Peace, p.14
Peace, page 14
“Naturally I didn’t want to go in back and bother him, figuring most likely he was compounding a prescription. I just took off my hat and found a good place to set it, and waited for him, and I must have waited half an hour, standing there and wondering if I wasn’t making a big fool of myself. Finally he came out, and I wish I could describe him to you in a way to make you see him. He was one of the tallest men I ever saw, I guess, but most of the time he stood like he didn’t have any chest at all, all hollowed out there, so he didn’t look much taller than the average. Once in a while he’d reach up to get something, and it was like watching a tree grow. He had a long face, a very long jaw, and a high forehead like you see in pictures of Shakespeare. His hair was black, and he wore it long because it was getting thin, and combed over. He said, you know, ‘What can I do for you?’ the way you do, and I said, ‘I’m a pharmacist, Mr. Tilly’ (I had gotten his name, you see, off a framed certificate while I had been waiting), ‘and I’d like to work for you. If you had another pharmacist here, you could stay open longer, and that would mean more business. And you could take holidays while the store made money for you.’ That was what I always said.
“He said, ‘You’re a druggist.’ Just like that, flat, and let it hang there.
“I said, ‘Let me show you my credentials,’ but he waved his hand in a vague kind of way to show that he believed me. After a minute I said, ‘I could come back this afternoon if you’d like to think it over; and I don’t smoke or drink, in case you’re wondering, and I’m a regular churchgoer.’
“Just then I heard the little bell he had on a spring over the door. I turned around, and coming through the door—
“Well, I guess you’ve all seen a man with only one arm, and maybe some of you’ve seen one without any. But this wasn’t a man, it was a woman, and she didn’t have any arms but she had hands.”
“I should think her hands would have fallen to the ground, Mr. Smart,” Eleanor Bold said, giggling behind her napkin.
“Her hands sprouted right out of her shoulders, without arms to space them out. The thing I particularly remember about her was that she was smoking a cigarette—”
My aunt leaned forward with quickened interest. “On the street?”
“She’d just come in from the street when she made the bell ring, so I suppose she must have been smoking it out there.”
Stewart Blaine said, “I imagine she was accustomed to being stared at.”
“That’s likely so. She held it like this—between her fingers, you see—and just sort of flipped it up to her mouth when she wanted some. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, either. Mr. Tilly sort of nodded at her when she came in—I could see he knew her—then he said to me, ‘Pardon me a minute,’ and got a little parcel wrapped in brown paper and gave it to her. I didn’t see how she could pay him, because she wasn’t carrying a purse or reticule, and she couldn’t have reached her pockets if she had any. But she was way out in front of me, I’ll tell you. She took that package in one hand, and put the cigarette in her mouth, and then flipped her free hand up into her hair and brought out a roll of bills. I couldn’t tell how much it was when Mr. Tilly counted it, but I saw that one was a twenty, and there were a lot of them there.”
“How could she have lit that cigarette you say she had, Julius?” Professor Peacock asked.
“I got to wondering about that, too, just about that time, and where she kept the pack. But then I looked outside through the glass in the door and saw a man waiting in a car out there, and looking in at us—a big man with big, wide shoulders and strong arms. He had one of his arms laying across the backs of the seats—you know how a man will when he’s driving—and I noticed particularly how muscular it looked. While I was still watching him, the woman finished her business with Mr. Tilly and walked past me and got into the car with him.”
“It would seem to me that a gentleman would have allowed that poor lady to remain in the car, and gone inside to get the medicine himself,” my aunt Olivia said.
“That kind of struck me, too, but I didn’t have much time to think about it, because Mr. T. was asking behind my back if I’d had any breakfast yet. I told him I hadn’t, and explained I had just got off the train and was looking for some when I noticed he was open already.
