More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

But Duffey's three new friends, with whom he now formed a conspiracy and consensus, would fall into the outrageously difficult class by this test. It had an advantage. They knew their way around boarding schools. Yet they seemed to be the three brightest and most intelligent and most pleasant persons ever. Well, Charley Murray was sleepy a lot of the time, and yet he was bright.

  This Charley Murray was from St. Louis. Charley and Melchisedech discovered that they knew many of the same people there. That Melchisedech knew them only out of the mind of his sister or stepsister and not from his own encounters was something that he did not tell Murray. Murray did magic tricks. He had a dozen magic sets and a score of magic trick books. When he discovered that Melchisedech was apt with his hands and with tools, he had him make many props for new magic acts. Melchisedech was a born carpenter and joiner and cabinet maker. He was a born machinist and pattern maker: and lathes and such were available in the Manual Training section of the school. Melchisedech was a good metal spinner and wood turner and mold caster.

  There were some things that could not be made by any of the trades or techniques however. And yet they were made. They were made after Melchisedech had received Murray's request that he needed them. And they were made in the middle of the night. But there were no tools sophisticated enough to make them with, none available there.

  “What do you use to make them, Melky, brownies?” Charley Murray demanded once. And this seemed to perturb Melchisedech. ‘Brownie’ is a vague word, but as a popular description it might have hit just what Melchisedech did use. Very large Brownies, if you want to call them that.

  “Why do you ask how this was made,” Melchisedech growled as he gave that new-made prop to Charley Murray. “It was made to order. It was made to my order. That's how it was made. Ask no more about it.”

  The order by which the most extreme things were made was sometimes an order given by Melchisedech to one of those ebony giants. So a thing might have been made by giant hands that are stronger than a drill press and cannier than a mortising machine. It was only by accident that Charley Murray soon discovered that Duffey had faber-giants under his command. And it was only by accident that he discovered that as he Murray could work magic tricks, so he Duffey could work real magic that was not trickery. This discovery did not completely reverse their relationship to each other (Charley was inventive in ways that Duffey could never be, and Charley was an older boy, and he had developed early leadership qualities), but it did compel in Charley a new and permanent respect for Melchisedech Duffey.

  Another of the intimates was John Rattigan from Chicago. John was a scrambler and money-maker. He, like Murray, was about two years older than Duffey. He had a witty look, and the look sufficed. You'd spot him with that ‘I'm-going-to-take-you’ grin, and you'd be wary of him, and he'd take you anyhow. He knew every wholesaler of gadgets and sundries in town, sellers of candy and fruit and tobacco and such. He bought from them all, and he sold clandestinely to the two hundred boarding school boys and the three hundred and fifty day students of the school. He made fast and happy money out of his enterprises. He cut corners. And he sold the corner-cuts far more than the full pieces were worth.

  There was Sebastian Hilton who was the first of them in so many ways. Sebastian already had fast and happy money and didn't have to make it. He was the de-luxe rich kid. He was even younger than Melchisedech, the only one out of the hundred and fifty boys in the ninth grade who was younger. And he was slight. He had what the ladies call a ‘not-long-for-this-world’ look. Nah, he wasn't long for this world. He had a better world on order and it was being built for him. It would be very expensive and parts of it were being brought from France and Italy. But Sebastian did look puny with his pale, greenish complexion.

  Well, he was like a puny panther. You would put on the gloves with him at your peril. He was the fastest kid with his hands that you ever saw, and to fight him with gloves was suicide. To fight him bare-fisted was worse. He was a diabolical schemer and he took unfair advantage of the bullies. He had a whole assembly of come-ons, a bait box to hook the most rancid bully. He had a simper he could use when he chose. He had effeminate gestures that he could slip into. He could even go into tears at a moment's notice, and what bully-boy could resist that?

  “Don't do it, Sebash, don't do it!” Charley Murray used to bet. “It's cruel and unusual.” Charley had a lot of compassion, and Charley and Sebastian had previously been to school together elsewhere. “Don't do it, Sebash. He's too big and awkward. He'll get hurt.”

