Great mischief
Page 2
The entrance of the delivery-boy hastened Timothy's
return to normal. The boy was soaked to the skin; he stood at the back door of the shop and shimmered darkly like a small sea monster floated up by the rain. Timothy interrogated him about his errands and received answers not much more satisfactory than he would have had from a rather bright fish. Polio was a boulevardier from the heart, he sought the sidewalks even in a downpour; but he came of a colored family who were pensioners of Penelope's and he had to be given a job regardless of his weak sense of direction and of his creative lying to disguise his truancies. Timothy satisfied himself that no serious errors had been made and told the boy to go home and dry his clothes, he doubted if any other customers would come in this rainy evening.
No sooner had Polio dived out of the door than a violent agitation of the bell mocked at this judgment. Timothy glanced up nervously, but it was only Dr. Golightly, whose violence was unpremeditated, the result of energy and bulk. "Howdy, old poisoner!" he cried, and all the glass vials and shelf bottles gave a faintly startled chime. 'Tine weather for ducks, eh? But I s'pose you don't put your nose outdoors on a day like this. You just hole up and mix potions to kill customers off with."
"Maybe I do at that." Timothy smiled guiltily. "But I'll bet a hat you shuffle more people off to the graveyard than I do. Come in—come in, and shut that door. There ought to be a special cold shelf in Hell for people who leave doors open behind them."
Golightly came in and banged the door. He seemed to trample the floor under with his big India-rubber boots. He threw his satchel on the counter and went over to the stove, opening the wide cape of his chec'ked wool greatcoat. "It's like a cold shelf in Hell right here," he complained. He put one foot on the base of the stove and spread his red, gloveless hands. "You're the stingiest damn fellow with your fuel, Tim."
"When your coal is low in the bin, you're apt to be stingy with it," said Timothy dryly. "You don't think I relish being chilly, do you?" He came and joined the doctor by the stove.
"Hell and death! I never skimp food on my table nor fire in my stove. The locomotive can't run without steam." He opened the isinglass door and spat extravagantly on the coals.
The fire had sunk in the past half hour and the shaft that caught Golightly's face produced no satanic transformation, it merely caricatured the full, ruddy flesh, the terrier eyebrows that were his already, and rendered his little boast superfluous. It tipped with light the gray bristles coming out of his ears and nose like spears glistening in an ambush.
Timothy was not really offended by these bluff comments, though they put him on the defensive. "That's mighty handsome talk," he argued, "but my business doesn't allow for overeating. This is a poor community —we've had a war, and a peace that's almost as bad as a war. Sister Penny and I can't indulge ourselves in the matter of food and warmth when so many of our neigh-
bors are cold and hungry. Not as long as we profess Christianity." He pulled his mustachios with thumbs and forefingers to a sharper, a more pious point. "Of course ordinary Christianity would do well enough for me," he added parenthetically, "but Sister professes a fancy brand, and that takes upkeep."
Golightly filled his lungs and gave a great porpoise-snort that sent the raindrops flying off his coat. He couldn't talk down Christianity, and when he couldn't talk you down, he snorted like a porpoise. "Listen, brother, I 'tend a God's plenty of free patients—enough to guarantee me a toehold in Christendom—but I keep the engine stoked. And who operates this pharmacy anyway. Penny or you?"
"I operate it," said Timothy sulkily. He put his foot on the opposite side of the iron base, keeping the sturdy stove between them while he parried his adversary's downright thrusts. "But Sister Penny is a very unusual person—she can't help being generous, she bubbles with the milk of human kindness. She has a woman's sympathy for suffering."
"Suffering and bubbling be damned! What is she, a Jersey cow? I know she's kind, of course she is! And I honor her for it. I come on her tracks all the time in my practice, supplying patients with medicine free of charge. But at whose expense, eh? She ought to try her woman's sympathy once on running a pharmacy, or any business where you have to make a ledger balance—"
While Timothy let Golightly talk himself out he followed his own thoughts for a little, speculating on
the antagonism between his sister and his friend. Will is bighearted as all outdoors, he would say (for he was always defending each to the other), and Penny would smile indulgently and answer, I know he does a great deal of good—and he has the finest set of whiskers in Charleston. But she wouldn't have him for her doctor, although he was a cousin and it was quite pointed for her to have Dr. Porter, who was a good doctor but no kin at all. Will, she said, had a very materialistic outlook, and she couldn't stand his keeping his hunting dogs in his office.
