“Don’t be ridiculous, Maude,” Professor De Busque harumphed, sending the little tendrils of hair around her face flying. “There’s absolutely no such thing.”
“Actually, I do believe there is such a--” here Professor P’ohlig broke off to partake in a coughing fit, and then continued, “--thing. Yes yes,” she went on, rifling through a 1768 Encyclopedia Britannica, “Well, it doesn’t seem to have been discovered at the time. But there most certainly is such a thing as internal decapitation.”
“I knew it.” Maude said matter-of-factly.
“Although I doubt you’ve got it,” Molly muttered under her breath, sniffling.
“But look.” Maude shuffled over in front of the professors’ desks. “My head’s all wobbly. I suppose it will just always be like that now.”
“Nonsense,” Emily said, looking up from the text of “Gray’s Anatomy” that she was currently livening up, “It’s just that your humors are out of balance. It’s probably your phlegm.”
“No, Emily, I’m the one with the current phlegm problem, thank you,” she said, dabbing at her nose with a threadbare handkerchief that had belonged to Edvard Munch’s poor, poor sister. “Although I think, like poor Sophie here,” she waved the handkerchief limply, “I might actually be verging on the tubercular.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Emily said for the second time that day, and threw down her pen, which she shouldn’t have done, as it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Montblanc. “It’s just yellow bile!”
“How vile,” murmured Mr. Periwinkle, who was limping in the door. “There’s no post today, I’m afraid, young ladies. I just didn’t quite feel up to it.”
“Black bile, to be sure,” Emily proclaimed, to everyone’s horror.
“What on earth are you on about today, Emily?” said Molly, rubbing her delicate collarbone which always came up in a rash when she was feverish. “We’re all feeling positively rotten, and here you are calling us names. I think you’re being bloody awful, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Precisely!” Emily shouted, and with a flick of the Trollope, dashed off into the house, leaving the other three members of Poppycock quite confused indeed.
***
“It all started with Hippocrates, you see,” said Emily a short time later in the kitchen, once she’d gotten everyone back on her side. “He believed in four humors present in the body, and sometimes one or another supersedes the others, and everything goes haywire, which seems to be what’s happening with all of us.”
“Doesn’t sound that funny to me,” Mr. Periwinkle sniffed. Molly and Maude giggled and Emily shot stern looks all round till they stopped. She straightened the kerchief that she tied on whenever a good deal of thinking had to be done.
“Maude, your humor right now seems to be phlegmatic, which means your brain’s a bit chilly. I think you’ve been eating too many of those tuna fish and onion sandwiches, my dear, so to liven you up a bit, it’s going to be lots of nice rich soups.” Maude sat back in her chair, quite pleased, and Molly and Mr. Periwinkle looked hopeful that they would get the same sort of prescription.
“Molly, you’re choleric.”
“I have cholera?!” Molly shrieked, jumping from her chair.
“No, dear,” Emily soothed, “Choleric. It means that you’re bad-tempered and a bit on the dry side, so I’m prescribing lots of rest and liquids and moisturizers.”
Molly twitched her nose and sat down. “Doesn’t sound like that much fun, but alright.”
“It’s not fun, that’s the point,” Emily said, looking over the pearly rims of Bette Davis’ old glasses from “Now, Voyager”, which made her eyes exceedingly large. “But it’s the kind of temperament that a lot of military dictators have, and we won’t have Napoleon here. I’m afraid I shall brook no argument. You’ve been a little on the bossy side lately.”
Molly shrunk in her seat a little bit, remembering how during Poppycock spring cleaning earlier in the week, she’d just left out bowls of ice cream and caramels for the Fwendy, instead of pitching in like everyone else.
Emily nodded. “I thought so.”
“And whatever is my problem?” Mr. Periwinkle sighed plaintively. “Can it even be cured?”
Emily sat down next to their bedraggled postman. “Poor melancholic Mr. Periwinkle. Too much gin in your spleen, I’m afraid. Perhaps a little champagne on the hour for the rest of the day?”
His wistful expression perked up immediately.
“Well,” Molly said timidly. “It seems we’re all on our way back to health. But you said there were four humors. And there’s four of us. So what does that make you?”
Three heads swiveled to the kerchiefed Professor. Emily smiled. “I’m sanguine.”
“And...and what does that mean?” Mr. Periwinkle asked hesitantly, not wanting a lengthy explanation to delay the promised champagne any longer.
“I’m fairly close to perfect,” she said, having the decency to blush a bit.
And once Emily had doled out the medications of soup and moisturizers and champagne, everyone thanked her with a hug. And another day at Poppycock ended as many of them did, with everyone in front of the fire under enormous duvets, watching an episode of “Upstairs, Downstairs”, waiting for their humors to realign.
