Little, Big

V.

what thou lovest well is

thy true heritage

what thou lovest well shall

not be reft from thee.

—Ezra Pound

The next morning, Smoky and Daily Alice assembled packs more complete than Smoky's City pack had been, and chose knobbed sticks from an urn full of walking-sticks, umbrellas, and so on that stood in the hail. Doctor Drinkwater gave them guides to the birds and the flowers, which in the end they didn't open; and they took along also George Mouse's wedding present, which had arrived that morning in the mail in a package marked Open Elsewhere and would turn out to be (as Smoky hoped and expected) a big handful of crushed brown weed odorous as a spice.


Lucky Children

Everyone gathered on the porch to see them off, making suggestions as to where they should go and whom of those that hadn't been able to get to the wedding they ought to visit. Sophie said nothing, but as they were turning to go, she kissed them both firmly and solemnly, Smoky especially as if to say So there, and then took herself quickly away.

While they were gone, Cloud intended to follow them by means of her cards, and report, insofar as she could, on their adventures, which she supposed would be small and numerous and just the kind of thing these cards of hers had always been best for discovering. So after breakfast she drew the glass table near the peacock chair on that porch, and lit a first cigarette of the day, and composed her thoughts.

She knew that first they would climb the Hill, but that was because they said they would. She saw with the mind's eye the way they went up over the well-trodden paths to the top, to stand there then and look out over morning's domain and theirs: how it stretched green, forested and farmed across the county's heart. Then they would go down the wilder far side to walk the marches of the land they had looked at.

She laid down cups and wands, squires of coins and kings of swords. She guessed that Smoky would be falling behind Alice's long strides as they crossed the sun-whitened pastures of Plainfield; there Rudy Flood's brindled cows would look up at them with lashy eyes, and tiny insects would leap from their footfalls.

Where would they rest? Perhaps by the quick stream that bites into that pasture, undermining the upholstered tussocks and raising infant willow groves by its sides. She laid the trump called the Bundle within the pattern and thought: Time for lunch.

In the pale tigery shade of the willow-grove they lay fulllength looking into the stream and its complex handiwork in the bank. "See already," she said, chin in hands. "Can't you see apartments, river-houses, esplanades or whatever? Whole ruined palaces? Balls, banquets, visiting?" He stared with her into the fretwork of weed, root, and mud which striped sunlight reached into without illuminating. "Not now," she said, "but by moonlight. I mean isn't that when they come out to play? Look." Eye level with the bank, it was just possible to imagine. He stared hard, knitting his brows. Make-believe. He'd make an effort.

She laughed, getting up. She donned her pack again that made her breasts stand. "We'll follow the brook up," she said. "I know a good place."

So through the afternoon they went up and slowly out of the valley, which the gurgling stream in malapert pride had taken over from some long-dead great river. They drew closer to fcrest, and Smoky wondered if this were the wood Edgewood is on the edge of. "Gee, I don't know," Alice said. "I never thought about it."

"Here," she said at last, wet and breathless from the long climb up. "This is a place we used to come to."

It was like a cave cut in the wall of the sudden forest. The crest they stood on fell away down into it, and he thought he had never looked into anywhere so deeply and secretly The Wood as this. For some reason its floor was carpeted with moss, not thick with the irregulars of the forest's edge, shrub and briar and small aspen. It led inward, it drew them inward into whispering darkness where the big trees groaned intermittently.

Within, she sat gratefully. The shade was deep, and deepened as the afternoon perceptibly passed. It was as still and as stilling as a church, with the same inexplicable yet reverent noises from nave, apse, and choir.

"Did you ever think," Alice said, "that maybe trees are alive like we are, only just more slowly? That what a day is to us, maybe a whole summer is to them—between sleep and sleep, you know. That they have long, long thoughts and conversations that are just too slow for us to hear." She laid aside her stick and slid one by one the pack-straps from her shoulders; her shirt was stained where she had worn them. She drew up her big knees glossy with sweat and rested her arms on them. Her brown wrists were wet too, and damp dust was caught in their golden hair. "What do you think?" She began to pluck at the heavy thongs of her high-top shoes. He said nothing, only took all this in, too pleased to speak. It was like watc.hing a Valkyrie disarm after battle.

When she knelt up to force down her creased, constricting shorts he came to help.

By the time Mother snapped on the yellow bulb above Cloud's head, changing her card-dream from evening blue to something harsh and not quite intelligible, she had discerned what most of her cousins' journey might be like in the days to come, and she said: "Lucky children."

"You'll go blind out here," Mother said. "Dad's poured you a sherry."

"They'll be all right," Cloud said, shutting up the cards and getting up with some difficulty from the peacock chair.

"They did say, didn't they, that they'd stop in at the Woods'."

"Oh, they will," Cloud said. "They will."

"Listen to the cicadas still going," Mother said. "No relief."

She took Cloud's arm and they went in. They spent that evening playing cribbage with a polished folding board, one missing ivory peg replaced with a matchstick; they listened to the knock and rasp of great stupid June bugs against the screens.


Some Final Order

In the middle of the night Auberon awoke in the summer house and decided he would get up and begin to put his photographs in order: some final order.

He didn't sleep much anyway, and was beyond the age when getting up in the night to do some task seemed inappropiate or vaguely immoral. He had lain a long time listening to his heart, and grown bored with that, and so he found his spectacles and sat up. It was hardly night anyway; Grady's watch said three o'clock, yet the six squares of the window were not black but faintly blue. The insects seemed asleep; in not too long the birds would begin. For the moment though it was quite still.

