Little, Big Part 29

The Top of a Stair Since taking this a.s.signment, Hawksquill had gone far, though never quite this far, and little of what she had begun to suspect about Russell Eigenblick could be put into a form understandable to the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, which almost daily now importuned her for a decision concerning the Lecturer. His power and appeal had grown enormously, and soon it would be impossible for them to dispose of Eigenblick tidily, if dispose of him they must; not much longer and it would be impossible to dispose of him at all. They raised Hawksquill's fees, and spoke in veiled terms of perhaps seeking other sources of advice. Hawksquill ignored all this. So far from malingering, she now spent nearly every waking and many sleeping hours in pursuit of whoever or whatever it was that claimed to be Russell Eigenblick, haunting her own memory mansions like an unlaid ghost, and following flying sc.r.a.ps of evidence farther than she had ever gone before, pulling up at times before powers she would rather not have started into wakefulness, and finding herself in places that she had not before known she knew existed.

Where she found herself just now was at the top of a stair.

Whether she mounted or descended these stairs she wouldn't afterwards be able to determine; but they were long. At the end of them was a chamber. The broad studded door stood flung open. A great stone, by its track in the dust, had not long ago been rolled away from barring shut the door. Dimly within she could see a long feast-table, spilled cups and scattered chairs iced with ancient dust; from the chamber came an odor as of a messy bedroom just opened. But there was no one within.

She made to pa.s.s the broken door to investigate, but noticed then seated on the stone a figure in white, small, pretty, head bound in a golden fillet, paring its nails with a small knife. Not knowing what language to speak to this person, Hawksquill raised her brows and pointed within.

"He is not here," the person said. "He is risen."

Hawksquill considered a question or two, but understood before she asked that this personage would not answer them, that he (or she) was an embodiment only of that one remark: He is not here, he is risen. She turned away (the stair and the door and the message and the messenger fading from her attention like a shape momentarily perceived in changeful clouds) and set off further, bethinking herself where she might go for answers to many new questions, or questions to fit the many new answers she was quickly garnering.

Daughter of Time "The difference," Hawksquill had long ago written in one of the tall marbled folios filled with her left-handed script which stood or lay on the long lamplit study table far behind her now, "the difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of s.p.a.ce.

"To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at. When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in s.p.a.ce; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante's sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Herac.l.i.tus could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repet.i.tion: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, forma"the qualities of s.p.a.ce. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repet.i.tion and change: by Memory."

Knowing this to be so, it could not matter to Hawksquill that on her travels her gray-bunned head and nerveless limbs did not probably change place, remained (she supposed) in the plush chair in the middle of the Cosmo-Opticon at the top of her house which stood in a hexagram of lower City streets. The winged horse she had summoned to bear her away was not a winged horse but that Great Square of stars pictured above her, and "away" was not where she was borne; but the greatest skill (perhaps the only skill) of the true mage is to apprehend these distinctions without making them, and to translate time into s.p.a.ce without an error. It's all, said the old alchemists quite truthfully, so simple.

"Away!" said the voice of her Memory when the hand of her Memory was on the reins again and her seat was sure, and away they went, vast wings beating through Time. They traversed oceans of it while Hawksquill thought; and then her steed plunged, at her command, unhesitatingly, without a blink, which took the breath of her Memory away, into either the southern sky below the world or into the limpid-dark austral waters, in any case making for there where all past ages lie, Ogygia the Fair.

Her Steed's silver-shod feet touched that sh.o.r.e, and his great head sank; his strong wings, billowing like draperies, now emptied of the air of time, sank too with a whisper and trailed along the eternal gra.s.s, which he cropped for strength. Hawksquill dismounted, patted her steed's enormous neck, whispered that she would return, and started off, following the footprints, each longer than herself, pressed on these sh.o.r.es at the end of the Golden Age and petrified long since. The air was windless, yet the gigantic forest under whose eaves she entered soughed with a breath of its own, or perhaps with His breath, expelled and drawn with the long regularity of immemorial sleep.

