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Christopher and Columbus

by Elizabeth Von Arnim · English · Gutenberg #14646 · 688,515 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Christopher and Columbus

Author: Elizabeth Von Arnim

Illustrator: Arthur Litle


        
Release date: January 10, 2005 [eBook #14646]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14646

Credits: E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS ***

CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS

By the Author of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_

Frontispiece by Arthur Litle

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1919







[Illustration: "Oh, yes. You're both very fond of me," said Mr. Twist,
pulling his mouth into a crooked and unhappy smile.

"We love you." said Anna-Felicitas simply.]






CHAPTER I


Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas; but they decided,
as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the
American liner _St. Luke_, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey
slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist,
and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn't got a
father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realized
that in front of them lay a great deal of gray, uneasy, dreadfully wet
sea, endless stretches of it, days and days of it, with waves on top of
it to make them sick and submarines beneath it to kill them if they
could, and knew that they hadn't the remotest idea, not the very
remotest, what was before them when and if they did get across to the
other side, and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two
wretched little Germans who were neither really Germans nor really
English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both,--they
decided, looking very calm and determined and sitting very close
together beneath the rug their English aunt had given them to put round
their miserable alien legs, that what they really were, were Christopher
and Columbus, because they were setting out to discover a New World.

"It's very pleasant," said Anna-Rose. "It's very pleasant to go and
discover America. All for ourselves."

It was Anna-Rosa who suggested their being Christopher and Columbus. She
was the elder by twenty minutes. Both had had their seventeenth
birthday--and what a birthday: no cake, no candles, no kisses and
wreaths and home-made poems; but then, as Anna-Felicitas pointed out, to
comfort Anna-Rose who was taking it hard, you can't get blood out of an
aunt--only a month before. Both were very German outside and very
English inside. Both had fair hair, and the sorts of chins Germans have,
and eyes the colour of the sky in August along the shores of the Baltic.
Their noses were brief, and had been objected to in Germany, where, if
you are a Junker's daughter, you are expected to show it in your nose.
Anna-Rose had a tight little body, inclined to the round.
Anna-Felicitas, in spite of being a twin, seemed to have made the most
of her twenty extra minutes to grow more in; anyhow she was tall and
thin, and she drooped; and having perhaps grown quicker made her eyes
more dreamy, and her thoughts more slow. And both held their heads up
with a great air of calm whenever anybody on the ship looked at them, as
who should say serenely, "We're _thoroughly_ happy, and having the time
of our lives."

For worlds they wouldn't have admitted to each other that they were even
aware of such a thing as being anxious or wanting to cry. Like other
persons of English blood, they never were so cheerful nor pretended to
be so much amused as when they were right down on the very bottom of
their luck. Like other persons of German blood, they had the squashiest
corners deep in their hearts, where they secretly clung to cakes and
Christmas trees, and fought a tendency to celebrate every possible
anniversary, both dead and alive.

The gulls, circling white against the gloomy sky over the rubbish that
floated on the Mersey, made them feel extraordinarily forlorn. Empty
boxes, bits of straw, orange-peel, a variety of dismal dirtiness lay
about on the sullen water; England was slipping away, England, their
mother's country, the country of their dreams ever since they could
remember--and the _St. Luke_ with a loud screech had suddenly stopped.

Neither of them could help jumping a little at that and getting an inch
closer together beneath the rug. Surely it wasn't a submarine already?

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, changing as it
were the unspoken conversation.

As the eldest she had a great sense of her responsibility toward her
twin, and considered it one of her first duties to cheer and encourage
her. Their mother had always cheered and encouraged them, and hadn't
seemed to mind anything, however awful it was, that happened to
her,--such as, for instance, when the war began and they three, their
father having died some years before, left their home up by the Baltic,
just as there was the most heavenly weather going on, and the garden was
a dream, and the blue Chinchilla cat had produced four perfect kittens
that very day,--all of whom had to be left to what Anna-Felicitas, whose
thoughts if slow were picturesque once she had got them, called the
tender mercies of a savage and licentious soldiery,--and came by slow
and difficult stages to England; or such as when their mother began
catching cold and didn't seem at last ever able to leave off catching
cold, and though she tried to pretend she didn't mind colds and that
they didn't matter, it was plain that these colds did at last matter
very much, for between them they killed her.

Their mother had always been cheerful and full of hope. Now that she was
dead, it was clearly Anna-Rose's duty, as the next eldest in the family,
to carry on the tradition and discountenance too much drooping in
Anna-Felicitas. Anna-Felicitas was staring much too thoughtfully at the
deepening gloom of the late afternoon sky and the rubbish brooding on
the face of the waters, and she had jumped rather excessively when the
_St. Luke_ stopped so suddenly, just as if it were putting on the brake
hard, and emitted that agonized whistle.

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, "and we're
going to discover America."

"Very well," said Anna-Felicitas. "I'll be Christopher."

"No. I'll be Christopher," said Anna-Rose.

"Very well," said Anna-Felicitas, who was the most amiable, acquiescent
person in the world. "Then I suppose I'll have to be Columbus. But I
think Christopher sounds prettier."

Both rolled their r's incurably. It was evidently in their blood, for
nothing, no amount of teaching and admonishment, could get them out of
it. Before they were able to talk at all, in those happy days when
parents make astounding assertions to other parents about the
intelligence and certain future brilliancy of their offspring, and the
other parents, however much they may pity such self-deception, can't
contradict, because after all it just possibly may be so, the most
foolish people occasionally producing geniuses,--in those happy days of
undisturbed bright castle-building, the mother, who was English, of the
two derelicts now huddled on the dank deck of the _St. Luke_, said to
the father, who was German, "At any rate these two blessed little
bundles of deliciousness"--she had one on each arm and was tickling
their noses alternately with her eyelashes, and they were screaming for
joy--"won't have to learn either German or English. They'll just _know_
them."

"Perhaps," said the father, who was a cautious man.

"They're born bi-lingual," said the mother; and the twins wheezed and
choked with laughter, for she was tickling them beneath their chins,
softly fluttering her eyelashes along the creases of fat she thought so
adorable.

"Perhaps," said the father.

"It gives them a tremendous start," said the mother; and the twins
squirmed in a dreadful ecstasy, for she had now got to their ears.

"Perhaps," said the father.

But what happened was that they didn't speak either language. Not, that
is, as a native should. Their German bristled with mistakes. They spoke
it with a foreign accent. It was copious, but incorrect. Almost the last
thing their father, an accurate man, said to them as he lay dying, had
to do with a misplaced dative. And when they talked English it rolled
about uncontrollably on its r's, and had a great many long words in it
got from Milton, and Dr. Johnson, and people like that, whom their
mother had particularly loved, but as they talked far more to their
mother than to their father, who was a man of much briefness in words
though not in temper, they were better on the whole at English than
German.

Their mother, who loved England more the longer she lived away from
it,--"As one does; and the same principle," Anna-Rose explained to
Anna-Felicitas when they had lived some time with their aunt and uncle,
"applies to relations, aunts' husbands, and the clergy,"--never tired of
telling her children about it, and its poetry, and its spirit, and the
greatness and glory of its points of view. They drank it all in and
believed every word of it, for so did their mother; and as they grew up
they flung themselves on all the English books they could lay hands
upon, and they read with their mother and learned by heart most of the
obviously beautiful things; and because she glowed with enthusiasm they
glowed too--Anna-Rose in a flare and a flash, Anna-Felicitas slow and
steadily. They adored their mother. Whatever she loved they loved
blindly. It was a pity she died. She died soon after the war began. They
had been so happy, so _dreadfully_ happy....

"You can't be Christopher," said Anna-Rose, giving herself a shake, for
here she was thinking of her mother, and it didn't do to think of one's
mother, she found; at least, not when one is off to a new life and
everything is all promise because it isn't anything else, and not if
one's mother happened to have been so--well, so fearfully sweet. "You
can't be Christopher, because, you see, I'm the eldest."

Anna-Felicitas didn't see what being the eldest had to do with it, but
she only said, "Very well," in her soft voice, and expressed a hope that
Anna-Rose would see her way not to call her Col for short. "I'm afraid
you will, though," she added, "and then I shall feel so like Onkel
Nicolas."

This was their German uncle, known during his life-time, which had
abruptly left off when the twins were ten, as Onkel Col; a very ancient
person, older by far even than their father, who had seemed so very old.
But Onkel Col had been older than anybody at all, except the pictures of
the _liebe Gott_ in Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job. He came to
a bad end. Neither their father nor their mother told them anything
except that Onkel Col was dead; and their father put a black band round
the left sleeve of his tweed country suit and was more good-tempered
than ever, and their mother, when they questioned her, just said that
poor Onkel Col had gone to heaven, and that in future they would speak
of him as Onkel Nicolas, because it was more respectful.

"But why does mummy call him poor, when he's gone to heaven?"
Anna-Felicitas asked Anna-Rose privately, in the recesses of the garden.

"First of all," said Anna-Rose, who, being the eldest, as she so often
explained to her sister, naturally knew more about everything, "because
the angels won't like him. Nobody _could_ like Onkel Col. Even if
they're angels. And though they're obliged to have him there because he
was such a very good man, they won't talk to him much or notice him much
when God isn't looking. And second of all, because you _are_ poor when
you get to heaven. Everybody is poor in heaven. Nobody takes their
things with them, and all Onkel Col's money is still on earth. He
couldn't even take his clothes with him."

"Then is he quite--did Onkel Col go there quite--"

Anna-Felicitas stopped. The word seemed too awful in connection with
Onkel Col, that terrifying old gentleman who had roared at them from the
folds of so many wonderful wadded garments whenever they were led in,
trembling, to see him, for he had gout and was very terrible; and it
seemed particularly awful when one thought of Onkel Col going to heaven,
which was surely of all places the most _endimanché_.

"Of course," nodded Anna-Rose; but even she dropped her voice a little.
She peeped about among the bushes a moment, then put her mouth close to
Anna-Felicitas's ear, and whispered, "Stark."

They stared at one another for a space with awe and horror in their
eyes.

"You see," then went on Anna-Rose rather quickly, hurrying away from the
awful vision, "one knows one doesn't have clothes in heaven because they
don't have the moth there. It says so in the Bible. And you can't have
the moth without having anything for it to go into."

"Then they don't have to have naphthalin either," said Anna-Felicitas,
"and don't all have to smell horrid in the autumn when they take their
furs out."

"No. And thieves don't break in and steal either in heaven," continued
Anna-Rose, "and the reason why is that there _isn't_ anything to steal."

"There's angels," suggested Anna-Felicitas after a pause, for she didn't
like to think there was nothing really valuable in heaven.

"Oh, nobody ever steals _them_," said Anna-Rose.

Anna-Felicitas's slow thoughts revolved round this new uncomfortable
view of heaven. It seemed, if Anna-Rose were right, and she always was
right for she said so herself, that heaven couldn't be such a safe place
after all, nor such a kind place. Thieves could break in and steal if
they wanted to. She had a proper horror of thieves. She was sure the
night would certainly come when they would break into her father's
_Schloss_, or, as her English nurse called it, her dear Papa's slosh;
and she was worried that poor Onkel Col should be being snubbed up
there, and without anything to put on, which would make being snubbed so
much worse, for clothes did somehow comfort one.

She took her worries to the nursemaid, and choosing a moment when she
knew Anna-Rose wished to be unnoticed, it being her hour for
inconspicuously eating unripe apples at the bottom of the orchard, an
exercise Anna-Felicitas only didn't indulge in because she had learned
through affliction that her inside, fond and proud of it as she was, was
yet not of that superior and blessed kind that suffers green apples
gladly--she sought out the nursemaid, whose name, too, confusingly, was
Anna, and led the conversation up to heaven and the possible conditions
prevailing in it by asking her to tell her, in strict confidence and as
woman to woman, what she thought Onkel Col exactly looked like at that
moment.

"Unrecognizable," said the nursemaid promptly.

"Unrecognizable?" echoed Anna-Felicitas.

And the nursemaid, after glancing over her shoulder to see if the
governess were nowhere in sight, told Anna-Felicitas the true story of
Onkel Col's end: which is so bad that it isn't fit to be put in any book
except one with an appendix.

A stewardess passed just as Anna-Felicitas was asking Anna-Rose not to
remind her of these grim portions of the past by calling her Col, a
stewardess in such a very clean white cap that she looked both reliable
and benevolent, while secretly she was neither.

"Can you please tell us why we're stopping?" Anna-Rose inquired of her
politely, leaning forward to catch her attention as she hurried by.

The stewardess allowed her roving eye to alight for a moment on the two
objects beneath the rug. Their chairs were close together, and the rug
covered them both up to their chins. Over the top of it their heads
appeared, exactly alike as far as she could see in the dusk; round
heads, each with a blue knitted cap pulled well over its ears, and round
eyes staring at her with what anybody except the stewardess would have
recognized as a passionate desire for some sort of reassurance. They
might have been seven instead of seventeen for all the stewardess could
tell. They looked younger than anything she had yet seen sitting alone
on a deck and asking questions. But she was an exasperated widow, who
had never had children and wasn't to be touched by anything except a
tip, besides despising, because she was herself a second-class
stewardess, all second-class passengers,--"As one does," Anna-Rose
explained later on to Anna-Felicitas, "and the same principle applies to
Jews." So she said with an acidity completely at variance with the
promise of her cap, "Ask the Captain," and disappeared.

The twins looked at each other. They knew very well that captains on
ships were mighty beings who were not asked questions.

"She's trifling with us," murmured Anna-Felicitas.

"Yes," Anna-Rose was obliged to admit, though the thought was repugnant
to her that they should look like people a stewardess would dare trifle
with.

"Perhaps she thinks we're younger than we are," she said after a
silence.

"Yes. She couldn't see how long our dresses are, because of the rug."

"No. And it's only that end of us that really shows we're grown up."

"Yes. She ought to have seen us six months ago."

Indeed she ought. Even the stewardess would have been surprised at the
activities and complete appearance of the two pupæ now rolled motionless
in the rug. For, six months ago, they had both been probationers in a
children's hospital in Worcestershire, arrayed, even as the stewardess,
in spotless caps, hurrying hither and thither with trays of food,
sweeping and washing up, learning to make beds in a given time, and be
deft, and quick, and never tired, and always punctual.

This place had been got them by the efforts and influence of their Aunt
Alice, that aunt who had given them the rug on their departure and who
had omitted to celebrate their birthday. She was an amiable aunt, but
she didn't understand about birthdays. It was the first one they had had
since they were complete orphans, and so they were rather sensitive
about it. But they hadn't cried, because since their mother's death they
had done with crying. What could there ever again be in the world bad
enough to cry about after that? And besides, just before she dropped
away from them into the unconsciousness out of which she never came
back, but instead just dropped a little further into death, she had
opened her eyes unexpectedly and caught them sitting together in a row
by her bed, two images of agony, with tears rolling down their swollen
faces and their noses in a hopeless state, and after looking at them a
moment as if she had slowly come up from some vast depth and distance
and were gradually recognizing them, she had whispered with a flicker of
the old encouraging smile that had comforted every hurt and bruise they
had ever had, "_Don't cry_ ... little darlings, _don't_ cry...."

But on that first birthday after her death they had got more and more
solemn as time passed, and breakfast was cleared away, and there were no
sounds, prick up their ears as they might, of subdued preparations in
the next room, no stealthy going up and down stairs to fetch the
presents, and at last no hope at all of the final glorious flinging open
of the door and the vision inside of two cakes all glittering with
candles, each on a table covered with flowers and all the things one has
most wanted.

Their aunt didn't know. How should she? England was a great and beloved
country, but it didn't have proper birthdays.

"Every country has one drawback," Anna-Rose explained to Anna-Felicitas
when the morning was finally over, in case she should by any chance be
thinking badly of the dear country that had produced their mother as
well as Shakespeare, "and not knowing about birthdays is England's."

"There's Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, whose honest mind groped
continually after accuracy.

"Yes," Anna-Rose admitted after a pause. "Yes. There's Uncle Arthur."




CHAPTER II


Uncle Arthur was the husband of Aunt Alice. He didn't like foreigners,
and said so. He never had liked them and had always said so. It wasn't
the war at all, it was the foreigners. But as the war went on, and these
German nieces of his wife became more and more, as he told her, a
blighted nuisance, so did he become more and more pointed, and said he
didn't mind French foreigners, nor Russian foreigners; and a few weeks
later, that it wasn't Italian foreigners either that he minded; and
still later, that nor was it foreigners indigenous to the soil of
countries called neutral. These things he said aloud at meals in a
general way. To his wife when alone he said much more.

Anna-Rose, who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to soften his
heart by offering to read aloud to him in the evenings when he came home
weary from his daily avocations, which were golf. Her own suggestion
instantly projected a touching picture on her impressionable imagination
of youth, grateful for a roof over its head, in return alleviating the
tedium of crabbed age by introducing its uncle, who from his remarks was
evidently unacquainted with them, to the best productions of the great
masters of English literature.