He pumped up the pressure lamp, his chest wheezing each time he drove in the plunger. It was a good lamp, looked just like a lamp, with a pleated paper shade and blue Delft ice skaters around its base. Needed a new mantle, though. Wouldn't get one. He lit it, turned it down. Its long hiss was comforting. Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue running down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

It wasn't that the photographs were in no order. In fact he spent much of his time with their ordering. But he always felt that their own order, which wasn't chronological, or by size, or by some description of subjects, had always escaped him. They seemed to him sometimes individual frames taken from a motion picture, or several motion pictures, with lacunae long or short between the frames he had; and that if they were filled in, they would make scenes: long, story-telling pans, various and poignant. But how was he to tell if he had constituted even the frames he had aright, since so many others were missing? He always hesitated to disturb the after all quite rational cross-referenced order he did have in order to discover some other that might not be there at all.

He took out a portfolio labeled Contacts, 1911-1915. They were, though the label didn't specify it, his earliest pictures. There had been others, of course, early failures that he had destroyed. In those days, as he never tired of saying, photography was like a religion. A perfect image was like a gift of grace, but sin would always be swiftly punished. A sort of Calvinist dogma, where you never knew when you were right, but must be constantly vigilant against error.

Here now was Nora on the whitewashed porch of the kitchen, in creased white skirt and shirt. Her scuffed high-top shoes seemed too large for her. White cotton, white porch-pillars, darkness of her summer skin, fairness of her summer hair, her eyes startlingly pale from the shadowless brightness that fills whitewashed porches on sunny days. She was (he looked at the date on the picture's back) twelve. No, eleven.

Nora, then. Was there a way to begin with Nora (where his pictures began although of course the plot might not) and follow her, going away from her as a mOtion picture might when some other entered the frame, and follow that one?

Timmie Willie, for instance, and here she was by the X-gate that led out of the Park in that same summer, perhaps on that same day. Not quite sharp, for she would never be still. She was probably talking, telling where she was going, while he said Keep still. There was a towel in her hand: swimming. Hang your clothes on the hickory limb. It was a fine clear image, except that wherever the sun struck something, it flared: the weeds flamed whitely, one shoe of hers shone, the rings burned that she loved to wear even at that age. Hussy.

Which had he loved more?

Hung from Timmie Willie's wrist by a black strap was the small, leather-bound Kodak he let them borrow. Be careful with it, he told them. Don't break it. Don't open it up to look inside. Don't get it wet.

He traced with a forefinger Timmie Willie's single eyebrow, denser in this picture even than it had been in life, and suddenly missed her desperately. As though riffled by some inward dealer a deck of later pictures passed through his mind. Timmie Willie posed in winter at the frosty window of the music room. Timmie and Nora and tall Harvey Cloud and Alex Mouse in the dawn on a butterfly expedition, Alex wearing plus-fours and a hangover. Nora with dog Spark. Nora a bridesmaid at Timmie and Alex's wedding. Alex's roadster and glad Timmie standing in it waving, holding its canted windshield and wearing the most hopeful of ribboned hats. And in time Nora and Harvey Cloud married with Timmie present looking already pale and wasted, he blamed the City; and then gone, not seen again; the moving camera must pass and follow others.

Montage, then: but how was he to explain Timmie Willie's sudden absenèe from these groups of faces and festivals? His first pictures seemed to lead him right through his entire collection, branching and proliferating; and yet there was no way for any single picture to tell its whole story without a thousand words of explanation.

He thought wildly of printing them all on lantern-slides, and packing them together, packing more and more until their stained darknesses overlapped and nothing at all could be seen, no light came through: yet it would all be there.

No. Not all.

For there was another divergence it could take, symmetrical dark root to these patent everyday branches. He turned again to the picture of Timmie Willie at the X-gate, the camera on her wrist: the moment of divergence, the place or was it time where the parting came.


Can You Find the Faces

He had always thought of himself as rational, commonsensical, an employer of evidences and a balancer of claims; a changeling, it seemed, in a family of mad believers and sybils and gnomic fancifiers. At the teacher's college where he had learned about the scientific method and logic, he had also been given a new Bible, that is Darwin's Descent of Man; in fact it was between its pages of careful Victorian science that he flattened Nora and Timmie Willie's camera-work when the finished prints had dried into scrolls.

When Nora at evening with a new pink flush on her brown cheekbones had brought him the camera, breathless with some excitement, he had indulgently taken it to his red-lit cell in the basement, extracted the film, washed it in amnionic fluid, dried it and printed it. "You mustn't look at them, though," Nora said to him, "because, well," dancing from foot to foot, "in some of them we were—Stark Naked!" And he had promised, thinking of the Muslim letter-readers who must cover their ears when they read letters for their clients, so as not to overhear the contents.

They were naked by the lake in one or two, which interested and disturbed him profoundly (your own sisters!). Otherwise for a long time he didn't look carefully at them again. Nora and Timmie Willie lost interest; Nora had found a new toy in Violet's old cards, and Timmie met Alex Mouse that summer. And so they lay between the pages of Darwin, facing the closely-reasoned arguments and the engravings of skulls. It was only after he had developed an impossible, an inexplicable picture of his parents on a thundery day that he searched them out again: looked closely at them: examined them with loupe and reading-glass: studied them more intently than he ever had the "Can You Find the Faces" pictures in St. Nicholas magazine.

And he found the faces.

