Tish Plays the Game (3 page)

When she had got rid of him Tish was her usual cool and dignified self. She offered no explanation and we asked for none. And for a month or so nothing happened. Tish distributed her usual list of improving books at the Sunday-school Christmas treat, and we packed our customary baskets for the poor. On Christmas Eve we sang our usual carols before the homes of our friends, and except for one mischance, owing to not knowing that the Pages had rented their house, all was symbolic of the peace and good will of the festive period. At the Pages’, however, a very unpleasant person asked us for — sake to go away and let him sleep.

But shortly after the holidays Tish made a proposition to us, and stated that it was a portion of a plan to bring about the happiness of two young and unhappy people.

“In developing this plan,” she said, “it is essential that we all be in the best of physical condition; what I believe is known technically as in the pink. You two, for instance, must be able to walk for considerable distances, carrying a weight of some size.”

“What do you mean by ‘in the pink’?” Aggie asked suspiciously.

“What you are not,” Tish said with a certain scorn. “How many muscles have you got?”

“All I need,” said Aggie rather acidly.

“And of all you have, can you use one muscle, outside of the ordinary ones that carry you about?”

“I don’t need to.”

“Have you ever stood up, naked to the air, and felt shame at your flaccid muscles and your puny strength?”

“Really, Tish!” I protested. “I’ll walk if you insist. But I don’t have to take off my clothes and feel shame at my flabbiness to do it.”

She softened at that, and it ended by our agreeing to fall in with her mysterious plan by going to a physical trainer. I confess to a certain tremor when we went for our first induction into the profundities of bodily development. There was a sign outside, with a large picture of a gentleman with enormous shoulders and a pigeon breast, and beneath it were the words: “I will make you a better man.” But Tish was confident and calm.

The first day, however, was indeed trying. We found, for instance, that we were expected to take off all our clothing and to put on one-piece jersey garments, without skirts or sleeves, and reaching only to the knees. As if this were not enough, the woman attendant said when we were ready “In you go, dearies,” and shoved us into a large bare room where a man was standing with his chest thrown out, and wearing only a pair of trousers and a shirt which had shrunk to almost nothing. Aggie clutched me by the arm.

“I’ve got to have stockings, Lizzie!” she whispered. “I don’t feel decent.”

But the woman had closed the door, and Tish was explaining that we wished full and general muscular development.

“The human body,” she said, “instantly responds to care and guidance, and what we wish is simply to acquire perfect coordination. ‘The easy slip of muscles underneath the polished skin,’ as some poet has put it.”

“Yeah,” said the man. “All right. Lie down in a row on the mat, and when I count, raise the right leg in the air and drop it. Keep on doing it. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Lizzie!” Aggie threw at me in an agony. “Lizzie, I simply can’t!”

“Quick,” said the trainer. “I’ve got four pounds to take off a welterweight this afternoon. Right leg, ladies. Up, down; one, two—”

Never since the time in Canada when Aggie and I were taking a bath in the lake, and a fisherman came and fished from a boat for two hours while we sat in the icy water to our necks, have I suffered such misery.

“Other leg,” said the trainer. And later: “Right leg up, cross, up, down. Left leg up, cross, up, down.” Aside from the lack of dignity of the performance came very soon the excruciating ache of our weary flesh. Limb by limb and muscle by muscle he made us work, and when we were completely exhausted on the mat he stood us up on our feet in a row and looked us over.

“You’ve got a long way to go, ladies,” he said sternly. “It’s a gosh-awful shame the way you women neglect your bodies. Hold in the abdomen and throw out the chest. Balance easily on the ball of the foot. Now touch the floor with the finger tips, as I do.”

“Young man,” I protested, “I haven’t been able to do that since I was sixteen.”

“Well, you’ve had a long rest,” he said coldly. “Put your feet apart. That’ll help.”

When the lesson was over we staggered out, and Aggie leaned against a wall and moaned. “It’s too much, Tish,” she said feebly. “I’m all right with my clothes on, and anyhow, I’m satisfied as I am. I’m the one to please, not that wretch in there.”

