We had meant to go to Europe this last summer, and Tish would have gone
anyhow, war or no war, if we had not switched her off onto something
else. "Submarines fiddlesticks!" she said. "Give me a good life
preserver, with a bottle of blackberry cordial fastened to it, and the
sea has no terrors for me."
She said the proper way to do, in case the ship was torpedoed, was to go
up on an upper deck, and let the vessel sink under one.
"Then without haste," she explained, "as the water rises about one,
strike out calmly. The life-belt supports one, but swim gently for the
exercise. It will prevent chilling. With a waterproof bag of crackers,
and mild weather, one could go on comfortably for a day or two."
I still remember the despairing face Aggie turned to me. It was December
then, and very cold.
However, she said nothing more until January. Early in that month
Charlie Sands came to Tish's to Sunday dinner, and we were all there.
The subject came up then.
It was about the time Tish took up vegetarianism, I remember that,
because the only way she could induce Charlie Sands to come to dinner
was to promise to have two chops for him. Personally I am not a
vegetarian. I am not and never will be. I took a firm stand except when
at Tish's home. But Aggie followed Tish's lead, of course, and I believe
lived up to it as far as possible, although it is quite true that,
stopping in one day unexpectedly to secure a new crochet pattern, I
smelled broiling steak. But Aggie explained that she merely intended to
use the juice from a small portion, having had one of her weak spells,
the balance to go to the janitor's dog.
However, this is a digression.
"Europe!" said Charlie Sands. "Forget it! What in the name of the
gastric juice is this I'm eating?"
It was a mixture of bran, raisins, and chopped nuts, as I recall it,
moistened with water and pressed into a compact form. It was Tish's own
invention. She called it "Bran-Nut," and was talking of making it in
large quantities for sale.
Charlie Sands gave it up with a feeble gesture. "I'm sorry, Aunt
Letitia," he said at last; "I'm a strong man ordinarily, but by the time
I've got it masticated I'm too weak to swallow it. If--if one could
have a stream of water playing on it while working, it would facilitate
things."
"The Ostermaiers," said Aggie, "are going West."
"Good for the Ostermaiers," said Charlie Sands. "Great idea. See America
first. 'My Country Tish of Thee,' etc. Why don't you three try it?"
Tish relinquished Europe slowly.
"One would think," Charlie Sands said, "that you were a German being
asked to give up Belgium."
"What part of the West?" she demanded. "It's all civilized, isn't it?"
"The Rocky Mountains," said Charlie Sands, "will never be civilized."
Tish broke off a piece of Bran-Nut, and when she thought no one was
looking poured a little tea over it. There was a gleam in her eye that
Aggie and I have learned to know.
"Mountains!" she said. "That ought to be good for Aggie's hay fever."
"I'd rather live with hay fever," Aggie put in sharply, "than cure it by
falling over a precipice."
"You'll have to take a chance on that, of course," Charlie Sands said.
"I'm not sure it will be safe, but I am sure it will be interesting."
Oh, he knew Tish well enough. Tell her a thing was dangerous, and no
power could restrain her.
I do not mind saying that I was not keen about the thing. I had my
fortune told years ago, and the palmist said that if a certain line had
had a bend in it I should have been hanged. But since it did not, to be
careful of high places.
"It's a sporting chance," said Charlie Sands, although I was prodding
him under the table. "With some good horses and a bag of
this--er--concentrated food, you would have the time of your young
lives."
This was figurative. We are all of us round fifty.
"The--the Bran-Nut," he said, "would serve for both food and ammunition.
I can see you riding along, now and then dropping a piece of it on the
head of some unlucky mountain goat, and watching it topple over into
eternity. I can see--"
"Riding!" said Aggie. "Then I'm not going. I have never been on a horse
and I never intend to be."
"Don't be a fool," Tish snapped. "If you've never been on a horse, it's
time and to spare you got on one."
Hannah had been clearing the table with her lips shut tight. Hannah is
an old and privileged servant and has a most unfortunate habit of
speaking her mind. So now she stopped beside Tish.
"You take my advice and go, Miss Tish," she said. "If you ride a horse
round some and get an appetite, you'll go down on your knees and
apologize to your Maker for the stuff we've been eating the last four
weeks." She turned to Charlie Sands, and positively her chin was
quivering. "I'm a healthy woman," she said, "and I work hard and need
good nourishing food. When it's come to a point where I eat the cat's
meat and let it go hungry," she said, "it's time either I lost my
appetite or Miss Tish went away."
Well, Tish dismissed Hannah haughtily from the room, and the
conversation went on. None of us had been far West, although Tish has a
sister-in-law in Toledo, Ohio. But owing to a quarrel over a pair of
andirons that had been in the family for a time, she had never visited
her.
"You'll like it, all of you," Charlie Sands said as we waited for the
baked apples. "Once get started with a good horse between your knees,
and--"
"I hope," Tish interrupted him, "that you do not think we are going to
ride astride!"
"I'm darned sure of it."
That was Charlie Sands's way of talking. He does not mean to be rude,
and he is really a young man of splendid character. But, as Tish says,
contact with the world, although it has not spoiled him, has roughened
his speech.
