Little, Big

II.

You may observe that I do not put

a hyphen between the two words.

I write "country house," not

"country-house." This is deliberate.

—V. Sackville-West

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:

O great wide beautiful wonderful World

With the wonderful waters around you curled

And the beautiful grass upon your breast

O World you are beautifully dressed.


A Gothic Bathroom

Devotions done, she tilted the tall standing mirror that had been her great-grandmother's so that she could see her whole length in it, asked the usual question of it and got the right reply this morning; sometimes it was equivocal. She belted around herself a long brown gown, did a turn on her toes so that its frayed edges flew out, and went out wary into the still cold hall. She passed her father's study and listened briefly to his old Remington click-clacking about the adventures of mice and rabbits. She opened the door to her sister Sophie's room; Sophie was tangled in her bedclothes, a long golden hair in her parted lips, and her sleeping hands closed like a baby's. The morning sun was just then looking in at this room, and Sophie stirred, resentful. Most people look odd asleep; foreign, not themselves. Sophie asleep looked most like Sophie, and Sophie liked sleep and could sleep anywhere, even standing up. Daily Alice stayed awhile to watch her, wondering what her adventures were. Well, she would hear later, in detail.

At the end of a whorl of hall was the Gothic bathroom, the only one in the house with a tub long enough for her. Stuck as it was at a turning of the house, the sun hadn't yet reached it; its stained windows were dim and its cold tile floor made her stand tiptoe. The gargoyle faucet coughed phthisically, and deep within the house the plumbing held conference before allowing her some hot water. The sudden rush had its effect, and she gathered up her brown skirts around her waist and sat on the somewhat episcopal hollow throne, chin in hand, watching the steam rise from the sepulchral tub and feeling suddenly sleepy again.

She pulled the chain, and when the loud clash of contrary waters was done she unbelted and stepped from her gown, shuddered, and climbed carefully into the tub. The Gothic bathroom had filled with steam. Its sort of Gothic was really more woodland than church; the vaulting of it arched above Daily Alice's head and interlaced like meeting branches, and everywhere carven ivy, leaves, tendrils and vines were in restless biomorphic motion. On the surface of the narrow stained-glass windows, dew formed in drops on cartoon-bright trees, and on the distant hunters and vague fields which the trees framed; and when the sun on its lazy way had lit up all twelve of these, bejewelling the fog that rose from her bath, Daily Alice lay in a pool in a medieval forest. Her great-grandfather had designed the room, but another had made the glass. His middle name was Comfort, and that's what Daily Alice felt. She even sang.


From Side to Side

While she scrubbed and sang, her bridegroom came on, footsore and surprised at the fierceness of his muscles' retaliation for yesterday's walk. While she breakfasted in the long and angular kitchen and made plans with her busy mother, Smoky climbed up a buzzing, sun-shot mountain and down into a valley. When Daily Alice and Sophie were calling to each other through intersecting halls and the Doctor was looking out his window for inspiration, Smoky stood at a crossroads where four elder elms stood like grave old men conversing. A signboard there said EDGEWOOD and pointed its finger along a dirt road that looped down a shadowy tunnel of trees; and as he walked it, looking from side to side and wondering what next, Daily Alice and Sophie were in Daily Alice's room preparing what Daily Alice next day would wear, while Sophie told her dream.


Sophie's Dream

"I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn't want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor's office, or coming back from someplace you didn't enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus—all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised at all when I told them I'd learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story." While she talked, Sophie's quick fingers were dealing with a hem, and Daily Alice couldn't always hear her because she talked with pins in her mouth. The dream was hard to follow anyway; Daily Alice forgot each incident as soon as Sophie told it, just as though she were dreaming them herself. She picked up and put down a pair of satin shoes, and wandered out onto the tiny balcony of her oriel window. "I got frightened then," Sophie was saying. "I had this big dreary envelope stuffed with unhappy time, and I didn't know how to get any out and use it when I wanted it without letting all the dreary waiting and stuff out. It seemed maybe I'd made a mistake starting this. Anyhow . . ." Daily Alice looked down the front way, a brown drive with a tender spine of weed, all trembling in leaf shadow. Down at the end of the drive, gateposts grew up with a sudden curve from a wall, each topped with a pitted ball like a gray stone orange. As she looked, a Traveler turned hesitantly in at the gate.

