Little, Big

by John Crowley

  “Pretending?” Hawksquill said, following her.

  “Just to keep our interest up,” Sophie said. “Hope.”

  Hawksquill glanced back at them. Like the circle Blossom had tried to make, they were linked strongly, even in disorder, by their opposite hands. The end of them … She looked quickly away, and signalled reassuringly to the old woman she had sat by, who didn’t seem to see.

  In fact Marge Juniper didn’t see her, but it wasn’t fading eye-sight or failing attention that blinded her. She was only absorbed in thinking, as Sophie had abjured them, how she might walk to that place, and what she might take with her (a pressed flower, a shawl embroidered with the same kind of flowers, a locket containing a curl of black hair, an acrostic valentine on which the letters of her name headed sentiments faded now to sepia and insincerity) and how she might husband her strength until the day she should set out.

  For she knew what place it was that Sophie spoke of. Lately Marge’s memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life; its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her memory had grown incontinent with age; and she knew very well what place it was she was to go to. It was the place where, eighty-some years ago or yesterday, August Drinkwater had run off to; and the place also where she had remained when he had gone. It was the place all young hopes go when they have become old and we no longer feel them; the place where beginnings go when endings have come, and then themselves passed.

  Midsummer Day, she thought, and made to count out the days and weeks remaining until them; but she forgot what season this was she counted from, and so gave it up.

  Where Was She Headed?

  In the dining room Hawksquill came upon Smoky, loitering in the corner, seeming lost in his own house and at loose ends.

  “How,” she said to him, “do you understand all this, Mr. Barnable?”

  “Hm?” He took a time to focus on her. “Oh. I don’t. I don’t understand it.” He shrugged, not as though in apology but as though it were a position he found himself taking, one side of a question, the other side had lots to be said for it too. He looked away.

  “And how,” she said then, seeing she ought not to pursue that further, “is your orrery coming? Have you got it working?”

  This too seemed to be the wrong question. He sighed. “Not working,” he said. “All ready to go. Only not working.”

  “What’s the difficulty?”

  He thrust his hands in his pockets. “The difficulty is,” he said, “that it’s circular….”

  “Well, so are the Spheres,” Hawksquill said. “Or nearly.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Smoky said. “I mean that it depends on itself to go around. Depends on its going around to go around. You know. Perpetual Motion. It’s a perpetual motion machine, believe it or not.”

  “So are the Spheres,” Hawksquill said. “Or nearly.”

  “What I can’t understand,” Smoky said, growing more agitated as he contemplated this, and jingling the small objects he had in his pockets, screws, washers, coins, “is how someone like Henry Cloud, or Harvey either, could have come up with such a dumb idea. Perpetual motion. Everybody knows …” He looked at Hawksquill. “How does yours work,” he said, “by the way? What makes is go around?”

  “Well.” Hawksquill said, setting down the two coffee cups she carried on a sideboard, “not, I think the way yours does. Mine shows a different heavens, after all. Simpler, in many ways …”

  “Well, but how?” Smoky said. “Give me a hint.” He smiled, and Hawksquill thought, seeing him, that he had not often done so lately. She wondered how he had come among this family in the first place.

  “I can tell you this,” she said. “Whatever makes mine go around now, I have the definite impression that it was designed to go around by itself.”

  “By itself,” Smoky said doubtfully.

  “It couldn’t, though,” Hawksquill said. “Perhaps because it’s the wrong heavens, because it models a heavens that never did go by themselves, but were always moved by will: by angels, by gods. Mine are the old heavens. But yours are the new, the Newtonian, self-propelling, once-wound-up-forever-ticking type of heavens. Perhaps it does move by itself.”

  Smoky stared at her. “There’s a machine that looks like it’s supposed to drive it,” he said. “But it needs to be driven itself. It needs a push.”

