by John Crowley
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, buff-colored and patent in the late afternoon sun, seemed to her severe yet smiling, like Erasmus’ face in a frontispiece she had seen over Father’s shoulder.
“Well,” she said. “Those ideas, about worlds within worlds and all that, those are Father’s ideas. I don’t know.”
“But you’ve been there.”
“Father says I have.” She crossed her legs and covered an old ineradicable brown stain on her muslin dress with interlaced fingers. “I never expected this, you know. I only told him about … all that, what had happened to me—because I hoped to lift his spirits. To tell him it would be all right, that all the troubles were part of the Tale.”
“Tale?”
She grew circumspect. “I mean I never expected this. To leave home. To leave …” Them, she almost said, but since the night at the Theosophical Society—the last straw!—she had resolved not to speak any more about them. It was bad enough to have lost them.
“Miss Bramble,” he said. “Please. I certainly wouldn’t pursue you, pursue your … your tale.” That wasn’t true. He was rapt before it. He must know it: know her heart. “You won’t be bothered here. You can rest.” He gestured toward the cedars of Lebanon he had planted in that careful lawn. The wind in them spoke in a childish gabble, faint presage of the great grave voice they would speak in when they were grown. “It’s safe here. I built it for that.”
And she did feel, despite the deep constraints of formality that seemed laid on her here, a kind of serenity. If it had all been a terrible error telling Father about them, if it had inflamed not settled his mind and sent the two of them out on the road like a pair of itinerant preachers, or a gypsy and his dancing bear more nearly, to make their living entertaining the mad and the obsessed in glum lecture-halls and meeting rooms (and counting afterwards their take, good Lord!) then rest and forgetfulness were the best issue it could have. Better than they could have expected. Only …
She rose, restless, unreconciled, and followed a radiating path toward a kind of stage-set wing of arches that protruded from a corner of the house. “I built it,” she heard him say, “for you really. In a way.”
She had passed through the arches and come around the corner of the house, and suddenly out of the plain pillared envelope of the wing a flowered valentine was unfolded and offered her, whitewashed and American, bright with flowerbeds and lacy with jigsaw work. It was a wholly different place; it was as though the severe face of Erasmus had tittered behind his hand. She laughed, the first time she had laughed since she had shut the wicket on her English garden forever.
He came almost at a run, grinning at her surprise. He tilted his straw hat on the back of his head and began to talk with animation about the house, about himself; the quick moods came and went in his big face. “Not usual, no,” he laughed, “not a thing about it’s usual. Like here: this was to be the kitchen-garden, you see, where anybody’d put a kitchen-garden, but I’ve filled it with flowers. The cook won’t garden, and the gardener’s a great one with flowers, but says he can’t keep a tomato alive….” He pointed with his bamboo walking-stick at a pretty, cut-out pumphouse—”Just like,” he said, “one my parents had in their garden, and useful too”—and then the pierced, ogee arches of the porch, which broad grape-leaves had begun to climb. “Hollyhocks,” he said, taking her to admire some that the bumblebees were engaged on. “Some people think hollyhocks are a weed. Not me.”
“ ‘Ware heads, there!” called out a broad, Irish voice above them. A maid upstairs had flung open a window, and shook a dust mop in the sun.
“She’s a great girl,” Drinkwater said, indicating her with his thumb. “A great girl …” He looked down at Violet, dreamy again, and she up at him, as the dust-motes descended in the sun like Danae’s gold. “I suppose,” he said gravely, the bamboo stick swinging pendulum-fashion behind his back, “I suppose you think of me as old.”
“You mean you think that’s so.”
“I’m not, you know. Not old.”
“But you suppose, you expect …”
“I mean I think …”
“You’re supposed to say ‘I guess,’ “ she said, stamping her small foot and raising a butterfly from the sweet William. “Americans always say ‘I guess,’ don’t they?” She put on a bumpkin basso: “I guess it’s time to bring the cows in from the pasture. I guess there’ll be no taxation without representation.—Oh, you know.” She bent to smell flowers, and he bent with her. The sun beat down on her bare arms, and as though tormenting them made the garden insects hum and buzz.