“ ‘Then please accept my hospitality,’ he said, and we locked up the store and went a couple of blocks down Main Street to a place that was called the Bluebird Cafe (like so many of them are) and sat down in a booth. It was plain that he intended to pay, and since my money was running a little short after all the journeying around I’d been doing, I ordered myself a good breakfast—pancakes with a slice of ham on the side, and a glass of milk. Mr. T. had waited for me to go first, and when I was done he said two eggs over easy for him, and biscuits and sausage and maybe a dish of grits. And coffee. Naturally I didn’t think anything about it.
“ ‘Now, then,’ he said, ‘you are seeking a position.’
“I told him I was.
“ ‘I could use a man,’ he said, and he named a figure. I won’t tell you what it was, but it was just about twice the best I’d hoped to get. ‘Have you a place to stay here?’
“I told him I hadn’t, and I had just come there, without knowing anybody.
“ ‘I live alone,’ he said. ‘My wife passed on a number of years ago, and I have never remarried. You might stay with me, provided you are willing to undertake a certain amount of bachelor housekeeping. I will not bind myself to furnish your board, but there would be no charge for the room and I would be glad of your company.’ Naturally I thanked him and told him I would.
“Just about that time the woman that ran the cafe—I got to know her a little bit later on, a heavyset woman with a gold tooth in front that had a girl that was a schoolteacher; her name was Mrs. Baum—came with our breakfasts. I was just about to pick up my fork and dig in when Mr. T. reached out and touched my hand to stop me. He had the longest fingers I have ever seen on a man, and believe it or not they were as cold as pieces of ice. ‘Mr. Smart,’ he said. I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Tilly,’ sharp and polite, like he had just asked me to pass him the quinine.
“ ‘Mr. Smart,’ he said, ‘I am bothered from time to time by digestive disorders—tell me, do you ever experience that problem?’
“I told him I didn’t.
“ ‘You’re a fortunate man, then. Your appetite is always good?’
“ ‘Yes, indeed.’
“He gave a big sigh then. ‘Not so my own, I’m afraid. Mr. Smart, could you do me a very great favor?’
“I told him, of course, that I certainly would if I could.
“ ‘Then allow me to exchange breakfasts with you. I am badly underweight, as no doubt you have already noticed; yet very often just when I am prepared to eat I am overcome by a terrible revulsion at the thought of food. At this very moment I find I am completely unable to touch the breakfast I have ordered, while your own breakfast appears quite appetizing to me. Will you exchange? You have no objection to eggs?’
“So I gave him my pancakes and ham, and he gave me the eggs and biscuits and so on, and he even took my milk and gave me his coffee. And after that we pitched in. Now, if you had asked me I would have said that I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten since dinner the day before, and had gone to bed without supper in order to conserve my money, of which, as I’ve said, there wasn’t a whole lot left. But I hadn’t hardly begun when Mr. T. was finished, and he ate everything except the plate, with the exception of one thing. Now we’ve got some smart men here— even a college teacher—and two clever ladies, and I’ve noticed a clever lady is cleverer than any man since Adam. So can any of you tell me what it was Mr. T. didn’t eat?”
“Let me see if I can remember what you told us you ordered,” Stewart Blaine said. “Pancakes and ham, wasn’t it?”
Eleanor Bold added, “And a glass of milk.”
My aunt Olivia smiled in a way that managed to be both charming and superior. “I really don’t think this is so difficult, Mr. Smart. It was the ham, of course.”
“I would have said the milk,” Mr. Macafee put in. “It disagrees with a great many people, you know.”
Stewart Blaine shook his head. “The pancakes.”
My aunt said, “Stewart, dear, it’s perfectly obvious—isn’t it, Eleanor? There are two great aberrations concerning food in this country: Orthodox Judaism and vegetarianism. And Mr. Smart’s Mr. Tilly would not eat ham no matter which he belonged to.”
Blaine still disagreed. “Julius is expecting to surprise us, Vi; and therefore I’m sure we’ll find that the dish not eaten was the principal one of the meal.”