She came no closer than the entrance of the vale he filled. "Father," she said, and her voice startled the silence; aged eagles with heavy wings rose up and settled sleepily again. "Father," she said again, and the vale stirred. The great gray boulders were his knees, the long gray ivy his hair, the precipice-gripping rna.s.sy roots his fingers; the eye he opened to her was milky-gray, a dim-glowing stone, the Saturn of her Cosmo-Opticon. He yawned: the inhalation turned the leaves of trees like storm-wind and stirred her hair, and when he exhaled his breath was the cold black breath of a bottomless cave.

"Daughter," he said, in a voice like earth's.

"I'm sorry to disturb your sleep, Father," she said, "but I have a question only you can answer."

"Ask it then."

"Does a new world now begin? I see no reason why it should, and yet it seems it does."

Everyone knows that when his sons overthrew their ancient Father, and cast him here, the endless Age of Gold ended, and Time was invented with all its labors. Less well known is how the young, unruly G.o.ds, frightened or ashamed at what they had done, gave the ruling of this new ent.i.ty into the hands of their Father. He was asleep in Ogygia then and didn't care, so ever since it has been here in this isle, where the five rivers have their common wellspring, that all the used years acc.u.mulate like fallen leaves; and when the Ancientest One, troubled by a dream of overthrow or change, shifts his ma.s.sy limbs and smacks his lips, scratching at the rock-ribbed muscles of his hams, a new age issues, the measures alter which he gives to the dance of the universe, the sun is born in a new sign.

Thus the airy scheming G.o.ds contrived to put the blame for the calamity on their old Father. In time, Kronos, king of the happy Timeless Age, became old busybody Chronos with his sickle and hourgla.s.s, father of chronicles and chronometers. Only his true sons and daughters know bettera"and some adopted ones, Ariel Hawksquill among them.

"Does a new age now begin?" she asked again. "It's beforehand if it does."

"A New Age," said Father Time in a voice that could create one. "No. Not for years and years." He brushed away a few of these that had gathered in withered piles on his shoulders.

"Then," Hawksquill said, "who is Russell Eigenblick, if he isn't King of a new age?"

"Russell Eigenblick?"

"The man with the red beard. The Lecturer. The Geography."

He lay back again, his rocky couch groaning beneath him. "No King of a new age," he said. "An upstart. An invader."

"Invader?"

"He is their champion. That's why they waked him." His milky-gray eye was drifting closed. "Asleep for a thousand years, lucky man. And now awakened for the conflict."

"Conflict? Champion?"

"Daughter," he said. "Don't you know there's a war on?"

War a There had been, all along, one word she had sought for, one word under which all the disorderly facts, all the oddities she had gathered up concerning Russell Eigenblick and the random disturbances he seemed to cause in the world might be subsumed. She had that word now: it blew through her consciousness like a wind, uprooting structures and harrying birds, tearing leaves from trees and laundry from lines, but at least, at last, blowing from one direction only. War: universal, millennial, unconditional War. For G.o.d's sake, she thought, he'd said as much himself in every recent Lecture; she'd always thought it was merely a metaphor. Merely! "I didn't know, Father," she said, "until this moment."

"Nothing to do with me," said the Ancientest One, his words m.u.f.fled in a yawn. "They applied to me once for his sleep, and I granted it. A thousand years ago, give or take a century a They are after all children of my children, related by marriagea . I do them a favor once and again. No harm in that. Little enough to do here anyway."

"Who are they, Father?"

"Mm." His enormous vacant eye was shut.

"Who are they whose champion he is?"

But the vast head was bent backward on its bouldered pillow, the vast throat swallowed a snore. The h.o.a.ry-headed eagles who had risen shrieking when he woke settled again on their crags. The windless forest soughed. Hawksquill, reluctantly, turned her steps toward the sh.o.r.e again. Her steed (sleepy himself, even he) raised his head at her approach. Well! No help for it. Thought must conquer this, Thought could! "No rest for the weary," she said, and leapt smartly onto his broad back. "On! And quickly! Don't you know there's a war on?"

