PAGE 22
Tish Does Her Bit
by
“For whom?” Tish demanded. “For that slacker outside?”
Suddenly Myrtle laughed. She had been in tears for so long that it surprised us. We all stared at her, but she seemed to get worse and worse.
“She’s hysterical, poor child,” Aggie said, feeling for her smelling salts. “I don’t know that I blame her, Tish. No one knows better than I do what it is to expect to be married, and then find the divine hand of Providence intervening.”
But Myrtle suddenly walked over to Aggie and, stooping, kissed her on the top of her right ear.
“You dear thing!” she said. “I still don’t get all the idea, but I don’t much care if I don’t. I haven’t had so much excitement since I ran away from boarding school.”
She then straightened and looked at Tish. It was clear that her feeling for dear Tish was still vague, but was rather more of respect than of love.
“As for the–the young man outside,” she said, “I seem to gather that he hasn’t registered, and that I am not to marry him until he has. Very well. I hadn’t thought about it before, but that speech of yours–suppose you tell him that I won’t marry him until he has a–a magic blue card. I should like to see his face.”
But Tish is a woman of delicacy, and she suggested that Myrtle do it herself, from an upper window. I went up with her, and we found Mr. Culver again under the tree. The conversation ran like this:
MYRTLE, (looking very pretty indeed but very firm): Look here, I–I’ve decided not to marry you.
MR. CULVER (rousing suddenly and staring up at her): I beg your pardon!
MYRTLE: I know now that I was making a terrible mistake. No matter how much I care for you, I cannot marry a slacker.
MR. C. (furiously angry and glaring at her): You know better than that!
MYRTLE: Not at all. Can you deny that you haven’t registered yet?
MR. C.: What’s that got to do with it? I daresay I’m losing my mind. It wouldn’t be much wonder if I have. When I think of the way I’ve suffered lately–look at me!
MYRTLE (in a somewhat softened voice): Have you really suffered?
MR. C.: I? Good Lord, Myrtle–why, I haven’t slept for weeks. I—-
But here he stopped, with his eyes fixed on the roof overhead.
“Watch out!” he yelled. “Get back. Myrtle, she’ll fall on you.”
“Not at all,” said Tish’s calm voice from overhead. There was a rasping sound, and then a long wire fell past the window. “Now,” she called triumphantly, “let your policeman telephone for the Sheriff and a posse! That was a party wire, and that farmhouse over there is on it. There isn’t another telephone for ten miles.”
Well, I looked around for Myrtle, and she was on the guest room bed, face down.
“Oh,” she groaned, “I wouldn’t have missed it for a trip to Europe. And his face! Miss Lizzie, did you see his face?” She then got up suddenly and put her arms around me. “I’m simply madly happy, Miss Lizzie,” she said. “I have to kiss somebody, and since he–may I kiss you?”
Well, of course I allowed her to, but I was surprised. It was not natural, somehow.
Myrtle came down soon after and said that Mr. Culver was bringing some water from the well, and would he be allowed to come in with it? But Tish was firm on this point. She gave her consent, however, to his leaving the pail on the porch and then retiring to the chestnut tree. He did so, whistling to signify that he was at a safe distance, and I then carried it in.
“I say,” he called to me when he saw me, “this situation is getting on my nerves. I carried off that policeman, for one thing. He was on duty.”
“You needn’t stay here.”
“I daresay not,” he replied rather bitterly. “But what I want to ask is this: Won’t it be deucedly unpleasant for you three, when I report that you deliberately put my car out of commission so I could not get back by nine o’clock to register? Of course,” he went on, “a box of tacks may have spilled itself on the road, but I never heard of a barbed wire fence trying to crawl across a road and getting run over, like a snake.”