Little, Big

by John Crowley

  She blinked, smacking her lips, wondering what it was.

  “Sleepy,” said Mrs. Underhill.

  For Lilac had just yawned her first yawn. Her second came soon after. She put her cheek against the rough stuff of Mrs. Underhill’s broad cloak, and, Somehow no longer unwilling, closed her eyes.

  Hidden Ones Revealed

  When he was very young, Auberon had begun a collection of postmarks. On a trip with Doc to the post office in Meadowbrook, he had begun idly examining the wastebaskets, having nothing else to do, and had immediately come up with two treasures: envelopes from places that seemed fantastically distant to him, and looking remarkably crisp for having come so far.

  It soon developed into a small passion, like Lily’s for bird’s nests. He insisted on accompanying whoever was traveling near a post office; he conned his friends’ mail; he gloated over distant cities, far states whose names begin with I, and, rarest of all, names from across the sea.

  Then one day Joy Flowers, whose granddaughter had lived abroad for a year, gave him a fat brown bag full of envelopes sent her from every part of the world. He could hardly find on the map a place which had not stamped its name on one of these pieces of blue flimsy. Some of them came from places so distant they weren’t even in the alphabet he knew. And at a stroke his collection was complete, and his pleasure in it over. No discovery he could make in Meadowbrook’s post office could add to it. He never looked at it again.

  It was the same with old Auberon’s photographs, when at last young Auberon discovered them to be more than a record of a large family’s long life. Beginning with the last, of a beardless Smoky in a white suit beside the birdbath made of dwarves which still stood by the Summer House door, he had dipped tentatively, then sorted curiously, and at last hunted greedily through the thousands of pictures big and small, elated with wonder and horror (here! Here was the secret, the hidden ones revealed, each image worth a thousand words) and for a week was almost unable to speak to his family for fear of revealing what he had learned—or rather thought he was about to learn.

  For in the end the pictures illuminated nothing, because nothing illuminated them.

  “Note thumb,” old Auberon would write on the back of a dim view of gray and black shrubbery. And there was, in the undisentanglable convolvulus, something that looked very much like a thumb. Good. Evidence. Another, though, would annul this evidence entirely, because (with only speechless exclamation marks on its back) here was an entire figure, a ghostly little miss in the leaves, with a trailing skirt of dew-glistening cobweb, pretty as a picture; and in the foreground, out of focus, the excited figure of a blond human child looking at the camera and pointing out the wee stranger. Now who could believe that? And if it was true (it couldn’t be, how it had been faked Auberon had no idea, but it was just too stupidly real not to be fake) then what good was the maybe-a-thumb-in-the-shrubbery and a thousand others just as obscure? When he had sorted a dozen boxes into the few impossible and the many unintelligible, and saw that there were dozens of boxes and portfolios yet to go, he shut them all up (with a mixed sense of relief and loss) and rarely thought about them again.

  He never again opened the old five-year diary in which his own notes had been made either, after that. He returned the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses to its place in the library. His own humble discoveries, or what had seemed like discoveries—the orrery, a few interesting slips of the tongue made by his great-aunt and his grandmother—heart-startling as they had once seemed, had been swamped by the thick flood of torturous pictures and worse notes on them which his namesake had made. He forgot about it all. His secret-agentry was over.

  His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one. (It often happens so with secret agents.) The secret that was not revealed in Auberon’s photographs lay, if it lay anywhere, in the hearts of his relatives; and Auberon had for so long pretended to know what they all knew (so that they would reveal it to him by accident) that he came to suppose he did know it as well as any of them; and like his evidences, and about the same time, he forgot about it. And since, if they had ever really known anything that he didn’t know, they too had all forgotten it or seemed to have forgotten it, then they were all equal and he was one of them. He even felt, just below consciousness, that he was aligned with all the rest of them in a conspiracy that excluded only his father: Smoky didn’t know, and didn’t know they knew he didn’t know. Somehow, rather than separating them from him, this joined them to Smoky all the more, as though they kept from him the secret of a surprise party planned for Smoky himself. And so for a while Auberon’s relations with his father grew a little easier.