  But Sebastian would stalk his prey with simpering and tears. And what a sickening, sissy, sleazy kid Sebastian could be when he wanted to! And the climax would always be well-witnessed, for Sebastian Hilton had a perfect sense of the theatrical. He could lay almost any face open, but especially a fat face, with his fast angling fists and the sharply embossed rings that he wore on each hand. He could rack a big boy completely with body punches that were only about eight inches too low. He knew all the tricks out of the special combat books.

  And a slight boy is always lionized after he takes the measure of a larger boy, after identifying that larger boy so conspicuously as a bully. “Baw, lemmy alone, you big bully!” was Sebastian's favorite squawl. It was sickening.

  “I wish he'd trade that in for another line!” Charley Murray used to moan. But Sebastian knew better than to change a good line before it was worn out. Sebastian shed a lot of blood. He entrapped and scuttled a number of hulking kids before both the boarders and the day students got onto his game. And, if he ever over-matched himself, Sebastian was as fast afoot as he was with his hands.

  In the gymnasium, Duffey found that he could take Sebastian with his fists, or with borrowed giant fists. But Duffey wasn't big, and Sebastian had never entrapped him. They were friends and they fought only for fun in the gym.

  But there was another way that Duffey could never take Sebastian, never in this world. And it hurt. Duffey had to admit that Sebastian was smarter than himself. Duffey had never before met a boy that was smarter than himself, and he was unprepared for such a thing. This would be the only clear-cut case in Duffey's life or lives that he would find anyone absolutely smarter than himself. There would be half a dozen close ones, but no other case of clear superiority.

  John Rattigan wanted a talisman from Duffey, and Duffey wouldn't give it to him.

  “No, no, it just won't work, John,” Duffey insisted. “It just isn't meant to be. Something would go wrong, I know it would. You are not one of the people I'm supposed to give a talisman to.”

  “But I don't believe in them,” Rattigan insisted. “There is nothing can go wrong if I don't believe in them.”

  “I won't do it, John,” Duffey still protested. “I do believe in them, and something will go wrong. They're not to play with.”

  Then one day Rattigan gave Duffey a wrapped package. “Hold this for a minute, Melky,” he said. And Duffey held it, but he felt through the wrappings that something was wrong. Then Rattigan took it back from Duffey and unwrapped it. It was a talisman that Rattigan had made as a copy of Duffey's talismans, and it was a good copy.

  “Good! It's a perfect copy,” Rattigan crowed, “and I tricked you into holding it in your hands. Now your power has gone into it. It will work!”

  “If it works, it will work wrong,” Duffey said darkly. Rattigan understood only about half on the matter of the talismans. Duffey himself understood only about two-thirds. But Sebastian, with his quick and unearthly mind, understood it all from the beginning.

  Well, where was this school that Melchisedech Duffey was now attending? And what was its name? Well, there isn't any one set of answers to those questions. Possibly it was Creighton in Omaha. Did they not have a high school as well as a college in those years. Or it may have been Loras in Dubuque, or Rockhurst in Kansas City, or it might have been that boys' boarding school in the shadow of St. Louis University. Really, there wasn't two nickels' worth of difference in those places. And, as a matter of fact, the
‘school’ was at least two of the places named.

  Melchisedech's four years of boarding school high school, while it was all a single experience, did not all happen in the same place. He changed schools at least once, and possibly twice. And those other difficult boys were used to changing schools. Melchisedech Duffey and Charley Murray were together all those four years, but there was a year or so when John Rattigan turned into Delbert Dugan and when Sebastian Hilton turned into Martin Troyat, this to preserve the group of four. Sebastian reappeared in the last year, however. He'd been to school in Europe in the interval. He was with Melchisedech the first and last year of their four year experience.

