Little, Big

Book Three - OLD LAW FARM

I.

Those who had the entrée

entered the private apartments by

the mirror-door that gave onto

the gallery and was kept shut. It was

only opened when one scratched at it,

and was closed again immediately.

—Saint-Simon

Twenty-five years passed.

On a night late in the autumn, George Mouse stepped out the window of what had been the third-floor library of his townhouse and through a small covered bridge, which connected his window with the window of what had once been a kitchen in a tenement that adjoined his building. The ex-kitchen was dark and cold; George Mouse's breath was manifest in the light of his lantern. As he walked, rats or mice moved away from him and his light, he heard their scratches and rustlings but saw nothing. Without opening a door (there hadn't been a door for years) he went out into the hallway and started carefully down the stairs, carefully because the stairs were rotten and loose where they weren't missing altogether.


Keeping People Out

On the floor below there were light and laughter; people greeted him as they went in and out of apartments with the makings of a communal dinner; children chased along the halls. But the first floor was dark again, unused now except for storage. George, holding his lantern aloft, peered down along the dark hall to the outer door, and could see its great bar in place, its chains and locks secure. He went around the stairs to the door which led to the basement, taking Out as he went an enormous bunch of keys. One, specially marked, dark as an old penny, unlocked the ancient Segal lock of the basement.

Every time he opened the basement door, George fretted over whether he shouldn't put a nice new padlock on it; this old lock was a toy by now, an elder's grip, anyone could break it. He always decided that a new lock would only make people wonder, and a shoulder against the door would satisfy curiosity, new padlock or no.

Oh, they had all grown very circumspect in this matter of keeping people out.

Down, the stairs, even more carefully, God knew what lived down here amid the rusted pipe and old boilers and fabulous detritus, he had once stepped on something large, soft and dead and nearly broken his neck. At the bottom of the stairs he hung up his lantern, went to a corner, and maneuvered an old trunk so that he could stand on it and reach a high, ratproof shelf.

He had had the gift, predicted long ago by Great-aunt Cloud (left him by a stranger, and not money), for a long time before he learned how he could have come by it. Even before he learned, he was in his Mouse way secretive about it, the result of growing up on the street and youngest in a nosy family. Everyone admired the potent, musky hashish George seemed always to be provided with, and all desired to have some; but he would not (could not) introduce them to his dealer (who was long dead). He kept everyone happy with free bits, and the pipe was always full at his place; but though sometimes, after a few pipes of it, he would look around at his stupefied company and feel guilt for his gloating, and his great, his hilarious, his astonishing secret would burn within him to be spilt, he never told, not a soul.

It was Smoky who, inadvertently, revealed to George the source of his great good fortune. "I read somewhere," Smoky said (his usual entry into conversation), "that oh fifty or sixty years ago, your neighborhood was a Middle Eastern neighborhood. Lots of Lebanese. And the little candy stores and places like that sold hashish, right out in the open. You know, along with the toffee and halvah. For a nickel, you could buy a lot. Big hunks. Like chocolate bars."

And indeed they were very much like chocolate bars. . . . George had felt like a cartoon mouse suddenly struck over the head with the great, well-worn mallet of Revelation.

Ever afterward, when he went down to take from his hoard, he had imagined himself a goat-bearded Levantine, hooknosed and skull-capped, a secret pederast who gave free baklava to the olive boys of the streets. Fussily he would arrange the old trunk and climb on it (lifting the frayed skirts of an imaginary dressing gown) and lift the lid of the wooden crate stenciled with curling letters.

Not much left. Time to reorder soon.

Beneath a thick covering of silvered paper, layer upon layer of lay. The layers were separated by yellow oiled paper. The bars themselves were wrapped tightly too in a third sort of oily paper. He took out two, considered a moment, and put one reluctantly back. It would not, though he had exclaimed so in awe many years ago when he had discovered what it was, last forever. He replaced the layer of oiled paper and then the layer of silvered paper; he drew back on the stout lid, and pushed in place the ancient shapeless nails; he blew across it to resettle the dust. He got down, and studied the bar in the lantern's light as he had the very first by electric light. He peeled away its paper carefully. It was as black as chocolate, and about the size of a playing card, an eighth of an inch thin. It bore on it a convolute impress: A trademark? Tax stamp? Mystic sign? He had never decided.

He pushed the trunk he had used for a stepladder back into its place in the corner, took up the lantern and started up the stairs. In his cardigan pocket was a piece of hashish something like a hundred years old, and, George Mouse had long ago decided, not reduced in potency by age at all. Improved, perhaps, like vintage port.


News from Home

He was relocking the cellar door when there came a pounding at the street door, so sudden and unexpected that he cried out. He waited a moment, hoping it was some madman's momentary whim and wouldn't come again. But it did. He went to the door, listened at it without speaking, and heard frustrated cursing outside. Then, with a growl, the someone grabbed at the bars and began to shake them.

