More Tish

“WANTED: A small donkey. Must be gentle, female, and if possible answer to the name of Modestine. Address X 27, Morning News.”

“Well,” I said when I had read it, “did you insert the advertisement or do you propose to answer it?”

Aggie was preparing to take a drink of water, but, the water being cold and the weather warm, she was dabbing a little on her wrists first to avoid colic. She looked up at me in surprise.

“Do you mean to say, Lizzie,” she demanded, “that you don’t recognize that advertisement?”

“Modestine?” I reflected. “I’ve heard the name before somewhere. Didn’t Tish have a cook once named Modestine?”

But it seemed that that was not it. Aggie sat down opposite me and took off her bonnet. Although it was only the first of May, the weather, as I have said, was very warm.

“To think,” she said heavily, “that all the time while I was reading it aloud to her when she was laid up with neuralgia she was scheming and planning and never saying a word to me! Not that I would have gone; but I could have sent her mail to her, and at least have notified the authorities if she had disappeared.”

“Reading what aloud to her—her mail?” I asked sharply.

“‘Travels with a Donkey,’” Aggie replied. “Stevenson’s ‘Travels with a Donkey.’ It isn’t safe to read anything aloud to Tish any more. The older she gets the worse she is. She thinks that what any one else has done she can go and do. If she should read a book on poultry-farming she would think she could teach a young hen to lay an egg.”

As Aggie spoke a number of things came back to me. I recalled that the Sunday before, in church, Tish had appeared absorbed and even more devout than usual, and had taken down the headings of the sermon on her missionary envelope; but that, on my leaning over to see if she had them correctly, she had whisked the paper away before I had had more than time to see the first heading. It had said “Rubber Heels.”

Aggie was pacing the floor nervously, holding the empty glass.

“She’s going on a walking tour with a donkey, that’s what, Lizzie,” she said, pausing before me. “I could see it sticking out all over her while I read that book. And if we go to her now and tax her with it she’ll admit it. But if she says she is doing it to get thin don’t you believe it.”

That was all Aggie would say. She shut her lips and said she had come for my recipe for caramel custard. But when I put on my wraps and said I was going to Tish’s she said she would come along.

Tish lives in an apartment, and she was not at home. Miss Swift, the seamstress, opened the door and stood in the doorway so we could not enter.

“I’m sorry, Miss Aggie and Miss Lizzie,” she said, putting out her left elbow as Aggie tried to duck by her; “but she left positive orders to admit nobody. Of course if she had known you were coming—but she didn’t.”

“What are you making Miss Letitia?” Aggie asked sweetly. “Summer clothes?”

“Yes. Some little thin things—it’s getting so hot!”

“Humph! I see you are making them with an upholsterer’s needle!” said Aggie, and marched down the hall with her head up.

I was quite bewildered. For even if Tish had decided on a walking tour I couldn’t imagine what an upholsterer’s needle had to do with it, unless she meant to upholster the donkey.

We got down to the entrance before Aggie spoke again. Then:

“What did I tell you?” she demanded. “That woman’s making her a——”

But at that very instant there was a thud under our feet and something came “ping” through the floor not six inches from my toe, and lodged in the ceiling. Aggie and I stood looking up. It had made a small round hole over our heads, and a little cloud of plaster dust hung round it.

“Somebody shot at us!” declared Aggie, clutching my arm. “That was a bullet!”

I stooped down and felt the floor. There was a hole in it, and from somewhere below I thought I heard voices. It was not very comfortable, standing there on top of Heaven knows what; but we were divided between fear and outrage, and our indignation won. With hardly a word we went back to the rear staircase and so to the cellar. Halfway down the stairs both of us remembered the same thing—that it was Tish’s day to use the basement laundry, and that perhaps——

Tish was not in the laundry, nor was Hannah, her maid. But Tish’s blue-and-white dressing sacque was on the line, and the blue had run, as I had said it would when she bought it. In the furnace room beyond we heard voices, and Aggie opened the door.

Tish and Hannah were both there. They had not heard us.

“Nonsense!” Tish was saying. “If anybody had been hit we’d have heard a scream; or if they were killed we’d have heard ’em fall.”

“I heard a sort of yell,” said poor Hannah. “I don’t like it, Miss Tish. The time before you just missed me.”

“Why did you stick your arm out?” demanded Tish. “Now take that broomstick and we’ll start again. Did you score that?”

“How’ll I score it?” asked Hannah. “Hit or miss?” She went to the cellar wall and stood waiting, with a piece of charcoal in her hand. The whitewashed wall was marked with rows of X’s and ciphers. The ciphers predominated.

“Mark it a miss.”

“But I heard a yell——”

“Fiddle-de-dee! Are you ready?” Tish had lifted a small rifle into position and was standing, with her feet apart, pointing it at a white target hanging by a string from a rafter. As she gave the signal, Hannah sighed, and, picking up a broomhandle, started the target to swaying, pendulum fashion; Tish followed it with the gun.

I thought things had gone far enough, so I stepped into the cellar and spoke in ringing tones.

“Letitia Carberry!” I said sternly.

Tish pulled the trigger at that moment and the bullet went into the furnace pipe. It was absurd, of course, for Tish to blame me for it, but she turned on me in a rage.

“Look what you made me do!” she snapped. “Can’t a person have a moment’s privacy?”

“What I think you need,” I retorted, “is six months’ complete seclusion in a sanitarium.”

“You nearly shot us in the upper hall,” Aggie put in warmly.

“Well, as long as I didn’t shoot you in the upper hall or any other place, I guess you needn’t fuss,” said Tish. “Ready, Hannah.”