But Uncle Arthur merely stared at her with a lacklustre eye when she
proposed it, from his wide-legged position on the hearthrug, where he
was moving money about in trouser-pockets of the best material. And
later on she discovered that he had always supposed the "Faery Queen,"
and "Adonais," and "In Memoriam," names he had heard at intervals during
his life, for he was fifty and such things do sometimes get mentioned
were well-known racehorses.

Uncle Arthur, like Onkel Col, was a very good man, and though he said
things about foreigners he did stick to these unfortunate alien nieces
longer than one would have supposed possible if one had overheard what
he said to Aunt Alice in the seclusion of their bed. His ordered
existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew, was shaken in its
innermost parts, in its very marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans.
Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned; but
who but he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans? And he
couldn't groan, because they were, besides being motherless creatures,
his own wife's flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he groan; but
he could and did do it in bed. Why on earth that silly mother of theirs
couldn't have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian sand-heap where she
belonged, instead of coming gallivanting over to England, and then when
she had got there not even decently staying alive and seeing to her
children herself, he at frequent intervals told Aunt Alice in bed that
he would like to know.

Aunt Alice, who after twenty years of life with Uncle Arthur was both
silent and sleek (for he fed her well), sighed and said nothing. She
herself was quietly going through very much on behalf of her nieces.
Jessup didn't like handing dishes to Germans. The tradespeople twitted
the cook with having to cook for them and were facetious about sausages
and asked how one made sauerkraut. Her acquaintances told her they were
very sorry for her, and said they supposed she knew what she was doing
and that it was all right about spies, but really one heard such strange
things, one never could possibly tell even with children; and regularly
the local policeman bicycled over to see if the aliens, who were
registered at the county-town police-station, were still safe. And then
they looked so very German, Aunt Alice felt. There was no mistaking
them. And every time they opened their mouths there were all those r's
rolling about. She hardly liked callers to find her nieces in her
drawing-room at tea-time, they were so difficult to explain; yet they
were too old to shut up in a nursery.

After three months of them, Uncle Arthur suggested sending them back to
Germany; but their consternation had been so great and their entreaties
to be kept where they were so desperate that he said no more about that.
Besides, they told him that if they went back there they would be sure
to be shot as spies, for over there nobody would believe they were
German, just as over here nobody would believe they were English; and
besides, this was in those days of the war when England was still
regarding Germany as more mistaken than vicious, and was as full as ever
of the tradition of great and elaborate indulgence and generosity toward
a foe, and Uncle Arthur, whatever he might say, was not going to be
behind his country in generosity.

Yet as time passed, and feeling tightened, and the hideous necklace of
war grew more and more frightful with each fresh bead of horror strung
upon it, Uncle Arthur, though still in principle remaining good, in
practice found himself vindictive. He was saddled; that's what he was.
Saddled with this monstrous unmerited burden. He, the most patriotic of
Britons, looked at askance by his best friends, being given notice by
his old servants, having particular attention paid his house at night by
the police, getting anonymous letters about lights seen in his upper
windows the nights; the Zeppelins came, which were the windows of the
floor those blighted twins slept on, and all because he had married Aunt
Alice.

At this period Aunt Alice went to bed with reluctance. It was not a
place she had ever gone to very willingly since she married Uncle
Arthur, for he was the kind of husband who rebukes in bed; but now she
was downright reluctant. It was painful to her to be told that she had
brought this disturbance into Uncle Arthur's life by having let him
marry her. Inquiring backwards into her recollections it appeared to her
that she had had no say at all about being married, but that Uncle
Arthur had told her she was going to be, and then that she had been.
Which was what had indeed happened; for Aunt Alice was a round little
woman even in those days, nicely though not obtrusively padded with
agreeable fat at the corners, and her skin, just as now, had the moist
delicacy that comes from eating a great many chickens. Also she
suggested, just as now, most of the things most men want to come home
to,--slippers, and drawn curtains, and a blazing fire, and peace within
one's borders, and even, as Anna-Rose pointed out privately to
Anna-Felicitas after they had come across them for the first time, she
suggested muffins; and so, being in these varied fashions succulent, she
was doomed to make some good man happy. But she did find it real hard
work.

It grew plain to Aunt Alice after another month of them that Uncle
Arthur would not much longer endure his nieces, and that even if he did
she would not be able to endure Uncle Arthur. The thought was very
dreadful to her that she was being forced to choose between two duties,
and that she could not fulfil both. It came to this at last, that she
must either stand by her nieces, her dead sister's fatherless children,
and face all the difficulties and discomforts of such a standing by, go
away with them, take care of them, till the war was over; or she must
stand by Arthur.

She chose Arthur.

How could she, for nieces she had hardly seen, abandon her husband?
Besides, he had scolded her so steadily during the whole of their
married life that she was now unalterably attached to him. Sometimes a
wild thought did for a moment illuminate the soothing dusk of her mind,
the thought of doing the heroic thing, leaving him for them, and helping
and protecting the two poor aliens till happier days should return. If
there were any good stuff in Arthur would he not recognize, however
angry he might be, that she was doing at least a Christian thing? But
this illumination would soon die out. Her comforts choked it. She was
too well-fed. After twenty years of it, she no longer had the figure for
lean and dangerous enterprises.

And having definitely chosen Arthur, she concentrated what she had of
determination in finding an employment for her nieces that would remove
them beyond the range of his growing wrath. She found it in a children's
hospital as far away as Worcestershire, a hospital subscribed to very
largely by Arthur, for being a good man he subscribed to hospitals. The
matron objected, but Aunt Alice overrode the matron; and from January to
April Uncle Arthur's house was pure from Germans.

Then they came back again.

It had been impossible to keep them. The nurses wouldn't work with them.
The sick children had relapses when they discovered who it was who
brought them their food, and cried for their mothers. It had been
arranged between Aunt Alice and the matron that the unfortunate
nationality of her nieces should not be mentioned. They were just to be
Aunt Alice's nieces, the Miss Twinklers,--("We will leave out the von,"
said Aunt Alice, full of unnatural cunning. "They have a von, you know,
poor things--such a very labelling thing to have. But Twinkler without
it might quite well be English. Who can possibly tell? It isn't as
though they had had some shocking name like Bismarck.")

Nothing, however, availed against the damning evidence of the rolled
r's. Combined with the silvery fair hair and the determined little
mouths and chins, it was irresistible. Clearly they were foreigners, and
equally clearly they were not Italians, or Russians, or French. Within a
week the nurses spoke of them in private as Fritz and Franz. Within a
fortnight a deputation of staff sisters went to the matron and asked, on
patriotic grounds, for the removal of the Misses Twinkler. The matron,
with the fear of Uncle Arthur in her heart, for he was altogether the
biggest subscriber, sharply sent the deputation about its business; and
being a matron of great competence and courage she would probably have
continued to be able to force the new probationers upon the nurses if it
had not been for the inability, which was conspicuous, of the younger
Miss Twinkler to acquire efficiency.

In vain did Anna-Rose try to make up for Anna-Felicitas's shortcomings
by a double zeal, a double willingness and cheerfulness. Anna-Felicitas
was a born dreamer, a born bungler with her hands and feet. She not only
never from first to last succeeded in filling the thirty hot-water
bottles, which were her care, in thirty minutes, which was her duty, but
every time she met a pail standing about she knocked against it and it
fell over. Patients and nurses watched her approach with apprehension.
Her ward was in a constant condition of flood.

"It's because she's thinking of something else," Anna-Rose tried eagerly
to explain to the indignant sister-in-charge.

"Thinking of something else!" echoed the sister.

"She reads, you see, a lot--whenever she gets the chance she reads--"

"Reads!" echoed the sister.

"And then, you see, she gets thinking--"

"Thinking! Reading doesn't make _me_ think."

"With much regret," wrote the matron to Aunt Alice, "I am obliged to
dismiss your younger niece, Nurse Twinkler II. She has no vocation for
nursing. On the other hand, your elder niece is shaping well and I shall
be pleased to keep her on."

"But I can't stop on," Anna-Rose said to the matron when she announced
these decisions to her. "I can't be separated from my sister. I'd like
very much to know what would become of that poor child without me to
look after her. You forget I'm the eldest."

The matron put down her pen,--she was a woman who made many notes--and
stared at Nurse Twinkler. Not in this fashion did her nurses speak to
her. But Anna-Rose, having been brought up in a spot remote from
everything except love and laughter, had all the fearlessness of
ignorance; and in her extreme youth and smallness, with her eyes shining
and her face heated she appeared to the matron rather like an indignant
kitten.

"Very well," said the matron gravely, suppressing a smile. "One should
always do what one considers one's first duty."

So the Twinklers went back to Uncle Arthur, and the matron was greatly
relieved, for she certainly didn't want them, and Uncle Arthur said
Damn.

"Arthur," gently reproved his wife.

"I say Damn and I mean Damn," said Uncle Arthur. "What the hell can
we--"

"Arthur," said his wife.

"I say, what the hell can we do with a couple of Germans? If people
wouldn't swallow them last winter are they going to swallow them any
better now? God, what troubles a man lets himself in for when he
marries!"

"I do beg you, Arthur, not to use those coarse words," said Aunt Alice,
tears in her gentle eyes.

There followed a period of desperate exertion on the part of Aunt Alice.
She answered advertisements and offered the twins as nursery
governesses, as cheerful companions, as mothers' helps, even as orphans
willing to be adopted. She relinquished every claim on salaries, she
offered them for nothing, and at last she offered them accompanied by a
bonus. "Their mother was English. They are quite English," wrote Aunt
Alice innumerable times in innumerable letters. "I feel bound, however,
to tell you that they once had a German father, but of course it was
through no fault of their own," etc., etc. Aunt Alice's hand ached with
writing letters; and any solution of the problem that might possibly
have been arrived at came to nothing because Anna-Rose would not be
separated from Anna-Felicitas, and if it was difficult to find anybody
who would take on one German nobody at all could be found to take on
two.

Meanwhile Uncle Arthur grew nightly more dreadful in bed. Aunt Alice was
at her wits' end, and took to crying helplessly. The twins racked their
brains to find a way out, quite as anxious to relieve Uncle Arthur of
their presence as he was to be relieved. If only they could be
independent, do something, work, go as housemaids,--anything.

They concocted an anonymous-advertisement and secretly sent it to _The
Times_, clubbing their pocket-money together to pay for it. The
advertisement was:

    Energetic Sisters of belligerent ancestry but unimpeachable
    Sympathies wish for any sort of work consistent with respectability.
    No objection to being demeaned.

Anna-Felicitas inquired what that last word meant for it was Anna-Rose's
word, and Anna-Rose explained that it meant not minding things like
being housemaids. "Which we don't," said Anna-Rose. "Upper and Under.
I'll be Upper, of course, because I'm the eldest."

Anna-Felicitas suggested putting in what it meant then, for she regarded
it with some doubt, but Anna-Rose, it being her word, liked it, and
explained that it Put a whole sentence into a nut-shell, and wouldn't
change it.

No one answered this advertisement except a society in London for
helping alien enemies in distress.

"Charity," said Anna-Rose, turning up her nose.

"And fancy thinking _us_ enemies," said Anna-Felicitas, "Us. While
mummy--" Her eyes filled with tears. She kept them back, however,
behind convenient long eye-lashes.

Then they saw an advertisement in the front page of _The Times_ that
they instantly answered without saying a word to Aunt Alice. The
advertisement was:

    Slightly wounded Officer would be glad to find intelligent and
    interesting companion who can drive a 14 h.p. Humber. Emoluments by
    arrangement.

"We'll _tell_ him we're intelligent and interesting," said Anna-Rose,
eagerly.

"Yes--who knows if we wouldn't be really, if we were given a chance?"
said Anna-Felicitas, quite flushed with excitement.

"And if he engages us we'll take him on in turns, so that the emoluments
won't have to be doubled."

"Yes--because he mightn't like paying twice over."

"Yes--and while the preliminaries are being settled we could be learning
to drive Uncle Arthur's car."

"Yes--except that it's a Daimler, and aren't they different?"

"Yes--but only about the same difference as there is between a man and a
woman. A man and a woman are both human beings, you know. And Daimlers
and Humbers are both cars."

"I see," said Anna-Felicitas; but she didn't.

They wrote an enthusiastic answer that very day.

The only thing they were in doubt about, they explained toward the end
of the fourth sheet, when they had got to politenesses and were
requesting the slightly wounded officer to allow them to express their
sympathy with his wounds, was that they had not yet had an opportunity
of driving a Humber car, but that this opportunity, of course, would be
instantly provided by his engaging them. Also, would he kindly tell them
if it was a male companion he desired to have, because if so it was very
unfortunate, for neither of them were males, but quite the contrary.

They got no answer to this for three weeks, and had given up all hope
and come to the depressing conclusion that they must have betrayed their
want of intelligence and interestingness right away, when one day a
letter came from General Headquarters in France, addressed _To Both the
Miss Twinklers_, and it was a long letter, pages long, from the slightly
wounded officer, telling them he had been patched up again and sent back
to the front, and their answer to his advertisement had been forwarded
to him there, and that he had had heaps of other answers to it, and that
the one he had liked best of all was theirs; and that some day he hoped
when he was back again, and able to drive himself, to show them how
glorious motoring was, if their mother would bring them,--quick motoring
in his racing car, sixty miles an hour motoring, flashing through the
wonders of the New Forest, where he lived. And then there was a long bit
about what the New Forest must be looking like just then, all quiet in
the spring sunshine, with lovely dappled bits of shade underneath the
big beeches, and the heather just coming alive, and all the winding
solitary roads so full of peace, so empty of noise.

"Write to me, you two children," said the letter at the end. "You've no
idea what it's like getting letters from home out here. Write and tell
me what you do and what the garden is like these fine afternoons. The
lilacs must be nearly done, but I'm sure there's the smell of them
still about, and I'm sure you have a beautiful green close-cut lawn, and
tea is brought out on to it, and there's no sound, no sort of sound,
except birds, and you two laughing, and I daresay a jolly dog barking
somewhere just for fun and not because he's angry."

The letter was signed (Captain) John Desmond, and there was a scrawl in
the corner at the end: "It's for jolly little English kids like you that
we're fighting, God bless you. Write to me again soon."

"English kids like us!"

They looked at each other. They had not mentioned their belligerent
ancestry in their letter. They felt uncomfortable, and as if Captain
Desmond were fighting for them, as it were, under false pretences. They
also wondered why he should conclude they were kids.

They wrote to him again, explaining that they were not exactly what
could be described as English, but on the other hand neither were they
exactly what could be described as German. "We would be very glad indeed
if we were really _something_," they added.

But after their letter had been gone only a few days they saw in the
list of casualties in _The Times_ that Captain John Desmond had been
killed.

And then one day the real solution was revealed, and it was revealed to
Uncle Arthur as he sat in his library on a wet Sunday morning
considering his troubles in detail.

Like most great ideas it sprang full-fledged into being,--obvious,
unquestionable, splendidly simple,--out of a trifle. For, chancing to
raise his heavy and disgusted eyes to the bookshelves in front of him,
they rested on one particular book, and on the back of this book stood
out in big gilt letters the word

    AMERICA

There were other words on its back, but this one alone stood out, and it
had all the effect of a revelation.

There. That was it. Of course. That was the way out. Why the devil
hadn't Alice thought of _that_? He knew some Americans; he didn't like
them, but he knew them; and he would write to them, or Alice would write
to them, and tell them the twins were coming. He would give the twins
£200,--damn it, nobody could say that wasn't handsome, especially in
war-time, and for a couple of girls who had no earthly sort of claim on
him, whatever Alice might choose to think they had on her. Yet it was
such a confounded mixed-up situation that he wasn't at all sure he
wouldn't come under the Defence of the Realm Act, by giving them money,
as aiding the enemy. Well, he would risk that. He would risk anything to
be rid of them. Ship 'em off, that was the thing to do. They would fall
on their feet right enough over there. America still swallowed Germans
without making a face.

Uncle Arthur reflected for a moment with extreme disgust on the
insensibility of the American palate. "Lost their chance, that's what
_they've_ done," he said to himself--for this was 1916, and America had
not yet made her magnificent entry into the war--as he had already said
to himself a hundred times. "Lost their chance of coming in on the side
of civilization, and helping sweep the world up tidy of barbarism.
Shoulder to shoulder with us, that's where _they_ ought to have been.
English-speaking races--duty to the world--" He then damned the
Americans; but was suddenly interrupted by perceiving that if they had
been shoulder to shoulder with him and England he wouldn't have been
able to send them his wife's German nieces to take care of. There was,
he conceded, that advantage resulting from their attitude. He could not,
however, concede any others.