"That's no use, that's no use," George called. The shaking stopped.

"Well, open the door."

"What?" It was a habit of George's, when stuck for an answer, to act as though he hadn't heard the question.

"Open the door!"

"Now, you know I can't just open the door, man. You know what it's like."

"Well, listen. Can you tell me which of these buildings is number two-twenty-two?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Why does everybody in this city answer everything with a question?"

"Huh?"

"Why can't you open the door and talk to me like a god DAMN human being?"

Silence. The horrid depths of frustration in that outcry touched George's heart, and he listened at the door to see if there would be more; he tingled secretly at the safety he felt behind the door's fastness.

"Can you tell me," the someone began, and George could hear his rage strangled down into politeness, "please, where I can find, or if you know, the Mouse house or George Mouse?"

"Yes," George said. "I am him." That was risky, but surely even the most desperate bill-collectors and process-servers weren't abroad this late. "Who are you?"

"My name is Auberon Barnable. My father . . ." But already the clankings and scrapings of locks and shootings of bolts drowned him out. George reached into the darkness and pulled the person standing on the threshold into the hall. With quick skill he reslammed and barred and bolted the door, and then raised his lamp to look at his cousin.

"So you're the baby," he said, noting with perverse pleasure how ill this remark sat on the tall youth. The moving lantern made his expression changeful, but it wasn't really a changeful face; it was narrow and tight; in fact the whole of him, slim and neat as a pen in pipe-rack black clothes that fit him well, was somewhat rigid and aloof. Just pissed off, George thought. He laughed, and patted his arm. "Hey, how's the folks? How's Elsie, Lacy, and Tilly, whatever their names are? What brings you here?"

"Dad wrote," Auberon said, as though unwilling to waste effort answering all this if it had already been done.

"Oh yeah? Well, you know how the mail's been. Look, look. Come on. We don't have to stand in the hall. Colder than a witch's tit here. Coffee and something?"

Smoky's son shrugged shortly. "Be careful on the stairs," George said, and the lamplight threaded them both back through the tenement and over the little bridge till they stood together on the threadbare rug where Auberon's parents had first met.

Somewhere along their route, George had picked up an old three-and-a-half-legged kitchen chair. "Did you run away from home? Have a seat," he said, motioning Auberon to a tattered wingback.

"My father and mother know I left, if that's what you mean," Auberon said, a bit haughtily, which was understandable, George thought. Then he shrank back in the chair: George had with a grunt and a wild look raised the broken chair over his head, and, his face twisted with exertion, brought it down on the stone hearth. It fell clattering to pieces. "Did they approve?" George asked, tossing the chair-parts into the fire.

"Of course." Auberon crossed his legs and plucked at his trouser-knee. "He wrote. I told you. He said to look you up."

"Oh, yeah. Did you walk?"

"No." With some contempt.

"And you came to the City to . . ."

"To seek my fortune."

"Aha." George hung a kettle over the fire and took down a precious can of contraband coffee from a bookshelf. "Any glimpse yet what form it might take?"

"No, not exactly. Only. . ." George mmm-hmmm'd encouragingly as he prepared the coffeepot and set out mismatched cups. "I wanted, I want to write, or be a writer." George raised his eyebrows. Auberon was twisted around in the wing-back chair as though these admissions were escaping him against his will, and he were trying to hold them in. "I thought television."

"Wrong coast."

"What?"

"They do all that television out on the Sunny, the Golden, the West Coast." Auberon locked his right foot behind his left calf and declined to answer this. George, searching for something in the bookshelves and drawers and beating his many pockets, wondered how that antique desire could have made its way to Edgewood. Odd how the young take to these dying trades so hopefully. When he was young, when the last poets were prattling incommunicado, glowworms gone out in their dells of dew, boys of twenty-one set out to be poets. . . . At length he found what he was looking for: a gift-shop dagger-shaped letter-opener chased with enamel which he had found years ago in an abandoned apartment and sharpened to a fine edge. "Takes a lot of ambition, that television," he said, "and drive, and the failures are many." He poured water into the coffeepot.

"How would you know?" his cousin said swiftly, as though he had heard that adult wisdom often before.

"Because," George said, "I haven't got those qualities, and I haven't failed in that field cause I don't, to wit, QED. Coffee's running through." The boy didn't crack a smile. George put the coffeepot on a trivet that bore a joke in Pennsylvania Dutch argot, and broke out a tin box of cookies, mostly broken. He also took from his cardigan pocket the brown square of hashish. "Like a taste?" he said, not at all grudgingly, he thought, showing Auberon the square. "Best Lebanese. I think."

"I don't use drugs."

"Oh, aha."

