Little, Big

III.

There was an old woman

Who lived under the hill

And if she's not gone

She lives there still.

It was during a glad summer toward the end of the last century that John Drinkwater, while on a walking tour of England ostensibly to look at houses, came one twilight to the gates of a red-brick vicarage in Cheshire. He had lost his way, and his guidebook, which he had foolishly knocked into the millrace by which he had eaten his lunch hours before; he was hungry, and however safe and sweet the English countryside he couldn't help feeling uneasy.


Strange Insides

In the vicarage garden, an unkempt and riotous garden, moths glimmered amid a dense cascade of rosebushes, and birds flitted and rustled in a gnarled and domineering apple tree. In the tree's crook someone sat and, as he looked, lit a candle. A candle? It was a young girl in white, and she cupped the candle with her hands; it glowed and faded and then glowed again. She spoke, not to him: "What's the matter?" The candleglow was extinguished, and he said, "I beg your pardon." She began to climb quickly and expertly down from the tree, and he stood away from the gate so as not to look importunate and prying when she came to speak to him. But she didn't come. From somewhere or everywhere a nightingale began, ceased, began again.

He had come not long before to a crossroads (not a literal crossroads, though many of those too in his month's walk where he had to choose to go down by the water or over the hill, and found it not much use as practice for the crossroads in his life). He had spent a hateful year designing an enormous Skyscraper that was to look, as exactly as its hugeness and use allowed, like a thirteenth-century cathedral. When he had first submitted sketches to his client it had been in the nature of a joke, a fancy, a red herring even, meant to be dismissed, but the client hadn't understood that; he wanted his Skyscraper to be just this, just what it eventually would become, a Cathedral of Commerce, and nothing John Drinkwater could think of, brass letterbox like a baptismal font, grotesque basreliefs in Cluniac style of dwarves using telephones or reading stone ticker tape, gargoyles projecting from the building at such a height that no one could ever see them and wearing (though even that the man had refused to recognize) his client's own headlamp eyes and porous nose—nothing was too much for him and now it would all have to be executed just as he had conceived it.

While this project dragged on, a change attempted to come over him. Attempted, because he resisted it; it seemed a thing apart from him, a thing he could almost hut not quite name. He first noticed it as an insinuation into his crowded yet orderly day of peculiar daydreams: abstract words merely, that would suddenly he spoken within him as though by a voice. Multiplicity was one. Another on another day (as he sat looking out the tall windows of the University Club at the sooty rain) was combinatory. Once uttered, the notion had a way of taking over his whole mind, extending into the work-place there and into the countinghouse, until he was left paralyzed and unable to take the next long-prepared and wellthought-out step in the career everyone described as "meteoric."

He felt he was lapsing into a long dream, or perhaps awaking from one. Either way, he didn't want it to happen. As a specific against it (he thought) he began to take an interest in theology. He read Swedenborg and Augustine; he was soothed most by Aquinas, could sense the Angelic Doctor building stone by stone the great cathedral of his Summa. He learned then that at the end of his life Aquinas regarded all that he had written as "a heap of straw."

A heap of straw. Drinkwater sat at his broad board in the long skylit offices of Mouse, Drinkwater, Stone and stared at the sepia photographs of the towers and parks and villas he had built, and thought: a heap of straw. Like the first and most ephemeral house the Three Pigs in the story built. There must be a stronger place, a place where he could hide from whatever this wolf was that pursued him. He was thirty-nine years old.

His partner Mouse found that after he had been some months at his drawing board he had gotten no further with firm plans for the Cathedral of Commerce, had been sitting instead hour after hour doodling tiny houses with strange insides; and he was sent abroad for a while, to rest.

Strange insides . . . By the path that led up from the gate to the fanlighted door of the vicarage he could see a machine or garden ornament, a white globe on a pedestal surrounded by rusted iron hoops. Some of the hoops had sprung and lay fallen on the path, obscured in weeds. He pushed the gate and it opened, making a brief song on its hinges. Within the house a light was moving, and as he came up the weedy path he was hailed from the door.


For It Was He

"You are not welcome," said Dr. Bramble (for it was he). "You are none of you, any more. Is that you, Fred? I shall have a lock to that gate, if people can't have better manners."

"I'm not Fred."

His accent made Dr. Bramble stop to think. He raised his lamp. "Who are you then?"

"Just a traveler. I'm afraid I've lost my way. You don't have a telephone."

"Of course not."

"I didn't mean to barge in."

"Mind the old orrery there. It's all fallen, and a dreadful trap. American?"

"Yes."

"Well, well, come in."

The girl was gone.


