Tish Plays the Game (13 page)

He then rose to his feet and looked out over the water, and said, “What kind of a boat was it anyhow?”

“It was a schooner.”

“Of course,” he said. “It would be a schooner, naturally. And while I am not a betting man, I’ll wager ten dollars against a bottle of blackberry cordial that this is it now.”

I leaped to my feet, and there, coming around the point of our cove, was the revenue boat! I could only stand and stare. Our beloved Tish was at the helm, and as we gazed she shouted to Lily May, who at once shoved the anchor overboard. As all the sails were still up, the boat listed heavily to one side, but it stopped.

There was no one else in sight, and this seemed to make Charlie Sands somewhat uneasy.

“By the gods,” he said, “she’s done away with them!”

But this proved to be erroneous. Our dear Tish, having brought the vessel to a halt, straightened her bonnet, and then drawing the small boat which trailed behind to the foot of the rope ladder, she and Lily May got into it and Tish rowed it to the shore.

Her first words were typical.

“I want a policeman, Lizzie,” she said briefly, “and a room in the jail, and a bath.”

“I doubt if the jails are arranged that way,” said Charlie Sands, coming forward. “Still, we can inquire.”

She had not noticed him before, and his presence startled her. I have never seen our Tish flinch, but she very nearly did so then. And she gave Lily May a curious look.

“I have taken three prisoners,” she said with dignity. “They are locked in, down below in that ship. And here’s the key, for Mr. MacDonald.”

She then felt in her workbag, handed a key to Charlie Sands, and started with dignity to the house. Charlie Sands looked at the key and then called after her.

“Is that all you’ve got?” he said.

She stiffened and glared at him.

“If you mean the curse of this nation, rum,” she said coldly, “I have thrown it overboard.”

“Not every bottle?” he said in a pleading voice.

“Every bottle,” she said, and walked firmly into the house.

Lily May did not follow her. She stood eying Charlie Sands through her long lashes.

“Well?” she said. “Doesn’t papa still love mamma?”

“I’ll tell you that,” he said sternly, “when you tell me something else.” He then stooped and picked up a one-hundred-dollar bill which was lying on the grass. “Where did this come from?”

“Well, well!” said Lily May. “You are lucky, aren’t you?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Charlie Sands. “Where did this come from?”

“They grow around here,” said Lily May cheerfully. “Not everywhere, but here and there, you know. Like four-leaf clovers.”

“It didn’t by any chance drop from my Aunt Tish’s workbag?”

“Well, you might call up and inquire,” she suggested, and sauntered off to the house.

She spent an hour and a quarter getting dressed that evening, and when the Swallow and Christopher came back, Christopher almost crazy, she was sitting on the veranda doing her finger nails.

Hannah was laying the table inside, and she says she greeted him with “Hello, old egg! And how are things?”

And that fool of a boy just got down on his knees and put his head in her lap and his arms around her; and when he looked up he said, “You little devil! I’ve a good notion to turn you over my knee and spank you.”

As Aggie says, it was queer love-making, and there is no use trying to understand the younger generation.

“Under no circumstances,” she says, “would Mr. Wiggins have threatened me with that. But then,” she adds, “Mr. Wiggins would never have put on those dreadful clothes and pretended to be something he wasn’t either. Times have changed, Lizzie.”

For it turned out, that very night, that Christopher was Billy Field.

Never, so long as I live, shall I forget that evening around Aggie’s bed, when Tish told her story. The bootleggers had tied her up at once, and even Lily May also. But Lily May was so quiet and chastened that they had weakened, after a while, and had let her loose.

“And then what did you do?” asked Charlie Sands.

“I amused them,” she said, not looking at Tish.

“I think,” Tish said in a terrible voice, “the less said of that the better.”

But it appears—for one must be frank—that Lily May saw that Tish was working with her ropes, and so she began to tell them stories. They must have been very queer ones, for Tish has never reverted to the subject.

“I told them the flapper story,” she said to Charlie Sands, “and that new Ford one, and the April-fool joke.”

Charlie Sands seemed to understand, for he nodded.

“Pretty fair,” he said.