Judging nicely, George cut off a corner with his Florentine instrument, pierced the fragment with its point, and dunked it in his cup. He sat turning the knife in the cup and looking at his cousin, who was blowing on his coffee with single-minded intensity. Ah, it was lovely to be old and gray, and to have learned to ask neither for too much nor too little. "So," he said. He lifted the knife from his coffee to see that the fragment had nearly dissolved. "Tell us your history."

Auberon was mum.

"Come on, let's have it." He slurped the fragrant brew eagerly. "News from home."

It took a deal of questioning, but as the night wore down, Auberon did speak phrases, yield anecdotes. It was enough for George; his laced coffee finished, he heard a whole life in Auberon's sentences, complete with amusing detail and odd conjunctions; pathos, even magic, even. He found himself looking into his cousin's closed heart as into the halved shell of a coiled and chambered nautilus.


What George Mouse Heard

He'd left Edgewood early, awakening just before dawn, as he'd intended to—it was an ability he shared with his mother, that he could wake when he chose. He lit a lamp; it would be another hour or two before Smoky shuffled down to the basement to start up the generator. There was a trembling tightness around his diaphragm, as though something struggled for release or escape there. He knew the phrase "butterflies in your stomach," but is one of those people to whom phrases like that communicate nothing. He has had butterflies in his stomach as he'd had the willies, and the jitters; more than once he has been beside himself; but has always thought these experiences were his alone, and never knew they were so common as to have names. His ignorance allowed him to compose poetry about the weird feelings he felt, a handful of typewritten pages which as soon as he was dressed in the neat black suit he put carefully into the green canvas knapsack along with his other clothes, his toothbrush, what else? An antique Gillette, four bars of soap, a copy of Brother North-wind's Secret, and the testamentary stuff for the lawyers.

He walked through the sleeping house for what he solemnly imagined was the last time, on his way to an unknown destiny. The house seemed in fact to be quite restless, tossing and turning in an unquiet half-dream, opening its eyes, startled, as he passed. A watery, wintery light lay along the corridors; the imaginary rooms and halls were real in the gloom.

"You look as though you hadn't shaved," Smoky said uncertainly when Auberon came into the kitchen. "You want some oatmeal?"

"I didn't want to wake up everybody, running the water and everything. I don't think I can eat."

Smoky went on fussing with the old wood stove anyway. It always amazed Auberon as a child to see his father go to bed at night in this house and then appear at his desk in the schoolhouse next morning as though translated, or as though there were two of him. The first time he got up early enough to catch his father with frowzy hair and a plaid robe, on his way between sleep and school, it was as though he had caught out a conjurer; but in fact Smoky always made his own breakfast, and though for years the glossy white electric range has stood cold and useless in the corner, like a proud old housekeeper unwillingly retired, and Smoky was as unhandy with fires as he was about most things, he went on doing it; it only meant he had to get up earlier to begin.

Auberon, growing impatient with his father's patience, bent down before the stove and got it angrily flaming in a moment; Smoky stood behind him, hands in his robe pockets, admiring; and in a while they sat opposite each other with bowls of oatmeal, and coffee too, a gift from George Mouse in the City.

They sat for a moment, hands in laps, looking not into each other's eyes but into the brown Brazilian eyes of the two coffee cups together; and then Smoky, with an apologetic cough, got up and got the brandy bottle from a high shelf. "It's a long walk," he said, and spiked the coffee.

Smoky?

Yes; George could see that there could well have grown in him in the last years a sort of constriction of feeling sometimes that a nip can untangle. No problem really; just a nip, so he can begin to ask Auberon if he's sure he has enough money, if he's got Grandpa's agents' address and George Mouse's address and all the legal instruments and so on about the inheritance and so on. And yes he does.

Even after Doc died, his stories continued to be published in the City's evening paper—George read them even before he read the funnies. Besides these posthumous stories squirreled away like winter nuts, Doc left a mess of affairs as thick and entangling as any briar patch; lawyers and agents pursued his intentions there, and might for years. Auberon had a special interest in these thorny matters because Doc had specified a bequest to him, enough to live for a year or so and write unhampered. Doc had hoped, actually—though he was too shy to say so—that his grandson and the best friend of his last years might take up the little adventures, though Auberon was at a disadvantage there—he would have to make them up, unlike Doc, who for years had been getting them firsthand.

There's a certain embarrassment, George could easily imagine, in learning that you can talk to animals. No one knew how long Doc's conviction was in growing, though some of the grown-ups could remember his first claiming it was so, shyly, tentatively, as a joke they supposed, a lame sort of joke, but then Doc's jokes weren't ever very funny except to millions of children. It took later the form of a metaphor or puzzle: he recounted his conversations with salamanders and chickadees with a cryptic smile, as though inviting his family to guess why he spoke so. In the end, he ceased trying to hide it: what he heard from his correspondents was just too interesting not to recount.

