Peace, p.15
Peace, page 15
“He took them from me and put the needle onto the syringe, and then filled it from a glass of water I had poured for him when I had set the table. I told him that he shouldn’t use it like I had given it to him, pointing out that I had handled the needle and it ought to be sterilized, and the water to be boiled if he hadn’t got distilled. He laughed and said the patient wouldn’t mind, and then picked up an orange from the bowl and injected about half a cc. into it. ‘Look here,’ he said, and he showed me the place where he’d pulled the needle out. There was a little drop of juice there, and he wiped it away.
“I couldn’t divine what it was he was wanting me to see, so at a venture I said, ‘It doesn’t show much, does it?’
“ ‘On the contrary, there is a distinct puncture mark in the skin. An alert observer, searching for it under a strong light, could hardly fail to find it.’ He began to peel the orange, but after a minute he stopped (he seemed to be having trouble with his fingers) and asked me to do it for him. When I had got the peel off, he broke the sections apart and showed me the one that had got the water; it had a little blister, like.
“ ‘Obvious, isn’t it?’ he said. He was smiling. ‘Now that you have put me in mind of it, there are several other fruits of which the same thing must be true: And eggs. Just as I should have thought of oranges, I should have remembered eggs myself. A hard-boiled egg should be very difficult to tamper with.’
“Well, naturally I asked him questions and tried to find out what he was talking about, but I didn’t get very far; and after a couple he started to get angry. The thing of it was—this is what I came to believe—that he was used to talking to himself, living alone like that, but when I asked questions he remembered someone else was really there and he didn’t want to answer, so pretty soon we went up to bed.
“That night, I can tell you, was one I’ll never forget. Remember that when I had come into town in the morning I had been broke and out of a job and not even in sight of getting one. Now I was fixed up, and it paid a lot more than I had ever thought of getting, and I was sure, even then, that Mr. T. was a brilliant man, a pharmacist I could learn a lot from. And at the same time I was wondering about that woman with her hands right up at her shoulders that kept her money in her hair, and about the orange. I’m telling you I must’ve speculated an hour just about the orange before I finally fell asleep, and to make it worse, when I was just about in dreamland, a big yellow moon started shining in at the window of my room, looking just like an orange. You may not credit it, but I still think of oranges most nights before I fall asleep, especially if I see the moon, and I’ve got some ideas about them that may make folks sit up and take notice one day.
“I don’t believe I told about the top layout of rooms. There were three bedrooms up there, just like there were three rooms down below, only there was a little hall, too, that the stairs from the parlor and the kitchen led up to. It was on the south side of the house and didn’t run the full length; just had Mr. T.’s bedroom at one end—that was the front one—and mine, the back one, at the other. On the side there was a door leading into another bedroom that was on the north wall of the house, if you understand me; but Mr. T., when we went up to bed, told me that he had some things stored in there he didn’t want to clean out for me, and it was hotter than the other rooms, anyway, because of only having windows on one side. The back room was to be mine. It was pretty sparely furnished, I must say—and not good furniture, either. Mr. T. kind of apologized for that, and said he hadn’t known I was coming. ‘It was the cook’s,’ he said, ‘when my wife was alive. The second bedroom —between mine and this—was my son’s.’
“I said I took it that he was departed, too, and that I was real sorry to hear of it.”
“ ‘I’m sure you must be thinking that you should be in there instead, and that it would be better furnished,’ Mr. T. says, ‘but that isn’t really the case, Mr. Smart. I sold poor Rodney’s little bed and table when he passed on. I couldn’t bear to have them around, and the room is full of lumber from my store, as I told you.’
“So, as I said, my room was the one at the back of the house, which was large and a nice enough room, but hadn’t much in it but a high bed, a rickety chair, an old dresser, and a chromo— I think it was ‘The Stag at Bay’—and me. Well, I drifted off looking at that yellow moon and thinking about Mr. T.’s orange; and then I woke up.
