Tish Marches On (21 page)

But Aggie was struggling against temptation. There on the sand in full view lay protection for her lower limbs, lay warmth at night and decency by day; and at last she succumbed.

Tish was thoughtful during this recital.

“I see no objection,” she said at last, “to an equal distribution; to a day-about arrangement, for example. You have them one day and he the next. If he has any sense of fairness whatever he will agree. After all, you are a woman. Where is he?”

“He’s still od the bar, ad the tide is cobig id.”

This proved to be accurate. Indeed, when after spending some time looking for a palm tree which would be available for salad, we reached our camp again, only his head was above water. But he could still speak. Never in my life, before or since, have I heard such language. Aggie stood with her hands in his pockets, and gazed out at him.

“He cad swib,” she said. “It’s only false pride, Tish. He’d let be go about exposed id a bathig suit, but he’s too proud to be seed id his shirt. He’s got udderwear too, which I hadd’t.”

Well, the tide was still coming in, and finally he did swim to shore, landing at some distance away on a point. There he stood for some time, shaking his fists at us and apparently jumping up and down; but at last he turned and went away, and we were left to peace and a beautiful sunset.

With the coconut milk and some turtle eggs which we found buried in the sand I was able to prepare a very fair omelet for dinner, serving it in the large shells which were scattered over the beach; and as Tish had managed to cut down a young palm, Aggie chilled a salad dressing for it in the sea. Also by grating the coconut into some of its own milk we had a truly delicious drink. Thus fed and comfortable, we slept very well.

But as I have said, coconut gives me indigestion, and toward daybreak it roused me. The night had turned cold, and there was quite a wind. I sat up, and in the starlight I saw a strange and desperate figure. It was bending over Aggie!

With a shriek I roused the others, and the figure quickly departed. We felt, however, that it was not fair to Aggie to sleep again, and we kept watch until morning.

The next two days passed without incident. Our diet, although monotonous, was plentiful, and was varied by a school of mackerel which came in close to shore. With her usual consideration, however, Tish insisted that we leave the beach each afternoon, to allow the Monster to reach the oyster bar, and also was careful to leave the salt and pepper where he could see them.

It was on the third day, I believe, that he seemed to tire of the oysters. Returning a little earlier than usual, we were in time to see him reach the bar and stand there for some time, looking down at the oysters. He seemed to shake his head in a melancholy manner, and then he turned and waded back without touching any of them.

Tish, observing him narrowly, commented on the fact that this process was carried through in silence.

“He is growing gentler,” she observed. “He no longer leaps and shouts. In a few hours he will be open to negotiations.”

The nature of the negotiations she did not divulge, but I desire to call attention to the shrewdness of that prophecy. It was indeed but a few hours; at the time of our evening meal, in fact.

We were eating an excellent supper at the time, and his voice, when it came, showed that he was sheltered in underbrush behind us.

“Ladies,” he said, “things being as they are, I must ask you not to look around. But I have come to appeal to your better natures. I shall not mention the affair of my trousers. It is a delicate matter. But I have come to speak of food. I find that I am surfeited, fed up, with oysters. Today it was all I could do to face that bar. Once I was fond of oysters, but that is gone. Gone forever.”

He seemed to shudder, and Aggie looked at me pitifully. She is very sympathetic. But Tish was uncompromising.

“Lizzie, I’ll have a little more of the boiled mackerel,” she said, and proceeded to eat it calmly.

“It’s like this,” he went on in a plaintive voice. “I apologize for everything. Only don’t ask me to face that oyster bar again.”

“It’s your stomach that speaks, not your heart,” said Tish firmly.

He seemed to be surprised at that.

“My heart?” he inquired. “What’s my heart got to do with it? You don’t expect me to be sorry for those d——d oysters, do you?”

And then Tish told him certain uncomplimentary truths.

“You’ve been a violent man all your life, probably,” she said. “A nuisance and a pest. It is likely that you have had money, and that your employees cringe when they confront you. Aggie, I’ll have the salad now, please. Yes, undoubtedly they hate you as well as fear you. And you’re a bully; your own daughter—”

“What do
you
know about my daughter?” he asked in amazement.

