Great mischief (8 page)

Penelope went on. "And now you are going to let

that poor woman die and her children depend on charity so you can travel, forsooth, and visit the Crystal Palace!"

Timothy saw the dome split wide and send its bright splinters right and left. Penelope's demand was logic-proof—the poor widow, the orphan children. He hated her for being right as he had never hated in his life before.

"Very well. Sister; Lena shall go, but this is the last time you'll get money from me."

Penelope's sudden triuinph unnerved her. She clawed at the collar of her dress, stretching her neck this way and that. Then she went silently tOAvard the door, stumbling a little over the rumpled pamphlets. "May God forgive us," she said without turning. "I will go and pray. I beg you to do the same."

But Timothy watched her in despair as she crossed the threshold because he knew his final threat to her was vain.

Timothy sat down and gazed at the door that Penelope had from ineradicable habit closed behind her. He could hear her going softly up the stairs to her chilly bedroom two floors above his own. Then he stood up again, put his head back, and looked for a long time at the ceiling; and having in his heightened state some power to see through lath and plaster, he perceived Mr. Dombie recumbent over his head and Penny above them both. Slowly the ceiling began to come down on

him in a barely perceptible descent; he blinked hard and saw instead his herb compress and the sticky juices that trickled from the leaves and stalks as it squeezed them.

Presently his pale serious face returned to the perpendicular and he stood for a moment twisting one hand with the other as if compelled to wreak himself an injury. Then he went over and leaned on the marble top of the bureau. The looking glass gave back the same muffled and melancholy countenance he was used to and the same high, narrow shoulders. Yet he was teased by a likeness he could not name; it was as if a draftsman, without changing a feature, had brought out certain traits by a deft touch here and there of the charcoal. The mustache he wore as a refuge and a disguise seemed no longer to hide the slight lift of his lips at the corners; his lank black hair looked like a foreigner's. His flesh pimpled over with the chill of exposure and strangeness.

Dreadful as the unmasking of Penelope had been, he feared worse this half-lit presence within himself. Yet— if he accepted its dominion, would it break that other, that lifelong dominion over him? In a spurt of action he lighted the lamp on his night table; as the flame rose from the wick it made a yellow circle on the ceiling and dissolved the gray shadows. He ran over to the fireplace and piled on fresh coal until the little black nuggets fell off and rolled among the papers on the carpet. The grate responded to his excitement with a furious crackling.

Well, what can you do in a situation like this? I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, he said, with a great full sigh.

He turned to his books, his handy substitute for moral decision. He opened a bookcase, and from long-established habit took out a volume at random and opened it, looking for a sign, a message, an instruction from some unformulated power. Travels in Arabia, American Female Poets Illustrated—he threw them on the floor and went on to the next bookcase.

The top shelves, neglected and forbidding, bent their carved walnut frown upon him; he brought a chair and stood on it, pulling down the sagging, dusty volumes. But the invertebrate back numbers of Littell's Living Age, Sermons on Sundry Occasions—these offered him no magical formulae. Delphi remained silent.

The Farr girl, he thought, treading restlessly up and down, because he had taken off his shoes and the cane-bottomed chair cut through his soles, would burst into raucous laughter if she could see him now. She, he felt sure, would be able to decide confidently between two evils; she would not have given up a resolve through cowardice. For it was not Penelope's fault, he owned justly. As the eldest she had properly taken over the family and managed its affairs after their parents' death, and he had let her. It was his habit of defeatism, the too-willing acceptance, that had brought him to this moment. The Farr girl, he thought, wishing he had a name to call her by, knew what she wanted and took it —even a jar of frogs—for of course she had taken them,

for some obscure reason, or for no reason except that she wanted them.

The room became bright and furiously hot. His palms and his forehead sweated gently. He got off the chair and sat down on it, feeling Penelope stand over him, bending on him, like the bookcases, a carven frown. Suddenly he said with rancor, Why, she's half a head taller than me! No woman, he thought, ever used half a head to such advantage.

He thought of an old prop and mainstay in times of dread and wondered why he had not tried it before. He padded over to his bedside table and picked up the Bible—the new Bible Penny had given him for his birthday. But a great reluctance to open it seized him; he went back to the fire and looked into the blazing coals for some time. Then he resolutely inserted his thumbnail between the thin pages and parted them.

