THE GRAY GOOSE
In order to understand the case of Emmie Hartford and the rather drastic method by which our splendid Tish endeavored to effect a cure, it is necessary to go back a few months to that strange but brief period during which Letitia Carberry developed psychic power.
Not, indeed, that she used her power in the case referred to; on the contrary, rather. But the influence of her earlier experiences is plainly to be discovered by the careful reader, and since she has been severely criticized for her attitude to Emmie, as well as for the methods she pursued, it is only fair to her to revert briefly to the incidents which preceded the Hartford affair.
It is, I admit, a long step from a book on palmistry to that frightful evening when Aggie and I were compelled to sit under the eyes of a policeman and listen to a number of men digging frantically in the cellar of the Hartford house just beneath the room in which we waited. But that is the way it began.
It was last Christmas that Charlie Sands, Tish’s nephew, sent her a book on palmistry. Tish studied it carefully, and for some time Aggie and I, and even Hannah, her maid, were obliged to make impressions of our hands on a sheet of smoked paper while Tish studied the results. Aggie, I recall, had a line down near her wrist which worried Tish greatly, revealing as it did an unbridled and passionate nature, although Aggie was certain that it was where she had been cut while paring quinces some years ago. And Hannah certainly had the circle which indicated death by drowning. But what is important to this narrative is that our dear Tish discovered that she herself had the psychic cross on both hands.
She at once undertook a study of such matters, although at first her attitude was largely one of academic interest, she having always stoutly maintained that under no circumstances, once having passed over, would she care to be brought back and forced to inhabit even temporarily the body of a medium she might not care for or might indeed positively dislike.
And, I may say, her interest was largely impersonal until well on into the spring. Then one night she had a most curious experience, and there began that earnest investigation which was tolead us into such strange paths, and was later, indeed, to see us driven from the Hartford home under conditions so unpleasant that only a sense of fairness to Tish compels me to record them.
Briefly, then, Tish was reading one evening in the living room of her apartment, while Hannah in the kitchen was cutting out a nightgown from a paper pattern. There was only the light from the reading lamp, an auspicious fact, since we have since learned how fatal is light to these delicate phenomena, and it so happened that there was on the table beside her a vase of flowers and also a pitcher of drinking water. Since both water and flowers greatly assist in psychic manifestations, it will be readily seen that, without Tish knowing it, the stage was already set for the drama which ensued.
Suddenly she heard a faint rustling, and on glancing up there was the sleeve pattern of Hannah’s nightgown moving across the doorsill and into the room!
It is unfortunate that, in her surprise, she dropped her book and thus broke the ectoplasmic force, or whatever it may be called. The paper instantly ceased to move. But her interest was naturally aroused, and with her usual promptness she at once inaugurated a series of sittings, consistingof the three of us—Aggie, Tish and myself. Later on, for one experiment, we persuaded Hannah to join us, with results so startling that neither she nor Aggie sat again. But even these early sittings brought surprising results. I quote a few extracts from Tish’s record, made each evening after the event, and thus as correct as possible:
At oneA.M.last night we secured heavy raps on the wall next to the Ingersoll apartment, distinctly audible over the sound of the phonograph.By an unmistakable affirmative in the usual code of raps for yes and no, Mr. Wiggins tonight told Aggie he had desired her to have his cameo scarf pin, and not his sister, who has it.C. S.—Charlie Sands—sat with us tonight. Vase of flowers and bowl of water on floor. He requested that the spirits place something in the bowl of water, and since it was Friday, suggested fish. In thirty seconds we heard a loud plop, and found on turning on the light that a goldfish was swimming in the bowl.
At oneA.M.last night we secured heavy raps on the wall next to the Ingersoll apartment, distinctly audible over the sound of the phonograph.
By an unmistakable affirmative in the usual code of raps for yes and no, Mr. Wiggins tonight told Aggie he had desired her to have his cameo scarf pin, and not his sister, who has it.
C. S.—Charlie Sands—sat with us tonight. Vase of flowers and bowl of water on floor. He requested that the spirits place something in the bowl of water, and since it was Friday, suggested fish. In thirty seconds we heard a loud plop, and found on turning on the light that a goldfish was swimming in the bowl.
Brief as they are, these few extracts prove conclusively that we were securing results. Already, a purely amateur circle as we were, we had succeeded in securing a materialized form. More than that, the fish remained some days, in every way acting like a real fish, even eating the food we placed in the bowl. Indeed, it was only to leave us later on under circumstances as amazing as those of its arrival.
It will be seen, then, that we were slowly but definitely progressing, although small setbacks and annoyances came our way also. Hannah, for instance, became so nervous that she constantly threatened to leave, and on a storm coming up one night and Tish going into her room in her nightdress to see if the window was closed, was only in time to catch her before she leaped out of the window!
But in the main we were satisfied. True, our one attempt to utilize a trumpet medium, strongly recommended by Mrs. Ostermaier as having predicted Willie’s measles, was most unfortunate. We had invited Charlie Sands to sit with us, and the early performance was most surprising. Mr. Abraham, the medium, went into a deep trance and the trumpet which had been placed on the floor moved about and touched us all. Not only that, but it hovered in the air in front of Charlie Sands, and after a number of kissing sounds, a young woman who said her name was Katie and that she used to know him, asked him to go to a private sitting at Mr. Abraham’s, because she didn’t want to make any trouble for him by talking there.
“That’s right, Katie,” he said. “I don’t seem to remember you, but be discreet anyhow. And you might pass that word along over there, becausea lot of folks could come back and make trouble here if they wanted to.”