“Besides,” Eleanor Bold put in, “he said this drugstore man was finished before he had hardly begun. I’m with Stewart. The pancakes.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you right now, because it wouldn’t make any sense to you. Later on maybe it will, and then I’ll let you know.
“Anyway, Mr. T. waited for me to finish; then he paid for everything and we went back to his store. He showed me where things were in the pharmacy, and the more I looked, the more I came to think that by the purest kind of luck I had come into one of the best shops in the whole country, because he had just about everything I’d ever heard mentioned when I was in school, and a whole lot that I hadn’t. And I already knew enough about the business to know that at a lot of pharmacies they don’t keep the rarer things in stock—only order them if some doctor close by starts prescribing them.
“After about half an hour he asked me if I knew my way around well enough to keep the shop open without him. I said I did, and he said that in that case he was going home, and for me to keep the place open until eight, and then to come over to his house, and he’d show me where I could sleep. He wrote out the address for me on a slip of paper and gave me directions how to get there; it was only about five blocks away. I gave him about an hour to get off and be doing whatever it was he was going to do; then I locked the store for a minute—he had given me the keys so I could lock up at night—and nipped over to the depot to get my Gladstone, which I had left there and was worried about. After that I stayed right in the store.
“We didn’t do much business, and I noticed that the people that did come in never asked about Mr. T., even though I could see they were surprised to find me there instead of him. One man did ask me if I’d taken over the business, but when I said no, that was the end of it—he just clammed up. By and by dinnertime rolled around, and I thought about locking up the shop and going down to that cafe again—the eggs and sausage had been good—but I remembered I had already gone out once to get my bag, and decided I would just stay there until sup-pertime, then go out and have a good one.
“It got to be about six o’clock and Mr. T. came back—not wearing his white coat like he had been, but one of those black suits and a little ribbon for a necktie, like so many of them do down there. He asked if I’d had any supper yet, and when I said I hadn’t he asked if I would be willing to go by the grocery and pick up a few things for him so we could have supper at home. I said I would, and he gave me ten dollars and a little list he had written out; and he told me not to wait until eight because the grocery would be closed by then, but to go over now and get the things and meet him at his house. He said he’d close up the store for me.
“I found his house all right with no trouble, but he wasn’t there when I came. They build their houses thin down there because it’s so hot and they want the wind to get through them without being slowed down. Some of them are thin back to front—wide but not deep, if you know what I mean—and others are thin side to side. Mr. T.’s was one of the side-to-side kind, two stories, but so narrow you thought it wasn’t any bigger than just a cottage when you looked at it from the front, but it went way back.
“The lot it stood on was narrow, too, and the front yard was deep, with a little walk not much wider than your shoes running right down the middle that had sea shells on it instead of gravel, and an orange tree on one side of it and a lemon tree on the other. There was a porch in front about big enough for three chairs, with screens around it to keep the mosquitoes out and eight or nine steps leading up to it. I set the groceries down on the porch and tried the door, but it was locked. That puzzled me, for I had already got the idea that there it was just about like it is here, and nobody hardly ever locked their doors unless they were going away for a long time. But that one was locked for sure, and no one answered when I knocked.
“I left the groceries there and went down the steps again to have a better look at the house. It was two stories, as I have said, and had a high-pitched roof on it that ran straight along, front to back. There was a little sloped roof over the porch in the regular way that ended under the second-floor front window. I walked around to the back, and like I have said, she was long. There had been flower beds along the sides, but they were gone to seed, and I said to myself, ‘There’s the work of poor dead Mrs. T. returning to nature.’ In back was a doghouse, but no sign of a dog, and the grass was high everywhere.
“I had just got around to the front again and was looking up at the house trying to decide what to do next when I saw the curtains at that second-floor front window twitch, and I’m here to tell you it was a strange thing to see; it was just like somebody was standing in front of that window and pushing them to one side—you know the way you do—to see out. Only there wasn’t any face.”
“Is this a ghost story, Mr. Smart?” Stewart Blaine asked.
