From the very beginning of the war Tish was determined to go to France.
But she is a truthful woman, and her age kept her from being accepted.
She refused, however, to believe that this was the reason, and blamed
her rejection on Aggie and myself.
“Age fiddlesticks!” she said, knitting violently. “The plain truth
is—and you might as well acknowledge it, Lizzie—that they would take
me by myself quick enough, just to get the ambulance I’ve offered, if
for no other reason. But they don’t want three middle-aged women, and I
don’t know that I blame them.”
That was during September, I think, and Tish had just received her third
rejection. They were willing enough to take the ambulance, but they
would not let Tish drive it. I am quite sure it was September, for I
remember that Aggie was having hay fever at the time, and she fell to
sneezing violently.
Tish put down her knitting and stared at Aggie fixedly until the
paroxysm was over.
“Exactly,” she observed, coldly. “Imagine me creeping out onto a
battlefield to gather up the wounded, and Aggie crawling behind, going
off like an alarm clock every time she met a clump of golden rod, or
whatever they have in France to produce hay fever.”
“I could stay in the ambulance, Tish,” Aggie protested.
“I understand,” Tish went on, in an inflexible tone, “that those German
snipers have got so that they shoot by ear. One sneeze would probably be
fatal. Not only that,” she went on, turning to me, “but you know
perfectly well, Lizzie, that a woman of your weight would be always
stepping on brush and sounding like a night attack.”
“Not at all,” I replied, slightly ruffled. “And for a very good reason.
I should not be there. As to my weight, Tish, my mother was always
considered merely a fine figure of a woman, and I am just her size. It
is only since this rage for skinny women——”
But Tish was not listening. She drew a deep sigh, and picked up her
knitting again.
“We’d better not discuss it,” she said. But in these days of efficiency
it seems a mistake that a woman who can drive an ambulance and can’t
turn the heel of a stocking properly to save her life, should be
knitting socks that any soldier with sense would use to clean his gun
with, or to tie around a sore throat, but never to wear.
It was, I think, along in November that Charlie Sands, Tish’s nephew,
came to see me. He had telephoned, and asked me to have Aggie there. So
I called her up, and told her to buy some cigarettes on the way. I
remember that she was very irritated when she arrived, although the very
soul of gentleness usually.
She came in and slammed a small package onto my table.
“There!” she said. “And don’t ever ask me to do such a thing again. The
man in the shop winked at me when I said they were not for myself.”
However, Aggie is never angry for any length of time, and a moment later
she was remarking that Mr. Wiggins had always been a smoker, and that
one of his workmen had blamed his fatal accident on the roof to smoke
from his pipe getting into his eyes.
Shortly after that I was surprised to find her in tears.
“I was just thinking, Lizzie,” she said. “What if Mr. Wiggins had lived,
and we had had a son, and he had decided to go and fight!”
She then broke down and sobbed violently, and it was some time before I
could calm her. Even then it was not the fact that she had no son which
calmed her.
“Of course I’m silly, Lizzie,” she said. “I’ll stop now. Because of
course they don’t _all_ get killed, or even wounded. He’d probably come
out all right, and every one says the training is fine for them.”
Charlie Sands came in shortly after, and having kissed us both and tried
on a night shirt I was making for the Red Cross, and having found the
cookie jar in the pantry and brought it into my sitting room, sat down
and came to business.
“Now,” he said. “What’s she up to?”
He always referred to Tish as “she,” to Aggie and myself.
“She has given up going to France,” I replied.
“Perhaps! What does Hannah report?”
I am sorry to say that, fearing Tish’s impulsive nature, we had felt
obliged to have Hannah watch her carefully. Tish has a way of breaking
out in unexpected places, like a boil, as Charlie Sands once observed,
and by knowing her plans in advance we have sometimes prevented her
acting in a rash manner. Sometimes, not always.