Strange and Shaded Lanes

Two years later, John Drinkwater was sitting sleepily in the overheated and spiritually-lit rooms of the City Theosophical Society (he never guessed that any of the ways his crossroads pointed out would lead him there, but there he was). A subscription was being raised for a course of lectures by variously enlightened persons, and among the mediums and gymnosophists who were awaiting the Society's decision, Drinkwater found the name of Dr. Theodore Burne Bramble, to speak on the Smaller Worlds within the Large. As soon as he read the name he saw, at once and unsummoned, the girl within the apple tree, the light within her cupped hands going dim. What's the matter? He saw her again come into the dusky dining room, unintroduced by the vicar who couldn't bring himself to break his paragraph long enough to speak her name, only nodded and pushed aside a pile of mildewed books and sheaves of papers tied with blue tape so that there was room for her to put down (without raising her eyes to him) the tarnished tea service and cracked plate of kippers. She might have been daughter or ward or servant or prisoner—or keeper even, for Dr. Bramble's ideas were odd and obsessive enough, though mildly expressed.

"Paracelsus is of the opinion, you see," he said, and paused to light his pipe; Drinkwater managed to say, "The young lady is your daughter?"

Bramble shot a look behind him as though Drinkwater had seen some member of the Bramble family he didn't know about; then he agreed, nodding, and went on: "Paracelsus, you see . . ."

She brought white port and ruby, unsummoned, and when that was gone Dr. Bramble was inflamed enough to speak of some of his personal sorrows, how his pulpit had been taken from him because he would speak the truth as he learned it, and how they came around now to taunt him and tie tins to his dog's tail, poor dumb creature! She brought whiskey and brandy and at last he didn't care and asked her her name. "Violet," she said, not looking at him. When Dr. Bramble finally showed him to a bed, it was only because if he had not Drinkwater would have got out of earshot; as it was he had ceased to understand anything Dr. Bramble was saying. "Houses made of houses within houses made of time," he found himself saying aloud when just before dawn he awoke from a dream of Dr. Bramble's kindly face and with a fierce burning in his throat. When he tipped up the ewer at his bedside a discomfited spider crawled out, and he stood at the window unrelieved, pressing the cool porcelain to his cheek. He looked out at the wind-ordered islands of mist that lay between the lacy cutout trees, and watched the last fireflies extinguishing themselves. He saw her returning from the barn, shoeless and in her pale dress, with a bucket of milk in each hand that threw out drops on the ground at her every step however carefully she walked; and he understood, in a moment of knifelike clarity, how he would go about making a sort of house, a house that a year and some months later became the house Edgewood.

And here now in New York was her name before him, whom he had thought never to see again. He signed the subscription.

He knew that she would accompany her father, knew this the moment he read the name. He knew, Somehow, that she would be even more lovely and that her never-cut hair would be two years longer. He didn't know that she would arrive three months pregnant by Fred Reynard or Oliver Hawksquill or some other not welcome at the parsonage (he never asked the name); it didn't occur to him that she, like him, would be two years older, and have come upon hard crossroads of her own, and gone a ways down strange and shaded lanes.


Call Them Doors

"Paracelsus is of the opinion,"- Dr. Bramble told the theosophists, "that the universe is crowded with powers, spirits, who are not quite immaterial—whatever that means or meant, perhaps made of some finer, less tangible stuff than the ordinary world. They fill up the air and the water and so on; they surround us on every side, so that at our every movement" —he moved his long-fingered hand gently in the air, causing turmoil amid his pipesmoke—"we displace thousands."

She sat by the door, just out of the light of a red-shaded lamp, bored or nervous or both; her cheek was in her palm and the lamp lit the dark down of her arms and turned it blond. Her eyes were deep and feral, and she had a single eyebrow—that is, it extended without a break across her nose, unplucked and thick. She didn't look at him, or when she did didn't see him.

"Nereids, dryads, sylphs, and salamanders is how Paracelsus divides them," Dr. Bramble said. "That is to say (as we would express it) mermaids, elves, fairies, and goblins or imps. One class of spirit for each of the four elements—mermaids for the water, elves for the earth, fairies for the air, goblins for the fire. It is thus that we derive the common name for all such beings—'elementals.' Very regular and neat. Paracelsus had an orderly mind. It is not, however, true, based as it is on the common error—the old, the great error that underlies the whole history of our science—that there are these four elements, earth, air, fire, water, out of which the world is made. We know now of course that there are some ninety elements, and that the old four are not among them."

There was a stirring at this among the more radical or Rosicrucian wing of the assembly, who still set great store by the Four, and Dr. Bramble, who desperately needed this appearance to be a success, gulped water from a goblet beside him, cleared his throat, and tried to march on to the more sensational or revelatory parts of his lecture. "The question is really," he said "why, if the 'elementals' are not several kinds of being but only one, which I believe, why they manifest themselves in such various forms. That they do manifest themselves, ladies and gentlemen, is no longer open to doubt." He looked meaningfully at his daughter, and many there did also; it was her experiences, after all, that lent Dr. Bramble's notions what weight they had. She smiled, faintly, and seemed to contract beneath their gaze. "Now," he said. "Collating the various experiences, both those told of in myth and fable and those more recent ones verifiable by investigation, we find that these elementals, while separable into two basic characters, can be any of several different sizes and (as we might put it) densities.

"The two distinct characters—the ethereal, beautiful, and elevated character on the one hand, and the impish, earthy, gnomelike character on the other, is in fact a sexual distinction. The sexes among these beings are much more distinct than among men.