Many of Will's patients found it trying, when they went to have a boil lanced or their tonsils out, to hear the hounds sniffing round; they grumbled in private about the doggy smell thickening the air, the hairs on the shabby upholstery, the fleas in summer. But Penny was the only one with the hardihood to stand up to the popular physician about his pets—they had had several memorable encounters about it. Yet it was more than doG:s in offices that set them against each other. . . .
Timothy came up with a splash into the freshet of Golightly's argument. "... and of course we're poor down here—we're poor as rats!" He laughed spontaneously, belittling the curse that weighed on the half-prostrate South. "Well, what you gonna do about it? Get rich, that's what I say. Get busy and make some money."
"You tell me how to do it. And there are still moss-backs, you know, who cling to the old-fashioned idea that money isn't the answer to everything."
"Money! That poor pariah," Golightly cried flamboyantly. "Everybody cusses money—the root of all evil —Devil's get! But secretly everybody wants it, it's the illicit love of all men—and most women—"
Uttering this heresy, the doctor took his foot off the stove, stamped up and down, and flapped his cape. The Flying Pill-Roller, people called him, seeing him dash through the streets, the buggy-top folded back, the full cape streaming out behind like fashionable plaid wings.
To escape being run over, Timothy dodged from under the wheels of this headlong argument. "By the way, there's something I want to ask you. Just now I had a most singular visitor—a young lady who came in wanting solanum. It appears she has a father who is subject to earache—maybe from having to listen to her. I can't place her, somehow; she wasn't pretty exactly, and she's sort of small and harsh, no gloves and no manners either. She had the most extraordinary eyes; they can singe you like a chemical—I still feel as if I had some kind of phosphorus burn from her being here."
"My God, Tim!" Golightly turned a diagnostic stare on his cousin. "You must be seeing apparitions. What color were these singular eyes?"
Timothy pulled his chin and thought a while. "I can't remember. And they don't burn all the time, thank God, or I'd be a pile of cinders. I do recollect her eyebrows though; they were dark, too thick for beauty, and rounded. My physiognomy books say high-arched eyebrows are a sign of courage—"
"Pshaw! An extraordinary critter, I must say. How old was she?"
Timothy thought again. "You know, I'd find it pretty hard to say. Youngish looking. But she seemed quite mature. Or perhaps she's just wicked . . . bad people have a disconcerting way of seeming more knowledgeable than good people. She had on a long, dark cloak, like a man's—a hand-me-down, I imagine. I'd give a lot to know what her name is, where she lives, and so on."
"Why the Devil didn't you ask her?"
"She wasn't the sort of person you ask questions of —unessential questions, that is. She has a way of chopping off with a look any excrescences in your conversation."
"I can't think of anybody that fits such a fanciful description . . . unless it might be one of Charley Farr's girls. You know him? He lives over by the jail and has a big litter of daughters. They say
the youngest one is wild and unruly. I've seen her scuttling along the street, but I can't say she ever swinged me like phosphorus. Do you feel bilious? You better take two grains of calomel."
Timothy had studious refined features, the kind that could go obstinate as a lightwood knot. "You should have been here, then you'd know what I mean. She was going to get that solanum if it killed her, or rather if it killed me. And somehow her story about the father's having an earache didn't ring true. I suspect she's up to no good. The prescription she had was an antique and by a doctor I never heard of—some foreigner, from his name."
"Well, Charley Farr, if that's whose daughter she is, could have earache, backache, or bellyache the way he lays aboard demon rum."
"She may not even be his daughter; but whoever begat her, I wouldn't want her hanging round me with that solanum."