Her heart turned over. She had been so happily calm all day that she had decided he wasn't coming, that Somehow her heart knew he wouldn't come today and that therefore there was no reason for it to sink and hammer in expectation. And now her heart was taken by surprise.

"Then it all got mixed up. It seemed there wasn't any time that wasn't being broken flat and put away, that I wasn't doing it any more, that it was happening by itself; and that all that was left was awful time, walking down halls time, waking up in the night time, nothing doing time. . . ."

Daily Alice let her heart hammer, there being nothing she could say to it anyway. Below, Smoky came closer, slowly, as though in awe, she could not tell of what; but when she knew that he saw her, she undid the brown robe's belt and shrugged the robe from her shoulders. It slid open down her arms to her wrists and she could feel, like cool hands and warm, the shadows of leaves and the sun on her skin.


Led Astray

There was a hot flush in his legs that began with the soles of his feet and traveled midway up his shins, as though the long friction of his journey had heated them. His bitten head hummed with the noonday, and there was a sharp, threadlike pain in the inside of his right thigh. But he stood in Edgewood; there was no doubt. Even as he came down the path toward the immense and manyangled house, he knew he wouldn't ask the old woman on the porch for directions, because he needed none; he had arrived. And when he came close to the house, Daily Alice showed herself to him. He stood staring, his sweat-stained pack dangling in his hand. He didn't dare respond—there was the old woman on the porch—but he couldn't look away.

"Lovely, isn't it?" the old woman said at last. He blushed. She sat upright smiling at him from her peacock chair; there was a little glass-topped table by her, and she was playing solitaire. "I say—lovely," she repedted, a little louder.

"Yes!"

"Yes . . . so graceful. I'm glad it's the first thing you see, coming up the drive. The casements are new, but the balcony and all the stonework are original. Won't you come up on the porch? It's difficult to talk this way."

He glanced up again, but Alice was gone now; there was only a fanciful housetop painted with sunlight. He ascended to the pillared porch. "I'm Smoky Barnable."

"Yes. I'm Nora Cloud. Won't you sit?" She picked up her cards with a practiced hand and put them into a velvet bag; the velvet bag she then put into a tooled box.

"Was it you then," he said sitting in a whispering wicker chair, "who put these conditions on me about the suit and the walking and all?"

"Oh, no," she said. "I only discovered them."

"A sort of test."

"Perhaps. I don't know." She seemed surprised by the suggestion. She took from her breast pocket, where a neat and useless handkerchief was pinned, a brown cigarette, and lit it with a kitchen match she struck on her sole. She wore a light dress of the sort of print proper to old ladies, though Smoky thought he had never seen one quite so intensely blue-green, or one with leaves, tiny flowers, vines, so intricately intertwined: as though cut from the whole day. "I think prophylactic, though, on the whole."

"Hm?"

"For your own safety."

"Ah, I see." They sat in silence awhile, Great-aunt Cloud's a calm and smiling silence, his expectant; he wondered why he wasn't taken within, introduced; he was conscious of the heat rising from his shirt's open neck; he realized it was Sunday. He cleared his throat. "Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater at church?"

"Why, in a sense, yes." It was odd the way she responded to everything he said as though it were a notion that had never occurred to her before. "Are you religious?"

He had been afraid of this. "Well," he began.

"The women tend to be more so, don't you think?"

"I guess. No one I grew up with cared much about it."

"My mother and I felt it far more strongly than my father, or my brothers. Though they suffered from it, perhaps, more than we."

He had no answer for this, and couldn't tell if her close inspection of him just then awaited one, or didn't, or was merely short sight.

"My nephew also—Dr. Drinkwater—well of course there are the animals, which he does pay close attention to. He pays very close attention there. The rest seems to pass him by."

"A pantheist, sort of?"

"Oh no. He's not that foolish. It just seems to"—she moved her cigarette in the air—"pass him by. Ah, who's here?"

A woman in a large picture hat had turned in at the gate on a bicycle. She wore a blouse, printed like Cloud's but more patent, and a pair of large jeans. She dismounted inexpertly and took a wooden bucket from the bike's basket; when she tilted her picture hat back, Smoky recognized Mrs. Drinkwater. She came up and sat heavily on the steps. "Cloud," she said, "that is forever the last time I will ever ask you for advice about berrying again."