“Hannah says everything is quiet,” Aggie said. “Dear Tish has apparently
given up all thought of going abroad. At least, Hannah says she no
longer practises first aid on her. Not since the time Tish gave her an
alcohol bath and she caught cold. Hannah says she made her lie
uncovered, with the window open, so the alcohol would evaporate. But she
gave notice the next day, which was ungrateful of her, for Tish sat up
all night feeding her things out of her First Aid case, and if she _did_
give her a bit of iodine by mistake——”
“She is no longer interested in First Aid,” I broke in. Aggie has a way
of going on and on, and it was not necessary to mention the matter of
the iodine. “I know that, because I blistered my hand over there the
other day, and she merely told me to stick it in the baking soda jar.”
“That’s curious,” said Charlie Sands.
“Because—— Great Scott, what’s wrong with these cigarettes?”
“They are violet-scented,” Aggie explained. “The smell sticks so, and
Lizzie is fond of violet.”
However, he did not seem to care for them, and appeared positively
ashamed. He opened a window, although it was cold outside, and shook
himself in front of it like a dog. But all he said was:
“I am a meek person, Aunt Lizzie, and I like to humor whims when I can.
But the next time you have a male visitor and offer him a cigarette,
for the love of Mike don’t tell him those brazen gilt-tipped incense
things are mine.”
He then ate nine cookies, and explained why he had come.
“I don’t like the look of things, beloved and respected spinsters,” he
said. “I fear my revered aunt is again up to mischief. You haven’t heard
her say anything more about aeroplanes, have you?”
“No,” I replied, for us both.
“Or submarines?”
“She’s been taking swimming lessons again,” I said, thoughtfully.
“Lizzie!” Aggie cried. “Oh, my poor Tish!”
“I think, however,” said Charlie Sands, “that it is not a submarine.
There are no submarine flivvers, as I understand it, and a full-size one
would run into money. No, I hardly think so. The fact remains, however,
that my respected and revered aunt has made away with about seven
thousand dollars’ worth of bonds that were, until a short time ago,
giving semi-annual birth to plump little coupons. The question is, what
is she up to?”
But we were unable to help him, and at last he went away. His parting
words were:
“Well, there is something in the air, and the only thing to do, I
suppose, is to wait until it drops. But when my beloved female relative
takes to selling bonds without consulting me, and goes out, as I met her
yesterday, with her hat on front side behind, there is something in the
wind. I know the symptoms.”
Aggie and I kept a close watch on Tish after that, but without result,
unless the following incident may be called a result. Although it was
rather a cause, after all, for it brought Mr. Culver into our lives.
I think it important to relate it in detail, as in a way it vindicates
Tish in her treatment of Mr. Culver, although I do not mean by this
statement that there was anything of personal malice in the incident of
June fifth of this year. Those of us who know Tish best realize that she
needs no defence. Her motives are always of the highest, although
perhaps the matter of the police officer was ill-advised. But now that
the story is out, and Mr. Ostermaier very uneasy about the wrong name
being on the marriage license, I think an explanation will do dear Tish
no harm.
I should explain, then, that Tish has retained the old homestead in the
country, renting it to a reliable family. And that it has been our
annual custom to go there for chestnuts each autumn. On the Sunday
following Charlie Sands’ visit, therefore, while Aggie and I were having
dinner with Tish, I suggested that we make our annual pilgrimage the
following day.
“What pilgrimage?” Tish demanded. She was at that time interested in
seeing if a table could be set for thirty-five cents a day per person,
and the meal was largely beans.
“For chestnuts,” I explained.
“I don’t think I’ll go this year,” Tish observed, not looking at either
of us. “I’m not a young woman, and climbing a chestnut tree requires
youth.”
“You could get the farmer’s boy,” Aggie suggested, hopefully. Aggie is a
creature of habit, and clings hard to the past.
“The farmer is not there any more.”
We stared at her in amazement, but she was helping herself to boiled
dandelion at the time, and made no further explanation.
“Why, Tish!” Aggie exclaimed.
“Aggie,” she observed, severely, “if you would only remember that the
world is hungry, you would eat your crusts.”
“I ate crusts for twenty years,” said Aggie, “because I’d been raised to
believe they would make my hair curl. But I’ve come to a time of life
when my digestion means more to me than my looks. And since I’ve had the
trouble with my teeth——”
“Teeth or no teeth,” said Tish, firmly, “eating crusts is a patriotic
duty, Aggie.”
She was clearly disinclined to explain about the farm, but on being
pressed said she had sent the tenants away because they kept pigs, which
was absurd and she knew it.
