Great mischief (3 page)
"What do you mean by mumbo jumbo? Don't we all
deal with something of the kind? Take this stuff you prescribe and I sell—Bosanko's Cough and Lung Syrup" —Timothy opened a glass case and took up some bottles —"Bradfield's Female Regulator—do they do any good except by mumbo jumbo? And even the drugs you would call scientific medicine . . . you say solanum is a poison, but do you know why a dense alkaloid should be poisonous to man? All physic works by magic of a kind."
Golightly slammed the door of a cupboard he had been prying into and there was the sharp ting of colliding glass. "Magic? Pshaw! Seeing is believing, that's what I say." He turned on Timothy. "Why don't you go North, man—sell out this ratty little business of yours and take the money to go away. Get some new ideas-study modern pharmacy—work in a drug manufactory! Go to New York, or Boston! Your guts are squeezed here. Why, you even look like a bed-slat."
Deeply affronted, Timothy drew himself up taller, which was not a happy move. His narrow shoulders and hips, the stiff verticals of his trouser legs, did give him the appearance of having been accidentally elongated in the pliable time of infancy. "Not me—I'm an unreconstructed provincial. What have they got up there that we haven't except money and machines? They're too rich for my blood; and a pricking of my thumbs tells me those machines will carry us all to Hell someday. You don't go North, I notice," he went on, "though you uphold their materialism and pretend to admire their manufactories and their great railroads."
"That's so, but, in spite of my 'materialism,' I'm not ambitious to get rich. If I can keep out of the cUuches of the pawnbrokers, own a piece of land and some houn' dogs, give my family three square meals a day and a few tomfooleries—everybody ought to have a few tomfooleries—I'm content "with my lot. I love this Low-Country of ours and couldn't breathe away from it. But you are different—you've let defeat suck you dry."
The bare idea of putting out from his riparian safety so agitated Timothy that he said nothing and let Golightly rush on.
"God Almighty, man, we got to heave out of the bog sometime! I recollect well the last campaigns when drugs were pitifully short—I've used every damn kind of stinking weed and plant trying to find substitutes for physic cut off by the Yankee blockade—and lucky for us that the Southern woods are rich in medicinal herbs. But that was a long time ago, and surgical instruments don't sprout in the woods, manufactories have to sprout first, we need more fruit like glass and steel—thank God there's a Democrat in the White House at last and business in the South ought to be looking up."
Golightly's war record had become legendary in this section, but Timothy had a way of forgetting it. He himself had been only ten when the war began, and he still felt inadequate that he hadn't managed his birth better, hadn't come along in time to bear a part in that holy cause. He was seldom aware of the ten years' difference in their ages; in so many ways his boisterous
cousin seemed younger, or perhaps, Timothy thought, he himself had grown old before his time. . . .
Nevertheless, his blood was up now and he had one shot left in his musket. He leaned on the counter and took aim.
"Maybe I'd have more money to put into my business if I could bring myself to gamble in Wall Street."
He had the satisfaction of seeing Golightly teeter, rocked back a little in his India rubbers. "Gamble, eh?" he snorted. "The Deuce and all! Life is a gamble! Every day is a gamble—if you're alive, that is. And as to Wall Street, why not bring some of that Yankee money into the South? 'If you can't beat 'em, jine 'em'—that's what I say."
"If you can 'jine' 'em," said Timothy meanly. "If you're sharp enough." For you could always tell: Will shot badly and cursed more eloquently when one of his "fliers" had dropped him with a grinding thud. But on the other hand his successes brought him many little luxuries, such as the sporty checked coat.
"I have heavy responsibilities to carry," Timothy continued primly. "I can't take that kind of risk, with two older people to support."
"You could carry them better if you had a good business!" cried Will. "How can you make money if you freeze your customers and have nothing to sell them? But I haven't got any more time to waste. I just dropped by for some vaseline and powdered alum— I s'pose you still keep them in this flat-bottomed phar-
macy. There'll be plenty of sore throats and rheumatic fever after this rain, blast it, and I won't get away to go deer-hunting Saturday." As Timothy put the required articles glumly on the counter, Golightly picked them up and threw them into his satchel. "My patients love to get their feet wet on Thursdays, I've noticed, just in time to come down with grippe Saturdays and keep me in town." He snapped the satchel shut. "Well, so long. Better take my advice and get out of this 'gator hole of yours." Muffling himself in his cape, he made for the door.
