Great mischief

by Pinckney, Josephine, 1895-1957

  "That's true," said Mr. Dombie, his thin face almost animated. "It must have been the east wind. Miss Penny. It's a mean wind, the east wind; you notice fish won't bite when it blows, fishing lines rot out, and it makes a man's wounds ache like the Old Boy."

  From long discipline or sheer discouragement Timothy forbore to point out the non sequiturs in this conversation. He returned to his chair and, tilted back at a reckless angle, nursed his grievances for a while. Mr. Dombie's flat, persistent voice went on, reading a description of the Crystal Palace, and the glittering structure began to take shape in the small stuffy room. A craving seized Timothy to escape from the damaged structures of defeat and to see this brave palace reared on foreign ground. The English names woke in him a queer response, a desire that had throbbed lately.

  He brought the forelegs of his chair down with a thump. "Sister, there's something I want to talk to you about. I'm thinking of going away."

  It came on him with a certain surprise that under the thick coat of habitual yielding he still had a residue of spunk . . . perhaps one always has more than one knows.

  The two faces by the fire turned on him in utter disbelief.

  "I want to visit the Crystal Palace."

  He felt as if the chair were still rocking under him in a precarious balance and went on quickly. "Besides, business is going badly—trade is falling off. Without any capital I haven't much chance of building it up."

  "Why, Timothy, you astound me—" The remark was unnecessary; Penelope's rigidity, her fixed blue glance, spoke for her. "I had no idea you were worried about the shop. Why didn't you tell me?"

  Timothy took a great gulp of breath to bolster himself. "Well, you know the shelves are half empty. And you know the income isn't enough to give us a decent living and support the charities you're interested in. What small profits the shop brings in go for these instead of being put back in the business."

  "We live quite decently, I think." The color rose in Penny's cheeks. "And would you be willing to let the people suffer whom we are able to help—would you cut them off in order to put that money into the business?"

  "Well, no," said Timothy fidgeting on his chair, a branch tossed by contrary winds. "But that's why I'm resolved to give up the shop, at least temporarily. Let someone buy it out who has the capital to make it a good one. Besides, the truth is, I need to brush up a

  bit; modern pharmacy is making great strides and leaving me behind. I need to go away and get some new ideas. With the proceeds from selling the business I'd like to go to London and study—" He spoke in a confident, even a grand manner.

  There was silence for a few moments while Penelope sewed a little ostentatiously on Timothy's coat. Against the lamp her dark outline flowed from her crown of hair to the worn carpet, statuesque and profoundly mysterious. He didn't really know her, Timothy thought, staggered; after all the days of all those years in the same house. . . . His eye supplied the details the shadow subdued, the smooth grain of her hair like a fine red-brown wood, the generous curve of ear and lip, and he felt a secret intent there, as a familiar statue will suddenly look as if it led in its garden alcove an unauthorized life of its own.

  "This is a great shock to me, naturally," she said after a while. "We've carried these responsibilities together, you and I; you have been splendid in your devotion to them, in your generosity toward people less fortunate than we are."

  Her unusual praise plunged Timothy into self-abasement. "It was your generosity. Sister, not mine," he muttered. "I wouldn't have done much except for you."

  Penelope ignored this confession. "I couldn't get along here without you, Timothy. There are only the two of us left since Sally passed away." Her eyes, lifted to Timothy's, filled with tears.

  There had been a brother and a sister between Penelope and himself; theirs and their parents' deaths had bound Timothy closely to his elder sister. He loved and admired her, and her mothering kindness to him and to Mr. Dombie, all her fine qualities, now rushed over his mind in an avenging host. Yet the more ignoble he felt the more contrary he became. He got up, walked between his accusers, and stood before the fire to bake out a kind of intestinal chill.

  For Mr. Dombie was accusing him too in his silent way. Timothy looked down and saw the man's pale face through the wisps of straw-colored hair lying loosely on it as if they had been dropped there by a casual wind that might soon blow them away again. But it's I who am monstrous, he thought.