"You see," he explained, "there are places out there where the horses
have to climb like goats. It's only fair to them to distribute your
weight equally. A side saddle is likely to turn and drop you a mile or
two down a crack."
Aggie went rather white and sneezed violently.
But Tish looked thoughtful. "It sounds reasonable," she said. "I've felt
for a long time that I'd be glad to discard skirts. Skirts," she said,
"are badges of servitude, survivals of the harem, reminders of a time
when nothing was expected of women but parasitic leisure."
I tried to tell her that she was wrong about the skirts. Miss
MacGillicuddy, our missionary in India, had certainly said that the
women in harems wore bloomers. But Tish left the room abruptly,
returning shortly after with a volume of the encyclopædia, and looked up
the Rocky Mountains.
I remember it said that the highest ranges were, as compared with the
size and shape of the earth, only as the corrugations on the skin of an
orange. Either the man who wrote that had never seen an orange or he had
never seen the Rocky Mountains. Orange, indeed! If he had said the upper
end of a pineapple it would have been more like it. I wish the man who
wrote it would go to Glacier Park. I am not a vindictive woman, but I
know one or two places where I would like to place him and make him
swallow that orange. I'd like to see him on a horse, on the brink of a
cañon a mile deep, and have his horse reach over the edge for a stray
plant or two, or standing in a cloud up to his waist, so that, as Aggie
so plaintively observed, "The lower half of one is in a snowstorm while
the upper part is getting sunburned."
For we went. Oh, yes, we went. It is not the encyclopædia's fault that
we came back. But now that we are home, and nothing wrong except a touch
of lumbago that Tish got from sleeping on the ground, and, of course,
Aggie's unfortunate experience with her teeth, I look back on our
various adventures with pleasure. I even contemplate a return next year,
although Aggie says she will die first. But even that is not to be taken
as final. The last time I went to see her, she had bought a revolver
from the janitor and was taking lessons in loading it.
The Ostermaiers went also. Not with us, however. The congregation made
up a purse for the purpose, and Tish and Aggie and I went further, and
purchased a cigar-case for Mr. Ostermaier and a quantity of cigars.
Smoking is the good man's only weakness.
I must say, however, that it is absurd to hear Mrs. Ostermaier boasting
of the trip. To hear her talk, one would think they had done the whole
thing, instead of sitting in an automobile and looking up at the
mountains. I shall never forget the day they were in a car passing along
a road, and we crossed unexpectedly ahead of them and went on straight
up the side of a mountain.
Tish had a sombrero on the side of her head, and was resting herself in
the saddle by having her right leg thrown negligently over the horse's
neck. With the left foot she was kicking our pack-horse, a creature so
scarred with brands that Tish had named her Jane, after a cousin of hers
who had had so many operations that Tish says she is now entirely
unfurnished.
Mr. Ostermaier's face was terrible, and only two days ago Mrs.
Ostermaier came over to ask about putting an extra width in the skirt to
her last winter's suit. But it is my belief that she came to save Tish's
soul, and nothing else.
"I'm so glad wide skirts have come in," she said. "They're so modest,
aren't they, Miss Tish?"
"Not in a wind," Tish said, eying her coldly.
"I do think, dear Miss Tish," she went on with her eyes down, "that
to--to go about in riding-breeches before a young man is--well, it is
hardly discreet, is it?"
I saw Tish glancing about the room. She was pretty angry, and I knew
perfectly well what she wanted. I put my knitting-bag over Charlie
Sands's tobacco-pouch.
Tish had learned to roll cigarettes out in Glacier Park. Not that she
smoked them, of course, but she said she might as well know how. There
was no knowing when it would come in handy. And when she wishes to calm
herself she reaches instinctively for what Bill used to call, strangely,
"the makings."
"If," she said, her eye still roving,--"if it was any treat to a
twenty-four-year-old cowpuncher to see three elderly women in
riding-breeches, Mrs. Ostermaier,--and it's kind of you to think
so,--why, I'm not selfish."
Mrs. Ostermaier's face was terrible. She gathered up her skirt and rose.
"I shall not tell Mr. Ostermaier what you have just said," she observed
with her mouth set hard. "We owe you a great deal, especially the return
of my earrings. But I must request, Miss Tish, that you do not voice
such sentiments in the Sunday school."
Tish watched her out. Then she sat down and rolled eleven cigarettes for
Charlie Sands, one after the other. At last she spoke.
"I'm not sure," she said tartly, "that if I had it to do over again I'd
do it. That woman's not a Christian. I was thinking," she went on, "of
giving them a part of the reward to go to Asbury Park with. But she'd
have to wear blinders on the bathing-beach, so I'll not do it."
However, I am ahead of my recital.
For a few days Tish said nothing more, but one Sunday morning, walking
home from church, she turned to me suddenly and said:--
"Lizzie, you're fat."
"I'm as the Lord made me," I replied with some spirit.
"Fiddlesticks!" said Tish. "You're as your own sloth and overindulgence
has made you. Don't blame the Good Man for it."
Now, I am a peaceful woman, and Tish is as my own sister, and indeed
even more so. But I was roused to anger by her speech.