“Isn’t keeping pigs a patriotic duty?” Aggie demanded, glancing at me
across the table. But Tish ignored the question.
“What about the church?” I asked.
Tish has always given the farm money to missions, and is therefore
Honorary President of the Missionary Society. She did not reply
immediately as she was pouring milk over her cornstarch at the time, but
Hannah, her maid, spoke up rather bitterly.
“If we give the heathen what we save on the table, Miss Lizzie,” she
said, “I guess they’ll do pretty well. I’m that fed up with beans that
my digestion is all upset. I have to take baking soda after my meals,
regular.”
Tish looked up at her sharply.
“Entire armies fight on beans,” she said
“Yes’m,” said Hannah. “I’d fight on ’em too. That’s the way they make me
feel. And if a German bayonet is any worse than the colic I get——”
“Leave the room,” said Tish, in a furious voice, and finished her
cornstarch in silence.
But she is a just woman, and although firm in her manner, she is
naturally kind. After dinner, seeing that Aggie was genuinely
disappointed about the excursion to the farm, she relented and observed
that we would go to the farm as usual.
“After all,” she said, “chestnuts are nourishing, and might take the
place of potatoes in a pinch.”
Here we heard a hollow groan from the pantry, but on Tish demanding its
reason Hannah said, meekly enough, that she had knocked her crazy bone,
and Tish, with her usual magnanimity, did not pursue the subject.
There was a heavy frost that night, and two days later Tish called me up
and fixed the following day for the visit to the farm. On looking back,
I am inclined to think that her usual enthusiasm was absent, but we
suspected nothing. She said that Hannah would put up the luncheon, and
that she had looked up the food value of chestnuts and that it was
enormous. She particularly requested that Aggie should not bake a cake
for the picnic, as had been her custom.
“Cakes,” she said, “are a reckless extravagance. In butter, eggs and
flour a single chocolate layer cake could support three men at the
front for two days, Lizzie,” she said.
I repeated this to Aggie, and she was rather resentful. Aggie, I regret
to say, has rather a weakness for good food.
“Humph!” she said, bitterly. “Very well, Lizzie. But if she expects me
to go out like Balaam’s ass and eat dandelions, I’d rather starve.”
Neither Aggie nor I is inclined to be suspicious, and although we
noticed Tish’s rather abstracted expression that morning, we laid it to
the fact that Charlie Sands had been talking about going to the American
Ambulance in France, which Tish opposed violently, although she was more
than anxious to go herself.
Aggie put in her knitting bag the bottle of blackberry cordial without
which we rarely travel, as we find it excellent in case of chilling, or
indigestion, and even to rub on hornet stings. I was placing the
suitcase, in which it is our custom to carry the chestnuts, in the back
of the car, when I spied a very small parcel. Aggie saw it too.
“If that’s the lunch, Tish,” she said, “I don’t know that I care to go.”
“You can eat chestnuts,” said Tish, shortly. “But don’t go on my
account. It looks like rain anyhow, and the last time I went to the farm
in the mud I skidded down a hill backwards and was only stopped by
running into a cow that thought I was going the other way.”
“Nonsense, Tish,” I said. “It hasn’t an idea of raining. And if the
lunch isn’t sufficient, there are generally some hens from the Knowles
place that lay in your barn, aren’t there?”
“Certainly not,” she said stiffly, although it wasn’t three months since
she had threatened to charge the Knowleses rent for their chickens.
Well, I was puzzled. It is not like Tish to be irritable without reason,
although she has undoubtedly a temper. She was most unpleasant on the
way out, remarking that if the Ostermaiers’s maid continued to pare away
half the potatoes, as any fool could see around their garbage can, she
thought the church should reduce his salary. She also stated flatly that
she considered that the nation would be better off if some one would
uncork a gas bomb in the Capitol at Washington, in spite of the fact
that my second cousin, once removed, the Honorable J. C. Willoughby,
represents his country in its legislative halls.
It is always a bad sign when Tish talks politics, especially since the
income tax.
