Ray Bradbury Stories, Volume 1 (71 page)

Miss Hillgood crossed the downstairs lobby to fumble with the locks on the upright leather case.

‘I must pay you for my supper.’

‘On the house,’ said Mr Terle.

‘I must pay,’ she said, and opened the case.

There was a sudden flash of gold.

The two men quickened in their chairs. They squinted at the little old woman standing beside the tremendous heart-shaped object which towered above her with its shining columbined pedestal stop which a calm Grecian face with antelope eyes looked serenely at them even as Miss Hillgood looked now.

The two men shot each other the quickest and most startled of glances, as if each had guessed what might happen next. They hurried across the lobby, breathing hard, to sit on the very edge of the hot velvet lounge, wiping their faces with damp handkerchiefs.

Miss Hillgood drew a chair under her, rested the golden harp gently back on her shoulder, and put her hands to the strings.

Mr Terle took a breath of fiery air and waited.

A desert wind came suddenly along the porch outside, tilting the chairs so they rocked this way and that like boats on a pond at night.

Mr Fremley’s voice protested from above. ‘What’s goin’ on down there?’

And then Miss Hillgood moved her hands.

Starting at the arch near her shoulder, she played her fingers out along the simple tapestry of wires toward the blind and beautiful stare of the Greek goddess on her column, and then back. Then for a moment she paused and let the sounds drift up through the baked lobby air and into all the empty rooms.

If Mr Fremley shouted, above, no one heard. For Mr Terle and Mr Smith were so busy jumping up to stand riven in the shadows, they heard nothing save the storming of their own hearts and the shocked rush of all the air in their lungs. Eyes wide, mouths dropped, in a kind of pure insanity, they stared at the two women there, the blind Muse proud on her golden pillar, and the seated one, gentle eyes closed, her small hands stretched forth on the air.

Like a girl, they both thought wildly, like a little girl putting her hands out a window to feel what? Why, of course, of course!

To feel the rain.

The echo of the first shower vanished down remote causeways and roof drains, away.

Mr Fremley, above, rose from his bed as if pulled round by his ears.

Miss Hillgood played.

She played and it wasn’t a tune they knew at all, but it was a tune they had heard a thousand times in their long lives, words or not, melody or not. She played and each time her fingers moved, the rain fell pattering through the dark hotel. The rain fell cool at the open windows and the rain rinsed down the baked floorboards of the porch. The rain fell on the roof top and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rusted car and empty stable
and dead cactus in the yard. It washed the windows and laid the dust and filled the rain barrels and curtained the doors with beaded threads that might part and whisper as you walked through. But more than anything the soft touch and coolness of it fell on Mr Smith and Mr Terle. Its gentle weight and pressure moved them down and down until it had seated them again. By its continuous budding and prickling on their faces it made them shut up their eyes and mouths and raise their hands to shield it away. Seated there, they felt their heads tilt slowly back to let the rain fall where it would.

The flash flood lasted a minute, then faded away as the fingers trailed down the loom, let drop a few last bursts and squalls and then stopped.

The last chord hung in the air like a picture taken when lightning strikes and freezes a billion drops of water on their downward flight. Then the lightning went out. The last drops fell through darkness in silence.

Miss Hillgood took her hands from the strings, her eyes still shut.

Mr Terle and Mr Smith opened their eyes to see those two miraculous women way over there across the lobby somehow come through the storm untouched and dry.

They trembled. They leaned forward as if they wished to speak. They looked helpless, not knowing what to do.

And then a single sound from high above in the hotel corridors drew their attention and told them what to do.

The sound came floating down feebly, fluttering like a tired bird beating its ancient wings.

The two men looked up and listened.

It was the sound of Mr Fremley.

Mr Fremley, in his room, applauding.

It took five seconds for Mr Terle to figure out what it was. Then he nudged Mr Smith and began, himself, to beat his palms together. The two men struck their hands in mighty explosions. The echoes ricocheted around about in the hotel caverns above and below, striking walls, mirrors, windows, trying to fight free of the rooms.