“Well,” he said, and she could hear the sudden daring in his voice. “I guess, then. I guess I love you, Violet. I guess I want you to stay here always. I guess …”
She fled from him along the flagged garden path, knowing that next he would take her in his arms. She fled around the next corner of the house. He let her go. Don’t let me go, she thought.
What had happened? She slowed her steps, finding herself in a dark valley. She had come behind the shadow of the house. A sloping lawn fell away down to a noiseless stream, and just across the stream a sudden hill arose straight up, piney and sharp like a quiver of arrows, She stopped amid the yew trees planted there; she didn’t know which way to turn. The house beside her was as gray as the yews, and as dreary. Plump stone pillars, oppressive in their strength, supported flinty stringcourses that seemed purposeless, covert. What should she do?
She glimpsed Drinkwater then, his white suit a paleness loitering within the stone cloister; she heard his boots on the tiles of it. In a change, the wind pointed the yews’ branches toward him, but she wouldn’t look that way, and he, abashed, said nothing; but he came closer.
“You mustn’t say those things,” she said to the dark Hill, not turning to him. “You don’t know me, don’t know …”
“Nothing I don’t know matters,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, “oh …” She shivered, and it was his warmth that caused it; he had come up behind her, and covered her now with his arms, and she leaned against him and his strength. They walked on together thus, down to where the full-charged stream ran foaming into a cave’s mouth in the hillside and was lost. They could feel the cave’s damp and stony breath; he held her closer, protecting her from what seemed the cold infection of it that made her shiver. And from within the circle of his arms she told him, without tears, all her secrets.
“Do you love him, then?” Drinkwater said when she had done. “The one who did this to you?” It was his eyes that were bright with tears.
“No. I didn’t, ever.” It had never till this moment mattered. Now she wondered what would hurt him more, that she loved the one who had done this to her or did not (she wasn’t even absolutely certain which one it was, but he would never, never know that). Sin pressed on her. He held her like forgiveness.
“Poor child,” he said. “Lost. But no more. Listen to me now. If …” He held her at arm’s length, to look into her face; the single eyebrow and the thick lashes seemed to shutter it. “If you could accept me … You see, no stain on you can make me think less of you; I’d still be unworthy. But if you could, I swear the child will be raised here, one of mine.” His face, stern with resolve, softened. He almost smiled. “One of ours, Violet. One
of many.”
Now at last the tears came to her eyes, wondering tears at his goodness. She hadn’t before thought of herself as in terrible trouble; now he had offered to save her from it. What goodness! Father had hardly noticed.
Lost, though, yes; that she knew herself to be. And could she find herself here? She left his touch again, and went around the next corner of the house, beneath beetling arcades grotesquely carved and thick castellations. The white ribbons of her hat, which she held now in her hand, trailed across the damp emerald grass. She could sense him following at a respectful distance.
“Curious,” she said out loud when she had rounded the corner. “How very curious.”
The stonework of the house had changed from grim gray to cheerful brickwork in eye-intriguing shades of red and brown, with pretty enamel plaques set here and there, and white woodwork. All the Gothic heaviness had been stretched, pulled, pointed, and exploded into deep-curving, high-sweeping eaves, and comical chimney pots, and fat useless towers, and exaggerated curves of stacked and angled brick. It was as though—and here the sun shone again too, picking out the brickwork, and winking at her—it was as though the dark porch and soundless stream and dreaming yews had all been a joke.
“What it is,” Violet said when John, hands behind his back, came up to her, “is many houses, isn’t it?”
“Many houses,” he said, smiling. “Every one for you.”
Through a silly piece of cloistery archwork she could see a bit of Father’s back. He was still ensconced in his wicker chair, still looking out through the curtain of wisteria, presumably still seeing the avenue of sphinxes and the cedars of Lebanon. But from here, his bald head could be a dreaming monk’s in a monastery garden. She began to laugh. You will wander, and live in many houses. “Many houses!” She took John Drinkwater’s hand; she almost kissed it; she looked up laughing at his face, that seemed just then to be full of pleasant surprises.