Since all this was happening as Auberon was coming into consciousness, it only seemed to him that his grandfather's powers were growing surer, his ear more keen. When, on one of their long walks together through the woods, Doc at last stopped pretending that what he heard the animals say was made up, and admitted that he was passing on conversations he heard, they both felt a lot better. Auberon never much liked let's-pretend, and Doc had hated lying to the child. The science of it escaped him, he said; maybe it was only a result of his long devotion; anyway, it was only certain animals he could understand, small ones, the ones he knew best. Bears, moose, the scarce and fabulous cats, the solitary, long-winged predators he knew nothing of. They disdained him, or couldn't discourse, or had no use for small talk—he couldn't tell.

"And insects and bugs?" Auberon asked him.

"Some, but not all," Doc answered.

"Ants?"

"Oh, yes, ants," Doc said, "sure."

And taking his grandson's hands where they knelt together beside a new yellow hill, he gratefully translated for him the mindless shoptalk of the ants within.


George Mouse Goes on Overhearing

Auberon was asleep now, on the bursting loveseat, curled beneath a blanket, as who would not be who had risen as early and come as far in as many ways as he had today; but George Mouse, subject to tics and exulting on the giddy chutes and ladders of High Thought, kept watch over the boy and continued to overhear his adventures.

When, oatmeal untasted but coffee finished, he went out the great front door, Smoky's hand paternally on his shoulder though it was higher than his own, Auberon saw that he wasn't to make his getaway without goodbyes. His sisters, all three, had come to see him off; Lily and Lucy were walking up the drive arm-in-arm, Lily bearing her twins fore-and-aft in canvas carriers, and Tacey was just turning in at the end of the drive on her bike.

He might have known, but hadn't wished this sendoff, wished it less than anything because of the formal finality his sisters' presence always lent to whatever partings or arrivals or conjunctions they attended. How the hell anyway had they known this was to be the morning? He had only told Smoky late last night, and sworn him to secrecy. A certain familiar rage rose in him whose name he didn't know was rage. "Hi, hi," he said.

"We came to say goodbye," Lily said. Lucy shifted the front twin and added, "And give you some things."

"Yeah? Well." Tacey turned her bike neatly at the porch stairs and dismounted. "Hi, hi," Auberon said again. "Did you bring along the whole county?" But of course they hadn't brought anyone else; no one else's presence was necessary, as theirs was.

Perhaps because their names were so similar, or because so often in the community they appeared and acted together, but people around Edgewood always found it hard to distinguish among Tacey, Lily, and Lucy. In fact they were very different. Tacey and Lily were descendants of their mother and her mother, long, bigboned and coltish, though Lily had inherited from somewhere a head of fine straight blond hair, straw spun into gold as the princess in the story spun it, where Tacey's was curly reddish-gold like Alice's. Lucy, though, was all Smoky's; shorter than her sisters, with Smoky's dark curls and Smoky's cheerful bemused face and even something of Smoky's congenital anonymity in her round eyes. But in another sense it was Lucy and Lily who were a pair: the sort of sisters who can finish one another's sentences, and feel even at a distance one another's pains. For years the two of them kept up a running series of seemingly pointless jokes; one would ask, in a serious tone, a silly question, and the other would just as seriously give an even sillier answer, and then they would (never cracking a smile) give the joke a number. The numbers ran into the hundreds. Tacey, perhaps because she was the oldest, was remote from their games; she was a naturally regal and private person who cultivated intensely a number of passions, for the alto recorder, for raising rabbits, for fast bikes. On the other hand, in all complots, plans, and ceremonies that dealt with grownups and their affairs, it had always been Tacey who was priestess, and the younger two her acolytes.

(In one thing all three were alike: they each had only one eyebrow, running over their noses from outer eye-corner to outer eye-corner without a break. Of Smoky and Alice's children, only Auberon was without it.)

Auberon's memories of his sisters would always be of their playing at the mysteries, birth, marriage, love, and death. He had been their Baby when he was very young, chivvied around from imaginary bath to imaginary hospital endlessly, a living doll. Later he was compelled to be Bridegroom, and finally Departed when he was old enough to be pleased simply to lie there while they ministered to him. And it was not only play; as they grew older, all three seemed to develop an instinctive grasp of the scenes and acts of quotidian life, of the curtains rising and rung down in the lives around them. No one remembered telling them (they were aged four, six, and eight then) that the youngest of the Bird girls was to be married to Jim Jay over in Plainfield, but they appeared at the church in jeans with bunches of wildflowers in their hands and knelt decorously on the church steps while inside the bride and groom took their vows. (The wedding photographer, waiting outside for the couple to appear, took a whimsical picture of the three darlings which later won a prize in a photo contest. It looked posed. In a sense, it was.)