She thought as they ascended, or descended: who slept for a thousand years? What children of the children of Time would make war on men, to what end, with what hope of success?

And who (by the way) was that golden-haired child she had glimpsed curled up asleep in the lap of Father Time?

The Child Turned The child turned, dreaming; dreaming of what had come of all she had seen on her last day awake, dreaming it all and altering it in her dreaming even as, elsewhere, it came to pa.s.s; plucking apart her bright and dark dream-tapestry and knitting it up again with the same threads in a way she liked better. She dreamt of her mother awaking and saying "What?", of one of her fathers on a path at Edgewood; she dreamt of Auberon, in love somewhere with a dream-Lilac of his own invention; she dreamt of armies made of cloud, led by a red-bearded man who startled her nearly awake. She dreamt, turning, lips parted, heart beating slowly, that at the end of her tour she came riding down from the air, came coursing with vertiginous speed along an iron-gray and oily river.

The ghastly red round sun was sinking vaporously amid the elaborate smokes and scorings of jets that had made the false armies in the west. Lilac could only hold her tongue: the brutal esplanades, the stained blocks of buildings, the clamor brought to her ears, silenced her. The stork turned inward; Mrs. Underhill's stick seemed uncertain in the rectangular valleys; they went east, then south. A thousand people seen from above are not as one or two: a heaving queasy sea of hair and hats, the odd bright m.u.f.fler blown back. h.e.l.l-holes in the street shot up steam; crowds were swallowed up in clouds of it, and (so it seemed to Lilac) didn't emerge, but there were countless others to replace them.

"Remember these markers, child," Mrs. Underhill shouted back at Lilac over the keening sirens and the turmoil. "That burned church. Those railings, like arrows. That fine house. You'll pa.s.s this way again, alone." A caped figure just then detached itself from the crowd and made to enter the fine house, which didn't seem fine to Lilac. The stork, at Mrs. Underhill's direction, topped the house, cupped her wings to stop, and with a grunt of relief put her red feet down amid the weather-obscured detritus of the rooftop. The three of them looked down into the middle of the block just as the caped figure came out the back door.

"Now mark him, dear," Mrs. Underhill said. "Who do you suppose he is?"

With arms akimbo beneath the cloak, and a wide hat on his head, he was a dark lump to Lilac. Then he took off the hat, and shook out long black hair. He turned clockwise in a circle, nodding, and looked around at the rooftops, a white grin on his dark face. "Another cousin," Lilac said.

"Well, yes, and who else?"

He put his finger thoughtfully to his lips, and scuffed the dirt of the untidy garden. "I give up," Lilac said.

"Why, your other father!"

"Oh."

"The one who engendered you. Who'll need your help, as much as the other."

"Oh."

"Planning improvements," Mrs. Underhill said with satisfaction, "just now."

George paced out his garden. He went and chinned himself on the board fence which separated his yard from the next building's, and looked over like Kilroy into the even less well-kept garden there. He said aloud, "G.o.d d.a.m.n! All right!" He let himself down, and rubbed his hands together.

Lilac laughed as the stork stepped to the roof's ledge to take off. Like the stork's white wings opening, George's black cape flew outward and then closed more tightly around him as he laughed too. This, Lilac decided, delighted by something about him which she couldn't name, was the father which, of the two of them, she would have chosen to have: and with the instant certainty of a solitary child about who is and who is not on its side, she chose him now.

"There's no choosing, though," said Mrs. Underhill as they ascended. "Only Duty."

"A present for him!" she cried to Mrs. Underhill. "A present!"

Mrs. Underhill said nothinga"the child had been indulged quite enougha"but as they coursed down the shabby street, in their wake there sprang up from the sidewalk at even intervals a row of skinny and winter-naked saplings, one by one. This street is ours, anyway, thought Mrs. Underhill, or as good as; and what's a farm without a row of guardian trees along the road that pa.s.ses it?