  "You are right, of course, Miss Penny," Mr. Dombie said and the words seemed to Timothy to reverberate through his past life, so often had he heard them repeated. "A sister and brother, left alone by an unhappy fate—surely you two have been drawn together by a beautiful devotion."

  His husky, colorless voice robbed the words of their intended effect. The question of our devotion isn't involved, Timothy wanted to explain. But the sharp hooves galloping over his mind threw him into confusion, and he said starkly, "I think it's best for me to go away." He planted his feet a little farther apart and clasped his hands behind his back.

  Penelope, her poise shattered, upset her sewing basket. By the time Timothy had crawled under the

  sideboard and recaptured spools, thimble, and buttons the tension in the room was broken. Penelope put the basket away behind the bunch of dried grasses on the corner table.

  "We'll talk it over some other time," she said pacifically. "A good night's sleep will clear oiu" minds about it. Are you ready for your milk punch, Mr. Dombie?"

  "Yes, thank you, ma'am. We all need a good night's rest."

  While Penelope went to prepare the milk punch, Timothy escorted Mr. Dombie across the hall to his bedroom. A remnant of fire drowsing in the grate had kept the room sufficiently warm. Hating his task and hating himself for it, he helped the injured man with his undressing; neither made any effort to speak, though Mr. Dombie, who had a chronic cold, hawked unpleasantly from time to time.

  When Penelope knocked and handed in the milk punch, Timothy took it to Mr. Dombie and lighted the bedside candle. Before he closed the door he gave a last look about the room to see that the fire was safe and the gas turned off. Propped against the dark headboard of the walnut bed, Mr. Dombie looked white and bone-dry, like a skeleton from Timothy's student days laid out and articulated by some careful hand.

  In the dining room Penelope said, "I don't think you should have broached the subject of your going away before Mr. Dombie. Naturally it would be very up-

  setting to him." But she kissed Timothy affectionately as she left him and went up to her bedroom on the third floor.

  Timothy stood by the stove and roasted himself, trying to store some heat in his bones before starting to bed. Now that the scene was ended, his suggestion of leaving home seemed unreal—when had he made this decision? In agitation he went about covering the coals with their night blanket of ashes. He blew out the lamp and scudded down the icy stairs to the floor below.

  His room, being close to the ground, was like a tomb in this damp weather. The gas jet flared as he lighted it and made the chill visible. A fire was laid in the small basket grate, ready for emergencies; but this was not exactly an emergency, though his teeth chattered dismally as if in fear of a crisis getting ready to happen.

  Mechanically he went to the fireplace and stood for a few minutes with his back to the lifeless grate. Penny's parting remark stirred up the creeping guilt her goodness gave him, but he still felt mean, so he fought repentance off. Instead he saw the face of the Farr girl (if that was who she was) and she seemed to give him one of her pointed, surprising smiles. It bolstered him in his meanness; his clammy extremities suddenly warmed that he had stood up to his elders and told them he wanted to go away. Would he really go? Perhaps-queerer things had happened, he silently addressed the girl, who knew what she wanted and suffered no let nor hindrance in getting it. Abruptly he took a paper

  spill from the vase on the mantel, lighted it at the jet, and touched it to the grate.

  While the fire caug
ht, Timothy leaned against the mantel, one leg crossed over the other, not sure in his own mind whom this negligent air was meant to impress. The kindling spluttered, the coals shifted and sank with a strange rustle of decision. The basket grate was shallow and effectual; the lightwood sent little tongues of flame through the bars, and presently the lumps of anthracite began to glow. Having a fire in his bedroom gave Timothy a novel sense of wealth and wickedness. He toasted his feet, he fiddled among his papers; he thought about his situation in the house, of his two visitors of the evening before, of his dyspepsia and of apparitions. Lying eater-cornered across his bed, he leafed through his books on magic, pretending to study up for his journey. His mind idled, making side excursions hither and yon. Happily no hypochondriacs knocked at the shop door to trouble his just repose.

