PAGE 10
Tish Does Her Bit
by
The winter passed quietly enough. Aggie and I made Red Cross dressings for Europe, and Tish, tiring of knitting, made pajamas. She had turned against the government, and almost left the church when she learned that Mr. Ostermaier had voted the Democratic ticket. Then in January, without telling any one, she went away for four days, and Sarah Willoughby wrote me later that the Honorable J. C., her husband, said that a woman resembling Tish had demanded from the gallery of the Senate that we declare war against Germany and had been put out by the Sergeant-at-arms.
I do not know that this was Tish. She returned as unannounced as she had gone, and went back to her pajamas, but she was more quiet than usual, and sometimes, when she was sewing, her lips moved as though she was rehearsing a speech. She observed once or twice that she wanted to do her bit, but that she considered digging trenches considerably easier than driving a sewing machine twelve miles a day.
I remember, in this connection, a conversation I had with Mrs. Ostermaier some time in January. She asked me to wait after the Red Cross meeting, and I saw trouble in her eye.
“Miss Lizzie,” she said, “do you think Miss Tish really enjoys sewing?”
“Not particularly,” I admitted. “But it is better than knitting, she says, because it is faster. She likes to get results.”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Ostermaier observed. “I’ll just ask you to look at this pajama coat she has turned in.”
Well, there was no getting away from it. It was wrong. Dear Tish had sewed one of the sleeves in the neck opening, and had opened the sleeve hole and faced back the opening and put buttons and buttonholes on it.
“Not only that,” said Mrs. Ostermaier, “but she has made the trousers of several suits wrong side before and opened them up the back, and men are such creatures of habit. They like things the way they are used to them.”
Well, I had to tell Tish, and she flew into a temper and said Mrs. Ostermaier never could cut things out properly, and she would leave the society. Which she did. But she was very unhappy over it, for Tish is patriotic to her finger tips.
All the spring, until war was declared, she was restless and discontented, and she took to long trips in the car, by herself, returning moodier than ever. But with the announcement of war she found work to do. She made enlisting speeches everywhere, and was very successful, because Tish has a magnetic and compelling eye, and she would fix on one man in the crowd and talk at him and to him until all the men around were watching him. Generally, with every one looking he was ashamed not to come forward, and Tish would take him by the arm and lead him in to the recruiting station.
It was on one of these occasions that we saw the young man of the blackberry cordial again.
Tish saw him first, from the tail of the wagon she was standing in. She fixed him with her eye at once, and a man standing near him, said:
“Go on in, boy. You’re as good as in the trenches already. She landed me yesterday, but I’ve got six toes on one foot. Blessed if she didn’t try to take me to a hospital to have one cut off.”
“Now,” said Tish, “does any one wish to ask any questions?”
I saw the blackberry cordial person take a step forward.
“I would like to ask you one,” he said. “How do you reconcile blackberry cordial with the W. C. T. U.?”
Tish went white with anger, and would no doubt have flayed him with words, as our blackberry cordial is made from her own grandmother’s recipe, and a higher principled woman never lived. But unluckily the driver of the furniture wagon we were standing in had returned without our noticing it, and drove off at that moment, taking us with him.