Little, Big Part 4

"The two distinct charactersa"the ethereal, beautiful, and elevated character on the one hand, and the impish, earthy, gnomelike character on the other, is in fact a s.e.xual distinction. The s.e.xes 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 a.s.sociated with flowers. Droll tales are spun of their spears of locust-thorns and their chariots made of nutsh.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.l within him, was so difficulta" maybe, oh Lord, impossiblea"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 waysa"call them doorsa"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 pa.s.s, 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 alla"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 pointa"Faery, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibilitya"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" a"he patted a messy pile of papers and place-marked books beside hima""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 a"

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 s.h.i.+n: "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 youa ."

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

"No." How old could she be, to have to live soa"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, somewherea . 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 cla.s.sical bridge.

Dr. Bramble declined, already drawing an octavo volume from his pocket. Violet murmured her a.s.sent (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 hera"a builder's strong arm she thoughta"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 Ches.h.i.+re 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 a all that, what had happened to mea"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 circ.u.mspect. "I mean I never expected this. To leave home. To leave a" Them, she almost said, but since the night at the Theosophical Societya"the last straw!a"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 a 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 a 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.ttered 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 alivea ." He pointed with his bamboo walking-stick at a pretty, cut-out pumphousea""Just like," he said, "one my parents had in their garden, and useful too"a"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 b.u.mblebees 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 a" 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-fas.h.i.+on 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 a"

"I mean I think a"

"You're supposed to say *I guess,'" she said, stamping her small foot and raising a b.u.t.terfly from the sweet William. "Americans always say *I guess,' don't they?" She put on a b.u.mpkin ba.s.so: "I guess it's time to bring the cows in from the pasture. I guess there'll be no taxation without representation.a"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 a"

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 a"

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

"Oh," she said, "oh a" She s.h.i.+vered, 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 s.h.i.+ver. 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. Ifa" 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 a 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 gra.s.s. 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 thougha"and here the sun shone again too, picking out the brickwork, and winking at hera"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 bra.s.s 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 grat.i.tude.

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-sh.e.l.l 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s, 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 bra.s.s 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 a" 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. Onlya""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."