“The moon wasn’t shining right in at the window the way it had been, but was off at a slant, so just a little spot of light hit the floor in one corner. That made the rest of the room darker than it would have been otherwise. I sat up in bed, listening and trying to look around: there was someone besides me in that room, and I was as sure of it as I’m sure I’m sitting here in Miss Olivia’s parlor. I’d had a dream, if you want to call it that, and in the dream I was lying in that bed like I was, and there was a terrible face, a horrible face, just within inches of mine. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and as I did my hand touched a spot of damp on the sheet that I knew was none of my doing.”
“Why didn’t you turn on the lights?” Eleanor Bold said. “It’s such a simple thing, yet no one in these stories ever seems to think of it.”
“I did. That’s what I did right then—jumped out of bed and turned on the lights; but naturally in a strange room like that I had to do some feeling around before I could find them. You know the way you do.
“The door to my room was open; that was one thing I noticed right off, and I was sure I’d shut it before I went to bed. And the damp spot I told about was real, though it was already drying fast. Too fast, I thought, for it to be water, especially as it was so hot and muggy there that a man could hardly stand to wear a nightshirt when he slept. Where it dried, though, it didn’t dry clean, but left a sort of a soil behind that was sticky when I touched it.
“I didn’t fancy getting back into that bed right away, as you can imagine; so first of all I pretended to search the room, though I knew that now there wasn’t anybody in it but me. There wasn’t anywhere to hide anyway, but I looked under the bed and behind the old dresser. Then I decided to get myself a clean sheet, remembering that Mr. T. had fetched the one I had been on out of a linen closet in the hall right outside. I went out to get it; and what did I see but Mr. T. himself, standing there at the other end of the hall holding a candle. I don’t mean to offend you ladies, but the truth of it was that he wasn’t wearing a thing but a pair of drawers, which is going to be important in a minute, and I’ll tell you he looked a regular skeleton, as tall as he was, and no flesh on him. I said, ‘Hello,’ and he said, ‘Hello,’ back, and then he asked me if I’d heard anything. I suppose I crawfished around a bit and didn’t give him too straight an answer.
“ ‘I grant you,’ he says, ‘that innocent sounds are often magnified in dreams, but are you certain you heard no one walking in this house?’
“I said that if I had it wouldn’t signify, because I could have been hearing him and he could have been hearing me. And naturally while I was talking to him I didn’t want to do it from clear down at the end of that hall, so I walked up to him.
“ ‘I know your step,’ is what he said then, ‘and I should think that by now you would know mine. What you heard—if you had heard her—would be quite different.’
“Well, I didn’t say anything to that, for I had noticed something while he was talking that was taking up all my mind. On Mr. T.’s right side, just here where the lower ribs are, was a big place where the flesh didn’t look natural; and now that I could see up his arms I could tell that whatever was wrong with it was wrong with both his hands as well, so that it looked like he had on a pair of rough, scaly gloves of a kind of dirty-white color. ‘You appear interested,’ he says to me.
“I said yes, I was, deciding, you see, to take the bull by the horns. Then I said I wasn’t aware before that he was unwell, and asked if he’d tried cocoa butter on it.
“ ‘Here,’ he said, and before I could do anything to prevent him, he took my left hand in his and touched it to his side so I could feel the place. Some evening when you go out for a stroll, when it’s a trifle damp and cold, and you wear a wrap and find yourself thinking of having a nice cup of coffee or cocoa when you get home, reach down and feel the walk. That was just what poor Mr. T.’s side felt like—cold, and gritty, and not quite dry.”
“I think I should have screamed,” my aunt Olivia said. I could see, however, that this expression was intended merely as a conventional indication of excitement. What she would really have done was borrow a knife and whack off a piece to put under the little microscope in the conservatory.
“ ‘Now you are aware of my distemper, Mr. Smart,’ Mr. T. says. ‘If you were not already. I am dying, Mr. Smart. My living flesh is being turned to stone.’
“ ‘That’s impossible, sir,’ said I.
