his Summa. He learned then that at the end of his life Aquinas regarded all that he had written as "a heap of straw."
A heap of straw. Drinkwater sat at his broad board in the long skylit offices of Mouse, Drinkwater, Stone and stared at the sepia photographs of the towers and parks and villas he had built, and thought: a heap of straw. Like the first and most ephemeral house the Three Pigs in the story built. There must be a stronger place, a place where he could hide from whatever this wolf was that pursued him. He was thirty-nine years old.
His partner Mouse found that after he had been some months at his drawing board he had gotten no further with firm plans for the Cathedral of Commerce, had been sitting instead hour after hour doodling tiny houses with strange insides; and he was sent abroad for a while, to rest.
Strange insides . . . By the path that led up from the gate to the fanlighted door of the vicarage he could see a machine or garden ornament, a white globe on a pedestal surrounded by rusted iron hoops. Some of the hoops had sprung and lay fallen on the path, obscured in weeds. He pushed the gate and it opened, making a brief song on its hinges. Within the house a light was moving, and as he came up the weedy path he was hailed from the door.
For It Was He
"You are not welcome," said Dr. Bramble (for it was he). "You are none of you, any more. Is that you, Fred? I shall have a lock to that gate, if people can't have better manners."
"I'm not Fred."
His accent made Dr. Bramble stop to think. He raised his lamp. "Who are you then?"
"Just a traveler. I'm afraid I've lost my way. You don't have a telephone."
"Of course not."
"I didn't mean to barge in."
"Mind the old orrery there. It's all fallen, and a dreadful trap. American?"
"Yes."
"Well, well, come in."
The girl was gone.
Strange and Shaded Lanes
Two years later, John Drinkwater was sitting sleepily in the overheated and spiritually-lit rooms of the City Theosophical Society (he never guessed that any of the ways his crossroads pointed out would lead him there, but there he was). A subscription was being raised for a course of lectures by variously enlightened persons, and among the mediums and gymnosophists who were awaiting the Society's decision, Drinkwater found the name of Dr. Theodore Burne Bramble, to speak on the Smaller Worlds within the Large. As soon as he read the name he saw, at once and unsummoned, the girl within the apple tree, the light within her cupped hands going dim. What's the matter? He saw her again come into the dusky dining room, unintroduced by the vicar who couldn't bring himself to break his paragraph long enough to speak her name, only nodded and pushed aside a pile of mildewed books and sheaves of papers tied with blue tape so that there was room for her to put down (without raising her eyes to him) the tarnished tea service and cracked plate of kippers. She might have been daughter or ward or servant or prisoner—or keeper even, for Dr. Bramble's ideas were odd and obsessive enough, though mildly expressed.
"Paracelsus is of the opinion, you see," he said, and paused to light his pipe; Drinkwater managed to say, "The young lady is your daughter?"
Bramble shot a look behind him as though Drinkwater had seen some member of the Bramble family he didn't know about; then he agreed, nodding, and went on: "Paracelsus, you see . . ."
She brought white port and ruby, unsummoned, and when that was gone Dr. Bramble was inflamed enough to speak of some of his personal sorrows, how his pulpit had been taken from him because he would speak the truth as he learned it, and how they came around now to taunt him and tie tins to his dog's tail, poor dumb creature! She brought whiskey and brandy and at last he didn't care and asked her her name. "Violet," she said, not looking at him. When Dr. Bramble finally showed him to a bed, it was only because if he had not Drinkwater would have got out of earshot; as it was he had ceased to understand anything Dr. Bramble was saying. "Houses made of houses within houses made of time," he found himself saying aloud when just before dawn he awoke from a dream of Dr. Bramble's