"Mr. Barnable and I," said Cloud merrily, "were discussing religion."

"Cloud," said Mrs. Drinkwater darkly, scratching her ankle above a slip-on sneaker frayed about the big toe, "Cloud, I was led astray."

"Your bucket is full."

"I was led astray. The bucket, hell, I filled that the first ten minutes I got there."

"Well. There you are."

"You didn't say I would be led astray."

"I didn't ask."

There was a pause then. Cloud smoked. Mrs. Drinkwater dreamily scratched her ankle. Smoky (who didn't mind not being greeted by Mrs. Drinkwater; in fact hadn't noticed it; that comes from growing up anonymous) had time to wonder why Cloud hadn't said you didn't ask. "As for religion," Mrs. Drinkwater said, "ask Auberon."

"Ah. There you see. Not a religious man." To Smoky: "My older brother."

"It's all he thinks about," Mrs. Drinkwater said.

"Yes," Cloud said thoughtfully, "yes. Well, there it is, you see."

"Are you religious?" Mrs. Drinkwater asked Smoky.

"He's not," Cloud said. "Of course there was August."

"I didn't have a religious childhood," Smoky said. He grinned. "I guess I was sort of a polytheist."

"What?" said Mrs. Drinkwater.

"The Pantheon. I had a classical education."

"You have to start somewhere," she replied, picking leaves and small bugs from her bucket of berries. "This should be nearly the last of the foul things. Tomorrow's Midsummer Day, thank it all."

"My brother August," Cloud said, "Alice's grandfather, he was perhaps religious. He left. For parts unknown."

"A missionary?" Smoky asked.

"Why yes," Cloud said, again seeming newly struck with the idea. "Yes, maybe so."

"They must be dressed by now," Mrs. Drinkwater said. "Suppose we go in."


An Imaginary Bedroom

The screen door was old and large, its wood pierced and turned a bit to summery effect, and the screen potbellied below from years of children's thoughtless egress; when Smoky pulled its porcelain handle, the rusty spring groaned. He stepped across the sill. He was inside.

The vestibule, tall and polished, smelled of cool trapped night air and last winter's fires, lavender sachets in brass-handled linen closets, what else? Wax, sunlight, collated seasons, the June day outside brought in as the screen groaned and clacked shut behind him. The stairs rose before him and above him, turning a half-circle by stages to the floor above. On the first landing, in the light of a Iancet window there, dressed now in jeans made all of patches, her feet bare, his bride stood. A little behind her was Sophie, a year older now but still not her sister's height, in a thin white dress and many rings.

"Hi," said Daily Alice.

"Hi," Smoky said.

"Take Smoky upstairs," Mrs. Drinkwater said. "He's in the imaginary bedroom. And I'm sure he wants to wash up." She patted his shoulder and he put his foot on the first stair. In later years he would wonder, sometimes idly, sometimes in anguish, whether having once entered here he had ever again truly left; but at the time he just mounted to where she stood, deliriously happy that after a long and extremely odd journey he had at last arrived and that she was greeting him with brown eyes full of promise (and perhaps then this was the journey's only purpose, his present happiness, and if so a good one and all right with him) and taking his pack and his hand and leading him into the cool upper regions of the house.

"I could use a wash," he said, a little breathless. She dipped her big head near his ear and said, "I'll lick you clean, like a cat." Sophie giggled behind them.

"Hall," Alice said, running her hand along the dark wainscoting. She patted the glass doorknobs she passed: "Mom and Dad's room. Dad's study—shhh. My room—see?" He peeked in, and mostly saw himself in the tall mirror. "Imaginary study. Old orrery, up those stairs. Turn left, then turn left." The hallway seemed concentric, and Smoky wondered how all these rooms managed to sprout off it. "Here," she said.

The room was of indiscernible shape; the ceiling sank toward one corner sharply, which made one end of the room lower than the other; the windows there were smaller too; the room seemed larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't decide which. Alice threw his pack on the bed, narrow and spread for summer in dotted swiss. "The bathroom's down the hall," she said. "Sophie, go run some water."

"Is there a shower?" he asked, imagining the hard plunge of cool water.

