Great mischief (13 page)

That evening he did not even lock the door. He returned the washstand to its place under the splasher on the wall and made his room neat. In a little spurt of hospitality he put a bottle of port and two glasses on the table; it might not go well, but one could only try.

While he waited for his guest to arrive, he continued to talk to himself about Good and Evil. Precepts from the Scriptures poured into his mind; it was almost as if God had decided to take a hand in this battle. He alternately walked the floor in hope and threw himself down in despair, and he kept this up for a good part of the night.

When he heard a distant clock strike four and realized that the hag would not come, he felt distinctly flat. Now that he had some good arguments for her ... It was unfair, just like a woman; the sex was congenitally weak in dialectic and in the sense of sportsmanship. Still, a good rest . . . He fell across the bed and sank into downy slumber.

The sound of church bells woke him. Sunday. . . . He stayed on the bed enjoying sheer laziness, the rare and blissful sense of having a long day ahead with nothing whatever to do. Belatedly he remembered his dinner engagement and sat up, swinging his bare feet to the floor with a thump. Anna Maria—he thought in dismay, the Iron Horse! His recent experiences had quite unfitted him to meet that large front of puffing energy, admirable as a steam engine. Even Will's robust good humor . . . He got up and wrote them a note asking them to excuse him today, he felt a little bilious.

When he had dispatched Polio with the note, he bethought him of his neglected plants, and he put on some old clothes and went outdoors. The bare beds on either side the flagged walk had become two strips of fuzzy green, little vines had begun to reach greedy fingers up the brick wall. They had done surprisingly well, he reflected, mousing around, in spite of the shady lot; they poked out new leaves even in the places where dampness clung and the earth smelt sour.

The air of seclusion about his house which Timothy 5o cherished came from the livery stable building on one side and a tall dwelling on the other. At the back a transverse wall bounded the lot, along which he had planted kitchen herbs. Penelope would never allow chives or garlic in the old house, and he still felt guilt at offending against her canon of good taste. Nevertheless, he tended them carefully and made a pretty brick border to give them respectability. As he set to work now, debating with her the moral philosophy of eating garlic, he began to feel that someone was spying on him, and looking up he saw a disembodied head which had apparently come to rest on the wall above where he knelt. It was a female visitor, one very much alive and well fleshed. The sun shone on the hairpins in her brown hair, drawn into a seemly knot at the back of her neck; her light eyes, which were coolly taking his measure between their short black lashes, reflected in this leafy spot the green of nature with which she seemed allied. Timothy, who liked expressive eyes in a woman and long curling lashes, looked back at her in some distaste, not unmixed with nervousness.

"Good morning. Miss Farr," he said. "Won't you come in? You must be mighty uncomfortable up there, and certainly your appearance is odd—"

Broken bottles sunk in cement topped the wall to discourage marauders, and the jagged points set off the girl's face in a brightly wicked ruff.

She shook her head slowly and somehow her pointed chin escaped the crystal blades. "You're sort of eerie-looking yourself, Dr. Partridge, if we're going in for personal remarks."

Timothy smoothed his short gray hair and brushed the dirt off the knees of his trousers. "No—no; let's not start in on personal remarks. I'm outgeneraled by your eloquence in that field. But where do you keep yourself? I never see you about town."

She craned her neck to get a better look at his plants and Timothy was comforted to find it was attached to a real pair of shoulders and surrounded by a conventional pleated collar. She hoisted herself a little higher and her hand appeared over the wall holding a straw hat, which she laid on top of the broken glass as a padding for her arm. "I've passed you once or twice on the streets, but you were looking down as usual. You don't waste much time on the world around you, especially not on women. Or maybe it's just that I'm not your style."

Timothy apologized hastily for having overlooked her. "I've thought about you constantly since the day I first saw you. You must have guessed that."

She smiled and did not deny it; after her fashion, which Timothy found so irritating, she did not answer him at all. Instead she surveyed the back of his house curiously, her eyes dawdled over the plaster walls stained with green, over the washtub, the back-yard rubble of brickbats and anonymous bits of rusty iron. Timothy took advantage of the moment to scrutinize her. Her nose was too long, he decided, for beauty; it was low and slender and her nostrils flared a little, like a trumpet. But before he could finish his scrutiny she turned back to him and asked, "What are you going to do with all these plants you've set out? Are you going back into pharmacy? I should think you'd be thankful not to be cooped up in that shop."

"No, I don't plan to open another shop. For one thing, very little of the equipment was saved from the fire— and even that is scattered."

She gave him a look full of humor and malice. "Well, you can loaf like a gentleman now. It must be nice to have plenty of money for a change."

Timothy thought quickly, if it's money she wants . . . Bribery was a novelty to him, another sweetmeat he could now indulge in; a device to try. He said, "Why don't you get down from that ridiculous position and come in? There are some questions I want to ask you—"

She laughed delightedly and showed for the first time her white teeth, set wide apart and slightly pointed. "Not today, thanks. I just ran by to see what you were up to, and now I've seen. My family will be putting bloodhounds on my trail if I don't get along home. Not that they bother their heads about me, except when they need me to get supper or something. You hoe your row, Dr. Partridge, and I'll hoe mine; you'll see me again, if you keep your eyes open." And she disappeared with surprising suddenness below the top of the wall.

He jerked open the back gate and stepped out into a narrow alley, down which he could see a figure skimming, her long skirts scalloping provocatively; she had already covered a considerable distance. But Timothy himself had learned to run, he had made the acquaintance of speed, and he went after her with all his new abandon. Before she reached the corner he caught up to her and seized her by the wrist.

"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.