Great mischief

by Pinckney, Josephine, 1895-1957

"You're absurdly credulous, Timothy; I wish you'd outgrow it."

  "Of course I'm credulous. I can believe anything." He stalked beside her boastfully, more vertical than ever

  in his long black coat, now rimed with tiny gray drops. "There are unicorns in the Bible," he added.

  "Don't be trivial. It passes iny understanding how you can accept science and religion and still have so many silly superstitions. It's so inconsistent."

  "But in this world you have to be inconsistent to have any faith at all. The scientists don't know much when you come right down to it; simple people often make fools of them, they get there first by a short cut—by intuition, if you like. Besides, it seems to me you are the inconsistent one; how can you believe the Bible, the Word of God, and not accept its witness that witches and familiar spirits work through the world?"

  "With God nothing is impossible, of course," said Penelope tranquilly, "but it is not for us to meddle in such dangerous matters." In the deathly, muffled streets this sentiment sounded particularly apt, so Timothy dropped the argument. They crossed the street to the church, and, as they turned and walked beside it, he dragged his forefinger along the white sweating plaster and was not surprised to discover that the timorous beast had escaped his coarse male touch by becoming a church again.

  In spite of her fatiguing day Penelope walked buoyantly, indeed the asperity of the night air seemed to exhilarate her. She went back to the subject of Lena Whitlock. "I don't believe she's beyond hope," she said with combat in her voice. "Dr. Porter gives up too easily, I'm afraid."

  "He knows his business, Sister. You always say yourself that he's a splendid diagnostician—much better than Will."

  Penelope made her doctor, her minister, her greengrocer, subjects of ardent partisanship, so this answer fetched her up short. She merely repeated, "He gives up too soon—I wouldn't be beaten so easily." Timothy felt in his nerve-ends that she was leading somewhere, a road he might balk at taking, so again he let the conversation drop and they walked the rest of the way in silence.

  When they came into the entry hall Penelope thanked her brother warmly for bringing her home. "You'd better catch up the fire to go to bed by, Timothy. Your clothes are damp and you mustn't get a chill." She followed him into his bedroom and put a match to the grate herself.

  Timothy, easily touched by her solicitude, mumbled his thanks self-consciously. There was a look of the wise woman about Penelope stooping by the hearth, her long dark garments piled about her, and stirring the fire which sprang to life under her hands and shed a broken light on her strong, intent face. She looked up over her shoulder. "Timothy, I think we should send Lena on a sea voyage." Timothy was silent. "I hate to ask you for more money, but I spent all my surplus refitting that Murphy family after they were burnt out. Lena is a fine woman; the little money I've paid her is no compensation for the faithful service she has given us."

  "But, Sister, it's no use—you heard what Dr. Porter said." He made a rough mental calculation of the journey's cost.

  "You can only try."

  Timothy walked over to the bookcase and leaned against it as if the magic it contained might stiffen his backbone. He ran his hands into his trouser pockets.

  "Sister, I know you'll think I'm selfish, but you'll have to find the money somewhere else. I've decided to start saving to go to England."

  Penelope flowed up to her full height with a rippling of heavy cloth. "England!" She seemed consciously to turn the weight of tallness and darkness on her shorter brother. "I can't go about begging, Timothy. Besides, we should be the ones to do this. It's never yet been said of us that we failed in our responsibilities. I'm willing to save every cent—I'll contribute all I can to the expenses."

  "There are other people who can afford it better than we can."

  "You can't be serious about going off and leaving the shop, the house—us? What, may I ask, would become of Mr. Dombie and me? We couldn't live here alone."

  The fire sent out a ribald tongue between the iron lips of the grate and made a small glare in Timothy's brain. "Mr. Dombie could go away," he said and he felt his mouth draw up at the corners, against his will, into a wicked smile. "He speaks of having a niece—he could go to live with her. This house is too expensive for us, anyway. We could sell it and you could live with Cousin

  Lou Partridge for a while. You always say you love her dearly."