"The differences observed in size is another matter. What are the differences? In their sylphlike or pixie manifestation they appear no bigger than a large insect, or a hummingbird; they are said to inhabit the woods, they are associated with flowers. Droll tales are spun of their spears of locust-thorns and their chariots made of nutshells drawn by dragonflies, and so on. In other instances, they appear to be a foot to three feet in height, wingless, fully-formed little men and women of more human habits. And there are fairy maidens who capture the hearts of, and can apparently lie with, humans, and who are the size of human maidens. And there are fairy warriors on great steeds, banshees and pookahs and ogres who are huge, larger by far than men.

"What is the explanation for this?

"The explanation is that the world inhabited by these beings is not the world we inhabit. It is another world entirely, and it is enclosed within this one; it is in a sense a universal retreating mirror image of this one, with a peculiar geography I can only describe as infundibular." He paused for effect. "I mean by this that the other world is composed of a series of concentric rings, which as one penetrates deeper into the other world, grow larger. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite. Or at least very very large." He drank water again. As always when he began to explain it all, it began to leak away from him; the perfect clarity of it, the just-seizable perfect paradox of it, which sometimes rang like a hell within him, was so difficult— maybe, oh Lord, impossible—to express. The unmoved faces before him waited. "We men, you see, inhabit what is in fact the vastest outermost circle of the converse infundibulum which is the other world. Paracelsus is right: our every movement is accompanied by these beings, but we fail to perceive them not because they are intangible but because, out here, they are too small to be seen!

"Around the inner perimeter of this circle which is our daily world are many, many ways—call them doors—by which we can enter the next smaller, that is larger, circle of their world. Here the inhabitants appear the size of ghost-birds or errant candle-flames. This is our most common experience of them, because it is only through this first perimeter that most people ever pass, if at all. The next-innermost perimeter is smaller, and thus has fewer doors; it is therefore less likely anyone would step through by chance. There, the inhabitants will appear fairy-children or Little People, a manifestation correspondingly less often observed. And so on further within: the vast, inner circles where they grow to full size are so tiny that we step completely over them, constantly, in our daily lives, without knowing we do so, and never enter there at all—though it may be that in the old heroic age, access there was easier, and so we have the many tales of deeds done there. And lastly, the vastest circle, the infinity, the center point—Faëry, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibility—why that circle is so tiny it has no door at all."

He sat, spent. "Now." He put his dead pipe between his teeth. "Before I proceed to certain evidences, certain demonstrations, mathematical and topographical" —he patted a messy pile of papers and place-marked books beside him—"you should know that there are individuals to whom it is given to be able to penetrate at will, or nearly, the small worlds I have discussed. If you require firsthand evidence of the general propositions I have laid down, my daughter Miss Violet Bramble . . ."

The company, murmuring (it was this they had come for), turned toward where Violet sat in the light of the red-shaded lamp.

The girl was gone.


No End to Possibility

It was Drinkwater who found her, huddled on the landing of the stairs that led up from the Society's rooms to a lawyer's office on the next floor. She didn't stir as he climbed toward her, only her eyes moved, searching him. When he moved to light the gas above her, she touched his shin: "Don't."

"Are you ill?"

"No."

"Afraid?"

She didn't answer. He sat down beside her and took her hand. "Now, my child," he said paternally, hut felt a thrill as though some current ran through her hand to his. "They don't want to hurt you, you know, they won't badger you. . . ."

"I am not," she said slowly, "a circus show."

"No." How old could she be, to have to live so—fifteen, sixteen? Closer to her now, he could see that she was weeping softly; big tears formed in the dark pools of her eyes, trembled at the thick lashes, and tumbled one by one down her cheek.

"I feel so sorry for him, He hates to do this to me and yet he does it. It's because we're desperate." She said it quite simply, as though she had said "It's because we're English." She hadn't released his hand; perhaps she hadn't noticed it.

"Let me help." That had sprung to his lips, but he felt any choice about her was anyway beyond him; the two years of vain struggle that lay between the twilight he saw her in the apple tree and now seemed to shrivel into a mote and blow away. He must protect her; he would take her away, somewhere safe, somewhere. . . . She would say nothing further, and he could not; he knew that his well-built life, masoned and furnished over forty careful years, had not weathered the wind of his dissatisfaction: he felt it crumble, the foundations slipped, vast cracks appeared, the whole edifice of it caved in with a long noise he could almost hear. He was kissing the warm salt tears from her cheek.


A Turn Around the House

"Perhaps," John Drinkwater said to Violet when all their boxes and trunks had been piled in the doorway for the servant to put away, and Dr. Bramble had been installed in a comfortable chair on the wide marmoreal porch, "you'd like to take a turn around the house."

Wisteria had been trained up the tapering columns of the porch, and their crystalline green leaves, though the summer was young, already curtained the scenes he offered them with his hand, the broad lawn and young plantings, the view to a pavilion, the distant sheet of water arched by a neat classical bridge.