Although it had no significance for us at the time, she did not put her
car in the barn as she usually does, but left it in the road. The house
was closed, and there was no cool and refreshing buttermilk with which
to wash down our frugal repast, which we ate on the porch, as Tish did
not offer to unlock the house. Frugal repast it was indeed, consisting
of lettuce sandwiches made without butter, as Tish considered that both
butter and lettuce was an extravagance. There were, of course, also
beans.
Now as it happens, Aggie is not strong and requires palatable as well as
substantial food to enable her to get about, especially to climb trees.
We missed her during the meal, and I saw that she was going toward the
barn. Tish saw it also, and called to her sharply.
“I am going to get an egg,” Aggie replied, with gentle obstinacy. “I am
starving, Tish, and I am certain I heard a hen cackle. Probably one of
the Knowles’s chickens——”
“If it is a Knowles’s chicken,” Tish said, virtuously, “its egg is a
Knowles’s egg, and we have no right to it.”
I am sorry to relate that here Aggie said: “Oh, rats!” but as she
apologized immediately, and let the egg drop, figuratively, of course,
peace again hovered over our little party. Only momentarily, however,
for, a short time after, a hen undoubtedly cackled, and Aggie got up
with an air of determination.
“Tish,” she said, “that may be a Knowles’s hen or it may be one
belonging to this farm. I don’t know, and I don’t give a—I don’t care.
I’m going to get it.”
“The barn’s locked,” said Tish.
“I could get in through a window.”
I shall never forget Tish’s look of scorn as she rose with dignity, and
stalked toward the barn.
“I shall go myself, Aggie,” she said, as she passed her. “You would
probably fall in the rain barrel under the window. You’re no climber.
And you might as well eat those crusts you’ve hidden under the porch, if
you’re as hungry as you make out you are.”
“Lizzie,” Aggie hissed, when Tish was out of hearing, “_what is in that
barn?_”
“It may be anything from a German spy to an aeroplane,” I said. “But
it’s not your business or mine.”
“You needn’t be so dratted virtuous,” Aggie observed, scooping a hole in
the petunia bed and burying the crusts in it. “Whatever’s on her mind is
in that barn.”
“Naturally,” I observed, “while Tish is in it!”
Tish returned in a short time with one egg, which she placed on the
porch floor without a word. But as she made no effort to give Aggie the
house key, and as Aggie has never learned to swallow a raw egg,
although I have heard that they taste rather like oysters, and slip down
in much the same way, Aggie was obliged to continue hungry.
It is only just to record that Tish grew more companionable after
luncheon, and got into a large chestnut tree near the house by climbing
on top of the hen house. We had always before had the farmer’s boy to do
the climbing into the upper branches, and I confess to a certain
nervousness, especially as Tish, when far above the ground, decided to
take off her dress skirt, which was her second best tailor-made, and
climb around in her petticoats.
She had to have both hands free to unhook the band, and she very nearly
overbalanced while stepping out of it.
“Drat a woman’s clothes, anyhow,” she said. “If we had any sense we’d
wear trousers.”
“I understand,” I said, “that even trousers are not easy to get out of,
Tish.”
“Don’t be a fool, Lizzie,” she said tartly. “If I had trousers on I
wouldn’t have to take them off. Catch it!”
However, the skirt did not fall clear, but caught on a branch far out,
and hung there. Tish broke off a small limb and poked at it from above,
and I found a paling from a fence and threw it up to dislodge it. But
it stuck tight, and the paling came down and struck Aggie on the head.
Had we only known it, this fortunate accident probably saved Aggie’s
life, for she sat down suddenly on the ground, and said faintly that her
skull was fractured.
I was bending over Aggie when I heard a sharp crack from above. I looked
up, and Tish was lying full length on a limb, her arm out to reach for
the skirt and a most terrible expression on her face. There was another
crack, and our poor Tish came hurtling through the air, landing half in
Aggie’s lap and half in the suitcase.
I was quite unable to speak, and owing, as I learned later, to Tish’s
head catching her near the waist line, Aggie had no breath even to
scream.
There was a dreadful silence. Then Tish said, without moving:
“All my property is to go to Charlie Sands.”
“Tish!” I cried, in an agony, and Aggie, who still could not speak,
burst into tears.