  But even though he stopped scrutinizing others’ motives and movements, a habit of secrecy about his own persisted in Auberon. He often put false faces over his actions, for no good reason. Certainly it wasn’t to mystify; even as a secret agent he hadn’t wanted to mystify anybody, a secret agent’s task is just the reverse of that. If he had a reason at all, it may have been only a desire to present himself in a milder, clearer light than he might otherwise have appeared in: milder and clearer than the dim-flaring lamps by which he perceived himself.

  “Where are you off to in such a tear?” Daily Alice asked him as he wolfed his milk and cookies at the kitchen table after school. He was in this autumn the last Barnable still a scholar in Smoky’s school. Lucy had stopped going the year before.

  “Play ball,” he said, his mouth full. “With John Wolf and those guys.”

  “Oh.” She half-refilled the glass he held out to her. Good lord he had gotten big lately. “Well, tell John to tell his mother I’ll be over tomorrow with some soup and things, and see what she needs.” Auberon kept his eyes on his cookies. “Is she feeling any better, do you know?” He shrugged. “Tacey said … oh, well.” It seemed unlikely from Auberon’s air that he would go tell John Wolf that Tacey had said his mother was dying. Probably her simple message wouldn’t even be passed. But she couldn’t be sure. “What do you play?”

  “Catcher,” he said quickly. “Usually.”

  “I was a catcher,” Alice said. “Usually.”

  Auberon put down the glass, slowly, thinking. “Do you think,” he said, “that people are happier when they’re alone, or with other people?”

  She carried his glass and plate to the sink. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess … Well, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just wondered if …” What he wondered was whether it was a fact everyone knew, every grown-up anyway: that everyone is of course happiest alone, or the reverse, whichever it was. “I guess I’m happier with other people,” he said.

  “Oh yes?” She smiled; since she faced the sink, he couldn’t see her. “That’s nice,” she said. “An extrovert.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well,” Alice said softly, “I just hope you don’t creep back in your shell again.”

  He was already on his way out, stuffing extra cookies in his pockets, and didn’t stop, but a strange window had suddenly been flung open within him. Shell? Had he been in a shell? And—odder still—had he been seen to be in one, was it common knowledge? He looked through this window and saw himself for a moment, for the first time, as others saw him. Meanwhile his feet had taken him out the broad swinging doors of the kitchen, which grump-grumped behind him in their way, and through the raisin-odorous pantry, and out through the stillness of the long dining room, going toward his imaginary ball-game.

  Alice at the sink looked up, and saw an autumn leaf blown by the casement, and called out to Auberon. She could hear his footsteps receding (his feet had grown even faster than the rest of him) and she picked up his jacket from the chair where he had left it, and went after him.

  He was gone out of sight on his bike by the time she got out the front door. She called again, going down the porch stairs; and then noticed that
she was outdoors, for the first time that day, and that the air was clear and tangy and large, and that she was aimless. She looked around herself. She could just see, extending beyond the corner of the house, a bit of the walled garden around the other side. On the stone ornament at its corner a crow was perched. It looked at her looking around herself—she couldn’t remember ever having seen one so close to the house before, they were fearless but wary—and flopped from its perch, and flapped with heavy wings away over the park. Cras, eras: that’s what Smoky said crows say in Latin. Cras, cras: “tomorrow, tomorrow.”

  She walked around the walled garden. Its little arched door stood ajar, inviting her in, but she didn’t go in. She went around to the funny little walk bordered by hydrangeas that had once been in training to be ornamental shrubs, tall and orderly and cabbage-headed, but which had declined over the years into mere hydrangeas, and smothered the walk they were supposed to border, and obscured the view they were supposed to exhibit: two Doric pillars, leading to the path that went up the Hill. Still aimless, Alice walked along that walk (brushing from the last hydrangea blossoms a shower of papery petals like faded confetti) and started up the Hill.

