Great mischief

by Pinckney, Josephine, 1895-1957

  "You're behaving like a spoiled brat," he panted. She gave him a furious look that threw him back a step, but he withstood its burning this time and kept his grip on her. "Now you're coming with me for a little talk. You have nothing to be afraid of—"

  She let out a derisive mew at this idea and relaxed a little. Timothy pulled her along and found to his surprise that he was actually stronger than she; whatever he had expected, she was just an ordinary girl of flesh like his, and rather peaked, he thought, giving her a jerk. Suddenly he wondered what had come over him— he could imagine what Sister Penny would say about such carryings on. But her views, once so authoritative, now merely made a footnote in his mind; he continued to drag Miss Farr into his back yard.

  He led her over to a tree whose gnarled roots, heaving out of the ground, formed a sort of rococo chair. Seating her in it, he planted himself opposite and looked directly at her.

  "Why should you hate me?" he asked.

  She grasped the root on either side of her fingers, which were long for one of her neat proportions. "What reason would I have to hate you?"

  "That's what I want to know. After all, I gave you the ointment you wanted, though it was against my better judgment. And, by the way, how is your father's earache? Quite cured, I presume?"

  She laughed again, throwing herself back against the trunk of the tree. "You have a budding sense of humor, after all. I didn't expect it."

  Timothy, who considered he had a delightful sense of humor, looked affronted. She went on: "As a matter of fact. Father has another earache, and several new complaints besides. He's an old soak, so it's no wonder. But if that's what he wants, he can have it."

  This disrespectful frankness shocked Timothy. "You are certainly heartless about your family."

  "I have seven sisters and brothers—not counting three in the graveyard. You can't be expected to like nine people just because you live in the same house with them, can you? Some are less aggravating than others, of course. Still, you need lots of good servants to have time for brotherly love."

  "I doubt if you'd have time for it—even if you had a palace staff. Brotherly love isn't your dish, I fancy. Tell me, did you get to the meeting that rainy night when you were in the shop?"

  She looked away and said with the crisp intonation that made her replies sound slightly contemptuous,

  "My group meets every month. I generally go." It might have been a sewing circle she was speaking of.

  "Yes, on the full moon, I believe. They must be very lively meetings, with all the dancing, feasting, and love-making. And rather naughty, from what I've heard."

  "You take life too much by hearsay. I can't imagine why I thought that evening you belonged . . . you were so stubborn about the solanum."

  "I didn't know then—as you remarked before, I had a bad upbringing. I was taught that magic was all hokum."

  "Thank goodness I wasn't Bible-raised," she said devoutly. "It just mixes people up about what's true and what isn't,"

  Timothy thought of Sinkinda and had no disposition to deny her and her witch-world a real existence.

  Lucy was looking past the house at his front garden.

  "If you have plenty of roots and herbs to sell, people will come for them with or without a shop. They'll come to the back gate, as they did before."

  "Yes, they're beginning already; but it will take time to grow a supply. Nature can't be hurried, you know."

  "Oh, but she can—that is, if you know the trick. But I have to go along." She gave him an obscure, glancing smile and put out her hand to be helped up.

  Timothy pulled her to her feet.

  "Well, Doctor, this visit has given me some ideas that may be useful to both of us. We'll talk about it some other time."

  "Before you go I'd like to come to some agreement with you. If your circumstances are—er—cramped . . . at home, I should say . . . I'm a man of liberal means now, as you just mentioned ..." He blushed; he was really too new at it. Bribery was astonishingly difficult, especially with a lady.

  She headed for the alley, tittering. "I'll stop by some other day."

  As he caught up with her at the back gate, Timothy said again, "Do you hate me?"

  She glanced at him, then away. "You flatter yourself. I don't either hate or like you. Has somebody got a grudge against you? It isn't easy to tell who your enemies are . . . why, people hate me I hardly even know. Take a still-hunt among your old customers, is my advice— for somebody your root-medicine disappointed. There must be hundreds! Pharmacists are natural targets for grudges."

