Tish Plays the Game

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  I

  IT WAS LAST MAY that Tish’s cousin, Annabelle Carter, wrote to her and asked her to take Lily May for the summer.

  “I need a rest, Tish,” she wrote. “I need a rest from her. I want to go off where I can eat a cup custard without her looking at my waistline, and can smoke an occasional cigarette without having to steal one of hers when she is out. I may even bob my hair.”

  “She’ll smoke no cigarettes here,” Tish interjected. “And Annabelle Carter’s a fool. Always was and always will be. Bob her hair indeed!”

  She read on: “I want you to take her, Tish, and show her that high principles still exist in the older generation. They seem to think we are all hypocrites and whited sepulchers. But most of all, I want to get her away from Billy Field. He is an enchanting person, but he couldn’t buy gas for her car. Jim says if he can earn a thousand dollars this summer he’ll think about it. But outside of bootlegging, how can he? And he has promised not to do that.”

  Tish had read us the letter, but she had already made up her mind.

  “It is a duty,” she said, “and I have never shirked a duty. Annabelle Carter has no more right to have a daughter than I have; I’ve seen her playing bridge and poker before that child. And she serves liquor in her house, although it is against the law of the nation.”

  And later on: “What the girl needs,” she said, “is to be taken away from the artificial life she is living, and to meet with Nature. Nature,” she said, “is always natural. A mountain is always a mountain; the sea is the sea. Sufficient of either should make her forget that boy.”

  “Too much of either might, Tish,” I said, rather tartly. “You can drown her or throw her over a precipice, of course. But if you think she’ll trade him for a view or a sailboat, you’d better think again.”

  But Tish was not listening.

  “An island,” she said, “would be ideal. Just the four of us, and Hannah. Simple living and high thinking. That’s what the young girls of to-day require.”

  “I often wonder,” Aggie said sadly, “what Mr. Wiggins would have thought of them! I remember how shocked he was when his Cousin Harriet used ice on her face before a party, to make her cheeks pink.”

  So the matter was determined, and Tish appealed to Charlie Sands, her nephew, to find her an island. I shall never forget his face when she told him why.

  “A flapper!” he said. “Well, your work’s cut out for you all right.”

  “Nonsense!” Tish said sharply. “I have been a girl myself. I understand girls.”

  “Have you made any preparations for her?”

  “I’ve bought a set of Louisa M. Alcott. And I can hire a piano if she wants to keep in practice.”

  “Oh, she’ll keep in practice all right,” he said, “but I wouldn’t bother with a piano.” He did not explain this, but went away soon after. “I’ll do my best to find you an island,” he said cryptically, as he departed, “but the chances are she can swim.”

  That last sentence of his made Tish thoughtful, and she determined that, if our summer was to be spent on the sea, we should all learn to swim. I cannot say that the result was successful. Indeed, our very first lesson almost ended in a tragedy, for it was Tish’s theory that one must start in deep water.

  “The natural buoyancy of the water is greater there,” she said. “One goes in and then simply strikes out.”

  She did this, therefore, standing on the diving board in the correct position—the instructor was not yet ready—and made a very nice dive. But she did not come up again, although the water was very agitated, and after a time Aggie became alarmed and called the instructor. He found her at last, but she was so filled with water that we abandoned the lesson for the day.

  As the instructor said to her, “All you need is a few goldfish, lady, and you’d be a first-class aquarium.”

  And then, with all our ideas of setting Lily May an example of dignity and decorum, along about the middle of June Hannah, going out on a Thursday, came creeping in about nine o’clock at night and brought in the tray with cake and blackberry cordial, with her hat on.

  “What do you mean,” Tish demanded, fixing her with a stony glare, “by coming in here like that?”

  Hannah set the tray down and looked rather pale.

  “It’s my hat, Miss Tish,” she said; “and it’s my head.”

  “Take it off,” said Tish. “Your hat, not your head. Not that you’d miss one more than the other.”