Timothy glanced involuntarily at the floor-boards, expecting to see them ground to splinters by Will's big feet. When the dust had settled he walked about, angrily putting the shop to rights. What an evening! He felt all stirred up inside; these two encounters were giving him dyspepsia. He went to the sink and took a teaspoonful of soda in half a glass of water.
Returning the jars and bottles from the counter to the shelves, he halted a moment in surprise. The glass jar holding the frogs and newts was gone. He looked quickly about; its place on the shelf gaped dark. The determined face of the strange girl came up before him; but would even such queer tastes as hers have prompted her to hide a jar of moldering frogs under her cloak? Maybe Will had gathered them up by mistake and chucked them into his satchel. Pondering this riddle, he went across the hall to his cluttered bedroom behind the shop.
Penelope had had the carved walnut bookcases containing his uncle's library of science and esoterica
moved into this room as the best means of getting rid of them, and the dry-fruited cornices, the rows of calf-bound books, paneled it around with heavy brownness. Timothy himself kept piled on every chair and table and in every corner the magazines, pamphlets, old newspapers he had collected, apparently in the assurance that he would one day do something terrific with all that knowledge. The brownness and muddle, however, well satisfied his esthetic tastes. The books standing close-packed on the shelves both soothed and excited him; the pamphlets and clippings ... in all his nights of reading he had never gone half way through these pages that closed round him like a brambly thicket. He stepped out of his low-quarter shoes—which remained by the hearth neatly teamed, ready to proceed when his ghostly part, having enough of waywardness, should require sole-leather again—and began to open the glass doors of the cases, going to and fro over the carpet in his stocking feet and pulling out books which Penelope had luckily never concerned herself to open.
A treatise on the Manichaeans engaged him for a while. The theory that the Devil is coequal with God struck him forcibly; it would explain lots of strange things about life. For one thing, it would explain why he so sincerely admired his elder sister's goodness and generosity, but had so many temptations toward wickedness and materialism himself. Not that his wickedness took an active form—it went on mostly in his heart, but that, as Satan well knew, was the worst kind.
But he put the question of Good and Evil aside for
a while and continued his search along the dark alley that ran through the back of his mind. He leafed through an ancient almanac in pursuit of a recipe for mixing herbs and simples; the item eluded him, but he was rewarded by an even more arresting one—a prophecy that 1886 was a year in which was to be wrought. Readily flattered by such signal attentions to a present which was his, he turned the page down and laid the booklet on a handy pile for future reference.
His energetic burrowings, however, quickly covered it with others; reminded of his trade, he dipped into a monograph on the cryptogamic plants of the United States and willingly devoted half an hour to improving his knowledge of the place of fungi in the economy of the world. Besides, he enjoyed thinking about blights, molds, mildews, and the toxic principle of poisonous mushrooms. These last, he read, "depend on their power to coagulate the albumen of the blood and thus arrest the circulation." Pure magic! But whether of God or the Devil he couldn't determine for the moment.
It was late in the night when he came on what he wanted, the Discouerie of Witchcraft by an old Scot. Carefully holding the volume with its broken hinges, he took it over to the fireplace and held it up to the jet beside the mantel. Its yellowing pages rewarded him with sundry directions for witches' brews which he read with an apothecary's careful observation: aconite or wolfsbane mixed with soot, the blood of a bat—yes, and solanum nigrum, all seethed with the fat of young children in a copper cauldron. And what a diversity of
creatures dealt familiarly with these prescriptions! Seeing is believing, but believing is also seeing, and by the spectacles of faith Timothy easily bested nearsighted reason. The bookcases, the shabby carpet, dissolved around him while he slid along the sharply tilted plane of the changelings, incubi, hags, and hobgoblins.