  "I do indeed—it would be a joy and a privilege to live with Cousin Lou. But we know nothing of Mr. Dombie's niece. She must be an unnatural relative never to have written nor come to see him in all this time. Would you turn him out of the house, Timothy? The Devil must have gotten into you to make you think of such a thing!"

  Well, let him stand by me then, thought Timothy. Aloud he said, "We've done our part by Mr. Dombie, Sister. For twenty years we've housed and fed him and never said what we both know—that he's sponged on us. He's never made any attempt to go back to his kin. You say they've never come to see him—has he ever tried to find them? Maybe they think he's dead. The truth is that he'd rather stay here and let us support him—"

  The Devil must really possess him, Timothy thought. He had never phrased these horrors before, even in his mind.

  "Speak for yourself," said Penelope, and her words took on an unintended significance. "It has been my happiness and satisfaction to take care of Mr. Dombie— a victim of war, needing my strength—" She began to walk stormily up and down the cluttered room, scattering the piles of papers with the flounce of her skirt.

  "That's because he agrees with everything you say!" cried Timothy, finding that this as much as anything was his grudge against Mr. Dombie.

  Penelope turned and threw him a look like a sharp

  stone. The quarrel was having a peculiar effect on her. The more she took the part of the good, the generous, the unselfish, the less it seemed to become her. Her grave beauty of the earlier evening had gone without a trace. Her eyes were distraught; the smooth surface of her face had puckered into little planes of dark and light, which did not conceal her bitter wilfulness.

  She said, "You did not go through what I did to save Mr. Dombie. That night in the hospital ... I had to search for him among the dead ... it was almost as if I went down into the grave to bring him back. I will not give him up."

  A quality in Penelope's voice more than the actual words tingled unpleasantly along Timothy's nerves, a morbidity he had never recognized in her before. They stood together unmasked in the room after all these years and their nakedness was indecent and dreadful.

  Penelope heaved a great sigh and came back to herself. The revelation clouded, hungj on the hairline that divides the horrible from the ridiculous and fell back into absurdity. She said with quite ordinary sisterly badgering, "You've always had a commercial streak in you, Timothy, but I never knew what base materialism you were capable of."

  This was a telling shot; Timothy's own knowledge of himself convicted him. He became aware that he was clutching the leather purse in his pocket and remained silent.

  Penelope went on. "And now you are going to let

  that poor woman die and her children depend on charity so you can travel, forsooth, and visit the Crystal Palace!"

  Timothy saw the dome split wide and send its bright splinters right and left. Penelope's demand was logic-proof—the poor widow, the orphan children. He hated her for being right as he had never hated in his life before.

  "Very well. Sister; Lena shall go, but this is the last time you'll get money from me."

  Penelope's sudden triuinph unnerved her. She clawed at the collar of her dress, stretching her neck this way and that. Then she went silently tOAvard the door, stumbling a little over the rumpled pamphlets. "May God forgive us," she said without turning. "I will go and pray. I beg you to do the same."

  But Timothy watched her in despair as she crossed the threshold because he knew his final threat to her was vain.

  Timothy sat down and gazed at the door that Penelope had from ineradicabl
e habit closed behind her. He could hear her going softly up the stairs to her chilly bedroom two floors above his own. Then he stood up again, put his head back, and looked for a long time at the ceiling; and having in his heightened state some power to see through lath and plaster, he perceived Mr. Dombie recumbent over his head and Penny above them both. Slowly the ceiling began to come down on

  him in a barely perceptible descent; he blinked hard and saw instead his herb compress and the sticky juices that trickled from the leaves and stalks as it squeezed them.

  Presently his pale serious face returned to the perpendicular and he stood for a moment twisting one hand with the other as if compelled to wreak himself an injury. Then he went over and leaned on the marble top of the bureau. The looking glass gave back the same muffled and melancholy countenance he was used to and the same high, narrow shoulders. Yet he was teased by a likeness he could not name; it was as if a draftsman, without changing a feature, had brought out certain traits by a deft touch here and there of the charcoal. The mustache he wore as a refuge and a disguise seemed no longer to hide the slight lift of his lips at the corners; his lank black hair looked like a foreigner's. His flesh pimpled over with the chill of exposure and strangeness.