"Nope," Sophie said. "We were going to modernize the plumbing, but we can't find it anymore. . . ."

"Sophie."

Sophie shut the door on them.

First she wanted to taste the sweat that shone on his throat and fragile clavicle; then he chose to undo the tails of her shirt, that she had tied up beneath her breasts; then, but then impatient they forgot about taking turns and quarreled silently, eagerly over each other, like pirates dividing treasure long sought, long imagined, long withheld.


In the Walled Garden

Alone together at noon they ate peanut-butter and apple sandwiches in the walled garden at the back front of the house.

"The back front?"

Opulent trees looked over the gray garden wall, like calm spectators leaning on their elbows. The stone table they sat at, in a corner beneath a spreading beech, was marked with the coiled stains left by caterpillars crushed in other summers; their cheerful paper plates lay on its thickness flimsy and ephemeral. Smoky struggled to clear his palate; he didn't usually eat peanut-butter.

"This used to be the front," Daily Alice said. "Then they built the garden and the wall; so the back became the front. It was a front anyway. And now this is the back front." She straddled the bench, and picked up a twig, at the same time drawing out with her pinkie a glittering hair that had blown between her lips. She scratched a quick five-pointed star in the dirt. Smoky looked at it, and at the tautness of her jeans. "That's not really it," she said, looking birdwise at her star, "but sort of. See, it's a house all fronts. It was built to be a sample. My great-grandfather? Who I wrote you about? He built this house to be a sample, so people could come and look at it, from any side, and choose which kind of house they wanted; that's why the inside is so crazy. It's so many houses, sort of put inside each other or across each other, with their fronts sticking out."

"What?" He had been watching her talk, not listening; she saw it in his face and laughed. "Look. See?" she said. He looked where she pointed, along the back front. It was a severe, classical facade softened by ivy, its gray stone stained as though by dark tears; tall, arched windows; symmetrical detail he recognized as the classical Orders; rustications, columns, plinths. Someone was looking out one tall window with an air of melancholy. "Now come on." She took a big bite (big teeth) and led him by the hand along that front, and as they passed, it seemed to fold like scenery; what had looked flat became out-thrust; what stuck out folded in; pillars turned pilasters and disappeared. Like one of those ripply pictures children play with, where a face turns from grim to grin as you move it, the back front altered, and when they reached the opposite wall and turned to look back, the house had become cheerful and mock-Tudor, with deep curling eaves and clustered chimneys like comic hats. One of the broad casement windows (a stained piece or two glittered among the leaded panes) opened on the second floor, and Sophie looked out, waving. "Smoky," she called, "when you've finished your lunch, you're to go talk to Daddy in the library." She stayed in the window, arms folded and resting on the sill, looking down at him smiling, as though pleased to have brought this news.

"Oh, aha," Smoky called up nonchalantly. He walked back to the stone table, the house translating itself back into Latin beside him. Daily Alice was eating his sandwich. "What am I going to say to him?" She shrugged, mouth full. "What if he asks me what are your prospects, young man?" She laughed, covering her mouth, the way she had in George Mouse's library. "Well, I can't just tell him I read the telephone book." The immensity of what he was about to embark on, and Doctor Drinkwater's obvious responsibility to impress it on him, settled on his shoulders like birds. He wavered suddenly, doubted doubts. He looked at his big beloved. What anyway were his prospects? Could he explain to the Doctor that his daughter had cured Smoky's anonymity as if in one blow—one glancing blow—and that that was enough? That the marriage service once completed (and whatever religious commitments they would like him to make made) he intended to just live happily ever after, like other folks?

She had taken out a little jackknife and was peeling a green apple in one segmented curling ribbon. She had such talents. What good was he to her?

"Do you like children?" she asked, without taking her eyes from her apple.


Houses & Histories

It was dim in the library, according to the old philosophy of keeping a house shut up on hot summer days to keep it cool. It was cool. Dr. Drinkwater wasn't there. Through the draped, arched windows he could just glimpse Daily Alice and Sophie talking at the stone table in the garden, and he felt like a boy kept indoors, bad or sickly. He yawned nervously, and looked over nearby titles; it didn't appear that anyone had taken a book from these laden shelves in a long time. There were sets of sermons, volumes of George MacDonald, Andrew Jackson Davis, Swedenborg. There were a couple of yards of the Doctor's children's stories, pretty, shoddily bound, with repetitious titles. Some nicely bound classics propped against an anonymous laureled bust. He took down Suetonius, and brought down with it a pamphlet that had been wedged between the volumes. It was old, both dog-eared and foxed, illustrated with pearly photogravure, and titled Upstate Houses and Their Histories. He turned its pages carefully so as not to break the old glue of the binding, looking at dim gardens of black flowers, a roofless castle built on a river island by a thread magnate, a house made of beer vats.

