Great mischief (2 page)

He swung around in the narrow passage and ran full tilt into the girl, who had come soundlessly behind the counter and stood at his back. Her light eyes, close to his, struck through him with such a look of determination and power that Timothy involuntarily fell back a step or two. The natural impulse to beg her pardon rose to his lips and froze there; naked intensity of this kind would have no use for apologies.

"You have the solanum and you might just as well give it to me. I can tell what you've got in those jars and drawers—it takes more than glass and wood to hide things from me. And your mind, Doctor, is even easier to see through. One believer smells out another fast enough."

Timothy retreated in wild confusion, because he didn't care to sort out his motley beliefs, and her unshrinking gaze pushed him toward the horrid abysm of logic. She went on. "It's time we dropped the pretence. This is the night for a meeting; I'm short the necessities—the drought has pinched other folks beside you—and I have to come here for them. So don't waste any more time with this flapdoodle."

The word was like a slap in the face. What kind of were-woman this was, bursting into his shop with her talk of meetings and ointments, he couldn't decide. Was

she real or sham? But he felt disinclined to find out by thwarting her. . . .

Cautiously he brought the ingredients together and began to pound them in a mortar.

He took his time, because a queer sensation was growing on him of being dragged from his moorings. The mixture burned his fingers a little, his body felt light. The girl stood stock-still where he had left her; he would have liked to tell her to go back to that part of the shop where customers properly belonged, but he saved his breath. When he had prepared the components he went through the back room of the house to the pantry, where he took a small firkin of lard from Sister Penny's cold shelf and brought it back to the prescription counter. Meantime his visitor had returned of her own accord to the front of the store and stood looking moodily out of the window.

He carefully measured out the lard, mixed it with the ingredients, and solemnly pasted the label on the jar: Apply twice daily for earache. Then he went behind the front counter and wrapped it up. "This is for external use only," he said. "Solanum should be mixed with an equal quantity of pure hog's lard before applying, so I took the precaution of mixing it for you. This will make it useless for anything but an external anesthetic."

He half-expected another outburst, but she gave him a sharp, surprising smile. "That's all right—it's no good to me without a grease base. You could have saved your lard, high as it is now. How much do I owe you?"

"Oh—about thirty-five cents," he said, remembering the lean mesh purse.

She opened it, took out a fifty-cent piece, and snapped it down on the counter. "What you've given me is cheap at fifty cents. Good night, Dr. Partridge." Snatching up the jar, she made for the door.

"Wait a moment!" He wanted to draw her out further about those queer ideas of hers, but his words were lost in the shrilling of the bell as she jerked the door open. She took off from the threshold like a night bird swooping, a darkness on the dark.

A harsh squeaking came in and filled the quiet shop; the great mortar and pestle that hung above the entrance were shaking on their metal bracket from some passing gust. The cold, damp draft struck Timothy to the bone. He went over and slammed the door himself.

"Whewl" he said, sitting down on the edge of his chair, for the strong dream-sensation began to fade and left a slight dizziness, more of the limbs than of the head. "A queer creature, and no mistake. . . ." He went on muttering platitudes to cover the unsettling fact that he really didn't know what to think about his visitor. To make it further confusing, the visitation seemed more dreamlike the more he himself withdrew from the dream-area and his senses picked up again his area of reality—his apothecary's scales on the counter, the small-talk of the gas jet, the smell of orris root and spirits of nitre.

The entrance of the delivery-boy hastened Timothy's

return to normal. The boy was soaked to the skin; he stood at the back door of the shop and shimmered darkly like a small sea monster floated up by the rain. Timothy interrogated him about his errands and received answers not much more satisfactory than he would have had from a rather bright fish. Polio was a boulevardier from the heart, he sought the sidewalks even in a downpour; but he came of a colored family who were pensioners of Penelope's and he had to be given a job regardless of his weak sense of direction and of his creative lying to disguise his truancies. Timothy satisfied himself that no serious errors had been made and told the boy to go home and dry his clothes, he doubted if any other customers would come in this rainy evening.