Well, she agreed to that and was just sending another kiss to him through the trumpet, when she sneezed twice. Tish thought it was Aggie, but it was not. And while this was being argued the medium in his chair suddenly gave a terrific yelp.
“I’ve been injured!” he shouted. “Somebody’s played a trick on me! I’m damaged! I’m hurt!”
Well, Aggie turned on the lamp, and Mr. Abraham was on his feet, making dreadful faces and pulling at the seat of his trousers. Somebody had put a tack with the point upright on his chair, and he must have been standing up, for he had sat down on it. He was very much upset, and left without waiting to collect his fee at all.
It turned out that Charlie Sands had suspected him right along, and had blown some snuff into the trumpet when he was talking to Katie. It was he, also, who had placed the tack on the chair.
A weaker spirit than Letitia Carberry might have been discouraged, but Tish was not daunted; and, although our next sitting was the last we held, since neither Aggie nor Hannah would so much as venture into a dark room after it, it was so conclusive that it left no room for doubt.
To be brief, Tish had always felt that inmaterializing a goldfish we had done well, but not sufficiently well.
“A fish,” she said, “is a lower earth form. It is soulless and purely material, for there is no record of water in the higher planes of existence, since in the spirit we neither thirst nor bathe. We must do better than that.”
As a result of this resolution we were, as I have said, compelled to give up our sittings entirely; but not before we had had a success beyond our wildest hopes.
On the night in question, then, we had coaxed Hannah to sit once more, and in a very few minutes we heard undeniable sounds from the neighborhood of the open window. As it was entirely dark we could see nothing, but after a short time Hannah yelled in a terrified voice that something was rubbing against her.
“Hush!” said Tish quietly. “If it is a spirit form it is welcome. Welcome, friend.”
“It’s scratching my leg!” said Hannah in a dreadful tone.
She then let out a bloodcurdling yell and the next instant the spirit form had leaped to Aggie’s shoulder, and she fell from her chair in a dead faint. We were obliged to turn on the light, but it was a long time before she could do more than moan. Naturally the force was entirely dissipatedby that time; but Hannah was able to show two long scratches on her leg as evidence, and Aggie’s shoulder revealed three or four minute punctures entirely through the skin.
A careful examination of the room also revealed a startling fact. The goldfish had disappeared from its bowl!
It was, indeed, a remarkable achievement, marking as it did our advance from the piscatorial to the animal plane, and indicating that we might even hope before long for the materialized human body. But, alas for Tish’s hopes, neither Aggie nor Hannah would sit again. So undermined, indeed, was Hannah’s morale by the incident that she gave us a considerable fright only a few days later.
Tish was experimenting with automatic writing at the time, and had already secured a curious result. Her hand had drawn first a series of straight horizontal lines and then crossed them with a similar number of vertical ones, resulting in numerous small squares. Then, moving on inexorably, it had just written beneath: “Number one horizontal,” when we heard a terrific shriek from Hannah’s room, followed by another and another.
The power, of course, was broken, and, on rushing to Hannah’s assistance, we found thatshe had heard strange movements and sounds from her closet and was convinced that there was a spirit there. It turned out, however, to be only the Ingersolls’ cat; a troublesome animal which had crawled in over the fire escape and was playing with a mouse it had captured.
But this practically ended our experiments in that direction. As Tish so justly observed, the craven heart has no place in the spirit world. I have related it, however, because indirectly but surely it had its influence in the Hartford matter.
It was just after all this that Aggie’s cousin Will Hartford came to see her and to ask her to indorse a note for five hundred dollars. We were all struck by the change in him; he used to be a nice-looking man, rather fastidious about his clothes, but he looked thin and had a bad color that day, and as shabby as a person could be and go about.
Aggie was so sorry for him that she would have done what he asked, but Tish at once advised against it.
“Lending money to relatives is like lending seed to a canary bird,” she said. “You get paid only in song, and some of them can’t sing. What’s the matter, anyhow, Will?” she demanded, gazing at him with her usual searching glance. “Youearn a good salary. You oughtn’t to be borrowing seed—I mean money.”
“Well,” he said, “Emmie’s kind of frail. She has been most ever since I married her. It’s mostly a matter of doctors and nurses.”
“Frail, how?” said Tish sharply. “Morally or physically? She used to be all right. I can remember when she ate three eggs for breakfast and was out in the pantry at eleven o’clock for a glass of milk.”
He looked pained.
“She doesn’t eat now at all, Letitia,” he said sadly. “She feeds most everything that goes up on her tray to the dog. I don’t know how she lives on what she eats.”
Well, poor Will’s story was certainly a sad one. About ten years ago Emmie had been taken sick. Fainted. And from that time on she’d just been up and down. Once they had thought it was a dropped stomach, and about the time she was all strapped up for that along came a new doctor and located something in her gall bladder. Her kidneys were wrong, too, and they’d got a new specialist lately who was laying the trouble to the thyroid gland.
“She’s had so many hypodermics that her poor skin is full of holes,” he told us. “I guess they’ve used about a hundred needles on her.”
“It’s a pity somebody wouldn’t use a needle on you,” said Tish sharply, looking at a hole in his sock.
But he only put his foot under his chair and went on about his troubles.
“I don’t like asking for help,” he said, “but every time I get a little money it goes to doctors and nurses. I’ve paid a nurse forty dollars a week for seven years and I’ve been needing a new suit for the last six of them. And we can’t keep help. There’s nobody there now but the nurse. Seems as though the feebler Emmie gets the worse they treat her.”
Well, he looked so forlorn that Tish sent Aggie out for some blackberry cordial.
