by Helen Wells
“What about his formula? Was it for a poor old man’s hobby that you three young idiots tore out a wall?”
“But the formula is so much more than an old man’s hobby,” Lisette insisted. “Mrs. Harrison, we can’t stop now! I don’t know just how to say it, to make you see—”
“You mean, I suppose, that you are so deeply involved you must finish what you’ve started? Ordinarily I would say that’s a good, conscientious attitude. But, Lisette, what makes you think Pierre Gauthier’s perfume formula is any good?”
“No one ever believed in Great grandfather’s formula, but I do!”
“How do you know—not merely believe sentimentally and blindly, but know—that the formula actually creates a fine perfume?”
Lisette looked stricken. Cherry tried to come to her rescue.
“Pierre Gauthier’s garden flowers are wonderfully fragrant, Mrs. Harrison. The special roses and the silver lace—”
“The perfume may not resemble the flowers at all,” Mrs. Harrison pointed out. “Even if your great-grandfather Pierre used those flowers in making his perfume, a chemical change during the process could alter the flowers’ fragrance entirely. Isn’t that correct, Dr. Alan?”
“Yes, that’s right, Mrs. Harrison. Odor depends on invisible molecules and their organic structure. If you crush a rose petal, you change the structure and possibly the fragrance.”
“There, you see! Lisette, you are dreaming.”
Alan cleared his throat. “Well, it’s a funny thing about odors, Mrs. Harrison. Odor,” he said, “defies chemical explanation. Chemistry plus something unknown make a scent what it is. Chemistry and mathematics together cannot analyze, for instance, a violet. So you see, Mrs. Harrison, there’s a fifty fifty chance for any reasonably skilled perfume formula.”
Lisette looked as if she could hug him. Cherry beamed at him. Mrs. Harrison leaned back in her chair, saying she was open to reason.
“Just give me a chance to prove it is a lovely scent,” Lisette cried.
“Since you have gone this far in the search, I will not stop you now. I myself would be very happy if the formula could be found and if it worked out well.”
Still, she was dubious. She looked so worried, so tired in her splendid dress, that Cherry realized what a burden they were putting on her, had been putting on her, all along.
“Mrs. Harrison?” Cherry ventured. “We—we thought you knew or guessed what we were up to.”
The lady smiled. “I knew Lisette was prowling, and I thought you were, too, Cherry, but I trusted you.” They felt immensely grateful to her for that. “So I didn’t pay much attention. I’ve had school finances so much on my mind, as you know—”
Lisette boldly said, “The perfume formula might earn something for the school. If we find it.” Her glance strayed to the open closet.
“My dear Lisette, I hope your dream comes true, and you are sweet to think of the school. We would have to discuss anything of that sort. But there is a time limit on your dream. Yes, go ahead with whatever you have found. I’m interested, in spite of my better judgment.”
“It’s Pierre Gauthier’s cupboard in there!” Lisette told her.
Mrs. Harrison nodded and it struck Cherry that the headmistress accepted all these extraordinary facts without much explanation.
In order to open the cupboard, Lisette went to the bureau drawer and took out the doll. She was busy extracting the key from the doll’s little handbag when Mrs. Harrison noticed and exclaimed:
“Where did you find that doll? I haven’t seen a doll like that one in years!”
Lisette handed her the little wooden manikin, explaining that it had resided behind the stuck drawer. Then she presented the doll’s key to Alan. They all crowded behind the young man, focusing their flashlights, while he tried the key in the cupboard’s keyhole.
It fit! Alan turned the key, and with a creak the cupboard door swung open. A strong odor of decaying, cloyingly sweet chemicals floated out to them.
On the cupboard’s shelves stood the remains of Pierre’s miniature laboratory. Cherry could identify old fashioned scales and measuring spoons and stirring rods. More important, she saw old, empty bottles and jars whose labels of perfume ingredients were still dimly legible. Finding those labels provided them with valuable information.
“Where is the formula?” Lisette mumbled in her ear.