  So Hannah took her hat off, and she had had her hair shingle-bobbed! I never saw anything more dreadful, unless it was our dear Tish’s face. She looked at her for some moments in silence.

  “Have you seen yourself?” she demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I shall add no further punishment,” said Tish grimly. “But as I do not propose to look at you in this condition, you will continue to wear a hat until it grows out again.”

  “I’m to wear a hat over the stove?”

  “You’re to wear a hat over yourself, Hannah,” Tish corrected her, and Hannah went out in tears.

  It was very strange, after that, to see Hannah serving the table with a hat on, but our dear Tish is firmness itself when it comes to a matter of principle, and even the discovery of an artificial rosebud in the stewed lamb one day did not cause her to weaken. I shall, however, never forget Lily May’s expression when Hannah served luncheon the day she arrived.

  She came in, followed by a taxi man and the janitor of Tish’s apartment building, who were loaded down with bags and hat boxes, and having kissed Tish without any particular warmth, turned to the janitor.

  “Go easy with that bag, Charles,” she said. His name is not Charles, but this seemed not to worry her. “If you break the contents Miss Carberry will be out her summer liquor.”

  As Tish has been for many years a member of the W.C.T.U., she protested at once, but the taxi man seemed to think it funny until Tish turned on him.

  “It is you,” she said, “and your kind who make it impossible to enforce the best law our nation has ever passed. If there is liquor in that bag,” she said to Lily May, “it will not remain in this apartment one instant. Lizzie, open the bag, and pour the wretched stuff into the kitchen sink.”

  I was about to open the bag, when the taxi man said that, while he was not a drinking man, plenty of hospitals need stimulants.

  “You pour it down the sink,” he said, “and where is it? Nowhere, lady. But if I take it to the Samaritan, and they use it—why, it’s a Christian action, as I see it.”

  I will say for Lily May that she offered no objection. She stood by, looking at each of us in turn and seeming rather puzzled. She only spoke once.

  “Look here, Aunt Tish,” she began, “I was only—”

  “I shall discuss this with you later and in private,” Tish cut in sternly, and motioned me to open the bag.

  I did so, but it contained no alcoholic stimulant whatever; only a number of bottles and jars for the toilet. Tish eyed them, and then turned to Lily May.

  “Have I your word of honor,” she said, “that these are what they purport to be?”

  “Probably not,” said Lily May coolly. “Nothing is these days. But there’s nothing there for Volstead to beat his breast about. I tried to tell you.”

  While she was in her room taking off her things, Tish expressed herself with her usual clearness on the situation in which she found herself.

  “Already,” she said, “the girl has shown two of the most undesirable modern qualities—flippancy and a disregard for the law of the nation. I am convinced that I saw a box of rouge in that bag, Lizzie.”

  But when, later on, she accused Lily May of making up her face, Lily May only smiled sweetly and said she was obliged to do so.

  “Obliged!” Tish sniffed. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  “Not nonsense at all,” said Lily May. “All the—” She seemed to hesitate. “It’s like this,” she said. “Make-up is respectable. The other thing isn’t.
When you see a woman these days with a dead-white face, watch her. That’s all.”

  Poor Aggie cast an agonized glance at herself in the mirror, but Tish stared hard at Lily May.

  “There are certain subjects on which I do not wish to be informed,” she said coldly.

  “Oh, very well,” said Lily May. “If you like to think that the Easter bunny lays hard-boiled eggs—”

  I must say things looked very uncomfortable from the start. Nobody could accuse Lily May of being any trouble, or even of being unpleasant; she had a very sweet smile, and she did everything she was told. But she seemed to regard the three of us as mere children, and this was particularly galling to Tish.

  “Why shouldn’t we see that picture?” Tish demanded one night, when she steered us away from a movie we had been waiting three weeks to see.

  “It’s not a nice movie,” said Lily May gently, and took us to see The Ten Commandments, which we had already seen three times.