“Is she in bed all the time?” she asked.
“She’s up and down. I carry her down to the living room once in a while, but I can’t do it often. I’m not so strong as I used to be.”
“Still, as thin as she must be——”
“Well, she isn’t exactly thin,” he said in an embarrassed manner. “It’s a funny thing, but she’s put on weight. Of course, weight itself may be a disease. I guess it is with her, anyhow.”
Tish glanced at him, but he was drinking his blackberry cordial and didn’t notice it. He was certainly shabby, and his face had sort of fallen in.
“What’s the matter with your teeth?” Tish said suddenly.
“I’ve lost one or two of them,” he admitted. “I haven’t liked to take the time away from her to get them looked at. You see”—he looked away from us, out of the window—“you see, I may not have her long. I don’t want ever to feel that I—that I failed her in any way.”
“It’s a pity it isn’t Emmie who’s lost her teeth, and not you,” said Tish. “Since she doesn’t need them and you do.”
But he looked pained at that; so she told him she would think things over and let him know what Aggie would do, and he went away. On his way out Tish asked him suddenly what sort of a dog they had, and he seemed surprised.
“It’s a Pekingese,” he said, and went out with his shoulders bent, like an old man.
After he had gone Aggie told us more about Emmie. She said it was a great pity about her, not forty yet and on her deathbed, but that that sort of weakness ran in the family.
“Her mother was delicate, too,” she said. “For twenty-five years she never came downstairs. Her mother carried up every bite of food she ate.”
“What happened to her then?” Tish put in, rousing herself. “Did she die?”
“No, but her mother did,” Aggie said.
“And then who carried the tray?”
“Well, she began to get better about that time, and she lived to be eighty. She would be living now, poor soul, but she got on a chair one night to reach a piece of pie that somebody had hidden in the pantry, and she fell off and broke her neck.”
Tish seemed very thoughtful as she went back to her apartment. She told Aggie not to do anything about the note for a time; that she would go and think over the situation. It was that night that she called me up and asked me how large a Pekingese dog was, and I told her the one her niece, Lily May Carter, had, weighed about seven pounds.
“You’re sure of that, are you?” she inquired. “It’s not the size of a police dog or a mastiff?”
“Not unless it’s grown considerably since I saw it,” I assured her.
“Then,” she said, “I fancy things at Will Hartford’s are in a very bad way. We’d better go there, Lizzie.”
“Do you think that Emmie’s going to die, Tish?”
“I do, indeed,” said Tish dryly. “At eighty or ninety, if I can restrain myself so long, she will pass on. But Will Hartford is in a bad way.And so, I should judge,” she added cryptically, “is the Pekingese dog.”
We left two days later to see Emmie. It suited none of us to go. It was almost time for the annual meeting at the church, where we invariably serve the supper. Also Aggie was having an early attack of hay fever, which the dust of the motor trip did nothing to allay. All in all, only a strong sense of duty took us, a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice; and when I think of that last evening there, with the house full of doctors and policemen, I cannot restrain a certain sense of bitterness.
We acted entirely for the best. If the results were not what we anticipated, surely the fault is not ours. And how true, indeed, are these lines, secured only the other day by Tish through the medium of automatic writing:
There swims no goose so gray but soon or lateShe finds some honest gander for her mate.
There swims no goose so gray but soon or lateShe finds some honest gander for her mate.
There swims no goose so gray but soon or lateShe finds some honest gander for her mate.
There swims no goose so gray but soon or late
She finds some honest gander for her mate.
It was the night before our departure that Tish and I sat together for advice on the situation, Aggie definitely refusing to join us.
We got rather feeble results, as the power was evidently low; but on her asking if we should go to the Hartfords’, the table very clearly rapped “Yes.” Whether, after I had gone, Tish receivedfurther instructions or not I do not know, but I am inclined to think she did. For one reason, I doubt if the idea of breaking a spring in her car and thus prolonging our stay there originated with her. She is very fond of her car.
On the other hand, the suggestion that I take along my small bathroom scale was clearly her own. Also, I imagine, the ipecac and the raw beef. Though of an idealistic type, the practical side of her nature is also extremely well developed.
But that she succeeded in breaking not one spring, but an entire set of them, was a proof undoubtedly that she was being carefully guided. I still think, and Aggie agrees with me, that she could have done so without us in the car, and thus have saved Aggie much physical discomfort—at the third ditch her poor head went entirely through the top.
But at least she achieved her purpose, and we limped into the untidy drive in front of the Hartford house in a considerably demoralized condition. The house was as run down as the property, and what with it being a mile beyond the village and isolated, and having a cemetery just across the road, it was as gloomy a place as ever I have laid eyes on. The front porch had not been swept for months, and the doorbell was disconnected, so we had to hammer for admission.
We learned later that the sound of the bell annoyed Emmie.
Will Hartford himself opened the door and I cannot say that he burst into shouts of joy when he saw us. He had heard us drive up, and he came out onto the front porch with his finger to his lips and a worried look on his face.
“Sh!” he said. “She’s had a bad day, and she’s resting now. Most folks leave their cars out in the road so as not to disturb her.”
“We had to drive in,” said Tish, “because of our luggage, Will.”
Well, he looked at the car then, and when he saw the bags in it he went quite pale.
“Oh!” he said. “So you’re staying over-night, are you? Well, I guess you’d better come in, but don’t make any noise. The nurse dropped the thermometer a few minutes ago, and Emmie hasn’t yet recovered from the shock.”