He looked up, turning the page. Daily Alice and Sophie were gone; a paper plate leapt from the table and spun balletically to the ground.

And here was a photograph of two people sitting at a stone table, having tea. There was a man who looked like the poet Yeats, in a pale summer suit and spotted tie, his hair full and white, his eyes obscured by the sunlight glinting from his spectacles; and a younger woman in a wide white hat, her dark features shaded by the hat and blurred perhaps by a sudden movement. Behind them was part of this house Smoky sat in, and beside them, reaching up a tiny hand to the woman, who perhaps saw it and moved to take it and then again perhaps not (it was hard to tell), was a figure, personage, a little creature about a foot high in a conical hat and pointed shoes. His broad inhuman features seemed blurred too by sudden movement, and he appeared to hear a pair of gauzy insect wings. The caption read "John Drinkwater and Mrs. Drinkwater (Violet Bramble;) elf. Edgewood, 1912." Below the picture, the author had this to say:

"Oddest of the turn-of-the-century folly houses may be John Drinkwater's Edgewood, although not strictly conceived as a folly at all. Its history must begin with the first publication of Drinkwater's Architecture of Country Houses in 1880. This charming and influential compendium of Victorian domestic architecture made the young Drinkwater's name, and he later became a partner in the famed landscape-architecture team of Mouse, Stone. In 1894 Drinkwater designed Edgewood as a kind of compound illustration of the plates of his famous book, thus making it several different houses of different sizes and styles collapsed together and quite literally impossible to describe. That it presents an aspect (or aspects) of logic and order is a credit to Drinkwater's (already waning) powers. In 1897 Drinkwater married Violet Bramble, a young Englishwoman, daughter of the mystic preacher Theodore Burne Bramble, and in the course of his marriage, came completely under the influence of his wife, a magnetic spiritualist. Her thought informs later editions of Architecture of Country Houses, into which he interpolated larger and larger amounts of theosophist or idealist philosophy without however removing any of the original material. The sixth and last edition (1910) had to be printed privately, since commercial publishers were no longer willing to undertake it, and it still contains all the plates of the 1880 edition.

"The Drinkwaters assembled around them in those years a group of like-thinking people including artists, aesthetes, and world-weary sensitives. From the beginning the cult had an Anglophile twist, and interested correspondents included the poet Yeats, J. M. Barrie, several well-known illustrators, and the sort of 'poetic' personality that was allowed to flourish in that happy twilight before the Great War, and that has disappeared in the harsh light of the present day.

"An interesting sidelight is that these people were able to profit from the general depopulation of the farms in that area at that time. The pentagon of five towns around Edgewood saw the heels of improverished yeoman farmers driven to the City and the West, and the bland faces of poets escaping economic realities who came to take their houses. That all who still remained of this tiny band were 'conscientious objectors' at the time of their country's greatest need is perhaps not surprising; nor is the fact that no trace of their bizarre and fruitless mysteries has survived to this day.

"The house is still lived in by Drinkwater's heirs. There is reputed to be a genuine folly summer house on the (very extensive) grounds, but the house and grounds are not open to the public at any time."

Elf?


Doctor Drinkwater's Advice

So we're supposed to have a chat," Dr. Drinkwater said. "Where would you like to sit?" Smoky took a club chair of buttoned leather. Dr. Drinkwater, on the chesterfield, ran his hand over his woolly head, sucked his teeth for a moment, then coughed in an introductory kind of way. Smoky awaited his first question.

"Do you like animals?" he said.

"Well," Smoky said, "I haven't known very many. My father liked dogs." Doctor Drinkwater nodded with a disappointed air. "I always lived in cities, or suburbs. I liked listening to the birds in the morning." He paused. "I've read your stories. I think they're . . . very true to life, I imagine." He smiled what he instantly realized to be a horridly ingratiating smile, but the Doctor didn't seem to notice. He only sighed deeply.