No sooner had Polio dived out of the door than a violent agitation of the bell mocked at this judgment. Timothy glanced up nervously, but it was only Dr. Golightly, whose violence was unpremeditated, the result of energy and bulk. "Howdy, old poisoner!" he cried, and all the glass vials and shelf bottles gave a faintly startled chime. 'Tine weather for ducks, eh? But I s'pose you don't put your nose outdoors on a day like this. You just hole up and mix potions to kill customers off with."

"Maybe I do at that." Timothy smiled guiltily. "But I'll bet a hat you shuffle more people off to the graveyard than I do. Come in—come in, and shut that door. There ought to be a special cold shelf in Hell for people who leave doors open behind them."

Golightly came in and banged the door. He seemed to trample the floor under with his big India-rubber boots. He threw his satchel on the counter and went over to the stove, opening the wide cape of his chec'ked wool greatcoat. "It's like a cold shelf in Hell right here," he complained. He put one foot on the base of the stove and spread his red, gloveless hands. "You're the stingiest damn fellow with your fuel, Tim."

"When your coal is low in the bin, you're apt to be stingy with it," said Timothy dryly. "You don't think I relish being chilly, do you?" He came and joined the doctor by the stove.

"Hell and death! I never skimp food on my table nor fire in my stove. The locomotive can't run without steam." He opened the isinglass door and spat extravagantly on the coals.

The fire had sunk in the past half hour and the shaft that caught Golightly's face produced no satanic transformation, it merely caricatured the full, ruddy flesh, the terrier eyebrows that were his already, and rendered his little boast superfluous. It tipped with light the gray bristles coming out of his ears and nose like spears glistening in an ambush.

Timothy was not really offended by these bluff comments, though they put him on the defensive. "That's mighty handsome talk," he argued, "but my business doesn't allow for overeating. This is a poor community —we've had a war, and a peace that's almost as bad as a war. Sister Penny and I can't indulge ourselves in the matter of food and warmth when so many of our neigh-

bors are cold and hungry. Not as long as we profess Christianity." He pulled his mustachios with thumbs and forefingers to a sharper, a more pious point. "Of course ordinary Christianity would do well enough for me," he added parenthetically, "but Sister professes a fancy brand, and that takes upkeep."

Golightly filled his lungs and gave a great porpoise-snort that sent the raindrops flying off his coat. He couldn't talk down Christianity, and when he couldn't talk you down, he snorted like a porpoise. "Listen, brother, I 'tend a God's plenty of free patients—enough to guarantee me a toehold in Christendom—but I keep the engine stoked. And who operates this pharmacy anyway. Penny or you?"

"I operate it," said Timothy sulkily. He put his foot on the opposite side of the iron base, keeping the sturdy stove between them while he parried his adversary's downright thrusts. "But Sister Penny is a very unusual person—she can't help being generous, she bubbles with the milk of human kindness. She has a woman's sympathy for suffering."

"Suffering and bubbling be damned! What is she, a Jersey cow? I know she's kind, of course she is! And I honor her for it. I come on her tracks all the time in my practice, supplying patients with medicine free of charge. But at whose expense, eh? She ought to try her woman's sympathy once on running a pharmacy, or any business where you have to make a ledger balance—"

While Timothy let Golightly talk himself out he followed his own thoughts for a little, speculating on

the antagonism between his sister and his friend. Will is bighearted as all outdoors, he would say (for he was always defending each to the other), and Penny would smile indulgently and answer, I know he does a great deal of good—and he has the finest set of whiskers in Charleston. But she wouldn't have him for her doctor, although he was a cousin and it was quite pointed for her to have Dr. Porter, who was a good doctor but no kin at all. Will, she said, had a very materialistic outlook, and she couldn't stand his keeping his hunting dogs in his office.

Many of Will's patients found it trying, when they went to have a boil lanced or their tonsils out, to hear the hounds sniffing round; they grumbled in private about the doggy smell thickening the air, the hairs on the shabby upholstery, the fleas in summer. But Penny was the only one with the hardihood to stand up to the popular physician about his pets—they had had several memorable encounters about it. Yet it was more than doG:s in offices that set them against each other. . . .

