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

that she would arrive three months pregnant by Fred Reynard or Oliver Hawksquill or some other not welcome at the parsonage (he never asked the name); it didn't occur to him that she, like him, would be two years older, and have come upon hard crossroads of her own, and gone a ways down strange and shaded lanes.

Call Them  Doors
    "Paracelsus is of the opinion,"- Dr. Bramble told the theosophists, "that the universe is crowded with powers, spirits, who are not quite immaterial—whatever that means or meant, perhaps made of some finer, less tangible stuff than the ordinary world. They fill up the air and the water and so on; they surround us on every side, so that at our every movement" —he moved his long-fingered hand gently in the air, causing turmoil amid his pipesmoke—"we displace thousands."
    She sat by the door, just out of the light of a red-shaded lamp, bored or nervous or both; her cheek was in her palm and the lamp lit the dark down of her arms and turned it blond. Her eyes were deep and feral, and she had a single eyebrow—that is, it extended without a break across her nose, unplucked and thick. She didn't look at him, or when she did didn't see him.
    "Nereids, dryads, sylphs, and salamanders is how Paracelsus divides them," Dr. Bramble said. "That is to say (as we would express it) mermaids, elves, fairies, and goblins or imps. One class of spirit for each of the four elements—mermaids for the water, elves for the earth, fairies for the air, goblins for the fire. It is thus that we derive the common name for all such beings—'elementals.' Very regular and neat. Paracelsus had an orderly mind. It is not, however, true, based as it is on the common error—the old, the great error that underlies the whole history of our science—that there are these four elements, earth, air, fire, water, out of which the world is made. We know now of course that there are some ninety elements, and that the old four are not among them."
    There was a stirring at this among the more radical or Rosicrucian wing of the assembly, who still set great store by the Four, and Dr. Bramble, who desperately needed this appearance to be a success, gulped water from a goblet beside him, cleared his throat, and tried to march on to the more sensational or revelatory parts of his lecture. "The question is really," he said "why, if the 'elementals' are not several kinds of being but only one, which I believe, why they manifest themselves in such various forms. 
That they do manifest themselves, ladies and gentlemen, is no longer open to doubt.
" He looked meaningfully at his daughter, and many there did also; it was her experiences, after all, that lent Dr. Bramble's notions what weight they had. She smiled, faintly, and seemed to contract beneath their gaze. "Now," he said. "Collating the various experiences, both those told of in myth and fable and those more recent ones verifiable by investigation, we find that these elementals, while separable into two basic 
characters
, can be any of several different sizes and (as we might put it) densities.
    "The two distinct characters—the ethereal, beautiful, and elevated character on the one hand, and the impish, earthy, gnomelike character on the other, is in fact a sexual distinction. The sexes among these beings are much more distinct than among men.
    "The differences observed in size is another matter. What are the differences? In their sylphlike or pixie manifestation they appear no bigger than a large insect, or a hummingbird; they are said to inhabit the woods, they are associated with flowers. Droll tales are spun of their spears of locust-thorns and their chariots made of nutshells drawn by dragonflies, and so on. In other instances, they appear to be a foot to three feet in height, wingless, fully-formed little men and women of more human habits. And there are fairy maidens who capture the hearts of, and can apparently lie with, humans, and who are the size of human maidens. And