"I suppose," he said, "you're aware of what you're getting into."

Now Smoky cleared his throat in introduction. "Well, sir, of course I know I can't give Alice, well, the splendor she's used to, at least not for a while. I'm—in research. I've had a good education, not really formal, but I'm finding out how to use my, what I know. I might teach."

"Teach?"

"Classics."

The doctor had been gazing upward at the high shelves burdened with dark volumes. "Um. This room gives me the willies. Go talk to the boy in the library, Mother says. I never come in here if I can help it. What is it you teach, did you say?"

"Well, I don't yet. I'm—breaking into it."

"Can you write? I mean write handwriting? That's very important for a teacher."

"Oh, yes. I have a good hand." Silence. "I've got a little money, an inheritance. . . ."

"Oh, money. There's no worry there. We're rich." He grinned at Smoky. "Rich as Croesus." He leaned back, clutching one flannel knee in his oddly small hands. "My grandfather's, mostly. He was an architect. And then my own, from the stories. And we've had good advice." He looked at Smoky in a strange, almost pitying way. "That you can always count on having—good advice." Then, as if he had delivered a piece of it himself, he unfolded his legs, slapped his knees, and got up. "Well. Time I was going. I'll see you at dinner? Good. Don't wear yourself out. You've got a long day tomorrow." He spoke this last out the door, so eager was he to go.


The Architecture of Country Houses

He had noticed them, behind glass doors up behind where Doctor Drinkwater had sat on the chesterfield; he got up now on his knees on the sofa, turned the convolute key in its lock, and slid open the door. There they were, six together, Just as the guidebook had said, neatly graduated in thickness. Around them, leaning together or stacked up horizontally, were others, other printings perhaps He took out the slimmest one, an inch or so thick. Arc hitecture of Country Houses. Intaglie cover, with that "rustic" Victorian lettering (running biaswise) that sprouts twigs and leaves. The olive color of dead foliage. He riffled the heavy leaves. The Perpendicular, Full or Modified. The Italianate Villa, suitable for a residence on an open field or campagna. The Tudor and the Modified Neo-classical, here chastely on separate pages. The Cottage. The Manor. Each in its etched circumstances of poplars or pines, fountain or mountain, with little black visitors come to call, or were they the proud owners come to take possession? He thought that if all the plates were on glass, he could hold them all up at once to the mote-inhabited bar of sunlight from the window and Edgewood would appear whole. He read a bit of the text, which gave careful dimensions, optional fancies, full and funny accounting of costs (ten-dollar-a-week stonemasons long dead and their skills and secrets buried too) and, oddly, what sort of house suited what sort of personality and calling. He returned it.

The next one he drew out was nearly twice as thick. Fourth edition, it said, Little, Brown, Boston 1898. It had a frontispiece, a sad, soft pencil portrait of Drinkwater. Smoky vaguely recognized the artist's hyphenated double name. Its chock-full title page had an epigraph: I arise, and unbuild it again. Shelley. The plates were the same, though there were a set of Combinations that were all floorplans and labeled in a way Smoky couldn't comprehend.

The sixth and last edition, great and heavy, was beautifully bound in art-nouveau mauve; the letters of the title stretched out shuddered limbs and curling descenders as though to grow; the whole seemed as though reflected in a rippled lily-pond surface all in bloom at evening. The frontispiece was not Drinkwater now but his wife, a photograph like a drawing, smudged like charcoal. Her indistinct features. Perhaps it wasn't the art. Perhaps she was as he had been, not always fully present; but she was lovely. There were dedicatory poems and epistles and a great armor of Prefaces, Forewords and Prolegomena, red type and black; and then the little houses again just as before, looking now old-fashioned and awkward, like an ordinary small town swept up in a modern mania. As though Violet's amanuensis were struggling for some last grasp of reason over the pages and pages studded with capitalized abstractions (the type had grown smaller as books had grown thicker), there were marginal glosses every page or so, and epigraphs, chapter headings, and all paraphernalia that makes a text into an object, logical, articulated, unreadable. Tipped in at the end against the watered endpapers was a chart or map, folded over several times, a thick packet in fact. It was of thin paper, and Smoky at first couldn't see how to go about unfolding it; he began one way, winced at the little cry it made as an old fold tore slightly, began again. As he glimpsed parts of it, he could see it was an immense plan, but of what? At last he had the whole unfolded; it lay crackling across his lap face down, he had only to turn it face up. He stopped then, not sure he wanted to see what it was. I suppose, the Doctor had said, you're aware of what you're getting into. He lifted its edge, it rose up lightly like a moth's wing so old and fine it was, a shaft of sunlight pierced it and he glimpsed complex shapes studded with notions; he laid it down to look at it.