  The four boys, being good students who didn't have to spend a lot of extra time over books, went out a lot. They all had money. Melchisedech had some of that hand-washing money with which his false kindred had sluffed him off, and he had money that he made in ventures with John Rattigan. Rattigan had money from his own scrambling and scheming. Sebastian had money because he was a rich kid. And Charley Murray had money because he was one of the St. Louis Murrays.

  The boys would catch the movies first-run downtown. They saw every vaudeville bill that came to the city. They ate at downtown restaurants where the meals might run as high as sixty cents. And they sat on stools at that short bar between the kitchen and the long bar in Traveler's Saloon.

  Traveler had no objection to serving twelve and thirteen year old boys when he knew them to be sensible. He served them small glasses of whisky at five cents a glass, and John Rattigan bought a full quart to retail to his school mates in money-making mixtures. He did this twice a week.

  They ate German lunches. They rode streetcars, and went to ice cream parlors. And only when it was after ten o'clock at night and they knew that all the doors were locked at the school did they return there along California Street, or along whatever street it might be in whatever town was the scene that year.

  They would climb over the walls that surrounded the school area. Then they would climb the walls of their own building within the area. John Rattigan the scrambler climbed like a monkey. Sebastian Hilton climbed like a squirrel. Melchisedech Duffey climbed like a competent and careful boy of intelligence and agility, and one who knew that he could call on giant hands for support if he needed them.

  But Charley Murray climbed in nightly terror. He was the tallest of them and had the greatest reach. But sometimes, mid-way in a climb, he would freeze in fear. And yet he would force himself to it. He would make it all the way up with them, up the walls and through the windows.

  Then it would be low-wick lamp time in the rooms, and stuff-the-door-crack time. The merchants Rattigan and Duffey would set out their merchandise for the ten-thirty market if it was a store night. And Charley Murray and Sebastian Hilton would fling themselves feverishly into their books, for a very little while.

  Sebastian was as fast of mind and eye as he was of hand and foot. He devoured books in every tongue of the world, as he said. Really he had traveled in France and Italy, and he was far and away the best first-year French Student in the school. He was the best first-year student at everything: Latin, Greek, English Composition, Algebra, American History, Religion. And he was the best customer that Rattigan and Duffey had for their book sales.

  Rattigan and Duffey bought and sold a hundred or so books, new and used every week. Rattigan had a feel for value and profit in books. Duffey didn't have it at first, but he pirated the mind and thinking fingers and eyes of Rattigan till he had a pretty good feel for money worth.

  Melchisedech also ransacked and pirated the minds of Charley Murray and Sebastian Hilton. From Murray he received a great good nature and an easy honesty, and the Lace Curtain Irish elegance. He would go back and dip into that mind for the rest of his life whenever he felt himself becoming despondent, whenever he felt himself becoming dishonest.

  From Sebastian he pirated a really extensive and light-suffused intelligence and infallible taste. There was no way he could appropriate the complete swiftness of the Sebastian mind, and there were things in that mind that assumed their proper shape only under the conditions of high speed. But Duffey could handle very much of what he found there. But to the store again.

  If it was a store night, the boys would come in with the merchandise about twenty minutes after ten o'clock. The boys brought stuff they wished to sell, and Rattigan and Duffey would take the things and sell them on commission. They didn't make a great amount on the commission sales: they were mostly an accommodation. But these floating items did add to the attractiveness and volume of the merchandise and they gave a good setting to the profit items.

  The sales ran front ten-thirty to midnight on sale nights, about three nights a week. Candy and sandwiches were on sale every night, but not the full line of merchandise. The sales were held by candle light or by kerosene lamp. After curfew bell, at ten minutes to ten, the gas was turned off to the boys' rooms from ten o'clock at night till five o'clock in the morning. Boys were not to have gas lights available during the hours for sleep.