"I've been fleshy all my life," I said. "I'm no lazier than most, and
I'm a dratted sight more agreeable than some I know, on account of
having the ends of my nerves padded."
But she switched to another subject in her characteristic manner.
"Have you ever reflected, either of you," she observed, "that we know
nothing of this great land of ours? That we sing of loving 'thy rocks
and rills, thy woods and templed hills'--although the word 'templed'
savors of paganism and does not belong in a national hymn? And that it
is all balderdash?"
Aggie took exception to this and said that she loved her native land,
and had been south to Pinehurst and west to see her niece in
Minneapolis, on account of the baby having been named for her.
But Tish merely listened with a grim smile. "Travel from a car window,"
she observed, "is no better than travel in a nickelodeon. I have done
all of that I am going to. I intend to become acquainted with my native
land, closely acquainted. State by State I shall wander over it,
refreshing soul and body and using muscles too long unused."
"Tish!" Aggie quavered. "You are not going on another walking-tour?"
Only a year or two before Tish had read Stevenson's "Travels with a
Donkey," and had been possessed to follow his example. I have elsewhere
recorded the details of that terrible trip. Even I turned pale, I fear,
and cast a nervous eye toward the table where Tish keeps her
reading-matter.
Tish is imaginative, and is always influenced by the latest book she has
read. For instance, a volume on "Nursing at the Front" almost sent her
across to France, although she cannot make a bed and never could, and
turns pale at the sight of blood; and another time a book on flying
machines sent her up into the air, mentally if not literally. I shall
never forget the time she secured some literature on the Mormon Church,
and the difficulty I had in smuggling it out under my coat.
Tish did not refute the walking-tour at once, but fell into a deep
reverie.
It is not her custom to confide her plans to us until they are fully
shaped and too far on to be interfered with, which accounts for our
nervousness.
On arriving at her apartment, however, we found a map laid out on the
table and the Rocky Mountains marked with pins. We noticed that whenever
she straightened from the table she grunted.
"What we want," Tish said, "is isolation. No people. No crowds. No
servants. If I don't get away from Hannah soon I'll murder her."
"It wouldn't hurt to see somebody now and then, Tish," Aggie objected.
"Nobody," Tish said firmly. "A good horse is companion enough." She
forgot herself and straightened completely, and she groaned.
"We might meet some desirable people, Tish," I put in firmly. "If we do,
I don't intend to run like a rabbit."
"Desirable people!" Tish scoffed. "In the Rocky Mountains! My dear
Lizzie, every desperado in the country takes refuge in the Rockies. Of
course, if you want to take up with that class--"
Aggie sneezed and looked wretched. As for me, I made up my mind then and
there that if Letitia Carberry was going to such a neighborhood, she was
not going alone. I am not much with a revolver, but mighty handy with a
pair of lungs.
Well, Tish had it all worked out. "I've found the very place," she said.
"In the first place, it's Government property. When our country puts
aside a part of itself as a public domain we should show our
appreciation. In the second place, it's wild. I'd as soon spend a
vacation in Central Park near the Zoo as in the Yellowstone. In the
third place, with an Indian reservation on one side and a national
forest on the other, it's bound to be lonely. Any tourist," she said
scornfully, "can go to the Yosemite and be photographed under a redwood
tree."
"Do the Indians stay on the reservation?" Aggie asked feebly.
"Probably not," Tish observed coldly. "Once for all, Aggie--if you are
going to run like a scared deer every time you see an Indian or a bear,
I wish you would go to Asbury Park."
She forgot herself then and sat down quickly, an action which was
followed by an agonized expression.
"Tish," I said sharply, "you have been riding a horse!
"Only in a cinder ring," she replied with unwonted docility. "The
teacher said I would be a trifle stiff."
"How long did you ride?"
"Not more than twenty minutes," she said. "The lesson was to be an hour,
but somebody put a nickel in a mechanical piano, and the creature I was
on started going sideways."
Well, she had fallen off and had to be taken home in a taxicab. When
Aggie heard it she simply took the pins out of the map and stuck them in
Tish's cushion. Her mouth was set tight.
"I didn't really fall," Tish said. "I sat down, and it was cinders, and
not hard. It has made my neck stiff, that's all."
"That's enough," said Aggie. "If I've got to seek pleasure by ramming my
spinal column up into my skull and crowding my brains, I'll stay at
home."
"You can't fall out of a Western saddle," Tish protested rather
bitterly. "And if I were you, Aggie, I wouldn't worry about crowding my
brains."
However, she probably regretted this speech, for she added more gently:
"A high altitude will help your hay fever, Aggie."
Aggie said with some bitterness that her hay fever did not need to be
helped. That, as far as she could see, it was strong and flourishing. At
that matters rested, except for a bit of conversation just before we
left. Aggie had put on her sweater vest and her muffler and the jacket
of her winter suit and was getting into her fur coat, when Tish said:
"Soft as mush, both of you!"
"If you think, Tish Carberry," I began, "that I--"
"Apple dumplings!" said Tish. "Sofa pillows! Jellyfish! Not a muscle to
divide between you!"