Tish Plays the Game

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “You’re killing me!” she would yell. “I’m dying!”

  “You will die if you don’t keep quiet,” Tish would say.

  “But I’ll take cold; I’ll take pneumonia.”

  “Not with a temperature like that,” Tish would assure her, and pour on more ice and salt.

  They did not stop until her temperature was down to ninety-five. She would not speak to any of us by that time, but when it was all over, Tish came over to the room Aggie and I occupied together and closed the door.

  “I fancy,” she said grimly, “that it will be some time before she holds the thermometer against her hot-water bottle again.”

  As Tish says, the Emmies of this world never fool the women, although they always fool the men. But Emmie knew well enough that she had not fooled us for a minute. And the way she hated us after the affair of the cold pack was simply wicked. She would lie in bed and loathe the very ground we walked on, and when she found it would take at least a week to repair the car she had a convulsion and frothed at the mouth. Tish was quite certain the froth was merely lather from a cake of soap, but Will was almost out of his mind.

  The strangest thing, however, was the way she had turned against Miss Smith. Possibly the fact that Tish found a picture of her in Will’s coat one day while she was repairing it in Emmie’s room had something to do with it. But both Will and Miss Smith were as puzzled as could be about it, and Miss Smith said it had been on her bureau when she went out.

  Will went right down on his knees beside Emmie’s bed and swore he had always been true to her.

  “There has never been any other woman in my life, Emmie,” he told her. “I’ve never had any time for that sort of thing, and you know it. Surely you can trust me!”

  “I trust nobody,” said Emmie grimly. “If you haven’t the decency to wait until I am gone, which at the best is a matter of weeks, I can but lie here and await the end.”

  But she couldn’t very well send the nurse away, for in ten years she had had most of the nurses thereabouts, and none of them would come back, and she knew it. She was very suspicious after that, however, and the very next day, Aggie happening to dust baking soda instead of powdered sugar over her cup custard—yes, she was eating a little by that time; she had to, or starve—she accused Miss Smith of trying to poison her.

  Naturally, things were considerably strained from then on, although both Will and the dog were showing marked improvement. Will would come home to a clean house and a good dinner and smoke a couple of cigarettes up the chimney afterward. Then he would get up heavily and draw a long breath and say:

  “Well, I suppose I’d better be getting on the job again,” and go slowly up the stairs.

  But long after he should have been in his bed, getting the rest he needed, we could hear him reading aloud, on and on, until Emmie went to sleep.

  How long this might have continued I cannot say. But one morning we missed the half of a coconut cake from the kitchen cupboard, and Tish promptly went to Will about it.

  “None are so blind as those who will not see,” she said to him. “But if you think, Will Hartford, that a mouse ate that cake and then put the pan in the garbage can, I don’t.”

  “But I don’t think anything of the kind, Letitia,” he protested, looking distressed. “Every now and then a tramp breaks into a house out here and eats what he can find.”

  Tish gave him a terrible stare, and then she used an expression I had never before heard from her lips. “Some people are idiots,” she said, “and some are just plain fools,” and with that she stalked out of the room.

  She called us together for a council of war, as she termed it, after he had gone to the train.

  “Two courses are open before us,” she said. “We can leave the poor deluded imbecile to his fate, or we can take matters into our own hands. If the former, we must go; if the latter, that nurse must get out. I cannot be hampered.”

  Well, after some argument we agreed to do whatever Tish suggested, although Aggie stipulated that Emmie, being her cousin by marriage, was to suffer no physical harm. Tish, on the other hand, demanded absolute freedom and no criticism. And this being satisfactorily arranged it remained only to get rid of Miss Smith.

  As it happened, fate played into our hands that very morning.

  The coconut cake had upset Emmie’s stomach, and the doctor sent some medicine for her. But Tish met the boy at the door, and, having instructed us to have the kettle boiling, was able to steam off the label and place it on the bottle of ipecac swiftly and neatly. Miss Smith gave her two doses before it began to act, but when it did it was thorough.