Tish, however, had got her breath and said that she felt like a new woman, and that blood had got to parts of her it had never reached before. But Aggie went sound asleep in the cabinet bath and had to be assisted to the cold shower. I mention this tendency of hers to sleep, as it caused us some trouble later on.

In the meantime Tish was keeping in touch with the two young people. She asked Nettie Lynn to dinner one night, and seemed greatly interested in her golf methods. One thing that seemed particularly to interest her was Miss Lynn’s device for keeping her head down and her eye on the ball.

“After I have driven,” she said, “I make it a rule to count five before looking up.”

“How do you see where the ball has gone?” Tish asked.

“That is the caddie’s business.”

“I see,” Tish observed thoughtfully, and proceeded for some moments to make pills of her bread and knock them with her fork, holding her head down as she did so.

Another thing which she found absorbing was Miss Lynn’s statement that a sound or movement while she drove was fatal, and that even a shadow thrown on the ball while putting decreased her accuracy.

By the end of February we had become accustomed to the exercises and now went through them with a certain sprightliness, turning back somersaults with ease, and I myself now being able to place my flat hand on the floor while standing. Owing to the cabinet baths I had lost considerable flesh and my skin seemed a trifle large for me in places, while Aggie looked, as dear Tish said, like a picked spare rib.

At the end of February, however, our training came to an abrupt end, owing to a certain absent-mindedness on Tish’s part. Tish and Aggie had gone to the gymnasium without me, and at ten o’clock that night I telephoned Tish to ask if Aggie was spending the night with her. To my surprise Tish said nothing for a moment, and then asked me in a strained voice to put on my things at once and meet her at the door to the gymnasium building.

Quick as I was, she was there before me, hammering at the door of the building, which appeared dark and deserted. It appeared that the woman had gone home early with a cold, and that Tish had agreed to unfasten the bath cabinet and let Aggie out at a certain time, but that she had remembered leaving the electric iron turned on at home and had hurried away, leaving Aggie asleep and helpless in the cabinet.

The thought of our dear Aggie, perspiring her life away, made us desperate, and on finding no response from within the building Tish led the way to an alleyway at the side and was able to reach the fire escape. With mixed emotions I watched her valiant figure disappear, and then returned to the main entrance, through which I expected her to reappear with our unhappy friend.

But we were again unfortunate. A few moments later the door indeed was opened, but to give exit to Tish in the grasp of a very rude and violent watchman, who immediately blew loudly on a whistle. I saw at once that Tish meant to give no explanation which would involve taking a strange man into the cabinet room, where our hapless Aggie was completely disrobed and helpless; and to add to our difficulties three policemen came running and immediately placed us under arrest.

Fortunately the station house was near, and we were saved the ignominy of a police wagon. Tish at once asked permission to telephone Charlie Sands, and as he is the night editor of a newspaper he was able to come at once. But Tish was of course reticent as to her errand before so many men, and he grew slightly impatient.

“All right,” he said. “I know you were in the building. I know how you got in. But why? I don’t think you were after lead pipe or boxing gloves, but these men do.”

“I left something there, Charlie.”

“Go a little further. What did you leave there?”

“I can’t tell you. But I’ve got to go back there at once. Every moment now—”

“Get this,” said Charlie Sands sternly: “Either you come over with the story or you’ll be locked up. And I’m bound to say I think you ought to be.”

In the end Tish told the unhappy facts, and two reporters, the sergeant and the policemen were all deeply moved. Several got out their handkerchiefs, and the sergeant turned quite red in the face. One and all they insisted on helping to release our poor Aggie, and most of them escorted us back to the building, only remaining in the corridor at our request while we entered the cabinet room.

Although we had expected to find Aggie in a parboiled condition the first thing which greeted us was a violent sneeze.

“Aggie!” I called desperately.

She sneezed again, and then said in a faint voice, “Hurry up. I’b dearly frozed.”

We learned later that the man in charge had turned off all the electricity when he left, from a switch outside, and that Aggie had perspired copiously and been on the verge of apoplexy until six o’clock, and had nearly frozen to death afterwards. Tish draped a sheet around the cabinet, and the policemen et cetera came in. Aggie gave a scream when she saw them, but it was proper enough, with only her head showing, and they went out at once to let her get her clothing on.