However, a moment later, Tish drew up first one limb and then the other,
and observed that her back was broken. She then mentioned that Aggie was
to have her cameo set and the dining room sideboard, and that I was to
have the automobile, but the next instant she felt a worm on her neck
and sat up, looking rather dishevelled, but far from death.
“Where are you hurt, Tish?” I asked, trembling.
“Everywhere,” she replied. “Everywhere, Lizzie. Every bone in my body is
broken.”
But after a time the aching localized itself in her right arm, which
began to swell. We led her down to the creek and got her to hold it in
the cold water and Aggie, being still nervous and unsteady, slipped on a
mossy stone and sat down in about a foot of water. It was then that our
dear Tish became like herself again, for Aggie was shocked into saying,
“Oh, damn!” and Tish gave her a severe lecture on profanity.
Tish was quite sure her arm was broken, as well as all the ribs on one
side. But she is a brave woman and made little fuss, although she kept
poking a finger into her flesh here and there.
“Because,” she said, “the First Aid book says that if a lung is
punctured the air gets into the tissues, and they crackle on pressure.”
It was soon after this that I saw Aggie, who had made no complaint about
Tish falling on her, furtively testing her own tissues to see if they
crackled.
Leaving my injured there by the creek, I went back to the tree and
secured my paling again. By covering it with straw from the barn I was
quite sure I could make a comfortable splint for Tish’s arm. However, I
had but just reached the barn and was preparing to crawl through a
window by standing on a rain barrel when I saw Tish limping after me.
“Well?” she said. “What idiotic idea is in your head, Lizzie? Because if
it is more eggs——”
“I am going to get some straw and make a splint.”
“Nonsense. What for?”
“What do you suppose I intend it for?” I demanded, tartly. “To trim a
hat?”
“I won’t have a splint.”
“Very well,” I retorted. “Then I shall get some straw and start a fire
to dry Aggie out.”
“You’ll stick in that window,” Tish said, in what, in a smaller woman,
would have been a vicious tone.
“Look here, Tish,” I said, balancing on the edge of the rain barrel, “is
there something in this barn you do not wish me to see?”
She looked at me steadily.
“Yes,” she said. “There is, Lizzie. And I’ll ask you to promise on your
honor not to mention it.”
That promise I am glad to say I have kept until now, when the need of
secrecy is past, Tish herself having divulged the truth. But at the time
I was greatly agitated, and indeed almost fell into the rain barrel.
“Or try to find out what it is,” Tish went on, sternly.
I promised, of course, and Tish relaxed somewhat, although I caught her
eye on me once or twice, as though she was daring me to so much as guess
at the secret.
“Of course, Lizzie,” she said, as we approached Aggie, “it is nothing I
am ashamed of.”
“Of course not,” I replied hastily. I took my courage in my hands and
faced her. “Tish, have you an aeroplane hidden in that barn?”
“No,” she replied promptly. She might have enlarged on her denial, but
Aggie took a violent sneezing spell just then, pressing herself between
paroxysms to see if she crackled, and we decided to go home at once.
Here a new difficulty presented itself. Tish could not drive the car! I
shall never forget my anguish when she turned to me and said:
“You will have to drive us home, Lizzie.”
“Never!” I cried.
“It’s perfectly easy,” she went on. “If children can run them, and the
idiots they have in garages and on taxicabs——”
“Never,” I said firmly. “It may be easy, but it took you six months,
Tish Carberry, and three broken springs and any number of dead chickens
and animals, besides the time you went through a bridge, and the night
you drove off the end of a dock. It may be easy, but if it is, I’d
rather do something hard.”
“I shall sit beside you, Lizzie,” she said, in a patient voice. “I
daresay you know which is your right foot and which is your left. If
not, I can tell you. I shall say ‘left’ when I want you to push out the
clutch, and ‘right’ for the brake. As for gears, I can change them for
you with my left hand.”
“I could do it sitting in a chair,” I said, in a despairing voice. “But
Tish,” I said, in a last effort, “do you remember when you tried to
teach me to ride a bicycle? And that the moment I saw something to avoid
I made a mad dash for it?”
“This is different,” Tish said. “It is a car——”
“And that I rode about a quarter of a mile into Lake Penzance, and would
likely have ridden straight across if I hadn’t run into a canoe and
upset it?”