At luncheon he was very nearly gay. It was terrible to see Uncle
Arthur very nearly gay, and both his wife and the twins were most
uncomfortable. "I wonder what's the matter now," sighed Aunt Alice
to herself, as she nervously crumbled her toast.

It could mean nothing good, Arthur in such spirits on a wet Sunday, when
he hadn't been able to get his golf and the cook had overdone the joint.




CHAPTER III


And so, on a late September afternoon, the _St. Luke_, sliding away from
her moorings, relieved Uncle Arthur of his burden.

It was final this time, for the two alien enemies once out of it would
not be let into England again till after the war. The enemies themselves
knew it was final; and the same knowledge that made Uncle Arthur feel so
pleasant as he walked home across his park from golf to tea that for a
moment he was actually of a mind to kiss Aunt Alice when he got in, and
perhaps even address her in the language of resuscitated passion, which
in Uncle Arthur's mouth was Old Girl,--an idea he abandoned, however, in
case it should make her self-satisfied and tiresome--the same knowledge
that produced these amiable effects in Uncle Arthur, made his alien
nieces cling very close together as they leaned over the side of the
_St. Luke_ hungrily watching the people on the wharf.

For they loved England. They loved it with the love of youth whose
enthusiasms have been led by an adored teacher always in one direction.
And they were leaving that adored teacher, their mother, in England. It
seemed like losing her a second time to go away, so far away, and leave
her there. It was nonsense, they knew, to feel like that. She was with
them just the same; wherever they went now she would be with them, and
they could hear her saying at that very moment, "Little darlings,
_don't_ cry...." But it was a gloomy, drizzling afternoon, the sort of
afternoon anybody might be expected to cry on, and not one of the people
waving handkerchiefs were waving handkerchiefs to them.

"We ought to have hired somebody," thought Anna-Rose, eyeing the
handkerchiefs with miserable little eyes.

"I believe I've gone and caught a cold," remarked Anna-Felicitas in her
gentle, staid voice, for she was having a good deal of bother with her
eyes and her nose, and could no longer conceal the fact that she was
sniffing.

Anna-Rose discreetly didn't look at her. Then she suddenly whipped out
her handkerchief and waved it violently.

Anna-Felicitas forgot her eyes and nose and craned her head forward.
"Who are you waving to?" she asked, astonished.

"Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose, waving, "Good-bye! Good-bye!"

"Who? Where? Who are you talking to?" asked Anna-Felicitas. "Has any one
come to see us off?"

"Good-bye! Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose.

The figures on the wharf were getting smaller, but not until they had
faded into a blur did Anna-Rose leave off waving. Then she turned round
and put her arm through Anna-Felicitas's and held on to her very tight
for a minute.

"There wasn't anybody," she said. "Of course there wasn't. But do you
suppose I was going to have us _looking_ like people who aren't seen
off?"

And she drew Anna-Felicitas away to the chairs, and when they were
safely in them and rolled up to their chins in the rug, she added, "That
man--" and then stopped. "What man?"

"Standing just behind us--"

"Was there a man?" asked Anna-Felicitas, who never saw men any more than
she, in her brief career at the hospital, had seen pails.

"Yes. Looking as if in another moment he'd be sorry for us," said
Anna-Rose.

"Sorry for us!" repeated Anna-Felicitas, roused to indignation.

"Yes. Did you ever?"

Anna-Felicitas said, with a great deal of energy while she put her
handkerchief finally and sternly away, that she didn't ever; and after a
pause Anna-Rose, remembering one of her many new responsibilities and
anxieties--she had so many that sometimes for a time she didn't remember
some of them--turned her head to Anna-Felicitas, and fixing a worried
eye on her said, "You won't go forgetting your Bible, will you, Anna
F.?"

"My Bible?" repeated Anna-Felicitas, looking blank.

"Your German Bible. The bit about _wenn die bösen Buben locken, so folge
sie nicht_."

Anna-Felicitas continued to look blank, but Anna-Rose with a troubled
brow said again, "You won't go and forget that, will you, Anna F.?"

For Anna-Felicitas was very pretty. In most people's eyes she was very
pretty, but in Anna-Rose's she was the most exquisite creature God had
yet succeeded in turning out. Anna-Rose concealed this conviction from
her. She wouldn't have told her for worlds. She considered it wouldn't
have been at all good for her; and she had, up to this, and ever since
they could both remember, jeered in a thoroughly sisterly fashion at her
defects, concentrating particularly on her nose, on her leanness, and
on the way, unless constantly reminded not to, she drooped.

But Anna-Rose secretly considered that the same nose that on her own
face made no sort of a show at all, directly it got on to
Anna-Felicitas's somehow was the dearest nose; and that her leanness was
lovely,--the same sort of slender grace her mother had had in the days
before the heart-breaking emaciation that was its last phase; and that
her head was set so charmingly on her neck that when she drooped and
forgot her father's constant injunction to sit up,--"For," had said her
father at monotonously regular intervals, "a maiden should be as
straight as a fir-tree,"--she only seemed to fall into even more
attractive lines than when she didn't. And now that Anna-Rose alone had
the charge of looking after this abstracted and so charming younger
sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey to her while tactfully
avoiding putting ideas into the poor child's head which might make her
conceited, that it behoved her to conduct herself with discretion.

But she found tact a ticklish thing, the most difficult thing of all to
handle successfully; and on this occasion hers was so elaborate, and so
carefully wrapped up in Scriptural language, and German Scripture at
that, that Anna-Felicitas's slow mind didn't succeed in disentangling
her meaning, and after a space of staring at her with a mild inquiry in
her eyes, she decided that perhaps she hadn't got one. She was much too
polite though, to say so, and they sat in silence under the rug till the
_St. Luke_ whistled and stopped, and Anna-Rose began hastily to make
conversation about Christopher and Columbus.

She was ashamed of having shown so much of her woe at leaving England.
She hoped Anna-Felicitas hadn't noticed. She certainly wasn't going on
like that. When the _St. Luke_ whistled, she was ashamed that it wasn't
only Anna-Felicitas who jumped. And the amount of brightness she put
into her voice when she told Anna-Felicitas it was pleasant to go and
discover America was such that that young lady, who if slow was sure,
said to herself, "Poor little Anna-R., she's really taking it dreadfully
to heart."

The _St. Luke_ was only dropping anchor for the night in the Mersey, and
would go on at daybreak. They gathered this from the talk of passengers
walking up and down the deck in twos and threes and passing and
repassing the chairs containing the silent figures with the round heads
that might be either the heads of boys or of girls, and they were
greatly relieved to think they wouldn't have to begin and be sea-sick
for some hours yet. "So couldn't we walk about a little?" suggested
Anna-Felicitas, who was already stiff from sitting on the hard cane
chair.

But Aunt Alice had told them that the thing to do on board a ship if
they wished, as she was sure they did, not only to avoid being sick but
also conspicuous, was to sit down in chairs the moment the ship got
under way, and not move out of them till it stopped again. "Or, at
least, as rarely as possible," amended Aunt Alice, who had never herself
been further on a ship than to Calais, but recognized that it might be
difficult to avoid moving sooner or later if it was New York you were
going to. "Two such young girls travelling alone should be seen as
seldom as ever you can manage. Your Uncle is sending you second-class
for that very reason, because it is so much less conspicuous."

It was also very much less expensive, and Uncle Arthur's generosities
were of the kind that suddenly grow impatient and leave off. Just as in
eating he was as he said, for plain roast and boiled, and messes be
damned, so in benefactions he was for lump sums and done with it; and
the extras, the driblets, the here a little and there a little that were
necessary, or were alleged by Aunt Alice to be necessary, before he
finally got rid of those blasted twins, annoyed him so profoundly that
when it came to taking their passage he could hardly be got not to send
them in the steerage. This was too much, however, for Aunt Alice, whose
maid was going with them as far as Euston and therefore would know what
sort of tickets they had, and she insisted with such quiet obstinacy
that they should be sent first-class that Uncle Arthur at last split the
difference and consented to make it second. To her maid Aunt Alice also
explained that second-class was less conspicuous.

Anna-Rose, mindful of Aunt Alice's words, hesitated as to the wisdom of
walking about and beginning to be conspicuous already, but she too was
stiff, and anything the matter with one's body has a wonderful effect,
as she had already in her brief career had numerous occasions to
observe, in doing away with prudent determinations. So, after cautiously
looking round the corners to see if the man who was on the verge of
being sorry for them were nowhere in sight, they walked up and down the
damp, dark deck; and the motionlessness, and silence, and mist gave them
a sensation of being hung mid-air in some strange empty Hades between
two worlds.

Far down below there was a faint splash every now and then against the
side of the _St. Luke_ when some other steamer, invisible in the mist,
felt her way slowly by. Out ahead lay the sea, the immense uneasy sea
that was to last ten days and nights before they got to the other side,
hour after hour of it, hour after hour of tossing across it further and
further away; and forlorn and ghostly as the ship felt, it yet, because
on either side of it were still the shores of England, didn't seem as
forlorn and ghostly as the unknown land they were bound for. For
suppose, Anna-Felicitas inquired of Anna-Rose, who had been privately
asking herself the same thing, America didn't like them? Suppose the
same sort of difficulties were waiting for them over there that had
dogged their footsteps in England?

"First of all," said Anna-Rose promptly, for she prided herself on the
readiness and clearness of her explanations, "America will like us,
because I don't see why it shouldn't. We're going over to it in exactly
the same pleasant spirit, Anna-F.,--and don't you go forgetting it and
showing your disagreeable side--that the dove was in when it flew across
the waters to the ark, and with olive branches in our beaks just the
same as the dove's, only they're those two letters to Uncle Arthur's
friends."

"But do you think Uncle Arthur's friends--" began Anna-Felicitas, who
had great doubts as to everything connected with Uncle Arthur.

"And secondly," continued Anna-Rose a little louder, for she wasn't
going to be interrupted, and having been asked a question liked to give
all the information in her power, "secondly, America is the greatest of
the neutrals except the _liebe Gott_, and is bound particularly to
prize us because we're so unusually and peculiarly neutral. What ever was
more neutral than you and me? We're neither one thing nor the other, and
yet at the same time we're both." Anna-Felicitas remarked that it sounded
rather as if they were the Athanasian Creed.

"And thirdly," went on Anna-Rose, waving this aside, "there's £200
waiting for us over there, which is a very nice warm thing to think of.
We never had £200 waiting for us anywhere in our lives before, did
we,--so you remember that, and don't get grumbling."

Anna-Felicitas mildly said that she wasn't grumbling but that she
couldn't help thinking what a great deal depended on the goodwill of
Uncle Arthur's friends, and wished it had been Aunt Alice's friends they
had letters to instead, because Aunt Alice's friends were more likely to
like her.

Anna-Rose rebuked her, and said that the proper spirit in which to start
on a great adventure was one of faith and enthusiasm, and that one
didn't have doubts.

Anna-Felicitas said she hadn't any doubts really, but that she was very
hungry, not having had anything that could be called a meal since
breakfast, and that she felt like the sheep in "Lycidas," the hungry
ones who looked up and were not fed, and she quoted the lines in case
Anna-Rose didn't recollect them (which Anna-Rose deplored, for she knew
the lines by heart, and if there was any quoting to be done liked to do
it herself), and said she felt just like that,--"Empty," said
Anna-Felicitas, "and yet swollen. When do you suppose people have food
on board ships? I don't believe we'd mind nearly so much about--oh well,
about leaving England, if it was after dinner."

"I'm not minding leaving England," said Anna-Rose quickly. "At least,
not more than's just proper."

"Oh, no more am I, of course," said Anna-Felicitas airily. "Except
what's proper."

"And even if we were feeling it _dreadfully_," said Anna-Rose, with a
little catch in her voice, "which, of course, we're not, dinner wouldn't
make any difference. Dinner doesn't alter fundamentals."

"But it helps one to bear them," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Bear!" repeated Anna-Rose, her chin in the air. "We haven't got much to
bear. Don't let me hear you talk of bearing things, Anna-F."

"I won't after dinner," promised Anna-Felicitas.

They thought perhaps they had better ask somebody whether there wouldn't
soon be something to eat, but the other passengers had all disappeared.
They were by themselves on the gloomy deck, and there were no lights.
The row of cabin windows along the wall were closely shuttered, and the
door they had come through when first they came on deck was shut too,
and they couldn't find it in the dark. It seemed so odd to be feeling
along a wall for a door they knew was there and not be able to find it,
that they began to laugh; and the undiscoverable door cheered them up
more than anything that had happened since seeing the last of Uncle
Arthur.

"It's like a game," said Anna-Rose, patting her hands softly and vainly
along the wall beneath the shuttered windows.

"It's like something in 'Alice in Wonderland,'" said Anna-Felicitas,
following in her tracks.

A figure loomed through the mist and came toward them. They left off
patting, and stiffened into straight and motionless dignity against the
wall till it should have passed. But it didn't pass. It was a male
figure in a peaked cap, probably a steward, they thought, and it stopped
in front of them and said in an American voice, "Hello."

Anna-Rose cast rapidly about in her mind for the proper form of reply
to Hello.

Anna-Felicitas, instinctively responsive to example murmured "Hello"
back again.

Anna-Rose, feeling sure that nobody ought to say just Hello to people
they had never seen before, and that Aunt Alice would think they had
brought it on themselves by being conspicuous, decided that perhaps
"Good-evening" would regulate the situation, and said it.

"You ought to be at dinner," said the man, taking no notice of this.

"That's what _we_ think," agreed Anna-Felicitas earnestly.

"Can you please tell us how to get there?" asked Anna-Rose, still
distant, but polite, for she too very much wanted to know.

"But _don't_ tell us to ask the Captain," said Anna-Felicitas, even more
earnestly.

"No," said Anna-Rose, "because we won't."

The man laughed. "Come right along with me," he said, striding on; and
they followed him as obediently as though such persons as possible _böse
Buben_ didn't exist.

"First voyage I guess," said the man over his shoulder.

"Yes," said the twins a little breathlessly, for the man's legs were
long and they could hardly keep up with him.

"English?" said the man.

"Ye--es," said Anna-Rose.

"That's to say, practically," panted the conscientious Anna-Felicitas.

"What say?" said the man, still striding on. "I said," Anna-Felicitas
endeavoured to explain, hurrying breathlessly after him so as to keep
within reach of his ear, "practically."

"Ah," said the man; and after a silence, broken only by the pantings for
breath of the twins, he added: "Mother with you?"

They didn't say anything to that, it seemed such a dreadful question to
have to answer, and luckily he didn't repeat it, but, having got to the
door they had been searching for, opened it and stepped into the bright
light inside, and putting out his arm behind him pulled them in one
after the other over the high wooden door-frame.

Inside was the same stewardess they had seen earlier in the afternoon,
engaged in heatedly describing what sounded like grievances to an
official in buttons, who seemed indifferent. She stopped suddenly when
the man appeared, and the official took his hands out of his pockets and
became alert and attentive, and the stewardess hastily picked up a tray
she had set down and began to move away along a passage.

The man, however, briefly called "Hi," and she turned round and came
back even more quickly than she had tried to go.

"You see," explained Anna-Rose in a pleased whisper to Anna-Felicitas,
"it's Hi she answers to."

"Yes," agreed Anna-Felicitas. "It's waste of good circumlocutions to
throw them away on her."

"Show these young ladies the dining-room," said the man.

"Yes, sir," said the stewardess, as polite as you please.

He nodded to them with a smile that developed for some reason into a
laugh, and turned away and beckoned to the official to follow him, and
went out again into the night.

"Who was that nice man?" inquired Anna-Rose, following the stewardess
down a broad flight of stairs that smelt of india-rubber and machine-oil
and cooking all mixed up together.

"And please," said Anna-Felicitas with mild severity, "don't tell us to
ask the Captain, because we really do know better than that."

"I thought you must be relations," said the stewardess.

"We are," said Anna-Rose. "We're twins."

The stewardess stared. "Twins what of?" she asked.

"What of?" echoed Anna-Rose. "Why, of each other, of course."

"I meant relations of the Captain's," said the stewardess shortly,
eyeing them with more disfavour than ever.

"You seem to have the Captain greatly on your mind," said
Anna-Felicitas. "He is no relation of ours."

"You're not even friends, then?" asked the stewardess, pausing to stare
round at them at a turn in the stairs as they followed her down
arm-in-arm.

"Of course we're friends," said Anna-Rose with some heat. "Do you
suppose we quarrel?"

"No, I didn't suppose you quarrelled with the Captain," said the
stewardess tartly. "Not on board this ship anyway."

She didn't know which of the two she disliked most, the short girl or
the long girl.