  Dreadful as the unmasking of Penelope had been, he feared worse this half-lit presence within himself. Yet— if he accepted its dominion, would it break that other, that lifelong dominion over him? In a spurt of action he lighted the lamp on his night table; as the flame rose from the wick it made a yellow circle on the ceiling and dissolved the gray shadows. He ran over to the fireplace and piled on fresh coal until the little black nuggets fell off and rolled among the papers on the carpet. The grate responded to his excitement with a furious crackling.

  Well, what can you do in a situation like this? I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, he said, with a great full sigh.

  He turned to his books, his handy substitute for moral decision. He opened a bookcase, and from long-established habit took out a volume at random and opened it, looking for a sign, a message, an instruction from some unformulated power. Travels in Arabia, American Female Poets Illustrated—he threw them on the floor and went on to the next bookcase.

  The top shelves, neglected and forbidding, bent their carved walnut frown upon him; he brought a chair and stood on it, pulling down the sagging, dusty volumes. But the invertebrate back numbers of Littell's Living Age, Sermons on Sundry Occasions—these offered him no magical formulae. Delphi remained silent.

  The Farr girl, he thought, treading restlessly up and down, because he had taken off his shoes and the cane-bottomed chair cut through his soles, would burst into raucous laughter if she could see him now. She, he felt sure, would be able to decide confidently between two evils; she would not have given up a resolve through cowardice. For it was not Penelope's fault, he owned justly. As the eldest she had properly taken over the family and managed its affairs after their parents' death, and he had let her. It was his habit of defeatism, the too-willing acceptance, that had brought him to this moment. The Farr girl, he thought, wishing he had a name to call her by, knew what she wanted and took it —even a jar of frogs—for of course she had taken them,

  for some obscure reason, or for no reason except that she wanted them.

  The room became bright and furiously hot. His palms and his forehead sweated gently. He got off the chair and sat down on it, feeling Penelope stand over him, bending on him, like the bookcases, a carven frown. Suddenly he said with rancor, Why, she's half a head taller than me! No woman, he thought, ever used half a head to such advantage.

  He thought of an old prop and mainstay in times of dread and wondered why he had not tried it before. He padded over to his bedside table and picked up the Bible—the new Bible Penny had given him for his birthday. But a great reluctance to open it seized him; he went back to the fire and looked into the blazing coals for some time. Then he resolutely inserted his thumbnail between the thin pages and parted them.

  The fine print spun before his eyes, reversed, settled itself in ordered lines, just above his finger-tip.

  "I know where thou dwellest, even where Satan's throne is—"

  The fire crackled and spat, and he turned his back to cool his scorched face. Then he twirled to the light and reread the passage.

  So, Sister had been right again. And by being right, had once more put him in the wrong. Permanently, it now appeared.

  In an abandonment of rage against her he tried to tear the Bible in half, but its stout new covers balked his pulling and jerking. He threw it on top of the coals;

  a gasp came from the grate as the supple leaves ignited. He went over to the wardrobe, took out his coat and hat. The stench of burning leather closed his nostrils and his throat, the red light of the upward flames leapt on the wall as he jerked the door open and went out coughing into the street.

  The cold and dampness touched Timothy's senses with healing as he tramped along between the sleeping houses. The fog had shredded and was moving inland, leaving a spectral shine on railings and window-ledges, like the tracks of an army of snails. In his urge to get away he merely followed the street for several blocks until he could go no farther. What stopped him at last was an iron railing, and beyond it the river in which misty stars swam. He walked about between the hushed trees, surprised only that he felt no fear of the darkness and the emptiness of the park in which he found himself. If the supernatural beings to whom he had given a backdoor allegiance couched in the grottoes of shadow behind him, he was now indifferent to their spells and their mischief.