"Now for the door!" she said, and the cold city tumbled beneath them as they fled uptown. "It's long past your bedtimea" there!" She pointed ahead to an aged building that must once have been tall, overweening even, but no more. It had been built of white stone, white no longer, carved into a myriad of faces, caryatids, birds and beasts, all coal-miners now and weeping filthily. The central part of it was set back from the street; wings on either side framed a dark dank courtyard into which taxis and people disappeared. The wings were linked, high up at the top, by an archlike course of masonry, an arch for a giant to pa.s.s under: and they three did pa.s.s under it, the stork ceasing to beat its wings, coasting, wing-tipping slightly to arrow accurately into the darkness of the courtyard. Mrs. Underhill cried "*Ware heads! Duck, duck!" and Lilac, feeling a whoosh of stale air rush up at her from the interior, ducked. She closed her eyes. She heard Mrs. Underhill say, "Nearly done now, old girl, nearly done; you know the door," and the darkness behind her lids grew brighter, and the noise of the City vanished, and they were elsewhere again.

So she dreamed; so it came to have been; so the saplings grew, dirty-faced urchins, tough, neglected and sharp. They grew, fattening in the trunk, buckling the sidewalk that ran beneath them. They wore broken kites and candy-wrappers, burst balloons and sparrows' nests in their hair, unmindful; they shouldered each other for a glimpse of sun, they shook their sooty snow winter after winter on pa.s.sersby. They grew, penknife-scarred, snaggle-branched, dog-manured, unkillable. On a mild night in a certain March, Sylvie, returning to Old Law Farm at dawn, looked up at their branches outlined against a raw pale sky and saw that every twig-tip bore a heavy bud.

She said goodnight to the one who had seen her home, though he was importunate, and sought the four keys she needed to get herself into Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom. He'll never believe this crazy story, she thought laughing, never believe the crazy but essentially innocent, nearly innocent, chain of events that had had her up till dawn. Not that he would grill her; he'd only be glad she was safe, she wished he wouldn't worry. She got whirled away, sometimes, is all; everybody put a claim in on her, and most of them seemed to her good. It was a big city, and its revels ran till late when the moon was full in March, and hey, one thing just led to anothera . She unlocked the door into the Farm, and made her way up through the sleeping warren of it; at the hall that led to the Folding Bedroom she slipped off the high-heeled shoes from her dancing feet and tiptoed to the door. She unlocked the locks quietly as a burglar, and peeked in. Auberon lay in a heap on the bed, obscure in the dawn light and (for some reason she was sure) only feigning untroubled sleep.

An Imaginary Study The Folding Bedroom and its little kitchen were so small that Auberon, in order to have some quiet and isolation in which to work, had to create out of it an imaginary study.

"A what?" Sylvie asked.

"An imaginary study," he said. "Okay. Look. This chair." He had found somewhere in the ruined habitations of Old Law Farm an old schoolhouse chair with one broad paddle arm for a student to use as a desk. Underneath the seat was a compartment for the student's books and papers. "Now," he said. He positioned the chair carefully. "Let's pretend I have a study in this bedroom. This chair is in it. Now really all we have is this chair, but a"

"What are you talking about?"

"Well will you please just listen a minute?" Auberon said, blazing up. "It's very simple. There were lots of imaginary rooms at Edgewood where I grew up."

"I bet." She stood arms akimbo, a wooden spoon in one hand, head bound in a bright hussy kerchief beneath which her earrings trembled amid escaping curls of raven hair.

"The idea is," Auberon said, "that when I say *I'm going into my study, babe,' and then sit down in this chair, then it's as though I've gone into a separate room. I shut the door. Then I'm alone in there. You can't see me or hear me, because the door is closed. And I can't see or hear you. Get it?"

"Well, okay. But how come?"