We tiptoed inside, and he went out and carried in our bags and the bathroom scale. But he had not been quite prepared for the weight of the scale, and just inside the door it slipped and fell with a terrible crash on the floor. It caught his foot, too, and there was nothing subdued either about the racket or the way he swore.
Tish said she took heart from that minute. It showed that he was not entirely crushed. Butthere was a yelp from upstairs, and the next minute a nurse in uniform dashed down the stairs.
“You’ve got the aromatic ammonia in your pocket,” she said to him. “She’s fainted again.”
Well, he let go of his foot and gave her the bottle, and Tish watched her rush up the stairs with a queer look on her face.
“Do you mean to say that that noise made Emmie faint?” she inquired.
“Her nerves are about gone,” he whispered, all subdued again. “Any unexpected sound almost kills her. I’ve had to put a piece of felt on the back porch, so the milkman can put down his bottles quietly.”
He limped into the living room and while Tish took the car to the garage in the village we followed him. Just one look around was enough for me, and the dust started Aggie to sneezing again at once. He closed the door with a pained expression and said he was glad to see us once more, and asked Aggie if she still made cream puffs with whipped-cream filling. Then he groaned, and said that he was a criminal to be thinking of the flesh when Emmie, as like as not, was near the end of the road.
And at that moment the dog scratched at the door and he let it in. It was a tiny thing and as thin as a rail, and when Tish came back fromleaving her car at the garage she took one look at it and said:
“Why don’t you feed that poor little beast?”
“Feed it!” he said. “It has worms, or something. It eats enough for two men. Last night it ate Emmie’s sweetbread entire, and then came down and tried to take my pork chop from me.”
He sighed and then limped to the door again.
“I’ll have some beds made up for you,” he said. “I guess we can manage for one night.”
“It may be more than one night,” said Tish, looking him straight in the eye. “They have to send away for those springs, Will.”
“Well, two nights then,” he said, and went out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.
It did not require any keen intelligence to show us that we were not welcome, and I said so to Tish.
“Personally,” I observed, “I imagine he would rather have the whooping cough!”
“Not the whooping cough,” said Tish. “That’s noisy, Lizzie.” She then walked to the door, opened it and slammed it hard. “There’s no death here yet,” she said, “although there may be, if I don’t hold myself in. Where’s that dog?”
Well, the poor little thing had crept under a sofa, and was almost too feeble to crawl out.
“Eats her food, does he?” said Tish. “So nobodyfeeds him downstairs, and he’s starving to death. Here,” she said, “try this, old boy.”
To our surprise she drew a package of raw chopped beef out of her pocket, and the way that creature bolted it was a revelation. Tish watched him carefully but said nothing, and before Will came back she had burned the paper in the fireplace.
Well, we didn’t see Emmie before dinner. Will said somebody or other had slammed a door and she had gone into a collapse. He’d sent for the doctor again. As there was no servant, we pitched in and cooked what was in the house, which wasn’t much, except for the broiled squab, baked potato, two rolls, some green peas and a saucer of ice cream which the nurse took up to Emmie.
“If she would only eat!” Will said. “And build up her strength. But she just groans and turns her face away.”
It turned out that the nurse ate while Emmie was merely toying with her tray upstairs and feeding Teddy from it. But that night Teddy did not go upstairs. He had been fed and was asleep under the table. And it wasn’t more than five minutes after the nurse and the rest of us had sat down to our frugal repast when we heard Emmie feebly calling for him.
“You see?” Will said, hopelessly. “She won’t touch it, and she’s calling Teddy.”
“And Teddy isn’t going!” said Tish. “He’s under the table at my feet.”
Well, all through the meal we could hear Emmie weakly calling the dog, and Will and the nurse kept running up to see if she was all right. Once Will came down and tried to carry the dog up, but he ran out into the kitchen and into the yard, and he couldn’t catch him.
“Emmie’s frightfully upset,” he said in a worried way. “She has fancies like this, and I don’t like to cross her. But that dog has crawled under the porch and I don’t know what to do.”
Tish said nothing. Later on the tray came down untouched, and Will said Emmie was in a very bad way. She would not speak to him, and just lay there staring at the ceiling.
“She looks as though she is staring into eternity,” he said. “To think of me sitting here eating like an animal, and my poor wife——”
He was so overcome he had to leave the room, and Aggie got out her handkerchief.
“I’m afraid it’s the end, Tish,” she whimpered.
“It is the end,” Tish said shortly, “or it will be unless somebody holds me.”
It was that evening that Will took Tish to awindow and pointed out the lot he had selected in the cemetery across the road.
“It has a good view, you see, Letitia,” he told her. “And her sainted mother lies there too. There is room for me beside her also. I shan’t outlive her very long.”
“No,” Tish said dryly, “I imagine you’ll not outlive Emmie, Will; not to amount to anything anyhow.”
We had a long talk with Will that night. We had dusted the living room and started a fire there, and he seemed to relax. He even lighted a cigarette, after Tish had told him that if he sat near the fire the smoke would go up the chimney.
Emmie, it seemed, didn’t like tobacco smoke.
“It affects her heart,” he said. “I smoke outside, and then come in and change my coat. The faintest odor sickens her.”
The trouble, he said, had been coming on for some years.
“We’d been talking about getting a car,” he said, “and I didn’t feel able to. I remember she had just said she wasn’t as well as she might be, and that she needed a car for fresh air; and when I said that I couldn’t afford it she fell over just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “In a heap. That was the beginning.”
“And it’s gone on ever since?”
“Yes. She just wouldn’t take care of herself. And I didn’t understand. I used to ask her to do things. The second attack came when I asked her to wash out a pair of golf hose for me. The laundress always shrunk them, and I thought—well, she took cold, and it settled on her lungs. Every now and then she has a hemorrhage.”