  “Well,” Hawksquill said, “once properly set … I mean if it had the star’s motions, they’d be irresistible, wouldn’t they? Forever.” A strange light was dawning in Smoky’s eyes, a light that looked like pain to Hawksquill. She should shut up. A little learning. If she hadn’t felt Smoky to be effectively outside the scheme the rest of her cousins were proposing, which Hawksquill had no intention of furthering, she would not have added: “You may well have it backwards, Mr. Barnable. Drive and driven. The stars have power to spare.”

  She picked up her coffee cups, and when he reached out a hand to keep her, she showed them to him, nodded and escaped; his next question would be one she couldn’t answer without breaking old vows. But she wanted to have helped him. She felt, for some reason, the need of an ally here. Standing confused at a juncture of hallways (she had taken a wrong turning away from the dining room) she saw him hurrying away upstairs, and hoped she hadn’t set him on fruitlessly.

  Now where was it she was headed? She looked around herself, turning this way and that, the coffee cooling in her hands. Somewhere there was a murmur of voices.

  A turning, a juncture where many ways could be seen at once; a Vista. No memory mansion of her own was built more overlappingly, with more corridors, more places that were two places at once, more precise in its confusions, than this house. She felt it rise around her, John’s dream, Violet’s castle, tall and many-roomed. It took hold of her mind, as though it were in fact made of memory; she saw, and it swept her into a fearful clarity to see, that if this were her own mind’s house, all her conclusions would now be coming out quite differently; quite, quite differently.

  She had sat this night smiling among them, listening politely, as though she were attending someone else’s religious service, mistaken for a member of the congregation, feeling at once embarrassed at their sincerity and aloof from emotions she was glad not to share, and perhaps just a little sad to be excluded, it looked like fun to understand things so simply. But the house had meanwhile been all around them as it was all around her now, great, grave, certain and impatient: the house said it was not so, not so at all. The house said (and Hawksquill knew how to hear houses speak, it was her chief skill and great art, she only wondered how she had been deaf to this huge voice so long), the house said that it was not they, not Drinkwaters and Barnables and the rest, who had understood things too simply. She had thought that the great cards they played with had come to them by chance, a Grail stashed amusingly with the daily drinking cups, an historical accident. But the house didn’t believe in accidents; the house said she had been mistaken, again, and this time for the last time. As though while sitting aloof in some humble church, among ordinary parishioners who sang corny hymns, she had witnessed some concrete and terrible miracle or grace, she trembled in denial and fear: she could not have been so horribly mistaken, reason couldn’t bear it, it would turn dream and shatter, and in its shattering she would awake into some world, some house so strange, so new….

  She heard Daily Alice call to her, from an unexpected direction. She heard the coffee cups she still held rattling faintly in their saucers. She composed herself, took courage, and pulled herself out of the tangle of the imaginary drawing-room where she had got stuck.

  “You’ll stay the night, won’t you, Ariel?” Alice said. “The imaginary bedroom’s made up, and …”

  “No,” Hawksquill said. She delivered Marge’s coffee to her where she still sat. The old woman took it abstrac
tedly, and it seemed to Hawksquill that she wept, or had been weeping, though perhaps it was only the watering of aged eyes. “No, it’s very kind of you, but I must leave. I have to meet a train north of here. I should be on it now, but I managed to get away to here first.”

  “Well, couldn’t you …”

  “No,” Hawksquill said. “It’s a Presidential train. Waiting on princes, you know. He’s taking one of his tours. I don’t know why he bothers. He’s either shot at, or ignored. Still.”

  The guests were leaving, pulling on heavy coats and ear-flap hats. Many stopped to talk with Sophie; Hawksquill saw that one of these, an old man, wept too as he talked, and that Sophie embraced him.

  “They’ll all go, then?” she asked Alice.

  “I think,” Alice said. “Mostly. We’ll see, won’t we?”

  Her eyes on Hawksquill, so clear and brown, so full of serene complicity, made Hawksquill look away, afraid that she too would stutter and weep. “My bag,” she said. “I’ll get it, then I must go. Must.”

