Tish Plays the Game

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “Here is the treasure,” she announced. “It has been an interesting evening, and I hope we shall soon do it again.”

  Mr. Ostermaier took up the bag and examined it.

  “I have the honor of stating,” he said, “that this, as Miss Carberry claims, is the treasure, and that Miss Carberry wins the hand-painted candlestick which is the prize for the event.” He then examined the bag more carefully, and added:

  “But this sack seems to be stained. Perhaps our good sister will explain what the stains are.”

  Tish eyed the bag with an expressionless face.

  “Stains?” she said. “Oh, yes, of course. I remember now. They are blood.”

  Then, leaving them staring and speechless with astonishment, she led the way out of the house, and home.

  THE GRAY GOOSE

  IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND the case of Emmie Hartford and the rather drastic method by which our splendid Tish endeavored to effect a cure, it is necessary to go back a few months to that strange but brief period during which Letitia Carberry developed psychic power.

  Not, indeed, that she used her power in the case referred to; on the contrary, rather. But the influence of her earlier experiences is plainly to be discovered by the careful reader, and since she has been severely criticized for her attitude to Emmie, as well as for the methods she pursued, it is only fair to her to revert briefly to the incidents which preceded the Hartford affair.

  It is, I admit, a long step from a book on palmistry to that frightful evening when Aggie and I were compelled to sit under the eyes of a policeman and listen to a number of men digging frantically in the cellar of the Hartford house just beneath the room in which we waited. But that is the way it began.

  It was last Christmas that Charlie Sands, Tish’s nephew, sent her a book on palmistry. Tish studied it carefully, and for some time Aggie and I, and even Hannah, her maid, were obliged to make impressions of our hands on a sheet of smoked paper while Tish studied the results. Aggie, I recall, had a line down near her wrist which worried Tish greatly, revealing as it did an unbridled and passionate nature, although Aggie was certain that it was where she had been cut while paring quinces some years ago. And Hannah certainly had the circle which indicated death by drowning. But what is important to this narrative is that our dear Tish discovered that she herself had the psychic cross on both hands.

  She at once undertook a study of such matters, although at first her attitude was largely one of academic interest, she having always stoutly maintained that under no circumstances, once having passed over, would she care to be brought back and forced to inhabit even temporarily the body of a medium she might not care for or might indeed positively dislike.

  And, I may say, her interest was largely impersonal until well on into the spring. Then one night she had a most curious experience, and there began that earnest investigation which was to lead us into such strange paths, and was later, indeed, to see us driven from the Hartford home under conditions so unpleasant that only a sense of fairness to Tish compels me to record them.

  Briefly, then, Tish was reading one evening in the living room of her apartment, while Hannah in the kitchen was cutting out a nightgown from a paper pattern. There was only the light from the reading lamp, an auspicious fact, since we have since learned how fatal is light to these delicate phenomena, and it so happened that there was on the table beside her a vase of flowers and also a pitcher of drinking water. Since both water and flowers greatly assist in psychic manifestations, it will be readily seen that, without Tish knowing it, the stage was already set for the drama which ensued.

  Suddenly she heard a faint rustling, and on glancing up there was the sleeve pattern of Hannah’s nightgown moving across the doorsill and into the room!

  It is unfortunate that, in her surprise, she dropped her book and thus broke the ectoplasmic force, or whatever it may be called. The paper instantly ceased to move. But her interest was naturally aroused, and with her usual promptness she at once inaugurated a series of sittings, consisting of the three of us—Aggie, Tish and myself. Later on, for one experiment, we persuaded Hannah to join us, with results so startling that neither she nor Aggie sat again. But even these early sittings brought surprising results. I quote a few extracts from Tish’s record, made each evening after the event, and thus as correct as possible:

  At one A.M. last night we secured heavy raps on the wall next to the Ingersoll apartment, distinctly audible over the sound of the phonograph.