Just Then

"Will she go, then, Cloud?" Mother asked, and Cloud answered, "Well it appears not so;" but she wouldn't add any more, only sat at the far end of the kitchen table, the smoke of her cigarette an obscurity in the sunlight. Mother was powdered to the elbows in the process of pie-making, not a mindless task though she liked to call it that, in fact she found that at it her thoughts were often clearest, notions sharpest; she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope. She remembered verse sometimes cooking that she had forgotten she knew, or spoke in tongues, her husband's or her children's or her dead father's or her unborn, clearly-seen grandchildren's, three graduated girls and a lean unhappy boy. She knew the weather in her elbows, and mentioned as she slipped the old glass pie-plates into the oven which breathed its heated breath on her that it would storm soon. Cloud made no answer, only sighed and smoked, and dabbed at the dew at her wrinkled throat with a little hankie which she then tucked neatly back into her sleeve. She said: "It will be lots clearer later," and went slowly from the kitchen and through the halls to her room to see if she might be able to close her eyes for a while before dinner had to be prepared; and before she lay down on the wide featherbed that for a few short years had been hers and Henry Cloud's she looked out toward the hills and yes, white cumulus had begun to assemble itself that way, climbing like imminent victory, and no doubt Sophie was right. She lay and thought: At least he came all right, and contradicted none of it. Beyond that she couldn't tell.

Just then where the Old Stone Fence divides the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture which goes down rocky and leaping with insects to the margin of the Lily Pond, Doctor Drinkwater in a wide-awake hat stopped, panting from his climb; slowly the roar of his own blood diminished in his ears and he could begin to listen to the scene in progress of his only drama, the interminable conversations of birds, cicada's semitune, the rustle and thump of a thousand creatures' entrances and exits. The land was touched by the hand of man, though that hand was in these days mostly withdrawn; way down beyond the Lily Pond he could see the dreaming roof of Brown's barn, and knew this to be an abandoned pasture of his enterprise, and this wall his ancient marker. The scene was variegated by man's enterprise, and room made for many houses large and small, this capacious wall, that sunny pasture, that pond. It all seemed to the Doctor just what was truly meant by the word "ecology," which he saw now and then misused in the dense columns that bordered his chronicles of this place in the City paper; and as he sat on a warm lichened stone utterly attentive, a Little Breeze brought him news that by evening a mountain of cloud would break in pieces here.

Just then in Sophie's room on the wide featherbed where for many years John Drinkwater lay with Violet Bramble, their two great-grandchildren lay. The long pale dress that next day Daily Alice would put on, and then presumably not again ever completely put off, was hung carefully from the top of the closet door, and made in the closet door mirror another like it, which it pressed back to back; and below it and around it were all things proper to it. Sophie and her sister lay naked in the afternoon heat; Sophie brushed her hand across her sister's sweat-damp flank, and Daily Alice said "Ah, it's too hot," and felt hotter still her sister's tears on her shoulder. She said: "Someday soon it'll be you, you'll choose or maybe be chosen, and you'll be another June bride," and Sophie said, "I'll never, never," and more that Alice couldn't hear because Sophie buried her face against her sister's neck and murmured like the afternoon; what Sophie said was, "He'll never understand or see, they'll never give him what they gave us, he'll step in the wrong places and look when he should look away, never see doors or know turnings; wait and see, you just wait and see"; which just then Great-aunt Cloud was pondering, what they would see if they waited, and what their mother also felt though not with the same plain curiosity but a sort of maneuvering within of the armies of Possibility; and what Smoky too, left alone for what he imagined was the general Sunday siesta, day of rest, in the black and dusty library with the whole plan before him, just then trembled with, sleepless and erect as a flame.