The fine print spun before his eyes, reversed, settled itself in ordered lines, just above his finger-tip.

"I know where thou dwellest, even where Satan's throne is—"

The fire crackled and spat, and he turned his back to cool his scorched face. Then he twirled to the light and reread the passage.

So, Sister had been right again. And by being right, had once more put him in the wrong. Permanently, it now appeared.

In an abandonment of rage against her he tried to tear the Bible in half, but its stout new covers balked his pulling and jerking. He threw it on top of the coals;

a gasp came from the grate as the supple leaves ignited. He went over to the wardrobe, took out his coat and hat. The stench of burning leather closed his nostrils and his throat, the red light of the upward flames leapt on the wall as he jerked the door open and went out coughing into the street.

The cold and dampness touched Timothy's senses with healing as he tramped along between the sleeping houses. The fog had shredded and was moving inland, leaving a spectral shine on railings and window-ledges, like the tracks of an army of snails. In his urge to get away he merely followed the street for several blocks until he could go no farther. What stopped him at last was an iron railing, and beyond it the river in which misty stars swam. He walked about between the hushed trees, surprised only that he felt no fear of the darkness and the emptiness of the park in which he found himself. If the supernatural beings to whom he had given a backdoor allegiance couched in the grottoes of shadow behind him, he was now indifferent to their spells and their mischief.

He had no inkling of the hour except that a late moon leaned a sunken cheek on the eastern bar of the harbor. His feet hurt because he had forgotten his shoes in his dash from the house, but he was indifferent to them also. He turned westward beside the quiet river and at length left it behind him, following soundlessly an irregular course along incurious streets. Questions floated through his mind, light and random as milk-

weed floss. What did it mean to belong to the Devil? His poor dead mother would feel badly for him about this. Yet he felt uncertain about it all. The throne of Satan—it rang in his head with a sonority he couldn't but admire; damnation had a high style, at least. . . .

He came out by a large pond set like a pane of glass in the leaden earth. A faint reddening had begun in the sky behind him but he held on to the night, to the west reflected at his feet; the mysterious image of the firmament, the tall and punctual constellations keeping their rendezvous in this still place—as his thoughts ran thus, a small star broke loose from the patterned sky and plunged in a bright arc toward the swallowing horizon. How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Perhaps lesser devils are being born all the time. Perhaps one is born tonight.

His inner fires burned lower; in spite of his thick socks his feet were icy on the flagstones and he turned eastward toward home. He felt inhuman skimming along with no footfalls in this steep corridor walled with brick and wood. The glow in the east had brightened and sounds crept down the street toward him of people awake and stirring; a far metallic clanking streaked the quietude. The glow, he discovered, was not in its proper place, it was a little north of east, it came from a fire, not the sun. But the boyish impulse to run to a fire did not throb strongly enough and he kept his direction at the same pace. When he reached the center of the town he began to encounter people running, lumpy figures also unreal, yet with a different unreality from his own.

The street he followed cut across his own at right angles. He reached the corner and turned into a lane of fiery color that smeared the sky and even the mud puddles in the street itself. Crowds of people, black and grotesque in their thick clothes, stood in a semicircle; the sight of the steepled flames licking around his own roof somehow caused him no surprise. He approached the silhouetted backs, unable to check his momentum.

As he reached the barrier made by the crowd a woman turned and looked at him. "Dr. Partridge!" Her scream tore a rent in the line of backs; as if he had been an apparition people fell away on either side and his name ricocheted along the street from mouth to mouth. Their shrinking stopped him in his tracks; he took it for accusation until Will Golightly ran up, looking demonic himself with his shirt torn and soot all over his face, and seized him by the arm.

"Timothy! We thought you— For God's sake, how did you escape?"

A new kind of cunning prompted Timothy's reply. "I went out—'way across town—on a sick call."

Will threw his arms about him and almost suffocated him with a great muscular anguish. "Poor fellow—poor fellow! We did everything we could to save them— before God, we did!" Timothy felt his blood thick in his veins; his ears were as sluggish as his tongue and only fragments of information came through to him . . . fire must have started on the ground floor . . . stairway a roaring furnace . . . thev were cut off on the second floor . . . the hook and ladder mired in Church Street...

