Little, Big

the night sky (for sure he had grown much smaller) but lowered his eyes quickly; he didn’t want to appear a stranger here or someone who didn’t know what was what; he couldn’t keep, though, from glancing around himself at those who, grinning or knowing or indifferent, glanced at him as he passed.

Where was Spark, he wondered as he pulled himself from a tangled deadfall into which he had sunk hip- deep. Now he could have climbed onto the dog’s back and gotten on much faster. But Spark had developed a contempt for his newly-small master and had gone off in the direction of Washington Heights to try his fortune alone.

Alone. Auberon remembered the three gifts his sisters had given him. He took from his canvas knapsack the one Tacey had given him and tore its ice-blue wrapping with trembling fingers.

It was a combination pen and flashlight, one end to see by and the other to write with. Handy. It even had its little battery: he pressed its button, and it burned. A few snowflakes drifted in the beam; a few faces that had come close withdrew. And by the light he saw that he stood before a tiny door in the woods; his journey was done. He knocked, and knocked again.

Look at the Time

George Mouse shuddered vastly. The effort of Mental Sympathy and the wearing off of his dose had him feeling a little ashen. It had been fun, but good Lord, look at the time! In a few hours he would have to be up again for milking. For sure Sylvie (brown as a berry, but not home yet, unless he missed his guess) wouldn’t be up for it. Gathering up his hash-dispersed limbs, which ached with pleasant tiredness (long trip), he stitched them back roughly where they belonged on his consciousness and rose. Getting too old for this. He made certain his cousin had blankets enough, raked up the fire, and (already forgetting in the main what he had perceived behind his cousin’s dark and shapely lids) took up the lamp and made his way to his own cluttered bedroom, yawning uncontrollably.

The Club Meets

Some city blocks away at that hour, before the narrow townhouse of Ariel Hawksquill which faced a small park, large and silent cars of another era one by one drew up and let out each a single passenger, and drove away to where cars like that await their masters. Each of the visitors rang Hawksquill’s bell and was admitted; each must take off his gloves finger by finger, so well they fitted; each gave them to the servant inside his hat, and some had white scarves that whistled faintly as they drew them from their necks. They gathered in Hawksquill’s parlor floor which was chiefly library; each crossed his legs as he sat. They exchanged a few words in low voices.

When Hawksquill at last entered, they rose for her (though she motioned that they shouldn’t) and sat again, each tugging at his trouser-knee as he recrossed his legs.

“I guess we can say,” one said, “that this meeting of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club is now open. For new business.”

Ariel Hawksquill awaited their questions. She was in this year nearing the height of her powers, her figure angular, hair iron-gray, manner sharp and deliberate as a cockatoo’s. She was imposing, if not quite the intimidating figure she would become; and everything about her, from dun shoes to ringed fingers, suggested powers—powers the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at least was well aware she possessed.

“The new business, of course,” another member said, smiling toward Hawksquill, “being the matter of Russell Eigenblick. The Lecturer.”

“What,” a third asked Hawksquill, “do you think now? What are your impressions?”

She put her fingertips together, like Holmes. “He is and is not what he seems,” she said in a voice as precise and dry as a parchment page. “More clever than he appears on television, though not so large. The enthusiasm he arouses is genuine, but, I can’t help thinking, evanescent. He has five planets in Scorpio; so did Martin Luther. His favorite color is billiard-cloth green. He has large, moist, falsely sympathetic brown eyes, like a cow. His voice is amplified by miniature devices concealed in his clothing, which is expensive but doesn’t fit well. He wears, beneath his pants, boots to his knees.”

They absorbed this.

“His character?” one asked.

“Contemptible.”

“His manners?”

“Well…”

“His ambitions?”

This she was for a moment unable to answer, yet it was this question which the puissant bankers, board chairmen, bureaucratic plenipotentiaries and retired generals who met under the aegis of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club most wanted answered. As the secret guardians of a touchy, wilful, aging republic suffering in the more or less permanent grip of social and economic depression, they were minutely sensitive to any attractive man, preacher, soldier, adventurer, thinker, thug. Hawksquill was well aware that her insights had led to the putting away of more than one such. “He has no interest in being President,” she said.

One of the members made a noise that indicated: if he does not, he could not have any other ambition that could truly alarm us; and if he does, he is helpless, because for some years the regular succession of shadowy presidents has been solely the concern of the Club, whatever the people or the Presidents may have thought. It was a brief noise, made in the throat.

“It’s difficult to describe precisely,” Hawksquill said. “On the one hand his self-importance seems ludicrous, and his aims so huge as to be dismissable entirely, like God’s. On the other hand… He claims, for instance, often and with a particular expression that seems to hint at large secrets, to be ‘in the cards.’ An old catch phrase: and yet Somehow (I’m afraid I can’t say quite how) I think his words are exact, and that he is in the cards, in some cards, only I don’t know which ones.” She looked over her slow-nodding listeners, and felt sorry to puzzle them, but she was puzzled herself. She had spent weeks with Russell Eigenblick on the road, in hotels, on planes, transparently disguised as a journalist (the hard-faced paladins who surrounded Eigenblick saw easily through the disguise, but could see nothing within); but she was less able now to offer a suggestion as to the disposition of his case than when she had first heard his name, and laughed.

Fingertips on her temples, she walked carefully through the perfectly-ordered new wing which she had added over the last weeks to her memory mansion to contain her investigation of Russell Eigenblick. She knew at what turnings he himself should appear, at the head of which staircases, at the nexus of which vistas. He would not appear. She could picture him with the ordinary or Natural Memory. She could see him against the rain-streaked window of a local train, talking indefatigably, his red beard wagging and his curling eyebrows ascending and descending like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. She could see him haranguing the vast ecstatic dove-moaning audiences, real tears in his eyes and real love poured forth from them to him; she could see him rattling a blue teacup and saucer on his knee at a women’s club meeting after another interminable lecture, with his steely disciples, each holding his own cup and saucer and cake, around him. The Lecturer: it was they who insisted on his being called that. They arrived first and made arrangements for the Lecturer’s appearance. The Lecturer will stand here. No one must use this room but the Lecturer. There must be a car for the Lecturer. And their eyes never filled with tears as they sat behind his lectern, faces as composed and expressionless as their black-socked ankles. All this she had quarried from Natural Memory and by artifice constructed into a fine Palladian wing of her memory mansion, where it ought all to make a new and subtle sense; she expected to be able to turn a marble corner and find him there, framed in a vista, suddenly revealed and revealing what he was, which she had known all along but had not known she knew. That was how it was intended to work, how it had always worked in the past. But now the Club waited, silent and unstirring, for her disposition; and between the pillars and on the belvederes there stood the disciples, neatly dressed, holding each the emblem to identify himself which she had given him— train-ticket stub, golf club, purple mimeo sheets, dead body. They were clear enough. But he would not appear. And yet the