"You seem to be greatly obsessed by the Captain," said Anna-Felicitas
gently. "Obsessed!" repeated the stewardess, tossing her head. She was
unacquainted with the word, but instantly suspected it of containing a
reflection on her respectability. "I've been a widow off and on for ten
years now," she said angrily, "and I guess it would take more than even
the Captain to obsess _me_."

They had reached the glass doors leading into the dining-room, and the
stewardess, having carried out her orders, paused before indignantly
leaving them and going upstairs again to say, "If you're friends, what
do you want to know his name for, then?"

"Whose name?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"The Captain's," said the stewardess.

"We don't want to know the Captain's name," said Anna-Felicitas
patiently. "We don't want to know anything about the Captain."

"Then--" began the stewardess. She restrained herself, however, and
merely bitterly remarking: "That gentleman _was_ the Captain," went
upstairs and left them.

Anna-Rose was the first to recover. "You see we took your advice," she
called up after her, trying to soften her heart, for it was evident that
for some reason her heart was hardened, by flattery. "You _told_ us to
ask the Captain."




CHAPTER IV


In their berths that night before they went to sleep, it occurred to
them that perhaps what was the matter with the stewardess was that she
needed a tip. At first, with their recent experiences fresh in their
minds, they thought that she was probably passionately pro-Ally, and had
already detected all those Junkers in their past and accordingly
couldn't endure them. Then they remembered how Aunt Alice had said, "You
will have to give your stewardess a little something."

This had greatly perturbed them at the time, for up to then they had
been in the easy position of the tipped rather than the tippers, and
anyhow they had no idea what one gave stewardesses. Neither, it
appeared, had Aunt Alice; for, on being questioned, she said vaguely
that as it was an American boat they were going on she supposed it would
have to be American money, which was dollars, and she didn't know much
about dollars except that you divided them by four and multiplied them
by five, or else it was the other way about; and when, feeling still
uninformed, they had begged her to tell them why one did that, she said
it was the quickest way of finding out what a dollar really was, and
would they mind not talking any more for a little while because her head
ached.

The tips they had seen administered during their short lives had all
been given at the end of things, not at the beginning; but Americans,
Aunt Alice told them, were in some respects, in spite of their talking
English, different, and perhaps they were different just on this point
and liked to be tipped at both ends. Anna-Rose wanted to crane out her
head and call up to Anna-Felicitas and ask her whether she didn't think
that might be so, but was afraid of disturbing the people in the
opposite berths.

Anna-Felicitas was in the top berth on their side of the cabin, and
Anna-Rose as the elder and accordingly as she explained to
Anna-Felicitas, needing more comfort, in the lower one. On the opposite
side were two similar berths, each containing as Anna-Felicitas
whispered after peeping cautiously through their closed curtains,--for
at first on coming in after dinner to go to bed the cabin seemed empty,
except for inanimate things, like clothes hanging up and an immense
smell,--its human freight. They were awed by this discovery, for the
human freight was motionless and speechless, and yet made none of the
noises suggesting sleep.

They unpacked and undressed as silently and quickly as possible, but it
was very difficult, for there seemed to be no room for anything, not
even for themselves. Every now and then they glanced a little uneasily
at the closed curtains, which bulged, and sniffed cautiously and
delicately, trying to decide what the smell exactly was. It appeared to
be a mixture of the sauce one had with plum pudding at Christmas, and
German bedrooms in the morning. It was a smell they didn't like the idea
of sleeping with, but they saw no way of getting air. They thought of
ringing for the stewardess and asking her to open a window, though they
could see no window, but came to the conclusion it was better not to
stir her up; not yet, at least, not till they had correctly diagnosed
what was the matter with her. They said nothing out loud, for fear of
disturbing whatever it was behind the curtains, but they knew what each
was thinking, for one isn't, as they had long ago found out, a twin for
nothing.

There was a slight scuffle before Anna-Felicitas was safely hoisted up
into her berth, her legs hanging helplessly down for some time after the
rest of her was in it, and Anna-Rose, who had already neatly inserted
herself into her own berth, after watching these legs in silence and
fighting a desire to give them a tug and see what would happen, had to
get out at last on hearing Anna-Felicitas begin to make sounds up there
as though she were choking, and push them up in after her. Her head was
then on a level with Anna-Felicitas's berth, and she could see how
Anna-Felicitas, having got her legs again, didn't attempt to do anything
with them in the way of orderly arrangement beneath the blankets, but
lay huddled in an irregular heap, screwing her eyes up very tight and
stuffing one of her pigtails into her mouth, and evidently struggling
with what appeared to be an attack of immoderate and ill-timed mirth.

Anna-Rose observed her for a moment in silence, then was suddenly seized
herself with a dreadful desire to laugh, and with a hasty glance round
at the bulging curtains scrambled back into her own berth and pulled the
sheet over her mouth.

She was sobering herself by going over her different responsibilities,
checking them off on her fingers,--the two five-pound notes under her
pillow for extra expenses till they were united in New York to their
capital, the tickets, the passports, and Anna-Felicitas,--when two thick
fair pigtails appeared dangling over the edge of her berth, followed by
Anna-Felicitas's head.

"You've forgotten to turn out the light," whispered Anna-Felicitas, her
eyelashes still wet from her late attack; and stretching her neck still
further down till her face was scarlet with the effort and the blood
rushing into it, she expressed a conviction to Anna-Rose that the human
freight behind the curtains, judging from the suspicious negativeness of
its behaviour, had no business in their cabin at all and was really
stowaways.

"German stowaways," added Anna-Felicitas, nodding her head emphatically,
which was very skilful of her, thought Anna-Rose, considering that it
was upside down. "_German_ stowaways," whispered Anna-Felicitas,
sniffing expressively though cautiously.

Anna-Rose raised herself on her elbows and stared across at the bulging
curtains. They certainly were very motionless and much curved. In spite
of herself her flesh began to creep a little.

"They're men," whispered Anna-Felicitas, now dangerously congested.
"Stowaways are."

There had been no one in the cabin when first they came on board and
took their things down, and they hadn't been in it since till they came
to bed.

"_German_ men," whispered Anna-Felicitas, again with a delicate
expressive sniff.

"Nonsense," whispered Anna-Rose, stoutly. "Men never come into ladies'
cabins. And there's skirts on the hooks."

"Disguise," whispered Anna-Felicitas, nodding again. "Spies' disguise."
She seemed quite to be enjoying her own horrible suggestions.

"Take your head back into the berth," ordered Anna-Rose quickly, for
Anna-Felicitas seemed to be on the very brink of an apoplectic fit.

Anna-Felicitas, who was herself beginning to feel a little
inconvenienced, obeyed, and was thrilled to see Anna-Rose presently
very cautiously emerge from underneath her and on her bare feet creep
across to the opposite side. She knew her to be valiant to recklessness.
She sat up to watch, her eyes round with interest.

Anna-Rose didn't go straight across, but proceeded slowly, with several
pauses, to direct her steps toward the pillow-end of the berths. Having
got there she stood still a moment listening, and then putting a careful
finger between the curtain of the lower berth and its frame, drew it the
smallest crack aside and peeped in.

Instantly she started back, letting go the curtain. "I beg your pardon,"
she said out loud, turning very red. "I--I thought--"

Anna-Felicitas, attentive in her berth, felt a cold thrill rush down her
back. No sound came from the berth on the other side any more than
before the raid on it, and Anna-Rose returned quicker than she had gone.
She just stopped on the way to switch off the light, and then felt along
the edge of Anna-Felicitas's berth till she got to her head, and pulling
it near her by its left pigtail whispered with her mouth close to its
left ear, "Wide awake. Watching me all the time. Not a man. Fat."

And she crawled into her berth feeling unnerved.




CHAPTER V


The lady in the opposite berth was German, and so was the lady in the
berth above her. Their husbands were American, but that didn't make them
less German. Nothing ever makes a German less German, Anna-Rose
explained to Anna-Felicitas.

"Except," replied Anna-Felicitas, "a judicious dilution of their blood
by the right kind of mother."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose. "Only to be found in England."

This conversation didn't take place till the afternoon of the next day,
by which time Anna-Felicitas already knew about the human freight being
Germans, for one of their own submarines came after the _St. Luke_ and
no one was quite so loud in expression of terror and dislike as the two
Germans.

They demanded to be saved first, on the ground that they were Germans.
They repudiated their husbands, and said marriage was nothing compared
to how one had been born. The curtains of their berths, till then so
carefully closed, suddenly yawned open, and the berths gave up their
contents just as if, Anna-Felicitas remarked afterwards to Anna-Rose, it
was the resurrection and the berths were riven sepulchres chucking up
their dead.

This happened at ten o'clock the next morning when the _St. Luke_ was
pitching about off the southwest coast of Ireland. The twins, waking
about seven, found with a pained surprise that they were not where they
had been dreaming they were, in the sunlit garden at home playing
tennis happily if a little violently, but in a chilly yet stuffy place
that kept on tilting itself upside down. They lay listening to the
groans coming from the opposite berths, and uneasily wondering how long
it would be before they too began to groan. Anna-Rose raised her head
once with the intention of asking if she could help at all, but dropped
it back again on to the pillow and shut her eyes tight and lay as quiet
as the ship would let her. Anna-Felicitas didn't even raise her head,
she felt so very uncomfortable.

At eight o'clock the stewardess looked in--the same stewardess, they
languidly noted, with whom already they had had two encounters, for it
happened that this was one of the cabins she attended to--and said that
if anybody wanted breakfast they had better be quick or it would be
over.

"Breakfast!" cried the top berth opposite in a heart-rending tone; and
instantly was sick.

The stewardess withdrew her head and banged the door to, and the twins,
in their uneasy berths, carefully keeping their eyes shut so as not to
witness the behaviour of the sides and ceiling of the cabin, feebly
marvelled at the stewardess for suggesting being quick to persons who
were being constantly stood on their heads. And breakfast,--they
shuddered and thought of other things; of fresh, sweet air, and of the
scent of pinks and apricots warm with the sun.

At ten o'clock the stewardess came in again, this time right in, and
with determination in every gesture.

"Come, come," she said, addressing the twins, and through them talking
at the heaving and groaning occupants of the other side, "you mustn't
give way like this. What you want is to be out of bed. You must get up
and go on deck. And how's the cabin to get done if you stay in it all
the time?"

Anna-Felicitas, the one particularly addressed, because she was more on
the right level for conversation than Anna-Rose, who could only see the
stewardess's apron, turned her head away and murmured that she didn't
care.

"Come, come," said the stewardess. "Besides, there's life-boat drill at
mid-day, and you've got to be present."

Anna-Felicitas, her eyes shut, again murmured that she didn't care.

"Come, come," said the stewardess. "Orders are orders. Every soul on the
ship, sick or not, has got to be present at life-boat drill."

"Oh, I'm not a soul," murmured Anna-Felicitas, who felt at that moment
how particularly she was a body, while the opposite berths redoubled
their groans.

"Come, come--" said the stewardess.

Then the _St. Luke_ whistled five times, and the stewardess turned pale.
For a brief space, before they understood what had happened, the twins
supposed she was going to be sick. But it wasn't that that was the
matter with her, for after a moment's staring at nothing with horror on
her face she pounced on them and pulled them bodily out of their berths,
regardless by which end, and threw them on the floor anyhow. Then she
plunged about and produced life-jackets; then she rushed down the
passage flinging open the doors of the other cabins; then she whirled
back again and tried to tie the twins into their life-jackets, but with
hands that shook so that the strings immediately came undone again; and
all the time she was calling out "Quick--quick--quick--" There was a
great tramping of feet on deck and cries and shouting.

The curtains of the opposite berths yawned asunder and out came the
Germans, astonishingly cured of their sea-sickness, and struggled
vigorously into their life-jackets and then into fur coats, and had the
fur coats instantly pulled off again by a very energetic steward who ran
in and said fur coats in the water were death-traps,--a steward so much
bent on saving people that he began to pull off the other things the
German ladies had on as well, saying while he pulled, disregarding their
protests, that in the water Mother Nature was the best. "Mother
Nature--Mother Nature," said the steward, pulling; and he was only
stopped just in the nick of time by the stewardess rushing in again and
seeing what was happening to the helpless Germans.

Anna-Rose, even at that moment explanatory, pointed out to
Anna-Felicitas, who had already grasped the fact, that no doubt there
was a submarine somewhere about. The German ladies, seizing their
valuables from beneath their pillows, in spite of the steward assuring
them they wouldn't want them in the water, demanded to be taken up and
somehow signalled to the submarine, which would never dare do anything
to a ship containing its own flesh and blood--and an American ship,
too--there must be some awful mistake--but anyhow they must be
saved--there would be terrible trouble, that they could assure the
steward and the twins and the scurrying passers-by down the passage, if
America allowed two Germans to be destroyed--and anyhow they would
insist on having their passage money refunded....

The German ladies departed down the passage, very incoherent and very
unhappy but no longer sick, and Anna-Felicitas, clinging to the edge of
her berth, feeling too miserable to mind about the submarine, feebly
wondered, while the steward tied her properly into her life-jacket, at
the cure effected in them. Anna-Rose seemed cured too, for she was
buttoning a coat round Anna-Felicitas's shoulders, and generally seemed
busy and brisk, ending by not even forgetting their precious little bag
of money and tickets and passports, and fastening it round her neck in
spite of the steward's assuring her that it would drag her down in the
water like a stone tied to a kitten.

"You're a _very_ cheerful man, aren't you," Anna-Rose said, as he pushed
them out of the cabin and along the corridor, holding up Anna-Felicitas
on her feet, who seemed quite unable to run alone.

The steward didn't answer, but caught hold of Anna-Felicitas at the foot
of the stairs and carried her up them, and then having got her on deck
propped her in a corner near the life-boat allotted to the set of cabins
they were in, and darted away and in a minute was back again with a big
coat which he wrapped round her.

"May as well be comfortable till you do begin to drown," he said
briskly, "but mind you don't forget to throw it off, Missie, the minute
you feel the water."

Anna-Felicitas slid down on to the deck, her head leaning against the
wall, her eyes shut, a picture of complete indifference to whatever
might be going to happen next. Her face was now as white as the frill of
the night-gown that straggled out from beneath her coat, for the journey
from the cabin to the deck had altogether finished her. Anna-Rose was
thankful that she felt too ill to be afraid. Her own heart was black
with despair,--despair that Anna-Felicitas, the dear and beautiful one,
should presently, at any moment, be thrown into that awful heaving
water, and certainly be hurt and frightened before she was choked out of
life.

She sat down beside her, getting as close as possible to keep her warm.
Her own twin. Her own beloved twin. She took her cold hands and put them
away beneath the coat the steward had brought. She slid an arm round her
and laid her cheek against her sleeve, so that she should know somebody
was there, somebody who loved her. "What's the _good_ of it all--_why_
were we born--" she wondered, staring at the hideous gray waves as
they swept up into sight over the side of the ship and away again as the
ship rose up, and at the wet deck and the torn sky, and the
miserable-looking passengers in their life-jackets collected together
round the life-boat.

Nobody said anything except the German ladies. They, indeed, kept up a
constant wail. The others were silent, the men mostly smoking
cigarettes, the women holding their fluttering wraps about them, all of
them staring out to sea, watching for the track of the torpedo to
appear. One shot had been fired already and had missed. The ship was
zig-zagging under every ounce of steam she could lay on. An official
stood by the life-boat, which was ready with water in it and provisions.
That the submarine must be mad, as the official remarked, to fire on an
American ship, didn't console anybody, and his further assurance that
the matter would not be allowed to rest there left them cold. They felt
too sure that in all probability they themselves were going to rest
there, down underneath that repulsive icy water, after a struggle that
was going to be unpleasant.

The man who had roused Anna-Rose's indignation as the ship left the
landing-stage by looking as though he were soon going to be sorry for
her, came across from the first class, where his life-boat was, to watch
for the track of the expected torpedo, and caught sight of the twins
huddled in their corner.

Anna-Rose didn't see him, for she was staring with wide eyes out at the
desolate welter of water and cloud, and thinking of home: the home that
was, that used to be till such a little while ago, the home that now
seemed to have been so amazingly, so unbelievably beautiful and blest,
with its daily life of love and laughter and of easy confidence that
to-morrow was going to be just as good. Happiness had been the ordinary
condition there, a simple matter of course. Its place was taken now by
courage. Anna-Rose felt sick at all this courage there was about. There
should be no occasion for it. There should be no horrors to face, no
cruelties to endure. Why couldn't brotherly love continue? Why must
people get killing each other? She, for her part, would be behind nobody
in courage and in the defying of a Fate that could behave, as she felt,
so very unlike her idea of anything even remotely decent; but it
oughtn't to be necessary, this constant condition of screwed-upness; it
was waste of effort, waste of time, waste of life,--oh the _stupidity_
of it all, she thought, rebellious and bewildered.

"Have some brandy," said the man, pouring out a little into a small cup.