So, the dark forces that rule our lives, whether of predestination or of anarchy, had taken a hand in this event. The miring of the hook and ladder was quite outside the scope of his imagination or his carelessness. People began to crowd around and pour their pity over him like oil on his burns; and indeed the great heat of the fire was beginning to scorch his hands and face. The roaring of the fanged flames as they consumed the clapboards, the slow tilt and crash of the cornice and part of the roof, forbade either hope or fear that anyone within might still live. The firemen had given up a fruitless task and were lymphatically pouring water on the adjoining houses.

Utter confusion lay over the street before the gutted shop. The wooden mortar and pestle that had hung above the door rolled about among a jumble of bottles, jugs, and instruments. The boots of the firemen ground his glass carboys under, the gaudy liquids dark on the pavement. Little had been saved, and that at random— someone had lugged out the bellows from the shop, as if the fire might languish.

Now only the supports of the house stood, looming like charred ribs against the roaring gold and vermilion behind them. As Timothy watched, he became conscious of a prickling at the back of his neck, and a monitor within warned him that someone was staring at him. Behind him in the raw light he saw his visitor of a few days ago. Only her face was visible across the high intervening shoulders, but he distinctly made out her eloquent eyes fixed on him. He could not translate their

gaze, secretive, yet full of communications. For what seemed a long time they looked at each other in a sort of partnership, separated from the rest of the crowd. Then she pushed aside the man in front of her, slipped through the opening, and went away along the edge of the circle of watchers, carrying some kind of bundle under her long shawl.

Timothy seized Will's arm. "Who's that. Will—that girl over there near the fire horses?" But Will did not understand him, or perhaps did not understand such a question at such a time. He put his arm around Timothy and said, "No good staying here any longer, Tim; there's nothing we can do, nothing anyone can do now. We must leave their souls to God. Come on home and get to bed. You'll just catch rheumatism out in this cold."

Timothy had no will either to go or to stay, so he let Golightly pilot him through the crowd. The staring eyes, full of horror and pity, peppered his face as if with a burning rash. It was a relief when the coolness and darkness of the next street closed round him. Go-lightly drew him along to his own house, where a light burned and where his wife greeted them with puffing solicitude but spared him the necessity for comment. She prepared a bed and some hot food and left him alone in her company room.

The sky was bright now with the true dawn. Timothy wrapped himself in Will's voluminous nightshirt and, climbing into the high bed, slept all day without waking.

Vart Two

N THE time following the fire the sense of unreality continued and grew stronger in Timothy, only sometimes it was he who seemed unreal and sometimes it was the world of appearances. Will and Anna Maria were kindness itself and urged him to live with them in their large drafty house. But their sympathy caused him acute dismay. He managed by some happy trick of the mind not to think of the horror which had befallen Penelope and Mr. Dombie; he continued to picture them as they had been in life. He could not imagine Penelope in particular as destructible by any earthly means, indeed the thought sometimes crossed his mind that she might still be about, having escaped the fire in some such way as he himself had. But if she walked the earth she did not appear in any of her accustomed places, and as his shocked nerves stirred and quivered back to normal this morbid notion faded away.

For a while business and legal matters engaged him

83

deeply, since the inheritance of money has a way of dislodging non-material preoccupations, even curiosity and fear. Penelope had named him the sole heir of her estate, which consisted of a small competence in bonds and her share of the house, now represented by the fire insurance, happily paid up. But the airing of Mr. Dombie's affairs brought two sharp surprises. First, Mr. Dombie was discovered to have had a substantial sum of money tucked away in his bank box and savings account. A spurt of sympathy tempered the annoyance Timothy felt at this unfairness to him; their lodger had stood off Penelope's inquisitiveness to that extent at least. Did he too have some secret hope, some scheme of getting away? The second surprise came at him head on out of Mr. Dombie's brief will. This money was left, not to Penelope as might have been expected, but to him. How vexed Sister would have been! He forgave Mr. Dombie the repetitious monologues, the loud self-pitying sneezes, the apathy toward everybody, including Timothy, his host.