  Glory

  Auberon circled back along the road that ran around Edgewood’s guardian stone wall, and at a certain point, dismounted. He climbed the wall (a fallen tree there and a weedy hummock on the other side made a stile) and hauled his bike over, wheeled it through the rustling gilded beechwood to the path, mounted again, and, glancing behind him, rode to the Summer House. He concealed the bike in the shed old Auberon had built.

  The Summer House, warmed by September sun poured in through its big windows, was still and dusty. On the table where once his diary and spying equipment had lain, and where later he had sorted through Auberon’s pictures, there lay now a mass of scribbled-over papers, the sixth volume of Gregorovius’s Medieval Rome, a few other large books, and a map of Europe.

  Auberon studied the top sheet, which he had written the day before:

  The scene is in the Emperor’s tent outside Iconium. The Emperor is seated alone in an X-kind of chair. His sword is across his knees. He is wearing his armor but some of it has been taken off, and a servant is slowly polishing it, and sometimes he looks at the Emperor, but the emperor just looks straight ahead and doesn’t notice him. The emperor looks tired.

  He considered this, and then mentally crossed out the last sentence. Tired wasn’t what he meant at all. Anybody can look tired. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the eve of his last battle looked … well, what? Auberon uncapped his pen, thought, and recapped it again.

  His play or screenplay (it might end up either, or be transmogrified into a novel) about the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had in it Saracens and papal armies, Sicilian guerillas and potent paladins and princesses too. A congeries of romantic place-names where battles were fought by mobs of romantic personages. But what Auberon loved in these doings wasn’t anything that could be called romantic. In fact all that he wrote was only to bring forth that figure, that single figure on a chair: a figure seen in a moment of repose snatched between two desperate actions, exhausted after victory or defeat, hard clothes stained with war and wear. Above all it was a gaze: a calm, appraising look, without illusions, the look of someone coming to see that the odds against a course of action were insurmountable but the pressures to execute it irresistible. He was indifferent to the weather around him, and as Auberon described it, it was like him: harsh, indifferent, without warmth. His landscape was empty, save for a far tower with an aspect like his own, and perhaps a distant muffled rider bearing news.

  Auberon had a name for all this: Glory. If it wasn’t what was meant by Glory, he didn’t care. His plot—who was to be master, that’s all—didn’t really much interest him; he was never able to grasp just what the Pope and Barbarossa were arguing about anyway. If someone had asked him (but no one would, his project had been begun in secrecy and years later would be burned in secrecy) what it was that had drawn him to this particular emperor, he wouldn’t have been able to say. A harsh ring in the name. The picture of him old, mounted, armed, on his last futile crusade (all crusades were futile to young Auberon). And then swept away by chance in that armor under the waters of a nameless Armenian river when his charger shied in the middle of the ford. Glory.

  “The Emperor doesn’t look tired exactly, but …”

  He marked this out too, angrily, and recapped his pen again. His huge ambition to delineate seemed suddenly insupportable, as though he might weep that he had to bear it alone.

  I just hope you don’t creep back into your shell.

  But he had worked so hard to make that shell look just like him. He thought everyone had been fooled, and they hadn’t been.

  Dust swam in the sunlight still being cast into weighty blocks by the windows of the Summer House, but the place was growing chilly. Auberon put his pen away. Behind him on the shelves, old Auberon’s boxes and portfolios stared at the back of his head. Would it always be so? Always a shell, always secrets? For his own secrets seemed likely to separate him from the rest of them as surely as any secret they had kept from him could have. And all he wanted was to be the Barbarossa he imagined: without illusions, without confusions, without shameful secrets: ferocious sometimes, embittered maybe, but all of a piece from breast to back.

  He shivered. What had become of his jacket, anyway?