He was rarely thereafter to see a picture anything like as clear and unambiguous as that picture of John and Violet and that other at the stone table. It was as though that one were a goad, a promise, to keep him searching through images far more subtle and puzzling. He was an investigator, without prejudice, and wouldn't say that he was "allowed" that one glimpse, that it was "intended" to make his life a search for further evidences, for some unambiguous answer to all the impossible puzzlement. Yet it had that effect. As it happened, he had nothing else pressing for his life to be about.

For there had to be, he was a certain of it, an explanation. An explanation, not airy talk like Grandy's of worlds-within-worlds or cryptic utterances out of Violet's subconscious.

He thought at first (even hoped, glass in hand) that he was wrong: tricked, deluded. Discounting the one singular image at the stone table—scientifically speaking an anomaly and therefore without interest—might not all these others be, oh, an ivy vine twisted into the shape of a claw-hand, light falling on a celandine so as to make a face? He knew light had its gifts and its surprises; could not these be among them? No, they could not. Nora and Timmie Willie had caught, by accident or design, creatures that seemed on the point of metamorphosis from natural to outlandish. A bird's face here and yet that claw which gripped the branch was a hand, a hand in a sleeve. There wasn't any doubt about it when you studied it long enough. This cobweb was no cobweb but the trailing skirt of a lady whose pale face was collared in these dark leaves. Why hadn't he given them a camera of higher resolution? There appeared to be crowds of them in some pictures, receding into the unfocused background. What size were they? All sizes, or else the perspective was Somehow distorted. As long as his little finger? As big as a toad? He printed them on lantern slides and threw them on a sheet, and sat before them for hours.

"Nora, did you when you went to the woods that day"— careful, mustn't prejudice her answer—"see anything, well, special to take pictures of?"

"No. Nothing special. Just . . . well, not special."

"Maybe we could go out again, with a good camera, see what we could see."

"Oh, Auberon."

He consulted Darwin, and the glimmer of a hypothesis began to be seen as though far off but coming closer.

In the primeval forests, by some unimaginable eon-long struggle, the race of Man separated itself from its near cousins the hairy apes. It appeared that there had been more than one attempt so to differentiate a Man, and that all of them had failed, leaving no trace behind except for the odd anomolous bone. Dead ends. Man alone had learned speech—fire—tool-making, and so was the only sapient one to survive.

Or was he?

Suppose a branch of our old family tree—a branch that seemed doomed to wither—had in fact not died out but survived, survived by learning arts just as new to the world but utterly different from the tool-making and fire-building of its grosser cousins, us. Suppose that instead they had learned concealment, smallification, disappearance, and some way to blind the eyes of beholders.

Suppose they had learned to leave no trace; no barrow, flint, glyph; no bone, no tooth.

Except that now Man's arts had caught up with them, had discovered an eye dull enough to see them and record the fact, a retina of celluloid and silver-salts less forgetful, less confusable; an eye that couldn't deny what it had seen.

He thought of the thousands of years—hundreds of thousands—it had taken men to learn what they knew, the arts they had invented out of absolute dark animal ignorance; how they had come to cast pots, amazing thing, whose clumsy shards we find now amid fires cold a millennium and the gnawed bones of prey and neighbors. This other race, supposing it existed, supposing data proving its existence could he found, must have spent those same millennia perfecting its own arts. There was the story Grandy told, that in Britain the Little People were those original inhabitants driven to littleness and secret wiles by invaders who carried iron weapons— thus their ancient fear and avoidance of iron. Maybe so! As (he turned Darwin's dense and cautious pages) turtles grow shells, zebras paint themselves in stripes; as men, like babies, grasped and gabbled, these others retreated into learned crafts of undiscoverability and track-covering until the race that planted, made, built, hunted with weapons no longer noticed their presence in our very midst—except for the discountable tales of goodwives who left dishes of milk on the sill for them, or the drunkard or the madman from whom they could not or chose not to hide.

They could not or chose not to hide from Timmie Willie and Nora Drinkwater, who had taken their likeness with a Kodak.


These Few Windows

From that time on his photography became for him not an entertainment but a tool, a surgical instrument that would slice out the heart of the secret and bring it before his scrutiny. Unfortunately, he discovered that he himself was barred from witnessing any further evidences of their presence. His photographs of woods, no matter of what spooky and promising corners, were only woods. He needed mediums, which endlessly complicated his task. He continued to believe—how could he not?—that the lens and the salted film behind it were impassive, that a camera could no more invent or falsify images than a frosted glass could make up fingerprints. And yet if someone were present with him when he made what seemed to him random images—a child, a sensitive—then sometimes the images grew faces and revealed personages, subtly perhaps, but study revealed them.

Yet what child?

Evidences. Data. There were the eyebrows, for one thing. He was convinced that the single eyebrow which some, but not all of them, had, inherited from Violet had something to do with it. August had had it, thick and dark over his nose, where it would sometimes grow a spray of long hairs like those over a cat's nose. Nora had had a trace of it, and Timmie Willie had had it, though when she became a young woman she shaved and plucked it constantly. Most of the Mouse children, who looked most like Grandy, hadn't had it, nor John Storm nor Grandy himself.

And Auberon lacked it too.

Violet always said that in her part of England a single eyebrow marked you as a violent, criminal person, possibly a maniac. She laughed at it, and at Auberon's idea of it, and in all the encyclopaedic explanations and conflations of the last Architecture there was nothing about eyebrows.