Timothy came up with a splash into the freshet of Golightly's argument. "... and of course we're poor down here—we're poor as rats!" He laughed spontaneously, belittling the curse that weighed on the half-prostrate South. "Well, what you gonna do about it? Get rich, that's what I say. Get busy and make some money."

"You tell me how to do it. And there are still moss-backs, you know, who cling to the old-fashioned idea that money isn't the answer to everything."

"Money! That poor pariah," Golightly cried flamboyantly. "Everybody cusses money—the root of all evil —Devil's get! But secretly everybody wants it, it's the illicit love of all men—and most women—"

Uttering this heresy, the doctor took his foot off the stove, stamped up and down, and flapped his cape. The Flying Pill-Roller, people called him, seeing him dash through the streets, the buggy-top folded back, the full cape streaming out behind like fashionable plaid wings.

To escape being run over, Timothy dodged from under the wheels of this headlong argument. "By the way, there's something I want to ask you. Just now I had a most singular visitor—a young lady who came in wanting solanum. It appears she has a father who is subject to earache—maybe from having to listen to her. I can't place her, somehow; she wasn't pretty exactly, and she's sort of small and harsh, no gloves and no manners either. She had the most extraordinary eyes; they can singe you like a chemical—I still feel as if I had some kind of phosphorus burn from her being here."

"My God, Tim!" Golightly turned a diagnostic stare on his cousin. "You must be seeing apparitions. What color were these singular eyes?"

Timothy pulled his chin and thought a while. "I can't remember. And they don't burn all the time, thank God, or I'd be a pile of cinders. I do recollect her eyebrows though; they were dark, too thick for beauty, and rounded. My physiognomy books say high-arched eyebrows are a sign of courage—"

"Pshaw! An extraordinary critter, I must say. How old was she?"

Timothy thought again. "You know, I'd find it pretty hard to say. Youngish looking. But she seemed quite mature. Or perhaps she's just wicked . . . bad people have a disconcerting way of seeming more knowledgeable than good people. She had on a long, dark cloak, like a man's—a hand-me-down, I imagine. I'd give a lot to know what her name is, where she lives, and so on."

"Why the Devil didn't you ask her?"

"She wasn't the sort of person you ask questions of —unessential questions, that is. She has a way of chopping off with a look any excrescences in your conversation."

"I can't think of anybody that fits such a fanciful description . . . unless it might be one of Charley Farr's girls. You know him? He lives over by the jail and has a big litter of daughters. They say the youngest one is wild and unruly. I've seen her scuttling along the street, but I can't say she ever swinged me like phosphorus. Do you feel bilious? You better take two grains of calomel."

Timothy had studious refined features, the kind that could go obstinate as a lightwood knot. "You should have been here, then you'd know what I mean. She was going to get that solanum if it killed her, or rather if it killed me. And somehow her story about the father's having an earache didn't ring true. I suspect she's up to no good. The prescription she had was an antique and by a doctor I never heard of—some foreigner, from his name."

"Well, Charley Farr, if that's whose daughter she is, could have earache, backache, or bellyache the way he lays aboard demon rum."

"She may not even be his daughter; but whoever begat her, I wouldn't want her hanging round me with that solanum."

"It's strong stuff—strong stuff," Golightly agreed. "You have to ride it with a light hand on the bit. I've given one grain internally for some nervous affections, and with good success. But a dense alkaloid like that is unhealthy to fool with unless you know how to use it. Externally, now, it's a different kettle of fish; for dilating the pupils I like it better in some ways than belladonna—"

Timothy began to walk around the shop, his chilly hands in his pockets. "I have some books," he muttered, "that give the ingredients for witches' brews; those creatures love nightshade, you know, and aconite, mixed with all kinds of vile messes. It wouldn't surprise me . . . there are a lot of queer people loose in this town."

The doctor drew his overhanging eyebrows together and looked out sharply from under them. "Fiddlesticks! You spend too much time messing with books and herbs. You ought to throw out those roots you hide under the counter and peddle from the back door. A good pharmacist has no business fooling with that kind of tripe. The trouble with mumbo jumbo is, it's a boomerang, it witches you in the end."