"It's strong stuff—strong stuff," Golightly agreed. "You have to ride it with a light hand on the bit. I've given one grain internally for some nervous affections, and with good success. But a dense alkaloid like that is unhealthy to fool with unless you know how to use it. Externally, now, it's a different kettle of fish; for dilating the pupils I like it better in some ways than belladonna—"
Timothy began to walk around the shop, his chilly hands in his pockets. "I have some books," he muttered, "that give the ingredients for witches' brews; those creatures love nightshade, you know, and aconite, mixed with all kinds of vile messes. It wouldn't surprise me . . . there are a lot of queer people loose in this town."
The doctor drew his overhanging eyebrows together and looked out sharply from under them. "Fiddlesticks! You spend too much time messing with books and herbs. You ought to throw out those roots you hide under the counter and peddle from the back door. A good pharmacist has no business fooling with that kind of tripe. The trouble with mumbo jumbo is, it's a boomerang, it witches you in the end."
"What do you mean by mumbo jumbo? Don't we all
deal with something of the kind? Take this stuff you prescribe and I sell—Bosanko's Cough and Lung Syrup" —Timothy opened a glass case and took up some bottles —"Bradfield's Female Regulator—do they do any good except by mumbo jumbo? And even the drugs you would call scientific medicine . . . you say solanum is a poison, but do you know why a dense alkaloid should be poisonous to man? All physic works by magic of a kind."
Golightly slammed the door of a cupboard he had been prying into and there was the sharp ting of colliding glass. "Magic? Pshaw! Seeing is believing, that's what I say." He turned on Timothy. "Why don't you go North, man—sell out this ratty little business of yours and take the money to go away. Get some new ideas-study modern pharmacy—work in a drug manufactory! Go to New York, or Boston! Your guts are squeezed here. Why, you even look like a bed-slat."
Deeply affronted, Timothy drew himself up taller, which was not a happy move. His narrow shoulders and hips, the stiff verticals of his trouser legs, did give him the appearance of having been accidentally elongated in the pliable time of infancy. "Not me—I'm an unreconstructed provincial. What have they got up there that we haven't except money and machines? They're too rich for my blood; and a pricking of my thumbs tells me those machines will carry us all to Hell someday. You don't go North, I notice," he went on, "though you uphold their materialism and pretend to admire their manufactories and their great railroads."
"That's so, but, in spite of my 'materialism,' I'm not ambitious to get rich. If I can keep out of the cUuches of the pawnbrokers, own a piece of land and some houn' dogs, give my family three square meals a day and a few tomfooleries—everybody ought to have a few tomfooleries—I'm content "with my lot. I love this Low-Country of ours and couldn't breathe away from it. But you are different—you've let defeat suck you dry."
The bare idea of putting out from his riparian safety so agitated Timothy that he said nothing and let Golightly rush on.
"God Almighty, man, we got to heave out of the bog sometime! I recollect well the last campaigns when drugs were pitifully short—I've used every damn kind of stinking weed and plant trying to find substitutes for physic cut off by the Yankee blockade—and lucky for us that the Southern woods are rich in medicinal herbs. But that was a long time ago, and surgical instruments don't sprout in the woods, manufactories have to sprout first, we need more fruit like glass and steel—thank God there's a Democrat in the White House at last and business in the South ought to be looking up."
Golightly's war record had become legendary in this section, but Timothy had a way of forgetting it. He himself had been only ten when the war began, and he still felt inadequate that he hadn't managed his birth better, hadn't come along in time to bear a part in that holy cause. He was seldom aware of the ten years' difference in their ages; in so many ways his boisterous
cousin seemed younger, or perhaps, Timothy thought, he himself had grown old before his time. . . .
Nevertheless, his blood was up now and he had one shot left in his musket. He leaned on the counter and took aim.
"Maybe I'd have more money to put into my business if I could bring myself to gamble in Wall Street."
He had the satisfaction of seeing Golightly teeter, rocked back a little in his India rubbers. "Gamble, eh?" he snorted. "The Deuce and all! Life is a gamble! Every day is a gamble—if you're alive, that is. And as to Wall Street, why not bring some of that Yankee money into the South? 'If you can't beat 'em, jine 'em'—that's what I say."