All right then. Maybe all that about eyebrows was just a way for him to discover why it was that he had been excluded, couldn't see them though his camera could, as Violet could, as Nora had for a time been able to. Grandy would talk for hours about the little worlds, and who might be admitted there, but had no reasons, no reasons; he'd pore over Auberon's pictures and talk about magnification, enlargement, special lenses. He didn't know quite what he was talking about, but Auberon did make some experiments that way, looking for a door. Then Grandy and John insisted on publishing some of the pictures he had collected in a little book—"a religious book, for children," John said, and Grandy wrote his own commentary, including his views on photography, and made such a hash of it that no one paid the slightest attention to it, not even— especially—children. Auberon never forgave them. It was hard enough to think of it all impartially, scientifically, not to suppose you were mad or deeply fooled, without the whole world saying you were. Or at least the few who cared to comment.

He came to the conclusion that they had reduced his struggle in this way—a children's book!—just in order to further exclude him. He had allowed them to do it because of his own deep sense of exclusion. He was outside, in every way; not John's son, not truly the younger children's brother, not of Violet's placid mind but not brave and lost like August; without the eyebrow, without belief. He was as well a lifelong bachelor, without wife or progeny; he was in fact almost a virgin. Almost. Excluded even from that company, yet he had never possessed anyone he had ever loved.

He felt now little anguish over all that. He had lived his whole life longing for unattainables, and such a life eventually achieves a balance, mad or sane. He couldn't complain. They were all exiles here anyway, he shared that at least with them, and he envied no one's happiness. He certainly didn't envy Timmie Willie, who had fled from here to the City; he didn't dare envy lost August. And he had always had these few windows, gray and black, still and changeless, casements opening on the perilous lands.

He closed the portfolio (it released a perfumy smell of old, broken black leather) and with it the new attempt at classification of these and the long sequence of his other pictures, ordinary and otherwise, up to the present day. He would leave it all as it was, in discrete chapters, neatly but oh inadequately crossreferenced. The decision didn't dismay him. He had often in his late life attempted this reclassification, and each time come to this same conclusion.

He patiently did up the knots of 1911-1915 and got up to take from its secret place a large display-hook with a buckram cover. Unlabeled. It needed none. It contained many late images, beginning only ten, twelve years ago; yet it was companion to the old portfolio which contained his first. It represented another kind of photography he did, the left hand of his life-work, though the right hand of Science had for a long time not known what this left hand was doing. In the end it was the left hand's work which mattered; the right had shriveled. He became, perhaps had always been, lefthanded.

It was easier to discover when he had become a scientist than to discover when he had ceased to be one; the moment, if there was one, when his flawed nature had betrayed him and, without divulging it, abandoned the great search in favor of—well, what? Art? Were the precious images in this buckrarn book art, and if they weren't did he care?

Love. Did he dare call it love?

He placed the book on the black portfolio, from which it grew, as a rose from a black thorn. He saw that he had his whole life piled up before him, beneath the hissing lamp. A pale night moth destroyed itself against the lamp's white mantle.

Daily Alice said to Smoky in the mossy cave in the woods: "He'd say, Let's go out in the woods and see what we can see. And he'd pack up his camera, sometimes he'd take a little one, and some- times the big one, the wood and brass one with legs. And we'd pack a lunch. Lots of times we'd come here.


To See What He Could See

"We only came out on days that were hot and sunny so we could take off all our clothes—Sophie and me would—and run around and say Look and Look and sometimes Oh it's gone when you weren't really sure you'd seen anything anyway. . . ."

"Take off your clothes? How old were you?"

"I don't remember. Eight. Till I was maybe twelve."

"Was that necessary? To do the looking?"

She laughed, a low sound for she was lying down, full length, letting whatever breeze that came by have its way with her—naked now too. "It wasn't necessary," she said. "Just fun. Didn't you like to take your clothes off when you were a kid?"

He remembered the feeling, a kind of mad elation, a freedom, some restraint discarded with the garments: not a feeling quite like grown-up sexual feelings, but as intense. "Never around grownups though."

"Oh, Auberon didn't count. He wasn't . . . well, one of them, I guess. In fact I suppose we were doing it all for him. He got just as crazy."

"I bet," Smoky said darkly.

Daily Alice was quiet for a time. Then she said: "He never hurt us. Never, never made us do anything. We suggested things! He wouldn't. We were all sworn to secrecy—and we swore him to secrecy. He was—like a spirit, like Pan or something. His excitement made us excited. We'd run around and shriek and roll on the ground. Or just stand stock still with a big buzz just filling you up till you thought you'd burst with it. It was magic."

"And you never told."

"No! Not that it mattered. Everybody knew anyway, except oh Mom and Dad and Cloud, anyway they never said anything; but I've talked to lots of people, later on, and they say Oh you too? Auberon took you to the woods to see what he could see?" She laughed again. "I guess he'd been at it for years. I don't know anybody who resented it, though. He picked them well, I guess."

"Psychological scars."

"Oh, don't be stupid."

He stroked his own nakedness, pearly in the moonlight, drying in the licking breeze. "Did he ever see anything? I mean, besides . . ."

"No. Never."

"Did you?"

"We thought we did." She was of course sure they had: on brave luminous mornings walking expectant and watchful, waiting to be led and feeling (at once, at the same moment) the turning they must take that would lead to a place they had never been but which was intensely familiar, a place that took your hand and said We're here. And you must look away, and so would see them.

And they would hear Auberon behind them somewhere and be unable to answer him or show him, though it was he who had brought them here, he who had spun them like tops, tops that then walked away from him, walked their own way.

Sophie? he would call. Alice?


But There It Is

The Summer House was all blue within except where the lamp glowed, with less authority now. Auberon, dusting his fingers rapidly against his thumbs, went around the little place peering into boxes and corners. He found what he wanted then, a large envelope of marbled paper, last one of many he had had once, in which French platinum printing-papers had long ago been mailed to him.

