FullReads

After four times round the music stopped and the horse did also. They were just in front of us, and Tish looked rather dazed.

“You did splendidly!” said Aggie. “Honestly, Tish, I was frightened at first, but you and that dear horse seemed one piece. Didn’t they, Lizzie?”

Tish straightened out the fingers of her left hand with her right and extricated the lines. Then she turned her head slowly from right to left to see if she could.

“Help me down, somebody,” she said in a thin voice, “and call an osteopath. There is something wrong with my spine!”

She was in bed three days, having massage and a vibrator and being rubbed with chloroform liniment. At the end of that time she offered me her divided skirt, but I refused.

“Riding would be good for your liver, Lizzie,” she said, sitting up in bed with pillows all about her.

“I don’t intend to detach it to do it good,” I retorted. “What your liver and mine and most of the other livers need these days isn’t to be sent out in a divided skirt and beaten to a jelly: they need rest–less food and simpler food. If instead of taking your liver on a horse you’d put it in a tent and feed it nuts and berries, you wouldn’t be the color you are to-day, Tish Carberry.”

That really started the whole thing, although at the time Tish said nothing. She has a way of getting an idea and letting it simmer on the back of her brain, as you may say, when nobody knows it’s been cooking at all, and then suddenly bringing it out cooked and seasoned and ready to serve.

On the day Tish sat up for the first time, Aggie and I went over to see her. Hannah, the maid, had got her out of bed to a window, and Tish was sitting there with books all about her. It is in times of enforced physical idleness that most of Tish’s ideas come to her, and Aggie had reminded me of that fact on the way over.

“You remember, Lizzie,” she said, “how last winter when she was getting over the grippe she took up that correspondence-school course in swimming. She’s reading, watch her books. It’ll probably be suffrage or airships.”

Tish always believes anything she reads. She had been quite sure she could swim after six correspondence lessons. She had all the movements exactly, and had worried her trained nurse almost into hysteria for a week by turning on her face in bed every now and then and trying the overhand stroke. She got very expert, and had decided she’d swim regularly, and even had Charlie Sands show her the Australian crawl business so she could go over some time and swim the Channel. It was a matter of breathing and of changing positions, she said, and was up to intelligence rather than muscle.

Then when she was quite strong, she had gone to the natatorium. Aggie and I went along, not that we were any good in emergency, but because Tish had convinced us there would be no emergency. And Tish went in at the deep end of the pool, head first, according to diagram, and did not come up.

Well, there seemed to be nothing threatening in what Tish was reading this time. She had ordered some books for Maria Lee’s children and was looking them over before she sent them. The “Young Woods-man” was one and “Camper Craft” was another. How I shudder when I recall those names!

Aggie had baked an angel cake and I had brought over a jar of cookies. But Tish only thanked us and asked Hannah to take them out. Even then we were not suspicious. Tish sat back among her pillows and said very little. The conversation was something like this:–

Aggie: Well, you’re up again: I hope to goodness it will be a lesson to you. If you don’t mind, I’d like Hannah to cut that cake. It fell in the middle.