Dr. Bramble declined, already drawing an octavo volume from his pocket. Violet murmured her assent (how demure she must now be, in this great place; she had expected log cabins and red Indians; she really knew very little). She took the arm he offered her—a builder's strong arm she thought—and they went out across the new lawn, walking a gravel path between stone sphinxes set at intervals to guard the way. (The sphinxes were cut by his Italian stonemason friends, the same who were just then cutting garlands of grapes and queer faces all across the facades of his partner Mouse's City blocks; they were cut quickly in soft stone that the years would not be kind to, but that was all to come.)

"You must stay on now as long as you like," Drinkwater said. He had said it in Sherry's restaurant where he had taken them after the lecture ended inconclusively, when he had first shyly but insistently invited them. He had said it again in the mean and odorous hotel lobby when he came to collect them, and in Grand Central Station beneath the great twinkling zodiac which (Dr. Bramble couldn't help but notice) ran the wrong way across the night-blue ceiling. And again in the train as she nodded in a doze beneath the silk rosebud which nodded too in its railroad bud-vase.

But how long did she like?

"It's very kind of you," she said.

You will live in many houses, Mrs. Underhill had told her. You will wander, and live in many houses. She had wept hearing that, or rather later when she thought of it on trains and boats and in waiting rooms, not knowing how many houses were many or how long it took to live in one. For sure it would take an immensity of time, for since they had left the vicarage in Cheshire six months ago they had lived only in hotels and lodgings, and seemed likely to go on doing so; how long?

As in a drill, they marched up one neat stone path, turned right, marched along another. Drinkwater made an introductory noise to announce he was about to break the silence they had fallen into.

"I'm so interested in these, well, experiences of yours," he said. He raised an honest palm. "I don't mean to pry, or upset you if it upsets you to talk of them. I'm just very interested."

She said nothing. She could only tell him that they were all over in any case. Her heart for a moment grew great and hollow, and he seemed to sense it, because he pressed the arm he held, very slightly. "Other worlds," he said dreamily. "Worlds within worlds." He drew her to one of the many small benches set against a curving, clipped wall of box-hedge. The complex housefront beyond, buffcolored and patent in the late afternoon sun, seemed to her severe yet smiling, like Erasmus' face in a frontispiece she had seen over Father's shoulder.

"Well," she said. "Those ideas, about worlds within worlds and all that, those are Father's ideas. I don't know."

"But you've been there."

"Father says I have." She crossed her legs and covered an old ineradicable brown stain on her muslin dress with interlaced fingers. "I never expected this, you know. I only told him about . . . all that, what had happened to me—because I hoped to lift his spirits. To tell him it would be all right, that all the troubles were part of the Tale."

"Tale?"

She grew circumspect. "I mean I never expected this. To leave home. To leave . . ." Them, she almost said, but since the night at the Theosophical Society—the last straw!—she had resolved not to speak any more about them. It was bad enough to have lost them.

"Miss Bramble," he said. "Please. I certainly wouldn't pursue you, pursue your . . . your tale." That wasn't true. He was rapt before it. He must know it: know her heart. "You won't be bothered here. You can rest." He gestured toward the cedars of Lebanon he had planted in that careful lawn. The wind in them spoke in a childish gabble, faint presage of the great grave voice they would speak in when they were grown. "It's safe here. I built it for that."

And she did feel, despite the deep constraints of formality that seemed laid on her here, a kind of serenity. If it had all been a terrible error telling Father about them, if it had inflamed not settled his mind and sent the two of them out on the road like a pair of itinerant preachers, or a gypsy and his dancing bear more nearly, to make their living entertaining the mad and the obsessed in glum lecture-halls and meeting rooms (and counting afterwards their take, good Lord!) then rest and forgetfulness were the best issue it could have. Better than they could have expected. Only . . .

She rose, restless, unreconciled, and followed a radiating path toward a kind of stage-set wing of arches that protruded from a corner of the house. "I built it," she heard him say, "for you really. In a way."

She had passed through the arches and come around the corner of the house, and suddenly out of the plain pillared envelope of the wing a flowered valentine was unfolded and offered her, whitewashed and American, bright with flowerbeds and lacy with jigsaw work. It was a wholly different place; it was as though the severe face of Erasmus had tittered behind his hand. She laughed, the first time she had laughed since she had shut the wicket on her English garden forever.

He came almost at a run, grinning at her surprise. He tilted his straw hat on the back of his head and began to talk with animation about the house, about himself; the quick moods came and went in his big face. "Not usual, no," he laughed, "not a thing about it's usual. Like here: this was to be the kitchen-garden, you see, where anybody'd put a kitchen-garden, but I've filled it with flowers. The cook won't garden, and the gardener's a great one with flowers, but says he can't keep a tomato alive. . . ." He pointed with his bamboo walking-stick at a pretty, cut-out pumphouse—"Just like," he said, "one my parents had in their garden, and useful too"—and then the pierced, ogee arches of the porch, which broad grape-leaves had begun to climb. "Hollyhocks," he said, taking her to admire some that the bumblebees were engaged on. "Some people think hollyhocks are a weed. Not me."

