But at least she achieved her purpose, and we limped into the untidy drive in front of the Hartford house in a considerably demoralized condition. The house was as run down as the property, and what with it being a mile beyond the village and isolated, and having a cemetery just across the road, it was as gloomy a place as ever I have laid eyes on. The front porch had not been swept for months, and the doorbell was disconnected, so we had to hammer for admission.
We learned later that the sound of the bell annoyed Emmie.
Will Hartford himself opened the door and I cannot say that he burst into shouts of joy when he saw us. He had heard us drive up, and he came out onto the front porch with his finger to his lips and a worried look on his face.
“Sh!” he said. “She’s had a bad day, and she’s resting now. Most folks leave their cars out in the road so as not to disturb her.”
“We had to drive in,” said Tish, “because of our luggage, Will.”
Well, he looked at the car then, and when he saw the bags in it he went quite pale.
“Oh!” he said. “So you’re staying over-night, are you? Well, I guess you’d better come in, but don’t make any noise. The nurse dropped the thermometer a few minutes ago, and Emmie hasn’t yet recovered from the shock.”
We tiptoed inside, and he went out and carried in our bags and the bathroom scale. But he had not been quite prepared for the weight of the scale, and just inside the door it slipped and fell with a terrible crash on the floor. It caught his foot, too, and there was nothing subdued either about the racket or the way he swore.
Tish said she took heart from that minute. It showed that he was not entirely crushed. But there was a yelp from upstairs, and the next minute a nurse in uniform dashed down the stairs.
“You’ve got the aromatic ammonia in your pocket,” she said to him. “She’s fainted again.”
Well, he let go of his foot and gave her the bottle, and Tish watched her rush up the stairs with a queer look on her face.
“Do you mean to say that that noise made Emmie faint?” she inquired.
“Her nerves are about gone,” he whispered, all subdued again. “Any unexpected sound almost kills her. I’ve had to put a piece of felt on the back porch, so the milkman can put down his bottles quietly.”
He limped into the living room and while Tish took the car to the garage in the village we followed him. Just one look around was enough for me, and the dust started Aggie to sneezing again at once. He closed the door with a pained expression and said he was glad to see us once more, and asked Aggie if she still made cream puffs with whipped-cream filling. Then he groaned, and said that he was a criminal to be thinking of the flesh when Emmie, as like as not, was near the end of the road.
And at that moment the dog scratched at the door and he let it in. It was a tiny thing and as thin as a rail, and when Tish came back from leaving her car at the garage she took one look at it and said:
“Why don’t you feed that poor little beast?”
“Feed it!” he said. “It has worms, or something. It eats enough for two men. Last night it ate Emmie’s sweetbread entire, and then came down and tried to take my pork chop from me.”
He sighed and then limped to the door again.
“I’ll have some beds made up for you,” he said. “I guess we can manage for one night.”
“It may be more than one night,” said Tish, looking him straight in the eye. “They have to send away for those springs, Will.”
“Well, two nights then,” he said, and went out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.
It did not require any keen intelligence to show us that we were not welcome, and I said so to Tish.
“Personally,” I observed, “I imagine he would rather have the whooping cough!”
“Not the whooping cough,” said Tish. “That’s noisy, Lizzie.” She then walked to the door, opened it and slammed it hard. “There’s no death here yet,” she said, “although there may be, if I don’t hold myself in. Where’s that dog?”
Well, the poor little thing had crept under a sofa, and was almost too feeble to crawl out.
“Eats her food, does he?” said Tish. “So nobody feeds him downstairs, and he’s starving to death. Here,” she said, “try this, old boy.”
To our surprise she drew a package of raw chopped beef out of her pocket, and the way that creature bolted it was a revelation. Tish watched him carefully but said nothing, and before Will came back she had burned the paper in the fireplace.
Well, we didn’t see Emmie before dinner. Will said somebody or other had slammed a door and she had gone into a collapse. He’d sent for the doctor again. As there was no servant, we pitched in and cooked what was in the house, which wasn’t much, except for the broiled squab, baked potato, two rolls, some green peas and a saucer of ice cream which the nurse took up to Emmie.
“If she would only eat!” Will said. “And build up her strength. But she just groans and turns her face away.”
It turned out that the nurse ate while Emmie was merely toying with her tray upstairs and feeding Teddy from it. But that night Teddy did not go upstairs. He had been fed and was asleep under the table. And it wasn’t more than five minutes after the nurse and the rest of us had sat down to our frugal repast when we heard Emmie feebly calling for him.
“You see?” Will said, hopelessly. “She won’t touch it, and she’s calling Teddy.”
“And Teddy isn’t going!” said Tish. “He’s under the table at my feet.”
Well, all through the meal we could hear Emmie weakly calling the dog, and Will and the nurse kept running up to see if she was all right. Once Will came down and tried to carry the dog up, but he ran out into the kitchen and into the yard, and he couldn’t catch him.
“Emmie’s frightfully upset,” he said in a worried way. “She has fancies like this, and I don’t like to cross her. But that dog has crawled under the porch and I don’t know what to do.”
