“She performed her trick or manipulation very well, and was thrilled at her new powers, though how the stork bore it—well, I’m afraid she, I, never gave much thought to that, or rather I, the stork, I thought about nothing else.
“I had been given consciousness, you see. I didn’t know that it was not my own but another’s, and only loaned to me, or rather given or hidden in me for safe-keeping. I, I the stork, thought—well, it’s very distressing to think of, but I thought that I was not a stork at all; I believed myself to be a human woman, who by the malice of someone, I didn’t know whom, had been transformed into a stork, or imprisoned in one. I had no memory of the human woman I had been, because of course she retained that life and its memories, and went gaily on living it. I was left to puzzle it out.
“Well, I flew far, and learned much; I passed through doors no stork before had ever passed through. I made a living; I raised young—yes, at Edgewood once—and I had other employments, well, no need to speak of them; storks, you know… Anyway, among the things I learned, or was told, was that a great King was returning, or re-awaking; and that after his liberation would come my own, and that then I would truly be a human woman.”
She paused in her tale, and stood staring; Alice, not knowing whether storks can weep or not, looked closely at her, and though no drop fell from her pinkish eye Alice thought that in some storkish sense she did weep.
“And so I am,” she said at length. “And so I am, now, that human woman. At last. And still only, and for always, the real stork I always and only was.” She lowered her head before Alice in sorrowful confession. “Alice, you do know me,” she said. “I am, or was, or we were, or will be, your cousin Ariel Hawksquill.”
Alice blinked. She had promised herself to be surprised by nothing here; and indeed, after she had contemplated the stork, or Hawksquill, for an astonished moment, it did seem that she had heard this tale before, or to have known that it would happen, or had happened. “But,” she said, “where, I mean how, where is…”
“Dead,” said the stork. “Dead, spoilt, ruined. Murdered. I really, she really, had no place else to go.” She opened her red beak, and clacked it shut again, a sort of sigh. “Well. No matter. Only it will take time to get used to. Her disappointment, the stork’s I mean. My new—body.” She raised a wing and looked at it. “Fly,” she said. “Well. Perhaps.”
“I’m sure,” Alice said, putting her hand on the stork’s soft shoulder. “And I should think you could share, I mean share it with Ariel, I mean share it with the stork. You can accommodate.” She smiled; it was like arbitrating a dispute between two of her children.
The stork stepped on in silence a time. Alice’s hand on her shoulder seemed to soothe her, she had stopped her irritable fluffing. “Perhaps,” she said at length. “Only—well. Forever and ever.” There was a catch in her throat; Alice could see the long apple move. “It does seem hard.”
“I know,” Alice said. “It never comes out like you think it will; or even like you thought they said it would, though maybe it does. You learn to live with it,” she said. “That’s all.”
“I’m sorry now,” Ariel Hawksquill said, “of course too late, that I didn’t accept your invitation of that night, to go with you. I should have.”
“Well,” Alice said.
“I thought I was separate from this fate. But I’ve been in this Tale all along, haven’t I? With all the rest.”
“I suppose,” Alice said. “I suppose you have, if here you are now. Tell me though,” she added, “whatever became of the cards?”
“Oh dear,” said Hawksquill, turning her red beak away in shame. “I do have a lot to make up for, don’t I?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Alice said. They were coming to the end of the forest glades; beyond lay a land of a different sort. Alice stopped. “I’m sure you can. Make up for it, I mean. For not coming and all.” She looked out over the land she must now travel. So big, so big. “You can be a help to me, I think. I hope.”
“I’m sure of it,” Hawksquill said with conviction. “Sure.”
“Because I’ll need help,” Alice said. There somewhere, beyond those hedges, over those green waves of earth where the new-risen grass-sea turned silver in the sunlight, Alice remembered or foresaw the knoll to be, on which there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace; and, if you knew the way, there was a small house there built underside, and a round door with a brass knocker; but there would be no need to knock, for the door would stand open, and the house would anyway be empty. And there would be knitting to take up, and duties, duties so large, so new… “I’ll need help,” she said again. “I will.”
“I’ll help,” said her cousin. “I can help.”
Somewhere there, beyond those blue hills, how far? An open door, and a small house big enough to hold all this spinning earth; a chair to rock away the years, and an old broom in the corner to sweep away winter.
“Come along,” the stork said. “We’ll get used to it. It’ll be all right.”
“Yes,” said Alice. There would be help, there must be; she couldn’t do it all alone. It would be all right. Still she didn’t take the first step beyond the woods’ edge; she stood a long time, feeling the asking breezes on her face, remembering or forgetting many things.
More, Much More
Smoky Barnable, in the warm glow of many electric lights, sat down in his library to turn over once again the pages of the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses. All the windows had been opened, and a cool fresh May night came and went unhindered as he read. The last of winter had been swept away as by a new broom.
Far upstairs, as silently as the stars it modeled, the orrery turned, passing its tiny but unresistable motion through many oiled brass gears to give impetus to the twenty-four-handed fly-wheel, shut up once again in its black case but delivering its own force to generators, which in turn fed the house with light and power, and would go on doing so until all the jewelled bearings, all the best-quality nylon and leather belts, all the hardened-steel points themselves wore away: years and years, Smoky supposed. The house, his house, as though from the effects of a tonic, had perked up, refreshed and strengthened; its basements had dried, its attics were ventilated; the dust that had filled it had been sucked up by a potent and ancient whole-house vacuum-cleaner whose existence in the walls of the house Smoky had vaguely known about but which no one had thought would ever work again; even the crack in the music-room ceiling seemed on the way to healing, though why was a mystery to Smoky. The old stocks of hoarded light-bulbs were brought out, and Smoky’s house alone, the only one for miles, was lit up continuously, like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. Not out of pride, not really, though he had been very proud of his arrangements, but because he found it easier to expend the limitless energy than to store it (why store it, anyway?) or to disengage the machine.
And besides, lit up, the house might be easier to find: easier for someone lost, or gone off, who might be returning on a moonless night, to find in the darkness.
He turned a heavy page.
Here was a horrid idea of some vindictive spiritualist’s. There is, of course, no hell after death, only a progress through higher and higher Levels. No eternal suffering, though there might be a difficult, or at least lengthy, Re-education for recalcitrant or stupid souls. Generous: but this had apparently not been enough coals to heap on the heads of sceptics, so the idea was conceived that those who refuse to see the light in this life will refuse to see it, or be blind to it, in the next as well; they will stagger alone eternally in cold darkness, believing that this is all there is, while all around them unbeknown the happy bustle of the communion of saints goes on, fountains and flowers and whirling spheres and the striving souls of the great departed.