“You can always _stop_ a car,” said Tish. “Don’t be a coward, Lizzie.
All you have to do is to shove hard with your right foot.”
Yet, when I did exactly that, she denied she had ever said it. Fond as I
am of Tish, I must admit that she has a way of forgetting things she
does not wish to remember.
In the end I consented. It was against my better judgment, and I warned
Tish. I have no talent for machinery, but indeed a great fear of it,
since the time when as a child I was visiting my grand-aunt’s farm and
almost lost a finger in a feed-cutter. In addition to that, Tish’s
accident and her secret had both unnerved me. I knew that calamity faced
us as I took my place at the wheel.
Tish was still in her petticoat, as we were obliged to leave her dress
skirt in the tree, and Aggie was wrapped in the rug to prevent her
taking cold.
“When we meet a buggy,” Tish said, “we’d better go past it rather fast.
I don’t ache to be seen in a seersucker petticoat.”
“Fast,” I said, bitterly. “You’d better pray that we go past it at all.”
However, by going very slowly, I got the thing as far as the gate going
into the road. Here there was a hill, and we began to move too rapidly.
“Slower,” said Tish. “You’ve got to make a turn here.”
“How?” I cried, frantically.
“Brake!” she yelled.
“Which foot?”
“Right foot. _Right foot!_”
However, it seems that my right foot was on the gas throttle at the
time, which she had forgotten. I jammed my foot down hard, and the car
seemed to lift out of the air. We went across the ditch, through a stake
and rider fence, through a creek and up the other side of the bank, and
brought up against a haystack with a terrific jolt.
Tish sat back and straightened her hat with a jerk.
“We’d better go back and do it again, Lizzie,” she said, “because you
missed one or two things.”
“I did what you told me,” I replied, sullenly.
“Did you?” said Tish. “I don’t remember telling you to leap the creek.
Of course, cross-country motoring has its advantages. Only one really
should have solid tires, because barbed wire fences might be awkward.”
She then sat back and rested.
“Well?” I said.
“Well?” said Tish.
“What am I to do now?”
“Oh!” she said. “I thought you preferred doing it your own way. I don’t
object, if you don’t. You are quite right. Roads do become monotonous.
Only I doubt, Lizzie, if you can get over this stack. You’d better go
around it.”
“Very well,” I said. “My own way is to walk home, Tish Carberry. And if
you think I am going to steer a runaway automobile you can think again.”
Aggie had said nothing, but I now turned and saw her, pale and shaken,
taking a sip of the blackberry cordial we always carry with us for
emergencies. I suggested that she drive the thing home, but she only
shook her head and muttered something about almost falling out of the
back end of the car when we leaped up out of the creek. She had, she
asserted, been clear up on the folded-back top, and had stayed there
until the jolt against the haystack had thrown her forward into the seat
again.
I daresay we would still be there had not a young man with a gun run
suddenly around the haystack. He had a frightened look, but when he saw
us all alive he relaxed. Unfortunately, however, Aggie still had the
bottle of blackberry cordial in the air. His expression altered when he
saw her, and he said, in a disgusted voice:
“Well, I be damned!”
Tish had not seen Aggie, and merely observed that she felt like that and
even more. She then remarked that I had broken her other arm, and her
nose, which had struck the wind shield. But the young man merely gave
her a scornful glance, and leaning his gun against the haystack, came
over to the car and inspected us all with a most scornful expression.
“I thought so!” he said. “When I saw you leaping that fence and jumping
the creek, I knew what was wrong. Only I thought it was a party of men.
In my wildest dreams—give me that bottle,” he ordered Aggie, holding
out his hand.
Now it is Aggie’s misfortune to have lost her own teeth some years ago,
owing to a country dentist who did not know his business. And when
excited she has a way of losing her hold, as one may say, on her upper
set. She then speaks in a thick tone, with a lisp.
“Thertainly not!” said Aggie.
To my horror, the young man then stepped on the running board of the car
and snatched the bottle out of her hand.
“I must say,” he said, glaring at us each in turn, “that it is the most
disgraceful thing I have ever seen.” His eyes stopped at Tish, and
traveled over her. “Where is your clothing?” he demanded, fiercely.