  "Oh," said Timothy. She went through the gate and down the lane without farewell.

  Timothy had much to think of in the following days. Having been virtually shielded from women by natural timidity, poverty, and his sister, he was now faced with a feminine problem of the utmost complexity. He couldn't get over it. He thought of it by day as he "vveeded his garden and by night as he waited for the hag. Sinkinda, strangely enough, was far more real to him than Lucy; she had a stronger personality, he decided. Sinkinda—he rolled her name unctuously on his tongue. While he feared her to the marrow of his bones, she tempted him in a curious way, not of the flesh but of the imagination. He prepared a list of interesting topics to discuss with her, partly from a desire to raise himself from the low esteem in which she held him and partly in the hope of prolonging the pleasant side of her visits. The nights when she failed to appear were divided for him between chagrin and relief.

  He began to wish he had a confidant, and thought a little of telling Will about this double conquest, of a sort, which he had made. But he could imagine Will, hearing such a tale. He would look at Timothy's tongue, feel his pulse, and tell him to take a course of calomel. The thought reminded Timothy that for the first time in his life he had omitted his spring dose, a ritual he followed with no less pious credulity than that of his remote pagan forefathers practicing their vegetation and fertility rites. How odd of him to have forgotten it! Then he did something that seemed to be in an equally odd way a substitute. He went back to the Palace Shaving Saloon and had his mustache taken off. When it had vanished in white foam he leaned forward and stared at himself in the barber-shop mirror. Why, I'm younger than I am!—was his first, his gratified thought—except for having gone gray. And except for an antique shape to his face—the clean jawline that seemed in its upward curve to drag the corners of his mouth with it in a marmoreal smile.

  Getting ready to leave, he settled his tall collar, he hitched his coat up on his high shoulders and approved his rear view in the glass. Then bowing to the right and left he took his departure. But in the bright outdoors, his self-esteem collapsed. The sunlight played over his defenseless mouth like a sharper razor. He hurried along the sidewalk with his face to the wall, fearing people's eyes on his tender skin. This rigid and angular gait brought him close to the door of the butcher shop, and, seeing the sallow, plucked, and pimply fowls that hung there, he broke out in a cold sweat.

  In the shelter of his own house, however, he gradually recovered his aplomb. He took the cunjer balls from the chimney and decided to give them to Polio. He did not open them—no doubt they contained a lizard's foot, a black hen's feathers, the dried blood of a bat, and more such bane. Polio was delighted with these as with all the hand-me-downs he received from Timothy, and went about the house with them tucked in the bosom of his shirt, where they made a horrid excrescence. After a while he said he had a toothache and, whether by associative magic or sheer ingenuity, developed a similar lump in his cheek. Timothy at length gave in and let him off. Polio went delicately down the path cradling his jaw with one hand and his shirt-front with the other.

  The following night Sinkinda came again. Timothy had fallen asleep in the rocker, so he did not know her means of entry on this occasion. He simply opened his eyes and found her sitting quite domestically in the armchair across the hearth.

  "So you have graduated from Maum Rachel's magic, Doctor?"

  "Well," said Tim
othy loyally, "Maum Rachel's magic might work, if circumstances—whom I don't care to name—were less contrary. You measure out the physic according to the disease, I suppose."

  For the first time Sinkinda's smile was tinged with approval. "All magic has some potency; you are right not to despise the old woman. A small cat bone, a shred of hair, are sometimes the first steps to a larger design."

  "I've been wanting to know—did you get hold of some of my hair as a first step?"

  "Well, yes; there were other things I could have used, but this happened to be the easiest. I took a form which —doesn't matter," she looked at him severely, "and got it from the barber's sweepings. The raven black you had dyed it made it especially pleasing to work with."

  "There—you're a romantic yourself," said Timothy triumphantly.

  "Of course I am. You couldn't possibly imagine me as anything else."

  "Do you mean that you are a figment of my imagination?"