“It’s a great joke!” she said. “Many jokes! Are there as many houses inside?”
“In a sense,” he said.
“Oh, show me!” She pulled him toward the white arched door that was hinged with neat brass Gothic e’s. In the sudden darkness of the brief, painted vestibule within, she lifted his big hand to her lips in an access of gratitude.
Beyond the vestibule, there was a vision of doorways, long lists of arches and lintels through which underscorings of light were painted by unseen windows.
“However do you find your way about?” Violet asked, on the threshold of all this.
“Sometimes I don’t, in fact,” he said. “I proved that every room needed more than two doors, but couldn’t ever prove that any could get along with only three.” He waited, unwilling to hurry her.
“Perhaps,” she said, “one day, you’ll be thinking of such a thing, and not be able to get out at all.”
Hands on the walls and going slowly, as though she were blind (but in fact only marveling), Violet Bramble stepped into the pumpkin-shell John Drinkwater had made to keep her in, which he had first transformed into a golden coach for her delight.
Tell Me the Tale
After moonrise Violet awoke in a large and unfamiliar bedroom, feeling the pressure of cold light and the sound of her name called. She lay deathly still for a long moment on the tall bed, holding her breath, waiting for the tiny call to come again; but it didn’t come. She threw off the coverlet and climbed down from the tall bed and across the floor. When she opened the casement she thought she heard her name again.
Violet?
Summer odors invaded the room, and a host of small noises from which she couldn’t sort out the voice, if it was one, that had called her, if it had. She pulled her big cloak from the steamer trunk which had been put in her room, and quickly, quietly left the room on the balls of her feet. Her white calico nightgown billowed in the stale air which came searching up the stairways for the window she had left open.
“Violet?”
But that was only her father, perhaps asleep, as she passed his room, and she didn’t answer.
It took some time of cautious creeping (feet growing cold on the uncarpeted stairs and halls) to find which way went down and out. And when at last she found a door flanked by windows which showed the night, she realized she had no idea which way she was faced. Did it matter?
It was that grand, still garden. The sphinxes watched her pass, their identical faces mobile in the aqueous moonlight. A frog spoke from the fishpond’s edge, but not her name. She went on, across the spectral bridge and through a screen of poplars like frightened heads of hair on end. Beyond was a field, crossed by a kind of hedge, not a proper hedge, a line of bushes and small sighing trees, and the piled stones of a crude wall. She followed this, not knowing where she was going, feeling (as Smoky Barnable would years hence) that she may not have left Edgewood at all, only turned down some new illusory outdoor corridor of it.
She went what seemed a long way. The hedge beings, rabbits and stoats and hedgehogs (did they have such creatures here?) didn’t speak, but they have no voices, or don’t use them, she didn’t know which. Her naked feet were cold at first in the dew, then numb; she drew the cloak over her nose, though it was a mild night, for the moonlight seemed to chill her.
Then, without knowing which foot had taken the step or when, she began to feel she was in familiar places. She looked up at the moon, and could tell by its smile that she was somewhere she had never been but knew, somewhere elsewhere. Ahead the sedgy, flower-starred meadow rose up to a knoll, and there grew an oak tree and a thorn together, in deep embrace, inseparable. She knew, her feet quickening and her heart too, that there would be a path around the knoll, and it would lead to a small house built underside. “Violet?”
Lamplight shone from its round window, and a brass face on the round door held a knocker in its teeth. But the door opened as she came to it: no need to knock.
“Mrs. Underhill,” she said, trembling between joy and hurt, “why didn’t you tell me this is how it was to be?”
“Come in, child, and ask me not; if I’d known more than I said I’d have said it.”
