facing in the wrong direction—also instructive; and that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house where he had put a distant winter once and then forgot.
Yes, forgot: because another thing about a memory house is that its builder and occupier can lose things in it just as you can in any house—the ball of string which you were certain you kept either with the stamps and the tape in the desk-drawer or in the hall closet with the tackhammer and the picture-wire, but which isn't in either place when you go to look for it. In the ordinary or Natural Memory such things can simply vanish; you don't even remember you forgot them. The advantage of a memory house is that you know it's in there somewhere.
So it was that Ariel Hawksquill was rooting around in one of the oldest attics of her memory mansions, looking for something she had forgotten but knew was there.
She had been re-reading an ars memorativa of Giordano Bruno's called De umbris idearum, a huge treatise on symbols and seals and signs to be used in the highest forms of the art. Her first-edition copy had marginal notes in a neat Italic hand, often illuminating but more often puzzling. On a page where Bruno treats of the various orders of symbols one might use for various purposes, the commentator had noted: "As in ye cartes of ye returne of R.C. are iiiij Personnes, Places, Thynges &c., which emblemes or cartes are for remembering or foretelling, and discoverie of smalle worldes." Now this "R.C." could stand for "Roman Church", or—just possibly— "Rosicrucian." But it was the persons and places and things that had rung a distant bell: a bell here, she thought, where she had stored her distant childhood long ago.
She moved carefully but with increasing impatience through the miscellany there, her dog Spark, a trip to Rockaway, her first kiss; she became intrigued with the contents of chests and went off down useless corridors of reminiscence. In one place she had put a battered cowbell, why she at first had no idea. Then she rang it tentatively. It was the bell she had heard, and instantly she remembered her grandfather (whom the cowbell was—of course !—to represent, since he had been a farm laborer in England till he emigrated to this vast and cowless city). She saw him distinctly now, where she had put him, below the mantel with the Toby jugs on it which resembled him, in a battered armchair; he turned the cowbell in his hands as he had used to turn his pipe.
"Did you," she questioned him, "tell me once about cards, with persons and places and things?"
"I might have."
"In what connection?"
Silence. "Well, small worlds then."
It grew clearer in that attic, lit with a past sun, and she sat at Grandpa's feet in the old apartment. "It was the only thing I ever found had any value, like," he said, "and I threw it away on a silly girl. Would've brought twenty bob in any dealer's, I can tell you that, they were that old and fine. I found them in an old cottage that the squire wanted pulled down. And she was a girl who said she saw fairies and pixies and such, and her father was another like her. Violet her name was. And I said, 'Tell my fortune then with these if you can.' And she like riffled through them—there were pictures on them of persons and places and things—and she laughed and said I'd die a lonely old man on a fourth storey. And wouldn't give me back the cards I'd found."
There it was then. She put the cowbell back in its place in the order of her childhood (put it next to a well-thumbed deck of Old Maid cards from the same year, just to keep the connection clear) and shut up that room.
Small worlds, she thought, staring out the rain-crazed window of her parlor. To discover small worlds. In no other connection had she ever heard of these cards. The persons and places and things were reminiscent of the Art of Memory, in which a place is established, and a vivid person imagined, holding his emblematic things. And "the return of R. C.": if that meant the "Brother R. C." of the Rosicrucians, it would place the cards in the first flush of Rosicrucian enthusiasms; which—she pushed away the tray of tea and toast, and wiped her fingers—might make some