“A large one?” Tish asked.
“I’ve never been around when she’s had one, but they weaken her terribly,” he said. “The worst thing about it all is I’m responsible. I never did realize just how delicate she was until it was too late.”
We sat there for a while, and he seemed glad to talk and be warm at the same time. But after a while the nurse tiptoed in and whispered that Emmie wanted him, and he slipped out and creaked up the stairs.
“I always read to her in the evenings,” he explained as he left. “It’s the least I can do, and it’s all she has.”
Tish was very thoughtful that evening, and after Will had read to Emmie until she was sleepy, and tucked her up and fixed her window and taken her ice water and moved her bell closer to her and given her an eggnog, which was all, he said, she could keep down, he locked up the house and we went to bed.
“Don’t worry if you hear me moving about in the night,” he said. “The nurse has to sleep sometime.”
“And when do you sleep?” Tish inquired.
“Oh, I get a nap now and then, and then I sleep in the train going up to business in the morning and coming back in the evening.”
The last thing I heard that night was Emmie’s bell ringing hard. I heard Will get up and go into her room, and when I dropped off he was still there, soothing her about something.
I had been asleep for perhaps three hours when I was wakened by a terrific crash from somewhere below, and I leaped out of bed. Across the hall I heard Will moving, and the next moment he ran down the staircase. Tish was not in her room, and, convinced that something dreadful had occurred, I hurried down in my nightdress.
I could hear Tish’s voice in the pantry, and Will moaning and saying Emmie was dead, and when I opened the pantry door I thought at first that she was.
She was lying on the floor in a dead faint, with a slice of bread and butter in her hand, and Tish was standing over her keeping Will off.
“She’s all right,” she said. “Let her alone. She’ll come round all right.”
“But she’s fainted,” Will yelled. “Get MissSmith. Ring up the doctor. Pour some water over her.”
Tish did this last. She turned on the cold-water tap, filled a dipper, and flung its contents hard in Emmie’s face. And if ever I’ve seen a fainting woman look furious Emmie did. But she only opened her eyes and said weakly:
“Where am I?”
“You’re here, darling,” said Will, trembling all over. “You’ll be all right now.”
“How did I get here?” she whimpered.
“You walked here,” Tish said dryly. “You didn’t fly, you know, Emmie.”
Well, she couldn’t have flown anywhere. She was as fat as butter, and as healthy-looking a woman as ever I’ve seen. Will had run to telephone for the doctor, and Emmie seemed to realize the bread and butter, for she held up the hand that had it and said feebly:
“What’s this?”
“Just what it looks like, Emmie,” said Tish.
“Strange!” she whispered. “I don’t remember anything. Who found me here, and when?”
“I did,” Tish said coldly. “You had just spread on the butter and were reaching for the jam when I came in.”
She gave Tish a look of absolute hatred, and then the nurse ran in and drove us out. Later onwe heard poor Will carrying her up the staircase, and when he bumped against the rail with her she yelped. He twisted his back doing it, but when the doctor came he said it had been a curious case of somnambulism.
“In her state of weakness,” he said, “it’s impossible to believe that she walked down those stairs, Miss Carberry. She must have slid down.”
“She walked down. I was behind her.”
“Why on earth didn’t you stop her?”
“I had an idea that maybe she was hungry,” Tish said quietly.
We did not feed Teddy the next morning, but we weighed him when he followed the breakfast tray to Emmie’s room. And when he came down, having supposedly eaten all of Emmie’s breakfast, he had lost two ounces!
Tish gazed at the scales angrily.
“As I thought!” she observed. “And that poor devil of a husband hasn’t probably been out of this house at night for five years, or had a sock darned in ten! If he had any sense he’d take up with another woman.”
“Why, Tish!” said Aggie, aghast.
“If there’s anything more immoral than that woman lying up there in bed and taking everythingWill gives her and giving nothing back, I haven’t heard of it.”
“She’s his wife.”
“She’s not his wife,” said Tish. “She’s a cancer, that’s what she is. Cancers thrive, but the people who have ’em die. And he’s got her.”
It was that morning that Emmie decided to make the best of a bad job and see us, and all the time the nurse was fixing her up for the doctor’s visit she told us her symptoms. For a dying woman she certainly was particular about her appearance, for she was dressed up to beat anything in a silk nightgown, and with her hair crimped. Just before the nurse went out she sprayed her with violet water, and Emmie stopped whining about serums and blood pressure long enough to say that she had to use perfume because the smell of cooking in the house upset her poor weak stomach.
“And Will is so thoughtless,” she said. “Would you believe that he brought home spareribs and sauerkraut the other night? And it isn’t more than ten days since he fried some onions for his supper! But I suppose men are all alike.”
“No, Emmie,” Tish told her gently. “No, they are not. There are some men who would as sooncommit murder as not. But your Will isn’t that sort. Anybody can see that.”
Well, Emmie eyed her suspiciously, but Tish went on asking her if all the arrangements for the funeral were made, and if she would like us to stay on until everything was over.
“We could put the house in order, and so on,” she said. “I dare say Will will marry again, because the lonelier they are, the sooner they do it; but we could leave things tidy. And he would have to wait a year anyhow.”
“I should think he would,” said Emmie coldly. “And if you think I intend to have this house put in order for Will’s second wife you can think again. Anyhow, Will Hartford has never looked at another woman and never will.”
“Not even at that nurse of yours?” Tish inquired. “I was just thinking last night that I didn’t consider it exactly wise to leave these two together as much as you do. She’s a right nice-looking girl.”