  Well, Emmie was about as sick as any human could be and live for the next six hours. I suppose it was the first real sickness she had felt in ten years, and the fuss she made was dreadful. There was no use blaming a tramp for the coconut cake after it either. But what really matters is that she made them bring Will out from town. And between paroxysms she told him Miss Smith had poisoned her.

  Miss Smith left that afternoon, but before she did she told Will that Emmie was as well as he was, or even better, and that the doctor knew it too. But if anyone thinks that Will believed her he does not know Will Hartford. All he did was to dismiss the doctor, too, and then come back to the kitchen and moan about the way people treated Emmie.

  “Even that doctor never understood her,” he said despondently. “And I must owe him two hundred dollars or so this minute! Sometimes, Letitia, I think there is no compassion left in the world. Even the neighbors neglect her nowadays; I don’t believe there has been a bowl of calf’s-foot jelly sent to her in months.”

  “Really?” said Tish. “It is surprising, when you think of the things folks might send her and don’t. Every now and then you read of somebody getting a bomb, or poisoned candy.”

  He looked at her, but she went on fixing Emmie’s tray in her usual composed manner.

  We had a day or two of peace after that. Tish brought Doctor Snodgrass, her own physician, out from town. And after a short talk with her, he put Emmie on a very light diet and went away again. As Tish had put a padlock on the kitchen cupboard the light diet was all Emmie got, too. She had a bowl of junket for breakfast, beef tea for lunch and in the evening she had some milk toast, and if ever I’ve seen a woman suffer she did. We did not run every time she rang her bell, either. She would jingle it for half a dozen times, and for a feeble woman the way she could fling it when nobody came was a marvel.

  But, looking back, I can see that we underestimated her intelligence. She had a good bit of time, by and large, to think things out, and she was no fool, whatever else she might be. And I imagine it galled her, too, to see Will filling out and looking more cheerful every day. He was spending more time than ever downstairs and, instead of tiptoeing into the room when he came home at night, he would walk in briskly and say: “Well, how’s the old girl to-night?”

  He still wandered across to the cemetery now and then, but we fancied there was more of speculation than of grief in his face when he picked the daisies off his lot. And one night, I remember, he came back and said it was a curious thing that Emmie’s mother had lived to be eighty, as frail as she had been, and that Emmie was like her in a lot of ways.

  Tish eyed him.

  “She certainly is,” she said. “I thought of that the night I found her in the pantry.”

  And then one night there was a yell and a crash upstairs, and when we all ran up, with Will in the lead, we found Emmie stretched out on the floor, and she said she was paralyzed from the waist down!

  It took the four of us to get her back into bed. She gave Tish a glance of triumph when she was finally installed and then grabbed Will’s hand and began to groan.

  “It’s the last straw,” she moaned. “Until now I have not been entirely helpless, but this is too much. I am near the end, William.”

  “My poor Emmie!” he wailed. “My poor afflicted girl!”

  Things were not only no better, for all that we had
done, but worse.

  Well, Will carried on like a madman, of course. There were specialists from town and a woman to massage her legs, but not a muscle would she move. Except once, when Tish jabbed a pin into her and she jerked and yelled like a lunatic. But she had us beaten, of course, for she had worked it all out in her mind. If she had paralysis she didn’t have to have anything else, and the very first thing she asked for was a broiled beefsteak. After that she ate everything; she ate like a day laborer.

  Tish tried skimping on her tray, but if she got one egg instead of two in the morning poor Will would come down looking troubled.

  “We must build her up,” he would say. “She needs all the strength we can give her, Letitia.”

  And that was the situation when our poor Tish finally took matters into her own hands, with results for which she has been so cruelly blamed.

  I have now come to that series of mysterious events which led, with tragic inevitability, to the crisis on the night of our departure. And it may be well here to revert to the subject of spiritualism.

