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

repetitious titles. Some nicely bound classics propped against an anonymous laureled bust. He took down Suetonius, and brought down with it a pamphlet that had been wedged between the volumes. It was old, both dog-eared and foxed, illustrated with pearly photogravure, and titled 
Upstate Houses and Their Histories
. He turned its pages carefully so as not to break the old glue of the binding, looking at dim gardens of black flowers, a roofless castle built on a river island by a thread magnate, a house made of beer vats.
    He looked up, turning the page. Daily Alice and Sophie were gone; a paper plate leapt from the table and spun balletically to the ground.
    And here was a photograph of two people sitting at a stone table, having tea. There was a man who looked like the poet Yeats, in a pale summer suit and spotted tie, his hair full and white, his eyes obscured by the sunlight glinting from his spectacles; and a younger woman in a wide white hat, her dark features shaded by the hat and blurred perhaps by a sudden movement. Behind them was part of this house Smoky sat in, and beside them, reaching up a tiny hand to the woman, who perhaps saw it and moved to take it and then again perhaps not (it was hard to tell), was a figure, personage, a little creature about a foot high in a conical hat and pointed shoes. His broad inhuman features seemed blurred too by sudden movement, and he appeared to hear a pair of gauzy insect wings. The caption read "John Drinkwater and Mrs. Drinkwater (Violet Bramble;) elf. Edgewood, 1912." Below the picture, the author had this to say:
    "Oddest of the turn-of-the-century folly houses may be John Drinkwater's 
Edgewood
, although not strictly conceived as a folly at all. Its history must begin with the first publication of Drinkwater's 
Architecture of Country Houses
 in 1880. This charming and influential compendium of Victorian domestic architecture made the young Drinkwater's name, and he later became a partner in the famed landscape-architecture team of Mouse, Stone. In 1894 Drinkwater designed Edgewood as a kind of compound illustration of the plates of his famous book, thus making it several different houses of different sizes and styles collapsed together and quite literally impossible to describe. That it presents an aspect (or aspects) of logic and order is a credit to Drinkwater's (already waning) powers. In 1897 Drinkwater married Violet Bramble, a young Englishwoman, daughter of the mystic preacher Theodore Burne Bramble, and in the course of his marriage, came completely under the influence of his wife, a magnetic spiritualist. Her thought informs later editions of 
Architecture of Country Houses
, into which he interpolated larger and larger amounts of theosophist or idealist philosophy without however removing any of the original material. The sixth and last edition (1910) had to be printed privately, since commercial publishers were no longer willing to undertake it, and it still contains all the plates of the 1880 edition.
    "The Drinkwaters assembled around them in those years a group of like-thinking people including artists, aesthetes, and world-weary sensitives. From the beginning the cult had an Anglophile twist, and interested correspondents included the poet Yeats, J. M. Barrie, several well-known illustrators, and the sort of 'poetic' personality that was allowed to flourish in that happy twilight before the Great War, and that has disappeared in the harsh light of the present day.
    "An interesting sidelight is that these people were able to profit from the general depopulation of the farms in that area at that time. The pentagon of five towns around Edgewood saw the heels of improverished yeoman farmers driven to the City and the West, and the bland faces of poets escaping economic realities who came to take their houses. That all who still remained of this tiny band were 'conscientious objectors' at the time of their country's greatest need is perhaps not surprising;