PLAYING CATCH (1)
By:
June 2, 2025
Algernon Blackwood’s “Playing Catch” appeared in the 1924 collection Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
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.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.