Little, Big

before the completing pattern; didn’t see her lips purse or her hand hesitate as she placed the last card in the center. It was a Place: the Vista.

“Well?” George said.

“George,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Exactly.” She reached for her box of cigarettes, shook it and found it empty. She had seen so many displays, so many possible falls had grown into her consciousness that sometimes they overlapped; with a sense like deja vu, she felt she was looking not at a single arrangement but at one of a series, as though some old display she had made were to be labeled “Continued,” and here, without warning, was the continuation. Yet it was all George’s fall too.

“If,” she said, “the Cousin card is you.” No. That wouldn’t do. There was something, some fact she didn’t know.

George of course knew what it was, and felt a sudden strangulation, a fear of discovery absurd on the face of it but intense anyway, as though he had walked into a trap. “Well,” he said, finding voice. “That’s enough anyway. I’m not sure I want to know my every future move.” He saw Cloud touch the Cousin card; then the Thing called Seed. Oh Christ, he thought; and just then the station wagon’s hoarse horn was heard in the drive.

“They’ll need help unloading,” Daily Alice said, struggling to rise from the grasp of her armchair. George jumped up. “No no, honey, oh no, not in your condition. You sit tight.” He went from the room, cold hands thrust in his sleeves like a monk.

Alice laughed and picked up her book again. “Did you scare him, Cloud? What did you see?”

Cloud only looked down at the pattern she had made.

For some time now she had begun to think she had been wrong about the Least Trumps, that they were not telling her of the small events of lives close to her-or rather that those small events were parts of chains, and the chains were great events; very great indeed.

The Vista card in the center of her pattern showed a meeting of corridors or aisles. Down each corridor was an endless vista of doorways, each one different, an arch then a lintel then pillars and so on till the artist’s invention ran out and the fineness of his woodcutting (which was very fine) could no longer make distinctions. You could see, down those aisles, other doors which led off in other directions, perhaps each showing vistas as endless and various as this one.

A juncture, doorways, turnings, a moment only when all the ways could be seen at once. This was George —all this. He was that vista, though he didn’t know it and she couldn’t think how to tell him. The vista wasn’t his: he was the vista. It was she who looked down it at the possibilities. And could not express them. She only knew—for sure now—that all the patterns she had ever cast were parts of one pattern, and that George had done or would do—or was at that moment doing—something that made an element in that pattern. And in any pattern, the elements do not stand alone; they are repeated, they are linked. What could it be?

Around her in the house the sounds of her family came, calling and hauling and treading the stairs. But it was into this place that she stared, into the prospect of endless branchings, corners, corridors. She felt that perhaps she was in that place; that there was a door just behind her, that she sat here between it and the first of the doors pictured on the card; that if she turned her head she might see an endless prospect of arch and lintel behind her too.

Only Fair

All night especially in cold weather the house was accustomed to speak softly to itself, perhaps because of its hundreds of joints and its half-floors and its stone parts piled on wooden. It tocked and groaned, grunted and squeaked; something gave way in an attic and fell, which caused something to come loose in a cellar and drop. The squirrels in the airspaces scratched and the mice explored the walls and halls. One mouse late at night went on tiptoe, a bottle of gin under his arm and a finger on his lips, trying to remember where Sophie’s room might be. He nearly tripped on an unexpected step; all steps in this house were unexpected.

Within his head it was still noon. The Pellucidar had not worn off, but it had turned evil, as it will do, not prodding flesh and consciousness any the less, but now with a cruel malice and not in fun. His flesh was contracted and defensive and he doubted that it would uncoil even for Sophie supposing he could find her. Ah: the lamp over a painting had been left on, and by it he saw the doorknob he wanted, he was sure of it. He was about to step quickly to it when it turned, spookily; he stepped back into the shadows, and the door opened. Smoky came out, an old dressing gown over his shoulders (the kind, George noticed, that has a braided edge of dark and light hues around the collar and pocket) and shut the door carefully and silently. He stood for a moment then, and seemed to sigh; then he went off around the corner.

Wrong damn door, George thought; imagine if I’d gone into their room, or is it the kids’ room? He went away, utterly confused now, searching hopelessly through the coiled nautilus of the second floor, tempted once to go down a floor; maybe in his madness he had gotten onto a matching upper floor and forgotten he had done so. Then Somehow he found himself in front of a door that Reason told him must be hers, though other senses disputed it. He opened it in some fear and stepped inside.

Tacey and Lily lay sweetly asleep beneath the sloping ceiling of a dormer room. By the nightlight he could see spectral toys, the glittering eye of a bear. The two girls, one still in a jailhouse crib, didn’t stir, and he was about to shut the door on them when he knew there was someone else in the room, near Tacey’s bed. Someone… He peered around the edge of the door.

Someone had just drawn from within the fine folds of his night-gray cloak a night-gray bag. George couldn’t see his face for the wide Spanish night-gray hat he wore. He stepped to the crib where Lily lay, and with fingers clothed in night-gray gloves took from his bag a pinch of something, which delicately he dispensed from between thumb and finger above her sleeping face. Sand descended in a dull-gold trickle to her eyes. He turned away then and was putting away his bag when he seemed to sense George turned to stone at the doorway. He glanced at him over the tall collar of his cloak, and George looked into his placid, heavy-lidded, night-gray eyes. Those eyes regarded him for a moment with something like pity, and he shook his heavy head, as who should say Nothing for you, son; not tonight. Which was after all only fair. And then he turned around, the tassel swinging on his hat, and went away with a low snap of his cloak to elsewhere and others more deserving.

So when George at last found his own cheerless bed (in the imaginary bedroom as it happened) he lay sleepless for hours, his withered eyeballs starting from his head. He cradled the gin bottle in his arms, tugging now and again at its cold and acid comfort, the night and day growing confused and raggedy on the still-burning Catherine-wheel of his consciousness. Only he did come to understand that the first room he had tried to enter, the one he saw Smoky come out of, was indeed Sophie’s, had to be. The shudder-starting rest of it dissolved as the sparkling synapses one by one mercifully began to bum out.

Toward dawn he watched it begin to snow.

IV.

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the starres heard,
the souls blood,