The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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!"

  I drew on my woolen tights angrily.

  "Elevators!" Tish went on scornfully. "Street cars and taxicabs! No wonder your bodies are mere masses of protoplasm, or cellulose, or whatever it is."

  "Since when," said Aggie, "have you been walking to develop yourself, Tish? I must say--"

  Here anger brought on one of her sneezing attacks, and she was unable to finish.

  Tish stood before us oracularly. "After next September," she said, "you will both scorn the sloth of civilization. You will move about for the joy of moving about. You will have cast off the shackles of the flesh and be born anew. That is, if a plan of mine goes through. Lizzie, you will lose fifty pounds!"

  Well, I didn't want to lose fifty pounds. After our summer in the Maine woods I had gone back to find that my new tailor-made coat, which had fitted me exactly, and being stiffened with haircloth kept its shape off and looked as if I myself were hanging to the hook, had caved in on me in several places. Just as I had gone to the expense of having it taken in I began to put on flesh again, and had to have it let out. Besides, no woman over forty should ever reduce, at least not violently. She wrinkles. My face that summer had fallen into accordion plaits, and I had the curious feeling of having enough skin for two.

  Aggie had suggested at that time that I have my cheeks filled out with paraffin, which I believe cakes and gives the appearance of youth. But Mrs. Ostermaier knew a woman who had done so, and being hit on one side by a snowball, the padding broke in half, one part moving up under her eye and the second lodging at the angle of her jaw. She tried lying on a hot-water bottle to melt the pieces and bring them together again, but they did not remain fixed, having developed a wandering habit and slipping unexpectedly now and then. Mrs. Ostermaier says it is painful to watch her holding them in place when she yawns.

  Strangely enough, however, a few weeks later Tish's enthusiasm for the West had apparently vanished. When several weeks went by and the atlas had disappeared from her table, and she had given up vegetarianism for Swedish movements, we felt that we were to have a quiet summer after all, and Aggie wrote to a hotel in Asbury Park about rooms for July and August.

  There was a real change in Tish. She stopped knitting abdominal bands for the soldiers in Europe, for one thing, although she had sent over almost a dozen very tasty ones. In the evenings, when we dropped in to chat with her, she said very little and invariably dozed in her chair.

  On one such occasion, Aggie having inadvertently stepped on the rocker of her chair while endeavoring by laying a hand on Tish's brow to discover i
f she was feverish, the chair tilted back and Tish wakened with a jerk.

  She immediately fell to groaning and clasped her hands to the small of her back, quite ignoring poor Aggie, whom the chair had caught in the epigastric region, and who was compelled for some time to struggle for breath.

  "Jumping Jehoshaphat!" said Tish in an angry tone. It is rare for Tish to use the name of a Biblical character in this way, but she was clearly suffering. "What in the world are you doing, Aggie?"

  "T-t-trying to breathe," poor Aggie replied.

  "Then I wish," Tish said coldly, "that you would make the effort some place else than on the rocker of my chair. You jarred me, and I am in no state to be jarred."

  But she refused to explain further, beyond saying, in reply to a question of mine, that she was not feverish and that she had not been asleep, having merely closed her eyes to rest them. Also she affirmed that she was not taking riding-lessons. We both noticed however, that she did not leave her chair during the time we were there, and that she was sitting on the sofa cushion I had made her for the previous Christmas, and on which I had embroidered the poet Moore's beautiful words: "Come, rest in this bosom."

  As Aggie was still feeling faint, I advised her to take a mouthful of blackberry cordial, which Tish keeps for emergencies in her bathroom closet. Immediately following her departure the calm of the evening was broken by a loud shriek.

  It appeared, on my rushing to the bathroom, while Tish sat heartlessly still, that Aggie, not seeing a glass, had placed the bottle to her lips and taken quite a large mouthful of liniment, which in color resembled the cordial. I found her sitting on the edge of the bathtub in a state of collapse.

  "I'm poisoned!" she groaned. "Oh, Lizzie, I am not fit to die!"

  I flew with the bottle to Tish, who was very calm and stealthily rubbing one of her ankles.

  "Do her good," Tish said. "Take some of the stiffness out of her liver, for one thing. But you might keep an eye on her. It's full of alcohol."

  "What's the antidote?" I asked, hearing Aggie's low groans.

  "The gold cure is the only thing I can think of at the moment," said Tish coldly, and started on the other ankle.

  I merely record this incident to show the change in Tish. Aggie was not seriously upset, although dizzy for an hour or so and very talkative, especially about Mr. Wiggins.

  Tish was changed. Her life, which mostly had been an open book to us, became filled with mystery. There were whole days when she was not to be located anywhere, and evenings, as I have stated, when she dozed in her chair.

  As usual when we are worried about Tish, we consulted her nephew, Charlie Sands. But like all members of the masculine sex he refused to be worried.

  "She'll be all right," he observed. "She takes these spells. But trust the old lady to come up smiling."

  "It's either Christian Science or osteopathy," Aggie said dolefully. "She's not herself. The fruit cake she sent me the other day tasted very queer, and Hannah thinks she put ointment in instead of butter."

  "Ointments!" observed Charlie thoughtfully. "And salves! By George, I wonder--I'll tell you," he said: "I'll keep an eye open for a few days. The symptoms sound like--But never mind. I'll let you know."

  We were compelled to be satisfied with this, but for several days we lingered in anxiety. During that painful interval nothing occurred to enlighten us, except one conversation with Tish.

  We had taken dinner with her, and she seemed to be all right again and more than usually active. She had given up the Bran-Nut after breaking a tooth on it, and was eating rare beef, which she had heard was digested in the spleen or some such place, thus resting the stomach for a time. She left us, however, immediately after the meal, and Hannah, her maid, tiptoed into the room.