It was then that Tish rose and fixed him with a glittering eye.
“Young man,” she said, “where my dress skirt is does not concern you.
Nor why we are here as we are. Give Miss Pilkington that bottle of
blackberry cordial.”
“Blackberry cordial!” jeered the young man.
“As for what you evidently surmise, you are a young idiot. I am the
President of the local branch of the W. C. T. U.”
“Of course you are,” said the young man. “I’m Carrie Nation myself. Now
watch.”
He then selected a large stone and smashed the bottle on it.
“Now,” he observed, “come over with the rest of it, and be quick.” But
here he seemed to realize that Tish’s face was rather awful, for he
stopped bullying and began to coax. “Now see here,” he said. “I’m going
to help you out of this if I can, because I rather think it is an
accident. You’ve all had something on an empty stomach. Go down to the
creek and get some cold water, and then walk about a bit. I’ll see what
I can do with the car.”
Aggie was weeping in the rear seat by that time, and I shall never
forget Tish’s face. Suddenly she got out of the car and before he
realized what was happening, she had his gun in her good hand.
“Now,” she said, waving it about recklessly, “I’ll teach you to insult
sober and God-fearing women whose only fault is that one of them hasn’t
all the wit she should have and let a car run away with her. Lizzie, get
out of that seat.”
It was the young man’s turn to look strange.
“Be careful!” he cried. “_Be careful!_ It’s loaded, and the safety
catch——”
“Get out, Aggie.”
Aggie crawled out, still holding the rug around where she had sat down
in the creek.
“Now,” Tish said, addressing the stranger, “you back that car out and
get it to the road. And close your mouth. Something is likely to fly
into it.”
“I beg of you!” said the young man. “Of course I’ll do what I can,
but—please don’t wave that gun around.”
“Just a moment,” said Tish. “That blackberry cordial was worth about a
dollar. Just give a dollar to the lady near you. Aggie, take that
dollar. Lizzie, come here and let me rest this gun on your shoulder.”
She did, keeping it pointed at the young man, and I could hear her
behind me, breathing in short gasps of fury. Nothing could so have
enraged Tish as the thing which had happened, and for a time I feared
that she would actually do the young man some serious harm.
He sat there looking at us, and he saw, of course, that he had been
mistaken. He grew very red, and said:
“I’ve been an idiot, of course. If you will allow me to apologize——”
“Don’t talk,” Tish snapped. “You have all you can do without any
conversation. Did you ever drive a car before?”
“Not through a haystack,” he said in a sulky voice.
But Tish fixed him with a glittering eye, and he started the engine.
Well, he got the car backed and turned around, and we followed him
through the stubble as the car bumped and rocked along. But at the edge
of the creek he stopped and turned around.
“Look here,” he said. “This is suicide. This car will never do it.”
“It has just done it,” Tish replied, inexorably. “Go on.”
“I might get down, but I’ll never get up the other side.”
“Go on.”
“Tish!” Aggie cried, anguished. “He may be killed, and you’ll be
responsible.”
Aggie is a sentimental creature, and the young man was very
good-looking. Indeed, arriving at the brink, I myself had qualms. But
Tish has a will of iron, and was, besides, still rankling with insult.
She merely glued her eye again to the sight of the gun on my shoulder,
and said:
“_Go on!_”
Well, he got the car down somehow or other, but nothing would make it
climb the other side. It would go up a few feet and then slide back. And
at last Tish herself saw that it was hopeless, and told him to turn and
go down the creek bed.
It was a very rough creek bed, and one of the springs broke almost at
once. We followed along the bank, and I think Tish found a sort of grim
humor in seeing the young man bouncing up into the air and coming down
on the wheel, for I turned once and found her smiling faintly. However,
she merely called to him to be careful of the other springs or she would
have to ask him to pay for them.
He stopped then, in a pool about two feet deep, and glared up at her.
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “I suppose the fact that I have permanently
bent in my floating ribs on this infernal wheel doesn’t matter.”
At last he came to a shelving bank, and got the car out. I think he
contemplated making a run for it then and getting away, but Tish
observed that she would shoot into the rear tires if he did so. So he
went back to the road, slowly, and there stopped the car.