“I thought,” Violet said, and for a moment couldn’t speak, couldn’t say that she had thought never to see her, never to see any of them again, not a single glowing person in the gloom of the garden, not one small secret face sipping at the honeysuckle. The roots of oak and thorn that made Mrs. Underhill’s house were lit by her little lamp, and when Violet raised her eyes to them and sighed a long shuddering sigh to keep from weeping, she inhaled the black odor of their growing. “But how …” she said.
Tiny, bent Mrs. Underhill, who was mostly shawl-bound head and great slippered feet, raised an admonitory finger as long almost as the needles she knitted with. “Don’t ask me how,” she said. “But there it is.”
Violet sat at her feet, all questions answered or at least not mattering any more. Only—”You might have told me,” she said, her eyes starred with happy tears,” that all the houses I’m to live in are one house.”
“Are they,” Mrs. Underhill said. She knitted and rocked. The scarf of many colors between her needles grew quickly longer. “Time past, time to come,” she said comfortably. “Somehow the Tale gets told.”
“Tell me the Tale,” Violet said.
“Ah, if I could I would.”
“Is it too long?”
“Longer than any. Why, child, they’ll have put you long beneath the earth, and your children, and your children’s children, before that Tale’s all told.” She shook her head. “That’s common knowledge.”
“Does it have,” Violet asked, “a happy ending?” She’d asked all this before; these weren’t questions, but exchanges, as though she and Mrs. Underhill passed back and forth, with compliments, the same gift: each time expressing surprise and gratitude.
“Well, who’s to say,” Mrs. Underhill said. The scarf grew longer, row by row. “It’s a Tale, is all. There are only short ones and long ones. Yours is the longest I know
.” Something, not a cat, began to unravel Mrs. Underhill’s fat ball of yarn. “Stop that, bold thing!” she said, and beat at it with a knitting needle she drew from behind her ear. She shook her head at Violet. “Not a moment’s peace in centuries.”
Violet got up and cupped her hand to Mrs. Underhill’s ear. Mrs. Underhill leaned close, grinning, ready for secrets. “Are they listening?” Violet whispered. Mrs. Underhill put her fingers to her lips. “I think not,”
she said.
“Then tell me truly,” Violet said. “How do you come to be here?”
Mrs. Underhill started in surprise. “I?” she said. “Whatever do you mean, child? I’ve been here all the time. It’s you who’ve been in motion.” She took up her whispering needles. “Use your sense.” She leaned back in her rocker; something caught beneath the tread shrieked, and Mrs. Underhill grinned maliciously.
“Not a moment’s peace,” she said, “in centuries.”
All Questions Answered
After his marriage, John Drinkwater began to retire, or retreat, more and more from an active life in architecture. The buildings he would have been called on to build came to seem to him at once heavy, obtuse, and lifeless, and at the same time ephemeral. He remained with the firm; he was constantly consulted, and his ideas and exquisite initial sketches (when reduced to ordinariness by his partners and their teams of engineers) continued to alter the cities of the east, but they were no longer his life’s work.
There were other schemes to occupy him. He designed a folding bed of astonishing ingenuity, in effect an entire bedroom disguised as or contained within a sort of wardrobe or armoire, which in a moment—a quick motion of brass catches and levers, a shift of heavy counterweighting—became the bed which made the bedroom a bedroom. He enjoyed that idea, a bedroom within the bedroom, and even patented his scheme, but the only buyer he ever found was his partner Mouse, who (chiefly as a favor) installed a few in his City apartments. And then there was the Cosmo-Opticon: he spent a happy year working on this with his friend the inventor Henry Cloud, the only man John Drinkwater had ever known who could actually sense the spin of the earth on its axis and its motion around the sun. The Cosmo-Opticon was an enormous, hideously expensive stained-glass-and-wrought-iron representation of the Zodiacal heavens and their movement, and the movement of the planets within them. And it did move: its owner could sit within it on a green plush seat, and as great weights fell and clockwork ticked over, the dome of many-colored glass would move just as the heavens did in their apparent motion. It was a measure of Drinkwater’s abstraction that he thought there would be a ready market for this strange toy among the wealthy.