Anna-Rose turned her eyes on him without moving the rest of her. She
recognized him. He was going to be sorry for them again. He had much
better be sorry for himself now, she thought, because he, just as much
as they were, was bound for a watery bier.

"Thank you," she said distantly, for not only did she hate the smell of
brandy but Aunt Alice had enjoined her with peculiar strictness on no
account to talk to strange men, "I don't drink."

"Then I'll give the other one some," said the man.

"She too," said Anna-Rose, not changing her position but keeping a
drearily watchful eye on him, "is a total abstainer."

"Well, I'll go and fetch some of your warm things for you. Tell me where
your cabin is. You haven't got enough on."

"Thank you," said Anna-Rose distantly, "we have quite enough on,
considering the occasion. We're dressed for drowning."

The man laughed, and said there would be no drowning, and that they had
a splendid captain, and were outdistancing the submarine hand over fist.
Anna-Rose didn't believe him, and suspected him of supposing her to be
in need of cheering, but a gleam of comfort did in spite of herself
steal into her heart.

He went away, and presently came back with a blanket and some pillows.

"If you _will_ sit on the floor," he said, stuffing the pillows behind
their backs, during which Anna-Felicitas didn't open her eyes, and her
head hung about so limply that it looked as if it might at any moment
roll off, "you may at least be as comfortable as you can."

Anna-Rose pointed out, while she helped him arrange Anna-Felicitas's
indifferent head on the pillow, that she saw little use in being
comfortable just a minute or two before drowning. "Drowning be hanged,"
said the man.

"That's how Uncle Arthur used to talk," said Anna-Rose, feeling suddenly
quite at home, "except that _he_ would have said 'Drowning be damned.'"

The man laughed. "Is he dead?" he asked, busy with Anna-Felicitas's
head, which defied their united efforts to make it hold itself up.

"Dead?" echoed Anna-Rose, to whom the idea of Uncle Arthur's ever being
anything so quiet as dead and not able to say any swear words for such a
long time as eternity seemed very odd.

"You said he _used_ to talk like that."

"Oh, no he's not dead at all. Quite the contrary."

The man laughed again, and having got Anna-Felicitas's head arranged in
a position that at least, as Anna-Rose pointed out, had some sort of
self-respect in it, he asked who they were with.

Anna-Rose looked at him with as much defiant independence as she could
manage to somebody who was putting a pillow behind her back. He was
going to be sorry for them. She saw it coming. He was going to say "You
poor things," or words to that effect. That's what the people round
Uncle Arthur's had said to them. That's what everybody had said to them
since the war began, and Aunt Alice's friends had said it to her too,
because she had to have her nieces live with her, and no doubt Uncle
Arthur's friends who played golf with him had said it to him as well,
except that probably they put in a damn so as to make it clearer for him
and said "You poor damned thing," or something like that, and she was
sick of the very words poor things. Poor things, indeed! "We're with
each other," she said briefly, lifting her chin.

"Well, I don't think that's enough," said the man. "Not half enough.
You ought to have a mother or something."

"_Everybody_ can't have mothers," said Anna-Rose very defiantly indeed,
tears rushing into her eyes.

The man tucked the blanket round their resistless legs. "There now," he
said. "That's better. What's the good of catching your deaths?"

Anna-Rose, glad that he hadn't gone on about mothers, said that with
so much death imminent, catching any of it no longer seemed to her
particularly to matter, and the man laughed and pulled over a chair
and sat down beside her.

She didn't know what he saw anywhere in that dreadful situation to laugh
at, but just the sound of a laugh was extraordinarily comforting. It
made one feel quite different. Wholesome again. Like waking up to
sunshine and one's morning bath and breakfast after a nightmare. He
seemed altogether a very comforting man. She liked him to sit near them.
She hoped he was a good man. Aunt Alice had said there were very few
good men, hardly any in fact except one's husband, but this one did seem
one of the few exceptions. And she thought that by now, he having
brought them all those pillows, he could no longer come under the
heading of strange men. When he wasn't looking she put out her hand
secretly and touched his coat where he wouldn't feel it. It comforted
her to touch his coat. She hoped Aunt Alice wouldn't have disapproved of
seeing her sitting side by side with him and liking it.

Aunt Alice had been, as her custom was, vague, when Anna-Rose, having
given her the desired promise not to talk or let Anna-Felicitas talk to
strange men, and desiring to collect any available information for her
guidance in her new responsible position had asked, "But when are men
_not_ strange?"

"When you've married them," said Aunt Alice. "After that, of course, you
love them."

And she sighed heavily, for it was bed-time.




CHAPTER VI


Nothing more was seen of the submarine.

The German ladies were certain the captain had somehow let them know he
had them on board, and were as full of the credit of having saved the
ship as if it had been Sodom and Gomorrah instead of a ship, and they
the one just man whose presence would have saved those cities if he had
been in them; and the American passengers were equally sure that the
submarine, on thinking it over, had decided that President Wilson was
not a man to be trifled with, and had gone in search of some prey which
would not have the might and majesty of America at its back.

As the day went on, and the _St. Luke_ left off zig-zagging, the relief
of those on board was the relief of a reprieve from death. Almost
everybody was cured of sea-sickness, and quite everybody was ready to
overwhelm his neighbour with cordiality and benevolence. Rich people
didn't mind poor people, and came along from the first class and talked
to them just as if they had been the same flesh and blood as themselves.
A billionairess native to Chicago, who had crossed the Atlantic forty
times without speaking to a soul, an achievement she was as justly proud
of as an artist is of his best creations, actually asked somebody in a
dingy mackintosh, whose little boy still looked pale, if he had been
frightened; and an exclusive young man from Boston talked quite a long
while to an English lady without first having made sure that she was
well-connected. What could have been more like heaven? The tone on the
_St. Luke_ that day was very like what the tone in the kingdom of heaven
must be in its simple politeness. "And so you see," said Anna-Rose, who
was fond of philosophizing in season and out of season, and particularly
out of season, "how good comes out of evil."

She made this observation about four o'clock in the afternoon to
Anna-Felicitas in an interval of absence on the part of Mr. Twist--such,
the amiable stranger had told them, was his name--who had gone to see
about tea being brought up to them; and Anna-Felicitas, able by now to
sit up and take notice, the hours of fresh air having done their work,
smiled the ready, watery, foolishly happy smile of the convalescent. It
was so nice not to feel ill; it was so nice not to have to be saved. If
she had been able to talk much, she would have philosophized too, about
the number and size of one's negative blessings--all the things one
hasn't got, all the very horrid things; why, there's no end to them once
you begin to count up, she thought, waterily happy, and yet people
grumble.

Anna-Felicitas was in that cleaned-out, beatific, convalescent mood in
which one is sure one will never grumble again. She smiled at anybody
who happened to pass by and catch her eye. She would have smiled just
like that, with just that friendly, boneless familiarity at the devil if
he had appeared, or even at Uncle Arthur himself.

The twins, as a result of the submarine's activities, were having the
pleasantest day they had had for months. It was the realization of this
that caused Anna-Rose's remark about good coming out of evil. The
background, she could not but perceive, was a very odd one for their
pleasantest day for months--a rolling steamer and a cold wind flicking
at them round the corner; but backgrounds, she pointed out to
Anna-Felicitas, who smiled her agreement broadly and instantly, are
negligible things: it is what goes on in front of them that matters. Of
what earthly use, for instance, had been those splendid summer
afternoons in the perfect woods and gardens that so beautifully framed
in Uncle Arthur?

No use, agreed Anna-Felicitas, smiling fatuously.

In the middle of them was Uncle Arthur. You always got to him in the
end.

Anna-Felicitas nodded and shook her head and was all feeble agreement.

She and Anna-Felicitas had been more hopelessly miserable, Anna-Rose
remarked, wandering about the loveliness that belonged to him than they
could ever have dreamed was possible. She reminded Anna-Felicitas how
they used to rub their eyes to try and see more clearly, for surely
these means of happiness, these elaborate arrangements for it all round
them, couldn't be for nothing? There must be some of it somewhere, if
only they could discover where? And there was none. Not a trace of it.
Not even the faintest little swish of its skirts.

Anna-Rose left off talking, and became lost in memories. For a long
time, she remembered, she had told herself it was her mother's death
blotting the light out of life, but one day Anna-Felicitas said aloud
that it was Uncle Arthur, and Anna-Rose knew it was true. Their mother's
death was something so tender, so beautiful, that terrible as it was to
them to be left without her they yet felt raised up by it somehow,
raised on to a higher level than where they had been before, closer in
their hearts to real things, to real values. But Uncle Arthur came into
possession of their lives as a consequence of that death, and he had
towered up between them and every glimpse of the sun. Suddenly there was
no such thing as freedom and laughter. Suddenly everything one said and
did was wrong. "And you needn't think," Anna-Felicitas had said wisely,
"that he's like that because we're Germans--or _seem_ to be Germans,"
she amended. "It's because he's Uncle Arthur. Look at Aunt Alice.
_She's_ not a German. And yet look at her."

And Anna-Rose had looked at Aunt Alice, though only in her mind's eye,
for at that moment the twins were three miles away in a wood picnicking,
and Aunt Alice was at home recovering from a _tête-à-tête_ luncheon with
Uncle Arthur who hadn't said a word from start to finish; and though she
didn't like most of his words when he did say them, she liked them still
less when he didn't say them, for then she imagined them, and what she
imagined was simply awful,--Anna-Rose had, I say, looked at Aunt Alice
in her mind's eye, and knew that this too was true.

Mr. Twist reappeared, followed by the brisk steward with a tray of tea
and cake, and their corner became very like a cheerful picnic.

Mr. Twist was most pleasant and polite. Anna-Rose had told him quite
soon after he began to talk to her, in order, as she said, to clear his
mind of misconceptions, that she and Anna-Felicitas, though their
clothes at that moment, and the pigtails in which their flair was done,
might be misleading, were no longer children, but quite the contrary;
that they were, in fact, persons who were almost ripe for going to
dances, and certainly in another year would be perfectly ripe for dances
supposing there were any.

Mr. Twist listened attentively, and begged her to tell him any other
little thing she might think of as useful to him in his capacity of
friend and attendant,--both of which, said Mr. Twist, he intended to be
till he had seen them safely landed in New York.

"I hope you don't think we _need_ anybody," said Anna-Rose. "We shall
like being friends with you very much, but only on terms of perfect
equality."

"Sure," said Mr. Twist, who was an American.

"I thought--"

She hesitated a moment.

"You thought?" encouraged Mr. Twist politely.

"I thought at Liverpool you looked as if you were being sorry for us."

"Sorry?" said Mr. Twist, in the tone of one who repudiates.

"Yes. When we were waving good-bye to--to our friends."

"Sorry?" repeated Mr. Twist.

"Which was great waste of your time."

"I should think so," said Mr. Twist with heartiness.

Anna-Rose, having cleared the ground of misunderstandings, an activity
in which at all times she took pleasure, accepted Mr. Twist's attentions
in the spirit in which they were offered, which was, as he said, one of
mutual friendliness and esteem. As he was never sea-sick, he could move
about and do things for them that might be difficult to do for
themselves; as he knew a great deal about stewardesses, he could tell
them what sort of tip theirs expected; as he was American, he could
illuminate them about that country. He had been doing Red Cross work
with an American ambulance in France for ten months, and was going home
for a short visit to see how his mother, who, Anna-Rose gathered, was
ancient and widowed, was getting on. His mother, he said, lived in
seclusion in a New England village with his sister, who had not married.

"Then she's got it all before her," said Anna-Rose.

"Like us," said Anna-Felicitas.

"I shouldn't think she'd got as much of it before her as you," said Mr.
Twist, "because she's considerably more grown up--I mean," he added
hastily, as Anna-Rose's mouth opened, "she's less--well, less completely
young."

"We're not completely young," said Anna-Rose with dignity. "People are
completely young the day they're born, and ever after that they spend
their time becoming less so."

"Exactly. And my sister has been becoming less so longer than you have.
I assure you that's all I meant. She's less so even than I am."

"Then," said Anna-Rose, glancing at that part of Mr. Twist's head where
it appeared to be coming through his hair, "she must have got to the
stage when one is called a maiden lady."

"And if she were a German," said Anna-Felicitas suddenly, who hadn't
till then said anything to Mr. Twist but only smiled widely at him
whenever he happened to look her way, "she wouldn't be either a lady or
a maiden, but just an It. It's very rude of Germans, I think," went on
Anna-Felicitas, abstractedly smiling at the cake Mr. Twist was offering
her, "never to let us be anything but Its till we've taken on some men."

Mr. Twist expressed surprise at this way of describing marriage, and
inquired of Anna-Felicitas what she knew about Germans.

"The moment you leave off being sea-sick, Anna-F.," said Anna-Rose,
turning to her severely, "you start being indiscreet. Well, I suppose,"
she added with a sigh to Mr. Twist, "you'd have had to know sooner or
later. Our name is Twinkler."

She watched him to see the effect of this, and Mr. Twist, perceiving he
was expected to say something, said that he didn't mind that anyhow, and
that he could bear something worse in the way of revelations.

"Does it convey nothing to you?" asked Anna-Rose, astonished, for in
Germany the name of Twinkler was a mighty name, and even in England it
was well known.

Mr. Twist shook his head. "Only that it sounds cheerful," he said.

Anna-Rose watched his face. "It isn't only Twinkler," she said, speaking
very distinctly. "It's _von_ Twinkler."

"That's German," said Mr. Twist; but his face remained serene.

"Yes. And so are we. That is, we would be if it didn't happen that we
weren't."

"I don't think I quite follow," said Mr. Twist.

"It _is_ very difficult," agreed Anna-Rose. "You see, we used to have a
German father."

"But only because our mother married him," explained Anna-Felicitas.
"Else we wouldn't have."

"And though she only did it once," said Anna-Rose, "ages ago, it has
dogged our footsteps ever since."

"It's very surprising," mused Anna-Felicitas, "what marrying anybody
does. You go into a church, and before you know where you are, you're
all tangled up with posterity."

"And much worse than that," said Anna-Rose, staring wide-eyed at her own
past experiences, "posterity's all tangled up with you. It's really
simply awful sometimes for posterity. Look at us."

"If there hadn't been a war we'd have been all right," said
Anna-Felicitas. "But directly there's a war, whoever it is you've
married, if it isn't one of your own countrymen, rises up against you,
just as if he were too many meringues you'd had for dinner."

"Living or dead," said Anna-Rose, nodding, "he rises up against you."

"Till the war we never thought at all about it," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Either one way or the other," said Anna-Rose.

"We never used to bother about what we were," said Anna-Felicitas. "We
were just human beings, and so was everybody else just human beings."

"We didn't mind a bit about being Germans, or about other people not
being Germans."

"But you mustn't think we mind now either," said Anna-Felicitas,
"because, you see, we're not."

Mr. Twist looked at them in turn. His ears were a little prominent and
pointed, and they gave him rather the air, when he put his head on one
side and looked at them, of an attentive fox-terrier. "I don't think I
quite follow," he said again.

"It _is_ very difficult," agreed Anna-Rose.

"It's because you've got into your head that we're German because of our
father," said Anna-Felicitas. "But what's a father, when all's said and
done?"

"Well," said Mr. Twist, "one has to have him."

"But having got him he isn't anything like as important as a mother,"
said Anna-Rose.

"One hardly sees one's father," said Anna-Felicitas. "He's always busy.
He's always thinking of something else."

"Except when he looks at one and tells one to sit up straight," said
Anna-Rose pointedly to Anna-Felicitas, whose habit of drooping still
persisted in spite of her father's admonishments.

"Of course he's very kind and benevolent when he happens to remember
that one is there," said Anna-Felicitas, sitting up beautifully for a
moment, "but that's about everything."

"And of course," said Anna-Rose, "one's father's intentions are
perfectly sound and good, but his attention seems to wander. Whereas
one's mother--"

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas, "one's mother--"

They broke off and looked straight in front of them. It didn't bear
speaking of. It didn't bear thinking of.

Suddenly Anna-Felicitas, weak from excessive sea-sickness, began to cry.
The tears just slopped over as though no resistance of any sort were
possible.

Anna-Rose stared at her a moment horror-struck. "Look here, Anna-F.,"
she exclaimed, wrath in her voice, "I won't _have_ you be sentimental--I
won't _have_ you be sentimental...."

And then she too began to cry.

Well, once having hopelessly disgraced and exposed themselves, there was
nothing for it but to take Mr. Twist into their uttermost confidence. It
was dreadful. It was awful. Before that strange man. A person they
hardly knew. Other strangers passing. Exposing their feelings. Showing
their innermost miserable places.