However, Tish was not through with him. She made him climb the chestnut
tree and bring down her dress skirt, and then turn his back while she
put it on. By that time, the young man was in a chastened mood, and he
apologized handsomely.
“But I think I have made amends, ladies,” he said. “I feel that I shall
never be the same again. When I started out today I was a blithe young
thing, feeling life in every limb, as the poet says. Now what I feel in
every limb does not belong in verse. May I have the shotgun, please?”
But Tish had no confidence in him, and we took the gun with us,
arranging to leave it at the first signpost, about a mile away. We left
him there, and Aggie reported that he stood in the road staring after us
as long as we were in sight.
Tish drove the car home after all, steering with one hand and taking the
wheel off a buggy on the way. I sat beside her and changed the gears,
and she blamed the buggy wheel on me, owing to my going into reverse
when I meant to go ahead slowly. The result was that we began to back
unexpectedly, and the man only saved his horse by jumping him over a
watering trough.
I have gone into this incident with some care, because the present
narrative concerns itself with the young man we met, and with the
secret in Tish’s barn. At the time, of course, it seemed merely one of
the unpleasant things one wishes to forget quickly. Tish’s arm was only
sprained, and although Aggie wore adhesive plaster around her ribs
almost all winter, because she was afraid to have it pulled off, there
were no permanent ill effects.
The winter passed quietly enough. Aggie and I made Red Cross dressings
for Europe, and Tish, tiring of knitting, made pajamas. She had turned
against the government, and almost left the church when she learned that
Mr. Ostermaier had voted the Democratic ticket. Then in January, without
telling any one, she went away for four days, and Sarah Willoughby wrote
me later that the Honorable J. C., her husband, said that a woman
resembling Tish had demanded from the gallery of the Senate that we
declare war against Germany and had been put out by the
Sergeant-at-arms.
I do not know that this was Tish. She returned as unannounced as she had
gone, and went back to her pajamas, but she was more quiet than usual,
and sometimes, when she was sewing, her lips moved as though she was
rehearsing a speech. She observed once or twice that she wanted to do
her bit, but that she considered digging trenches considerably easier
than driving a sewing machine twelve miles a day.
I remember, in this connection, a conversation I had with Mrs.
Ostermaier some time in January. She asked me to wait after the Red
Cross meeting, and I saw trouble in her eye.
“Miss Lizzie,” she said, “do you think Miss Tish really enjoys sewing?”
“Not particularly,” I admitted. “But it is better than knitting, she
says, because it is faster. She likes to get results.”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Ostermaier observed. “I’ll just ask you to look at this
pajama coat she has turned in.”
Well, there was no getting away from it. It was wrong. Dear Tish had
sewed one of the sleeves in the neck opening, and had opened the sleeve
hole and faced back the opening and put buttons and buttonholes on it.
“Not only that,” said Mrs. Ostermaier, “but she has made the trousers of
several suits wrong side before and opened them up the back, and men are
such creatures of habit. They like things the way they are used to
them.”
Well, I had to tell Tish, and she flew into a temper and said Mrs.
Ostermaier never could cut things out properly, and she would leave the
society. Which she did. But she was very unhappy over it, for Tish is
patriotic to her finger tips.
All the spring, until war was declared, she was restless and
discontented, and she took to long trips in the car, by herself,
returning moodier than ever. But with the announcement of war she found
work to do. She made enlisting speeches everywhere, and was very
successful, because Tish has a magnetic and compelling eye, and she
would fix on one man in the crowd and talk at him and to him until all
the men around were watching him. Generally, with every one looking he
was ashamed not to come forward, and Tish would take him by the arm and
lead him in to the recruiting station.
It was on one of these occasions that we saw the young man of the
blackberry cordial again.
Tish saw him first, from the tail of the wagon she was standing in. She
fixed him with her eye at once, and a man standing near him, said:
“Go on in, boy. You’re as good as in the trenches already. She landed me
yesterday, but I’ve got six toes on one foot. Blessed if she didn’t try
to take me to a hospital to have one cut off.”
“Now,” said Tish, “does any one wish to ask any questions?”