Charlie Sands apologized and looked thoughtful. On Tish"s remaining rather injured, he asked us all out to dinner that night, and almost the first thing he ordered was frogs" legs. Aggie got rather white about the lips.
"I--I think I"ll not take any," she said feebly. "I--I keep thinking of Tish tickling their throats with the hairpin, and how Percy--"
We glared at her, but it was too late. Charlie Sands drew up his chair and rested his elbows on the table.
"So there was a Percy as well as a Dorothea!" he said cheerfully. "I might have known it. Now we"ll have the story!"
TISH"S SPY
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED-HEADED DETECTIVE, THE LADY CHAUFFEUR, AND THE MAN WHO COULD NOT TELL THE TRUTH
I
It is easy enough, of course, to look back on our Canadian experience and see where we went wrong. What I particularly resent is the att.i.tude of Charlie Sands.
I am writing this for his benefit. It seems to me that a clean statement of the case is due to Tish, and, in less degree, to Aggie and myself.
It goes back long before the mysterious cipher. Even the incident of our abducting the girl in the pink tam-o"-shanter was, after all, the inevitable result of the series of occurrences that preceded it.
It is my intention to give this series of occurrences in their proper order and without bias. Herbert Spencer says that every act of one"s life is the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded it.
Naturally, therefore, I begin with the engagement by Tish of a girl as chauffeur; but even before that there were contributing causes. There was the faulty rearing of the McDonald youth, for instance, and Tish"s aesthetic dancing. And afterward there was Aggie"s hay fever, which made her sneeze and let go of a rope at a critical moment. Indeed, Aggie"s hay fever may be said to be one of the fundamental causes, being the reason we went to Canada.
It was like this: Along in June of the year before last, Aggie suddenly announced that she was going to spend the summer in Canada.
"It"s the best thing in the world for hay fever," she said, avoiding Tish"s eye. "Mrs. Ostermaier says she never sneezed once last year. The Northern Lights fill the air with ozone, or something like that."
"Fill the air with ozone!" Tish scoffed. "Fill Mrs. Ostermaier"s skull with ozone, instead of brains, more likely!"
Tish is a good woman--a sweet woman, indeed; but she has a vein of gentle irony, which she inherited from her maternal grandfather, who was on the Supreme Bench of his country. However, that spring she was inclined to be irritable. She could not drive her car, and that was where the trouble really started.
Tish had taken up aesthetic dancing in Mareb, wearing no stays and a middy blouse and short skirt; and during a fairy dance, where she was to twirl on her right toes, keeping the three other limbs horizontal, she twisted her right lower limb severely. Though not incapacitated, she could not use it properly; and, failing one day to put on the brake quickly, she drove into an open-front b.u.t.ter-and-egg shop.
[This was the time one of the newspapers headed the article: "Even the Eggs Scrambled."]
When Tish decided to have a chauffeur for a time she advertised. There were plenty of replies, but all of the applicants smoked cigarettes--a habit Tish very properly deplores. The idea of securing a young woman was, I must confess, mine.
"Plenty of young women drive cars," I said, "and drive well. And, at least, they don"t light a cigarette every time one stops to let a train go by."
"Huh!" Tish commented. "And have a raft of men about all the time!"
Nevertheless, she acted on the suggestion, advertising for a young woman who could drive a car and had no followers. Hutchins answered.
She was very pretty and not over twenty; but, asked about men, her face underwent a change, almost a hardening. "You"ll not be bothered with men," she said briefly. "I detest them!"
And this seemed to be the truth. Charlie Sands, for instance, for whose benefit this is being written, absolutely failed to make any impression on her. She met his overtures with cold disdain. She was also adamant to the men at the garage, succeeding in having the gasoline filtered through a chamois skin to take out the water, where Tish had for years begged for the same thing without success.
Though a dashing driver, Hutchins was careful. She sat on the small of her back and hurled us past the traffic policemen with a smile.
[Her name was really Hutchinson; but it took so long to say it at the rate she ran the car that Tish changed it to Hutchins.]
Really the whole experiment seemed to be an undoubted success, when Aggie got the notion of Canada into her head. Now, as it happened, owing to Tish"s disapproval, Aggie gave up the Canada idea in favor of Nantucket, some time in June; but she had not reckoned with Tish"s subconscious self. Tish was interested that spring in the subconscious self.
You may remember that, only a year or so before, it had been the fourth dimension.
[She became convinced that if one were sufficiently earnest one could go through closed doors and see into solids. In the former ambition she was unsuccessful, obtaining only bruises and disappointment; but she did develop the latter to a certain extent, for she met the laundress going out one day and, without a conscious effort, she knew that she had the best table napkins pinned to her petticoat. She accused the woman sternly--and she had six!]
"Nantucket!" said Tish. "Why Nantucket?"
"I have a niece there, and you said you hated Canada."
"On the contrary," Tish replied, with her eyes partly shut, "I find that my subconscious self has adopted and been working on the Canadian suggestion. What a wonderful thing is this buried and greater ego!
Worms, rifles, fishing-rods, "The Complete Angler," mosquito netting, canned goods, and sleeping-bags, all in my mind and in orderly array!"
"Worms!" I said, with, I confess, a touch of scorn in my voice. "If you will tell me, Tish Carberry--"
"Life preservers," chanted Tish"s subconscious self, "rubber blankets, small tent, folding camp-beds, a camp-stove, a meat-saw, a wood-saw, and some beads and gewgaws for placating the Indians." Then she opened her eyes and took up her knitting. "There are no worms in Canada, Lizzie, just as there are no snakes in Ireland. They were all destroyed during the glacial period."
"There are plenty of worms in the United States," I said with spirit.
"I dare say they could crawl over the border--unless, of course, they object to being British subjects."
She ignored me, however, and, getting up, went to one of her bureau drawers. We saw then that her subconscious self had written down lists of various things for the Canadian excursion. There was one headed Foodstuffs. Others were: Necessary Clothing: Camp Outfit; Fishing-Tackle; Weapons of Defense: and Diversions. Under this last heading it had placed binoculars, yarn and needles, life preservers, a prayer-book, and a cribbage-board.
"Boats," she said, "we can secure from the Indians, who make them, I believe, of hollow logs. And I shall rent a motor boat. Hutchins says she can manage one. When she"s not doing that she can wash dishes."
[We had been rather chary of motor boats, you may remember, since the time on Lake Penzance, when something jammed on our engine, and we had gone madly round the lake a number of times, with people on various docks trying to la.s.so us with ropes.]
Considering that it was she who had started the whole thing, and got Tish"s subconscious mind to working, Aggie was rather pettish.
"Huh!" she said. "I can"t swim, and you know it, Tish. Those canoe things turn over if you so much as sneeze in them."
"You"ll not sneeze," said Tish. "The Northern Lights fill the air with ozone."
Aggie looked at me helplessly; but I could do nothing. Only the year before, Tish, as you may recall, had taken us out into the Maine woods without any outfit at all, and we had lived on snared rabbits, and things that no Christian woman ought to put into her stomach. This time we were at least to go provisioned and equipped.
"Where are we going?" Aggie asked.
"Far from a white man," said Tish. "Away from milk wagons and children on velocipedes and the grocer calling up every morning for an order.
We"ll go to the Far North, Aggie, where the red man still treads his native forests; we"ll make our camp by some lake, where the deer come at early morning to drink and fish leap to see the sunset."
Well, it sounded rather refreshing, though I confess that, until Tish mentioned it, I had always thought that fish leaped in the evening to catch mosquitoes.
We sent for Hutchins at once. She was always respectful, but never subservient. She stood in the doorway while Tish explained.