SALVAGE
I
After Charlie Sands had gone to a training camp in Ohio there was a great change in Tish. She seemed for the first time to regret that she was a woman, and there were times when that wonderful poise and dignity that had always distinguished her, even under the most trying circumstances, almost deserted her. She wrote, I remember, a number of letters to the President, offering to go into the Secret Service, and sending a photograph of the bandits she had caught in Glacier Park. But she only received a letter from Mr. Tumulty in reply, commencing “May I not thank you,” but saying that the Intelligence Department had recently been increased by practically the entire population of the country, and suggesting that she could best use her energies for the national welfare by working for the return of the Democratic Party in 1920.
However, as Tish is a Republican she was not interested in this, and for a time she worked valiantly for the Red Cross and spent her evenings learning the national anthem. But she recited it, since, as the well-known writer, Mr. Irvin Cobb, has observed, it can only be properly sung by a boy whose voice is changing. It was evident, however, that she was increasingly restive, and as I look back I wonder that we did not realize that there was danger in her very repression.
As Aggie has said, Tish is volcanic in her temperament; she remains inactive for certain preparatory periods, but when she overflows she does so thoroughly.
The most ominous sign was when, in July of 1917, she stopped knitting and took up French.
Only the other day, while house cleaning, she came across the aeroplane photograph of the French village of V——, where our extraordinary experience befell us, and she turned on us both with that satiric yet kindly gaze which we both knew so well.
“If you two idiots had had your way,” she observed, “I should have been knitting so many socks for Charlie Sands that he’d have had to be a centipede to wear ’em all, instead of——”
“Tish,” Aggie said in a shivering voice, “I wish you wouldn’t talk about it. I can’t bear it, that’s all. It sets me shivering.”