Tish said nothing. Later on the tray came down untouched, and Will said Emmie was in a very bad way. She would not speak to him, and just lay there staring at the ceiling.
“She looks as though she is staring into eternity,” he said. “To think of me sitting here eating like an animal, and my poor wife—”
He was so overcome he had to leave the room, and Aggie got out her handkerchief.
“I’m afraid it’s the end, Tish,” she whimpered.
“It is the end,” Tish said shortly, “or it will be unless somebody holds me.”
It was that evening that Will took Tish to a window and pointed out the lot he had selected in the cemetery across the road.
“It has a good view, you see, Letitia,” he told her. “And her sainted mother lies there too. There is room for me beside her also. I shan’t outlive her very long.”
“No,” Tish said dryly, “I imagine you’ll not outlive Emmie, Will; not to amount to anything anyhow.”
We had a long talk with Will that night. We had dusted the living room and started a fire there, and he seemed to relax. He even lighted a cigarette, after Tish had told him that if he sat near the fire the smoke would go up the chimney.
Emmie, it seemed, didn’t like tobacco smoke.
“It affects her heart,” he said. “I smoke outside, and then come in and change my coat. The faintest odor sickens her.”
The trouble, he said, had been coming on for some years.
“We’d been talking about getting a car,” he said, “and I didn’t feel able to. I remember she had just said she wasn’t as well as she might be, and that she needed a car for fresh air; and when I said that I couldn’t afford it she fell over just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “In a heap. That was the beginning.”
“And it’s gone on ever since?”
“Yes. She just wouldn’t take care of herself. And I didn’t understand. I used to ask her to do things. The second attack came when I asked her to wash out a pair of golf hose for me. The laundress always shrunk t
hem, and I thought—well, she took cold, and it settled on her lungs. Every now and then she has a hemorrhage.”
“A large one?” Tish asked.
“I’ve never been around when she’s had one, but they weaken her terribly,” he said. “The worst thing about it all is I’m responsible. I never did realize just how delicate she was until it was too late.”
We sat there for a while, and he seemed glad to talk and be warm at the same time. But after a while the nurse tiptoed in and whispered that Emmie wanted him, and he slipped out and creaked up the stairs.
“I always read to her in the evenings,” he explained as he left. “It’s the least I can do, and it’s all she has.”
Tish was very thoughtful that evening, and after Will had read to Emmie until she was sleepy, and tucked her up and fixed her window and taken her ice water and moved her bell closer to her and given her an eggnog, which was all, he said, she could keep down, he locked up the house and we went to bed.
“Don’t worry if you hear me moving about in the night,” he said. “The nurse has to sleep sometime.”
“And when do you sleep?” Tish inquired.
“Oh, I get a nap now and then, and then I sleep in the train going up to business in the morning and coming back in the evening.”
The last thing I heard that night was Emmie’s bell ringing hard. I heard Will get up and go into her room, and when I dropped off he was still there, soothing her about something.
I had been asleep for perhaps three hours when I was wakened by a terrific crash from somewhere below, and I leaped out of bed. Across the hall I heard Will moving, and the next moment he ran down the staircase. Tish was not in her room, and, convinced that something dreadful had occurred, I hurried down in my nightdress.
I could hear Tish’s voice in the pantry, and Will moaning and saying Emmie was dead, and when I opened the pantry door I thought at first that she was.
She was lying on the floor in a dead faint, with a slice of bread and butter in her hand, and Tish was standing over her keeping Will off.
“She’s all right,” she said. “Let her alone. She’ll come round all right.”
“But she’s fainted,” Will yelled. “Get Miss Smith. Ring up the doctor. Pour some water over her.”
Tish did this last. She turned on the cold-water tap, filled a dipper, and flung its contents hard in Emmie’s face. And if ever I’ve seen a fainting woman look furious Emmie did. But she only opened her eyes and said weakly:
“Where am I?”
“You’re here, darling,” said Will, trembling all over. “You’ll be all right now.”
“How did I get here?” she whimpered.
“You walked here,” Tish said dryly. “You didn’t fly, you know, Emmie.”
Well, she couldn’t have flown anywhere. She was as fat as butter, and as healthy-looking a woman as ever I’ve seen. Will had run to telephone for the doctor, and Emmie seemed to realize the bread and butter, for she held up the hand that had it and said feebly:
“What’s this?”
“Just what it looks like, Emmie,” said Tish.
“Strange!” she whispered. “I don’t remember anything. Who found me here, and when?”
“I did,” Tish said coldly. “You had just spread on the butter and were reaching for the jam when I came in.”
She gave Tish a look of absolute hatred, and then the nurse ran in and drove us out. Later on we heard poor Will carrying her up the staircase, and when he bumped against the rail with her she yelped. He twisted his back doing it, but when the doctor came he said it had been a curious case of somnambulism.
“In her state of weakness,” he said, “it’s impossible to believe that she walked down those stairs, Miss Carberry. She must have slid down.”
“She walked down. I was behind her.”
