LITTLE, BIG
John Crowley
Dedication
For Lynda
who first knew it
with the author’s love.
Epigraph
A little later, remembering man’s earthly origin, ‘dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,’ they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying ‘We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!’
—Flora Thompson,
Lark Rise
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
BOOK ONE: EDGEWOOD
CHAPTER ONE
Somewhere to Elsewhere
A Long Drink of Water
Anonymity
Name & Number
A City Mouse
At First Sight
The Young Santa Claus
A Sea Island
Correspondence
Make-Believe
Life is Short, or Long
Trumps Turned at Edgewood
Junipers
CHAPTER TWO
A Gothic Bathroom
From Side to Side
Sophie’s Dream
Led Astray
An Imaginary Bedroom
In the Walled Garden
Houses & Histories
Doctor Drinkwater’s Advice
The Architecture of Country Houses
Just Then
CHAPTER THREE
Strange Insides
For It Was He
Strange and Shaded Lanes
Call Them Doors
No End to Possibility
A Turn Around The House
Tell Me the Tale
All Questions Answered
Gone, She Said
CHAPTER FOUR
A Suit of Truman’s
The Summer House
Woods and Lakes
Touching Noses
Happy Isles
A Sheltered Life
As Quietly As She Had Come
Suppose One Were a Fish
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucky Children
Some Final Order
Can You Find the Faces
These Few Windows
To See What He Could See
But There It Is
In the Woods
By the Way
Good Advice
What About It
BOOK TWO: BROTHER NORTH-WIND’S SECRET
CHAPTER ONE
Retreats and Operations
A Swell Idea
Some Notes About Them
What You Most Want
Something Horrific
Anthology of Love
Darker Before It Lightened
The Last Day of August
Strange Way to Live
No Catching Up
CHAPTER TWO
Robin Bird’s Lesson
The End of the World
Brother North-wind’s Secret
The Only Game Going
The One Good Thing About Winter
The Old Age of the World
Unflinching Predators
Responsibilities
Harvest-Home
Seized by the Tale
CHAPTER THREE
Time Flies
A Definite Hazard
Up on the Hill
Cocoa and a Bun
The Orphan Nymphs
The Least Trumps
Only Fair
CHAPTER FOUR
Agreement with Newton
Letters to Santa
Room for One More
A Gift They Had to Give
Old World Bird
Lucy, than Lilac
Little, Big
Solstice Night
In All Directions
BOOK THREE: OLD LAW FARM
CHAPTER ONE
Keeping People Out
News from Home
What George Mouse Heard
George Mouse Goes on Overhearing
A Friend of the Doctor’s
A Shepherd in the Bronx
Look at the Time
The Club Meets
Pictured Heavens
CHAPTER TWO
Old Law Farm
The Bee or the Sea
A Wingéd Messenger
A Folding Bedroom
Sylvie and Destiny
Gate of Horn
CHAPTER THREE
Lilacs and Fireflies
That’s a Secret
Books and a Battle
The Old Geography
Hills and Dales
A Getaway Look
Two Beautiful Sisters
CHAPTER FOUR
The Art of Memory
A Geography
Wakings-up
No Going Back Out
Slow Fall of Time
Princess
Brownie’s House
A Banquet
BOOK FOUR: THE WILD WOOD
CHAPTER ONE
A Time and a Tour
Rainy-day Wonder
That’s the Lot
A Secret Agent
The Worm Turned
Hidden Ones Revealed
Glory
Not Yet
CHAPTER TWO
Tossing and Turning
La Negra
The Seventh Saint
Whispering Gallery
Right Side Up
What a Tangle
CHAPTER THREE
The Top of a Stair
Daughter of Time
The Child Turned
An Imaginary Study
Nevertheless Spring
Let Him Follow Love
CHAPTER FOUR
More Would Happen
Something Going
Uncle Daddy
Lost for Sure
The Wild Wood
This Is War
Unexpected Seam
From East to West
Sylvie?