“I guess it is.”
“Then my sister-in-law ought to be here,” my aunt exclaimed. “She knows all the different kinds—revenants and poltergeists and goodness knows what else. Den’s shaking his head. Den thinks it’s the dog.”
“So does Sun-sun,” I said, trying to be clever. Actually Sun-sun was asleep.
“Well, you can believe I was puzzled. There wasn’t a breath of air stirring, and it hadn’t looked like wind anyway. I went up and pounded on the door again, but no one came. Then I heard feet on that shell walk—I had been listening at the door to see if I could hear anybody moving around in there—and I turned and looked, and saw Mr. T. coming. He got his key out and opened the door for us without saying anything, and I gave him the change from the money he had given me, and a receipt from the grocer showing it was right; then I carried them back to the kitchen and started putting them away. It was a great mess in there, very dirty, but before I get onto that I’d better give you some idea of how the house was laid out....
“It was built for coolness, as I have told you. Parlor, dining room, and kitchen, all big rooms, were all that was downstairs, all of them running from wall to wall, so that all except the dining room had windows on three sides. They were all about twice as deep as wide. The front stairs came up out of one corner of the parlor, with a coat closet under them, and back steps came out of a corner of the kitchen, with a little toilet—if you ladies will excuse the expression—underneath.
“That kitchen was in a bad way, which I said before: dirty dishes and spoiled food lying about, and even a couple of full plates left out until what was in them had gone to mold. I looked at them and said to myself, ‘I know your story—Mr. T. fixed you for himself, and then his stomach come over queer the way it does, and he left you lay.’ Anyway, I pitched right in and started to clean up, and when Mr. T. came in I told him supper’d be in about an hour, as there were some things I wanted to tidy up first. He asked if I had objections to company while I worked, and when I said I did not, he brought a book in and sat himself in a corner to read and watch me. I washed up and threw out a lot of spoiled food, and all the time I was thinking of the way that curtain had moved when nobody had looked out, and about the woman with no arms. I kept listening for somebody moving around upstairs, but I couldn’t hear anything. Finally I asked him if he lived alone here. He said he did, and I asked if he didn’t have a cat or a dog, because it had struck me that a cat or dog walking under the window might have made the curtain move like that, though I didn’t think so. He said no, he had bad luck with animals; but he didn’t say what that meant. I fixed us a simple supper out of the food I had brought—corned-beef hash and canned tomatoes it was, as I remember, and coffee, and oranges afterward. Just plain oranges off the tree, not made into a salad or anything fancy like that. I had bought them because they were cheap, not having to be shipped any distance down there.
“I noticed that Mr. T. didn’t salt what he ate, or pepper it neither, and he drank his coffee black. He ate slow, tasting everything, as it seemed to me, until he had all the taste out of it, but eating a lot. When we had finished up the hash and tomatoes, I brought out the oranges in a bowl and set them down on the table and started to peel one with my fingers. Mr. T. looked at me for a minute; then he started to smile, and before I had got most of that funny white stuff that’s inside oranges off mine he had almost laughed. ‘Smart,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you would do me a favor?’
“Naturally I said I would.
“ ‘The front bedroom upstairs is mine. If you’ll look in the upper left drawer of the largest white cabinet, I believe you’ll find some hypodermic syringes and some needles; bring me a ten-cc. syringe, please, and a fine needle.’
“I said, ‘Right away,’ and went into the parlor and up the stairs. The front bedroom was almost as big as the parlor, and about half of it had been fitted up as a pharmaceutical laboratory, with a regular bench, and racks and enameled cupboards to hold the preparations and equipment. You can bet I went over and had a look at that front window, but it was just an ordinary window, with long curtains that hung nearly to the floor. I got the syringe and needle just like he had told me, and slicked up my appearance a bit in his dresser mirror (for I found the kitchen work had rather wilted me, and I wanted to look sharp), and took them downstairs to him.