  It was a difficult situation, for of course Tish could not insist on going, after that. And Aggie suffered also, for on the hay-fever season coming on she brought out her medicinal cigarettes, and Lily May walked right out and bought her a vaporizing lamp instead, which smelled simply horrible when lighted.

  But it was over Hannah that Tish suffered the most, for of course Lily May had had her hair bobbed, and Hannah rebelled the first minute she saw it.

  “Either she wears a hat or I don’t, Miss Tish,” she said. “And you’d better put a hat on her. The way that janitor is hanging around this place is simply sinful.”

  It ended by Hannah abandoning her hat, copying Lily May’s method of fixing her hair; only where Lily May’s hair hung straight and dark, Hannah was obliged to use soap to gain the same effect.

  As Tish observed to her scathingly, “It will break off some night in your sleep. And then where will you be?”

  It became evident before long that the city simply would not do for Lily May. The grocer’s boy took to forgetting things so he could make a second trip, and in the market one day Mr. Jurgens, Tish’s butcher, handed Lily May a bunch of pansies.

  “Pansies are for thoughts, Miss Lily May,” he said.

  And Tish said he looked so like a sick calf that she absently ordered veal for dinner, although she had meant to have lamb chops.

  Other things, too, began to worry us. One was that although Lily May had, according to orders, received no letters from the Field youth, Hannah’s mail had suddenly increased. For years she had received scarcely anything but the catalogue of a mail-order house, and now there was seldom a mail went by without her getting something.

  Another was Tish’s discovery that Lily May wore hardly any clothes. I shall never forget the day Tish discovered how little she actually wore. It was wash day, and Tish had engaged Mrs. Schwartz for an extra day.

  “There will be extra petticoats and—er—under-garments, Mrs. Schwartz,” she explained. “I well remember in my young days that my dear mother always alluded to the expense of my frillies.”

  It has been Tish’s theory for years that no decent woman ever appears without a flannel petticoat under her muslin one, and I shall never forget the severe lecture she read Aggie when, one warm summer day, she laid hers aside. It was therefore a serious shock to her to come home the next day and find Mrs. Schwartz scrubbing the kitchen floor, while Hannah was drinking a cup of tea and gossiping with her.

  “The young lady’s clothes!” said Mrs. Schwartz. “Why, bless your heart, I pressed them off in fifteen minutes.”

  It turned out that Lily May wore only a single garment beneath her frock. I cannot express in words Tish’s shock at this discovery, or her complete discouragement when, having brought out her best white flannel petticoat and a muslin one with blind embroidery, of which she is very fond, Lily May flatly refused to put them on.

  “Why?” she said. “I’m not going to pretend I haven’t got legs. My feet have to be fastened to something.”

  It was in this emergency that Tish sent for Charlie Sands, but I regret to say that he was of very little assistance to us. Lily May was demure and quiet at first, and sat playing with something in her hand. Finally she dropped it, and it was a small white cube with spots on each side. Charlie Sands picked it up and looked at Lily May.

  “Got the other?” he asked.

  Well, she had, and it seems one plays a sort of game with them, for in a very short time they were both sitting on the floor, and she won, I think, a dollar and thirty cents.

  I cannot recall this situation without a pang, for our dear Tish never gambles, and is averse to all games of chance. Indeed, she went so pale that Aggie hastily brought her a glass of blackberry cordial, and even this was unfortunate, for Lily May looked up and said, “If you want mother’s recipe for homemade gin I think I can remember it.”

  Tish was utterly disheartened when Charlie Sands went away, but he seemed to think everything would be all right.

  “She’s a nice child,” he said. “She’s only living up to a type. And there isn’t an ounce of hypocrisy in her. I can see through her, all right.”

  “I dare say,” Tish retorted grimly. “So can anyone else, when the sun is shining.”

  But the climax really came when old Mr. Barnes, on the floor above Tish’s apartment, sent her a note. It seems that he had asthma and sat at the window just above Lily May’s, and the note he sent was to ask Tish not to smoke cigarettes out her window. I really thought Tish would have a stroke on the head of it, and if Annabelle Carter hadn’t been in Europe I am quite sure she would have sent Lily May back home.