“ ‘Not at all. What are your bones, Mr. Smart, but limestone? Why, limestone itself, as it is dug from a quarry, is composed of the bodies of myriads of ancient sea creatures, as you must surely be aware. And your teeth, Mr. Smart. What are they but a species of white flint? Stones form in the kidneys and galls even of normal men.’
“ ‘Do you mean you’re turning into a statue?’ I asked. That was foolishness, of course, but there hadn’t been time for my thoughts to catch up to what was being said. If you feel like laughing at me, think of how you’d feel being awakened in the middle of the night by someone in your room, and then having someone else come out with something like that just after you’d felt him and found him hard and cold as a rock pulled out of a pond.
“ ‘I will never achieve complete ossification,’ he said, ‘because I will die when the calcium compounds which are now permeating my epidermis invade my vital organs. Mr. Smart, I believe you told me today that you are not a drinking man.”
“I said, ‘That’s right, sir.’
“ ‘On such a night as this, I think even a teetotaler might be forgiven a pony of brandy, and I know I am going to have some. Will you join me?’
“I told him I wouldn’t, it being against my principles, but that I’d be honored to have a wholesome beverage in his company while he treated himself to whatever he fancied; so we went downstairs—back to the dining room. Mr. T. got the brandy bottle and a glass out of the sideboard there, and I squeezed some of the oranges for myself and added a hunk of ice from the box, and I can tell you I wouldn’t have traded that drink for just about anything, because it was nearly ninety degrees—that’s what I saw on a thermometer somebody’d hung up in the kitchen—though it was past midnight.
“ ‘I am a haunted man, Mr. Smart,’ Mr. T. says about five minutes after I sat down with him.
“ ‘You’re joshing me,’ I say.
“ ‘I only wish I were. This house in which we sit harbors a ghost, and it is intent upon my destruction.’
“ ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘that may be true, but I’d advise you to talk about it as little as you can. My grandmother, the late Rebecca Appleby, was a very knowledgeable woman in these matters, if I do say so, and she always counseled me that ghosts and such dislike and avoid those that won’t profess no belief in them, while clustering about them that does. I myself have never for one minute thought there was such things, and I’d advise you not to either.’
“ ‘And what do you call this?’ he says, and holds out one of those cold hands for me to feel.
“ ‘Skin disease,’ says I promptly, ‘and you ought to be seeing a doctor for it.’
“ ‘What if I were to tell you, Mr. Smart, that this skin disease (as you call it—believe me, it is in no way limited to the epidermal tissues) was my own discovery? That it is induced by a preparation I have compounded, and in no other way?’
“Well, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I just stared at him openmouthed.
“ ‘The malignant spirit of which I told you, Smart, has been drugging my own food with it. It is by this means that it intends to bring me to my grave.’
“ ‘I noticed,’ I says, not knowing what else to say, ‘that you are what I might have called a peculiar eater.’ ”
“Wait a minute, Julius,” Professor Peacock interrupted. “I think it’s high time you answered that riddle about the breakfasts. Are you trying to tell us that the reason this Mr. Tilly changed meals with you was that he thought the ghost might have doctored his food even though he was eating in a restaurant?”
Mr. Smart nodded.
“All right, you said there was one item in your breakfast— the breakfast he traded you for—that he didn’t eat. But then when we named everything, you said none of that was right. I think you should explain yourself.”
“And I think,” my aunt Olivia said, “that you should be ashamed of yourself, Bob. Haven’t you ever been below the Mason-Dixon line?”
Eleanor Bold said, “I have, Vi, but I still don’t understand the riddle.”
“When I was a small girl . . .” My aunt leaned back in her chair and looked dreamy, though she was careful not to spill her tea. “When I was a small girl, my father took Mother and John and I on a trip to Tallahassee. It was lovely. I have always remembered the snowy tablecloths in the dining car, and the flowers the waiter brought in a cut-glass vase, and eating with my parents—we children ate in the kitchen at home—with telegraph poles whizzing past the window.”