But it seems they relaxed after that, and then she got them started on mixing different kinds of drinks. She would say, Did you ever try this and that, with a drop of something else floated on the top? And she would taste the things they brought, and they would take the rest.

“It was Bill who went under first. He went asleep standing up,” she said. And the captain next. But by that time Tish had freed herself, and she knocked Joe out with a piece of chain that was handy. And then their troubles were over, for they only had to drag them down below and lock them up. But they had been banging at the door all day, and Tish had had to make them keep quiet. She had the captain’s revolver by that time, and now and again she fired a bullet into the door frame, and they would hush up for an hour or so. Then they would start again.

Our dear Tish finished her narrative and then rose.

“And now,” she said brightly, “it is time for bed. I have done my duty, and shall sleep with a clear conscience.”

“Are you so sure of that?” said Charlie Sands, and fixed her with a cold eye.

“Why not?” Tish asked tartly.

“One reason might be—piracy on the high seas.”

“Piracy!” said Tish furiously. “I capture three rum runners, and you call it piracy?”

“Then there’s no matter of money to be discussed.”

“Certainly not,” said Tish.

“Of seventeen hundred and forty-one dollars,” he insisted. “At the present moment concealed in your bedroom.”

“That money belongs to the church.”

“I see. But the amount interests me. I can understand the seventeen hundred, and even the forty. But why the one?”

“Two months at eight hundred and seventy dollars and fifty cents per month,” Tish said, staring at him defiantly. “Even an idiot could figure that.”

“And you took it from those bootleggers?”

“I’d earned it for them.”

“By force and duress?”

“Nothing of the sort. The man was asleep.”

“Hijacking,” he said softly. “Ye gods and little fishes! Hijacking for the church!”

He seemed a trifle dazed, although Tish carefully explained her position to him.

“I see it all,” he said. “It sounds all right, but there must be a catch in it somewhere. I don’t quite grasp it, that’s all.”

After a time, however, he got up and went to the door, still thinking, and called Christopher.

“Come in, you young imposter,” he said, “and tell us how much you’ve had out of the summer.”

“I couldn’t quite make it,” said Christopher sadly. “Five hundred for the boat and two hundred revenue salary. That’s all.”

“Certainly it’s not all, Billy Field!” said Lily May. “I have three hundred from Smith, haven’t I? That makes the thousand.”

But Charlie Sands was holding his head.

“It sounds all right,” he said. “The parish house gets a kitchen, and Field gets Lily May. Personally I think my Aunt Tish ought to get thirty years, but still—” He groaned. “Rum running, assault and battery, piracy, straight larceny and hijacking!” he said. “And everybody’s happy! There’s a profound immorality somewhere,” he added, looking around at us. “But where?”

He got up feebly. “I’m getting too old for much of this,” he said. “Get me a stiff dose of blackberry cordial, somebody. And, Field, slip around to old MacDonald’s and get a bit of something to float on the top.”

H
AD WE NOT BEEN
so anxious about our dear Tish last summer, I dare say it would never have happened. But even Charlie Sands noticed when he came to our cottage at Lake Penzance for the week-end that she was distinctly not her old self.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “She’s lost her pep, or something. I’ve been here two days and she hasn’t even had a row with Hannah, and I must say that fuss with old Carpenter yesterday really wasn’t up to her standard at all.”

Old Carpenter is a fisherman, and Tish having discovered that our motor boat went better in reverse than forward, he had miscalculated our direction and we had upset him.

As it happened, that very evening Tish herself confirmed Charlie’s fears by asking about Aggie’s Cousin Sarah Brown’s Chelsea teapot.

“I think,” she said, “that a woman of my age should have a hobby; one that will arouse interest at the minimum of physical exertion. And the collection of old china—”

“Oh, Tish!” Aggie wailed, and burst into tears.

“I mean it,” said Tish, “I have reached that period of my life which comes to every woman, when adventure no longer lurks around the next corner. By this I do not refer necessarily to amorous affairs, but to dramatic incidents. I think more than I did of what I eat. I take a nap every day. I am getting old.”

“Never!” said Aggie valiantly.