“Enough. I know that she is in love, and that you have thwarted that love. Your conduct has indeed been brutal. She is brokenhearted.”

He was silent for a moment or so, and I remember now that he seemed almost too astonished to speak.

“In love?” he said at last. “Are you sure of that?”

“She has told me so.”

“Curious,” he observed. “I didn’t know you knew her. I thought the young man—but never mind about that. I don’t suppose you intend to starve me to death as well as steal my pants because my daughter’s in love?”

“We might make a reasonable arrangement,” Tish told him, “while the dessert is being brought on.”

He groaned, and I could fairly feel his eyes boring into me as I carried a caramel custard from the fire.

“Is that a custard?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“A caramel custard?”

“It is,” Tish told him.

He sighed deeply.

“I used to be fond of caramel custard,” he said. “Very fond. It was my favorite dessert. But that was years ago, before I was cast away on an island with three—”

“Three what?” Tish demanded.

“Never mind about that,” he said hastily. “You mentioned an arrangement. What is it? I’m only a weak man, and I dare say I’ll sell my immortal soul, let alone my daughter, for a square meal. For a square meal and my trousers,” he added.

But here Aggie wailed, and Tish firmly stated that the trousers were not to be bargained about. She demanded, and he finally agreed, that he consent to his daughter’s engagement, and that he abide by this agreement.

“Go back, send for the man, and give your daughter to him,” she said. “That agreement finally drawn and placed in Miss Aggie’s pocket—”

“My pocket,” he interrupted.

“—we shall be able to discuss rates for board. Lodging unfortunately we cannot offer.”

“Rates! You’re going to
charge
me?”

“Why not?” said Tish placidly. “I have certain charities, and the funds shall go to them. Breakfast and lunch will be twenty-five dollars, and dinner fifty. If that is all right with you, you can stand behind that tree and we will pass your dinner to you now. There is plenty here.”

Well, he carried on dreadfully, far worse than about his daughter; but in the end he agreed, and while Tish was writing the agreement I prepared his meal. I made a tray out of the engine hatch cover, and was about to carry it to him when Tish interfered.

“Payment in advance,” she said. “Aggie, take fifty dollars off the roll of bills in your pocket—”

“My pocket,” he said again.

“—and give them to me. All right, Lizzie.”

I never knew a man to eat so much, and strangely enough, when he had finished we heard him laughing. He sat back there in the darkness and laughed and laughed, and I must say it made me creepy.

“Ladies,” he said, “I bow to you. Were conditions other than they are, I would emerge and kneel to you. For sheer highhanded banditry you have the world beaten by a mile, and as for cooking—! You’ve robbed me of my daughter, of my money, and of my pants—and by gad I’m for you. If any of you ever want a newspaper job, come to me.”

And even then we did not realize the awful truth! Not even when we were rescued the next day, nor when within twenty-four hours we received a telegram from Charlie Sands calling Tish home at once.

FOR GOSH SAKE COME HOME AND EXPLAIN WIRE FROM BOSS STOP SITUATION TERRIBLE STOP DON’T WANT THE GIRL AND NEVER DID STOP WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

We had spent the intervening time in bed and had seen no one, and now we packed hastily and prepared to go immediately. None of us was surprised to see Lily and her young man at the dock, and as he had his arm around her we knew that everything was as we had planned. But we were a little surprised at a few words which passed between Tish and Lily just before the boat started.

“Did you hear the news?” she said. “Everything’s all right.”

Tish smiled at her benignly.

“I am very glad,” she said. “We had to use a little moral suasion, but it has worked out perfectly.”

Lily looked a trifle bewildered.

“Really?” she said. “I thought it was because he had caught a diamond-button tarpon.”

Then the boat moved out, and we were left to consider Charlie Sands’ telegram. We could make nothing of it, however, nor of Charlie Sands’ wild expression when we got out of the train.

“Quick!” he said. “Out with it! What in the name of gosh-amighty have you done to me?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Tish. “What could we have done to you?”

Well, he looked fairly stupefied.

“You’re sure of that, are you? You don’t know anything and you didn’t do anything?”