“I thought you already had the formula,” Mrs. Harrison said in some exasperation.
“Part of it is in the journal,” Lisette said lamely. “I thought—from one passage in the journal—that Great-grandfather might have left the complete formula here in the cupboard somewhere.”
This was a serious lack. Cherry had seen the fragment of the formula in the journal and understood it to a degree with the aid of Lisette’s perfume textbook from the library. Though the journal mentioned the Provence, China, and fawn roses and the silver spray, it gave no clue to the all-important thing—which flower was the key to the perfume.
Cherry hastily figured. First, the journal hinted strongly at the existence of further notes. A second thing: from her own nursing training, Cherry knew that any scientist experimenting in a laboratory records his findings in a laboratory book of some sort. Such a record book naturally belongs with the lab equipment; it was not likely that Pierre carried his working notes around in his pocket.
These two facts made Cherry suspect that further notes must have existed, and might still exist. If they were not actually in the cupboard, might they not be near it? Would these notes be written on scraps of paper, or would they be written as systematically as the diary? In fact, Cherry wondered, mightn’t the notes be written in a largish, leather-bound notebook similar to the personal journal?
“Hmm! But that’s too big to fit into the cupboard! In that case—”
“What’s too big, Cherry?”
She was too busy to answer them. Cherry ran her hand along the newly revealed wall. She was probing for a hidden drawer or ledge or even a wall safe which might hold a second journal. But she found nothing. She walked slowly through the long, narrow supply closet with its shallow shelves of linens and nursing equipment, and trained her flashlight’s beam up, down, and around. On the closet ceiling the square outline of a trap door caught her attention.
“Alan! Would you bring a chair, please? Let’s try that trap door.” She held the light steady so the others could see.
“There’s nothing up there, Cherry,” said Mrs. Harrison. She explained that in these flat-roofed Victorian houses there were no attics, only a few feet of air space or at most a very low, unfinished garret in which a person could only crouch. These few feet served only for ventilation and insulation.
Cherry said politely, “If you don’t object, it might not hurt to have a look, anyhow.”
For there was a chance that old Pierre, jealous of his perfume secrets, feeling alone in a not too understanding household, might have kept his formula notes in a safe hiding place. A bureau drawer or a wall cupboard could be invaded, but an inconspicuous ceiling trap door was fairly safe.
Alan brought the chair and, as he was the tallest, climbed up and pushed until the trap door moved. Lisette handed him a wooden ruler with which to prop the trap door open. Alan reached up and felt around with both hands.
“Nothing up here but cobwebs and dust—can’t see a thing. Wait, I think I touched something.”
“Want a flashlight?” Cherry asked.
“Never mind, I have it, whatever it is.”
Covered with dust, hardly recognizable, it was a crumbling, largish, flat, leather-bound notebook which Alan handed down. Cherry and Lisette wiped it off with dampened paper towels. Mrs. Harrison murmured that she was glad Pierre Gauthier had not relegated the charming little doll to the ceiling trap door and all that dust, but Cherry scarcely heard. She and Lisette could hardly believe their luck and relief at finding a second notebook. Its pages bore Pierre’s spidery, Spencerian handwriting, as did his personal j
ournal, but these pages were filled with formulas and directions.
“In French,” Alan remarked, reading over their shoulders. He had washed, and was drying, his hands. “Will you look at that! Grammes, litres, and what’s this mean? Ajouter ensuite 500 centimétres cubes d’eau—”
“I can interpret it,” Lisette insisted. “After all, when I found Pierre’s personal journal in Papa’s old trunk, I figured it out with the French dictionary. I’ll figure out this second journal with the perfume textbook.”
Curiously enough, Mrs. Harrison was not paying any attention to their discovery. She was holding and touching the doll. She did not look up even when Lisette, excitedly leafing through the pages of the formulary, exclaimed:
“I think this is it! I think this is the key information!” She translated haltingly, “‘The base is silver lace, yet my creation is a rosy odor, for which I depend chiefly on my Provence rose!’”
