Little, Big (78 page)

"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 ohly 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."

"Oh," Alice said.

"Not only that, not only that," he said in astonished triumph. "I think it'll
do
work. I think it was
meant
to. It was so simple! I never thought of it. Can you imagine if that's so? Alice, the house will be all right! If that thing will turn, it'll turn belts! It'll turn generators! Lights! Heat!"

The lamp he held showed them his face, transformed, and seeming so close to some dangerous limit that it made Sophie shrink. She supposed that he couldn't see the two of them well; she glanced at Alice, who still tightly held her hand, and thought that Alice's eyes might fill with tears, if they could, but that they could not; that Somehow they never would again.

"That's nice," Alice said.

"Nice," Smoky said, resuming his search. "You think I'm crazy.
I
think I'm crazy. But I think just maybe Harvey Cloud wasn't crazy. Maybe." He pulled a thick book from under others, which fell noisily to the floor. "This is it, this is it, this is it," he said, and without looking back at them, he made to leave.

"The lamp, Smoky," Alice said.

"Oh. Sorry." He had been carrying it off absently. He put it down On the table, and smiled at them, so infinitely pleased that they couldn't not smile back. He left almost at a run, the thick book under his arm.

The two women sat without speaking for some time after he had gone. Then Sophie said: "You won't tell him?"

"No," Alice said. She began to say something further, a reason perhaps, but then didn't, and Sophie dared say nothing more. "Anyway," Alice said, "I won't be
gone
, not really. I mean I'll be gone, but still I'll be here. Always." She thought that was true; she thought, looking up at the dark ceiling and the tall windows, at the house around her, that what called to her, calling from the very heart of things, called to her as much from here as from any other place; and that the feeling she felt was not loss, it was only that sometimes she mistook it for loss. "But Sophie," she said, and her voice had grown rough, "Sophie, you have to take care of him. Watch out for him."

"How, Alice."

"I don't know, but—well, you must. I mean it, Soph. Do that for me."

"I will," Sophie said. "But I'm not much good at that, you know, watching out, and taking care."

"It won't be long," Alice said. That too she was sure of, or believed or hoped she was sure of; she tried, searching in herself, to find that certainty: to find the calm delight, the gratitude, the exhilaration she had felt when she had begun to understand what conclusion it was all to have, the half-scared, half-puissant sense that she had lived her whole life as a chick inside an egg, and then got too big for it, and then found a way to begin to break it, and then had broken it, and was now about to come forth into some huge, airy world she could have had no inkling of, yet bearing wings to live in it with that were still untried. She was sure that what she knew now, they would all come to know, and other things still more wonderful, and more wonderful yet; but in the cold old room at the dark end of night, she couldn't quite feel it alive within her. She thought of Smoky. She was afraid; as afraid as if . . .

"Sophie," she said softly. "Do you think it's death?"

Sophie had fallen asleep, her head resting against Alice's shoulder. "Hm?" she said.

"Do you think that dying is what it really is?"

"I don't know," Sophie said. She felt Alice trembling beside her. "I don't think so. But I don't know."

"I don't think so either," Alice said.

Sophie said nothing.

"If it is, though," Alice said, "it isn't . . . what I thought."

"You mean dying isn't? Or that place?"

"Either." She pulled the afghan more closely around them. "Smoky told me, once, about this place, in India or China, where ages ago when somebody got the death sentence, they used to give him this drug, like a sleeping drug, only it's a poison, but very slow-acting; and the person falls asleep first, deep asleep, and has these very vivid dreams. He dreams a long time, he forgets he's dreaming even; he dreams for days. He dreams that he's on a journey, or that some such thing has happened to him. And then, somewhere along, the drug is so gentle and he's so fast asleep that he never notices when, he dies. But he doesn't know it. The dream changes, maybe; but he doesn't even know it's a dream, so. He just goes on. He only thinks it's another country."

"That's spooky," Sophie said.

"Smoky said he didn't think it was so, though."

"No," Sophie said. "I bet not."

"He said, if the drug was always supposed to be fatal in the end, how would anybody know that's what its effect was?"

"Oh."

"I was thinking," Alice said, "that maybe this is like that."

"Oh, Alice, how awful, no."

But Alice had meant nothing awful; it seemed to her no dreadful issue, if you were condemned to death, to make out of death a country. That was the similarity she saw: for she had perceived, what none of the others had and Sophie only dimly and backwardly, that the place they had been invited to was no place. She had perceived in her own growing larger that there was no place there distinct from those who lived in it: the fewer of them, the smaller their country. And if there were now to be a migration to that land, each emigrant would have to make the place he traveled to, make it out of himself. It was what she, pioneer, would have to do: make out of her own death, or what just now seemed like her death, a land for the rest of them to travel to. She would have to grow large enough to contain the whole world, or the whole great world turn out to be small enough after all to fit within the compass of her bosom.

Smoky for sure wouldn't believe in that either. He'd find it hard, anyway. She thought then that he had found the whole thing hard; that however patient he had grown, however well he had learned to live with it, he had never and would never find it easy. Would he come? More than anything else she wanted to be sure of that. Could he? She was sure of so many things, but not sure of that; long ago she had seen that the very thing that had earned Smoky for her might be the cause of her losing him, that is, her place in this Tale. And there it still was, the bargain held; she felt him even now to be at the end of a long and fragile cord, that might part if she tugged it, or slip from her fingers, or from his. And she would leave now without farewell lest it be for good.