“No? When I need my glasses nowadays to see the telephone directory!”

“But they’re printing the names smaller, Tish.”

“Yes, and I dare say my arm is getting shorter also,” she returned with a sad smile. She pursued the subject no further, however, but went on knitting the bedroom slippers which are her yearly contribution to the Old Ladies’ Home, leaving Charlie Sands to gaze at her thoughtfully as he sipped his blackberry cordial.

But the fact is that Tish had outgrown the cottage life at Penzance, and we all knew it. Save for an occasional golf ball from the links breaking a window now and then, and the golfers themselves who brought extra shoes done up in paper for us to keep for them, paying Hannah something to put them on the ice, there was nothing to rouse or interest her.

Her mind was as active as ever; it was her suggestion that a clothespin on Aggie’s nose might relieve the paroxysms of her hay fever, and she was still filled with sentiment. It was her own idea on the anniversary of Mr. Wiggins’ demise to paint the cottage roof a fresh and verdant green as a memorial to him, since he had been a master roofer by profession.

But these had been the small and simple annals of her days. To all outward seeming, until the night of the treasure hunt, our Tish was no longer the Tish who with our feeble assistance had captured the enemy town of X— during the war, or held up the band of cutthroats on Thundercloud, or led us through the wilderness of the Far West. An aëroplane in the sky or the sound of the Smith boys racing along in their stripped flivver may have reminded her of brighter days, but she said nothing.

Once, indeed, she had hired a horse from the local livery stable and taken a brief ride, but while making a short cut across the Cummings estate the animal overturned a beehive. Although Tish, with her customary presence of mind, at once headed the terrified creature for the swimming pool, where a number of persons were bathing and sunning themselves in scanty apparel about the edge, the insects forsook the beast the moment horse and rider plunged beneath the surface and a great many people were severely stung. Indeed, the consequences threatened to be serious, for Tish was unable to get the horse out again and it was later necessary to bring a derrick from Penzance to rescue him. But her protests over the enormous bills rendered by the livery man were feeble, indeed, compared to the old days.

“Twenty dollars!” she said. “Are you claiming that that animal, which should have been able to jump over a beehive without upsetting it, was out ten hours?”

“That’s my charge,” he said. “Walk, trot and canter is regular rates, but swimming is double, and cheap at that. The next time you want to go out riding, go to the fish pier and I reckon they’ll oblige you. You don’t need a horse, lady. What you want is a blooming porpoise.”

Which, of course, is preposterous. There are no porpoises in Lake Penzance.

She even made the blackberry cordial that year, a domestic task usually left to Aggie and myself, but I will say with excellent results. For just as it was ready for that slight fermentation which gives it its medicinal quality, a very pleasant young man came to see us, having for sale a fluid to be added to homemade cordials and so on, which greatly increased their bulk without weakening them.

“But how can one dilute without weakening?” Tish demanded suspiciously.

“I would not call it dilution, madam. It is really expansion.”

It was a clear colorless liquid with a faintly aromatic odor, which he said was due to juniper in it, and he left us a small bottle for experimental purposes.

With her customary caution, our dear Tish would not allow us to try it until it had been proved, and some days later Hannah reporting a tramp at the back door, she diluted—or rather expanded—a half glass of cordial, gave him some cookies with it, and we all waited breathlessly.

It had no ill effect, however. The last we saw of the person he was quite cheery; and, indeed, we heard later that he went into Penzance, and getting one of the town policemen into an alley, forced him to change trousers with him. As a matter of record, whether it was Tish’s efforts with the cordial itself, or the addition of the expansion matter which we later purchased in bulk and added, I cannot say. But I do know that on one occasion, having run out of gasoline, we poured a bottle of our blackberry cordial into the tank of the motor boat and got home very nicely indeed. I believe that this use of fruit juices has not heretofore been generally known.

Tish, I know, told it to Mr. Stubbs, the farmer who brought us our poultry, advising him to try cider in his car instead of feeding his apples to his hogs. But he only stared at her.

“Feed apples to hogs these days!” he said. “Why, lady, my hogs ain’t seen an apple for four years! They don’t know there is such a thing.”