BOOK FIVE: THE ART OF MEMORY
CHAPTER ONE
The Hero Awakened
A Secret Sorrow
A Year to Place Upon It
In the First Place
And in the Second Place
And in the Third
CHAPTER TWO
Not Her But This Park
Never Never Never
Doesn’t Matter
Sylvie & Bruno Concluded
How Far You’ve Gone
Bottom of a Bottle
Door into Nowhere
Ahead and Behind
CHAPTER THREE
Not a Moment Too Soon
Needle in The Haystack of Time
Crossroads
An Awful Mess
Slowly I Turn
Embracing Himself
CHAPTER FOUR
Nothing for Something
Quite Long-Sighted
Ever After
Three Lilacs
Thinking of Waking
BOOK SIX: THE FAIRIES’ PARLIAMENT
CHAPTER ONE
Winters
Fifty-Two
Carrying a Torch
Something He Could Steal
Escapements
Caravans
New-Found-Land
Just About Over
CHAPTER TWO
What a Surprise
Walking from There
A Parliament
Not All Over
Lady with the Alligator Purse
Still Un-stolen
CHAPTER THREE
Is It Far?
Only Pretending
Where Was She Headed?
Too Simple to S
ay
Another Country
CHAPTER FOUR
Storm of Difference
Watch Your Step
A Family Thing
A Watch and a Pipe
Middle of Nowhere
Fifty-two Pickup
So Big
CHAPTER FIVE
Her Blessing
More, Much More
Only the Brave
Quite Close
Give Way, Give Way
Come or Stay
Not Going
Land Called the Tale
A Wake
A Real Gift
She’s Here, She’s Near
Once Upon a Time
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the Author: Meet John Crowley
About the Book: A Little, Big Review by Roz Kaveney
Read on: Have You Read?: More by John Crowley
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
BOOK ONE: EDGEWOOD
CHAPTER ONE
Men are men, but Man is a woman.
—Chesterton
On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.
Somewhere to Elsewhere
Though he had left his City room early in the morning it was nearly noon before he had crossed the huge bridge on a little-used walkway and come out into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side of the river. Through the afternoon he negotiated those Indian-named places, usually unable to take the straight route commanded by the imperious and constant flow of traffic; he went neighborhood by neighborhood, looking down alleys and into stores. He saw few walkers, even indigenous, though there were kids on bikes; he wondered about their lives in these places, which to him seemed gloomily peripheral, though the kids were cheerful enough.
The regular blocks of commercial avenues and residential streets began gradually to become disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest; began to be broken by weedy lots as though by glades; now and then a dusty undergrown woods or a scruffy meadow announced that it was available to be turned into an industrial park. Smoky turned that phrase over in his mind, since that seemed truly the place in the world where he was, the industrial park, between the desert and the sown.
He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere. He sat, shrugged his small pack from his back, took from it a sandwich he had made himself—another condition—and a confetti-colored gas-station road map. He wasn’t sure if the map were forbidden by the conditions, but the directions he’d been given to get to Edgewood weren’t explicit, and he opened it.
Now. This blue line was apparently the cracked macadam lined with untenanted brick factories he had been walking along. He turned the map so that this line ran parallel to his bench, as the road did (he wasn’t much of a map reader) and found, far off to his left, the place he walked toward. The name Edgewood didn’t appear, actually, but it was here somewhere, in this group of five towns marked with the legend’s most insignificant bullets. So. There was a mighty double red line that went near there, proud with exits and entrances; he couldn’t walk along that. A thick blue line (on the model of the vascular system, Smoky imagined all the traffic flowing south to the city on the blue lines, away on the red) ran somewhat nearer, extending corpuscular access to towns and townlets along the way. The much thinner sclerotic blue line he sat beside was tributary to this; probably commerce had moved there, Tool Town, Food City, Furniture World, Carpet Village. Well … But there was also, almost indistinguishable, a narrow black line he could take soon instead. He thought at first that it led nowhere, but no, it went on, faltering, seeming at first almost forgotten by the mapmaker in the ganglia, but then growing clearer in the northward emptiness, and coming very near a town Smoky knew to be near Edgewood.
That one, then. It seemed a walker’s road.
After measuring with his thumb and finger the distance on the map he had come, and how far he had to go (much farther), he slung on his pack, tilted his hat against the sun, and went on.
A Long Drink of Water
She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.
It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room.
She was tall.
