TO THE ZOO
Aggie being better, and having declared that no power on earth would
make her spend another night in the place, we planned to leave about
noon that day. But Tish’s astonishing conduct drove all idea of going
from our minds.
In the first place, Miss Lewis came in from breakfast looking a little
bit better, and insisted on giving Tish’s knee its massage, as usual.
But Tish was sitting poring over the notes she had made, and wouldn’t
even so much as look up.
“Get away,” she snarled, with her pencil in her teeth. “There’s nothing
wrong with my knee.”
Miss Lewis looked at me.
“There was something wrong with it yesterday,” she said, with her
thumbs tucked inside her belt and her spectacles flashing. “It’s got
cured pretty quick, I think.”
“I don’t employ you to think,” said Tish, hopping past her and opening
the lower bureau drawer.
“You needn’t employ me at all.”
“That’s a fact,” Tish said. “It hadn’t occurred to me. You go in and
take care of Miss Pilkington to-day, Miss Lewis. There’s nothing
pleases her like being taken care of.”
“There’s nothing the matter with Miss Pilkington, either,” snapped Miss
Lewis, but Tish was getting down on her knees by the drawer, groaning
as she did it, and she only threw an absent reply over her shoulder.
“Oh, well,” she said, “you know what I mean. I didn’t mean to offend
you. You’re a good nurse, but I’ve got something else on hand. Give
Miss Pilkington a bath and put talcum on; she’ll take to it like a
baby.”
Miss Lewis opened her mouth to refuse, thought better of it, and went
to Aggie’s room. Tish drew a long sigh.
“Thank heaven!” she said. “They’ll keep each other busy for the rest of
the day.”
Which they did. Aggie emerged from her room when Tish and I, breathless
and dirty, got back late that morning. She was powdered and manicured,
curled and French-puffed, and she knew the history of every private
case on the floor; name, age, family scandal and operation. She was
primed to talk, but by that time Tish and I had no time to stop. Things
were approaching a climax.
Well, Miss Lewis and Aggie off our hands, Tish emptied the lower drawer
and spread its contents on the floor in front of her. First of all,
she laid out the two roller towels, with the S. P. T. showing. Then
followed the brown tweed coat, secured by a dollar to Jacobs, the small
surgeon’s knife, the dented brass candlestick, the bandage Linda Smith
had picked up in the upper hall, the linen room key, and Charlie
Sands’ letter about Hero at the Zoo. Then with the sheet of note-paper
in her hand, she began to play a sort of checkers with the different
things. The two S. P. T. towels she put together and using this
combination as a king, she proceeded to jump the other articles, one by
one, moving them around aimlessly in the intervals and consulting her
notes.
At the end of the game, as well as I could make out, the king had
it. At least, the two towels seemed to have Charlie Sands’ letter
checkmated in a corner, and the other articles lay in a humiliated heap
on Tish’s lap.
“Well,” I said, “I see the towels win, although I think you cheated
once.”
Tish stuffed the notes into the bosom of her dress and tumbled the
other things back in the drawer. Then she got up, making horrible faces
as she straightened her knee.
“I’m sorry it’s raining, Lizzie,” she said. “We’ll have to go out.”
“Where!” I asked sarcastically. “To the matinée?”
“To the Zoo,” she replied, and hauling down her bonnet from the
cupboard, stuck it on her head. “Shall we need a taxicab?”
“Probably, if you intend to go out in your nightgown,” I said coldly.
But if I expected Tish to be confused, I was disappointed. With
her bonnet still on, she put on her shoes and stockings, her black
broadcloth skirt, a lamb’s wool vest and her long fur coat. It wasn’t
until she was finished that she remembered her nightgown underneath
everything.
“It’s a little long, isn’t it?” she said, when she’d started for the
door, with six inches of white trailing all around her. “Pin it up,
Lizzie; that’s a good girl.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” I said. “If you want to make a goose of
yourself with a knee that you are forbidden to step on, and maybe a
taxicab accident with you fixed like that underneath, I’m not going to
be a party to it.”
“Very well!” said Tish, and getting a pair of scissors, she was about
to cut off eight inches of her best French gown, when I weakened
and got the safety pins. It was plain, Tish was in no mood to stop
at trifles. I made her as respectable as possible, at least on the
surface, and by that time, seeing she was determined to go, I got ready
and went with her.
Now, a patient can’t leave a hospital without a card being sent down,
signed by the interne and countersigned by the superintendent, and
brought back by the elevator boy for the signatures of his family, his
friends and the police bureau, or something almost as complicated. But
not knowing anything of this, Tish and I went down in the elevator,
past the door-man and out the front door, called a taxicab and drove
away with perfect ease and calmness.
We went to the Zoo. That is generally known now, although that Tish
went in her nightgown is here for the first time set forth. But what we
did at the Zoo I do not know exactly. I might as well have been back
with Aggie, being bathed and talcumed. Tish let me pay the taxicab,
pointed to a chair in the ante-room, and spent twenty minutes in the
private office of the superintendent.
I was rather bitter about it. In the first place, I don’t like Zoos,
and in the second place, after I had been there ten minutes, a man in
uniform came in and examined all the corners of the room and turned
over every chair. When he came to the one I was in, he said, “Excuse
me, ma’am, but you haven’t noticed a small green snake with red and
yellow markings anywhere around here, have you?”
I was frozen in my chair.
“No,” I replied as calmly as I possibly could, “unless I
absent-mindedly put him in my hand-bag!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that, lady,” he hastened to explain, “I meant--he
may be curled on the rungs of your chair.”
I got up at that almost instantaneously and he turned the chair over.
“Not here,” he said, disappointed. “Little devil, this is the third
time this week!”
“Is he--is he poisonous?” I asked.
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “personally, I shouldn’t care to sit down
on him in the dark.”
He went out and closed the door, and when Tish came back, she declares
I was standing in the middle of the room with my skirts held up, and
turning slowly around in a circle.
There was a glitter in Tish’s eye that I had never seen there before,
as we drove back to the hospital. I attempted to explain a little of
how I felt at being left in a place like that, where at any moment
something might break loose for the third time that week, and why I was
turning around, but she told me tartly not to bother her.
We returned to the hospital in silence, and I paid for the taxicab. It
was not until we were back in Tish’s room, and had put her into her
chair and got a hot-water bottle under her knee, which had gone on a
strike about that time and refused to bend at all, that I spoke.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well--what?”
“Have they lost anything? Any animals?”
“No,” said Tish calmly. “I knew that before I went there. Aggie, what
day was it the two medical internes left?”
“This is Friday,” I said. “It was Tuesday evening, Tish.”
“I thought so,” she observed. “Now reach me my notes, Lizzie, and go
call Bates.”