"'Ware heads, there!" called out a broad, Irish voice above them. A maid upstairs had flung open a window, and shook a dust mop in the sun.

"She's a great girl," Drinkwater said, indicating her with his thumb. "A great girl . . ." He looked down at Violet, dreamy again, and she up at him, as the dust-motes descended in the sun like Danae's gold. "I suppose," he said gravely, the bamboo stick swinging pendulum-fashion behind his back, "I suppose you think of me as old."

"You mean you think that's so."

"I'm not, you know. Not old."

"But you suppose, you expect . . ."

"I mean I think . . ."

"You're supposed to say 'I guess,'" she said, stamping her small foot and raising a butterfly from the sweet William. "Americans always say 'I guess,' don't they?" She put on a bumpkin basso: "I guess it's time to bring the cows in from the pasture. I guess there'll be no taxation without representation.—Oh, you know." She bent to smell flowers, and he bent with her. The sun beat down on her bare arms, and as though tormenting them made the garden insects hum and buzz.

"Well," he said, and she could hear the sudden daring in his voice. "I guess, then. I guess I love you, Violet. I guess I want you to stay here always. I guess . . ."

She fled from him along the flagged garden path, knowing that next he would take her in his arms. She fled around the next corner of the house. He let her go. Don't let me go, she thought.

What had happened? She slowed her steps, finding herself in a dark valley. She had come behind the shadow of the house. A sloping lawn fell away down to a noiseless stream, and just across the stream a sudden hill arose straight up, piney and sharp like a quiver of arrows. She stopped amid the yew trees planted there; she didn't know which way to turn. The house beside her was as gray as the yews, and as dreary. Plump stone pillars, oppressive in their strength, supported flinty stringcourses that seemed purposeless, covert. What should she do?

She glimpsed Drinkwater then, his white suit a paleness loitering within the stone cloister; she heard his boots on the tiles of it. In a change, the wind pointed the yews' branches toward him, but she wouldn't look that way, and he, abashed, said nothing; but he came closer.

"You mustn't say those things," she said to the dark Hill, not turning to him. "You don't know me, don't know . . ."

"Nothing I don't know matters," he said.

"Oh," she said, "oh . . ." She shivered, and it was his warmth that caused it; he had come up behind her, and covered her now with his arms, and she leaned against him and his strength. They walked on together thus, down to where the full-charged stream ran foaming into a cave's mouth in the hillside and was lost. They could feel the cave's damp and stony breath; he held her closer, protecting her from what seemed the cold infection of it that made her shiver. And from within the circle of his arms she told him, without tears, all her secrets.

"Do you love him, then?" Drinkwater said when she had done. "The one who did this to you?" It was his eyes that were bright with tears.

"No. I didn't, ever." It had never till this moment mattered. Now she wondered what would hurt him more, that she loved the one who had done this to her or did not (she wasn't even absolutely certain which one it was, but he would never, never know that). Sin pressed on her. He held her like forgiveness.

"Poor child," he said. "Lost. But no more. Listen to me now. If. . ." He held her at arm's length, to look into her face; the single eyebrow and the thick lashes seemed to shutter it. "If you could accept me . . . You see, no stain on you can make me think less of you; I'd still be unworthy. But if you could, I swear the child will be raised here, one of mine." His face, stern with resolve, softened. He almost smiled. "One of ours, Violet. One of many."

Now at last the tears came to her eyes, wondering tears at his goodness. She hadn't before thought of herself as in terrible trouble; now he had offered to save her from it. What goodness! Father had hardly noticed.

Lost, though, yes; that she knew herself to be. And could she find herself here? She left his touch again, and went around the next corner of the house, beneath beetling arcades grotesquely carved and thick castellations. The white ribbons of her hat, which she held now in her hand, trailed across the damp emerald grass. She could sense him following at a respectful distance.

"Curious," she said out loud when she had rounded the corner. "How very curious."

The stonework of the house had changed from grim gray to cheerful brickwork in eye-intriguing shades of red and brown, with pretty enamel plaques set here and there, and white woodwork. All the Gothic heaviness had been stretched, pulled, pointed, and exploded into deep-curving, high-sweeping eaves, and comical chimney pots, and fat useless towers, and exaggerated curves of stacked and angled brick. It was as though—and here the sun shone again too, picking out the brickwork, and winking at her—it was as though the dark porch and soundless stream and dreaming yews had all been a joke.

"What it is," Violet said when John, hands behind his back, came up to her, "is many houses, isn't it?"

"Many houses," he said, smiling. "Every one for you."

Through a silly piece of cloistery archwork she could see a bit of Father's back. He was still ensconced in his wicker chair, still looking out through the curtain of wisteria, presumably still seeing the avenue of sphinxes and the cedars of Lebanon. But from here, his bald head could be a dreaming monk's in a monastery garden. She began to laugh. You will wander, and live in many houses. "Many houses!" She took John Drinkwater's hand; she almost kissed it; she looked up laughing at his face, that seemed just then to be full of pleasant surprises.

"It's a great joke!" she said. "Many jokes! Are there as many houses inside?"

"In a sense," he said.