Oh Smoky, she thought; oh death. And for a long time thought nothing else, only wishing, without making the wish, that this issue were not the issue it must have, the only issue it could have or ever had.

"You will watch out for him," she whispered; "Sophie, you have to see that he comes. You have to."

But Sophie was asleep again, the afghan drawn up to her chin. Alice looked around herself, as though waking; the windows were blue. Night was passing. Like someone coming to consciousness with the cessation of pain, she gathered around herself the world, the dawn, and her future. She stood then, easing herself away from her sleeping sister. Sophie dreamed that she did so, and partly woke to say, "I'm ready, I'll come," and then other words that made no sense. She sighed, and Alice tucked the afghan around her.

Above her, there were footsteps again, coming downward. Alice kissed her sister's brow, and blew out the dim lamp; blue dawn filled the room when the yellow flame was gone. It was later than she had thought. She went out into the hall; Smoky came running down to the landing on the stairs above her.

"Alice!" he said.

"Yes, hush," she said. "You'll wake everybody."

"Alice, it works." He gripped the newel at the stair's turning, as though he might fall. "It works, you have to come see."

"Oh?" Alice said.

"Alice, Alice, come see! It's all right now. It's all right, it works, it goes around. Listen!" And he pointed upward. Far, far off, barely discernible amid the dawn noises of peepers and first birds, there was a steady metallic clacking, like the ticking of a vast clock, a clock inside which the house itself was contained.

"All right?" Alice said.

"It's all right, we don't have to leave!" He paused again to listen, rapt. "The house won't fall apart. There'll be light and heat. We don't have to go anywhere!"

She only looked up, from the bottom of the stair.

"Isn't that great?" he said.

"Great," she said.

"Come see," he said, already turning back up the stairs.

"Okay," she said. "I'll come. In a minute."

"Hurry," he said, and started upwards.

"Smoky, don't run," she said.

She heard his climbing footsteps recede. She went to the hall-mirror, and from a peg beside it took her heavy cloak, and threw it around her. She glanced once at the figure in the mirror, who looked aged in the dawn light, and went to the great front door with its oval glass, and opened it.

The morning was huge, and went on in all directions before her, and blew coldly past her into the house. She stood a long time in the open doorway, thinking: one step. One step, which will seem to be a step away, but which will not be; one step into the rainbow, a step she had long ago taken, and which could not be untaken, every other step was only further. She took one step. Out on the lawn, amid the rags of mist, a little dog ran toward her, leaping and barking excitedly.

Itur in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferrarum.

—Aeneid, Book VI

While Daily Alice thought and Sophie watched and slept, while Ariel Hawksquill flew along foggy country roads to meet a train at a northern station, Auberon and George Mouse sat close to a small fire, wondering what place it was that Fred Savage had led them to, and unable to remember in any clear way just how they had got there.

They'd started off some time ago, it seemed to them; they'd begun by making preparations, going through George's old trunks and bureaus outfitting themselves, though since they had had not much idea at all of what dangers or difficulties they would meet, this had been haphazard; George found and tossed out sweaters, flaccid knapsacks, knitted caps, galoshes.

"Say," Fred said, tugging a cap over his wild hair. "Long time since I wore one of these here."

"What good is all this, though?" Auberon said, standing aside, hands in his pockets.

"Well, listen," George said. Better safe than sorry. Forewarned is forearmed."

"You'd about need to be four-armed," said Fred, holding up an immense poncho, "for thisere to do you much good."

"This is stupid," Auberon said. "I mean . . ."

"Okay, okay," George said angrily, flourishing a large pistol he had just then found in the trunk, "okay,
you
decide, Mr. Know-it-all. Just don't say I didn't warn you." He thrust the gun in his belt, then changed his mind and tossed it back. "Hey, how about this?" It was a twenty-bladed jackknife with a thousand uses. "God, I haven't seen this in
years
."

"Nice," Fred said, levering out the corkscrew with a yellow thumbnail. "Ver' nice.
And
handy."

Auberon went on watching, hands in pockets, but made no further objection; after a moment he no longer watched. Ever since Lilac's appearance at Old Law Farm he had had immense difficulty in remaining for any length of time in the world; he seemed only to enter and leave particular scenes, which had no connection with each other, like the rooms of a house whose plan he couldn't fathom, or didn't care to try to fathom. He supposed, sometimes, that he was going mad, but though the thought seemed reasonable enough and an explanation of sorts, it left him oddly unmoved. For sure an enormous difference had suddenly come over the nature of things, but just what that difference was he couldn't put his finger on: or rather, any individual thing he did put his finger on (a street, an apple, any thought, any memory) seemed no different, seemed to be now just what it had always been, and yet the difference remained. "Same difference," George often said, about two things that were more or less alike; but for Auberon the phrase had come to designate his sense of one thing, one thing that had Somehow become—and was probably now for good—more or less different.