They writhed and struggled in their efforts to stop, to pretend they
weren't crying, that it was really nothing but just tears,--odd ones
left over from last time, which was years and years ago,--"But _really_
years and years ago," sobbed Anna-Rose, anxiously explaining,--"the
years one falls down on garden paths in, and cuts one's knees, and
one's mother--one's mother--c-c-c-comforts one--"

"See here," said Mr. Twist, interrupting these incoherences, and pulling
out a beautiful clean pocket-handkerchief which hadn't even been
unfolded yet, "you've got to tell me all about it right away."

And he shook out the handkerchief, and with the first-aid promptness his
Red Cross experience had taught him, started competently wiping up their
faces.




CHAPTER VII


There was that about Mr. Twist which, once one had begun them,
encouraged confidences; something kind about his eyes, something not too
determined about his chin. He bore no resemblance to those pictures of
efficient Americans in advertisements with which Europe is
familiar,--eagle-faced gentlemen with intimidatingly firm mouths and
chins, wiry creatures, physically and mentally perfect, offering in
capital letters to make you Just Like Them. Mr. Twist was the reverse of
eagle-faced. He was also the reverse of good-looking; that is, he would
have been very handsome indeed, as Anna-Rose remarked several days later
to Anna-Felicitas, when the friendship had become a settled
thing,--which indeed it did as soon as Mr. Twist had finished wiping
their eyes and noses that first afternoon, it being impossible, they
discovered, to have one's eyes and noses wiped by somebody without being
friends afterwards (for such an activity, said Anna-Felicitas, belonged
to the same order of events as rescue from fire, lions, or drowning,
after which in books you married him; but this having only been wiping,
said Anna-Rose, the case was adequately met by friendship)--he would
have been very handsome indeed if he hadn't had a face.

"But you have to _have_ a face," said Anna-Felicitas, who didn't think
it much mattered what sort it was so long as you could eat with it and
see out of it.

"And as long as one is as kind as Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose; but
secretly she thought that having been begun so successfully at his feet,
and carried upwards with such grace of long limbs and happy proportions,
he might as well have gone on equally felicitously for the last little
bit.

"I expect God got tired of him over that last bit," she mused, "and just
put on any sort of head."

"Yes--that happened to be lying about," agreed Anna-Felicitas. "In a
hurry to get done with him."

"Anyway he's very kind," said Anna-Rose, a slight touch of defiance in
her voice.

"Oh, _very_ kind," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And it doesn't matter about faces for being kind," said Anna-Rose.

"Not in the least," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And if it hadn't been for the submarine we shouldn't have got to know
him. So you see," said Anna-Rose,--and again produced her favourite
remark about good coming out of evil.

Those were the days in mid-Atlantic when England was lost in its own
peculiar mists, and the sunshine of America was stretching out towards
them. The sea was getting calmer and bluer every hour, and submarines
more and more unlikely. If a ship could be pleasant, which
Anna-Felicitas doubted, for she still found difficulty in dressing and
undressing without being sea-sick and was unpopular in the cabin, this
ship was pleasant. You lay in a deck-chair all day long, staring at the
blue sky and blue sea that enclosed you as if you were living in the
middle of a jewel, and tried not to remember--oh, there were heaps of
things it was best not to remember; and when the rail of the ship moved
up across the horizon too far into the sky, or moved down across it and
showed too much water, you just shut your eyes and then it didn't
matter; and the sun shone warm and steady on your face, and the wind
tickled the tassel on the top of your German-knitted cap, and Mr. Twist
came and read aloud to you, which sent you to sleep quicker than
anything you had ever known.

The book he read out of and carried about with him his pocket was called
"Masterpieces You Must Master," and was an American collection of
English poetry, professing in its preface to be a Short Cut to Culture;
and he would read with what at that time, it being new to them, seemed
to the twins a strange exotic pronunciation, Wordsworth's "Ode to
Dooty," and the effect was as if someone should dig a majestic Gregorian
psalm in its ribs, and make it leap and giggle.

Anna-Rose, who had no reason to shut her eyes, for she didn't mind what
the ship's rail did with the horizon, opened them very round when first
Mr. Twist started on his Masterpieces. She was used to hearing them read
by her mother in the adorable husky voice that sent such thrills through
one, but she listened with the courtesy and final gratitude due to the
efforts to entertain her of so amiable a friend, and only the roundness
of her eyes showed her astonishment at this waltzing round, as it
appeared to her, of Mr. Twist with the Stern Daughter of the Voice of
God. He also read "Lycidas" to her, that same "Lycidas" Uncle Arthur
took for a Derby winner, and only Anna-Rose's politeness enabled her to
refrain from stopping up her ears. As it was, she fidgeted to the point
of having to explain, on Mr. Twist's pausing to gaze at her
questioningly through the smoke-coloured spectacles he wore on deck,
which made him look so like a gigantic dragon-fly, that it was because
her deck-chair was so very much harder than she was.

Anna-Felicitas, who considered that, if these things were short-cuts to
anywhere, seeing she knew them all by heart she must have long ago got
there, snoozed complacently. Sometimes for a few moments she would drop
off really to sleep, and then her mouth would fall open, which worried
Anna-Rose, who couldn't bear her to look even for a moment less
beautiful than she knew she was, so that she fidgeted more than ever,
unable, pinned down by politeness and the culture being administered, to
make her shut her mouth and look beautiful again by taking and shaking
her. Also Anna-Felicitas had a trick of waking up suddenly and
forgetting to be polite, as one does when first one wakes up and hasn't
had time to remember one is a lady. "To-morrow to fresh woods and
pastures noo," Mr. Twist would finish, for instance, with a sort of gulp
of satisfaction at having swallowed yet another solid slab of culture;
and Anna-Felicitas, returning suddenly to consciousness, would murmur,
with her eyes still shut and her head lolling limply, things like,
"After all, it _does_ rhyme with blue. I wonder why, then, one still
doesn't like it."

Then Mr. Twist would turn his spectacles towards her in mild inquiry,
and Anna-Rose, as always, would rush in and elaborately explain what
Anna-Felicitas meant, which was so remote from anything resembling what
she had said that Mr. Twist looked more mildly inquiring than ever.

Usually Anna-Felicitas didn't contradict Anna-Rose, being too sleepy or
too lazy, but sometimes she did, and then Anna-Rose got angry, and would
get what the Germans call a red head and look at Anna-Felicitas very
severely and say things, and Mr. Twist would close his book and watch
with that alert, cocked-up-ear look of a sympathetic and highly
interested terrier; but sooner or later the ship would always give a
roll, and Anna-Felicitas would shut her eyes and fade to paleness and
become the helpless bundle of sickness that nobody could possibly go on
being severe with.

The passengers in the second class were more generally friendly than
those in the first class. The first class sorted itself out into little
groups, and whispered about each other, as Anna-Rose observed, watching
their movements across the rope that separated her from them. The second
class remained to the end one big group, frayed out just a little at the
edge in one or two places.

The chief fraying out was where the Twinkler kids, as the second-class
young men, who knew no better, dared to call them, interrupted the
circle by talking apart with Mr. Twist. Mr. Twist had no business there.
He was a plutocrat of the first class; but in spite of the regulations
which cut off the classes from communicating, with a view apparently to
the continued sanitariness of the first class, the implication being
that the second class was easily infectious and probably overrun, there
he was every day and several times in every day. He must have heavily
squared the officials, the second-class young men thought until the day
when Mr. Twist let it somehow be understood that he had known the
Twinkler young ladies for years, dandled them in their not very remote
infancy on his already full-grown knee, and had been specially appointed
to look after them on this journey.

Mr. Twist did not specify who had appointed him, except to the Twinkler
young ladies themselves, and to them he announced that it was no less a
thing, being, or creature, than Providence. The second-class young men,
therefore, in spite of their rising spirits as danger lay further
behind, and their increasing tendency, peculiar to those who go on
ships, to become affectionate, found themselves no further on in
acquaintance with the Misses Twinkler the last day of the voyage than
they had been the first. Not that, under any other conditions, they
would have so much as noticed the existence of the Twinkler kids. In
their blue caps, pulled down tight to their eyebrows and hiding every
trace of hair, they looked like bald babies. They never came to meals;
their assiduous guardian, or whatever he was, feeding them on deck with
the care of a mother-bird for its fledglings, so that nobody except the
two German ladies in their cabin had seen them without the caps. The
young men put them down as half-grown only, somewhere about fourteen
they thought, and nothing but what, if they were boys instead of girls,
would have been called louts.

Still, a ship is a ship, and it is wonderful what can be managed in the
way of dalliance if one is shut up on one long enough; and the Misses
Twinkler, in spite of their loutishness, their apparent baldness, and
their constant round-eyed solemnity, would no doubt have been the
objects of advances before New York was reached if it hadn't been for
Mr. Twist. There wasn't a girl under forty in the second class on that
voyage, the young men resentfully pointed out to each other, except
these two kids who were too much under it, and a young lady of thirty
who sat manicuring her nails most of the day with her back supported by
a life-boat, and polishing them with red stuff till they flashed rosily
in the sun. This young lady was avoided for the first two days, while
the young men still remembered their mothers, because of what she looked
like; but was greatly loved for the rest of the voyage precisely for
that reason.

Still, every one couldn't get near her. She was only one; and there
were at least a dozen active, cooped-up young men taking lithe,
imprisoned exercise in long, swift steps up and down the deck, ready for
any sort of enterprise, bursting with energy and sea-air and spirits. So
that at last the left-overs, those of the young men the lady of the rosy
nails was less kind to, actually in their despair attempted ghastly
flirtations with the two German ladies. They approached them with a kind
of angry amorousness. They tucked them up roughly in rugs. They brought
them cushions as though they were curses. And it was through this
_rapprochement_, in the icy warmth of which the German ladies expanded
like bulky flowers and grew at least ten years younger, the ten years
they shed being their most respectable ones, that the ship became aware
of the nationality of the Misses Twinkler.

The German ladies were not really German, as they explained directly
there were no more submarines about, for a good woman, they said,
becomes automatically merged into her husband, and they, therefore, were
merged into Americans, both of them, and as loyal as you could find, but
the Twinklers were the real thing, they said,--real, unadulterated,
arrogant Junkers, which is why they wouldn't talk to anybody; for no
Junker, said the German ladies, thinks anybody good enough to be talked
to except another Junker. The German ladies themselves had by sheer luck
not been born Junkers. They had missed it very narrowly, but they had
missed it, for which they were very thankful seeing what believers they
were, under the affectionate manipulation of their husbands, in
democracy; but they came from the part of Germany where Junkers most
abound, and knew the sort of thing well.

It seemed to Mr. Twist, who caught scraps of conversation as he came
and went, that in the cabin the Twinklers must have alienated sympathy.
They had. They had done more; they had got themselves actively disliked.

From the first moment when Anna-Rose had dared to peep into their
shrouded bunks the ladies had been prejudiced, and this prejudice had
later flared up into a great and justified dislike. The ladies, to begin
with, hadn't known that they were von Twinklers, but had supposed them
mere Twinklers, and the von, as every German knows, makes all the
difference, especially in the case of Twinklers, who, without it, were a
race, the ladies knew, of small shopkeepers, laundresses and postmen in
the Westphalian district, but with it were one of the oldest families in
Prussia; known to all Germans; possessed of a name ensuring subservience
wherever it went.

In this stage of preliminary ignorance the ladies had treated the two
apparently ordinary Twinklers with the severity their conduct, age, and
obvious want of means deserved; and when, goaded by their questionings,
the smaller and more active Twinkler had let out her von at them much as
one lets loose a dog when one is alone and weak against the attacks of
an enemy, instead of falling in harmoniously with the natural change of
attitude of the ladies, which became immediately perfectly polite and
conciliatory, as well as motherly in its interest and curiosity, the two
young Junkers went dumb. They would have nothing to do with the most
motherly questioning. And just in proportion as the German ladies found
themselves full of eager milk of kindness, only asking to be permitted
to nourish, so did they find themselves subsequently, after a day or
two of such uncloaked repugnance to it, left with quantities of it
useless on their hands and all going sour.

From first to last the Twinklers annoyed them. As plain Twinklers they
had been tiresome in a hundred ways in the cabin, and as von Twinklers
they were intolerable in their high-nosed indifference.

It had naturally been expected by the elder ladies at the beginning of
the journey, that two obscure Twinklers of such manifest youth should
rise politely and considerately each morning very early, and get
themselves dressed and out of the way in at the most ten minutes,
leaving the cabin clear for the slow and careful putting together bit by
bit of that which ultimately emerged a perfect specimen of a lady of
riper years, but the weedy Twinkler insisted on lying in her berth so
late that if the ladies wished to be in time for the best parts of
breakfast, which they naturally and passionately did wish, they were
forced to dress in her presence, which was most annoying and awkward.

It is true she lay with closed eyes, apparently apathetic, but you never
know with persons of that age. Experience teaches not to trust them.
They shut their eyes, and yet seem, later on, to have seen; they
apparently sleep, and afterwards are heard asking their spectacled
American friend what people do on a ship, a place of so much gustiness,
if their hair gets blown off into the sea. Also the weedy one had a most
tiresome trick of being sick instantly every time Odol was used, or a
little brandy was drunk. Odol is most refreshing; it has a lovely smell,
without which no German bedroom is complete. And the brandy was not
common schnaps, but an old expensive brandy that, regarded as a smell,
was a credit to anybody's cabin.

The German ladies would have persisted, and indeed did persist in using
Odol and drinking a little brandy, indifferent to the feeble prayer from
the upper berth which floated down entreating them not to, but in their
own interests they were forced to give it up. The objectionable child
did not pray a second time; she passed immediately from prayer to
performance. Of two disagreeables wise women choose the lesser, but they
remain resentful.

The other Twinkler, the small active one, did get up early and take
herself off, but she frequently mixed up her own articles of toilet with
those belonging to the ladies, and would pin up her hair, preparatory to
washing her face, with their hairpins.

When they discovered this they hid them, and she, not finding any,
having come to the end of her own, lost no time in irresolution but
picked up their nail-scissors and pinned up her pigtails with that.

It was a particularly sacred pair of nail-scissors that almost
everything blunted. To use them for anything but nails was an outrage,
but the grossest outrage was to touch them at all. When they told her
sharply that the scissors were very delicate and she was instantly to
take them out of her hair, she tugged them out in a silence that was
itself impertinent, and pinned up her pigtails with their buttonhook
instead.

Then they raised themselves on their elbows in their berths and asked
her what sort of a bringing up she could have had, and they raised their
voices as well, for though they were grateful, as they later on
declared, for not having been born Junkers, they had nevertheless
acquired by practice in imitation some of the more salient Junker
characteristics.

"You are _salop_," said the upper berth lady,--which is untranslatable,
not on grounds of propriety but of idiom. It is not, however, a term of
praise.

"Yes, that is what you are--_salop_," echoed the lower berth lady. "And
your sister is _salop_ too--lying in bed till all hours."

"It is shameful for girls to be _salop_," said the upper berth.

"I didn't know it was your buttonhook. I thought it was ours," said
Anna-Rose, pulling this out too with vehemence.

"That is because you are _salop_," said the lower berth.

"And I didn't know it wasn't our scissors either."

"_Salop, salop_," said the lower berth, beating her hand on the wooden
edge of her bunk.

"And--and I'm sorry."

Anna-Rose's face was very red. She didn't look sorry, she looked angry.
And so she was; but it was with herself, for having failed in
discernment and grown-upness. She ought to have noticed that the
scissors and buttonhook were not hers. She had pounced on them with the
ill-considered haste of twelve years old. She hadn't been a lady,--she
whose business it was to be an example and mainstay to Anna-Felicitas,
in all things going first, showing her the way.

She picked up the sponge and plunged it into the water, and was just
going to plunge her annoyed and heated face in after it when the upper
berth lady said: "Your mother should be ashamed of herself to have
brought you up so badly."

"And send you off like this before she has taught you even the ABC of
manners," said the lower berth.

"Evidently," said the upper berth, "she can have none herself."

"Evidently," said the lower berth, "she is herself _salop_."

The sponge, dripping with water, came quickly out of the basin in
Anna-Rose's clenched fist. For one awful instant she stood there in her
nightgown, like some bird of judgment poised for dreadful flight, her
eyes flaming, her knotted pigtails bristling on the top of her head.

The wet sponge twitched in her hand. The ladies did not realize the
significance of that twitching, and continued to offer large angry faces
as a target. One of the faces would certainly have received the sponge
and Anna-Rose have been disgraced for ever, if it hadn't been for the
prompt and skilful intervention of Anna-Felicitas.

For Anna-Felicitas, roused from her morning languor by the unusual
loudness of the German ladies' voices, and smitten into attention and
opening of her eyes, heard the awful things they were saying and saw the
sponge. Instantly she knew, seeing it was Anna-Rose who held it, where
it would be in another second, and hastily putting out a shaking little
hand from her top berth, caught hold feebly but obstinately of the
upright ends of Anna-Rose's knotted pigtails.