Before he put us in a taxicab that night Charlie Sands spoke to Tish with unjustifiable bitterness.

“I have given the watchman twenty dollars for that tooth you loosened, Aunt Tish,” he said. “And I’ve got to set up some food for the rest of this outfit. Say, fifty dollars, for which you’d better send me a check.” He then slammed the door, but opened it immediately. “I just want to add this,” he said: “If my revered grandfather has turned over in his grave as much as I think he has, he must be one of the liveliest corpses underground.”

I am happy to record that Aggie suffered nothing more than a heavy cold in the head. But she called Tish up the next morning and with unwonted asperity said, “I do thig, Tish, that you bight have put a strig aroud your figer or sobethig, to rebeber be by!”

It was but a week or two after this that Tish called me up and asked me to go to her apartment quickly, and to bring some arnica from the drug store. I went as quickly as possible, to find Hannah on the couch in the sitting room moaning loudly, and Tish putting hot flannels on her knee cap.

“It’s broken, Miss Tish,” she groaned. “I know it is.”

“Nonsense,” said Tish. “Anyhow I called to you to stay out.”

In the center of the room was a queer sort of machine, with a pole on an iron base and a dial at the top, and a ball fastened to a wire. There was a golf club on the floor.

Later on, when Hannah had been helped to her room and an arnica compress adjusted, Tish took me back and pointed to the machine.

“Two hundred and twenty yards, Lizzie,” she said, “and would have registered more but for Hannah’s leg. That’s driving.”

She then sat down and told me the entire plan. She had been working all winter, and was now confident that she could defeat Nettie Lynn. She had, after her first experience in the department store, limited herself—in another store—to approach shots. For driving she had used the machine. For putting she had cut a round hole in the carpet and had sawed an opening in the floor beneath, in which she had placed a wide-mouthed jar.

“My worst trouble, Lizzie,” she said, “was lifting my head. But I have solved it. See here.”

She then produced a short leather strap, one end of which she fastened to her belt and the other she held in her teeth. She had almost lost a front tooth at the beginning, she said, but that phase was over.”

“I don’t even need it anymore,” she told me. “To-morrow I shall commence placing an egg on the back of my neck as I stoop, and that with a feeling of perfect security.”

She then looked at me with her serene and confident glance.

“It has been hard work, Lizzie,” she said. “It is not over. It is even possible that I may call on you to do things which your ethical sense will at first reject. But remember this, and then decide: The happiness of two young and tender hearts is at stake.”

She seemed glad of a confidante, and asked me to keep a record of some six practice shots, as shown by the dial on the machine. I have this paper before me as I write:

1st drive, 230 yards. Slight pull.

2nd drive, 245 yards. Direct.

3rd drive, 300 yards. Slice.

4th drive, 310 yards. Direct.

5th drive. Wire broke.

6th drive. Wire broke again. Ball went through window pane. Probably hit dog, as considerable howling outside.

She then showed me her clubs, of which she had some forty-six, not all of which, however, she approved of. It was at that time that dear Tish taught me the names of some of them, such as niblick, stymie, cleek, mashie, putter, stance, and brassie, and observed mysteriously that I would need my knowledge later on. She also advised that before going back to Penzance we walk increasing distances every day.

“Because,” she said, “I shall need my two devoted friends this summer; need them perhaps as never before.”

I am bound to confess, however, that on our return to Penzance Tish’s first outdoor work at golf was a disappointment. She had a small ritual when getting ready; thus she would say, firmly, suiting the action to the phrase: “Tee ball. Feet in line with ball, advance right foot six inches, place club, overlap right thumb over left thumb, drop arms, left wrist rigid, head down, eye on the ball, shoulders steady, body still. Drive!” Having driven she then stood and counted five slowly before looking up.

At first, however, she did not hit the ball, or would send it only a short distance. But she worked all day, every day, and we soon saw a great improvement. As she had prophesied, she used us a great deal. For instance, to steady her nerves she would have us speak to her when driving, and even fire a revolver out toward the lake.