He closed the bag.
“All right,” he said. He took it up by its leather handles, and it was heavy, but an ease entered him with its weight, it seemed a thing he had always carried, a weight without which he would be unbalanced, and unable to walk.
“Ready?” Sophie said from the door.
“Ready,” he said. “I guess.”
They went down together. Smoky paused in the hall to push in the ivory buttons of the lights that lit the vestibule, the porches, the basement. Then they went out.
Aaaah, said everyone gathered there.
Lilac had drawn them all after her, from the Park, from the walled garden, from the porches and parterres where they had gathered, to this front of the house, the wooden porch that faced a weedy drive leading to stone gateposts topped with pitted balls like stone oranges.
“Hi, hi,” said Smoky.
His daughters came up to him smiling, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and their children after them. Everyone rose, everyone looked at one another. Only Marge Juniper kept her seat on the porch stairs, unwilling to rise till she knew steps must be taken, for she didn’t have many. Sophie asked Lilac:
“Will you lead us?”
“Part way,” Lilac said. She stood in the center of the company, pleased, yet a little awed too, and not sure herself which of these would keep on till the end, and having not enough fingers to count. “Part way.”
“Is it that way?” Sophie asked, pointing to the stone gateposts. They all turned and looked that way. The first crickets’ voices began. Edgewood’s swifts cut the air, air blue and turning green. Exhalations of the cooling earth made the way beyond those gateposts obscure.
Had that been the moment, Smoky wondered; had it been that moment, when he had turned in at those stone gateposts for the first time, that the charm had fallen on him, not ever after that to release him? The arm and hand with which he held the carpetbag tingled like a warning bell, but Smoky didn’t hear it.
“How far, how far?” asked Bud and Blossom hand in hand.
On that day: the day he had first gone in at Edgewood’s door and then in some sense never again back out.
Perhaps: or it may have been before that, or after it, but it wasn’t a matter of figuring out when exactly the first charm had invaded his life, or when he had stumbled unwittingly into it, because another had come soon after, and another, they had succeeded one another by a logic of their own, each one occasioned by the last and none removable; even to try to disentangle them would only be the occasion for further charms, and anyway they had never been a causal chain but a series of removes, Chinese boxes one inside the other, the further in you went the bigger it got. And it didn’t end now: he was about to step into a new series, endless, infundibular, utter. Apalled by a prospect of endless variation, he was only glad that some things had remained constant: Alice’s love chief among them. It was toward that that he journeyed, the only thing that could draw him; and yet he felt that he left it behind; and still he carried it with him.
“A dog to meet us,” Sophie said, taking his hand. “A river to cross.”
Something began to open in Smoky’s heart as he stepped from the porch: a premonition, or the intimation of a revelation.
They had all begun to move, taking up their bags and belongings, talking in low voices, down the drive. But Smoky stopped, seeing he could not go out by that gate: could not go out by the gate through which he had come in. Too many charms had intervened. The gate wasn’t the same gate; he wasn’t the same either.
“A long way,” Lilac said, drawing her mother after her. “A long, long way.”
They passed him on either side, burdened and holding hands, but he had stopped: still willing, still journeying, only not walking.
On his wedding day, he and Daily Alice had gone among the guests seated on the grass, and many of them had given gifts, and all of them had said “Thank you.” Thank you: because Smoky was willing, willing to take on this task, to take exception to none of it, to live his life for the convenience of others in whom he had never even quite believed, and spend his substance bringing about the end of a Tale in which he did not figure. And so he had; and he was still willing: but there had never been a reason to thank him. Because whether they knew it or not, he knew that Alice would have stood beside him on that day and wed him whether they had chosen him for her or not, would have defied them to have him. He was sure of it.
He had fooled them. No matter what happened now, whether he reached the place they set out for or didn’t, whether he journeyed or stayed behind, he had his tale. He had it in his hand. Let it end: let it end: it couldn’t be taken from him. He couldn’t go where all of them were going, but it didn’t matter, for he’d been there all along.
And where was it, then, that all of them were going?
“Oh, I see,” he said, though no sound came from his lips. The something that had begun to open in his heart opened further; it let in great draughts of evening air, and swifts, and bees in the hollyhocks; it hurt beyond pain, and wouldn’t close. It admitted Sophie and his daughters, and his son Auberon too, and many dead. He knew how the Tale ended, and who would be there.
“Face to face,” Marge Juniper said, passing by him. “Face to face.” But Smoky heard nothing now but the wind of Revelation blowing in him; he would not, this time, escape it. He saw, in the blue midst of what entered him, Lilac, turning back and looking at him curiously; andby her face he knew that he was right.
The Tale was behind them. And it was to there they journeyed. One step would take them there; they were there already.
“Back there,” he tried to say, unable himself to turn in that direction, back there, he tried to tell them, back to where the house stood lit and waiting, the Park and the porches and the walled garden and the lane into the endless lands, the door into summer. If he could turn now (but he could not, it didn’t matter that he could not but he could not) he would find himself facing summer’s house; and on a balcony there, Daily Alice greeting him, dropping from her shoulders the old brown robe to show him her nakedness amid the shadows of leaves: Daily Alice, his bride, Dame Kind, goddess of that land behind them, on whose borders they stood, the land called the Tale. If he could reach those stone gateposts (but he never would) he would find himself only turning in at them, Midsummer Day, bees in the hollyhocks, and an old woman on the porch there turning over cards.
A Wake
Under an enormous moon full to bursting Sylvie traveled toward the house she had seen, which seemed to be further and further off the closer she came to it. There was a stone fence to climb, and a beech-wood to go through; there was finally a stream to cross, or an enormous river, rushing and gold-foamed in the moonlight. After long thought on its banks, Sylvie made a boat of bark, with a broad leaf for a sail, spider-web lines and an acorn-cup to bail with, and (though nearly swept into the mouth of a dark lake where the river poured underground) she reached the far bank; the flinty house, huge as a cathedral, looked down on her, its dark yews pointing in her direction, its stone-pillared porches warning her away. And Auberon always said it was a cheerful house!
Just as she was thinking that she never would quite reach it, or if she did would reach it as such an atomy that she would fall between the cracks of its paving-stones, she stopped and listened. Amid the sounds of beetles and nightjars, somewhere there was music, somber yet Somehow full of gladness; it drew Sylvie on, and she followed it. It grew, not louder but more full; she saw the lights of a procession gather around her in the furry darkness of the underwood, or saw anyway the fireflies and night-flowers as though in procession, a procession she was one of. Wondering, her heart filled with the music, she approached the place to which the lights tended; she passed through portals where many looked up to see her enter. She put her feet in the sleeping flowers of a lane, a lane that led to a glade where more were gathered, and more coming: where beneath a flowering tree the white-clothed table stood, many places set, and one in the center for her. Only it was not a banquet, as she had thought, or not only a banquet; it was a wake.