"I'm going to be sick," she announced with great presence of mind and
entire absence of candour.

She knew, however, that she only had to sit up in order to be sick, and
the excellent child--_das gute Kind_, as her father used to call her
because she, so conveniently from the parental point of view, invariably
never wanted to be or do anything particularly--without hesitation
sacrificed herself in order to save her sister's honour, and sat up and
immediately was.

By the time Anna-Rose had done attending to her, all fury had died out.
She never could see Anna Felicitas lying back pale and exhausted after
one of these attacks without forgiving her and everybody else
everything.

She climbed up on the wooden steps to smoothe her pillow and tuck her
blanket round her, and when Anna-Felicitas, her eyes shut, murmured,
"Christopher--don't mind _them_--" and she suddenly realized, for they
never called each other by those names except in great moments of
emotion when it was necessary to cheer and encourage, what
Anna-Felicitas had saved her from, and that it had been done
deliberately, she could only whisper back, because she was so afraid of
crying, "No, no, Columbus dear--of course--who really cares about
_them_--" and came down off the steps with no fight left in her.

Also the wrath of the ladies was considerably assuaged. They had
retreated behind their curtains until the so terribly unsettled Twinkler
should be quiet again, and when once more they drew them a crack apart
in order to keep an eye on what the other one might be going to do next
and saw her doing nothing except, with meekness, getting dressed, they
merely inquired what part of Westphalia she came from, and only in the
tone they asked it did they convey that whatever part it was, it was
anyhow a contemptible one.

"We don't come from Westphalia," said Anna-Rose, bristling a little, in
spite of herself, at their persistent baiting.

Anna-Felicitas listened in cold anxiousness. She didn't want to have to
be sick again. She doubted whether she could bear it.

"You must come from somewhere," said the lower berth, "and being a
Twinkler it must be Westphalia."

"We don't really," said Anna-Rose, mindful of Anna-Felicitas's words
and making a great effort to speak politely. "We come from England."

"England!" cried the lower berth, annoyed by this quibbling. "You were
born in Westphalia. All Twinklers are born in Westphalia."

"Invariably they are," said the upper berth. "The only circumstance that
stops them is if their mothers happen to be temporarily absent."

"But we weren't, really," said Anna-Rose, continuing her efforts to
remain bland.

"Are you pretending--pretending to _us_," said the lower berth lady,
again beating her hand on the edge of her bunk, "that you are not
German?"

"Our father was German," said Anna-Rose, driven into a corner, "but I
don't suppose he is now. I shouldn't think he'd want to go on being one
directly he got to a really neutral place."

"Has he fled his country?" inquired the lower berth sternly, scenting
what she had from the first suspected, something sinister in the
Twinkler background.

"I suppose one might call it that," said Anna-Rose after a pause of
consideration, tying her shoe-laces.

"Do you mean to say," said the ladies with one voice, feeling themselves
now on the very edge of a scandal, "he was forced to fly from
Westphalia?"

"I suppose one might put it that way," said Anna-Rose, again
considering.

She took her cap off its hook and adjusted it over her hair with a
deliberation intended to assure Anna-Felicitas that she was remaining
calm. "Except that it wasn't from Westphalia he flew, but Prussia," she
said.

"Prussia?" cried the ladies as one woman, again rising themselves on
their elbows.

"That's where our father lived," said Anna-Rose, staring at them in her
surprise at their surprise. "So of course, as he lived there, when he
died he did that there too."

"Prussia?" cried the ladies again. "He died? You said your father fled
his country."

"No. _You_ said that," said Anna-Rose.

She gave her cap a final tug down over her ears and turned to the door.
She felt as if she quite soon again in spite of Anna-Felicitas, might
not be able to be a lady.

"After all, it _is_ what you do when you go to heaven," she said as she
opened the door, unable to resist, according to her custom, having the
last word.

"But Prussia?" they still cried, still button-holing her, as it were,
from afar. "Then--you were born in Prussia?"

"Yes, but we couldn't help it," said Anna-Rose; and shut the door
quickly behind her.




CHAPTER VIII


Mr. Twist, who was never able to be anything but kind--he had the most
amiable mouth and chin in the world, and his name was Edward--took a
lively interest in the plans and probable future of the two Annas. He
also took a lively and solicitous interest in their present, and a
profoundly sympathetic one in their past. In fact, their three tenses
interested him to the exclusion of almost everything else, and his chief
desire was to see them safely through any shoals there might be waiting
them in the shape of Uncle Arthur's friends--he distrusted Uncle Arthur,
and therefore his friends--into the safe and pleasant waters of real
American hospitality and kindliness.

He knew that such waters abounded for those who could find the tap. He
reminded himself of that which he had been taught since childhood, of
the mighty heart of America which, once touched, would take persons like
the twins right in and never let them out again. But it had to be
touched. It had, as it were, to be put in connection with them by means
of advertisement. America, he reflected, was a little deaf. She had to
be shouted to. But once she heard, once she thoroughly grasped ...

He cogitated much in his cabin--one with a private bathroom, for Mr.
Twist had what Aunt Alice called ample means--on these two defenceless
children. If they had been Belgians now, or Serbians, or any persons
plainly in need of relief! As it was, America would be likely, he
feared, to consider that either Germany or England ought to be looking
after them, and might conceivably remain chilly and uninterested.

Uncle Arthur, it appeared, hadn't many friends in America, and those he
had didn't like him. At least that was what Mr. Twist gathered from the
conversation of Anna-Rose. She didn't positively assert but she very
candidly conjectured, and Mr. Twist could quite believe that Uncle
Arthur's friends wouldn't be warm ones. Their hospitality he could
imagine fleeting and perfunctory. They would pass on the Twinklers as
soon as possible, as indeed why should they not? And presently some
dreary small job would be found for them, some job as pupil-teacher or
girls' companion in the sterile atmosphere of a young ladies' school.

As much as a man of habitually generous impulses could dislike, Mr.
Twist disliked Uncle Arthur. Patriotism was nothing at any time to Mr.
Twist compared to humanity, and Uncle Arthur's particular kind of
patriotism was very odious to him. To wreak it on these two poor aliens!
Mr. Twist had no words for it. They had been cut adrift at a tender age,
an age Mr. Twist, as a disciplined American son and brother, was unable
to regard unmoved, and packed off over the sea indifferent to what might
happen to them so long as Uncle Arthur knew nothing about it. Having
flung these kittens into the water to swim or drown, so long as he
didn't have to listen to their cries while they were doing it, Uncle
Arthur apparently cared nothing.

All Mr. Twist's chivalry, of which there was a great deal, rose up
within him at the thought of Uncle Arthur. He wanted to go and ask him
what he meant by such conduct, and earnestly inquire of him whether he
called himself a man; but as he knew he couldn't do this, being on a
ship heading for New York, he made up for it by taking as much care of
the ejected nieces as if he were an uncle himself,--but the right sort
of uncle, the sort you have in America, the sort that regards you as a
sacred and precious charge.

In his mind's eye Mr. Twist saw Uncle Arthur as a typical bullying,
red-necked Briton, with short side-whiskers. He pictured him under-sized
and heavy-footed, trudging home from golf through the soppy green fields
of England to his trembling household. He was quite disconcerted one day
to discover from something Anna-Rose said that he was a tall man, and
not fat at all, except in one place.

"Indeed," said Mr. Twist, hastily rearranging his mind's-eye view of
Uncle Arthur.

"He goes fat suddenly," said Anna-Felicitas, waking from one of her
dozes. "As though he had swallowed a bomb, and it had stuck when it got
to his waistcoat."

"If you can imagine it," added Anna-Rose politely, ready to explain and
describe further if required.

But Mr. Twist could imagine it. He readjusted his picture of Uncle
Arthur, and this time got him right,--the tall, not bad-looking man,
clean-shaven and with more hair a great deal than he, Mr. Twist, had. He
had thought of him as an old ruffian; he now perceived that he could be
hardly more than middle-aged and that Aunt Alice, a lady for whom he
felt an almost painful sympathy, had a lot more of Uncle Arthur to get
through before she was done.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, accepting the word middle-aged as correct.
"Neither of his ends looks much older than yours do. He's aged in the
middle. That's the only place. Where the bomb is."

"I suppose that's why it's called middle-aged," said Anna-Felicitas
dreamily. "One middle-ages first, and from there it just spreads. It
must be queer," she added pensively, "to watch oneself gradually
rotting."

These were the sorts of observations, Mr. Twist felt, that might
prejudice his mother against the twins If they could be induced not to
say most of the things they did say when in her presence, he felt that
his house, of all houses in America, should be offered them as a refuge
whenever they were in need of one. But his mother was not, he feared,
very adaptable. In her house--it was legally his, but it never felt as
if it were--people adapted themselves to her. He doubted whether the
twins could or would. Their leading characteristic, he had observed, was
candour. They had no _savoir faire_. They seemed incapable of anything
but naturalness, and their particular type of naturalness was not one,
he was afraid, that his mother would understand.

She had not been out of her New England village, a place called briefly,
with American economy of time, Clark, for many years, and her ideal of
youthful femininity was still that which she had been herself. She had,
if unconsciously, tried to mould Mr. Twist also on these lines, in spite
of his being a boy, and owing to his extreme considerateness had not yet
discovered her want of success. For years, indeed, she had been
completely successful, and Mr. Twist arrived at and embarked on
adolescence with the manners and ways of thinking of a perfect lady.

Till he was nineteen he was educated at home, as it were at his mother's
knee, at any rate within reach of that sacred limb, and she had taught
him to reverence women; the reason given, or rather conveyed, being that
he had had and still was having a mother. Which he was never to forget.
In hours of temptation. In hours of danger. Mr. Twist, with his virginal
white mind, used to wonder when the hours of temptation and of danger
would begin, and rather wish, in the elegant leisure of his
half-holidays, that they soon would so that he might show how determined
he was to avoid them.

For the ten years from his father's death till he went to Harvard, he
lived with his mother and sister and was their assiduous attendant. His
mother took the loss of his father badly. She didn't get over it, as
widows sometimes do, and grow suddenly ten years younger. The sight of
her, so black and broken, of so daily recurring a patience, of such
frequent deliberate brightening for the sake of her children, kept Mr.
Twist, as he grew up, from those thoughts which sometimes occur to young
men and have to do with curves and dimples. He was too much absorbed by
his mother to think on such lines. He was flooded with reverence and
pity. Through her, all women were holy to him. They were all mothers,
either actual or to be--after, of course, the proper ceremonies. They
were all people for whom one leapt up and opened doors, placed chairs
out of draughts, and fetched black shawls. On warm spring days, when he
was about eighteen, he told himself earnestly that it would be a
profanity, a terrible secret sinning, to think amorously--yes, he
supposed the word was amorously--while there under his eyes, pervading
his days from breakfast to bedtime, was that mourning womanhood, that
lopped life, that example of brave doing without any hope or expectation
except what might be expected or hoped from heaven. His mother was
wonderful the way she bore things. There she was, with nothing left to
look forward to in the way of pleasures except the resurrection, yet
she did not complain.

But after he had been at Harvard a year a change came over Mr. Twist.
Not that he did not remain dutiful and affectionate, but he perceived
that it was possible to peep round the corners of his mother, the
rock-like corners that had so long jutted out between him and the view,
and on the other side there seemed to be quite a lot of interesting
things going on. He continued, however, only to eye most of them from
afar, and the nearest he got to temptation while at Harvard was to read
"Madame Bovary."

After Harvard he was put into an engineering firm, for the Twists only
had what would in English money be five thousand pounds a year, and
belonged therefore, taking dollars as the measure of standing instead of
birth, to the middle classes. Aunt Alice would have described such an
income as ample means; Mrs. Twist called it straitened circumstances,
and lived accordingly in a condition of perpetual self-sacrifice and
doings without. She had a car, but it was only a car, not a
Pierce-Arrow; and there was a bathroom to every bedroom, but there were
only six bedrooms; and the house stood on a hill and looked over the
most beautiful woods, but they were somebody else's woods. She felt, as
she beheld the lives of those of her neighbours she let her eyes rest
on, who were the millionaires dotted round about the charming environs
of Clark, that she was indeed a typical widow,--remote, unfriended,
melancholy, poor.

Mrs. Twist might feel poor, but she was certainly comfortable. It was
her daughter Edith's aim in life to secure for her the comfort and
leisure necessary for any grief that wishes to be thorough. The house
was run beautifully by Edith. There were three servants, of whom Edith
was one. She was the lady's maid, the head cook, and the family butler.
And Mr. Twist, till he went to Harvard, might be described as the
page-boy, and afterwards in his vacations as the odd man about the
house. Everything centred round their mother. She made a good deal of
work, because of being so anxious not to give trouble. She wouldn't get
out of the way of evil, but bleakly accepted it. She wouldn't get out of
a draught, but sat in it till one or other of her children remembered
they hadn't shut the door. When the inevitable cold was upon her and she
was lamentably coughing, she would mention the door for the first time,
and quietly say she hadn't liked to trouble them to shut it, they had
seemed so busy with their own affairs.

But after he had been in the engineering firm a little while, a further
change came over Mr. Twist. He was there to make money, more money, for
his mother. The first duty of an American male had descended on him. He
wished earnestly to fulfil it creditably, in spite of his own tastes
being so simple that his income of £5000--it was his, not his mother's,
but it didn't feel as if it were--would have been more than sufficient
for him. Out of engineering, then, was he to wrest all the things that
might comfort his mother. He embarked on his career with as determined
an expression on his mouth as so soft and friendly a mouth could be made
to take, and he hadn't been in it long before he passed out altogether
beyond the line of thinking his mother had laid down for him, and
definitely grew up.

The office was in New York, far enough away from Clark for him to be at
home only for the Sundays. His mother put him to board with her brother
Charles, a clergyman, the rector of the Church of Angelic Refreshment
at the back of Tenth Street, and the teapot out of which Uncle Charles
poured his tea at his hurried and uncomfortable meals--for he practised
the austerities and had no wife--dribbled at its spout. Hold it as
carefully as one might it dribbled at its spout, and added to the
confused appearance of the table by staining the cloth afresh every time
it was used.

Mr. Twist, who below the nose was nothing but kindliness and generosity,
his slightly weak chin, his lavishly-lipped mouth, being all amiability
and affection, above the nose was quite different. In the middle came
his nose, a nose that led him to improve himself, to read and meditate
the poets, to be tenacious in following after the noble; and above were
eyes in which simplicity sat side by side with appreciation; and above
these was the forehead like a dome; and behind this forehead were
inventions.

He had not been definitely aware that he was inventive till he came into
daily contact with Uncle Charles's teapot. In his boyhood he had often
fixed up little things for Edith,--she was three years older than he,
and was even then canning and preserving and ironing,--little
simplifications and alleviations of her labour; but they had been just
toys, things that had amused him to put together and that he forgot as
soon as they were done. But the teapot revealed to him clearly what his
forehead was there for. He would not and could not continue, being the
soul of considerateness, to spill tea on Uncle Charles's table-cloth at
every meal--they had tea at breakfast, and at luncheon, and at
supper--and if he were thirsty he spilled it several times at every
meal. For a long time he coaxed the teapot. He was thoughtful with it.
He handled it with the most delicate precision. He gave it time. He
never hurried it. He never filled it more than half full. And yet at the
end of every pouring, out came the same devastating dribble on to the
cloth.

Then he went out and bought another teapot, one of a different pattern,
with a curved spout instead of a straight one.

The same thing happened.

Then he went to Wanamaker's, and spent an hour in the teapot section
trying one pattern after the other, patiently pouring water, provided by
a tipped but languid and supercilious assistant, out of each different
make of teapot into cups.

They all dribbled.

Then Mr. Twist went home and sat down and thought. He thought and
thought, with his dome-like forehead resting on his long thin hand; and
what came out of his forehead at last, sprang out of it as complete in
every detail as Pallas Athene when she very similarly sprang, was that
now well-known object on every breakfast table, Twist's Non-Trickler
Teapot.

In five years Mr. Twist made a fortune out of the teapot. His mother
passed from her straitened circumstances to what she still would only
call a modest competence, but what in England would have been regarded
as wallowing in money. She left off being middle-class, and was received
into the lower upper-class, the upper part of this upper-class being
reserved for great names like Astor, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. With
these Mrs. Twist could not compete. She would no doubt some day, for
Edward was only thirty and there were still coffee-pots; but what he was
able to add to the family income helped her for a time to bear the loss
of the elder Twist with less of bleakness in her resignation. It was as
though an east wind veered round for a brief space a little to the
south.