Miss Hillgood opened her eyes now, as if this new storm had come on her in the open, unprepared.

The men gave their own recital. They smashed their hands together so fervently it seemed they had fistfuls of firecrackers to set off, one on another. Mr Fremley shouted. Nobody heard. Hands winged out, banged shut again and again until fingers puffed up and the old men’s breath came short and they put their hands at last on their knees, a heart pounding inside each one.

Then, very slowly, Mr Smith got up and still looking at the harp, went outside and carried in the suitcases. He stood at the foot of the lobby stairs looking for a long while at Miss Hillgood. He glanced down at her single
piece of luggage resting there by the first tread. He looked from her suitcase to her and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Miss Hillgood looked at her harp, at her suitcase, at Mr Terle, and at last back to Mr Smith.

She nodded once.

Mr Smith bent down and with his own luggage under one arm and her suitcase in the other, he started the long slow climb up the stairs in the gentle dark. As he moved, Miss Hillgood put the harp back on her shoulder and either played in time to his moving or he moved in time to her playing, neither of them knew which.

Half up the flight, Mr Smith met Mr Fremley who, in a faded robe, was testing his slow way down.

Both stood there, looking deep into the lobby at the one man on the far side in the shadows, and the two women further over, no more than a motion and a gleam. Both thought the same thoughts.

The sound of the harp playing, the sound of the cool water falling every night and every night of their lives, after this. No spraying the roof with the garden hose now any more. Only sit on the porch or lie in your night bed and hear the falling…the falling…the falling…

Mr Smith moved on up the stairs; Mr Fremley moved down.

The harp, the harp. Listen, listen!

The fifty years of drought were over.

The time of the long rains had come.

‘Send for some leeches; bleed her,’ said Doctor Gimp.

‘She has no blood left!’ cried Mrs Wilkes. ‘Oh, Doctor, what ails our Camillia?’

‘She’s not right.’

‘Yes, yes?’

‘She’s poorly.’ The good doctor scowled.

‘Go on, go on!’

‘She’s a fluttering candle flame, no doubt.’

‘Ah, Doctor Gimp,’ protested Mr Wilkes. ‘You but tell us as you go out what we told you when you came in!’

‘No, more! Give her these pills at down, high noon, and sunset. A sovereign remedy!’

‘Damn, she’s
stuffed
with sovereign remedies now!’

‘Tut-tut! That’s a shilling as I pass downstairs, sir.’

‘Go down and send the Devil up!’ Mr Wilkes shoved a coin in the good doctor’s hand.

Whereupon the physician, wheezing, taking snuff, sneezing, stamped down into the swarming streets of London on a sloppy morn in the spring of 1762.

Mr and Mrs Wilkes turned to the bed where their sweet Camillia lay pale, thin, yes, but far from unlovely, with large wet lilac eyes, her hair a creek of gold upon her pillow.

‘Oh,’ she almost wept. ‘What’s to become of me? Since the start of spring, three weeks, I’ve been a ghost in my mirror; I frighten me. To think I’ll die without seeing my twentieth birthday.’

‘Child,’ said the mother. ‘Where do you hurt?’

‘My arms. My legs. My bosom. My head. How many doctors—six?—have turned me like a beef on a spit. No more. Please, let me pass away untouched.’

‘What a ghastly, what a mysterious illness,’ said the mother. ‘Oh, do something, Mr Wilkes!’

‘What?’ asked Mr Wilkes angrily. ‘She won’t have the physician, the apothecary, or the priest!—and Amen to that!—they’ve wrung me dry! Shall I run in the street then and bring the Dustman up?’

‘Yes,’ said a voice.

‘What!’ All three turned to stare.

They had quite forgotten her younger brother, Jamie, who stood picking his teeth at a far window, gazing serenely down into the drizzle and the loud rumbling of the town.

‘Four hundred years ago,’ he said serenely, ‘it was tried, it worked. Don’t bring the Dustman up, no, no. But let us hoist Camillia, cot and all, maneuver her downstairs, and set her up outside our door.’

