Tom's Midnight Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

Only the picture-postcard of Ely tower was without it, and only that was not destroyed.
    That evening Tom went to bed as usual, and kept deliberate watch. His uncle and aunt seemed so slow in going to bed and to sleep! Twice Tom dozed, woke with a start, and went to his bedroom door and looked out; and there was still a light from under the door of the other bedroom. The third time, it had gone; and, after the shortest wait that prudence required, Tom crept out and downstairs as before, to the hall. As he went along it, the grandfather clock began striking for what must be midnight.
    ‘I hope the moon’s well up, outside,’ Tom thought. ‘I shall need light for getting across the yard. It would be awkward to make a noise out there—falling over dustbins or the car or anything.’
    The grandfather clock had reached the thirteenth stroke as he slid his fingers up the edge of the door to find the knob of the Yale lock. He could not find it. He felt again. There was no Yale lock.
    He did not understand; but he tried the bolt. It had been shot home: that was how the door was fastened now. Now he knew—he knew! With trembling fingers he began to ease the bolt back into a well-oiled, rustless socket.
    The grandfather clock was striking on and on. Upstairs Alan Kitson, wakened by it, humped his shoulders fretfully: ‘It’s midnight. What on earth does the clock think it’s striking?’
    His wife did not answer.
    ‘Striking hours and hours that don’t exist! I only hope it’s keeping Mrs Bartholomew awake, too!’
    But Alan Kitson would have been disappointed if he had seen Mrs Bartholomew. She was lying tranquilly in bed: her false teeth, in a glass of water by the bedside, grinned unpleasantly in the moonlight, but her indrawn mouth was curved in a smile of easy, sweet-dreaming sleep. She was dreaming of the scenes of her childhood.
    And the grandfather clock still went on striking, as if it had lost all count of time; and, while it struck, Tom, with joy in his heart, drew the bolt, turned the door-handle, opened the door and walked out into his garden, that he knew was waiting for him.

V
The Footprints in the Dew
    T here is a time, between night and day, when landscapes sleep. Only the earliest riser sees that hour; or the all-night traveller, letting up the blind of his railway-carriage window, will look out on a rushing landscape of stillness, in which trees and bushes and plants stand immobile and breathless in sleep—wrapped in sleep, as the traveller himself wrapped his body in his great-coat or his rug the night before.
    This grey, still hour before morning was the time in which Tom walked into his garden. He had come down the stairs and along the hall to the garden door at midnight; but when he opened that door and stepped out into the garden, the time was much later. All night—moonlit or swathed in darkness—the garden had stayed awake; now, after that night-long vigil, it had dozed off.
    The green of the garden was greyed over with dew; indeed, all its colours were gone until the touch of sunrise. The air was still, and the tree-shapes crouched down upon themselves. One bird spoke; and there was a movement when an awkward parcel of feathers dislodged itself from the tall fir-tree at the corner of the lawn, seemed for a second to fall and then at once was swept up and along, outspread, on a wind that never blew, to another, farther tree: an owl. It wore the ruffled, dazed appearance of one who has been up all night.
    Tom began to walk round the garden, on tiptoe. At first he took the outermost paths, gravelled and box-edged, intending to map for himself their farthest extent. Then he broke away impatiently on a cross-path. It tunnelled through the gloom of yew-trees arching overhead from one side, and hazel nut stubs from the other: ahead was a grey-green triangle of light where the path must come out into the open again. Underfoot the earth was soft with the humus of last year’s rotted leaves. As he