She was nearly six feet tall, which was several inches taller than Smoky; her sister, just turned fourteen, was as tall as he. Their party dresses were short, and glittered, hers red, her sister’s white; their long, long stockings glistened. What was odd was that tall as they were they were shy, especially the younger, who smiled but wouldn’t take Smoky’s hand, only turned away further behind her sister.
Delicate giantesses. The older glanced toward George as he made debonair introductions. Her smile was tentative. Her hair was red-gold and curly-fine. Her name, George said, was Daily Alice.
He took her hand, looking up. “A long drink of water,” he said, and she began to laugh. Her sister laughed too, and George Mouse bent down and slapped his knee. Smoky, not knowing why the old chestnut should be so funny, looked from one to another with a seraphic idiot’s grin, his hand unrelinquished.
It was the happiest moment of his life.
Anonymity
It had not been, until he met Daily Alice Drinkwater in the library of the Mouse townhouse, a life particularly charged with happiness; but it happened to be a life suited just right for the courtship he then set out on. He was the only child of his father’s second marriage, and was born when his father was nearly sixty. When his mother realized that the solid Barnable fortune had largely evanesced under his father’s management, and that there had been therefore little reason to marry him and less to bear him a child, she left him in an access of bitterness. That was too bad for Smoky, because of all his relations she was the least anonymous; in fact she was the only one of any related to him by blood whose face he could instantly bring to memory in his old age, though he had been a boy when she left. Smoky himself mostly inherited the Barnable anonymity, and only a streak of his mother’s concreteness: an actual streak it seemed to those who knew him, a streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.
They were a large family. His father had five sons and daughters by his first wife; they all lived in anonymous suburbs of cities in those states whose names begin with an I and which Smoky’s City friends couldn’t distinguish from one another. Smoky confused the catalogue himself at times. Since his father was supposed by them to have a lot of money and it was never clear what he intended to do with it, Dad was always welcome in their houses, and after his wife’s departure he chose to sell the house Smoky was born in and travel from one to another with his young son, a succession of anonymous dogs, and seven custom-made chests containing his library. Barnable was an educated man, though his learning was of such a remote and rigid kind that it gave him no conversation and didn’t reduce his natural anonymity at all. His older sons and daughters regarded the chests of books as an inconvenience, like having his socks confused in the wash with theirs.
(Later on, it was Smoky’s habit to try to sort out his half-siblings and their houses and assign them to th
eir proper cities and states while he sat on the toilet. Maybe that was because it was in their toilets that he had felt most anonymous, anonymous to the point of invisibility; anyway, he would pass the time there shuffling his brothers and sisters and their children like a pack of cards, trying to match faces to porches to lawns, until late in life he could deal out the whole of it. It gave him the same bleak satisfaction he got from solving crossword puzzles, and the same doubt—what if he had guessed words that crossed correctly, but weren’t the words the maker had in mind? The next-week’s paper with the solution printed would never arrive.)
His wife’s desertion didn’t make Barnable less cheerful, only more anonymous; it seemed to his older children, as he coalesced in and then evaporated from their lives, that he existed less and less. It was only to Smoky that he gave the gift of his private solidity: his learning. Because the two of them moved so often, Smoky never did go to a regular school; and by the time one of the states that began with an I found out what had been done to Smoky by his father all those years, he was too old to be compelled to go to school any more. So, at sixteen, Smoky knew Latin, classical and medieval; Greek; some old-fashioned mathematics; and he could play the violin a little. He had smelled few books other than his father’s leather-bound classics; he could recite two hundred lines of Virgil more or less accurately; and he wrote in a perfect Chancery hand.
His father died in that year, shriveled it seemed by the imparting of all that was thick in him to his son. Smoky continued their wanderings for a few more years. He had a hard time getting work because he had no Diploma; at last he learned to type in a shabby business school, in South Bend he later thought it must have been, and became a Clerk. He lived a lot in three different suburbs with the same name in three different cities, and in each his relatives called him by a different name—his own, his father’s, and Smoky—which last so suited his evanescence that he kept it. When he was twenty-one, an unknown thrift of his father’s threw down some belated money on him, and he took a bus to the City, forgetting as soon as he was past the last one all the cities his relatives had lived in, and all his relatives too, so that long afterwards he had to reconstruct them face by lawn; and once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.