“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 animal, 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—”
He touched her wrist, saw her melt toward delicious oblivion, drew back.
“Depressions, elations,” he went on. “Dreams—”
“Stop!” she cried, enthralled. “You know me to the letter. Now, name my ailment!”
“I will.” He pressed his lips to the palm of her hand so she quaked suddenly. “The name of the ailment is Camillia Wilkes.”
“How strange.” She shivered, her eyes glinting lilac fires. “Am I then my own affliction? How sick I make myself! Even now, feel my heart!”
“I feel it, so.”
“My limbs, they burn with summer heat!”
“Yes. They scorch my fingers.”
“But now, the night wind, see how I shudder, cold! I die, I swear it, I die!”
“I will not let you,” he said quietly.
“Are you a doctor, then?”
“No, just your plain, your ordinary physician, like another who guessed your trouble this day. The girl who would have named it but ran off in the crowd.”
“Yes, I saw in her eyes she knew what had seized me. But, now, my teeth chatter. And no extra blanket!”
“Give room, please. There. Let me see: two arms, two legs, head and body. I’m all here!”
“What, sir!”
“To warm you from the night, of course.”
“How like a hearth! Oh, sir, sir, do I know you? Your name?”
Swiftly above her, his head shadowed hers. From it his merry clear-water eyes glowed as did his white ivory slot of a smile.
“Why, Bosco, of course,” he said.
“Is there not a saint by that name?”
“Given an hour, you will call me so, yes.”
His head bent closer. Thus sooted in shadow, she cried with joyous recognition to welcome her Dustman back.
“The world spins! I pass away! The cure, sweet Doctor, or all is lost!”
“The cure,” he said. “And the cure is this …”
Somewhere, cats sang. A shoe, shot from a window, tipped them off a fence. Then all was silence and the moon …
“Shh …”
Dawn. Tiptoeing downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes peered into their courtyard.
“Frozen stone dead from the terrible night, I know it!”
“No, wife, look! Alive! Roses in her cheeks! No, more! Peaches, persimmons! She glows all rosy-milky! Sweet Camillia, alive and well, made whole again!”
They bent by the slumbering girl.
“She smiles, she dreams; what’s that she says?”
“The sovereign,” sighed the girl, “remedy.”
“What, what?”
The girl smiled again, a white smile, in her sleep.
“A medicine,” she murmured, “for melancholy.”
She opened her eyes.
“Oh, Mother, Father!”
“Daughter! Child! Come upstairs!”
“No.” She took their hands, tenderly. “Mother? Father?”
“Yes?”
“No one will see. The sun but rises. Please. Dance with me.”
They did not want to dance.
But, celebrating they knew not what, they did.
The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit
It was summer twilight in the city, and out front of the quiet-clicking pool hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence.
“Hey,” sighed Martínez at last. He was the youngest, the most sweetly sad of the three. “It’s a swell night, huh? Swell.”
As he observed the world it moved very close and then drifted away and then came close again. People, brushing by, were suddenly across the street. Buildings five miles away suddenly leaned over him. But most of the time everything—people, cars, and buildings—stayed way out on the edge of the world and could not be touched. On this quiet warm summer evening Martínez’s face was cold.