  "Partly so—human credulity is a great help in our profession—and partly not."

  "Now that's just what I want to know," said Timothy eagerly, taking a pencil and an old envelope from his breast-pocket. "Admitting—purely for the sake of argument—that I am responsible in part, it does seem to me that you've taken things pretty much in your own hands. I never could have invented you. That's preposterous."

  "So it is," she agreed complacently. "You see, there are parallels between magic and people's minds; your— indiscretions gave me the opening, I took the form your myth-making suggested. The rest is my own art." She took a little gold comb from her pocket and began coquettishly to smooth her hair. "But you ask too many questions. You're always trying to reduce mystery to a prescription and cork it up in a bottle. No one, I may say, has yet succeeded in that vaulting ambition." She deliberately changed the subject. "I see you've come further out of that thicket you've been hiding in."

  "Oh, that . . ." Timothy spoke offhand, but he rubbed his upper lip self-consciously. "I suppose it's odd to go clean-shaven; people think I look very old-timy." He glanced hopefully at her for a disclaimer.

  Sinkinda nodded, and her hollow cheeks, flushed like the inside of a shell, quivered slightly. " 'Old-timy' is an understatement. A throwback—that's what you look like. And are. You could have been taken down off the portal of a fourteenth-century cathedral and set to walking about. Well, that elongation of the figure is at least a distinguished trait—" She put her head back and surveyed him from between half-closed lids.

  Timothy blushed with gratification and ran to pour out the port. She refused, however, the glass he offered. "The trouble with living high is that it spoils you. You get used to the best. Frankly, I haven't the stomach for human provender. It's ill-seasoned stuff."

  "Too much red pepper, perhaps?" said Timothy hazardously.

  The hag's skin began to glow alarmingly as if he had blown on her with a pair of bellows. "You're a blundering kind of fellow; and all that dabbling in books has only fuddled your wits. Hags of the cruder sort slip their skins and leave them behind doors, but my tribe knows better ways to ride the air. We have secret ointments that take off only the outer layers of skin—"

  "Oh. Like cantharides, or even sunburn—"

  Sinkinda ignored this pharmaceutical analysis. "These agents make the body more sensitive to the buoyant powers naturally in the air. The ordinary human hide is too thick for such fine responses. As to red pepper, I hate the stuff just the same, and tomorrow by fowl-crow you will sweep it all up. And don't waste any more of it about these premises."

  "Yes, ma'am," said Timothy, regretting that he had ever mentioned this irritant. He tried hard to remember his list of suitable topics but they eluded him. Well, Good and Evil always remained, and he began to question her earnestly about them. She laughed, this time with genuine amusement in her voice. "There you go again. Man, the moralist—what a figure of fun! You ought to be in a Punch and Judy show."

  "But I love to argue about morals. What subject is more absorbing! Actually, everybody has an itch to understand them, to find out why Evil plagues us and what we ought to be doing about it."

  "Satan is everywhere," said the hag sedately. "Not much you can do about that."

  "Everywhere" was a territory Timothy was used to ascribing to God. He thought hard for a while. "There's something in what you say. Temptation swarms around us; and there's a natural depravity in inanimate things that's quite shocking, when you think of it. It's always the jar of ointment that's troublesome or expensive to mix that falls in the sink and smashes. And Sister's spool of thread was forever rolling under the china press instead of under some movable article of furniture."

  "And you always had to go down on all fours to get it. Yes, that would have given her pleasure."

  "But she didn't roll it under the china press; come, now, be reasonable."

  "Perhaps not; but she was always very gracious, wasn't she, seeing you down on all fours?"

  "You are certainly bitter about my sister." Timothy gulped his port. "And you're only partly right. She did, I suppose, enjoy her power over Mr. Dombie, but that she had a guilty passion for him I will not believe."

  Sinkinda drew her shapely legs up and clasped her hands around them. She laid her head against the high tufted back of the chair, whose carved and pointed frame had rather the look of a dark throne. "I suppose you never asked yourself why she raised such an outcry about your going away?"

