Read Online Little, Big by John Crowley - Free Book Online

white, and she cupped the candle with her hands; it glowed and faded and then glowed again. She spoke, not to him: "What's the matter?" The candleglow was extinguished, and he said, "I beg your pardon." She began to climb quickly and expertly down from the tree, and he stood away from the gate so as not to look importunate and prying when she came to speak to him. But she didn't come. From somewhere or everywhere a nightingale began, ceased, began again.
    He had come not long before to a crossroads (not a literal crossroads, though many of those too in his month's walk where he had to choose to go down by the water or over the hill, and found it not much use as practice for the crossroads in his life). He had spent a hateful year designing an enormous Skyscraper that was to look, as exactly as its hugeness and use allowed, like a thirteenth-century cathedral. When he had first submitted sketches to his client it had been in the nature of a joke, a fancy, a red herring even, meant to be dismissed, but the client hadn't understood that; he wanted his Skyscraper to be just this, just what it eventually would become, a Cathedral of Commerce, and nothing John Drinkwater could think of, brass letterbox like a baptismal font, grotesque basreliefs in Cluniac style of dwarves using telephones or reading stone ticker tape, gargoyles projecting from the building at such a height that no one could ever see them and wearing (though even 
that
 the man had refused to recognize) his client's own headlamp eyes and porous nose—nothing was too much for him and now it would all have to be executed just as he had conceived it.
    While this project dragged on, a change attempted to come over him. Attempted, because he resisted it; it seemed a thing apart from him, a thing he could almost hut not quite name. He first noticed it as an insinuation into his crowded yet orderly day of peculiar daydreams: abstract words merely, that would suddenly he spoken within him as though by a voice. 
Multiplicity
 was one. Another on another day (as he sat looking out the tall windows of the University Club at the sooty rain) was 
combinatory
. Once uttered, the notion had a way of taking over his whole mind, extending into the work-place there and into the countinghouse, until he was left paralyzed and unable to take the next long-prepared and wellthought-out step in the career everyone described as "meteoric."
    He felt he was lapsing into a long dream, or perhaps awaking from one. Either way, he didn't want it to happen. As a specific against it (he thought) he began to take an interest in theology. He read Swedenborg and Augustine; he was soothed most by Aquinas, could sense the Angelic Doctor building stone by stone the great cathedral of his 
Summa
. He learned then that at the end of his life Aquinas regarded all that he had written as "a heap of straw."
    A heap of straw. Drinkwater sat at his broad board in the long skylit offices of Mouse, Drinkwater, Stone and stared at the sepia photographs of the towers and parks and villas he had built, and thought: a heap of straw. Like the first and most ephemeral house the Three Pigs in the story built. There must be a stronger place, a place where he could hide from whatever this wolf was that pursued him. He was thirty-nine years old.
    His partner Mouse found that after he had been some months at his drawing board he had gotten no further with firm plans for the Cathedral of Commerce, had been sitting instead hour after hour doodling tiny houses with strange insides; and he was sent abroad for a while, to rest.
    Strange insides . . . By the path that led up from the gate to the fanlighted door of the vicarage he could see a machine or garden ornament, a white globe on a pedestal surrounded by rusted iron hoops. Some of the hoops had sprung and lay fallen on the path, obscured in weeds. He pushed the gate and it opened, making a brief song on its hinges. Within the house a light was moving, and as he came