  But there we were, with Lily May on our hands for three months, and Hannah already rolling her stockings below her knees and with one eyebrow almost gone, where she had tried to shave it to a line with a razor. And then one day Aggie began to talk about long hair being a worry, and that it would be easier to put on her tonic if it was short; and with that Tish took the island Charlie Sands had found, and we started.

  II

  I SHALL NEVER FORGET Lily May’s expression when she saw Tish trying on the knickerbockers which are her usual wear when in the open.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t!” she said in a sort of wail.

  “Why not?” Tish demanded tartly. “At least they cover me, which is more than I can say of some of your clothes.”

  “But they’re not—not feminine,” said Lily May, and Tish stared at her.

  “Feminine!” she said. “The outdoors is not a matter of sex. Thank God, the sea is sexless; so are the rocks and trees.”

  “But the people—”

  “There will be no people,” said Tish with an air of finality.

  The next few days were busy ones. Tish had immediately, on learning that the New England coast has several varieties of fish, decided that we could combine change and isolation with fishing for the market.

  “Save for the cost of the bait,” she said, “which should be immaterial, there is no expense involved. The sea is still free, although the bootleggers seem to think they own it. But I do not intend to profit by this freedom. The money thus earned will go to foreign missions.”

  She bought a book on New England fish, and spent a long time studying it. Then she went to our local fish market and secured a list of prices.

  “With any luck,” she said, “we should catch a hundred pounds or so a day. At sixty cents a pound, that’s sixty dollars, or we’ll say thirty-six hundred dollars for the summer. There may be a bad day now and then.”

  Mr. Ostermaier, our clergyman, was greatly impressed, and felt that the money should perhaps go toward a new organ. Tish, however, held out for missions, and in the end they compromised on a kitchen for the parish house.

  Toward the end, Lily May began to take more interest in our preparations. At first she had been almost indifferent, observing that any old place would do, and the sooner the better.

  “It will give you something to do,” Tish told her severely.

  “So would a case of hiv
es.” she replied, and lapsed again into the lethargy which Tish found so trying.

  But, as I have said, she cheered up greatly before our departure, and we all felt much encouraged. She never spoke to us of Billy Field, but she had made Hannah a confidante, and Hannah told Aggie that it was apparently off.

  “It’s this way, Miss Aggie,” she said. “He’s got to earn a thousand dollars this summer, one way or another, and I guess he’s about as likely to do it as you are to catch a whale.”

  Perhaps it was significant, although I did not think of it at the time, that Aggie did catch a whale later on; and that indeed our troubles began with that unlucky incident.

  But Lily May became really quite cheery as the time for departure approached, and we began to grow very much attached to her, although she inadvertently got us into a certain amount of trouble on the train going up.

  She had brought along a pack of cards, and taught us a game called cold hands, a curious name, but a most interesting idea. One is dealt five cards, and puts a match in the center of the table. Then one holds up various combinations, such as pairs, three of a kind, and so on, and draws again. Whoever has the best hand at the end takes all the matches.

  Tish, I remember, had all the matches in front of her, and rang for the porter, to bring a fresh box. But when he came back the conductor came along and said gambling was not allowed.

  “Gambling!” Tish said. “Gambling! Do you suppose I would gamble on this miserable railroad of yours, when at any moment I may have to meet my Creator?”

  “If it isn’t gambling, what is it?”

  And then Lily May looked up at him sweetly and said, “Now run away and don’t tease, or mamma spank.”

  That is exactly what she said. And instead of reproving her that wretched conductor only grinned at her and went away. What, as Tish says, can one do with a generation which threatens an older and wiser one with corporal punishment?

  We had telegraphed ahead for a motor boat to meet us and take us over to Paris Island, and we found it waiting; quite a handsome boat named the Swallow, a name which Tish later observed evidently did not refer to the bird of that sort, but to other qualities it possessed.