A fierce pain no worse than longing stitched up his torso, but went away again, more quickly than longing used to when he felt longing. He took the album of buckram and slipped it into the marbled envelope. He undid his ancient Waterman's (he'd never allowed his students to write with ball points or any of that) and wrote in his schoolmarm hand—shuddery now as though seen under water—For Daily Alice and Sophie. A great pressure seemed to enlarge his heart. He added: And for no one else. He thought of adding an exclamation, but didn't; only sealed it tightly. The black portfolio he put no name on. It was—all the rest of it was—for no living person anyway.

He went out into his yard. Still the birds for some reason had not begun. He tried to urinate at the lawn's edge but could not, gave up, went to sit on the canvas chair damp with dew.

He had always imagined, without of course ever believing it, that he would know this moment. He imagined that it would come at their time, unphotographable twilight; and that years after he had surrendered it all, grown hopeless, bitter even, in that twilight one would come to him, stepping through the gloaming without sound and without causing the sleeping flowers to nod. A child, it would seem to be, discarnate flesh glowing as in an antique platinum print, whose silver hair would be as though on fire, lit by the sun which had just set or perhaps hadn't yet risen. He wouldn't speak to it, unable to, stone dead already it may be; but it would speak to him. It would say: "Yes, you knew us. Yes, you alone came close to the whole secret. Without you, none of the others could have come near us. Without your blindness, they couldn't have seen us; without your loneliness, they couldn't have loved each other, or engendered their young. Without your disbelief, they couldn't have believed. I know it's hard for you to think the world could work in this strange way, but there it is."


In the Woods

By noon next day, clouds had gathered, fitting themselves together resolutely and without haste, seeming when they had put out all the sky to be almost low enough to touch.

The road they walked between Meadowbrook and Highland wound up and down amid an aged forest. The well-grown trees stood close together, their roots it must be all interlaced below; above the road, their branches met and grappled together, so it seemed the oaks grew maple leaves and the hickories oak leaves. They suffered great choking garments of ivy, especially the riddled and fibrous trunks of the dead, propped against their old neighbors, unable to fall.

"Dense," Smoky said.

"Protected," Daily Alice said.

"How do you mean?"

She held out a hand, to see whether the rain had begun, and her palm was struck once, then again. "Well, it's never been logged. Not anyway in a hundred years."

The rain came on steadily, without haste, as the clouds had; this wasn't to be some fickle shower, but a well-prepared day's rain. "Damn," she said. She pulled a crumpled yellow hat from her pack and put it on, but it was apparent they were in for a wetting.

"How far is it?"

"To the Woods' house? Not too far. Wait a minute though." She stopped, and looked back the way they had come, then the way they were going. Smoky's bare head began to itch from the drops. "There's a shortcut," Alice said. "A path you can take, instead of going all the way around by the road. It ought to be right around here, if I can find it."

They walked back and forth along the apparently impassable margin. "Maybe they've stopped keeping it up," she said as they searched. "They're kind of strange. Solitary. Just live out here all by themselves and almost never see anybody." She stopped before an ambiguous hole in the undergrowth and said: "Here it is," without confidence, Smoky thought. They started in. The rain ticked in the leaves steadily, the sound growing less discontinuous and more a single voice, surprisingly loud, drowning out the sounds their own progress made. It was dark as night beneath the trees beneath the clouds, and not lightened by the silver shimmer of the rain.

"Alice?"

He stood still. All he could hear was the rain. So intent on making his way along this supposed path that now he'd lost her. And surely he had lost the path too, if there had ever been one. He called out again, a confident, no-nonsense call, no reason to get excited. He got no reply, but just then saw between two trees a true path, quite patent, an easy winding way. She must have found it and just got quickly on ahead while he floundered in the creepers. He took the path and went along, pretty well wet now. Alice should any moment appear before him, but she didn't. The path led him deeper and deeper beneath the crackling forest; it seemed to unroll before his feet, he couldn't see where it led, but it was always there to follow. It brought him eventually (long or short time he couldn't tell, what with the rain and all) to the edge of a wide, grassy glade all ringed with forest giants slick and black with wet.

Down in the glade, seeming insubstantial in the dripping mist, was the oddest house he had ever seen. It was a miniature of one of Drinkwater's crazy cottages, but all colored, with a bright red tile roof and white walls encumbered with decoration. Not an inch of it hadn't been curled or carved or colored or blazoned in some way. It looked, odder still, brand new.

Well, this must be it, he thought, but where was Alice? It must have been she, not he, who had got lost. He started down the hill toward the house, through a crowd of red and white mushrooms that had come out in the wetness. The little round door, knockered and peepholed and brass-hinged, was flung open as he came close, and a sharp small face appeared around its edge. The eyes were glittering and suspicious, but the smile was broad.

"Excuse me," Smoky said, "is this the Woods'?"

"Indeed it is," the man said. He opened the door wider. "And are you Smoky Barnable?"

"Well I am!" How did he know that?

"Won't you come right on in."