  Late in the night he yawned and shivered. In his self-bewitchment he had forgotten to mend the fire, which, without the magic of more coal, went out. His excursion into the deep past made him feel hoary, and he passed his hand over his black hair self-consciously. The gesture brought him back to the present, and he opened a cupboard in the bottom of the washstand and brought out a pomatum jar containing a new kind of dye. He set it on the marble top of the high bureau and leaning toward the looking glass he deftly touched his

  side-part and the gray line beginning to show at the roots. It was his only personal vanity, this sensitiveness about his silvering hair; it seemed to stem from a vague distress because he was becoming an old man without having been a young one. The world contained so much of beauty and of ruth he never touched in his little orbit of experience.

  The next morning came up clear and bitter cold. Outside the sunlight fell in powdery particles and lay drifted on the pavement. Almost immediately the shop bell began its disturbance; the sheriff's servant came for some ipecac for his master, who had eaten green fruit at night and had cholera morbus. Timothy was called on to prescribe for an old lady with heart trouble and a baby with croup. He could tell it was going to be one of those days. His young apprentice came in to help him and they pounded, weighed, mixed, and listened to symptoms without a let-up for the better part of the morning.

  From time to time Timothy tried unsuccessfully to work at his desk. Papers had piled up, his fire-insurance premium had fallen due and he had a nervous itch to get it paid. There was no particular reason for this little phobia, except that the house was clapboard and he himself had come near setting it on fire once or twice while experimenting with formulae from the books of famous alchemists, whose spiritual descendant he liked to think he was. Penelope, cleaning up the debris, had

  small patience witJi this dream and brought up quite unnecessarily the point that as a boy he had had a bad habit of playing with matches; so perhaps these resentments, running over into the present, made him unduly irritable when she came into the shop after a while and said the drinking water tasted queer.

  "There must be a mouse in the cistern, Timothy. You'll have to go right away and get Ephraim to come and clean it out."

  Timothy pretended to be glued to his ledger, and indeed the page required concentration, for it was black to the four margins with his heavy-stroked, elaborate writing, evolved out of apothecary's dog-Latin, chemists' symbols, and a flavor of Gothic black-letter. Penelope came over and stood at his elbow. She said nothins:; but her stays creaked faintly with her deep breathing. This witness to her natural urgency about everything from mankind to mice roused Timothy's obstinacy; her vigor chided his procrastination, so he looked up and said, "I didn't notice any queer taste. Take some snakeroot out of that jar. Sister, and boil it in the water if you like. Remember how well it worked in the typhoid epidemic last summer? Not a single case in our household, nor among any of the customers I persuaded to boil their drinking water with this excellent preventive—"

  "I don't care," said Penelope, "it may kill germs but it won't get the mouse out of the cistern. Mr. Dombie and I have sensibilities, Timothy, even if you haven't. You're so used to bad smells in here— Now make haste, like a good fellow, and tell Ephraim to come quickly."

  "Very well, Sister." Actually he had been wanting an excuse to go on a very private investigation, but out of stubbornness he kept her standing a little longer while he made a note about the insurance and meticulously counted a pile of soiled one-dollar bills from the till. Leaving the shop to the inadequate care of his apprentice, he put on his hat and coat and went out.

  After the long rainy spell the sun fell on him like a rich unguent. It turned the shabby clapboards of the shop-front almost white again. In the window his big glass jars, the alchemist's sign, were kindled to potency and splendor by the lancing rays. The green and yellow reflections falling on the dusty, fly-specked jumble of cough-mixtures, corn-plasters, and nostrums lent even these a look of power. People hurried along the pavements in the sharp air, sending puffs of steam out of their nostrils like some breed of small dragons. The change in the weather infected everyone's spirits and they picked their way through the sloughs of mud with good-natured chirpings and jostlings.