  What with one thing and another Tish had apparently lost interest in it, hers being a mind which concentrates on one idea at a time, and having occupied itself almost entirely with Emmie since our arrival.

  True, such reading aloud as she had been forced to do for Emmie while Will had laryngitis had been on such subjects, dealing largely with specters and apparitions. And both Aggie and I recalled later that she had told Emmie that the nearness of the graveyard would make such materialization comparatively simple.

  But Emmie had shown more terror than interest in the subject, and finally Will had insisted that Tish abandon it for lighter and more cheerful material.

  It had been seed sown in fruitful ground, however, as shall presently appear.

  To go back then: Will came home very dejected one night and said he would have to go away for a business trip. Emmie was most disagreeable about it.

  “And what about me?” she demanded. “Are you going to leave me here alone?”

  “It’s the first time I’ve left you for five years, Emmie,” he told her. “I’ll just have to go. And as for being alone, haven’t you got Letitia here? And Lizzie and Aggie?”

  Well, I must admit that that did not seem to cheer her any, and the look she gave us was most unpleasant. But she had to let him go, although her last words were not calculated to send him away happy.

  “If anything happens to me while you are gone, Will,” she said, “you know how I want things done. And my black silk dress is in the lower bureau drawer.”

  “I can get back in six hours if I’m needed, Emmie,” he said brokenly. “A telegram or—”

  “When I go I shall be snuffed out like a candle,” she told him in a cold voice. And with that he went away, looking as though he was on his way to the electric chair.

  I met Tish on the stairs after she had seen him off. There was a strange look on her face, I remembered later; but after she had settled Emmie for the night she took up her knitting quietly enough. She always contributes a number of knitted pairs of bedroom slippers to the Old Ladies’ Home at Christmas.

  Aggie and I retired early, taking Emmie’s bell with us at Tish’s orders, so she could not disturb us during the night, and were soon fast asleep.

  But judge of our horror when, at two o’clock or thereabouts, we heard a dreadful shriek from Emmie’s room, followed by a strange, rushing sound. As soon as I could move I got out of bed and turned on the lights; Aggie was reaching for her teeth, with her eyes fixed on the door.

  “I left that door open, Lizzie,” she said in an agonized whisper. “Somebody’s closed it.”

  Well, it certainly was closed, and when I tried it, it was locked and the key was on the outside! And, to add to the dreadfulness of our position, there was no further sound whatever; no whimpering from Emmie’s room; no sound of Tish in short and sharp remonstrance. No anything.

  Never have we passed through such a half hour as followed. That both our wonderful Tish and Emmie had fallen to the knife or other method of some deadly assassin we never doubted. And when at the end of that time we heard halting but inevitable footsteps slowly climbing the staircase, both of us were certain that our hour had come. When they stopped outside the door and an unseen hand fumbled with the key, Aggie gave a low moan and made for the window, but she was stopped before it was too late by the entrance into the room of Tish herself!

  She was a curious dead-white color, and she came in limping and closed the door.

  “I’d like to borrow your tweezers, Lizzie,” she said, in a toneless sort of voice. “I ran out when I heard Emmie scream, and I’ve got something in my foot.”

  “But Emmie!” we inquired in unison. “What has happened to her?”

  It was a moment before she replied. Both Aggie and I remembered that hesitation later and that there was a hard and determined look on her face. But when she did reply, it was reassuring.

  “She’s all right,” she said.

  “But she screamed, Tish! She screamed horribly.”

  “You’ve heard her scream before this,” she said coldly. “She says she saw a ghost. That’s all.”

  She went out again, and to her own room. She was very lame, we noticed, but calm. Sometime later she called to Aggie to bring her the arnica, and Aggie did so. She reported that Tish had lost the strange pallor, but that she had got a number of thorns in her feet and was removing them.

  “She’s very quiet, Lizzie,” Aggie said. “And I thinks she’s sprained her ankle. You would think she had seen the ghost, to look at her, and not Emmie.”

