had a frontispiece, a sad, soft pencil portrait of Drinkwater. Smoky vaguely recognized the artist’s hyphenated double name. Its chock-full title page had an epigraph: I arise, and unbuild it again. Shelley. The plates were the same, though there were a set of Combinations that were all floorplans and labeled in a way Smoky couldn’t comprehend.
The sixth and last edition, great and heavy, was beautifully bound in art-nouveau mauve; the letters of the title stretched out shuddered limbs and curling descenders as though to grow; the whole seemed as though reflected in a rippled lily-pond surface all in bloom at evening. The frontispiece was not Drinkwater now but his wife, a photograph like a drawing, smudged like charcoal. Her indistinct features. Perhaps it wasn’t the art. Perhaps she was as he had been, not always fully present; but she was lovely. There were dedicatory poems and epistles and a great armor of Prefaces, Forewords and Prolegomena, red type and black; and then the little houses again just as before, looking now old-fashioned and awkward, like an ordinary small town swept up in a modern mania. As though Violet’s amanuensis were struggling for some last grasp of reason over the pages and pages studded with capitalized abstractions (the type had grown smaller as books had grown thicker), there were marginal glosses every page or so, and epigraphs, chapter headings, and all paraphernalia that makes a text into an object, logical, articulated, unreadable. Tipped in at the end against the watered endpapers was a chart or map, folded over several times, a thick packet in fact. It was of thin paper, and Smoky at first couldn’t see how to go about unfolding it; he began one way, winced at the little cry it made as an old fold tore slightly, began again. As he glimpsed parts of it, he could see it was an immense plan, but of what? At last he had the whole unfolded; it lay crackling across his lap face down, he had only to turn it face up. He stopped then, not sure he wanted to see what it was.
Just Then
“Will she go, then, Cloud?” Mother asked, and Cloud answered, “Well it appears not so;” but she wouldn’t add any more, only sat at the far end of the kitchen table, the smoke of her cigarette an obscurity in the sunlight. Mother was powdered to the elbows in the process of pie-making, not a mindless task though she liked to call it that, in fact she found that at it her thoughts were often clearest, notions sharpest; she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope. She remembered verse sometimes cooking that she had forgotten she knew, or spoke in tongues, her husband’s or her children’s or her dead father’s or her unborn, clearly-seen grandchildren’s, three graduated girls and a lean unhappy boy. She knew the weather in her elbows, and mentioned as she slipped the old glass pie-plates into the oven which breathed its heated breath on her that it would storm soon. Cloud made no answer, only sighed and smoked, and dabbed at the dew at her wrinkled throat with a little hankie which she then tucked neatly back into her sleeve. She said: “It will be lots clearer later,” and went slowly from the kitchen and through the halls to her room to see if she might be able to close her eyes for a while before dinner had to be prepared; and before she lay down on the wide featherbed that for a few short years had been hers and Henry Cloud’s she looked out toward the hills and yes, white cumulus had begun to assemble itself that way, climbing like imminent victory, and no doubt Sophie was right. She lay and thought: At least he came all right, and contradicted none of it. Beyond that she couldn’t tell.
Just then where the Old Stone Fence divides the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture which goes down rocky and leaping with insects to the margin of the Lily Pond, Doctor Drinkwater in a wide-awake hat stopped, panting from his climb; slowly the roar of his own blood diminished in his ears and he could begin to listen to the scene in progress of his only drama, the interminable conversations of birds, cicada’s semitune, the rustle and thump of a thousand creatures’ entrances and exits. The land was touched by the hand of man, though that hand was in these days mostly withdrawn; way down beyond the Lily Pond he could see the dreaming roof of Brown’s barn, and knew this to be an abandoned pasture of his enterprise, and this wall his ancient marker. The scene was variegated by man’s enterprise, and room made for many houses large and small, this capacious wall, that sunny pasture, that pond. It all seemed to the Doctor just what was truly meant by the word “ecology,” which he saw now and then misused in the dense columns that bordered his chronicles of this place in the City paper; and as he sat on a warm lichened stone utterly attentive, a Little Breeze brought him news that by evening a mountain of cloud would break in pieces here.
Just then in Sophie’s room on the wide featherbed where for many years John Drinkwater lay with Violet Bramble, their two great-grandchildren lay. The long pale dress that next day Daily Alice would put on, and then presumably not again ever completely put off, was hung carefully from the top of the closet door, and made in the closet door mirror another like it, which it pressed back to back; and below it and around it were all things proper to it. Sophie and her sister lay naked in the afternoon heat; Sophie brushed her hand across her sister’s sweat-damp flank, and Daily Alice said “Ah, it’s too hot,” and felt hotter still her sister’s tears on her shoulder. She said: “Someday soon it’ll be you, you’ll choose or maybe be chosen, and you’ll be another June bride,” and Sophie said, “I’ll never, never,” and more that Alice couldn’t hear because Sophie buried her face against her sister’s neck and murmured like the afternoon; what Sophie said was, “He’ll never understand or see, they’ll never give him what they gave us, he’ll step in the wrong places and look when he should look away, never see doors or know turnings; wait and see, you just wait and see”; which just then Great-aunt Cloud was pondering, what they would see if they waited, and what their mother also felt though not with the same plain curiosity but a sort of maneuvering within of the armies of Possibility; and what Smoky too, left alone for what he imagined was the general Sunday siesta, day of rest, in the black and dusty library with the whole plan before him, just then trembled with, sleepless and erect as a flame.
III.
It was during a glad summer toward the end of the last century that John Drinkwater, while on a walking tour of England ostensibly to look at houses, came one twilight to the gates of a red-brick vicarage in Cheshire. He had lost his way, and his guidebook, which he had foolishly knocked into the millrace by which he had eaten his lunch hours before; he was hungry, and however safe and sweet the English countryside he couldn’t help feeling uneasy.
Strange Insides
In the vicarage garden, an unkempt and riotous garden, moths glimmered amid a dense cascade of rosebushes, and birds flitted and rustled in a gnarled and domineering apple tree. In the tree’s crook someone sat