  He had no inkling of the hour except that a late moon leaned a sunken cheek on the eastern bar of the harbor. His feet hurt because he had forgotten his shoes in his dash from the house, but he was indifferent to them also. He turned westward beside the quiet river and at length left it behind him, following soundlessly an irregular course along incurious streets. Questions floated through his mind, light and random as milk-

  weed floss. What did it mean to belong to the Devil? His poor dead mother would feel badly for him about this. Yet he felt uncertain about it all. The throne of Satan—it rang in his head with a sonority he couldn't but admire; damnation had a high style, at least. . . .

  He came out by a large pond set like a pane of glass in the leaden earth. A faint reddening had begun in the sky behind him but he held on to the night, to the west reflected at his feet; the mysterious image of the firmament, the tall and punctual constellations keeping their rendezvous in this still place—as his thoughts ran thus, a small star broke loose from the patterned sky and plunged in a bright arc toward the swallowing horizon. How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Perhaps lesser devils are being born all the time. Perhaps one is born tonight.

  His inner fires burned lower; in spite of his thick socks his feet were icy on the flagstones and he turned eastward toward home. He felt inhuman skimming along with no footfalls in this steep corridor walled with brick and wood. The glow in the east had brightened and sounds crept down the street toward him of people awake and stirring; a far metallic clanking streaked the quietude. The glow, he discovered, was not in its proper place, it was a little north of east, it came from a fire, not the sun. But the boyish impulse to run to a fire did not throb strongly enough and he kept his direction at the same pace. When he reached the center of the town he began to encounter people running, lumpy figures also unreal, yet with a different unreality from his own.

  The street he followed cut across his own at right angles. He reached the corner and turned into a lane of fiery color that smeared the sky and even the mud puddles in the street itself. Crowds of people, black and grotesque in their thick clothes, stood in a semicircle; the sight of the steepled flames licking around his own roof somehow caused him no surprise. He approached the silhouetted backs, unable to check his momentum.

  As he reached the barrier made by the crowd a woman turned and looked at him. "Dr. Partridge!" Her scream tore a rent in the line
of backs; as if he had been an apparition people fell away on either side and his name ricocheted along the street from mouth to mouth. Their shrinking stopped him in his tracks; he took it for accusation until Will Golightly ran up, looking demonic himself with his shirt torn and soot all over his face, and seized him by the arm.

  "Timothy! We thought you— For God's sake, how did you escape?"

  A new kind of cunning prompted Timothy's reply. "I went out—'way across town—on a sick call."

  Will threw his arms about him and almost suffocated him with a great muscular anguish. "Poor fellow—poor fellow! We did everything we could to save them— before God, we did!" Timothy felt his blood thick in his veins; his ears were as sluggish as his tongue and only fragments of information came through to him . . . fire must have started on the ground floor . . . stairway a roaring furnace . . . thev were cut off on the second floor . . . the hook and ladder mired in Church Street...

  So, the dark forces that rule our lives, whether of predestination or of anarchy, had taken a hand in this event. The miring of the hook and ladder was quite outside the scope of his imagination or his carelessness. People began to crowd around and pour their pity over him like oil on his burns; and indeed the great heat of the fire was beginning to scorch his hands and face. The roaring of the fanged flames as they consumed the clapboards, the slow tilt and crash of the cornice and part of the roof, forbade either hope or fear that anyone within might still live. The firemen had given up a fruitless task and were lymphatically pouring water on the adjoining houses.

  Utter confusion lay over the street before the gutted shop. The wooden mortar and pestle that had hung above the door rolled about among a jumble of bottles, jugs, and instruments. The boots of the firemen ground his glass carboys under, the gaudy liquids dark on the pavement. Little had been saved, and that at random— someone had lugged out the bellows from the shop, as if the fire might languish.

  Now only the supports of the house stood, looming like charred ribs against the roaring gold and vermilion behind them. As Timothy watched, he became conscious of a prickling at the back of his neck, and a monitor within warned him that someone was staring at him. Behind him in the raw light he saw his visitor of a few days ago. Only her face was visible across the high intervening shoulders, but he distinctly made out her eloquent eyes fixed on him. He could not translate their