  Well, I felt uneasy myself, especially as something had certainly locked us in, and after a while I went across to Emmie’s room and tapped lightly at the door. It was Tish herself who answered from the other side.

  “Get away from there, Lizzie,” she said sharply. “We are all right. I shall stay with Emmie until she is calmer.”

  The rest of the night was quiet enough. It was not until the next day that certain things began to make us uneasy.

  One of these was Emmie herself. However lightly Tish might treat the matter, refusing to call a doctor and so on, it was evident that Emmie had passed through a terrible experience.

  She would not see anyone, even Aggie or myself, and she insisted on keeping her door closed and locked. Once in a while we could hear Tish reading to her, apparently to calm her. And she ate a little from the trays Tish carried up. But never once did she raise her voice; ordinarily when she wanted anything and no one answered her bell one could hear her shouting, from the main road. But she was apparently chastened beyond belief.

  Our real anxiety, however, was Tish herself. She was in a curious nervous state; a thing most unusual in her. She ate nothing at all. And if a door slammed she would jump violently and turn quite pale.

  Knowing her as we did, we could only believe that she, as well as Emmie, had seen the apparition, and had possibly received a message of some personal import. It was in a spirit of helpfulness, therefore, and not of curiosity, that we decided to remain awake that night to give her moral support if she required it.

  And that very night we saw it ourselves.

  Aggie was suffering from a bad attack of hay fever and had gone to the window for air. Suddenly I heard her whisper, “Lizzie; cobe here! It’s outside, od the walk!”

  I ran to the window. And there below us, just leaving the kitchen porch, was the apparition itself! It was a tall, thin, gray figure. And as we watched, it moved along through the back garden and then, on Aggie sneezing violently, apparently dissolved.

  Although we waited for some time, it did not materialize again.

  In view of Tish’s curious nervous condition, we did not mention it to her. But we saw it for three nights in succession.

  I must admit that it made us both very uneasy, especially in view of Emmie’s continued strange state. If Tish had been her usual buoyant self we would have gone to her, but she was oddly restless and uneasy,
and once or twice we even found her dozing in her chair—a thing unprecedented with her.

  But I kept a careful record of the appearance, and I quote from it here:

  Monday. 12 midnight. Materialized human figure. Gray in color, thin in outline. Ectoplasmic blanket around shoulders.

  Tuesday. 1 A.M. Same figure, but with long rodlike structure—See Crawford—across both shoulders. Figure bent, as though carrying weight.

  Wednesday. 12:30 A.M. Same figure, with misty projection around one arm, simulating basket or pail.

  This ends the record, for on Thursday Will Hartford unexpectedly came home and a situation developed which I cannot yet recall without anger and dismay.

  We had not expected him for some time, but he let himself in with his latchkey and came back to the kitchen where Aggie and I were fixing Emmie’s tray. He looked thin and worn.

  “How is she?’ he asked, almost in a whisper. “Still—”

  “She’s still alive, if that’s what you mean,” I said tartly. “Look at this tray and judge for yourself.”

  He was so relieved that he had to sit down and wipe his face, which was covered with a clammy sweat.

  “I just had to come back,” he said. “I didn’t even finish the business. What do money and success matter if I haven’t her with me to share in them?”

  He got up, however, and picked up a large package he had brought in.

  “I brought her some flowers,” he said. “I got to thinking while I was away. Maybe I could have done a lot of things to make her happy, but I’ve been too selfish to think of them. Well—”

  Aggie watched him go out. She still had her hay fever, and standing at the window for three nights had not improved it.

  “What I dod’t udderstad, Lizzie,” she said, “is why there are so bady healthy wobed in the world. The bed seeb to like theb feeble.”

  And just then Tish, on her way downstairs for the tray, met Will face to face. She never even spoke to him. She gave him one awful look, and then, just as she was, she went out of the house. She did not come back for the most terrible five hours of my life.