  "I'm that nervous I could scream," she said. "Do you know what she's doing now?

  "No, Hannah," I said with bitter sarcasm. "Long ago I learned never to surmise what Miss Tish is doing."

  "She's in the bathroom, standing on one foot and waving the other in the air. She's been doing it," Hannah said, "for weeks. First one foot, then the other. And that ain't all."

  "You've been spying on Miss Tish," Aggie said. "Shame on you, Hannah!"

  "I have, Miss Aggie. Spy I have and spy I will, while there's breath in my body. Twenty years have I--Do you know what she does when she come home from these sneakin' trips of hers? She sits in a hot bath until the wonder is that her blood ain't turned to water. And after that she uses liniment. Her underclothes is that stained up with it that I'm ashamed to hang 'em out."

  Here Tish returned and, after a suspicious glance at Hannah, sat down. Aggie and I glanced at each other. She did not, as she had for some time past, line the chair with pillows, and there was an air about her almost of triumph.

  She did not, however, volunteer any explanation. Aggie and I were driven to speculation, in which we indulged on our way home, Aggie being my guest at the time, on account of her janitor's children having measles, and Aggie never having had them, although recalling a severe rash as a child, with other measly symptoms.

  "She has something in mind for next summer," said Aggie apprehensively, "and she is preparing her strength for it. Tish is forehanded if nothing else."

  "Well," I remarked with some bitterness, "if we are going along it might be well to prepare us too."

  "Something," Aggie continued, "that requires landing on one foot with the other in the air."

  "Don't drivel," said I. "She's not likely going into the Russian ballet. She's training her muscles, that's all."

  But the mystery was solved the following morning when Charlie Sands called me up.

  "I've got it, beloved aunt," he said.

  "Got what?" said I.

  "What the old lady is up to. She's a wonder, and no mistake. Only I think it was stingy of her not to let you and Aunt Aggie in."

  He asked me to get Aggie and meet him at the office as soon as possible, but he refused to explain further. And he continued to refuse until we had arrived at our destination, a large brick building in the center of the city.

  "Now," he said, "take a long breath and go in. And mind--no excitement."

  We went in. There was a band playing and people circling at a mile a minute. In the center there was a cleared place, and Tish was there on ice skates. An instructor had her by the arm, and as we looked she waved him off, gave herself a shove forward with one foot, and then, with her arms waving, she made a double curve, first on one foot and then on the other.

  "The outside edge, by George!" said Charlie Sands. "The old sport!"

  Unluckily at that moment Tish saw us, and sat down violently on the ice. And a quite nice-looking young man fell over her and lay stunned for several seconds. We rushed round the arena, expecting to see them both carried out, but Tish was uninjured, and came skating toward us with her hands in her pockets. It was the young man who had to be assisted out.

  "Well," she said, fetching up against the railing with a bang, "of course you had to come before I was ready for you! In a week I'll really be skating."

  We said nothing, but looked at her, and I am afraid our glances showed disapproval, for she straightened her hat with a jerk.

  "Well?" she said. "You're not tongue-tied all of a sudden, are you? Can't a woman take a little exercise without her family and friends coming snooping round and acting as if she'd broken the Ten Commandments?"

  "Breaking the Ten Commandments!" I said witheringly. "Breaking a leg more likely. If you could have seen yourself, Tish Carberry, sprawled on that ice at your age, and both your arteries and your bones brittle, as the specialist told you,--and I heard him myself,--you'd take those things off your feet and go home and hide your head."

  "I wish I had your breath, Lizzie," Tish said. "I'd be a submarine diver."

  Saying which she skated off, and did not come near us again. A young gentleman went up to her and asked her to skate, though I doubt if she had ever seen him before. And as we left the building in d
isapproval they were doing fancy turns in the middle of the place, and a crowd was gathering round them.

  Owing to considerable feeling being roused by the foregoing incident, we did not see much of Tish for a week. If a middle-aged woman wants to make a spectacle of herself, both Aggie and I felt that she needed to be taught a lesson. Besides, we knew Tish. With her, to conquer a thing is to lose interest.

  On the anniversary of the day Aggie became engaged to Mr. Wiggins, Tish asked us both to dinner, and we buried the hatchet, or rather the skates. It was when dessert came that we realized how everything that had occurred had been preparation for the summer, and that we were not going to Asbury Park, after all.

  "It's like this," said Tish. "Hannah, go out and close the door, and don't stand listening. I have figured it all out," she said, when Hannah had slammed out. "The muscles used in skating are the ones used in mountain-climbing. Besides, there may be times when a pair of skates would be handy going over the glaciers. It's not called Glacier Park for nothing, I dare say. When we went into the Maine woods we went unprepared. This time I intend to be ready for any emergency."

  But we gave her little encouragement. We would go along, and told her so. But further than that I refused to prepare. I would not skate, and said so.

  "Very well, Lizzie," she said. "Don't blame me if you find yourself unable to cope with mountain hardships. I merely felt this way: if each of us could do one thing well it might be helpful. There's always snow, and if Aggie would learn to use snowshoes it might be valuable."

  "Where could I practice?" Aggie demanded.

  But Tish went on, ignoring Aggie's sarcastic tone. "And if you, Lizzie, would learn to throw a lasso, or lariat,--I believe both terms are correct,--it would be a great advantage, especially in case of meeting ferocious animals. The park laws will not allow us to kill them, and it would be mighty convenient, Lizzie. Not to mention that it would be an accomplishment few women possess."

  I refused to make the attempt, although Tish sent for the clothesline, and with the aid of the encyclopædia made a loop in the end of it. Finally she became interested herself, and when we left rather downhearted at ten o'clock she had caught the rocking-chair three times and broken the clock.