“I can’t say I admire your taste!” she said. But when the nurse came back she gave her a long, hard look and then said she would take a rest so as to be ready for the doctor’s visit.
“I don’t know if Will has told you,” she remarked, “but I’m not supposed to have company. Excitement is my worst enemy.”
“Well, we’re not company, Emmie,” Tish told her. “You just go on and be as sick as you like. And don’t worry about us. Nobody with a heart would leave Will to go through the funeral by himself. And you might tell us where your grave clothes are while you’re still able to speak.”
“They’re in the lower bureau drawer,” she said in a hard voice. And we went out.
When the doctor came that day Tish waylaid him in the lower hall. And he said Emmie Hartford could get out of bed and do a day’s washing any minute she had a mind to. But he said also that if he told her so she would only shop around for another doctor, who would tell her she had something seriously wrong with her. He had not been paid for a long time, but he did not mind that as much as the way she made him lose his sleep.
“My wife says,” he stated, “that she seems to know the minute I’ve taken my trousers off. I don’t know when I’ve slept a night through. Why, if you’ll believe me, the alarm clock in the kitchen went off at two o’clock the other morning and I got up in my sleep and was out to the cemetery here before I wakened.”
Well, after he had gone we sent Emmie a nice lunch, and soon after, she began to call the dog. But Tish had fed him and shut him in a closetand once more she had to send her tray down untouched. She was in a villainous temper by that time and the nurse came down about fourP.M.and said there was something queer about her. She just lay in bed and stared hard at her. And when she had told her she was going to put on a fresh uniform before Will got home, Emmie had called her something that sounded like a hussy.
But if Emmie’s condition was worse, Will’s was distinctly better. He ate a real meal that evening, and, instead of hurrying up to her afterward, he sat for a little while in the sitting room. We had brought along some blackberry cordial, and he sipped it with appreciation.
“I was making some right good moonshine myself a while back,” he said. “I bought a still, you know, and I gave the doctor some one night. He turned his car over on his way back into town and broke his arm. But the smell annoyed Emmie, so I had to give it up.”
Well, Miss Smith came in for a few minutes, too; she seemed glad to relax for once. But pretty soon Emmie’s bell began to ring and she had to go up. It was no time at all before she came running down the stairs with a thermometer in her hand and a scared look on her face.
“You’d better come up at once, Mr. Hartford,” she said. “She’s got a terrible fever.”
“How high is it?” asked Will, beginning to tremble.
“About as high as it can be,” said Miss Smith, looking worried. “I’ve telephoned to the doctor, and he says to use a cold pack. But she won’t have it.”
But as usual, our dear Tish rose to the emergency at once.
“Certainly she will have it,” she said. “You crack the ice, Will, and you might mix some salt with it while you’re at it. There’s no use doing it unless we do it right. A high fever is not to be fooled with.”
Well, I don’t know when I remember such a fuss as Emmie made over that cold pack. She was strong, too, and it was all we could do to put her between sheets wrung out of ice water and then pour the ice and salt over her. She howled and screamed, but Tish worked calmly.
“You’re killing me!” she would yell. “I’m dying!”
“You will die if you don’t keep quiet,” Tish would say.
“But I’ll take cold; I’ll take pneumonia.”
“Not with a temperature like that,” Tish would assure her, and pour on more ice and salt.
They did not stop until her temperature was down to ninety-five. She would not speak to any of us by that time, but when it was all over, Tish came over to the room Aggie and I occupied together and closed the door.
“I fancy,” she said grimly, “that it will be some time before she holds the thermometer against her hot-water bottle again.”
As Tish says, the Emmies of this world never fool the women, although they always fool the men. But Emmie knew well enough that she had not fooled us for a minute. And the way she hated us after the affair of the cold pack was simply wicked. She would lie in bed and loathe the very ground we walked on, and when she found it would take at least a week to repair the car she had a convulsion and frothed at the mouth. Tish was quite certain the froth was merely lather from a cake of soap, but Will was almost out of his mind.
The strangest thing, however, was the way she had turned against Miss Smith. Possibly the fact that Tish found a picture of her in Will’s coat one day while she was repairing it in Emmie’s room had something to do with it. But both Will and Miss Smith were as puzzled as could be about it, and Miss Smith said it had been on her bureau when she went out.
Will went right down on his knees beside Emmie’s bed and swore he had always been true to her.
“There has never been any other woman in my life, Emmie,” he told her. “I’ve never had any time for that sort of thing, and you know it. Surely you can trust me!”
“I trust nobody,” said Emmie grimly. “If you haven’t the decency to wait until I am gone, which at the best is a matter of weeks, I can but lie here and await the end.”
But she couldn’t very well send the nurse away, for in ten years she had had most of the nurses thereabouts, and none of them would come back, and she knew it. She was very suspicious after that, however, and the very next day, Aggie happening to dust baking soda instead of powdered sugar over her cup custard—yes, she was eating a little by that time; she had to, or starve—she accused Miss Smith of trying to poison her.
Naturally, things were considerably strained from then on, although both Will and the dog were showing marked improvement. Will would come home to a clean house and a good dinner and smoke a couple of cigarettes up the chimney afterward. Then he would get up heavily and draw a long breath and say:
“Well, I suppose I’d better be getting on the job again,” and go slowly up the stairs.
But long after he should have been in his bed, getting the rest he needed, we could hear him reading aloud, on and on, until Emmie went to sleep.
How long this might have continued I cannot say. But one morning we missed the half of a coconut cake from the kitchen cupboard, and Tish promptly went to Will about it.