  By an unmistakable affirmative in the usual code of raps for yes and no, Mr. Wiggins tonight told Aggie he had desired her to have his cameo scarf pin, and not his sister, who has it.

  C. S.—Charlie Sands—sat with us tonight. Vase of flowers and bowl of water on floor. He requested that the spirits place something in the bowl of water, and since it was Friday, suggested fish. In thirty seconds we heard a loud plop, and found on turning on the light that a goldfish was swimming in the bowl.

  Brief as they are, these few extracts prove conclusively that we were securing results. Already, a purely amateur circle as we were, we had succeeded in securing a materialized form. More than that, the fish remained some days, in every way acting like a real fish, even eating the food we placed in the bowl. Indeed, it was only to leave us later on under circumstances as amazing as those of its arrival.

  It will be seen, then, that we were slowly but definitely progressing, although small setbacks and annoyances came our way also. Hannah, for instance, became so nervous that she constantly threatened to leave, and on a storm coming up one night and Tish going into her room in her nightdress to see if the window was closed, was only in time to catch her before she leaped out of the window!

  But in the main we were satisfied. True, our one attempt to utilize a trumpet medium, strongly recommended by Mrs. Ostermaier as having predicted Willie’s measles, was most unfortunate. We had invited Charlie Sands to sit with us, and the early performance was most surprising. Mr. Abraham, the medium, went into a deep trance and the trumpet which had been placed on the floor moved about and touched us all. Not only that, but it hovered in the air in front of Charlie Sands, and after a number of kissing sounds, a young woman who said her name was Katie and that she used to know him, asked him to go to a private sitting at Mr. Abraham’s, because she didn’t want to make any trouble for him by talking there.

  “That’s right, Katie,” he said. “I don’t seem to remember you, but be discreet anyhow. And you might pass that word along over there, because a lot of folks could come back and make trouble here if they wanted to.”

  Well, she agreed to that and was just sending another kiss to him through the trumpet, when she sneezed twice. Tish thought it was Aggie, but it was not. And while this was being argued the medium in his chair suddenly gave a terrific yelp.

  “I’ve been injured!” he shouted. “Somebody’s played a trick on me! I’m damaged! I’m hurt!”

  Well, Aggie turned on the lamp, and Mr. Abraham was on his feet, making dreadful faces and pulling at the seat of his trousers. Somebody had put a tack with the point upright on his chair, and he must have been standing up, for he had sat down on it. He was very much upset, and left without waiting to collect his fee at all.

  It turned out that Charlie Sands had suspected him right along, and had blown some snuff into the trumpet when he was talking to Katie. It was he, also, who had placed the tack on the chair.

  A weaker spirit than Letitia Carberry might have been discouraged, but Tish was not daunted; and, although our next sitting was the last we held, since neither Aggie nor Hannah would so much as venture into a dark room after it, it was so conclusive that it left no room for doubt.

  To be brief, Tish had always felt that in materializing a goldfish we had done well, but not sufficiently well.

  “A fish,” she said, “is a lower earth form. It is soulless and purely material, for there is no record of water in the higher planes of existence, since in the spirit we neither thirst nor bathe. We
must do better than that.”

  As a result of this resolution we were, as I have said, compelled to give up our sittings entirely; but not before we had had a success beyond our wildest hopes.

  On the night in question, then, we had coaxed Hannah to sit once more, and in a very few minutes we heard undeniable sounds from the neighborhood of the open window. As it was entirely dark we could see nothing, but after a short time Hannah yelled in a terrified voice that something was rubbing against her.

  “Hush!” said Tish quietly. “If it is a spirit form it is welcome. Welcome, friend.”

  “It’s scratching my leg!” said Hannah in a dreadful tone.

  She then let out a bloodcurdling yell and the next instant the spirit form had leaped to Aggie’s shoulder, and she fell from her chair in a dead faint. We were obliged to turn on the light, but it was a long time before she could do more than moan. Naturally the force was entirely dissipated by that time; but Hannah was able to show two long scratches on her leg as evidence, and Aggie’s shoulder revealed three or four minute punctures entirely through the skin.