Stewart Blaine cleared his throat. “Lovely lady, since you have obviously no more intention of unraveling Mr. Smart’s conundrum than he has himself, I would like to pass along one observation that may be of use to the rest of us. The haunted Mr. Tilly, as described by our friend here, waited for him to order, then gave an order that had no item in common with his employee’s. He wouldn’t care what it was, I suppose, since he wasn’t planning to eat it anyway.”
“I noticed that, too,” Eleanor Bold said. “Everything was different.”
Mr. Smart nodded and continued.
“ ‘I endeavor to swallow as little of the drug as I can,’ says Mr. T., ‘and by my vigilance I have prolonged my life now for two years. I ask your assistance, Mr. Smart, in extending it further still.’
“I told him I would help in every way I could.
“ ‘I ask no more than that,’ says he. ‘Food prepared for me must not be left unattended for a moment, and it would be better if it were not known to be mine before it touched my lips. Do you understand me, Mr. Smart?’
“I said I did; then I ventured to suggest that if the house was haunted like he said, it might be better for him to move away.
“ ‘It is not this house that is haunted, Mr. Smart,’ he told me, ‘but I.’
“We went up to bed after that, and you may believe I fetched out the old shaky chair and propped it against the door tight before I went to bed. And it was a long time, it seemed like, that I lay there listening to every little stir of that old house.
“Next morning came, though, and there hadn’t anything happened. I fixed breakfast for us, but Mr. T. just sipped a bit of coffee and said that that was all he wanted. He took a little notebook out of the pocket of his black suit, and while I was eating he started writing in it. I looked—as well as I could—at what was there, upside down as it was, and I could see some of the symbols we use in writing prescriptions. I came close to asking him what it was he was studying so, when I got a glimpse of his face, and the pain there, and the concentration, and I knew then what it had to be. He was working on a cure for his condition; and after that I wouldn’t of interrupted him for anything in the world.
“By and by, of course, I finished my breakfast and thought to get up and go; then it came to me that I would be certain to disturb him if I did, and it was better not to, so I just poured myself a bit more coffee, and there we sat, the two of us, for I suppose twenty minutes. Then he lay down his pencil—a pretty little gold pocket pencil, it was—and put his head in his hands. And there we sat. Then he moved a little—I suppose moved his elbow on the tablecloth—and that pencil started rolling. He didn’t see it, and it rolled right off the table and onto the floor. He made a motion to pick it up, then stopped himself (as it seemed to me) and looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Smart, I fear you’ll have to get that for me.’
“Well, I shook my head at that. ‘Mr. Tilly,’ I said to him as bold as if I’d a thousand dollars in my pocket, ‘I’m a pharmacist, and planning to be a licensed pharmacist soon. I don’t mind cooking for both of us—it’s the least I can do to pay for my room and board. But if you want somebody to pick up your toys for you, you’d better hire a maid.’
“ ‘You think I am being arrogant,’ he said. ‘I am not. My spine has become inflexible, Mr. Smart, and my hips will bend just enough to permit me to sit down.’
“I went and got his pencil for him after that, as you may imagine, and we went down to the store and opened up. It was pretty near to ten o’clock by that time, and I wondered for a bit why it was Mr. T. had been open so early the day before, but of course it was that woman—the one without arms. She hadn’t just happened to come by then; that had been all arranged, and Mr. T.’d had her prescription ready and waiting for her, knowing she’d come by early like that. I thought about it some more and concluded she’d probably wanted it to be when there wasn’t many people on the street to see her.”
“Vi, you really must stop looking smug like that,” Eleanor Bold said.
“Hominy grits.” (They stared at her.)
“Hominy grits,” my aunt Olivia said again. “They give them to you with everything down there, and they always give them to you with ham. Mr. T. forgot that for a minute when he was ordering, and asked for some himself. Then when both breakfasts came, he saw there were two dishes of grits, and didn’t dare eat either for fear the drug had been put in one of them. He was quite mad, you understand, poor man.”