From an early age, they had all three learned needlework, becoming more skilled and taking up in turn more difficult and esoteric branches of it as they got older, tatting, silk embroidery, crewel-work; what Tacey learned first from Great-aunt Cloud and her grandmother she taught to Lily, and Lily to Lucy; and as they sat together expertly doing and undoing with thread (often in the many-sided music room where the sun came in at all seasons) they kept up among themselves a constant calendar of the passings, pledges, partings, parturitions expected (announced or not) among the people they knew. They made knots, they snipped threads, they knew all; it came to pass that no sad or glad occasion was unknown to them, and few went forward without the three of them present. Those that did seemed incomplete, unsanctioned. Their only brother's departure for his appointment with destiny and lawyers was not to be one of those.

"Here," said Tacey, plucking from her bike's basket a small package done up in ice-blue paper, "take this, and open it when you get to the City." She kissed him lightly.

"Take this," Lily said, giving him one wrapped in mintygreen, "and open it when you think of it."

"Take this," Lucy said. Hers was wrapped in white. "Open it when you want to come home again."

He gathered these together, nodding, embarrassed, and put them in his duffle. The girls said nothing more about them, only sat for a while with him and Smoky on the porch, across which dead leaves blew unswept, gathering up under the seats of wicker chairs (whith ought to go in the basement, Smoky thought; an old chore of Auberon's; he felt a chill of foreboding, or loss, but thought it to be the somber November gloaming only). Auberon, who was young and solitary enough to think that he might have escaped his house without anyone being the wiser, that no one paid much attention to his movements, sat constrainedly with them watching dawn grow; then he slapped his knees, rose, shook his father's hand, kissed his sisters, promised to write, and at last stepped off southward into the sounding sea of leaves, striking for the crossroads where a bus could be hailed; he didn't look back at the four who watched him go.

"Well," Smoky said, remembering his own journey to the City at an age near Auberon's, "he'll have adventures."

"Lots," Tacey said.

"It'll be fun," Smoky said, "probably, possibly. I remember . . ."

"Fun for a while," Lily said.

"Not much fun," Lucy said. "Fun first, though, at least."

"Dad," said Tacey, seeing him trembling, "you shouldn't sit out here in your 'jammies, for God's sake."

He rose, pulling his bathrobe around him. This afternoon he would have to get in the porch furniture, before snow piled absurdly in its summery seats.


A Friend of the Doctor's

Shifting focus, George Mouse watched from a niche in the Old Stone Fence as Auberon came across the Old Pasture, short-cutting his way toward Meadowbrook. The Meadow Mouse in that niche, grass blade between his teeth and gloomy thoughts in his mind, watched the human come toward him, crunching great twigs and dead leaves by the hundreds beneath his boots. Ah, the great and clumsy feet of them! The shod feet, larger and harder even than the Brown Bear's of ancient memory! Only the fact that they had only two each, and came around rarely and singly near his home, allowed the Meadow Mouse to feel somewhat more kindly toward them than toward the house-wrecking Cow, his personal behemoth. As Auberon came closer, passing indeed very close to the niche where he huddled, the Meadow Mouse had a surprise. This was the boy—grown huge—who had once come with the Doctor who was the Meadow Mouse's great-great-grandfather's friend; the very same boy that the Meadow Mouse as a tiny mousling had once observed, hands on his bare and scabby knees peering intently into the familial home as the Doctor took down Great-great-grandfather's memoirs, which were so famous now not only among generations of Meadow Mice but throughout the Great World as well! His natural timidity overcome by a rush of family feeling, the Meadow Mouse put his nose out of the niche in the wall and attempted a greeting: "My great-great-grandfather knew the Doctor," he called out. But the fellow went right on.

The Doctor could talk with the animals, but the boy, apparently, could not.


A Shepherd in the Bronx

When Auberon was standing by the crossroads ankle-deep in golden leaves, and Smoky was standing abstracted before his tribe who puzzled that he had fallen silent, chalk to board, between noun and predicate, Daily Alice beneath her figured quilt (yes! George Mouse gasped at the breadth and length of his own Mental Sympathies) dreamed that her son Auberon, who lived in the City now, had telephoned to tell her how he was getting on.

"For a while I was a shepherd in the Bronx," the disembodied and still secretive voice was saying, "but when November came, I sold the flock;" and as he told her of it, she could see the Bronx he spoke of: its green, cropped sea-hills, a space of clean, windy air between those hills and the low wet clouds. It was as though she had been there herself when he shepherded, and had followed the delicate prints and black droppings along the rutted ways to pasturage, her ears full of their complainings, nose full of the smell of their wet wool on misty mornings. Vivid! She could see her son when (as he told her) he would stand staff in hand on a promontory there and look off to the sea, and to the west from where the weather came, and to the south across the river, to the dark wood that covered the sea-island there, and wonder . . .

