John Crowley: Little, Big

“It doesn’t matter,” Alice said. They were coming to the end of the forest glades; beyond lay a land of a different sort. Alice stopped. “I’m sure you can. Make up for it, I mean. For not coming and all.” She looked out over the land she must now travel. So big, so big. “You can be a help to me, I think. I hope.”

“I’m sure of it,” Hawksquill said with conviction. “Sure.”

“Because I’ll need help,” Alice said. There somewhere, beyond those hedges, over those green waves of earth where the new-risen grass-sea turned silver in the sunlight, Alice remembered or foresaw the knoll to be, on which there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace; and, if you knew the way, there was a small house there built underside, and a round door with a brass knocker; but there would be no need to knock, for the door would stand open, and the house would anyway be empty. And there would be knitting to take up, and duties, duties so large, so new… “I’ll need help,” she said again. “I will.”

“I’ll help,” said her cousin. “I can help.”

Somewhere there, beyond those blue hills, how far? An open door, and a small house big enough to hold all this spinning earth; a chair to rock away the years, and an old broom in the corner to sweep away winter.

“Come along,” the stork said. “We’ll get used to it. It’ll be all right.”

“Yes,” said Alice. There would be help, there must be; she couldn’t do it all alone. It would be all right. Still she didn’t take the first step beyond the woods’ edge; she stood a long time, feeling the asking breezes on her face, remembering or forgetting many things.

Smoky Barnable, in the warm glow of many electric lights, sat down in his library to turn over once again the pages of the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses . All the windows had been opened, and a cool fresh May night came and went unhindered as he read. The last of winter had been swept away as by a new broom.

Far upstairs, as silently as the stars it modeled, the orrery turned, passing its tiny but unresistable motion through many oiled brass gears to give impetus to the twenty-four-handed fly-wheel, shut up once again in its black case but delivering its own force to generators, which in turn fed the house with light and power, and would go on doing so until all the jewelled bearings, all the best-quality nylon and leather belts, all the hardened-steel points themselves wore away: years and years, Smoky supposed. The house, his house, as though from the effects of a tonic, had perked up, refreshed and strengthened; its basements had dried, its attics were ventilated; the dust that had filled it had been sucked up by a potent and ancient whole-house vacuum-cleaner whose existence in the walls of the house Smoky had vaguely known about but which no one had thought would ever work again; even the crack in the music-room ceiling seemed on the way to healing, though why was a mystery to Smoky. The old stocks of hoarded light-bulbs were brought out, and Smoky’s house alone, the only one for miles, was lit up continuously, like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. Not out of pride, not really, though he had been very proud of his arrangements, but because he found it easier to expend the limitless energy than to store it (why store it, anyway?) or to disengage the machine.

And besides, lit up, the house might be easier to find: easier for someone lost, or gone off, who might be returning on a moonless night, to find in the darkness.

He turned a heavy page.

Here was a horrid idea of some vindictive spiritualist’s. There is, of course, no hell after death, only a progress through higher and higher Levels. No eternal suffering, though there might be a difficult, or at least lengthy, Re-education for recalcitrant or stupid souls. Generous: but this had apparently not been enough coals to heap on the heads of sceptics, so the idea was conceived that those who refuse to see the light in this life will refuse to see it, or be blind to it, in the next as well; they will stagger alone eternally in cold darkness, believing that this is all there is, while all around them unbeknown the happy bustle of the communion of saints goes on, fountains and flowers and whirling spheres and the striving souls of the great departed.

Alone.

It was clear that he could not go where all of them were summoned unless his desire were as strong as faith. But how could he desire another world than this one? He studied again and again the descriptions in the Architecture , but he found nowhere anything to convince him that There he would find a world anything like as rich, as deeply strange yet just as deeply familiar, as this one he lived in.

Always Spring there: but he wanted winter too, gray days and rain. He wanted it all, nothing left out; he wanted his fire, his long memories and what started them in his soul, his small comforts, his troubles even. He wanted the death he had often lately contemplated, and a place beside the others he had dug places for.

He looked up. Amid the constellation of the library’s lamps reflected in the windows the moon had risen. It was just crescent, fragile and white. When it was full, Midsummer Day, they would depart.

Paradise. A world elsewhere.

He didn’t really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn’t even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn’t want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn’t equal to. He didn’t want it to have taken his wife from him.

He didn’t want to be marched off to another world he couldn’t imagine; a little world that couldn’t be as big as this one.

Yet it is , said the breezes that passed his ears.

It couldn’t contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn’t contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.

But it does , said the breezes.

Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.

Oh more , said the Breezes; more, much more .

Smoky looked up. The drapes at the window moved. “Alice?” he said.

He got up, pushing the heavy book to the floor. He went to the tall window and looked out. The walled garden was a dark vestibule; the door open in the wall led to moonlit turf and misty evening.

She’s far, she’s there , a Little Breeze said.

“Alice?”

She’s near, she’s here , said another; but whatever it was that seemed to proceed toward him through the windy darkness and the garden, he didn’t recognize it. He stood a long time looking into the night as into a face, as though it might converse with him, and explain many things: he thought it could, but all he heard it say, or himself say, was a name.

The moon rose out of sight above the house. Smoky climbed slowly up to his bed. About the time the moon set, pale horns indicating the place where the sleepy sun would soon rise, Smoky awoke, feeling he hadn’t been asleep for a moment, as imsomniacs do; he dressed himself in an old frayed dressing gown with braided edges around the cuffs and pockets, and climbed up to the top of the house, turning on as he went the hall-sconces that some thoughtless person had left off.

Lit by planetshine and daybreak, the sleepless system didn’t seem to move, any more than the morning star outside the round window seemed to: and yet it did move. Smoky watched it, thinking of the night when by lamplight he had read out from the Ephemeris the degrees, minutes and seconds of the stars’ ascensions, and felt, when he had set the last moon of Jupiter, the infinitesimal shudder of its quickening. And heard the first steel croquet-ball fall otherwise unaided into the waiting hand of the absurd overbalancing wheel. Saved. He remembered the feeling.