  A careful examination of the room also revealed a startling fact. The goldfish had disappeared from its bowl!

  It was, indeed, a remarkable achievement, marking as it did our advance from the piscatorial to the animal plane, and indicating that we might even hope before long for the materialized human body. But, alas for Tish’s hopes, neither Aggie nor Hannah would sit again. So undermined, indeed, was Hannah’s morale by the incident that she gave us a considerable fright only a few days later.

  Tish was experimenting with automatic writing at the time, and had already secured a curious result. Her hand had drawn first a series of straight horizontal lines and then crossed them with a similar number of vertical ones, resulting in numerous small squares. Then, moving on inexorably, it had just written beneath: “Number one horizontal,” when we heard a terrific shriek from Hannah’s room, followed by another and another.

  The power, of course, was broken, and, on rushing to Hannah’s assistance, we found that she had heard strange movements and sounds from her closet and was convinced that there was a spirit there. It turned out, however, to be only the Ingersolls’ cat; a troublesome animal which had crawled in over the fire escape and was playing with a mouse it had captured.

  But this practically ended our experiments in that direction. As Tish so justly observed, the craven heart has no place in the spirit world. I have related it, however, because indirectly but surely it had its influence in the Hartford matter.

  It was just after all this that Aggie’s cousin Will Hartford came to see her and to ask her to indorse a note for five hundred dollars. We were all struck by the change in him; he used to be a nice-looking man, rather fastidious about his clothes, but he looked thin and had a bad color that day, and as shabby as a person could be and go about.

  Aggie was so sorry for him that she would have done what he asked, but Tish at once advised against it.

  “Lending money to relatives is like lending seed to a canary bird,” she said. “You get paid only in song, and some of them can’t sing. What’s the matter, anyhow, Will?” she demanded, gazing at him with her usual searching glance. “You earn a good salary. You oughtn’t to be borrowing seed—I mean money.”

  “Well,” he said, “Emmie’s kind of frail. She has been most ever since I married her. It’s mostly a matter of doctors and nurses.”

  “Frail, how?” said Tish sharply. “Morally or physically? She used to be all right. I can remember when she ate three eggs for breakfast and was out in the pantry at eleven o’clock for a glass of milk.”

  He looked pained.

  “She doesn’t eat now at all, Letitia,” he said sadly. “She feeds most everything that goes up on her tray to the dog. I don’t know how she lives on what she eats.”

  Well, poor Will’s story was certainly a sad one. About ten years ago Emmie had been taken sick. Fainted. And from that time on she’d just been up and down. Once they had thought it was a dropped stomach, and about the time she was all strapped up for that along came a new doctor and located something in her gall bladder. Her kidneys were wrong, too, and they’d got a new specialist lately who was laying the trouble to the thyroid gland.

  “She’s had so many hypodermics that her poor skin is full of holes,” he told us. “I guess they’ve used about a hundred needles on her.”

  “It’s a pity somebody wouldn’t use a needle on you,” said Tish sharply, looking at a hole in his sock.

  But he only put his foot under his chair and went on about his troubles.

  “I don’t like asking for help,” he said, “but every time I get a little money it goes to doctors and nurses. I’ve paid a nurse forty dollars a week for seven years and I’ve been needing a new suit for the last six of them. And we can’t keep help. There’s nobody there now but the nurse. Seems as though the feebler Emmie gets the worse they treat her.”

  Well, he looked so forlorn that Tish sent Aggie out for some blackberry cordial.

  “Is she in bed all the time?” she asked.

  “She’s up and down. I carry her down to the living room once in a while, but I can’t do it often. I’m not so strong as I used to be.”

  “Still, as thin as she must be—”

  “Well, she isn’t exactly thin,” he said in an embarrassed manner. “It’s a funny thing, but she’s put on weight. Of course, weight itself may be a disease. I guess it is with her, anyhow.”