  The drawing-rooms where they had all met were empty now, except for the dim figure of the old woman, drinking her coffee in tiny sips like a clockwork figure. Hawksquill took up her purse. Then she saw that the cards still lay spread out beneath the lamp.

  The end of their story. But not of hers; not if she could help it.

  She glanced up quickly. She could hear Alice and Sophie, saying goodbye to guests at the front door. Marge’s eyes were closed. Almost without thinking she turned her back to Marge, snapped open the purse, and swept the cards into it. They burned the fingertips that touched them like ice. She snapped the purse shut and turned to leave. She saw Alice standing in the drawing-room door, looking at her.

  “Goodbye, then,” Hawksquill said briskly, her icy heart thudding, feeling as helpless as a naughty child in a grown-up’s grip who’s yet unable to quit his tantrum.

  “Goodbye,” Alice said, standing aside to let her pass. “Good luck with the President. We’ll see you soon.”

  Hawksquill didn’t look at her, knowing that she would read her crime in Alice’s eyes, and more too that she wanted even less to see. There was an escape from this, there had to be; if wit couldn’t find it, power must make it. And it was too late now for her to think of anything but escape.

  Too Simple to Say

  Daily Alice and Sophie watched from the front door as Hawksquill climbed quickly, as though pursued, into her car, and gunned the motor. The car leapt forward like a steed, and arrowed out between the stone gateposts and into the night and fog.

  “Late for her train,” Alice said.

  “Do you think she’ll come, though?” Sophie said.

  “Oh,” Alice said, “she will. She will.”

  They turned away from the night, and shut the door. “But Auberon,” Sophie said. “Auberon, and George …”

  “It’s okay, Sophie,” Alice said.

  “But …”

  “Sophie,” Alice said. “Will you come sit up with me a while? I’m not going to sleep.”

  Alice’s face was calm, and she smiled, but Sophie heard an appeal, even something like a fear. She said, “Sure, Alice.”

  “How about the library?” Alice said. “Nobody will go in there.”

  “Okay.” She followed Alice into the great dark room; Alice lit a single lamp with a kitchen match and turned it low. Out the windows the fog seemed to contain dull lights, but nothing else could be seen. “Alice?” she said.

  Alice seemed to wake from thought, and faced her sister.

  “Alice, did you know all what I was going to say, tonight?”

  “Oh; most of it, I guess.”

  “Did you? How long ago?”

  “I don’t know. In a way,” she said, sitting slowly on one end of the long leather chesterfield, “in a way I think I always knew it; and it just kept getting clearer. Except when …”

  “When?”

  “When it got darker. When—well, when things didn’t seem to be going as you thought they would, or even the opposite. Times when—when it all seemed taken away.”

  Sophie turned away, though her sister had spoken only with a deep thoughtfulness, and in no way in reproach; she knew what times it was that Alice spoke of, and grieved that she had, even for a day, for an hour, deflected her certainties. And all so long ago!

  “Afterwards, though,” Alice said, “when things seemed, you know, to make sense again, they made an even bigger sense. And it seemed funny that you could ever have thought it wasn’t all right, that you could have been fooled. Isn’t that right? Wasn’t it like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said.

  “Come sit,” Alice said. “Wasn’t it like that with you?”

  “No.” She sat by Alice, and Alice pulled a multi-colored afghan, Tacey’s work, over the two of them; it was cold in the fireless room. “I think it just kept making less sense ever since I was little.” So hard to speak of it, after so many years of silence; once, years ago, they had chatted about it endlessly, not making sense and not caring to, mixing it with their dreams and with the games they played, knowing so surely how to understand it because they made no distinction between it and their desires, for comfort, for adventure, for wonder. Very suddenly she was visited with a memory, as vivid and as whole as though present, of her and Alice naked, and their uncle Auberon, at the place on the edge of the woods. For so long had her memories of those things come to be in effect replaced by Auberon’s photographs that recorded them, beautiful pale and still, that to have one return in all its fullness took her breath away: heat, and certainty, and wonder, in the deep real summer of childhood. “Oh, why,” she said, “why couldn’t we have just gone then, when we knew? When it would have been so easy?”

