The Lovephiltre of Ikey Schoenstein by "O Henry"

 

                    The Lovephiltre of Ikey Schoenstein

The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, nestled between Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not view pharmacy as a realm of bric-a-brac, scents, and ice-cream soda. If you ask for a painkiller there, it won't hand you a bonbon.
The Blue Light scorns the labor-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day, pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled out on its pill-tile, divided with a spatula, shaped with finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia, and delivered in small round, pasteboard pill-boxes. The store sits on a corner where coveys of ragged-plumed, joyous children play, soon to become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that await them inside.

Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and a friend of his customers. Thus, it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is not frilly. As it should be, the druggist is a counselor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated, and whose medicine is often poured, untouched, into the gutter. Therefore, Ikey's corniform, bespectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure were well-known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were highly sought after.

Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's, two squares away. Mrs. Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in vain—you must have guessed it—Ikey adored Rosy. She permeated all his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal—the dispensary contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter, he was a superior being, calmly aware of his special knowledge and worth; outside, he was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed stroller, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.

The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, apt trope!) was Chunk McGowan. Mr. McGowan was also vying for the bright smiles tossed about by Rosy. Yet he was no outfielder like Ikey; he caught them straight from the bat. At the same time, he was Ikey's friend and customer, often dropping into the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.

One afternoon, McGowan drifted in, in his silent, easy way, and sat—comely, smooth-faced, tough, indomitable, good-natured—upon a stool.

"Ikey," said he, as his friend fetched his mortar and sat opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, "get busy with your ear. It's drugs for me if you've got the line I need."

 

Ikey scanned Mr. McGowan's countenance for the usual evidences of conflict but found none.

 

"Take your coat off," he ordered. "I guess already that you've been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I've told you many times those Dagoes would do you up."

 

Mr. McGowan smiled. "Not them," he said. "Not any Dagoes. But you've located the diagnosis all right—it's under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey—Rosy and I are going to run away and get married tonight."

Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle but felt it not. Meanwhile, Mr. McGowan's smile faded into a look of perplexed gloom.

 

"That is," he continued, "if she keeps in the notion until the time comes. We've been laying pipes for the gateway for two weeks. One day she says she will; the same evening she says nixy. We've agreed on tonight, and Rosy's stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days. But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm afraid she'll stand me up when it comes to the scratch."

 

"You said you wanted drugs," remarked Ikey.

 

Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed—a condition opposed to his usual demeanor. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.

 

"I wouldn't have this double handicap make a false start tonight for a million," he said. "I've got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I've engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9:30. It's got to come off. And if Rosy doesn't change her mind again!"—Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.

"I don't see then yet," said Ikey shortly, "what makes it that you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it."

"Old man Riddle doesn't like me a bit," went on the uneasy suitor, bent upon marshaling his arguments. "For a week, he hasn't let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn't for losing a boarder, they'd have bounced me long ago. I'm making $20 a week, and she'll never regret flying the coop with Chunk McGowan."

"You will excuse me, Chunk," said Ikey. "I must make a prescription that is to be called for soon."

"Say," said McGowan, looking up suddenly, "say, Ikey, isn't there a drug of some kind—some kind of powder that'll make a girl like you better if you give 'em to her?"

Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:

"Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker uptown and fed 'em to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose, he was ace-high, and everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They were married in less than two weeks."

Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires. Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy's territory, he was seeking to guard every point against possible failure.

"I thought," went on Chunk hopefully, "that if I had one of them powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper tonight, it might brace her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she doesn't need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff'll work just for a couple of hours, it'll do the trick."

"When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?" asked Ikey.

"Nine o'clock," said Mr. McGowan. "Supper's at seven. At eight, Rosy goes to bed with a headache. At nine, old Parvenzano lets me through to his backyard, where there's a board off Riddle's fence, next door. I go under her window and help her down the fire escape. We've got to make it early on the preacher's account. It's all dead easy if Rosy doesn't balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?"

Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.

"Chunk," said he, "it is of drugs of that nature that pharmacists must exercise much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I entrust a powder like that. But for you, I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy think of you."

Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There, he crushed to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia. To them, he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk and folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult, this powder would ensure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan

, telling him to administer it in a liquid if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.

The subtlety of Ikey's action becomes apparent upon recounting his subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed McGowan's plans for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a stout man, brick-dusty in complexion, and sudden in action.

"Much obliged," he said briefly to Ikey. "The lazy Irish loafer! My own room's just above Rosy's. I'll go up there myself after supper, load the shotgun, and wait. If he comes into my backyard, he'll go away in an ambulance instead of a bridal chaise."

With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for many hours of deep slumber and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was indeed close to discomfiture.

All night in the Blue Light Store, he waited at his duties for any chance news of the tragedy, but none came.

At eight o'clock in the morning, the day clerk arrived, and Ikey hurriedly started for Mrs. Riddle's to learn the outcome. And, behold! As he stepped out of the store, Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing streetcar and grasped his hand—Chunk McGowan with a victor's smile and flushed with joy.

"Pulled it off," said Chunk, with Elysium in his grin. "Rosy hit the fire escape on time to a second, and we were under the wire at the Reverend's at 9:30 and a quarter. She's up at the flat—she cooked eggs this morning in a blue kimono—Lord! How lucky I am! You must come up someday, Ikey, and have a meal with us. I've got a job down near the bridge, and that's where I'm heading now."

"The—the powder?" stammered Ikey.

"Oh, that stuff you gave me!" said Chunk, broadening his grin. "Well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I said to myself, 'Chunk, if

you get the girl, get her on the square—don't try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.' And I kept the paper you gave me in my pocket. Then my eyes fell on another party present, who, I said to myself, is lacking in proper affection toward his future son-in-law, so I watched my chance and dumped that powder in old man Riddle's coffee—see?"