Great mischief (14 page)

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 Timothy 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 natural 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.

A powerful contralto crying "Buyeyster!" sounded down the block, and Timothy took a pan and went out. The morning sun beamed on his face; his whole being sopped it up as he leaned on the front gate. It's as good as Brown's Iron Bitters, he thought, strengthens the nerves, purifies the blood, invigorates the constitution. And doesn't taste bad. While he waited for the oyster-woman, the natural world came up in all its clarity and crowded round him. He watched a chameleon on the gatepost sunning its brilliant green back. It turned its bulging eyes on him warily; the skin of its neck, wrinkling in tiny folds, made it look timeless, the descendant of dragons. The harsh angle of leg and thigh, the little spraddled hands, the pointed reptilian head, were fierce and endearing. As he stood relishing this little fantasy of nature's, the lizard threw back its head, jerked it as if it were about to neigh, but instead of a sound it puffed out its blanket of innocent petal-pink from its throat and drew it in again.

"Eh-eh! De mo' feller leetle de mo' he have to strut some." A round brown face appeared on the other side of the gate.

"That's so, Mamie," said Timothy, enchanted with both of them. "I feel like strutting a little myself." He handed her his pan, which she filled from the cedar pail. Today she gave him an extra ladleful.

Encouraged by this sign of favor, he began to ask questions. "What do you think about Good and Evil?"

The oysterwoman had certain curious identities with her wares, "No, sir," she said with finality, and, dropping the dipper into her bucket, prepared to move.

"Hold on a minute. Do you know Mr. Farr's youngest daughter, Miss Lucy?"

"No, sir."

Whether it was caution or conspiracy, the Negroes of the town would give him nothing. He and Mamie scanned each other closely and deliberated for a moment.

From the corner of his eye Timothy saw a slight movement above his head and backed off a little. On the gatepost crouched the brindled cat, watching the lizard, which still basked just below. The cat's pale eyes with their narrow vertical slits were fixed in menace; the tip of her tail waved. Slowly she raised and extended one hooked paw.

"Scat!" Timothy shouted in the cat's face. With a furious yellow glance she dropped from the wall and streaked across the garden. The lizard, too, sprang off the post and scuttled among the leaves and twigs. Through the powerful force of its fear, its color changed before Timothy's eyes to a drab greenish-brown as it lost itself among the weeds.

"That damned cat—she'd better leave my lizards alone. I like having lizards around," he explained; "they keep down the mosquitoes and the pests that eat my plants."

Lizards, the oysterwoman agreed, were good for all sorts of things, but bad too if the wrong set of people got hold of them. Some people could slip in at night and put one inside your head if they wanted to harm you. Then you woke up choking and might die of shortness of breath, or your blood might turn to clabber. Sperrits were mischee-vous this time of year; everybody better be careful. She grasped the handles of her barrow, and with a great shout of "Buyeyster!" she trundled along the pavement.

Timothy couldn't make out whether a warning coiled in these generalities or not. Mamie, he had decided, did not "belong." She merely acknowledged the baffling tactics of both God and the Devil and kept out of the controversy as far as possible. Yet he recognized in her some quality sturdy and profound that brought him reassurance. Like a convert who finds another believer, he took comfort tliat she shared his heterodoxy.

That afternoon he had another visit from Lucy. This time she came boldly in at the front gate, listing under the weight of the large basket on her arm.

"Good evening," cried Timothy, hurrying to welcome her. But when they met in the path she stopped short, and gave him a mischievous glance. "You look like the Devil!"