Mrs. Harrison walked to the doorway and paused, still holding the old doll. “I think, for reasons of my own, I shall keep this little creature,” she said.
Tears stood in her eyes, Cherry saw, just before Mrs. Harrison turned away and left. She thought she saw tears in Lisette’s young eyes as well.
CHAPTER XI
Experiment
A BURST OF LAUGHTER SOUNDED OUTSIDE THE infirmary door. It sounded to Cherry as if the entire student body of the Jamestown School were scrambling and chattering from open doors all down the hall. Friday afternoons were always a bedlam. Over three portable phonographs playing like mad, Sibyl shouted:
“None of you care about me the tiniest little bit! Won’t somebody run down and mail this note for me?”
“Oh, Sib, we’re busy! What did Mrs. Harrison say we’re supposed to put in next?” That was Francie, one of Sibyl’s loyal clique—actually evading the duchess’s order.
“Who’s using all the ribbon?” That squeal sounded like Jannie, with her mouth full of candy. “Honestly! Give me some more of the pink and rose.”
“Gee, these are going to look darling.”
From down the hall Nancy called, “Who wants to cram with me for the monthly torture quizzes?”
Somebody called back, “Later, Nan—this sachet deal is getting glamorous.”
Cherry smiled as she worked in the infirmary and reflected that she wouldn’t mind making a sachet herself. Mrs. Harrison had described how to do it the other evening, in the sitting room, instead of reading poetry for them as she often did. The process was simple but made a most attractive gift:
Choose a chiffon handkerchief in a pastel color and in its center place a mixture of dried lavender flowers, rose geranium leaves, rose petals, and a few crushed leaves of lemon verbena. Then tie up the handkerchief with ribbons in colors representing the contents. These sachets were to be placed in with one’s garments and writing paper, where they lent a dainty fragrance.
Cherry had thought Lisette would be encouraged at this proof of the headmistress’s interest in the subject of scents. But Lisette was annoyed because many of the girls begged roses and leaves from the conservatory just when every blossom might be needed to compound Pierre’s perfume.
“Besides,” Lisette had protested to Cherry, “we don’t want the whole school to get so interested in perfumes—or they’ll guess what we’re up to in the infirmary.”
Cherry and Lisette were doing their best to keep the experiment a secret, chiefly because they wanted to avoid time consuming interruptions. So far this week the two girls had accomplished a good deal. They had set up an improvised chemistry laboratory on a spare enamel topped table, using the infirmary’s electric stove, rubber tubing, saucepans, kettles, and glass jars and bottles. Both girls were studying the perfume textbook intensively. (“The library fine on this book will be a ransom, even if I did take it for two months,” Lisette said. But Alan promised to try to renew the book’s time limit for her when next he went to Riverton.) Alan had ordered for them, through his physician’s contacts with chemical supply houses, certain of the perfume ingredients such as ninety per cent alcohol. Cherry had ordered from a perfumery supply house, by mail, one very expensive ounce of extract of ilang-ilang, which means “flower of flowers,” a yellowish-green flower grown in Burma, and which Pierre’s formula required. In addition, Cherry and Lisette had pieced together Pierre’s formula, until it seemed to them and to Alan to appear complete and reasonable. Of course, no one ever knew about anything as volatile and unpredictable as perfume. By the end of the week all of their ingredients, equipment, and notes were assembled. Now Cherry and Lisette were ready actually to try out the precious, questionable formula.
Saturday was their great chance. The chateau was quiet and nearly deserted this sunny morning. Virtually the entire school had gone off on their horses for an overnight trip to River’s End and the lodge. Lisette, who was a good horsewoman, would not have missed this trip for anything, excepting this was the perfect chance to experiment. Cherry had been invited, too, but chose loyally to remain with Lisette. Also, she was bursting with curiosity to find out how Pierre’s formula would work.