If there are more than the two of us in there, Smoky thought, it'll be crowded. He passed by Mr. Woods, who seemed to be wearing a striped nightcap, and was presenting the interior to Sthoky with the longest, flattest, knobbiest hand Smoky had ever seen. "Nice of you to take me in," he said, and the little man's grin grew wider, which Smoky wouldn't have thought possible. His nutbrown face would split right in two at the ears if it went on growing.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't tell which. He felt laughter for some reason rise up in him. There was room in here for a grandfather clock with a cunning expression, a bureau on which pewter candlesticks and mugs stood, a high fluffy bed with a patchwork quilt more varied and comical than any he had ever seen. There was a round, much polished table with a splinted leg, and a domineering wardrobe. There were moreover three more people, all quite comfortably disposed: a pretty woman busy at a squat stove, a baby in a wooden cradle who cooed like a mechanical toy whenever the woman gave the cradle a push, and an old, old lady, all nose and chin and spectacles, who rocked in a corner and knitted quickly on a long striped scarf. All three of these noticed his arrival, but seemed to take no notice.

"Sittee down," said Mr. Woods. "And tell us your history."

Somewhere in the blue joyful surprise that filled Smoky to the chin a small voice was trying to say What on earth, but it exploded at that moment like a stepped-on puff-ball and went out. "Well," he said, "I seem to have lost my way—that is Daily Alice and I had—but now I've found you, and I don't know what's become of her."

"Right," said Mr. Woods. He had put Smoky in a highbacked chair at the table, and now he took from a cupboard a stack of blue-flowered plates which he dealt out around the table like cards. "Take some refreshment," he said.

As though on cue, the woman drew out from the oven a tin sheet on which a single hot-cross bun steamed. This Mr. Woods put on Smoky's plate, watching him expectantly. The cross on the bun was not a cross, but a five-pointed star drawn in white icingsugar. He waited a moment for others to be served, but the smell of the bun was so rich and curranty that he picked it up and ate it without pause. It was as good as it smelled.

"I'm just married," he said then, and Mr. Woods nodded. "You know Daily Alice Drinkwater."

"We do."

"We think we'll be happy together."

"Yes and no."

"What?"

"Well what would you say, Mrs. Underhill? Happy together?"

"Yes and no," said Mrs. Underhill.

"But how . . ." Smoky began. An immense sadness flew over him.

"All part of the Tale," Mrs. Underhill said. "Don't ask me how."

"Be specific," Smoky said challengingly.

"Oh, well," said Mr. Woods. "It's not like that, you know." His face had grown long and contemplative, and he rested his chin in the great cup of one hand while the long fingers of the other strummed the table. "What gift did she give you, though? Tell us that."

That was very unfair. She had given him everything. Herself. Why should she have to give him any other gift? And yet even as he said it, he remembered that she had on their wedding night offered him a true gift. "She gave me," he said proudly, "her childhood. Because I didn't have one of my own. She said I could use it any time I liked."

Mr. Woods cocked an eye at him. "But," he said slyly, "did she give you a bag to put it in?" His wife (if that's who she was) nodded at this stroke. Mrs. Underhill rocked smugly. Even the baby seemed to coo as though it had scored a point.

"It's not a matter of that," Smoky said. Since he had eaten the hot-star bun, emotions seemed to sweep him alternately like swift changes of season. Autumnal tears rose to his eyes. "It doesn't matter anyway. I couldn't take the gift. You see"—this was difficult to explain—"when she was young she believed in fairies. The whole family did. I never did. I think they still do. Now that's crazy. How could I believe in that? I wanted to—that is, I wanted to have believed in them, and seen therh, but if I never did—if the thought never occurred to me—how can I take her gift?"

Mr. Woods was shaking his head rapidly. "No, no," he said. "It's a perfectly fine gift." He shrugged. "But you have no bag to put it in is all. See here! We'll give you gifts. Real ones. No holding back on essential parts." He flung open a humpbacked chest bound with black iron. It seemed to glow within. "See!" he said, drawing out a long snake of a necklace. "Gold!" The others there looked at Smoky, smiling in approval of this gift, and waiting for Smoky's amazed gratitude.

"It's . . . very kind," Smoky said. Mr. Woods draped the glowing coils around Smoky's neck, once, again, as though he meant to strangle him. The gold was not cold as metal should be but warm as flesh. It seemed to weight his neck, so heavy it was, to bend his back.

"What more?" Mr. Woods said, looking around him, finger to his lips. Mrs. Underhill with one of her needles pointed to a round leather box on top of the cupboard. "Right!" Mr. Woods said. "How about this?" He fingered the box from its high place till it fell into his arms. He popped open the lid. "A hat!"

It was a red hat, high-crowned and soft, belted with a plaited belt in which a white owl's feather nodded. Mr. Woods and Mrs. Underhill said Aaaaah, and watched closely as Mr. Woods fitted it to Smoky's head. It was as heavy as a crown. "I wonder," Smoky said, "what became of Daily Alice."

"Which reminds me," Mr. Woods said with a smile, "last but not least but best. . ." From under the bed he drew out a faded and mouse-chewed Gladstone carpetbag. He brought it to the table and placed it tenderly before Smoky. A sadness seemed to have entered him too. His great hands stroked the bag as though it were beloved. "Smoky Barnable," he said. "This is in my gift. She couldn't give it, no matter that she wanted to. It's old but all the more capacious for that. I bet there's room in it for . . ." A doubt came over him, and he snapped open the crossbones catch of the bag and looked inside. He grinned. "Ah, plenty of room. Not only for her gift, but pockets too for your unbelief, and whatever else. It'll come in handy."

The empty bag was heaviest of all.

"That's all," said Mrs. Underhill, and the grandfather clock struck sweetly.

"Time you were going," said Mrs. Woods, and the baby choked impatiently.

