Little, Big Read online

  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 but 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 be 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 well-thought-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 bell 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, but 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 e
nded 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?