“None are so blind as those who will not see,” she said to him. “But if you think, Will Hartford, that a mouse ate that cake and then put the pan in the garbage can, I don’t.”
“But I don’t think anything of the kind, Letitia,” he protested, looking distressed. “Every now and then a tramp breaks into a house out here and eats what he can find.”
Tish gave him a terrible stare, and then she used an expression I had never before heard from her lips. “Some people are idiots,” she said, “and some are just plain fools,” and with that she stalked out of the room.
She called us together for a council of war, as she termed it, after he had gone to the train.
“Two courses are open before us,” she said. “We can leave the poor deluded imbecile to hisfate, or we can take matters into our own hands. If the former, we must go; if the latter, that nurse must get out. I cannot be hampered.”
Well, after some argument we agreed to do whatever Tish suggested, although Aggie stipulated that Emmie, being her cousin by marriage, was to suffer no physical harm. Tish, on the other hand, demanded absolute freedom and no criticism. And this being satisfactorily arranged it remained only to get rid of Miss Smith.
As it happened, fate played into our hands that very morning.
The coconut cake had upset Emmie’s stomach, and the doctor sent some medicine for her. But Tish met the boy at the door, and, having instructed us to have the kettle boiling, was able to steam off the label and place it on the bottle of ipecac swiftly and neatly. Miss Smith gave her two doses before it began to act, but when it did it was thorough.
Well, Emmie was about as sick as any human could be and live for the next six hours. I suppose it was the first real sickness she had felt in ten years, and the fuss she made was dreadful. There was no use blaming a tramp for the coconut cake after it either. But what really matters is that she made them bring Will out from town.And between paroxysms she told him Miss Smith had poisoned her.
Miss Smith left that afternoon, but before she did she told Will that Emmie was as well as he was, or even better, and that the doctor knew it too. But if anyone thinks that Will believed her he does not know Will Hartford. All he did was to dismiss the doctor, too, and then come back to the kitchen and moan about the way people treated Emmie.
“Even that doctor never understood her,” he said despondently. “And I must owe him two hundred dollars or so this minute! Sometimes, Letitia, I think there is no compassion left in the world. Even the neighbors neglect her nowadays; I don’t believe there has been a bowl of calf’s-foot jelly sent to her in months.”
“Really?” said Tish. “It is surprising, when you think of the things folks might send her and don’t. Every now and then you read of somebody getting a bomb, or poisoned candy.”
He looked at her, but she went on fixing Emmie’s tray in her usual composed manner.
We had a day or two of peace after that. Tish brought Doctor Snodgrass, her own physician, out from town. And after a short talk with her, he put Emmie on a very light diet and went away again. As Tish had put a padlock on the kitchencupboard the light diet was all Emmie got, too. She had a bowl of junket for breakfast, beef tea for lunch and in the evening she had some milk toast, and if ever I’ve seen a woman suffer she did. We did not run every time she rang her bell, either. She would jingle it for half a dozen times, and for a feeble woman the way she could fling it when nobody came was a marvel.
But, looking back, I can see that we underestimated her intelligence. She had a good bit of time, by and large, to think things out, and she was no fool, whatever else she might be. And I imagine it galled her, too, to see Will filling out and looking more cheerful every day. He was spending more time than ever downstairs and, instead of tiptoeing into the room when he came home at night, he would walk in briskly and say: “Well, how’s the old girl to-night?”
He still wandered across to the cemetery now and then, but we fancied there was more of speculation than of grief in his face when he picked the daisies off his lot. And one night, I remember, he came back and said it was a curious thing that Emmie’s mother had lived to be eighty, as frail as she had been, and that Emmie was like her in a lot of ways.
Tish eyed him.
“She certainly is,” she said. “I thought ofthat the night I found her in the pantry.”
And then one night there was a yell and a crash upstairs, and when we all ran up, with Will in the lead, we found Emmie stretched out on the floor, and she said she was paralyzed from the waist down!
It took the four of us to get her back into bed. She gave Tish a glance of triumph when she was finally installed and then grabbed Will’s hand and began to groan.
“It’s the last straw,” she moaned. “Until now I have not been entirely helpless, but this is too much. I am near the end, William.”
“My poor Emmie!” he wailed. “My poor afflicted girl!”
Things were not only no better, for all that we had done, but worse.
Well, Will carried on like a madman, of course. There were specialists from town and a woman to massage her legs, but not a muscle would she move. Except once, when Tish jabbed a pin into her and she jerked and yelled like a lunatic. But she had us beaten, of course, for she had worked it all out in her mind. If she had paralysis she didn’t have to have anything else, and the very first thing she asked for was a broiled beefsteak. After that she ate everything; she ate like a day laborer.
Tish tried skimping on her tray, but if she got one egg instead of two in the morning poor Will would come down looking troubled.
“We must build her up,” he would say. “She needs all the strength we can give her, Letitia.”
And that was the situation when our poor Tish finally took matters into her own hands, with results for which she has been so cruelly blamed.
I have now come to that series of mysterious events which led, with tragic inevitability, to the crisis on the night of our departure. And it may be well here to revert to the subject of spiritualism.
What with one thing and another Tish had apparently lost interest in it, hers being a mind which concentrates on one idea at a time, and having occupied itself almost entirely with Emmie since our arrival.
True, such reading aloud as she had been forced to do for Emmie while Will had laryngitis had been on such subjects, dealing largely with specters and apparitions. And both Aggie and I recalled later that she had told Emmie that the nearness of the graveyard would make such materialization comparatively simple.