"What's become of Alice?" Mr. Woods said thoughtfully. He turned twice around the room, looking out the small deep windows and peering into corners. He opened a door; beyond it Smoky glimpsed utter darkness and heard a long, sleepy whisper before Mr. Woods closed it quickly. He lifted his finger and his eyebrows went up with a sudden idea. He went to the tall wardrobe that stood on claw feet in the corner; he threw open its doors, and Smoky saw the wet woods he had come through with Alice—and, far off, loitering in the afternoon, Alice herself. He was shown into the wardrobe.

"It was very nice of you," he said, stooping to enter. "Giving me all this stuff."

"Forget it," said Mr. Woods, his voice sounding distant and vague. The wardrobe doors shut on him with a long noise like a far great low-voiced bell. He walked through the wet underbrush, slapped at by branches, his nose starting to run.

"What on earth," Daily Alice said when she saw him.

"I've been in the Woods'," he said.

"I guess you have. Look at you."

A thick tangle of creeper had Somehow got twined around his neck; its tenacious prickles tore his flesh and plucked at his shirt. "Damn," he said. She laughed, and began to pull leaves from his hair.

"Did you fall? How did you get dead leaves all in your hair? What's that you've got?"

"A bag," he said. "It's all right now." He raised to show her the long-dead hornet's nest he carried; its fine paper-work was broken in places and showed the tunneled interior. A ladybug crawled from it like a spot of blood and flew away.

"Fly away home," Daily Alice said. "It's all right now. The path was there all the time. Come on."

The great weight he felt was his pack, sodden with rain. He wanted desperately to put it down. He followed her along a rutted trail, and soon they came to a great littered clearing below a crumbling bank of clay. In the midst of the clearing was a brown shack with a tarpaper roof, tied to the woods by a dripping clothesline. A pickup truck sat wheelless on concrete blocks in the yard, and a black-andwhite cat prowled, looking damp and furious. A woman in apron and galoshes was waving to them from the wire-bound chicken house.

"The Woods," Daily Alice said.

"Yes."

And yet, even when they had coffee in front of them, and Amy and Chris Woods were talking of this and that, and his discarded pack lay puddling the linoleum, still Smoky felt press on him a weight given him, which he could not shake off, and which gradually came to seem as if it had always been there. He thought he could carry it.

Of the rest of that day, and the rest of their adventures on that journey, Smoky later on would remember very little. Daily Alice would remind him later of this or that, in the middle of a silence, as though she rehearsed that journey often when her mind had nothing else to do, and he'd say, "Oh yes," and perhaps really remember what she spoke of and perhaps not.

On that same day Cloud on the porch by the glass table, thinking only to complete her pursuit of those same adventures, turned up a trump called the Secret, and when she prepared to put it in its place gasped, began to tremble; her eyes filled with sudden tears, and when Mother came to call her for lunch, Cloud, red-eyed and still surprised that she had not known or suspected, told her without hesitation or doubt what she had learned. And so when Smoky and Daily Alice returned, brown, scratched and happy, they found the blinds drawn in the front windows (Smoky didn't know this old custom) and Doctor Drinkwater solemn on the porch. "Auberon is dead," he said.


By the Way

Rooks (Smoky supposed) fled home across a cloudstreaked chilly sky toward naked trees which gestured beyond the newly-turned furrows of a March field (he was quite sure it was March). A split-rail fence, nicely cracked and knotholed, separated the field from the road, where a Traveler walked, looking a bit like Dante in Doré, with a peaked hood. At his feet were a row of white, red-capped mushrooms, and the Traveler's face had a look of alarm—well, surprise—because the last small mushroom in the row had tilted up its red hat and was looking at him with a sly smile from beneath the brim.

"It's an original," Doctor Drinkwater said, indicating the picture with his sherry glass. "Given to my grandmother Violet by the artist. He was an admirer of hers."

Because his childhood books had been Caesar and Ovid, Smoky had never seen the man's work before, his pollarded, faced trees and evening exactness; he was struck by it in ways he couldn't analyze. It was called By the Way, like a whisper in his ear. He sipped his sherry. The doorbell (it was the kind where you turn a key to make the noise, but what a noise) rang, and he saw Mother hurry by the parlor door, wiping her hands on her apron.

He had made himself useful, less affected as he was than the rest of them. He and Rudy Flood dug the grave, in a place on the grounds where these Drinkwaters lay together. There was John. Violet. Harvey Cloud. It was a fiercely hot day; above the maples burdened with awesome weight of leaves there hung a vapour, as though the trees panted it out with their soft breathing in the fainting breeze. Rudy expertly shaped the place, his shirt plastered with sweat to his great stomach; worms fled from their spades, or from the light, and the cool, dark earth they turned out turned pale quickly.

And the next day people arrived, all the guests from his wedding or most of them, appearing in their sudden way, some wearing the same clothes they had worn for the wedding since they hadn't expected another Drinkwater occasion so soon; and Auberon was buried without minister or prayer, only the long requiem of the harmonium, which sounded now calm and Somehow full of gladness.

"Why is it," Mother said returning from the door with a sky-blue Pyrex dish covered with foil, "that everyone thinks you're starving after a funeral? Well, it's very kind."


Good Advice

Great-aunt Cloud tucked her damp hankie away in a black sleeve. "I think of the children," she said. "All there today, year after year of them—Frank Bush and Claude Berry were in his very first class after the Deci- sion."

Doctor Drinkwater bit on a briar pipe he really seldom used, took it out and stared hard at it, as though surprised to find it was inedible.

"Decision?" Smoky said.

"Berry et al. vs. Board of Ed," Doc said solemnly.