  This disinterring of his last quarrel with Penelope threw Timothy into a violent and painful agitation. He looked down at his feet, trying to dodge the question shining from the demi-lunes of the hag's eyes.

  In the end Sinkinda answered the question herself. "She couldn't have lived there with Mr. Dombie if you had left. A common dwelling is as useful to the relationship of owner and slave as to what you call a guilty passion."

  Timothy tried to suppress a groan, but the sound would not be swallowed. Sinkinda pressed her advantage. "Penelope was always making a virtue into a vice by carrying it to extremes. Her excessive pity for Mr. Dombie, for her pensioners, for all her objects of charity, was really sentimentality, a mold, because at bottom it was self-pity. She had an affinity with the weak.

  "The truth is, the aftermath of a war makes an invigorating climate for Satan, especially in the defeated territory. Just imagine, for one thing, the keening of all those leftover women after their lost mates—what a head of steam for some imaginative leader to use! Penelope turned to and got herself up a man of sorts; but without professional help, which she was too stubborn to ask, she did a clumsy job. Still, crude as he was, he made her feel essential."

  "Now, wait," said Timothy, with dogged reasonableness. "You must remember this: Sister grew up in prosperity, she knew what it was like to have pretty dresses and good food, yet after the War she denied herself for people, she gave up the material things—which, if you are right about her, she must have wanted—in order to help them."

  Sinkinda gave a little cluck of affected astonishment. "Can you imagine a handsome woman like Penelope going round in those mildewed-looking clothes? You cannot. She appeared to be without vanity, but, mark me, she was eaten up with vanity. She wore poverty like a bustle, she turned self-denial wrong side out and made it into a new coat. Remember how eloquent she used to get about the richness and materialism of the North? One of her best subjects—because she really loathed her own poverty. Sour grapes easily turn to vinegar in the veins."

  Sinkinda's words were havingr a curious effect on Tim-othy ... he felt a loosening at his throat, like taking ofiE his high tight collar when he came home from church on Sundays. His head and limbs felt light; he gulped another glass of port.

  "I must say, you've made it all very confusing—this business of good and bad," he said.

  "Has it ever occurred to you that they might be the same thing—or at least complementary?"

  "They are not in the least the same thing. You are a wicked and cynical woman. Although a very charming one," he added, from nat
ural politeness and fear of reprisal.

  Sinkinda clucked again. "I'm a hag, and my means of locomotion give me more perspective than you get, tied to the ground. Tell me, do you believe that God is the maker of heaven and earth and of all that is under the earth?"

  "Of course. That's axiomatic."

  "Well, then—the Creator must have made Evil too. You must believe that Satan is His handiwork, which you shouldn't despise."

  "Oh, God!" cried Timothy in vexation, "I wish I knew! I've cudgeled my brain black and blue over that question."

  "Centuries of cudgeling have gone on over that question, in monasteries, libraries, pulpits, and wilderness retreats. How theologians love to trip themselves up over something quite simple! The truth is that Good and Evil are inseparable; when God came into existence, Satan sprang like His shadow from the same spot and equally created God. Good . . . Evil; light . . . shadow; pleasure . . . pain—none of these could exist without its opposite."

  Timothy's stomach sank. Perhaps she's right, he thought, perhaps morality is just an alternation and can never be fixed in a code. He pulled his upper lip so long over this that Sinkinda said sharply, "The Heaven you dream of is an absurdity. Perfection would be nothingness without Evil to point it up. The trouble with you is the Christian myth surrounded you at birth like a caul from which you've never emerged."

  Timothy was an obstinate man and he had one more argument. "But if Good can't exist without Evil, then bad people serve God's purpose just as well as good people."

  Sinkinda gave him a honeyed smile. "And have a lot more fun. Generations of men live and die without discovering that simple truth."

  "Let's go!" exclaimed Timothy, starting up. He was suddenly sick of morals; the open road lured him from a controversy of which he was not getting the better.