In the fall then he changed his leathers and gaiters for a decent suit of black and his crook for a walking-stick, and though he had never decided on it in so many words, he and the dog Spark (a good sheepdog whom Auberon could have sold with the flock but couldn't part with) set out along the Harlem River till they came to a place where they could cross (near 137th Street). The aged, aged ferryman had a beautiful great-grandaughter brown as a berry and a gray, flat, knocking, groaning boat; Auberon stood up in the bows as the ferry drifted along its line downstream to a mooring on the opposite side. He paid, the dog Spark leapt out before him, and he stepped off into the Wild Wood without looking back. It was late afternoon; the sun (he could glimpse it now and then, a dull yellow glow behind gray clouds) seemed so cold and cheerless he almost wished for night.

Deeper in, he retracted this wish. Somehow he had turned the wrong way between St. Nicholas Park and Cathedral Parkway, and found himself climbing stony uplands written on by lichen. The great trees clinging to the rocky places with their knuckled toes groaned and chuckled at him as he passed, and made bole-faces in the twilight. Panting on a high rock, he saw between the trees the gray sun go out. He knew he was still far uptown, and now night had come; he was cold, and how many warnings had he always had about night in this place? He felt small. In fact he was growing small. Spark noticed it, but made no remark.

The night as it will do brought forth creatures. Auberon began foolishly to hurry, which made him stumble, which caused the creatures to come close, thousand-eyed in the complex darkness all around. Auberon collected himself. Mustn't show them your fear. He took a grip on his stick. Looking neither right nor left, he toiled downtown; he walked, didn't walk as appropriate. Once or twice he caught himself gawking up at the immense trees scraping the night sky (for sure he had grown much smaller) but lowered his eyes quickly; he didn't want to appear a stranger here or someone who didn't know what was what; he couldn't keep, though, from glancing around himself at those who, grinning or knowing or indifferent, glanced at him as he passed.

Where was Spark, he wondered as he pulled himself from a tangled deadfall into which he had sunk hip-deep. Now he could have climbed onto the dog's back and gotten on much faster. But Spark had developed a contempt for his newly-small master and had gone off in the direction of Washington Heights to try his fortune alone.

Alone. Auberon remembered the three gifts his sisters had given him. He took from his canvas knapsack the one Tacey had given him and tore its ice-blue wrapping with trembling fingers.

It was a combination pen and flashlight, one end to see by and the other to write with. Handy. It even had its little battery: he pressed its button, and it burned. A few snowflakes drifted in the beam; a few faces that had come close withdrew. And by the light he saw that he stood before a tiny door in the woods; his journey was done. He knocked, and knocked again.


Look at the Time

George Mouse shuddered vastly. The effort of Mental Sympathy and the wearing off of his dose had him feeling a little ashen. It had been fun, but good Lord, look at the time! In a few hours he would have to be up again for milking. For sure Sylvie (brown as a berry, but not home yet, unless he missed his guess) wouldn't be up for it. Gathering up his hash-dispersed limbs, which ached with pleasant tiredness (long trip), he stitched them back roughly where they belonged on his consciousness and rose. Getting too old for this. He made certain his cousin had blankets enough, raked up the fire, and (already forgetting in the main what he had perceived behind his cousin's dark and shapely lids) took up the lamp and made his way to his own cluttered bedroom, yawning uncontrollably.


The Club Meets

Some city blocks away at that hour, before the narrow townhouse of Ariel Hawksquill which faced a small park, large and silent cars of another era one by one drew up and let out each a single passenger, and drove away to where cars like that await their masters. Each of the visitors rang Hawksquill's bell and was admitted; each must take off his gloves finger by finger, so well they fitted; each gave them to the servant inside his hat, and some had white scarves that whistled faintly as they drew them from their necks. They gathered in Hawksquill's parlor floor which was chiefly library; each crossed his legs as he sat. They exchanged a few words in low voices.

When Hawksquill at last entered, they rose for her (though she motioned that they shouldn't) and sat again, each tugging at his trouser-knee as he recrossed his legs.

"I guess we can say," one said, "that this meeting of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club is now open. For new business."

Ariel Hawksquill awaited their questions. She was in this year nearing the height of her powers, her figure angular, hair iron-gray, manner sharp and deliberate as a cockatoo's. She was imposing, if not quite the intimidating figure she would become; and everything about her, from dun shoes to ringed fingers, suggested powers—powers the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at least was well aware she possessed.

"The new business, of course," another member said, smiling toward Hawksquill, "being the matter of Russell Eigenblick. The Lecturer."

"What," a third asked Hawksquill, "do you think now? What are your impressions?"