‘Why? What for?’

‘In a single hour’—Jamie’s eyes jumped, counting—‘a thousand folk rush by our gate. In one day, twenty thousand people run, hobble, or ride by. Each might eye my swooning sister, each count her teeth, pull her ear lobes, and all, all, mind you, would have a sovereign remedy to offer! One of them would just have to be right!’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Wilkes, stunned.

‘Father!’ said Jamie breathlessly. ‘Have you ever known one single man who didn’t think he personally wrote
Materia Medica
? This green ointment for sour throat, that ox-salve for miasma or bloat? Right now, ten thousand self-appointed apothecaries sneak off down there, their wisdom lost to us!’

‘Jamie boy, you’re incredible!’

‘Cease!’ said Mrs Wilkes. ‘No daughter of mine will be put on display in this or any street—’

‘Fie, woman!’ said Mr Wilkes. ‘Camillia melts like snow and you hesitate to move her from this hot room? Come, Jamie, lift the bed!’

‘Camillia?’ Mrs Wilkes turned to her daughter.

‘I may as well die in the open,’ said Camillia, ‘where a cool breeze might stir my locks as I…’

‘Bosh!’ said the father. ‘You’ll not die. Jamie, heave! Ha! There! Out of the way, wife! Up, boy,
higher
!’

‘Oh,’ cried Camillia faintly. ‘I fly, I
fly…
!’

Quite suddenly a blue sky opened over London. The population, surprised by the weather, hurried out into the streets, panicking for something to see, to do, to buy. Blind men sang, dogs jigged, clowns shuffled and tumbled, children chalked games and threw balls as if it were carnival time.

Down into all this, tottering, their veins bursting from their brows, Jamie and Mr Wilkes carried Camillia like a lady Pope sailing high in her sedanchair cot, eyes clenched shut, praying.

‘Careful!’ screamed Mrs Wilkes. ‘Ah, she’s dead! No. There. Put her down. Easy…’

And at last the bed was tilted against the house front so that the River of Humanity surging by could see Camillia, a large pale Bartolemy Doll put out like a prize in the sun.

‘Fetch a quill, ink, paper, lad,’ said the father. ‘I’ll make notes as to symptoms spoken of and remedies offered this day. Tonight we’ll average them out. Now—’

But already a man in the passing crowd had fixed Camillia with a sharp eye.

‘She’s sick!’ he said.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Wilkes, gleefully. ‘It begins. The quill, boy. There. Go on, sir!’

‘She’s not well.’ The man scowled. ‘She does poorly.’

‘Does poorly—’ Mr Wilkes wrote, then froze. ‘Sir?’ He looked up suspiciously. ‘Are you a physician?’

‘I am, sir.’

‘I
thought
I knew the words! Jamie, take my cane, drive him off! Go, sir, be gone!’

The man hastened off, cursing, mightily exasperated.

‘She’s not well, she does poorly…pah!’ mimicked Mr Wilkes, but stopped. For now a woman, tall and gaunt as a specter fresh risen from the tomb, was pointing a finger at Camillia Wilkes.

‘Vapors,’ she intoned.

‘Vapors,’ wrote Mr Wilkes, pleased.

‘Lung-flux,’ chanted the woman.

‘Lung-flux!’ Mr Wilkes wrote, beaming. ‘Now, that’s more
like
it!’

‘A medicine for melancholy is needed,’ said the woman palely. ‘Be there mummy ground to medicine in your house? The best mummies are: Egyptian, Arabian, Hirasphatos, Libyan, all of great use in magnetic disorders. Ask for me, the Gypsy, at the Flodden Road. I sell stone parsley, male frankincense—’

‘Flodden Road, stone parsley—slower, woman!’

‘Opobalsam, pontic valerian—’

‘Wait, woman! Opobalsam, yes! Jamie, stop her!’

But the woman, naming medicines, glided on.