"I guess we can eat this now," Mother came in to say. "Sort of pot luck. Bring your glasses. Bring the bottle, Smoky—I'm having another." And at the dining table Sophie sat in tears because she had set without thinking a place for Auberon, who always came to eat on this day, Saturday. "How could I just forget," she said through the napkin covering her face. "He loved us so much. . . ." Still with the napkin over her face, she went quickly out. Smoky seemed hardly to have seen her face since he arrived, only her retreating back.

"She and you were his favorites," Cloud said, touching Daily Alice's hand.

"I suppose I'll go up and see Sophie," Mother said, irresolute by the door.

"Sit down, Mother," Doc said softly. "It's not one of those times." He helped Smoky to one of the three bowls of potato salad there were among the funeral offerings. "Well. Berry et al. It was thirty some years ago. . . ."

"You lose track of time," Mother said. "It's more like forty-five."

"Anyway. We're very out-of-the-way up here. Rather than trouble the State about our kids and all, we'd set up a little private school. Nothing fancy at all. But it began to appear that our school had to meet Standards. State Standards. Now the kids could read and write as well as any, and learned their math; but the Standards said they had to learn as well History, and Civics whatever that is or was, and a lot of other stuff we just didn't think was necessary. If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway. People around here aren't ignoramuses; just have an idea—or rather a lot of different ideas— about what's important to know, and very little of it's taught in school.

"Well, it turns out that our little school was closed down, and all the kids went outside to school for a couple of years. . . ."

"They said our Standards didn't fit our students for the real world," Mother said.

"What's so real about it?" Cloud said testily. "What I've seen lately doesn't seem so real to me."

"This was forty years ago, Nora."

"Hasn't gotten any realer since then."

"I went to the public school for a while," Mother said. "It didn't seem so bad. Only you always had to be there at exactly the same time every day, spring or winter, rain or shine; and they didn't let you out till exactly the same hour every day, as well." She marveled, looking back on it.

"How was the Civics and all that," Daily Alice asked, squeezing Smoky's hand under the table because the answer was a venerable clincher.

"You know what?" Mother said to Smoky. "I don't remember a single thing about them. Not a single thing."

And that was just how the School System had appeared to Smoky. Most of the kids he had known forgot everything they learned in school as soon as they left those (to him) mysterious halls. "Boy," he'd say, "you ought to go to school with my father. He never lets you forget a thing." On the other hand, when they questioned him about schoolroom fixtures like the Pledge of Allegiance or Arbor Day or Prince Henry the Navigator, he was made of ignorance. They thought he was strange, when they noticed him at all.

"So Claude Berry's dad got in trouble for keeping him out of the public school, and it became a case," Cloud was saying. "All the way to the State Supreme Court."

"Bent our bank accounts out of shape," Doc said.

"And eventually was decided in our favor," Mom said.

"Because," Cloud said, "It was a religious thing, we claimed. Like the Amish, do you know about them?" She smiled slyly. "Religious."

"A landmark decision," Mom said.

"Nobody's heard of it, though," Doc said, wiping his lips. "I think, the court surprised itself by the way it decided, and it was kept quiet; don't want to start people thinking, get their wind up, so to speak. But we've had no trouble since then."

"We had good advice," Cloud said, lowering her eyes; and they all consented silently to that.

Smoky, taking another glass of sherry and arguing from ignorance, began talking about a loophole in the Standards he knew of—that is, himself—and the superior education he'd anyway received, and how he wouldn't have it any other way, when Doctor Drinkwater suddenly struck the table with his palm, gavel-style, and beamed on Smoky, the light of a bright idea in his eyes.


What About It

"What about that?" Daily Alice said to him much later when they lay in bed.

"What?"

"What Dad suggested."

They had just the sheet over them in the heat, which only since midnight had begun to break apart into breezes. The long white hills and dales made by her body shifted cataclysmically and settled into a different country. "I don't know," he said,, feeling muzzy and thoughtless, helpless against sleep. He tried to think of some more pointed answer, but instead fell off into sleep. She shifted nervously again and he was snatched back.

"What."

"I think of Auberon," she said quietly, wiping her face on her pillow. He took her up then, and she hid her face in the hollow of his shoulder and sniffed. He stroked her hair, running his fingers soothingly through it, which she loved as much as a cat does, until she slept. And when she was asleep, he found himself staring into the sparkling phantasmal ceiling, surprised by sleeplessness, not having heard of the rule whereby one spouse can trade a restlessness for the other's sleep—a rule spelled out in no marriage contract.

Well, what about it then?

He had been taken in here, adopted, it seemed not an issue that he would ever leave. Since nothing had before been said about their future together, he hadn't thought about it himself: he was unaccustomed to having a future is what it was, since his present had always been so ill-defined.

But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. He put his hands behind his head, carefully so as not to disturb her still-fresh sleep. What sort of a person was he, if he was now a sort of person? Anonymous, he had been as well everything as nothing; now he would grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes. And did he like or dislike the idea of living in this house, teaching at their school, being—well, religious he supposed was how they would put it? Did it suit his character?

He looked at the dim range of snowy mountains which Daily Alice made beside him. If he was a character, she had made him one. And if he was a character, he was probably a minor one: a minor character in someone else's story, this tall story he had got himself into. He would have his entrances and exits, contribute a line of dialogue now and then. Whether the character would be crabby schoolmaster or something else didn't seem to matter much, and would be decided along the way. Well then.

He examined himself carefully for feelings of resentment at this. He did feel a certain nostalgia for his vanished anonymity, for the infinity of possibilities it contained; but he also felt her breathing next to him, and the house's breathing around him, and in rhythm with them he fell asleep, nothing decided.

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: "There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer." This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said "Years."