She put her fingertips together, like Holmes. "He is and is not what he seems," she said in a voice as precise and dry as a parchment page. "More clever than he appears on television, though not so large. The enthusiasm he arouses is genuine, but, I can't help thinking, evanescent. He has five planets in Scorpio; so did Martin Luther. His favorite color is billiard-cloth green. He has large, moist, falsely sympathetic brown eyes, like a cow. His voice is amplified by miniature devices concealed in his clothing, which is expensive but doesn't fit well. He wears, beneath his pants, boots to his knees."

They absorbed this.

"His character?" one asked.

"Contemptible."

"His manners?"

"Well . . ."

"His ambitions?"

This she was for a moment unable to answer, yet it was this question which the puissant bankers, board chairmen, bureaucratic plenipotentiaries and retired generals who met under the aegis of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club most wanted answered. As the secret guardians of a touchy, wilful, aging republic suffering in the more or less permanent grip of social and economic depression, they were minutely sensitive to any attractive man, preacher, soldier, adventurer, thinker, thug. Hawksquill was well aware that her insights had led to the putting away of more than one such. "He has no interest in being President," she said.

One of the members made a noise that indicated: if he does not, he could not have any other ambition that could truly alarm us; and if he does, he is helpless, because for some years the regular succession of shadowy presidents has been solely the concern of the Club, whatever the people or the Presidents may have thought. It was a brief noise, made in the throat.

"It's difficult to describe precisely," Hawksquill said. "On the one hand his self-importance seems ludicrous, and his aims so huge as to be dismissable entirely, like God's. On the other hand . . . He claims, for instance, often and with a particular expression that seems to hint at large secrets, to be 'in the cards.' An old catch phrase: and yet Somehow (I'm afraid I can't say quite how) I think his words are exact, and that he is in the cards, in some cards, only I don't know which ones." She looked over her slow-nodding listeners, and felt sorry to puzzle them, but she was puzzled herself. She had spent weeks with Russell Eigenblick on the road, in hotels, on planes, transparently disguised as a journalist (the hard-faced paladins who surrounded Eigenblick saw easily through the disguise, but could see nothing within); but she was less able now to offer a suggestion as to the disposition of his case than when she had first heard his name, and laughed.

Fingertips on her temples, she walked carefully through the perfectly-ordered new wing which she had added over the last weeks to her memory mansion to contain her investigation of Russell Eigenblick. She knew at what turnings he himself should appear, at the head of which staircases, at the nexus of which vistas. He would not appear. She could picture him with the ordinary or Natural Memory. She could see him against the rain-streaked window of a local train, talking indefatigably, his red beard wagging and his curling eyebrows ascending and descending like a ventriloquist's dummy's. She could see him haranguing the vast ecstatic dove-moaning audiences, real tears in his eyes and real love poured forth from them to him; she could see him rattling a blue teacup and saucer on his knee at a women's club meeting after another interminable lecture, with his steely disciples, each holding his own cup and saucer and cake, around him. The Lecturer: it was they who insisted on his being called that. They arrived first and made arrangements for the Lecturer's appearance. The Lecturer will stand here. No one must use this room but the Lecturer. There must be a car for the Lecturer. And their eyes never filled with tears as they sat behind his lectern, faces as composed and expressionless as their black-socked ankles. All this she had quarried from Natural Memory and by artifice constructed into a fine Palladian wing of her memory mansion, where it ought all to make a new and subtle sense; she expected to be able to turn a marble corner and find him there, framed in a vista, suddenly revealed and revealing what he was, which she had known all along but had not known she knew. That was how it was intended to work, how it had always worked in the past. But now the Club waited, silent and unstirring, for her disposition; and between the pillars and on the belvederes there stood the disciples, neatly dressed, holding each the emblem to identify himself which she had given him— train-ticket stub, golf club, purple mimeo sheets, dead body. They were clear enough. But he would not appear. And yet the whole wing was, yes, for sure, him; and it was chill, and pregnant.

"What about these lectures?" a member said, interrupting her survey.

She looked at him coldly. "God," she said. "You have transcripts of them all. Is that what I'm to concern myself with? Can you read?" She paused then, wondering whether her contempt was merely a mask for her own failure to encompass her quarry. "When he speaks," she said more graciously, "they listen. What he says you know. The old amalgam designed to touch every heart. Hope, a limitless hope. Common sense, or what passes for it. Wit that releases. He can draw tears. But many can. I think . . ."It was as close as she could come now to a definition, and was not close: "I think he is less or more than a man. I think we are Somehow dealing not with a man but with a geography."

"I see," said a member, brushing a moustache pearly-gray like his tie.

"You do not," Hawksquill said, "because I do not."

"Snuff him out," another said.

"His message," said another, drawing from his supple case a sheaf of papers, "is not one we object to, though. Stability. Vigilance. Acceptance. Love."

"Love," said another. "All things degenerate. Nothing works any more, everything misfires." There was a desperate quaver in his voice. "There is no force left on earth found stronger than love." He burst into strange sobs.

