ALICE, FALLING
Alice, falling, sees on the top shelf of the open cupboard a jar bearing the label RASPBERRY JAM, a yew-wood tea caddy with brass fastenings and a design of handpainted plants and flowers on the lid, and a tin of lemon snaps: the dark green top shows in the center an oval containing a colored head of Prince Albert. On the bottom shelf Alice sees a porcelain dessert plate with a gilt border and a center panel showing a young man in a tilted tricorne, red jacket, and white breeches, standing beside an oak tree; a bread knife with an ivory handle carved to show a boy holding wheat in his arms; and a silver-plated cream jug with a garland of silver-plated leaves and berries encircling the base. So slowly is Alice falling that she has time to take in all the details, to note the pink thistles on the lid of the tea caddy and the yellow buttons on the red jacket of the man on the dessert plate, to observe the faint reflections of her face above and below the label on the jar of raspberry jam.
Alice does not know how long she has been falling, but when she looks up she has the sense of a great shaft of darkness stretching interminably upward. In the alien tunnel-world she tries to think of the bright upper world, where her sister sits on a bank, under a tree, reading a book without pictures or conversations, but as she falls deeper and deeper it becomes harder for her thoughts to reach so high, as if each thought is a heavy rope that has to be hurled upward in the act of falling. And gradually, as she falls, a change comes about: the mysterious shaft or vertical tunnel through which she is falling begins to seem familiar to her, with its cupboards, its shelves, its lamplit bumps and hollows, while the upper world grows shadowy and strange; and as she falls she has to remind herself that somewhere far above, suddenly the air is blinding blue, white-and-yellow daisies grow in a green field, on a sloping bank her sister sits reading in sun-checked shade.
The dark walls of the shaft are faintly illuminated by globed oil lamps attached at irregular intervals to wrought-iron wall brackets: each bracket has the shape of an elongated S-curve turned sideways, and on the apex of the outermost curve sits a brass mermaid holding up a cylindrical chased-brass base with a brass adjustment knob; on the cylinder rests the globe of glass, topped by a slender glass stem. The light from the lamps permits Alice to observe the objects that abound on the walls. In addition to the cupboards with their shelves, she passes maps and pictures hung on pegs, including a black-and-white engraving of Scotland showing all the counties outlined in red, and a painting of a lion leaping onto the back of a horse: the horse’s head is twisted backward, its teeth are bared, the flared nostrils are wide as teacups, and dark red streaks of blood course along the shiny brown sides; a pair of oak bookshelves holding Twenty-five Village Sermons, Bewick’s Birds, Macauley’s History, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Life and Works of Edwin Landseer, Pope’s Homer, Coke upon Lyttleton, Rogers’ Pleasures of Memory, Sir Charles Grandison, Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, Bayle’s Dictionary, Ivo and Verena, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Gems of European Art; a barometer in a case of walnut wood shaped like an anchor: the flukes of the anchor support the glass disc, in which is pictured Neptune riding a sea horse within a circle of words (RAIN, FAIR, CHANGE, STORMY); a niche containing a marble Venus and Cupid: the winged, curly-haired boy reaches for his bow, which his seated mother holds away: her robe has slipped to her lap, and one breast is visible above his reaching arm; and a Gothic-arch-topped set of small, glass-fronted shelves on which stand a barefoot porcelain girl holding a basket of flowers over one forearm, a pincushion set in a brass wheelbarrow and stuck with hat pins ornamented with china flowers, a playing-card box with a floral border and a center panel showing a castellated mansion in Tunbridge Wells, two small oval silhouettes framed in ivory and showing, respectively, a snub-nosed girl in a bonnet and a snub-nosed boy in a flat-brimmed hat, a red glass rose with green glass thorns, and a majolica snake devouring a toad.
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? Alice has been falling for so long that she is beginning to grow uncertain. If the fall does end, then the vertical tunnel will be a connecting link, a transition, a bridge between the upper world and the unknown lower world; it will be unimportant in itself and, at the instant of ending, it will disappear. But if the fall never ends, then everything is changed: the fall itself becomes the adventure, and the tunnel through which she is falling becomes the unknown world, with its magic and mystery. Alice, looking about uncertainly, tries to decide whether she is on her way to an adventure or whether she is in the middle of one.
The shaft, well, or vertical tunnel down which Alice is falling has irregular walls of hard earth mixed with outcroppings of rock: granite, feldspar, and basalt. The hard earth is mostly dry, with occasional moist patches; here and there a trickle of dark water zigzags down, passing the edge of a map, slipping behind a cupboard’s open door. Some of the cupboards have small dishes on top, placed back against the wall, as if to catch dripping water. The tunnel is a comfortable width for falling: Alice falls without fear of striking the walls, yet at any moment she can reach out and remove a jar from a shelf or adjust a tilted picture. Alice wonders how the shelves are reached from below. At first she imagines a very long ladder, but this presents difficulties even if the tunnel has a bottom, for how would such a long ladder get into such a narrow space? Next she imagines small openings in the walls, through which servants can enter the tunnel, but she sees no openings, no doors. Perhaps the answer is small birds who fly up from below, or from nests hidden in the darkness. It occurs to Alice that there may be another answer: the jars, the pictures, the maps, the lamps have always been here, unchanging. But how can that be? Alice, as she falls, feels a little frown creasing her forehead.
Falling, always falling, Alice closes her eyes and sees her sister on the bank under a tree, reading a book without pictures or conversations. The bank slopes down to a pool with reeds; the sun-shot shadow of the tree, a thick beech (Fagus sylvatica), trembles on the water. Circles of sun and shade move on her sister’s hands. Deep in her book, Alice’s sister scarcely hears the stir of leaves overhead, the distant cries of the shepherd boy, the lowing of the cattle, the rustle of Alice’s dress. Gradually she becomes aware of a disturbance beside her; it is Alice, restless as always. It’s difficult, thinks Alice’s sister, to have a younger sister who won’t ever sit still and let you read. Although Alice’s sister is determined to keep her eyes fixed on the page, she feels that her attention has already been tugged away, it’s as if she is being pulled out of a dream, the words are nothing but words now; irritably she places her finger at the end of a line. Raising her eyes, she is surprised to see Alice chasing a white rabbit across a field. With an impatient sigh, Alice’s sister reaches into her pinafore pocket and removes a scrap of blue ribbon, which she places in her book before closing it. She rests the book carefully against a bare root. She then rises to her feet, brushing off her dress with sharp little flicks of the backs of her fingers, and begins to walk quickly after Alice through the field of daisies. When she comes to the rabbit hole under the hedge she stops and crouches down, pushing away the hedge branches, careful not to kneel on the ground. “Alice!” she calls, looking down into the dark hole. “Alice, are you there?” There is no answer. The hole is just large enough for her to enter, but it is very dirty, and very dark. For a while she looks down thoughtfully into the dark. Then she raises her head; in the distance she hears the tinkle of sheep bells; the sun burns down on the tall grass; reeds stir at the edge of the pool; under the leaning beech, sun and shade tremble on the grass, on the closed book, on a purple wildflower beside the bare root.