With these he visualized quite clearly a dark face capped with a tall headdress, bending over his past. Maum Rachel, his old nurse, was said to have second sight, and certainly she had succeeded in making real to his youthful eyes the spirits of the countryside, the ghost-dogs and witch doctors, the mysterious, the enchanting, the unpredictable creatures who lent richness and murk to the earth she trod. . . . Maum Rachel was no spirit; she still lived in the country, to which she had returned to spend her old age, but her strong personality often invaded Timothy's mind like a visitation.
He remembered her taking him once to see a cousin of hers, a gaunt Negro known as West Indie, who had come to the States on a visit and who had reduced Maum Rachel no less than himself to a condition of near-hysteria with his tales of dead men called zombies on his island, corpses that could be brought back to the imag-e of life and made to work for those who knew the spell; of fire-hags who could be sent through an enemy's cane-fields at night to set them ablaze. It had seemed to Timothy then that some blood kinship existed between West Indie's creatures and Maum Rachel's, a connection no queerer, and no less actual, than that of the stranger with his Creole accent and Maum Rachel her-
self. Now this problem of consanguinity enthralled him; he began to find correspondences between these tutelary beings of his childhood and the black, white, and red spirits of the Scottish writer, which gave the whole supernatural world a character vaster, more massive, and at the same time more familiar. He returned to his book and read tale after tale of the miraculous transportation of witches, of demons and sylvans up to the old tricks, thinking that they were like second cousins once removed whose conduct you might not care for but whom you would never really fear. How steeped the Scottish ground, the English hills, in the Celtic spirit ... a desire took him by the throat to go away, not to the ugly brick drug factories, but to England where the lost wisdom lay like gold in the earth to be dug by the faithful, the curious, the seeker after answers.
Timothy wriggled his cold toes and laid the book down on the nearest pile of papers. He got up and strolled into the shop. The stove had gone out; but a stale warmth lingrered and brought him a little comfort as he tidied up for the next day. Putting up the heavy iron bar across the front door, he noticed a queer smell in the air; he looked about and discovered by the sink the mortar in which he had mixed the solanum ointment. He picked up the pestle and sniffed the not unpleasant turpentinish smell. A salve for the miraculous transportation of witches, eh? He laughed silently, thinking how he must have clogged their wings by sub-
stituting the fat of swine for the fat of infants. Or had he?
With a spatula he scraped out the residue sticking to the sides of the mortar and, putting it into a small crock, covered it closely. Now, to find a safe place to hide it from the meddlings of his apprentice and Polio— A dark corner behind the jar of Epsom salts proved just the spot, and he tucked it away for further study when the shop should be warmer.
When he awoke next day it was still raining. He opened the windows in the shop, lighted the stove, and finished dressing by it. Then he sat down and read his daily passage in the Bible. His researches of the evening before remained safely in the world to which they belonged, so he felt no contradiction in this act. If you finished the evening in the company of Evil, you should begin the day in the company of Good; it was only a sensible precaution. By accident or natural proclivity he opened at First Samuel, and reading about the visit of the doomed Saul to the great witch by the fountain of En-dor, he felt a prickling in all his sensitive length as his nimble imagination and the fervor of his belief raised spirits from the cramped print.
That evening when Timothy went to his room to get ready for supper he noticed a tear in his coat; the mohair had shredded and pulled out at the armhole. He gave a cluck of annoyance but hurried on with his dressing because the room was as cold as charity and
because it was nearly seven o'clock, the hour at which they "took tea." As he stood at the washstand soaping his hands he could hear Penelope in the pantry behind his room putting the tray on the dumb-waiter. Shivering, he slipped into a serge coat and, throwing the other over his arm for her to mend, he went into the hall and climbed one flight to the dining room at the front over the shop.
In this room the fire was kept up all day. As hungry for warmth and light as for food, Timothy closed the door behind him and went over to the hearth. The third occupant of the house was reading his paper by the yellow-globed lamp on the center table; he sat so stiffly in his high-backed chair that only his eyes moving under their lids broke up the image of death, but he said "good evening" politely as Timothy came into his range of vision. Mr. Dombie had been brought to the Partridge house in the last year of the War to recover from his wounds, and had stayed twenty-one years; after their parents' death the sister and brother had not even suggested another arrangement—indeed Penelope, who had nursed him back to life, still regarded the care of the homeless man as her most sacred obligation.