  Alice took her hand under the comforter. “We could have,” she said. “We could have gone any time. When we did go is the Tale.”

  She added after a time: “But it won’t be easy.” Her words alerted Sophie, and she took her sister’s hand more tightly. “Sophie,” Alice said, “you said Mid-summer Day.”

  “Yes.”

  “But—all right,” Alice said. “Only. I have to go sooner.”

  Sophie raised her head from the sofa, not relinquishing her sister’s hand, and afraid. “What?” she said.

  “I,” Alice said, “have to go sooner.” She glanced at Sophie, and then away; a glance Sophie knew meant that Alice was telling her now a thing she had long known about and had kept a secret.

  “When?” Sophie said, or whispered.

  “Now,” Alice said.

  “No,” Sophie said.

  “Tonight,” Alice said, “or this morning. That’s why—that’s why I wanted you to sit with me, because …”

  “But why?” Sophie said.

  “I can’t say, Sophie.”

  “No, Alice, no, but …”

  “It’s okay, Soph,” Alice said, smiling at her sister’s bafflement. “We’re all to go, all of us; only I have to go sooner. That’s all.”

  Sophie stared at her, a very strange thought invading her, invading her wide eyes and open mouth and hollowed heart: strange, because she had heard Lilac say it, and had read it in the cards, and then spoken of it to all her cousins, but had only now come to truly think it. “We are going, then,” she said.

  Alice nodded, a tiny nod.

  “It’s all true,” Sophie said. Her sister, calm or at least not shaken, ready or seeming to be, grew huge before Sophie’s eyes. “All true.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Alice.” Alice, grown so great before her, frightened her. “Oh, but Alice, don’t. Wait. Don’t go now, not so soon….” “I have to,” Alice said.

  “But then I’ll be left, and … everybody …” She threw off the comforter and stood to plead. “No, don’t go without me, wait!”

  “I have to, Sophie, because … Oh, I can’t say it, it’s too strange to say, or too simple. I have to go, because if I don’t, there won’t be any place to go to. For you, and everybody
.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sophie said.

  Alice laughed, a small laugh like a sob. “I don’t either, yet. But. Soon.”

  “But all alone,” Sophie said. “How can you?”

  Alice said nothing to that, and Sophie bit her lip that she’d said it. Brave! A huge love, a love like deepest pity, filled her up, and she took Alice’s hand again; she sat again beside her. Somewhere in the house, a clock rang a small morning hour, and the bells stabbed one by one through Sophie. “Are you afraid?” she said, unable not to.

  “Just sit with me awhile,” Alice said. “It’s not long till dawn.”

  Far above them then there were footsteps, quick ones, heavy. They both looked up. The steps went overhead, down a hall, and then came rapidly and noisily down the stairs. Alice squeezed Sophie’s hand, in a way that Sophie understood, though what she understood Alice to be telling her by it shocked her more deeply than anything her sister had so far said.

  Smoky opened the door of the library, and gave a start seeing the two women on the sofa.

  “Hey, still up?” he said. His breath was labored. Sophie was sure he would read her stricken face, but he didn’t seem to; he went to the lamp, picked it up, and began going around the library, peering at the dark-burdened shelves.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know,” he said, “whereabouts the ephemeris might be?”

  “The what?” Alice said.

  “Ephemeris,” he said, pulling out a book, pushing it back. “The big red book that gives the positions of the planets. For every date. You know.”

  “You used to look at it when we were stargazing?”

  “Right.” He turned to them. He was still faintly panting, and seemed in the grip of a fierce excitement. “No guesses?” He held aloft the lamp. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “I don’t, yet. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. The only thing crazy enough to make sense.”

  He waited for them to question him, and at last Alice said, “What.”

  “The orrery,” he said. “It’ll work.”