  So it was always dim light for the sales, and Rattigan didn't really need his green eye shade in that faint light. But it had become his trade mark. There was lots of food for sale. There was new sheet music and new magazines as well as books. There were carbonated drinks, and there were water-mix sweet drinks. They had root beer and ginger beer, California Fruit chewing gum, coffee and tea and cocoa, candies and sweet bulls. There were the always popular pigs' feet.

  At about mid-point in a sale, Charley Murray would put aside his reading and would do several new and stunning magic tricks for the customers. Candle light and low-wick kerosene light give great advantage to magic acts that might be exposed as trickery by the strong, white illumination of gaslight fixtures.

  There was a whisky bar for the older boys. Thirteen year old John Rattigan was firm in his refusal to sell to anyone under sixteen years old. They sold the small glasses of watered whisky for ten cents each and seven cents of that was profit. There would be as many as a hundred boys coming to some of the sales, and as much as ten dollars profit. But when midnight rang on the ghostly bell across the area, no more transactions might begin.

  “Time, gentlemen!” John Rattigan would announce. “Quickly, quickly, let us wind it up quickly. “ And they would wind it up as quickly is they could. When the last of the customers was gone, the four boys who lived in the room would pray, and then they'd go to bed. Rattigan was always the last one. He would blow out the final candle. he would undress in the dark, for he was curiously modest. He would take off his green eye shade last of all. Then he would go to bed.

  So they lived out their days in enterprise and diligence and happiness and learning and purity.

  5

  ‘Chastity is the lily among virtues and makes men almost equal to angels. Nothing is beautiful but what is pure, and the purity of men is chastity. Chastity is called honesty, and its possession honor. It is also called integrity, and its opposite, corruption. In short, it has its own peculiar glory of being the fair and unspotted virtue of both soul and body.’ — St. Francis de Sales

  Castitas, castitas, and the peculiar chastity of mind that is the requirement of the highest intelligence! These were correct definitions and statements. Not one of the boys ever became so base as to depart from these definitions or to use words to mean their opposites. These four were good boys who had never been corrupted, and several of them would never be corrupted in any of their worlds or lives. Melchisedech Duffey would suffer a little corruption now and then, but he never repudiated the definitions or defended corruption as anything other than the opposite of integrity. Everybody has lived in a golden age. Quite a number of persons continue to live in one.

  As to his special state in life, Duffey had already made all the explanations possible. He had selected an older priest of the school as his confessor, and he had explained that he was a true magician and sorcerer and magus. This was accepted, and was always taken into account. Melchis
edech was told that a magus was subjected to peculiar temptations in life: overweening pride and other things; and he was given much good advice.

  There was, as it happened, in the neighborhood and in the acquaintance of the boys, a Lily among the virtues who was also a beauty without blemish. The boys held Sunday afternoon sales that were licit. These were allowed and approved by the Jesuit masters of the school. To the Sunday sales would come many of the day students is well as the boarders. And also non-students would come, and students from other schools, friends, visitors, grown-up people, even girls. One of the girls who came most often was Lily Koch.

  As a merchant, Lily was the counterpart of Rattigan and Duffey. She merchandised at St. Mary Major's School for Girls, a combination boarding school and day school. And Lily was a combination student. She was a boarding student when she wished to be, and she had a private room such as only the richer students had. And she was also a day student when she wished to be, for she had rich and powerful kindred who lived in a mansion that was directly across the road from the front gate of St. Mary Major's. In her room at school, she held a Wednesday night sale which was private, and in the house of her kindred she held a Saturday morning sale which was public. This Saturday morning sale was sometimes in the big living room and sometimes on the veranda, depending on the weather.

  Lily lacked one item for her Wednesday night sales and she asked the boys to get it for her. Boys could go in some places where girls couldn't. So Duffey began, once a week, to buy Lily a quart of better whisky than he and Rattigan sold to their own customers. Lily could get shaved ice. She could get French bitters and such things. She served her classmates classier drinks than the boys ever knew the names of.

  Lily sold art at the Saturday morning public sales. Duffey had hardly known what art was. But it came to him now like a revelation, and he would have to know all about it.