A girl, no more than seventeen, walked up now and stared at Camillia Wilkes.

‘She—’

‘One moment!’ Mr Wilkes scribbled feverishly. ‘—Magnetic disorders—pontic valerian—drat! Well, young girl, now. What do you see in my daughter’s face? You fix her with your gaze, you hardly breathe. So?’

‘She—’ The strange girl searched deep into Camillia’s eyes, flushed, and stammered. ‘She suffers from…from…’

‘Spit it out!’

‘She…she…oh!’

And the girl, with a last look of deepest sympathy, darted off through the crowd.

‘Silly girl!’

‘No, Papa,’ murmured Camillia, eyes wide. ‘Not silly. She
saw
. She
knew
. Oh, Jamie, run fetch her, make her tell!’

‘No, she offered nothing! Whereas, the Gypsy, see her list!’

‘I know it, Papa.’ Camillia, paler, shut her eyes.

Someone cleared his throat.

A butcher, his apron a scarlet battleground, stood bristling his fierce mustaches there.

‘I have seen cows with this look,’ he said. ‘I have saved them with brandy and three new eggs. In winter I have saved myself with the same elixir—’

‘My daughter is no cow, sir!’ Mr Wilkes threw down his quill. ‘Nor is she a butcher, nor is it January! Step back, sir, others wait!’

And indeed, now a vast crowd clamored, drawn by the others, aching to advise their favorite swig, recommend some country site where it rained less and shone more sun than in all England or your South of France. Old men and women, especial doctors as all the aged are, clashed by each other in bristles of canes, in phalanxes of crutches and hobble sticks.

‘Back!’ cried Mrs Wilkes, alarmed. ‘They’ll crush my daughter like a spring berry!’

‘Stand off!’ Jamie seized canes and crutches and threw them over the mob, which turned on itself to go seek their missing members.

‘Father, I fail, I fail,’ gasped Camillia.

‘Father!’ cried Jamie. ‘There’s but one way to stop this riot! Charge them! Make them pay to give us their mind on this ailment!’

‘Jamie, you are my son! Quick, boy, paint a sign! Listen, people! Tuppence! Queue up please, a line! Tuppence to speak your piece! Get your money out, yes! That’s it. You, sir. You, madame. And you, sir. Now, my quill! Begin!’

The mob boiled in like a dark sea.

Camillia opened one eye and swooned again.

Sundown, the streets almost empty, only a few strollers now. Camillia moth-fluttered her eyelids at a familiar clinking jingle.

‘Three hundred and ninety-nine, four hundred pennies!’ Mr Wilkes counted the last money into a bag held by his grinning son. ‘There!’

‘It will buy me a fine black funeral coach,’ said the pale girl.

‘Hush! Did you imagine, family, so many people, two hundred, would pay to give us their opinion?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wilkes. ‘Wives, husbands, children, are deaf to each other. So people gladly pay to have someone listen. Poor things, each today thought he and he alone knew quinsy, dropsy, glanders, could tell the slaver from the hives. So tonight we are rich and two hundred people are happy, having unloaded their full medical kit at our door.’

‘Gods, instead of quelling the riot, we had to drive them off snapping like pups.’

‘Read us the list, Father,’ said Jamie, ‘of two hundred remedies. Which one is true?’

‘I care not,’ whispered Camillia, sighing. ‘It grows dark. My stomach is queasy from listening to the names! May I be taken upstairs?’

‘Yes, dear, Jamie, lift!’

‘Please,’ said a voice.

Half-bent, the men looked up.

There stood a Dustman of no particular size or shape, his face masked with soot from which shone water-blue eyes and a white slot of an ivory smile. Dust sifted from his sleeves and his pants as he moved, as he talked quietly, nodding.

‘I couldn’t get through the mob earlier,’ he said, holding his dirty cap in his hands. ‘Now, going home, here I am. Must I pay?’

‘No, Dustman, you need not,’ said Camillia gently.

‘Hold on—’ protested Mr Wilkes.