"Oh, show me!" She pulled him toward the white arched door that was hinged with neat brass Gothic e's. In the sudden darkness of the brief, painted vestibule within, she lifted his big hand to her lips in an access of gratitude.

Beyond the vestibule, there was a vision of doorways, long lists of arches and lintels through which underscorings of light were painted by unseen windows.

"However do you find your way about?"Violet asked, on the threshold of all this.

"Sometimes I don't, in fact," he said. "I proved that every room needed more than two doors, but couldn't ever prove that any could get along with only three." He waited, unwilling to hurry her.

"Perhaps," she said, "one day, you'll be thinking of such a thing, and not be able to get out at all."

Hands on the walls and going slowly, as though she were blind (but in fact only marveling), Violet Bramble stepped into the pumpkin-shell John Drinkwater had made to keep her in, which he had first transformed into a golden coach for her delight.


Tell Me the Tale

After moonrise Violet awoke in a large and unfamiliar bedroom, feeling the pressure of cold light and the sound of her name called. She lay deathly still for a long moment on the tall bed, holding her breath, waiting for the tiny call to come again; but it didn't come. She threw off the coverlet and climbed down from the tall bed and across the floor. When she opened the casement she thought she heard her name again.

Violet?

Summer odors invaded the room, and a host of small noises from which she couldn't sort out the voice, if it was one, that had called her, if it had. She pulled her big cloak from the steamer trunk which had been put in her room, and quickly, quietly left the room on the balls of her feet. Her white calico nightgown billowed in the stale air which came searching up the stairways for the window she had left open.

"Violet?"

But that was only her father, perhaps asleep, as she passed his room, and she didn't answer.

It took some time of cautious creeping (feet growing cold on the uncarpeted stairs and halls) to find which way went down and out. And when at last she found a door flanked by windows which showed the night, she realized she had no idea which way she was faced. Did it matter?

It was that grand, still garden. The sphinxes watched her pass, their identical faces mobile in the aqueous moonlight. A frog spoke from the fishpond's edge, but not her name. She went on, across the spectral bridge and through a screen of poplars like frightened heads of hair on end. Beyond was a field, crossed by a kind of hedge, not a proper hedge, a line of bushes and small sighing trees, and the piled stones of a crude wall. She followed this, not knowing where she was going, feeling (as Smoky Barnable would years hence) that she may not have left Edgewood at all, only turned down some new illusory outdoor corridor of it.

She went what seemed a long way. The hedge beings, rabbits and stoats and hedgehogs (did they have such creatures here?) didn't speak, but they have no voices, or don't use them, she didn't know which. Her naked feet were cold at first in the dew, then numb; she drew the cloak over her nose, though it was a mild night, for the moonlight seemed to chill her.

Then, without knowing which foot had taken the step or when, she began to feel she was in familiar places. She looked up at the moon, and could tell by its smile that she was somewhere she had never been but knew, somewhere elsewhere. Ahead the sedgy, flower-starred meadow rose up to a knoll, and there grew an oak tree and a thorn together, in deep embrace, inseparable. She knew, her feet quickening and her heart too, that there would be a path around the knoll, and it would lead to a small house built underside.

"Violet?"

Lamplight shone from its round window, and a brass face on the round door held a knocker in its teeth. But the door opened as she came to it: no need to knock.

"Mrs. Underhill," she said, trembling between joy and hurt, "why didn't you tell me this is how it was to be?"

"Come in, child, and ask me not; if I'd known more than I said I'd have said it."

"I thought," Violet said, and for a moment couldn't speak, couldn't say that she had thought never to see her, never to see any of them again, not a single glowing person in the gloom of the garden, not one small secret face sipping at the honeysuckle. The roots of oak and thorn that made Mrs. Underhill's house were lit by her little lamp, and when Violet raised her eyes to them and sighed a long shuddering sigh to keep from weeping, she inhaled the black odor of their growing. "But how . . ." she said.

Tiny, bent Mrs. Underhill, who was mostly shawl-bound head and great slippered feet, raised an admonitory finger as long almost as the needles she knitted with. "Don't ask me how," she said. "But there it is."

Violet sat at her feet, all questions answered or at least not mattering any more. Only—"You might have told me," she said, her eyes starred with happy tears," that all the houses I'm to live in are one house."

"Are they," Mrs. Underhill said. She knitted and rocked. The scarf of many colors between her needles grew quickly longer. "Time past, time to come," she said comfortably. "Somehow the Tale gets told."

"Tell me the Tale," Violet said.

"Ah, if I could I would."

"Is it too long?"

"Longer than any. Why, child, they'll have put you long beneath the earth, and your children, and your children's children, before that Tale's all told." She shook her head. "That's common knowledge."

"Does it have," Violet asked, "a happy ending?" She'd asked all this before; these weren't questions, but exchanges, as though she and Mrs. Underhill passed back and forth, with compliments, the same gift: each time expressing surprise and gratitude.