"If you can 'jine' 'em," said Timothy meanly. "If you're sharp enough." For you could always tell: Will shot badly and cursed more eloquently when one of his "fliers" had dropped him with a grinding thud. But on the other hand his successes brought him many little luxuries, such as the sporty checked coat.
"I have heavy responsibilities to carry," Timothy continued primly. "I can't take that kind of risk, with two older people to support."
"You could carry them better if you had a good business!" cried Will. "How can you make money if you freeze your customers and have nothing to sell them? But I haven't got any more time to waste. I just dropped by for some vaseline and powdered alum— I s'pose you still keep them in this flat-bottomed phar-
macy. There'll be plenty of sore throats and rheumatic fever after this rain, blast it, and I won't get away to go deer-hunting Saturday." As Timothy put the required articles glumly on the counter, Golightly picked them up and threw them into his satchel. "My patients love to get their feet wet on Thursdays, I've noticed, just in time to come down with grippe Saturdays and keep me in town." He snapped the satchel shut. "Well, so long. Better take my advice and get out of this 'gator hole of yours." Muffling himself in his cape, he made for the door.
Timothy glanced involuntarily at the floor-boards, expecting to see them ground to splinters by Will's big feet. When the dust had settled he walked about, angrily putting the shop to rights. What an evening! He felt all stirred up inside; these two encounters were giving him dyspepsia. He went to the sink and took a teaspoonful of soda in half a glass of water.
Returning the jars and bottles from the counter to the shelves, he halted a moment in surprise. The glass jar holding the frogs and newts was gone. He looked quickly about; its place on the shelf gaped dark. The determined face of the strange girl came up before him; but would even such queer tastes as hers have prompted her to hide a jar of moldering frogs under her cloak? Maybe Will had gathered them up by mistake and chucked them into his satchel. Pondering this riddle, he went across the hall to his cluttered bedroom behind the shop.
Penelope had had the carved walnut bookcases containing his uncle's library of science and esoterica
moved into this room as the best means of getting rid of them, and the dry-fruited cornices, the rows of calf-bound books, paneled it around with heavy brownness. Timothy himself kept piled on every chair and table and in every corner the magazines, pamphlets, old newspapers he had collected, apparently in the assurance that he would one day do something terrific with all that knowledge. The brownness and muddle
, however, well satisfied his esthetic tastes. The books standing close-packed on the shelves both soothed and excited him; the pamphlets and clippings ... in all his nights of reading he had never gone half way through these pages that closed round him like a brambly thicket. He stepped out of his low-quarter shoes—which remained by the hearth neatly teamed, ready to proceed when his ghostly part, having enough of waywardness, should require sole-leather again—and began to open the glass doors of the cases, going to and fro over the carpet in his stocking feet and pulling out books which Penelope had luckily never concerned herself to open.
A treatise on the Manichaeans engaged him for a while. The theory that the Devil is coequal with God struck him forcibly; it would explain lots of strange things about life. For one thing, it would explain why he so sincerely admired his elder sister's goodness and generosity, but had so many temptations toward wickedness and materialism himself. Not that his wickedness took an active form—it went on mostly in his heart, but that, as Satan well knew, was the worst kind.
But he put the question of Good and Evil aside for
a while and continued his search along the dark alley that ran through the back of his mind. He leafed through an ancient almanac in pursuit of a recipe for mixing herbs and simples; the item eluded him, but he was rewarded by an even more arresting one—a prophecy that 1886 was a year in which was to be wrought. Readily flattered by such signal attentions to a present which was his, he turned the page down and laid the booklet on a handy pile for future reference.
His energetic burrowings, however, quickly covered it with others; reminded of his trade, he dipped into a monograph on the cryptogamic plants of the United States and willingly devoted half an hour to improving his knowledge of the place of fungi in the economy of the world. Besides, he enjoyed thinking about blights, molds, mildews, and the toxic principle of poisonous mushrooms. These last, he read, "depend on their power to coagulate the albumen of the blood and thus arrest the circulation." Pure magic! But whether of God or the Devil he couldn't determine for the moment.