Thus and thus only did she suggest the necessity for immediate action. Also her fear lest Mercier should find Mr. Ransome out. As if Mercier had not found him out long ago; as if he hadn't warned Ranny, time and again, of what might happen.
"All right, I'll go."
He went by the right-hand door at the back of the shop, and down a short and exceedingly narrow passage, lined with shallow shelves for the storage of drugs.
Another door at the end of the passage led straight into the dispensing-room outside, a long shed of corrugated iron run up against the garden wall and lined with honey-colored pine. Under a wide stretch of window was a work table. At one end of this table was a slab of white marble; at the other a porcelain sink fitted with taps and sprays for hot and cold water. From the far end of the room where the stove was came a smothered roar of gas flames. On the broken inner wall were shelves fitted with drawers of all sizes, each with its label, and above them other shelves with row after row of jars. Near the stove, more shelves with more and more jars, with phials, kettles, pannikins, and pipkins. Everywhere else shelves of medicine bottles, innumerable medicine bottles of all sorts and sizes, giving to the honey-colored walls a decorative glimmer of sea-blue and sea-green.
All this was brilliantly illuminated with gas that burned on every bracket.
To Ransome's senses it was as if the faint, the delicate colors of the place gave a more frightful grossness and pungency to its smell. Dying asafetida struggled still with gas fumes, and was pierced by another odor, a sharp and bitter odor that he knew.
At the long table, under the hanging gaselier, in shirt sleeves and apron, Mr. Ransome stood. The light fell full on his sallow baldness and its ring of iron-gray hair; on his sallow, sickly face; on his little long, peaked nose with its peevish nostrils; even on his thin and irritable mouth, unhidden by the scanty, close-trimmed iron-gray mustache and beard. He was weedy to the last degree.
Ranny came near and gazed inscrutably at this miracle of physical unfitness. Under his gaze the pitiful and insignificant figure bore itself as with a majesty of rectitude.
Mr. Ransome had before him a prescription, a medicine bottle, a large bottle of distilled water, two measuring-glasses, and a smaller bottle half full of a pale-amber liquid. He had been standing motionless, staring at these objects with a peculiar and intent solemnity. Now, as if challenged and challenging, he drew the smaller measuring-glass toward him with one hand. He held it to the light and moved his finger nail slowly along the middle measuring line. Then with two hands that trembled he poured into it a part of the infusion. The liquid went tink-tinkling in a succession of little jerks. He held it to the light; it rose a good inch above the line he had marked. He shook his head at it slowly, with an air of admonition and reproof, and poured it back into the bottle.