Puzzly's Day

The question turned up at about eight o'clock and got heavier all day.

Everybody was working extremely hard towards sundown. Hang them by sundown. Fill them by sundown. Get the far end done by sundown.

And I did not know when sundown was.

I assumed — and this is the whole of it, this is the entire mistake, and I made it before breakfast and then lived inside it until nearly two — that this was a thing everybody else knew and I had missed.

That feeling has a name and the name is silly, and it kept me quiet for five hours and fifty minutes.

What I did instead of asking was be extremely useful about other things, which is a trick I would recommend to nobody.

I met Muddle at the top of the bank at about quarter to eleven, soaked to both knees, with an armful of lanterns out of a ditch.

"Why have you got those?"

"Because I went the wrong way," said Muddle, "to the shed."

"That's not an answer."

"It is today."

Then there was the hole in the bank. Wondy wanted to go in and Newby wanted to fetch somebody and they were both extremely certain, and they had been at it for a minute or two when I came along and asked the only question neither of them had.

Dripping what?

And that was the oil — the can, gone over the edge that morning, wedged under a root, emptying quietly into the bank for four hours. A third left. It is a perfectly good example of the thing I am for, and I did not notice at the time that I was doing with a hole exactly what I had failed to do with a sunset.

At half past eleven four of us walked up to the Library, because Memo kept saying the path had been lit once before and nobody believed it. Dreamy read an entirely different book for an hour and a half. Cloudy went off somewhere behind the eyes about halfway through. And I asked the librarian three questions that I am quite sure nobody else in that building would have asked out loud, and got a thin book about the old doings of the land, and there it was: a line about the night the first chief came home.

I was completely comfortable asking a stranger three questions in a library.

I was not able to ask my own yard one question in six hours. I have no explanation for that and I have stopped expecting to find one.

At ten to two I said it.

"Wait. What time does the sun actually go down?"

Somebody laughed — a small laugh, at a small question — and then stopped, because nobody answered. Muddle said seven. Wondy said half six. Somebody at the back said eight with tremendous confidence and no evidence whatsoever.

Mossy said twenty past six. It has been getting earlier all month.

It was ten to two. We had four hours and ten minutes, and everybody in that barn had been working as though we had nine.

I have had a strange evening, if I am honest about it.

Everybody was very nice. Wondy told me at the gate that it was the only useful thing anybody said all day. Beamy read it off the envelope — Puzzly — asked what time sundown was — and the room made a noise, a warm one.

And I sat in Winky's with a cup and could not quite get past the sum.

We finished with about forty minutes to spare. Forty. If I had asked at nine o'clock in the morning we would have had five hours more, and nobody would have had to run, and the four o'clock hour when the whole land turned on each other might not have happened at all.

I have not said that to anybody, and I am not going to, because six fluffs would immediately tell me not to think like that and they would all be right and it would not help.

Wondy came and found me about half past nine and asked me something genuinely difficult about the hole in the bank — how two fluffs could want opposite things and both be right — and I said the first thing that came into my head, which was that Wondy had been right about the hole and Newby had been right about Wondy.

Wondy is still deciding whether that is fair. I like a fluff who will sit with an unfinished answer.