  Tish glanced at him, but he was drinking his blackberry cordial and didn’t notice it. He was certainly shabby, and his face had sort of fallen in.

  “What’s the matter with your teeth?” Tish said suddenly.

  “I’ve lost one or two of them,” he admitted. “I haven’t liked to take the time away from her to get them looked at. You see”—he looked away from us, out of the window—“you see, I may not have her long. I don’t want ever to feel that I—that I failed her in any way.”

  “It’s a pity it isn’t Emmie who’s lost her teeth, and not you,” said Tish. “Since she doesn’t need them and you do.”

  But he looked pained at that; so she told him she would think things over and let him know what Aggie would do, and he went away. On his way out Tish asked him suddenly what sort of a dog they had, and he seemed surprised.

  “It’s a Pekingese,” he said, and went out with his shoulders bent, like an old man.

  After he had gone Aggie told us more about Emmie. She said it was a great pity about her, not forty yet and on her deathbed, but that that sort of weakness ran in the family.

  “Her mother was delicate, too,” she said. ”For twenty-five years she never came downstairs. Her mother carried up every bite of food she ate.”

  “What happened to her then?” Tish put in, rousing herself. “Did she die?”

  “No, but her mother did,” Aggie said.

  “And then who carried the tray?”

  “Well, she began to get better about that time, and she lived to be eighty. She would be living now, poor soul, but she got on a chair one night to reach a piece of pie that somebody had hidden in the pantry, and she fell off and broke her neck.”

  Tish seemed very thoughtful as she went back to her apartment. She told Aggie not to do anything about the note for a time; that she would go and think over the situation. It was that night that she called me up and asked me how large a Pekingese dog was, and I told her the one her niece, Lily May Carter, had, weighed about seven pounds.

  “You’re sure of that, are you?” she inquired. “It’s not the size of a police dog or a mastiff?”

  “Not unless it’s grown considerably since I saw it,” I assured her.

  “Then,” she said, “I fancy things at Will Hartford’s are in a very bad way. We’d better go there, Lizzie.”

  “Do you think that Emmie’s going to die, Tish?”

  “I do, indeed,” said Tish dryly. “At eighty or ninety, if I can restrain myself so long, she will p
ass on. But Will Hartford is in a bad way. And so, I should judge,” she added cryptically, “is the Pekingese dog.”

  We left two days later to see Emmie. It suited none of us to go. It was almost time for the annual meeting at the church, where we invariably serve the supper. Also Aggie was having an early attack of hay fever, which the dust of the motor trip did nothing to allay. All in all, only a strong sense of duty took us, a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice; and when I think of that last evening there, with the house full of doctors and policemen, I cannot restrain a certain sense of bitterness.

  We acted entirely for the best. If the results were not what we anticipated, surely the fault is not ours. And how true, indeed, are these lines, secured only the other day by Tish through the medium of automatic writing:

  There swims no goose so gray but soon or late

  She finds some honest gander for her mate.

  It was the night before our departure that Tish and I sat together for advice on the situation, Aggie definitely refusing to join us.

  We got rather feeble results, as the power was evidently low; but on her asking if we should go to the Hartfords’, the table very clearly rapped “Yes.” Whether, after I had gone, Tish received further instructions or not I do not know, but I am inclined to think she did. For one reason, I doubt if the idea of breaking a spring in her car and thus prolonging our stay there originated with her. She is very fond of her car.

  On the other hand, the suggestion that I take along my small bathroom scale was clearly her own. Also, I imagine, the ipecac and the raw beef. Though of an idealistic type, the practical side of her nature is also extremely well developed.

  But that she succeeded in breaking not one spring, but an entire set of them, was a proof undoubtedly that she was being carefully guided. I still think, and Aggie agrees with me, that she could have done so without us in the car, and thus have saved Aggie much physical discomfort—at the third ditch her poor head went entirely through the top.