds, into a dim infinity⁠ ⁠…

His alarm deepened at once. There was something here he ought by rights to have known, but did not know; yet something, it occurred to him painfully, that Mabel knew already and had always known; something, again, that she was concealing from him deliberately.

He paused to consider the matter. It was, he realised, of immense importance⁠—not so much the horrible increase in the sheds, as her reason for the deliberate concealment. A singular new dread invaded, clutched him. What precisely was it that Mabel knew, yet kept so mysteriously hidden from him? A dreadful curiosity attached itself to the interminable row of bathing-sheds. Their number, certainly, was sinister. But her reason for concealment was far worse. Terror touched him with an icy finger. He faced, with shrinking, a portentous and appalling thing.

In this predicament his native habit of philosophical enquiry amid unanswerable questions proved of some assistance. His mind switched automatically elsewhere. Turning his attention in another direction altogether, he glanced up at the sky, perceived the moon safely in her accustomed place, and noted, not without a faint annoyance, that he had mistaken her light a few moments before for sunshine. The bathing-suit he wore was out of place now. He had evidently lingered somewhere; he must hasten home and change. He therefore hurried. He passed the row of sheds without the slightest difficulty, intent only upon finding Mabel so that she might explain properly to him what she had so long been hiding. He reached and entered his lodgings, forgetting entirely that he had ever felt uneasy, and quite happy that everything was now all right again. Passing through the hall he saw his landlady very quickly close the kitchen door. She spoke to him, but he did not catch the words. Very quickly she closed that door. He caught but a glimpse of her vanishing face.

Things, however, were only fairly “all right,” it seemed. For instance, he at once missed Mabel. There was no sign of her anywhere. A feeling came to him⁠—it was in the very air⁠—that she had never been in this particular house at all. For a second he felt sure it was the wrong house altogether. A wild bewilderment came on him. Mabel was lost, hopelessly, irrecoverably lost; and it was due to some stupid carelessness of his own that she was thus irretrievably mislaid. Somehow he had blundered: he had neglected some obvious precaution, had been somewhere he ought not to have been, had missed or overlooked a prearranged instruction of very simple kind⁠—with the result that his wife was now finally and completely lost.

A realisation of his deep guilt overwhelmed him. A sense of hideous, imminent danger at once hung in the air. He had stolen upon the threshold of a mystery none but Mabel could possibly unravel⁠—and she was lost. He felt it with capital letters: LOST. A sense of frantic hurry rushed upon him. It was tremendous, over-mastering. He knew himself hideously caught by the thing that all men dread⁠—the panic sense.

He hurried, he rushed, he tore headlong.⁠ ⁠…

In the confused and frenzied search that followed, Mr. Anthony experienced such acute anguish, such poignant, heartfelt sadness, such aching misery and distress of mind, that he realised it was altogether impossible to continue looking. It was a hopeless, an intolerable search: the strain was unbearable; the pain was more than he could support without a collapse that involved the awful disaster of some terrible extinction. He, therefore, gave up the search, and turned his thoughts to other things.⁠ ⁠… The power of detachment pertaining to a mind that dealt with unanswerable questions asserted itself once again. At the back of his head, moreover, was a feeling that really he knew all the time exactly where Mabel was, what she was concealing from him, and why she was concealing it; yet, further, that when she did reveal her secret it would prove to be something he had known all along quite well. What puzzled him a little, indeed, was why he hid this knowledge from himself? Why did he shrink from facing it? Why did he deliberately avoid it? Whence came this elaborate and artificial pretence? He raged, he shrank, he trembled.⁠ ⁠…

Then, suddenly, the reason for his attitude flashed clearly. He understood the monstrous thing: if he faced it, his terror would be too appalling to contemplate and live. He must go mad, or die.

That Mabel grasped this and, out of love for him, still consented to remain Lost, brought a measure of comfort to his anguished soul, though it was in vain he tried to grasp its full significance. The full meaning of the whole episode continued to evade him. That her remaining lost bore some subtle relation to the throwing of the moon, he perceived vaguely, but what that relation precisely was he could not, for the life of him, determine. The effort to understand at length exhausted him. He dripped with perspiration.⁠ ⁠…

With sharp, dreadful clarity, his intelligence then strangely opened, and⁠—he knew.

Transfixed with terror, he could scarcely breathe. His voice failed him. He called out wildly, but no sound was audible. He screamed and shrieked for help, but no whisper left his lips. He was alone, entirely alone, lost in an infinity of emptiness. And⁠—he was shining: a figure of light amid the Egyptian blackness of outer space.

He himself had been thrown away. He was falling, falling⁠ ⁠… and Mabel was aware of it.⁠ ⁠…

In those awful seconds before he crashed upon some point in ultimate space, the full significance of the moon’s return became at last quite clear. The revelation came with a final certainty there was no resisting. It was appalling beyond words. The Other Player, he realised, had held the catch⁠—this time. But one day that catch would not be held. It would be missed. Another heavenly body would then be seized and flung, a constellation, perhaps the Pleiades, perhaps⁠—the Earth herself!

“One day soon, we, too, shall be flung away!” he roared aloud, incoherent with the horror of his dizzy falling. But no sound left his lips. He heard instead⁠—where, oh where, had she said this dreadful thing?⁠—the voice of his landlady:

“The Pleiades would scatter in a handful of golden dust!”

His terrified thought could not grapple with such fearful words. Meanwhile, he rushed and tore and fell.⁠ ⁠…

“Mabel!” he screamed, finding a strangled voice that hurt his throat in the effort to get out. “Mabel! Look out, dear! Look out! He’s going to⁠—miss!”

The odd thing⁠—the first detail in the whole experience that occurred to him as really strange⁠—the odd thing was that Mabel seemed quite unfrightened. She was not even interested, much less disturbed. She paid no attention to his frenzied warning, as she passed, prettily smiling, through the room. The sunlight fell on her smooth, comely body in its becoming bathing-suit that was dripping wet and clung tightly to her. She went very quickly towards the inner room to dry herself and put her clothes on. She came, evidently, straight from her dip in the sea, and it annoyed him that she had gone to bathe alone, without even letting him know that she was going.

This annoyance, however, lay far below his terror, barely recognisable at all. His terror usurped all other feeling. Even the frightful descent through empty space was quite forgotten. It was the smile on her placid, patient face that petrified him. The ghastly horror of it, its indifference, its gentle sweetness, its fatuous imperturbability, froze his blood.

He understood at last⁠—everything.

The tossed moon, the stupendous arm and hand that clutched her, the horrible increase of the bathing-sheds, his own fierce fling through blackness towards some final crash of extinction⁠—all, all had a reason, an explanation, which had been concealed from him with cunning and diabolical success by⁠—Mabel, by his own stupid, loving, faithful, yet knowing wife.

Mabel knew. She knew everything. Also⁠—she had always known.

Yet his understanding, even now, was not complete. God! Would he never understand anything completely?

He slowly turned his head. Mabel, in the act of passing out of the room, was looking back at him over her wet, shapely shoulder. The line of her delicious body enticed him. Her lips were moving. She was mentioning something⁠—by the way, as it were:

“He has missed, dear! But, why bother⁠ ⁠… ?”

Mr. Anthony, shivering with cold, opened his eyes, rose from his indifferent shelter below the breakwater, and walked home rapidly to his cheerless lodgings.⁠ ⁠…