But Emmie had shown more terror than interestin the subject, and finally Will had insisted that Tish abandon it for lighter and more cheerful material.
It had been seed sown in fruitful ground, however, as shall presently appear.
To go back then: Will came home very dejected one night and said he would have to go away for a business trip. Emmie was most disagreeable about it.
“And what about me?” she demanded. “Are you going to leave me here alone?”
“It’s the first time I’ve left you for five years, Emmie,” he told her. “I’ll just have to go. And as for being alone, haven’t you got Letitia here? And Lizzie and Aggie?”
Well, I must admit that that did not seem to cheer her any, and the look she gave us was most unpleasant. But she had to let him go, although her last words were not calculated to send him away happy.
“If anything happens to me while you are gone, Will,” she said, “you know how I want things done. And my black silk dress is in the lower bureau drawer.”
“I can get back in six hours if I’m needed, Emmie,” he said brokenly. “A telegram or——”
“When I go I shall be snuffed out like a candle,” she told him in a cold voice. And with that hewent away, looking as though he was on his way to the electric chair.
I met Tish on the stairs after she had seen him off. There was a strange look on her face, I remembered later; but after she had settled Emmie for the night she took up her knitting quietly enough. She always contributes a number of knitted pairs of bedroom slippers to the Old Ladies’ Home at Christmas.
Aggie and I retired early, taking Emmie’s bell with us at Tish’s orders, so she could not disturb us during the night, and were soon fast asleep.
But judge of our horror when, at two o’clock or thereabouts, we heard a dreadful shriek from Emmie’s room, followed by a strange, rushing sound. As soon as I could move I got out of bed and turned on the lights; Aggie was reaching for her teeth, with her eyes fixed on the door.
“I left that door open, Lizzie,” she said in an agonized whisper. “Somebody’s closed it.”
Well, it certainly was closed, and when I tried it, it was locked and the key was on the outside! And, to add to the dreadfulness of our position, there was no further sound whatever; no whimpering from Emmie’s room; no sound of Tish in short and sharp remonstrance. No anything.
Never have we passed through such a half hour as followed. That both our wonderful Tish andEmmie had fallen to the knife or other method of some deadly assassin we never doubted. And when at the end of that time we heard halting but inevitable footsteps slowly climbing the staircase, both of us were certain that our hour had come. When they stopped outside the door and an unseen hand fumbled with the key, Aggie gave a low moan and made for the window, but she was stopped before it was too late by the entrance into the room of Tish herself!
She was a curious dead-white color, and she came in limping and closed the door.
“I’d like to borrow your tweezers, Lizzie,” she said, in a toneless sort of voice. “I ran out when I heard Emmie scream, and I’ve got something in my foot.”
“But Emmie!” we inquired in unison. “What has happened to her?”
It was a moment before she replied. Both Aggie and I remembered that hesitation later and that there was a hard and determined look on her face. But when she did reply, it was reassuring.
“She’s all right,” she said.
“But she screamed, Tish! She screamed horribly.”
“You’ve heard her scream before this,” she said coldly. “She says she saw a ghost. That’s all.”
She went out again, and to her own room. She was very lame, we noticed, but calm. Some time later she called to Aggie to bring her the arnica, and Aggie did so. She reported that Tish had lost the strange pallor, but that she had got a number of thorns in her feet and was removing them.
“She’s very quiet, Lizzie,” Aggie said. “And I think she’s sprained her ankle. You would think she had seen the ghost, to look at her, and not Emmie.”
Well, I felt uneasy myself, especially as something had certainly locked us in, and after a while I went across to Emmie’s room and tapped lightly at the door. It was Tish herself who answered from the other side.
“Get away from there, Lizzie,” she said sharply. “We are all right. I shall stay with Emmie until she is calmer.”
The rest of the night was quiet enough. It was not until the next day that certain things began to make us uneasy.
One of these was Emmie herself. However lightly Tish might treat the matter, refusing to call a doctor and so on, it was evident that Emmie had passed through a terrible experience.
She would not see anyone, even Aggie or myself, and she insisted on keeping her door closedand locked. Once in a while we could hear Tish reading to her, apparently to calm her. And she ate a little from the trays Tish carried up. But never once did she raise her voice; ordinarily when she wanted anything and no one answered her bell one could hear her shouting, from the main road. But she was apparently chastened beyond belief.
Our real anxiety, however, was Tish herself. She was in a curious nervous state; a thing most unusual in her. She ate nothing at all. And if a door slammed she would jump violently and turn quite pale.
Knowing her as we did, we could only believe that she, as well as Emmie, had seen the apparition, and had possibly received a message of some personal import. It was in a spirit of helpfulness, therefore, and not of curiosity, that we decided to remain awake that night to give her moral support if she required it.
And that very night we saw it ourselves.
Aggie was suffering from a bad attack of hay fever and had gone to the window for air. Suddenly I heard her whisper, “Lizzie; cobe here! It’s outside, od the walk!”
I ran to the window. And there below us, just leaving the kitchen porch, was the apparition itself! It was a tall, thin, gray figure. And aswe watched, it moved along through the back garden and then, on Aggie sneezing violently, apparently dissolved.
Although we waited for some time, it did not materialize again.
In view of Tish’s curious nervous condition, we did not mention it to her. But we saw it for three nights in succession.
I must admit that it made us both very uneasy, especially in view of Emmie’s continued strange state. If Tish had been her usual buoyant self we would have gone to her, but she was oddly restless and uneasy, and once or twice we even found her dozing in her chair—a thing unprecedented with her.
But I kept a careful record of the appearance, and I quote from it here: