by Flynn
"You're a bit young for this, aren't you, little one."
Anna held her silence, testing and probing Old Woody. He didn't demand an answer, he wasn't anxious, he was prepared to wait.
He passed the test, so he got his answer. "I'm old enough to live, mister," said Anna quietly.
Old Woody smiled, shifted a wooden box beside him, and patted it. Anna sat down.
I was left standing, so I rummaged around until I found a suitable box to sit on and joined the circle. The silence had been held for three minutes or more. Old Woody was busy stuffing his pipe and testing it to see if it was drawing properly. Satisfied that all was as it should be, he got up, went over to the fire and lit up. He put his hand on Anna's head before he sat down and said something that I couldn't catch. They both laughed. Old Woody took a long and satisfying pull at his pipe.
"Do you like poetry?" he asked.
Anna nodded. Old Woody settled the glowing tobacco in his pipe with his thumb.
"Do you," he said, sucking away, "do you know what poetry is?"
"Yes," replied Anna. "It's sort of like sewing."
"I see," Old Woody nodded, "and what do you mean by sewing?"
Anna juggled the words around in her mind. "Well, it's making something from different bits that is different from all the bits."
"Urn," said Old Woody, "I think that is rather a good definition of poetry."
"Mister," said Anna, "can I ask you a question?"
"Of course," Old Woody nodded.
"Why don't you live in a house?"
Old Woody looked at his pipe and rubbed h thumb on his beard. "I don't think there is a real answer to that question, not put like that. Can you a it in another way?"
Anna thought for a moment, then said, "Mister why do you like living in the dark?"
"Living in the dark?" smiled Old Woody. "I can answer that very easily, but can you understand my answer, I wonder?"
"If it's an answer, I can," responded Anna.
"Yes, of course. If it is an answer, you can. That's true, only if it's an answer." He paused, and then, "Do you like the darkness?"
Anna nodded. "It stretches you out big. It makes l he box big."
He gave a little chuckle. "Indeed, indeed," he said. "My reason for preferring the darkness is that in the dark you have to describe yourself. In the daylight oilier people describe you. Do you understand that?"
Anna smiled, and Old Woody reached out a gnarled Old hand and gently closed Anna's eyes, held both her hands and settled some inner aspect of himself. This radicular little spot in London Town looked by daylight a shambles; at this moment, in the light of the Ire, it was pure magic.
Old Woody's firm and strong voice spoke to his God, to Anna, and to all mankind:
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise.
His nut-brown chuckle broke the spell. "Do you know that one? It's one of Shakespeare's sonnets. They," he said, and his arms swept out to embrace the win Id, "will tell you and encourage you to develop your brain and your five senses. But that's only the half of it, that's only being half a human. The other lull is to develop the heart and the wits." He ticked
II inn off on one old gnarled hand with the end of his pipe. "There's common wit, there's imagination, there's fantasy, there's estimation, and there's memory." Old Woody's face turned upward, his spirit danced and was warmed out among the stars, while his body remained with us and was warmed by the old tin-can brazier. "Never let anyone rob you of your right to be complete. The daylight is for the brain and the senses, the darkness is for the heart and the wits. Never, never be afraid. Your brain may fail you one day, but your heart won't." He returned like a comet, leaving behind a shining trail of love.
He stood up and stretched himself, looked around at all the faces, and his gaze stopped at Anna. "I know you, young lady, I know you well." He pulled his coat closer round his old shoulders, moved out of the circle of light, and stopped and smiled once more at Anna. He held out his arm to her and spoke:
Thus doth she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds,
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates,
Steal access thro' our senses to our minds.
Then he was gone. No, not gone, for some part of him, perhaps the biggest part of him, remained and remains even to this day. We stayed looking into the fire for ten minutes or so. We asked no questions, for there were no answers. We didn't even say good-bye to the night people as we left. I wondered if we had left as much behind us at our going.
We walked on slowly through the streets of London, each afloat on our own thoughts. One of the council's motorized road sweepers made clean the mess of the day. It came toward us, spraying the roadway and the pavement as it came, its large cylindrical brushes clearing up the streets of London for the daylight people. We did a pas de deux to the right as its spray hissed onto the pavement and one to the left as it passed us.
Anna switched on her klaxon-horn laugh and spun like a top with joy. Pointing after the receding sweeper, she said. "Fairies; they're like fairies."
"Some fairies," I chuckled.
"Like what you read to me—about Puck."
The mood and joy of the night caught hold of me I ran and leapt on to a nearby pillar box and stood u and declaimed the lines of Puck to the night:
1 am sent with broom before,
To sweep the dust behind the door.
Titania pirouetted and circled the pillar box in fairy dance. A policeman advanced in the distance, and pointing a finger at him, I yelled, "How now, spirit! Whither wander you?" His What do you think you're up to? was almost lost in our laughter. I jumped off l he pillar box and grabbed Anna by the hand and we raced after the disappearing road sweeper. We dashed ihrough its fountains of spray and waited ahead of it, breathless with running and laughter.
"Look! It's Moth and Mustardseed," I gasped out.
"No, it's not; it's Peaseblossom and Cobweb," she squeaked.