  Not Yet

  His mother was drawing it over her shoulders as she climbed the hill, thinking: Who plays baseball in weather like this? Young maples along the path, surrendering early, had already flamed beside still-green sisters and brothers. Wasn’t this football or soccer weather? An extrovert, she thought, and smiled and shook her head: the glad hand, the easy smile. Oh dear … Since her children had stopped growing up quite so fast, the seasons had started going by Daily Alice faster: once, her children were different people in spring and fall, so much learning and sensing and laughing and weeping were packed into their age-long summers. She had hardly noticed that this fall had come. Maybe because she had only one child now to be readied for school. One and Smoky. Practically dutiless on autumn mornings with only one lunch to make, one sleepy body to chivvy from bath to breakfast, one bookstrap and one pair of boots to find.

  And yet, as she went up the Hill, she felt huge duties calling to her.

  She reached the stone table at the peak of the Hill, a little out of breath, and sat on the stone bench by it. Beneath it—a sorry mess, decayed and autumnal-looking—she glimpsed the pretty straw hat that Lucy had lost in June and mourned all summer. Seeing it, she felt sharply her children’s fragility, their danger, their helplessness before loss, before pain, before ignorance. She named them in order in her mind: Tacey, Lily, Lucy, Auberon. They rang like bells of different pitch, some truer than others, but all answering her pull: they were fine, really, all four, just as she always told Mrs. Wolf or Marge Juniper or whoever else inquired after them: “They’re fine.” No: the duties she felt calling her (and she felt them more intensely now, seated in the sunlight above a wide landscape) didn’t have to do with them, or with Smoky either. They had, Somehow, to do with that path upward, and this windy hill-top, and that sky raddled with fast-moving, pigeon-feather gray-and-white cloud, and this young autumn full (as every autumn so strangely is) of hope and expectation.

  The feeling was intense, as though she were being drawn in or swept away; she sat motionless in its grip, marveling and a little frightened, expecting it to pass in a moment, like sensations of déjà vu. But it didn’t pass.

  “What?” she said to the day. “What is it?”

  Mute, the day couldn’t answer: but it seemed to gesture to her, to tug at her familiarly, as though it had mistaken her for someone else. It seemed, and it would not stop seeming, just about to turn all at once to face in her direction, having heard her voice—as though she had all this time been looking at the wrong or back side of it (and of everything, always) and was now about to see it plain, a
s it really was: and it she, too: and still it couldn’t speak.

  “Oh, what,” Daily Alice said, not knowing she spoke. She felt that she was dissolving helplessly into what she beheld, and at the same time had grown imperious enough to command it in every part; light enough to fly, yet so heavy that not the stone bench but the whole stone hill was her seat; awed, yet for some reason not surprised as she came to know what was being asked of her, what she was summoned to.

  “No,” she said in reply; “no,” she said, softly, as she might have to a child who had by mistake taken hold of her hand or the skirt of her dress, thinking her its mother, turning up to her, inquiringly, its wondering face. “No.”

  “Turn away,” she said, and the day did.

  “Not yet,” she said, and rang the bells of her children’s names again. Tacey Lily Lucy Auberon. Smoky. Too much, too much yet to do; and yet there would come a time when, no matter how much was left to do, no matter how her daily duties had grown or shrunk away, a time when she could no longer refuse. She wasn’t unwilling, or afraid, though she thought that when the time came she would be afraid, and yet could not refuse…. Astonishing, astonishing that there could be no end to growing bigger, she had thought years ago that she had grown so huge that she could grow no more, and yet she hadn’t even begun. But: “Not yet, not yet,” she said, as the day turned away; “not yet, there’s too much to do still; please, not yet.”

  The Black Crow (or someone like him), far off invisible through the turning trees, called its call, heading home.

  Cras. Cras.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

  —Milton

  What Smoky liked about his girls’ growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives: when they were kids, their lives and concerns—Tacey’s rabbits and music, Lily’s bird’s-nests and boy-friends, Lucy’s bewilderments—could all fit within the compass of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him than ever, and he liked that. What he didn’t like about their growing up was the same thing: that it forced him to grow, to enlarge, sometimes beyond what he felt the character he had come over the years to be encased in could stand.