  Coming out of the insurance office where he had deposited his roll of bills, he followed along the Bay for a while. Behind the houses on the water side ran a frieze of masts and rigging, every rope exquisitely defined in this blue crystal air. A great heartening rumble rose from the Belgian blocks of the wide thoroughfare pounded by carts, barrows, gentlemen's carriages, drays loaded with sea-island cotton and fertilizer. In all this din Timothy, walking with his hands in the pockets of

  his greatcoat, heard another, a tiny sound that gave him deep satisfaction: the crackling of the receipt for the insurance. He had got it paid in spite of Penelope and her contempt for the pettiness of ledgers and accounts. Well, women were like that, of course; the business of grubbing for money properly belonged to the coarser-grained sex, and Penelope's sweeping generosity was that of the non-grubber, of the spirit untarnished by contact with an account book. He was quite aware that the nods and smiles the passers-by bestowed on him were less for Dr. Partridge walking lank and solitary down the Bay than for the brother of Miss Penny—I declare, she's the most generous lady in the world—the most thoughtful—why, she'd give you the coat off her back . . .

  "Yes, and the coat off mine too," said Timothy loudly, and startled a bill-collector dodging out of a doorway. "Who do you think foots the bill?"

  The bill-collector gave him a wide berth and Timothy drew his head in between his shoulders like an embarrassed turtle. He was also embarrassed at being a mere grubber and at being critical of his sister's warmheartedness. Penelope had a fling to her which he, as much as anyone, admired, whereas he didn't have much fling—at least, not in his druggist's day-by-day. It was only when he withdrew to the book-cluttered room of his fancy that he moved with largeness and style.

  Reluctantly he turned a corner and walked away from East Bay. After the clatter of the Belgian blocks the quiet was like velvet, until it was broken by the

  clippety-clop of hooves galloping in mud, and Timothy turned to see his cousin Will coming hell-for-leather down the middle of the street.

  Catching sight of him, Golightly reigned in and his big roan slid to a standstill. "Howdy, Tim! What weather, eh?—after all that filthy rain. The streets are like a hog-wallow—I didn't even get out my buggy; I'd have sat all day bogged up to my middle in some cussed alley—"

  "You're mud up to your middle anyhow," said Timothy.

  "Well, I'm not puddling along on shanks' mare. Been to the depot yet to take your ticket for foreign parts?"

  "If I was a shag-eared country doctor with nothing to do but gallop up and down the street I might go off for a while," said Timothy, standing tall and disdainful on the curb. In this waste of mud and paving stones his proposed journey seemed too illusory to mention.

  "I was just going to drop off at the ice-cream parlor for a minute. Come on down and have a soda water or something."

  "Still stoking the locomotive, eh?"

  "Well, you got
to keep your chest up," Will protested, the time-worn phrase with which he defended his adolescent's appetite, "specially when you been up half the night delivering babies first one end of town and then the other. The unreliable way women drop their young beats me—always the wrong time and the wrong place."

  "Sorry I can't join you, Will. Have to do an errand and get back to the shop."

  "Well, so long, then. If I was as skinny as you I'd try one of those tonics you keep in your shop-window. Why don't you take a couple of bottles of L'Elixir d'Amour?" He gave Timothy a large wink. "It might make you more soople."

  Will's French accent was as rich as his English but the preposterous syllables communicated their meaning clearly to Timothy, whose French Avas of the same school, "So long. Will." The roan started, fell into his long stride, the satchel bounced on his croup, the mud fountained up from his flying hooves.

  In spite of his stout replies, Timothy followed glumly along on the sidewalk. There was something about a man on a horse that made you feel wizened, plodding, left behind. His heart swelled up like a cabbage to be riding headlong with Will—to be tasting the magnificence of speed.

  His legs, however, carried him faithfully to the tenement where Ephraim, the yard man, lived. Ephraim was out, but an old lame Negro sat against the wall of the house sunning himself and selling groundnut cakes and monkey meat from a large flat basket. A group of colored children drawn by the rich smell of the molasses clustered around, jigging, shrieking, and tormenting him. Timothy bought a few moment's quiet by taking ten cents' worth of the chewy candy and distributing it. The old man gladly contracted to send Ephraim a mes-

  sage to go to Miss Penny Partridge's right away. Having full faith in the efficacy of the grapevine Timothy let the matter rest there, but before leaving he asked him if Mr. Charley Farr didn't live somewhere in that part of town.