“Why on earth didn’t you stop her?”
“I had an idea that maybe she was hungry,” Tish said quietly.
We did not feed Teddy the next morning, but we weighed him when he followed the breakfast tray to Emmie’s room. And when he came down, having supposedly eaten all of Emmie’s breakfast, he had lost two ounces!
Tish gazed at the scales angrily.
“As I thought!” she observed. “And that poor devil of a husband hasn’t probably been out of this house at night for five years, or had a sock darned in ten! If he had any sense he’d take up with another woman.”
“Why, Tish!” said Aggie, aghast.
“If there’s anything more immoral than that woman lying up there in bed and taking everything Will gives her and giving nothing back, I haven’t heard of it.”
“She’s his wife.”
“She’s not his wife,” said Tish. “She’s a cancer, that’s what she is. Cancers thrive, but the people who have ’em die. And he’s got her.”
It was that morning that Emmie decided to make the best of a bad job and see us, and all the time the nurse was fixing her up for the doctor’s visit she told us her symptoms. For a dying woman she certainly was particular about her appearance, for she was dressed up to beat anything in a silk nightgown, and with her hair crimped. Just before the nurse went out she sprayed her with violet water, and Emmie stopped whining about serums and blood pressure long enough to say that she had to use perfume because the smell of cooking in the house upset her poor weak stomach.
“And Will is so thoughtless,” she said. “Would you believe that he brought home spareribs and sauerkraut the other night? And it isn’t more than ten days since he fried some onions for his supper! But I suppose men are all alike.”
“No, Emmie,” Tish told her gently. “No, they are not. There are some men who would as soon commit murder as not. But your Will isn’t that sort. Anybody can see that.”
Well, Emmie eyed her suspiciously, but Tish went on asking her if all the arrangements for the funeral were made, and if she would like us to stay on until everything was over.
“We could put the house in order, and so on,” she said. “I dare say Will will marry again, because the lonelier they are, the sooner they do it; but we could leave things tidy. And he would have to wait a year anyhow.”
“I should think he would,” said Emmie coldly. “And if you think I intend to have this house put in order for Will’s second wife you can think again. Anyhow, Will Hartford has never looked at another woman and never will.”
“Not even at that nurse of yours?” Tish inquired. “I was just thinking last night that I didn’t consider it exactly wise to leave these two together as much as you do. She’s a right nice-looking girl.”
“I can’t say I admire your taste!” she said. But when the nurse came back she gave her a long, hard look and then said she would take a rest so as to be ready for the doctor’s visit.
“I don’t know if Will has told you,” she remarked, “but I’m not supposed to have company. Excitement is my worst enemy.”
“Well, we’re not company, Emmie,” Tish told her. “You just go on and be as sick as you like. And don’t worry about us. Nobody with a heart would leave Will to go through the funeral by himself. And you might tell us where your grave clothes are while you’re still able to speak.”
“They’re in the lower bureau drawer,” she said in a hard voice. And we went out.
When the doctor came that day Tish waylaid him in the lower hall. And he said Emmie Hartford could get out of bed and do a day’s washing any minute she had a mind to. But he said also that if he told her so she would only shop around for another doctor, who would tell her she had something seriously wrong with her. He had not been paid for a long time, but he did not mind that as much as the way she made him lose his sleep.
“My wife says,” he stated, “that she seems to know the minute I’ve taken my trousers off. I don’t know when I’ve slept a night through. Why, if you’ll believe me, the alarm clock in the kitchen went off at two o’clock the other morning and I got up in my sleep and was out to the cemetery here before I wakened.”
But if Emmie’s condition was worse, Will’s was distinctly better. He ate a real meal that evening, and, instead of hurrying up to her afterward, he sat for a little while in the sitting room. We had brought along some blackberry cordial, and he sipped it with appreciation.
“I was making some right good moonshine myself a while back,” he said. “I bought a still, you know, and I gave the doctor some one night. He turned his car over on his way back into town and broke his arm. But the smell annoyed Emmie, so I had to give it up.”
Well, Miss Smith came in for a few minutes, too; she seemed glad to relax for once. But pretty soon Emmie’s bell began to ring and she had to go up. It was no time at all before she came running down the stairs with a thermometer in her hand and a sacred look on her face.
“You’d better come up at once, Mr. Hartford,” she said. “She’s got a terrible fever.”
“How high is it?” asked Will, beginning to tremble.
“About as high as it can be,” said Miss Smith, looking worried. “I’ve telephoned to the doctor, and he says to use a cold pack. But she won’t have it.”
But as usual, our dear Tish rose to the emergency at once.
“Certainly she will have it,” she said. “You crack the ice, Will, and you might mix some salt with it while you’re at it. There’s no use doing it unless we do it right. A high fever is not to be fooled with.”
Well, I don’t know when I remember such a fuss as Emmie made over that cold pack. She was strong, too, and it was all we could do to put her between sheets wrung out of ice water and then pour the ice and salt over her. She howled and screamed, but Tish worked calmly.
Tish Plays the Game Page 16