"Well, who's to say," Mrs. Underhill said. The scarf grew longer, row by row. "It's a Tale, is all. There are only short ones and long ones. Yours is the longest I know." Something, not a cat, began to unravel Mrs. Underhill's fat ball of yam. "Stop that, bold thing!" she said, and beat at it with a knitting needle she drew from behind her ear. She shook her head at Violet. "Not a moment's peace in centuries."

Violet got up and cupped her hand to Mrs. Underhill's ear. Mrs. Underhill leaned close, grinning, ready for secrets.

"Are they listening?" Violet whispered.

Mrs. Underhill put her fingers to her lips. "I think not," she said.

"Then tell me truly," Violet said. "How do you come to be here?"

Mrs. Underhill started in surprise. "I?" she said. "Whatever do you mean, child? I've been here all the time. It's you who've been in motion." She took up her whispering needles. "Use your sense." She leaned back in her rocker; something caught beneath the tread shrieked, and Mrs. Underhill grinned maliciously.

"Not a moment's peace," she said, "in centuries."


All Questions Answered

After his marriage, John Drinkwater began to retire, or retreat, more and more from an active life in architecture. The buildings he would have been called on to build came to seem to him at once heavy, obtuse, and lifeless, and at the same time ephemeral. He remained with the firm; he was constantly consulted, and his ideas and exquisite initial sketches (when reduced to ordinariness by his partners and their teams of engineers) continued to alter the cities of the east, hut they were no longer his life's work.

There were other schemes to occupy him. He designed a folding bed of astonishing ingenuity, in effect an entire bedroom disguised as or contained within a sort of wardrobe or armoire, which in a moment—a quick motion of brass catches and levers, a shift of heavy counterweighting—became the bed which made the bedroom a bedroom. He enjoyed that idea, a bedroom within the bedroom, and even patented his scheme, hut the only buyer he ever found was his partner Mouse, who (chiefly as a favor) installed a few in his City apartments. And then there was the Cosmo-Opticon: he spent a happy year working on this with his friend the inventor Henry Cloud, the only man John Drinkwater had ever known who could actually sense the spin of the earth on its axis and its motion around the sun. The Cosmo-Opticon was an enormous, hideously expensive stained-glass-and-wrought- iron representation of the Zodiacal heavens and their movement, and the movement of the planets within them. And it did move: its owner could sit within it on a green plush seat, and as great weights fell and clockwork ticked over, the dome of many-colored glass would move just as the heavens did in their apparent motion. It was a measure of Drinkwater's abstraction that he thought there would be a ready market for this strange toy among the wealthy.

And yet—strange—no matter how he removed himself from the world, no matter how he poured the rich gains of his working life into such schemes, he flourished; his investments turned over at a great rate, his fortune only increased.

Protected, Violet said. Taking tea at the stone table he had placed to overlook the Park, John Drinkwater looked up at the sky. He had tried to feel protected. He had tried to repose himself within the protection she was so certain of, and to laugh at the world's weather from within it. But in his heart he felt unsheltered, bare-headed, abroad.

In fact, as he grew older, he became more and more concerned with the weather. He collected almanacs scientific and not so, and he studied the daily weather surmise in his paper though it was the divination of priests he didn't entirely trust—he only hoped, without having reason to, that they were right when they read the omens Fair and wrong when they read them Foul. He watched the summer sky especially, could feel as a burden on his own back any far-off cloud that might obscure the sun, or that might bring others after it. When fluffy harmless cumulus trod the sky like sheep, he was at ease but watchful. They could combine suddenly into thunderheads, they could drive him indoors to listen to the dull fall of rain on his roofs.

(As they seemed just now to be doing, over in the west, and he powerless to stop them. They drew his eye, and each time he looked they were piled that much higher. The air was dense and palpable. There was then little hope that rain and storm would not begin soon. He was not reconciled.)

In the winter, he wept often; in the spring he was desperately impatient, rageful when he found heaps of winter still piled in the corners of April. When Violet spoke of spring she meant a time of flowers and baby animals—a notion. A single clear day in April was like what she had in mind, he supposed. Or May, rather, because it had become clear to him that her idea of the qualities of months differed from his: hers were English months, Februaries when the snow melted and Aprils when flowers burst, not the months of this harsher exile place. May, there, was like June here. And no experience of these American months could change her mind: or even reach it, he sometimes thought.

Perhaps that conspiracy of cloud on the horizon was stationary, a kind of decoration merely, like the high-piled clouds behind country scenes in his children's picture books. But the air around him belied that: laden and sparkling with change.

Violet thought (or did she?—he spent hours grappling with her cryptic remarks, with Dr. Bramble's elaborate explications for a guide, and yet he wasn't sure) that it was always spring There., But spring is a change only. All seasons, collated into a string of fast-following days like changes of mood. Was that what she meant? Or did she mean the notional spring of young grass and newunfurled leaves, changeless single equinoctial day? There is no spring. Perhaps it was a joke. There would be precedent for that. He felt sometimes that all she said to his urgent inquiries was a joke. Spring is all seasons and no season. It's always spring There. There is no There. A humid wave of despair washed over him: a thunder mood, he knew, and yet . . .