"Do I see, Hawksquill," someone said calmly, "decanters on your sideboard there?"

"One is cut-glass, and has brandy," Hawksquill said. "The other is not, and has rye."

They calmed their associate with a taste of brandy, and declared the meeting closed, sine die, with Hawksquill's commission continued and the new business unresolved; and left her house in greater puzzlement than they had felt since the society whose secret pillars they were had first begun perversely to sicken and waste.


Pictured Heavens

When she had shown them out, Hawksquill's servant stood in the hall, gloomily contemplating what seemed to be a pale stain of dawn showing in the barred glass of the door, and complaining inwardly of her state, her subservience, her brief glows of nighttime consciousness worse almost than having none at all. All this while the gray light grew, and seemed to stain the unmoving servant, to subtract the living light from her eyes. She raised a hand in an Egyptian gesture of blessing or dismissal; her lips sealed. When Hawksquill passed her on her way upward, day had come, and the Maid of Stone (as Hawksquill named this ancient statue) was all marmoreal again.

Hawksquill climbed up within the tall, narrow house, four long flights (a daily exercise that would keep her strong heart beating till great old age) and arrived at a small door at the very top of the house, where the stairs narrowed sharply and ran out. She could hear the steady noise of the great mechanism beyond the door, the drop of heavy weights inch by inch, the hollow clicks of catchments and escapements, and felt her mind already soothed. She opened the door. Daylight, many-colored and faint, poured out; the music of the spheres, like soft-soughing wind among clicking bare branches, became distinct. She glanced at her old, square-faced wristwatch, and bent to enter.

That this City house was one of only three in the world equipped with a complete Patent Cosmo-Opticon or Theatrum Mundi in more-or-less working order, Hawksquill had known before she bought it. It had amused her to think that her house would be capped by such an enormous and iron-bound talisman of her mind's heavens. She had been prepared, though, neither for its great beauty, nor—when it had been set in motion, and she had adjusted it in certain long-thought-out ways—for its usefulness. She had been unable to learn much about the Cosmo-Opticon's designer, so she couldn't tell what he had conceived its function to be—entertainment only, probably—but what he hadn't known she supplied, and so now when she bent to enter the tiny door she entered not only a stained-glass-and-wrought-iron Cosmos exquisitely detailed and moving with spanking exactness in its clockwork rounds, but one which presented to Hawksquill the actual moment of the World-Age that was passing as she entered.

In fact, though Hawksquill had corrected the Cosmo-Opticon so that it accurately reflected the state of the real heavens outside it, it was still not quite exact. Even if its maker had been aware of it, there was no way to build into a machine of cogs and gears as gross as this one the slow, the vast fall of the Cosmos backward through the Zodiac, the so-called precession of the equinoxes—that unimaginably stately grand tour which would take some twenty thousand years longer, until once again the spring equinox coincided with the first degrees of Aries: where conventional astrology for convenience's sake assumes it always to be, and where Hawksquill had found it fixed in her Cosmo-Opticon when she had first aquired the thing. No: the only true pictures of time were the changeful heavens themselves, and their perfect reflection within the powerful consciousness of Ariel Hawksquill, who knew what time it was: this engine around her was in the end a crude caricature, though pretty enough. Indeed, she thought, taking the green plush seat in the center of the universe, very pretty.

She relaxed in the warm pour of winter sun (by noon it would be hot as hell inside this glass egg, something else its designer hadn't apparently taken into account) and gazed upwards. Blue Venus trine with blood-orange Jupiter, each blown-glass figured sphere borne between the Tropics on its own band; the mirrorsurfaced Moon just declining below the horizon, and tiny ringed Saturn, milky-gray, just rising. Saturn in the ascendant house, proper for the sort of meditation she must now make. Click: the Zodiac turned a degree, lady Libra (looking a little like Bernhardt in her finely-leaded art-nouveau draperies, and weighing something in her scales that had always seemed to Hawksquill to be a bunch of lush Malaga grapes) lifted her toes out of the austral waters. The real Sol burned so hotly through her that her features were obscured. As they of course were in the blank blue sky of day, burned out entirely and invisible, but still of course there behind his brightness, of course, of course. . . . Already she felt her thoughts becoming ordered as the undifferentiated light of heaven was ordered by the colors and marked degrees of the Cosmo-Opticon; she felt her own Theatrum Mundi within open its doors, and the stage manager strike the stage three times with his staff to signal the curtain rising. The enormous engine, star-founded, of her Artificial Memory began to lay out for her once again the parts of the problem of Russell Eigenblick. And she felt, sharp-set for the work, that there had not ever been among all the strange tasks her powers had been bent upon a task as strange as this one, or one which was more important to her herself; or one that would require her to go as far, dive as deep, see as widely, or think as hard.

In the cards. Well. She would see.