Our feet and legs were drenched as the sweeper passed. It went on for a few more yards and then slopped; the spray was turned off. The cab door opened and Mustardseed stepped to the ground. The light of a six-foot, 250-pound, overall-clad Mustardseed was too much; we clung to each other, helpless with laughter. Mustardseed moved toward us from one direction while the policeman, with measured tread, approached from behind us. We fled howling down a side street and stopped at some safe distance. The policeman and Mustardseed, now joined by Moth, were looking down the street after us. What they were talking about, who knows? but my guess was that it was something to do with the madness of the young. I gabbed Anna's hand again and we ran. We didn't Mop running until we came to the embankment. We climbed onto the parapet and opened our sandwiches and munched them while we watched the night traffic on the Thames pass by.
After finishing the sandwiches I lit a cigarette. Anna climbed down and began a lonely game of hopscotch on the pavement. She got about thirty yards away, turned, ran back, and stood in front of me.
"Hello, Fynn." She twirled around and parachuted her skirt.
"Hello, Anna." I inclined my head and threw out a gracious hand.
She was off again, hopping away for all she was worth, chanting a one-two-three song. She stopped and performed a little dance of pure joy. She ran back, her finger drawing a wavy line on the wall. She stopped again about five yards short of me, turned again, and drew another wavy line with the fingers of her other hand on the wall.
Twenty or thirty times she covered that twenty-yard length of wall. Long and slow waves, short and fast waves. Sometimes she walked as she drew her wavy lines, sometimes she went backward and then forward as fast as her legs would carry her. The wall showed no signs of her activity, bore no witness to her thoughts; it remained a blank, but then Anna was writing on her inner blackboard.
At the end of her run she s
topped, the lamplight glinting on her hair. She shook her head violently and a cloud of copper sparks rose up and settled. She began to walk, head down, heel to toe along the cracks of the paving stones, her course unplanned and uncharted, led only by the chance intersection of the paving-stone cracks. I doubt if she was even aware of what she was doing. This activity absorbed about one percent of her attention. The other ninety-nine percent had got turned around and was looking inside at something. It's funny how you learn to read the signs. This was the impending revelation prelude, that is, if it got worked out. I put my packet of cigarettes and. matches beside me. It was possible I wouldn't have another chance for an hour or so, if I had read the signs right.
Her walk finished, she drifted over to the wall, leaned against it, and remained perfectly still for a minute or two. With about as much attention as she had walked the cracks of the pavement, she shuffled her feet forward about a yard or so. She made an angle with the wall, supported only by her heels and the back of her head. I nearly yelled, but I didn't. It wouldn't have made much difference if I had; there wasn't much of her outside. She couldn't have heard me where she was.
She didn't walk back, she didn't hop, jump, skip, or run back, she rolled back. For thirty or more yards she rolled, balanced between head and heels. Over and over and over she rolled, ending up with her head buried on my legs, and there she stayed.
Her voice, muffled by my trousers, said, "I'm dizzy." "Ain't that the truth," I replied.
"The wall's hard," came her muffled voice.
"So's your head."
I got a sharp don't-be-funny bite on my leg.
"Oi! that hurts," I reminded her.
"So does my head."
"It's your own fault. You shouldn't be so daft. What was all that for?"
"I was thinking."
"That was thinking?" I asked. "Please God I never learn to think."
"Do you want to know what I was thinking about, Fynn?"
She looked up at me.
"If I've got a choice," I asked, "no, I don't."
She knew that I was teasing her and her smile told me that I didn't have a choice anyway.
"It can't be light." Anna gave that sentence a finality I hat was irrefutable.
"So, fine," I said. "If it can't be light, what is it?"
"Mister God can't be light." The words flew like stone chippings as Anna hacked away with her mental chisels.
I could imagine Mister God edging forward on his golden throne and peering down through the clouds, a little anxious to know what kind of a mold he was being forced into now. I had the itch to look upward and say, "Relax, Mister God. Just relax, you're in safe hands." I reckon Mister God must get a bit fed up now mid again considering all the various shapes we'd pressed on him over the last umpteen thousand years, and I don't suppose we've come to the end of it yet, not by a long chalk.
"He can't be light, can he? Can he, Fynn?"
"Search me, Tich. Search me."
"Well he can't be, 'cos what about them little waves we can't see and the big waves we can't see? What about them?"
"See what you mean. I reckon things would look a whole lot different if we could see by those waves."
"I think that the light's inside us. That's what I think."
"Could be. Could be you're right," I said.
"I think it's so's we can see how to see," she nodded her head, "that's what I think."
Upstairs Mister God—if you'll pardon the image— slapped his leg and turned to his angel hosts and said, "How about that! How about it?"
"Yes," continued Anna, "the Mister God light inside us is so's we can see the Mister God light outside us, and—and, Fynn," she jumped up and down with excitement as she rounded it all off, "the Mister God light outside us is so's we can see the Mister God light inside us."
She played the whole melody over again to herself in silence. With a grin that would have put the Cheshire cat to shame, she said, "That's nice, Fynn. Ain't it nice?"