It wasn't that he loved her less as they grew older (or rather as he grew older and she grew up); only that he lost that first wild certainty that she would lead him somewhere, a certainty that he had because for sure she had been there herself. He couldn't, as it happened, follow. After a bitter year he knew that. Better years followed. He would be Purchas to her pilgrims: he would tell her journeys to the world, her traveler's tall tales of marvels he would never see. She had intimated to him (he thought) that without the house he had built the whole Tale could not be told, that it was the beginning and perhaps the end, in some way, like the house that Jack built, cause of a chain. He didn't understand, but he was satisfied.

And there was no time when (even after years, after three children, after who knows how much water under what crumbling bridges) his heart would not swell when she came up to him and put her small hands on him suddenly and whispered in his ear Go to bed, old Goat—Goat she called him for his shameless ceaselessness—and he would mount the stairs and await her.

And look what he possessed now, all framed against the vertiginous height of cloud forming.

Here were his daughters Timothea Wilhelmina and Nora Angelica come home from a swim. And his son (her son, his) Auberon stalking across the lawn with his camera as though seeking something to strike with it. And his baby August in a sailor suit, who had never smelled the sea. He had named him for that month when the year stands still and blue day follows blue day, when for a while he stopped looking at the sky. He looked at the sky now. The white clouds were being edged with somber gray, sagging like old men's sad eyes. Yet still before him his shadow lay amid the shadows of leaves. He shook his newspaper and changed the way his legs were crossed. Enjoy, enjoy.

Among many other and odder beliefs, his father-in-law was sure that a man can't think or feel clearly if he can see his own shadow. (He thought also that looking at oneself in the mirror immediately before retiring caused bad, or at least troubling, dreams.) He always sat in the shade or faced into the sun, as he now sat in the wrought-iron love seat by "The Syrinx" with a stick between his knees to rest his hairy hands on, and a gold chain glowing on his stomach as the sun played with it. August sat at his feet listening or perhaps only politely seeming to listen to the old man, whose voice reached Drinkwater as a murmur, one murmur among many, the cicadas, the lawn mower Ottolo pushed in widening circles, the piano in the music room where Nora was practicing now, her chords running together like tears down a cheek.


Gone, She Said

She liked mostly the feel of the keys beneath her fingers, liked the thought of them being solid ivory and ebony. "What are they made of?" "Solid ivory." She stroked them in harmonic sets of six and eight at a time, no longer really practicing, only testing the plangency as her fingertips tested the smoothness. Her mother wouldn't notice it was no longer Delius she was playing or trying to play, her mother had no ear, she said so herself, though Nora could see the shapely whorl of her mother's ear where she sat cheek in hand at the drum table, playing her cards or looking at them anyway. For a moment her long earrings were still, till she looked up to take another card from the pile and everything moved, earrings shook, necklaces swung. Nora slid from her polished stool and came to stare at her mother's work.

"You should go outside," Violet said to her without looking up. "You and Timmie Willie should go down to the lake. It's so hot."

Nora didn't say that she had just returned from there, because she had told her mother that already, and if she hadn't understood then, there seemed no reason to insist on it. She only looked down at what her mother had laid out.

"Can you make a house of cards?" she asked.

"Yes," Violet said, and went on looking. This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn't quite enunciate. With his father-in-law's help, he had filled volumes with his searchings. Her children, though, hardly noticed it. Nora shifted from foot to foot for a moment waiting for the promised structure, and when it didn't appear forgot it. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed.

"Oh." Violet looked up. "They must have had their tea already." She rubbed her cheeks as though suddenly waking. "Why didn't you say something? Let's go see what's left."

She took Nora's hand and they went to the French doors that led out to the garden. Violet picked up a wide hat that lay on the table there, hut stopped when she had it on, and stood looking out into the haze. "What is it in the air?" she said.

"Electricity," Nora said, already crossing the patio. "That's what Auberon says." She squinted her eyes. "I can see it, all red and blue squiggles, when I do this. It means a storm."

Violet nodded, and started across the lawn slowly, as though making progress through an unfamiliar element, to where her husband waved to her from the stone table. Auberon had just done taking a picture of Grandy and the baby, and now he brought his instrument toward the table, making a motion to gather his mother into his field of focus. He went about his picture-taking solemnly, as though it were duty not pleasure. She felt a sudden pity for him. This air!

She sat, and John poured her tea. Auberon put his camera before them. The vast cloud defeated the sun, and John looked up at it, resentful.

"Oh! Look!" Nora said.

"Look!" Violet said.

Auberon opened the camera's eye, and closed it again.

"Gone," Nora said.

"Gone," Violet said.

The advancing edge of the occluded front swept invisibly across the lawn, stirring hair and turning lapels and leaves to show their pale undersides. It cut through the broken front of the house, lifting a card on the card-table and riffling the pages of five-finger exercises on the piano. It swung the tassels of scarves hung on sofas, it snapped the edges of drapes. Its cold oncoming wedge rose up through the second floor and the third and then thousands of feet into the air, where the rainmaker minted his first fat drops to throw on them.

"Gone," August said.