“We have done a number of things, but none that concern you or your affairs.”

“And you didn’t see the boss?”

“Certainly not.”

Well, he seemed stunned. He drew a telegram out of his pocket and handed it to us. It said:

CERTAINLY YOU MAY HAVE HER MY BOY STOP HAD NO IDEA THAT IT WAS SO SERIOUS STOP GOOD LUCK TO YOU.

“I’ve wired back for a confirmation,” he said dejectedly, “but it’s ‘her,’ not ‘it.’ He doesn’t mean the job; he means Clara.”

“Tish!” said Aggie suddenly. “You don’t suppose—”

But Tish silenced her with a look, and we went into the station.

I have related this series of incidents as they occurred, and in the hope that Charlie Sands will read them without bias. He has never been really fair to us, although after all Clara eloped with somebody else a few days later. But he did not get the job, and he has always for some reason held it against us. Especially Aggie.

“A woman who will steal a man’s only pair of trousers will do anything.”

Also it appears that just as soon as Clara had eloped he sent the boss a keg of very fine oysters, and that when they were opened in his presence he turned pale and ordered them out of the office.

“I don’t know why,” he says. “He used to like oysters. But that very day he gave another chap the job.”

But he also says that he is much changed, and that he has ordered that every man on the staff buy two pairs of trousers with every suit. It has become a sort of mania with him.

“A man without trousers is worse than a woman without virtue,” he told them. “For one is wicked, but the other is ridiculous.”

But he has never told the story, nor have we until now, and that without using his name. As a matter of fact, he asked us not to do so, and that in the following manner:

Although we have not related this to Charlie Sands, the “boss” sent Tish that very keg of oysters, and with it a card.

“The oyster has a mouth, but does not talk.”

O
NLY LAST NIGHT I
was looking at the sky, and the sight of the Dipper brought back to me forcibly the events of last summer. I went to my desk, and there I got out the one or two small objects which I had retained as reminders of the affair: a small piece of black cloth cut, as we later discovered, from one of the extra curtains of Tish’s car and having two small round holes in it, the notes made on the third, fourth, and fifth of August, a box of marshmallows now dried and hard, and a pair of long spurs which we found discarded by the cabin when all was over.

So tonight, while Tish is at prayer meeting and Aggie has retired to her couch, I propose to make a permanent record of the experience in the hope that, given chronologically, Charlie Sands will see that no Christian woman, such as his dear aunt Tish undoubtedly is, could have done otherwise than as she did.

As a matter of fact, a portion of the responsibility is actually his. It was he who on her birthday in the spring presented Tish with the book on the art of fishing which was the beginning of it all.

“Stream fishing, my beloved aunt,” he said, with emphasis. “Nice quiet creeks and rivers. It may seem a trifle flat after a certain affair which I recall, but the idea is that you catch the fish and not vice versa.”

By this he referred to the summer before, when we had rented a cottage on the Maine coast and were wont to take a boat and do a little quiet fishing for codfish, tying our lines to the seats and knitting or reading until a certain agitation showed that something was on the hook.

Unfortunately, on the day in question, our anchor had caught in the blow hole of a whale and for some time it looked as though we were bound for the mid-Atlantic, if not for the British Isles. I remember our passing through a fishing fleet at a terrific pace and that one man called to us to let go.

“If you do get him what’ll you do with him?” he said.

I forget our dear Tish’s reply, but I do know that we finally collided with a large revenue boat and that, while it freed us, a sailor leaned over the edge and accused us of trying to sink them.

Save that Aggie suffered severely from mal de mer during the experience, there were no untoward results, and I have simply recounted the affair to explain Charlie Sands’ speech.

The fact is that for some time Tish had been growing restless again, and all of us had noticed it. To turn her mind to fishing, then, seemed to offer a safe outlet for those energies which with Tish are prone to translate themselves into action.

For three or four days, therefore, we were very hopeful. Then, one Thursday afternoon, on her day out, Hannah came in to see us. She has lived with Tish so long that she knows her every mood, and there was a certain wildness in her eye that set Aggie to sneezing at once.