"Because the imaginary door is closed, and a"

"No, I mean how come you need this imaginary study? Why don't you just sit there?"

"I'd rather be in private. You see, we have to make a deal, that whatever I do in my imaginary study is invisible to you; you can't comment on it or dwell on it ora"

"Gee. What are you going to do?" A smile, and she made a rude gesture with the spoon. "Hey." But what he intended to do, though no less private and self-indulgent, was mostly to daydream, though he wouldn't have put it that way; to court, on long woolgathering rambles, Psyche his soul; put two and two together, and perhaps write down the sum, for he would have sharpened pencils in the pencil-well of the desk and a clean pad before him. But mostly, he knew, he would only sit, twist a lock of hair between his fingers, suck his teeth, scratch himself, try to catch the flying speckles that swam in his vision, mutter the same half-line of someone else's verse over and over and generally behave like the quieter sort of nut. He might also read the papers.

"Thinkin' and readin' and writin', huh," Sylvie said with great affection.

"Yes. You see, I have to be alone sometimes a"

She was stroking his cheek. "For thinkin' and readin' and writin'. Yes, baby. Okay." She backed away, watching him with interest.

"I'm going into my study now," Auberon said, feeling foolish.

"Okay. *Bye."

"I'm shutting the door."

She waved the spoon. She began to say something further, but he cast his eyes upward, and she returned to the kitchen.

In his study, Auberon rested his cheek in the cup of his hand and stared at the old grainy surface of his desk. Someone had scratched an obscenity there, and someone else had priggishly altered it into BOOK in block letters. Probably all done with the point of a compa.s.s. Compa.s.s and protractor. When he started in at his father's little school his grandfather gave him his old pencil-case, leather with a snap closure and weird Mexican designs cut in ita"a naked woman was one, you could run your finger over her stylized breast and feel the leather b.u.t.ton of her nipple. There were pencils with dowdy pink hats for erasers, which pulled off to reveal the naked pencil end; there was another rhomboid dialectical gray eraser, half for pencil and a grittier half for ink, which macerated the paper it was used on. Pens black and cork-tipped like Aunt Cloud's cigarettes, and a steel box of points. And a compa.s.s and protractor. Bisect an angle. But never trisect it. With his fingers he moved an imaginary compa.s.s above the desk-top. When the little yellow pencil wore down, the compa.s.s leaned at a useless angle. He could write a story about those long afternoons in school, in May, say the last day, hollyhocks growing outside and vines clambering in at the open windows; the smell of the outhouse. The pencil box. Mother Westwind and the Little Breezes. Those protracted afternoons a He could call the story Protractor. "Protractor," he said aloud, and then shot a glance at Sylvie to see if she had overheard him. He caught her just having shot him a glance, and now looking back at her task unconcernedly.

Protractor, protractor a He drummed his fingers on the oak. What was she up to in there anyway? Making coffee? She had heated a big kettle of water, and now dumped heedlessly into it several big shakes of coffee, right from the bag, and threw in this morning's used grounds as well. A rich, boiling-coffee smell filled the air.

"You know what you ought to do?" she said, stirring the pot. "You ought to try to get a job writing on *A World Elsewhere.' It's really degenerating."

"I a" he began to say, but then studiously turned away.

"Oops, oops," she said, stifling a laugh.

George had said that all that TV was written on the other coast. But how would he know anyway? The real difficulty was that he had come to see, through Sylvie's elaborate retellings of the events of "A World Elsewhere," that he could never have thought up the myriad and (to him) incongruous pa.s.sions that seemed to fill it. Yet for all he knew the terrible griefs, great sufferings, accidents and windfalls it told of were all true to lifea"what did he know about life, about people? Maybe most people were as wilful, as overmastered by ambition, blood, l.u.s.t, money, pa.s.sion as the TV showed them. People and life weren't his strengths as a writer anyway. His strengths as a writer were a "Knock-knock," Sylvie said, standing before him.

"Yes?"

"Can I come in?"

"Yes."