“Or whether we can make it work,” Cherry said under her breath. She rigged up the apparatus and plugged in the small electric stove.
Lisette came in with her garden basket filled with silver lace and the three types of roses she had just picked. The girl’s hands shook as she stripped off the petals.
“Do you think we can really distill out the flowers’ essential oils, Cherry?”
“Certainly. There’s no special trick to that part. It would go faster if we had a hospital sterilizer.”
The girls worked quickly, knowing that the odor changes as the flowers die. Lisette weighed the petals on the borrowed kitchen scale, translating from Pierre’s grammes into ounces, and using the proportions noted in Pierre’s formula. As she finished weighing each batch, Cherry put the petals into a wire basket or strainer, and placed this in a kettle, adding half as much water as petals. She fit a cork over the spout of the kettle; this cork had a hole cut in it. Into the cork Cherry inserted tubing, about four feet long, while Lisette spread putty around the kettle’s spout and lid to make it airtight.
“Now!” said Cherry. “Here we go.”
She placed the kettle full of petals and water in a large saucepan of boiling water on the stove. Lisette took the free end of the tubing and placed it in a small open jar which was set away from the stove, and lower than the stove. Cherry brought a pan of cold water and coiled the tubing in it, where the tubing ran between kettle and jar.
“I can smell it already,” Lisette said hopefully.
A delicious fragrance of blended flowers began to fill the infirmary, as the water in the kettle heated and vaporized into steam. What happened was this: the vapor passed through the mass of petals, became chilled as it passed through the cold tubing, and condensed into small drops that fell into the open jar. These drops were the essential natural oils which gave the flowers their fragrance. It took two hours to complete the distillation, and it took patience.
“Did you notice,” Lisette asked Cherry, “that the air in here, while it smells nice, doesn’t smell exactly like the fresh flowers did? Roses can be distilled but maybe silver lace can’t. The textbook doesn’t mention silver lace—”
“Now don’t start worrying. We have to allow for changes due to the distillation, and correct it later with chemicals.”
Following the instructions of the perfume text, the girls removed the glass jar with its distillate—the precious key to Pierre’s perfume—covered it, and set it aside. In three or four hours the essential oils would rise and float on the surface of the water in the jar. The girls cleaned and put away this part of their equipment and went downstairs for lunch. They could hardly tell what they were eating; everything tasted of roses. Apparently some of the natural flower oils had clung to their hands.
That afternoon Cherry and Lisette carefully skimmed off the oil in the jar, using a spoon at first until Cherry had the
bright idea of using an eye dropper. They transferred the oil to a small, clean amber bottle, filled it to the top with flower oil, and sealed the bottle with hot paraffin.
“The book says, ‘Store in a cool, dark place,’” Lisette read.
“Well, what about the infirmary’s little refrigerator?”
“Then all the medicines will taste of flowers,” Lisette giggled.
“Oops! Don’t throw away that water that’s left in the jar.”
Lisette sniffed it. “But of course. It’s rose water. We have a perfectly nice cologne here. If we add a little pink or lavender coloring, it would seem more fragrant—”
“We can’t stop now to tint toilet water, Lisette. We’re racing against perishable flower oils.”
Now all the thinking and studying and pondering of Pierre’s formula, which they had done during these past days, helped them to act with dispatch. Luckily for them, the old formula called for chemicals and perfumers’ synthetics which were still in use and which, like the alcohol base, Alan had obtained for them. This was necessary because several other ingredients beside the essential flower oils were needed to create a finished perfume. Lisette read aloud, translating Pierre’s old formula as they had pieced it together from the two journals:
“Over a period, of a week, preferably, infuse 7 litres of 90 per cent alcohol with:
Distilled rose water … 5 litres
Extract of commercial orange flower
water ………… 3 “
Essence (in equal parts) of fawn, China
and Provence roses …….200 grammes
Essence of silver lace ……110 “
Essence of bitter almonds …… 20 “
Essence of bergamot …… 25 “
Vanillin ……… 15 “