I agreed that it was nice, very nice, but I was beginning to think that I had had just about enough for one night. I was glutted and needed a little time to digest the night's happenings, but not Anna; she had just got into her stride.
"Fynn, can I have the chalks?"
It was time to come up for air and I rummaged about in my pockets for the tin.
Going out with Anna fell naturally into three categories. There was "oozing" along, like we were doing this night. The demands of oozing were simply met. Two smallish tins containing colored chalks, string, bits of colored wool, 'lastic bands, a small bottle or two, paper, pencil, pins, and a few other knickknacks, odds and ends, and suchlike.
Category two was going for a walk. This was a bit more complicated. Over and above the two tins just for oozing, going for a walk demanded such things as collapsible fishing net, jam jars, boxes of various sizes, tins, bags, etc., etc. Ideally we should have had a five-ton truck following us, carrying everything necessary for going for a walk. If Mother Nature had been a little kinder to all the bugs, beetles, caterpillars, frog spawn, and what-have-you that Anna brought back from going for a walk, I reckon that London would have ground to a halt. We'd have been up to our eyes in frogs and bugs.
The last category was going for a walk with a fixed purpose in mind. This was a daunting experience, such as would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. To satisfy every contingency in going for a walk with a fixed purpose in mind would take about three—better make it half a dozen—vans. Little items, like maybe an oil rig or two, air compressors, a hundred-foot ladder, a diving bell, a crane or two,; little things like that. It's far too painful to talk about. After the three times we went for a walk with a fixed purpose in mind I couldn't stand upright for a week.
Carrying chalks about, then, came as naturally as breathing. They went everywhere with me. Carrying about these chalks produced a sort of Walter Mittyish fantasy game. I'd be at the opera, or maybe the proms, and the performance would stop. Someone would step forward and say, "Has any gentleman in the audience got a piece of chalk?" I'd get up and say, "Yes, I've got some. What color would you like?" Applause! Applause! Nobody ever asked me, except Anna that is, but Anna never used the chalks as a prop for fantasy; she used them to explain the fantastic.
I passed her the chalks. She knelt down on the pavement and drew a large red circle.
"Pretend that's me," she said.
Outside the circle she liberally sprinkled a number of dots. About the same number of dots were sprinkled inside the circle. She beckoned me off my perch on the wall. I went and knelt beside her. Looking around, she pointed to a tree.
"That," she said, "is that there," and she pointed to a dot outside the circle and marked it with a cross. Then, pointing to a dot inside the circle, she said, "That is that dot outside the circle, and that is the tree," and with her finger on the tree dot inside the circle, she continued with, "And that's the tree inside me."
"I seem to have been here before," I murmured.
"And that," she exclaimed in triumph, laying her finger on a dot inside the circle, "is a—is a—a flying elephant. But where is it outside? Where is it, Fynn?"
"There ain't no such beastie, so it can't be outside," I explained.
"Well then, how did it get into my head?" She sat back on her heels and stared at me.
"How anything gets into your head beats me, but a flying elephant is pure imagination, it's not factual."
"Ain't my imagination a fact, Fynn?" she quizzed me with a tilt of her head.
"Sure, of course your imagination is a fact, but what comes out of it isn't necessarily a fact." I was beginning to wriggle a bit.
"Well then, how did it get in there"—she thumped the inside of the circle—"if it ain't out there?" she went on with a few more thumps. "Where did it come from?"
I was thankful that I wasn't given the opportunity to answer that one. She was in full flight. She got up and walked around the diagram of her universe.
"Ther
e's a lot of things out there that ain't in here."
She leaped from the edge of the universe into the circle of herself and knelt down.
"Fynn, did you like my painting?"
"I liked it fine," I said. "I thought it was pretty darn good."
"Where," she said with her hands on her hips, "was it?"
I pointed to a dot outside the circle. "There, I suppose."
She scrabbled backward until she was clear of the diagram and pointed a finger to the center of the circle. Her finger stabbed out her sentence. "There, that's where I painted it—inside me."
She remained silent for a long moment, then, sweeping her hands over the diagram, she said in a puzzled voice, "Sometimes I don't know if I am locked out or locked in."
Touching the inner dots and then the outer dots, she continued, "It's funny, sometimes you look inside and find something outside and sometimes you look outside and find something inside. It's very funny."
As we knelt considering the southeast sector of Anna's universe, a pair of shining size-twelve boots appeared in the northwest sector and a voice said, "Well, well, if it isn't Master Puck and the Lady Titania."
"Blimey, it's Oberon," I muttered, looking up and wring the policeman.
"Haven't you got a home to go to? And what do you Ihink you're up to, drawing pictures on the pavement?"
"We've got a home to go to," I admitted.
"That ain't a picture, mister," said Anna, still hunk-ned down on the pavement.
"What's it supposed to be then?" asked the policeman.
"It's really Mister God. That's me, that's inside me mid that's outside me, but it's all Mister God."
"Well now," said the policeman, "it's still drawing on the pavement, and that's not allowed."
Anna reached out and pushed a pair of size twelves out of her universe. The policeman looked down at Anna.
"You've just flattened a couple of billion stars," I bid him.