But Camillia gave him a soft look and he grew silent.

‘Thank you, ma’am.’ The Dustman’s smile flashed like warm sunlight in the growing dusk, ‘I have but one advice.’

He gazed at Camillia. She gazed at him.

‘Be this Saint Bosco’s Eve, sir, ma’am?’

‘Who knows? Not
me
, sir!’ said Mr Wilkes.

‘I think it
is
Saint Bosco’s Eve, sir. Also, it is the night of the full moon. So,’ said the Dustman humbly, unable to take his eyes from the lovely haunted girl, ‘you must leave your daughter out in the light of that rising moon.’

‘Out under the moon!’ said Mrs Wilkes.

‘Doesn’t that make the lunatic?’ asked Jamie.

‘Beg pardon, sir.’ The Dustman bowed. ‘But the full moon soothes all sick animals, be they human or plain field beast. There is a serenity of color, a quietude of touch, a sweet sculpturing of mind and body in full moonlight.’

‘It may rain—’ said the mother uneasily.

‘I swear,’ said the Dustman quickly. ‘My sister suffered this same swooning paleness. We set her like a potted lily out one spring night with the moon. She lives today in Sussex, the soul of reconstituted health!’

‘Reconstituted! Moonlight! And will cost us not one penny of the four hundred we collected this day, Mother, Jamie, Camillia.’

‘No!’ said Mrs Wilkes, ‘I won’t have it!’

‘Mother,’ said Camillia.

She looked earnestly at the Dustman.

From his grimed face the Dustman gazed back, his smile like a little scimitar in the dark.

‘Mother,’ said Camillia. ‘I feel it. The moon will cure me, it will, it will…’

The mother sighed. ‘This is not my day, nor night. Let me kiss you for the last time, then. There.’

And the mother went upstairs.

Now the Dustman backed off, bowing courteously to all.

‘All night, now, remember, beneath the moon, not the slightest disturbance until dawn. Sleep well, young lady. Dream, and dream the best. Good night.’

Soot was lost in soot; the man was gone.

Mr Wilkes and Jamie kissed Camillia’s brow.

‘Father, Jamie,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’

And she was left alone to stare off where at a great distance she thought she saw a smile hung by itself in the dark blink off and on, then go round a corner, vanishing.

She waited for the rising of the moon.

Night in London, the voices growing drowsier in the inns, the slamming of doors, drunken farewells, clocks chiming. Camillia saw a cat like a woman stroll by in her furs, saw a woman like a cat stroll by, both wise, both Egyptian, both smelling of spice. Every quarter hour or so a voice drifted down from above:

‘You all right, child?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Camillia?’

‘Mother, Jamie, I’m fine.’

And at last. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night.’

The last lights out. London asleep.

The moon rose.

And the higher the moon, the larger grew Camillia’s eyes as she watched the alleys, the courts, the streets, until at last, at midnight, the moon moved over her to show her like a marble figure atop an ancient tomb.

A motion in darkness.

Camillia pricked her ears.

A faint melody sprang out on the air.

A man stood in the shadows of the court.

Camillia gasped.

The man stepped forth into moonlight, carrying a lute which he strummed softly. He was a man well-dressed, whose face was handsome and, now anyway, solemn.

‘A troubadour,’ said Camillia aloud.

The man, his finger on his lips, moved slowly forward and soon stood by her cot.

‘What are you doing out so late?’ asked the girl, unafraid but not knowing why.

‘A friend sent me to make you well.’ He touched the lute strings. They hummed sweetly. He was indeed handsome there in the silver light.

‘That cannot be,’ she said, ‘for it was told me, the
moon
is my cure.’

‘And so it will be, maiden.’

‘What songs do you sing?’

‘Songs of spring nights, aches and ailments without name. Shall I name your fever, maiden?’

‘If you know it, yes.’

‘First, the symptoms: raging temperatures, sudden cold, heart fast then slow, storms of temper, then sweet calms, drunkenness from having sipped only well water, dizziness from being touched only
thus
—’