Being naturally, however, inclined to deprecation, when every other
reason for it was finally removed by her assiduous son she once more
sought out and firmly laid hold of the departed Twist, and hung her
cherished unhappiness up on him again as if he were a peg. When the
novelty of having a great many bedrooms instead of six, and a great deal
of food not to eat but to throw away, and ten times of everything else
instead of only once, began to wear off, Mrs. Twist drooped again, and
pulled the departed Twist out of the decent forgetfulness of the past,
and he once more came to dinner in the form of his favourite dishes, and
assisted in the family conversations by means of copious quotations from
his alleged utterances.

Mr. Twist's income was anything between sixty and seventy thousand
pounds a year by the time the war broke out. Having invented and
patented the simple device that kept the table-cloths of America, and
indeed of Europe, spotless, all he had to do was to receive his
percentages; sit still, in fact, and grow richer. But so much had he
changed since his adolescence that he preferred to stick to his
engineering and his office in New York rather than go home and be happy
with his mother.

She could not understand this behaviour in Edward. She understood his
behaviour still less when he went off to France in 1915, himself
equipping and giving the ambulance he drove.

For a year his absence, and the dangers he was running, divided Mrs.
Twist's sorrows into halves. Her position as a widow with an only son in
danger touched the imagination of Clark, and she was never so much
called upon as during this year. Now Edward was coming home for a rest,
and there was a subdued flutter about her, rather like the stirring of
the funeral plumes on the heads of hearse-horses.

While he was crossing the Atlantic and Red-Crossing the Twinklers--this
was one of Anna-Felicitas's epigrams and she tried Anna-Rose's patience
severely by asking her not once but several times whether she didn't
think it funny, whereas Anna-Rose disliked it from the first because of
the suggestion it contained that Mr. Twist regarded what he did for them
as works of mercy--while Mr. Twist was engaged in these activities, at
his home in Clark all the things Edith could think of that he used most
to like to eat were being got ready. There was an immense slaughtering
of chickens, and baking and churning. Edith, who being now the head
servant of many instead of three was more than double as hard-worked as
she used to be, was on her feet those last few days without stopping.
And she had to go and meet Edward in New York as well. Whether Mrs.
Twist feared that he might not come straight home or whether it was what
she said it was, that dear Edward must not be the only person on the
boat who had no one to meet him, is not certain; what is certain is that
when it came to the point, and Edith had to start, Mrs. Twist had
difficulty in maintaining her usual brightness.

Edith would be a whole day away, and perhaps a night if the _St. Luke_
got in late, for Clark is five hours' train journey from New York, and
during all that time Mrs. Twist would be uncared for. She thought Edith
surprisingly thoughtless to be so much pleased to go. She examined her
flat and sinewy form with disapproval when she came in hatted and booted
to say good-bye. No wonder nobody married Edith. And the money wouldn't
help her either now--she was too old. She had missed her chances, poor
thing.

Mrs. Twist forgot the young man there had been once, years before, when
Edward was still in the school room, who had almost married Edith. He
was a lusty and enterprising young man, who had come to Clark to stay
with a neighbour, and he had had nothing to do through a long vacation,
and had taken to dropping in at all hours and interrupting Edith in her
housekeeping; and Edith, even then completely flat but of a healthy
young uprightness and bright of eyes and hair, had gone silly and
forgotten how to cook, and had given her mother, who surely had enough
sorrows already, an attack of indigestion.

Mrs. Twist, however, had headed the young man off. Edith was too
necessary to her at that time. She could not possibly lose Edith. And
besides, the only way to avoid being a widow is not to marry. She told
herself that she could not bear the thought of poor Edith's running the
risk of an affliction similar to her own. If one hasn't a husband one
cannot lose him, Mrs. Twist clearly saw. If Edith married she would
certainly lose him unless he lost her. Marriage had only two solutions,
she explained to her silent daughter,--she would not, of course, discuss
with her that third one which America has so often flown to for solace
and relief,--only two, said Mrs. Twist, and they were that either one
died oneself, which wasn't exactly a happy thing, or the other one did.
It was only a question of time before one of the married was left alone
to mourn. Marriage began rosily no doubt, but it always ended black.
"And think of my having to see you like _this_" she said, with a gesture
indicating her sad dress.

Edith was intimidated; and the young man presently went away whistling.
He was the only one. Mrs. Twist had no more trouble. He passed entirely
from her mind; and as she looked at Edith dressed for going to meet
Edward in the clothes she went to church in on Sundays, she
unconsciously felt a faint contempt for a woman who had had so much time
to get married in and yet had never achieved it. She herself had been
married at twenty; and her hair even now, after all she had gone
through, was hardly more gray than Edith's.

"Your hat's crooked," she said, when Edith straightened herself after
bending down to kiss her good-bye; and then, after all unable to bear
the idea of being left alone while Edith, with that pleased face, went
off to New York to see Edward before she did, she asked her, if she
still had a minute to spare, to help her to the sofa, because she felt
faint.

"I expect the excitement has been too much for me," she murmured, lying
down and shutting her eyes; and Edith, disciplined in affection and
attentiveness, immediately took off her hat and settled down to getting
her mother well again in time for Edward.

Which is why nobody met Mr. Twist on his arrival in New York, and he
accordingly did things, as will be seen, which he mightn't otherwise
have done.




CHAPTER IX


When the _St. Luke_ was so near its journey's end that people were
packing up, and the word Nantucket was frequent in the scraps of talk
the twins heard, they woke up from the unworried condition of mind Mr.
Twist's kindness and the dreamy monotony of the days had produced in
them, and began to consider their prospects with more attention. This
attention soon resulted in anxiety. Anna-Rose showed hers by being
irritable. Anna-Felicitas didn't show hers at all.

It was all very well, so long as they were far away from America and
never quite sure that a submarine mightn't settle their future for them
once and for all, to feel big, vague, heroic things about a new life and
a new world and they two Twinklers going to conquer it; but when the new
world was really upon them, and the new life, with all the multitudinous
details that would have to be tackled, going to begin in a few hours,
their hearts became uneasy and sank within them. England hadn't liked
them. Suppose America didn't like them either? Uncle Arthur hadn't liked
them. Suppose Uncle Arthur's friends didn't like them either? Their
hearts sank to, and remained in, their boots.

Round Anna-Rose's waist, safely concealed beneath her skirt from what
Anna-Felicitas called the predatory instincts of their fellow-passengers,
was a chamois-leather bag containing their passports, a letter to the
bank where their £200 was, a letter to those friends of Uncle Arthur's
who were to be tried first, a letter to those other friends of his who
were to be the second line of defence supposing the first one failed,
and ten pounds in two £5 notes.

Uncle Arthur, grievously grumbling, and having previously used in bed
most of those vulgar words that made Aunt Alice so miserable, had given
Anna-Rose one of the £5 notes for the extra expenses of the journey
till, in New York, she should be able to draw on the £200, though what
expenses there could be for a couple of girls whose passage was paid
Uncle Arthur was damned, he alleged, if he knew; and Aunt Alice had
secretly added the other. This was all Anna-Rose's ready money, and it
would have to be changed into dollars before reaching New York so as to
be ready for emergencies on arrival. She judged from the growing
restlessness of the passengers that it would soon be time to go and
change it. How many dollars ought she to get?

Mr. Twist was absent, packing his things. She ought to have asked him
long ago, but they seemed so suddenly to have reached the end of their
journey. Only yesterday there was the same old limitless sea everywhere,
the same old feeling that they were never going to arrive. Now the waves
had all gone, and one could actually see land. The New World. The place
all their happiness or unhappiness would depend on.

She laid hold of Anna-Felicitas, who was walking about just as if she
had never been prostrate on a deck-chair in her life, and was going to
say something appropriate and encouraging on the Christopher and
Columbus lines; but Anna-Felicitas, who had been pondering the £5 notes
problem, wouldn't listen.

"A dollar," said Anna-Felicitas, worrying it out, "isn't like a
shilling or a mark, but on the other hand neither is it like a pound."

"No," said Anna-Rose, brought back to her immediate business.

"It's four times more than one, and five times less than the other,"
said Anna-Felicitas. "That's how you've got to count. That's what Aunt
Alice said."

"Yes. And then there's the exchange," said Anna-Rose, frowning. "As if
it wasn't complicated enough already, there's the exchange. Uncle Arthur
said we weren't to forget that."

Anna-Felicitas wanted to know what was meant by the exchange, and
Anna-Rose, unwilling to admit ignorance to Anna-Felicitas, who had to be
kept in her proper place, especially when one was just getting to
America and she might easily become above herself, said that it was
something that varied. ("The exchange, you know, varies," Uncle Arthur
had said when he gave her the £5 note. "You must keep your eye on the
variations." Anna-Rose was all eagerness to keep her eye on them, if
only she had known what and where they were. But one never asked
questions of Uncle Arthur. His answers, if one did, were confined to
expressions of anger and amazement that one didn't, at one's age,
already know.)

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas, for a moment glancing at Anna-Rose out of the
corner of her eye, considerately not pressing her further.

"I wish Mr. Twist would come," said Anna-Rose uneasily, looking in the
direction he usually appeared from.

"We won't always have _him_" remarked Anna-Felicitas.

"I never said we would," said Anna-Rose shortly.

The young lady of the nails appeared at that moment in a hat so
gorgeous that the twins stopped dead to stare. She had a veil on and
white gloves, and looked as if she were going for a walk in Fifth Avenue
the very next minute.

"Perhaps we ought to be getting ready too," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Yes. I wish Mr. Twist would come--"

"Perhaps we'd better begin and practise not having Mr. Twist," said
Anna-Felicitas, as one who addresses nobody specially and means nothing
in particular.

"If anybody's got to practise that, it'll be you," said Anna-Rose.
"There'll be no one to roll you up in rugs now, remember. I won't."

"But I don't want to be rolled up in rugs," said Anna-Felicitas mildly.
"I shall be walking about New York."

"Oh, _you'll_ see," said Anna-Rose irritably.

She was worried about the dollars. She was worried about the tipping,
and the luggage, and the arrival, and Uncle Arthur's friends, whose
names were Mr. and Mrs. Clouston K. Sack; so naturally she was
irritable. One is. And nobody knew and understood this better than
Anna-Felicitas.

"Let's go and put on our hats and get ready," she said, after a moment's
pause during which she wondered whether, in the interests of Anna-Rose's
restoration to calm, she mightn't have to be sick again. She did hope
she wouldn't have to. She had supposed she had done with that. It is
true there were now no waves, but she knew she had only to go near the
engines and smell the oil. "Let's go and put on our hats," she
suggested, slipping her hand through Anna-Rose's arm.

Anna-Rose let herself be led away, and they went to their cabin; and
when they came out of it half an hour later, no longer with that bald
look their caps had given them, the sun catching the little rings of
pale gold hair that showed for the first time, and clad, instead of in
the disreputable jerseys that they loved, in neat black coats and
skirts--for they still wore mourning when properly dressed--with
everything exactly as Aunt Alice had directed for their arrival, the
young men of the second class could hardly believe their eyes.

"You'll excuse me saying so," said one of them to Anna-Felicitas as she
passed him, "but you're looking very well to-day."

"I expect that's because I _am_ well," said Anna-Felicitas amiably.

Mr. Twist, when he saw them, threw up his hands and ejaculated "My!"

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas, who was herself puzzled by the difference
the clothes had made in Anna-Rose after ten solid days of cap and
jersey, "I think it's our hats. They do somehow seem very splendid."

"Splendid?" echoed Mr. Twist. "Why, they'd make the very angels jealous,
and get pulling off their haloes and kicking them over the edge of
heaven."

"What is so wonderful is that Aunt Alice should ever have squeezed them
out of Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Rose, gazing lost in admiration at
Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't disgorge nice hats easily at all."

And one of the German ladies muttered to the other, as her eye fell on
Anna-Felicitas, "_Ja, ja, die hat Rasse._"

And it was only because it was the other German lady's hair that spent
the night in a different part of the cabin from her head and had been
seen doing it by Anna-Felicitas, that she cavilled and was grudging.
"_Gewiss_," she muttered back, "_bis auf der Nase. Die Nase aber
entfremdet mich. Die ist keine echte Junkernase_."

So that the Twinklers had quite a success, and their hearts came a
little way out of their boots; only a little way, though, for there were
the Clouston K. Sacks looming bigger into their lives every minute now.

Really it was a beautiful day, and, as Aunt Alice used to say, that does
make such a difference. A clear pale loveliness of light lay over New
York, and there was a funny sprightliness in the air, a delicate dry
crispness. The trees on the shore, when they got close, were delicate
too--delicate pale gold, and green, and brown, and they seemed so
composed and calm, the twins thought, standing there quietly after the
upheavals and fidgetiness of the Atlantic. New York was well into the
Fall, the time of year when it gets nearest to beauty. The beauty was
entirely in the atmosphere, and the lights and shadows it made. It was
like an exquisite veil flung over an ugly woman, hiding, softening,
encouraging hopes.

Everybody on the ship was crowding eagerly to the sides. Everybody was
exhilarated, and excited, and ready to be friendly and talkative. They
all waved whenever another boat passed. Those who knew America pointed
out the landmarks to those who didn't. Mr. Twist pointed them out to the
twins, and so did the young man who had remarked favourably on
Anna-Felicitas's looks, and as they did it simultaneously and there was
so much to look at and so many boats to wave to, it wasn't till they had
actually got to the statue of Liberty that Anna-Rose remembered her £10
and the dollars.

The young man was saying how much the statue of Liberty had cost, and
the word dollars made Anna-Rose turn with a jump to Mr. Twist.

"Oh," she exclaimed, clutching at her chamois leather bag where it very
visibly bulged out beneath her waistband, "I forgot--I must get change.
And how much do you think we ought to tip the stewardess? I've never
tipped anybody yet ever, and I wish--I wish I hadn't to."

She got quite red. It seemed to her dreadful to offer money to someone
so much older than herself and who till almost that very morning had
treated her and Anna-Felicitas like the naughtiest of tiresome children.
Surely she would be most offended at being tipped by people such years
younger than herself?

Mr. Twist thought not.

"A dollar," said the young man. "One dollar. That's the figure. Not a
cent more, or you girls'll get inflating prices and Wall Street'll bust
up."

Anna-Rose, not heeding him and clutching nervously the place where her
bag was, told Mr. Twist that the stewardess hadn't seemed to mind them
quite so much last night, and still less that morning, and perhaps some
little memento--something that wasn't money--

"Give her those caps of yours," said the young man, bursting into
hilarity; but indeed it wasn't his fault that he was a low young man.

Mr. Twist, shutting him out of the conversation by interposing a
shoulder, told Anna-Rose he had noticed stewardesses, and also stewards,
softened when journeys drew near their end, but that it didn't mean they
wanted mementos. They wanted money; and he would do the tipping for her
if she liked.

Anna-Rose jumped at it. This tipping of the stewardess had haunted her
at intervals throughout the journey whenever she woke up at night. She
felt that, not having yet in her life tipped anybody, it was very hard
that she couldn't begin with somebody more her own size.

"Then if you don't mind coming behind the funnel," she said, "I can give
you my £5 notes, and perhaps you would get them changed for me and
deduct what you think the stewardess ought to have."

Mr. Twist, and also Anna-Felicitas, who wasn't allowed to stay behind
with the exuberant young man though she was quite unconscious of his
presence, went with Anna-Rose behind the funnel, where after a great
deal of private fumbling, her back turned to them, she produced the two
much-crumpled £5 notes.

"The steward ought to have something too," said Mr. Twist.

"Oh, I'd be glad if you'd do him as well," said Anna-Rose eagerly. "I
don't think I _could_ offer him a tip. He has been so fatherly to us.
And imagine offering to tip one's father."

Mr. Twist laughed, and said she would get over this feeling in time. He
promised to do what was right, and to make it clear that the tips he
bestowed were Twinkler tips; and presently he came back with messages of
thanks from the tipped--such polite ones from the stewardess that the
twins were astonished--and gave Anna-Rose a packet of very dirty-looking
slices of green paper, which were dollar bills, he said, besides a
variety of strange coins which he spread out on a ledge and explained to
her.

"The exchange was favourable to you to-day," said Mr. Twist, counting
out the money.

"How nice of it," said Anna-Rose politely. "Did you keep your eye on
its variations?" she added a little loudly, with a view to rousing
respect in Anna-Felicitas who was lounging against a seat and showing a
total absence of every kind of appropriate emotion.

"Certainly," said Mr. Twist after a slight pause. "I kept both my eyes
on all of them."

Mr. Twist had, it appeared, presented the steward and stewardess each
with a dollar on behalf of the Misses Twinkler, but because the exchange
was so favourable this had made no difference to the £5 notes. Reducing
each £5 note into German marks, which was the way the Twinklers, in
spite of a year in England, still dealt in their heads with money before
they could get a clear idea of it, there would have been two hundred
marks; and as it took, roughly, four marks to make a dollar, the two
hundred marks would have to be divided by four; which, leaving aside
that extra complication of variations in the exchange, and regarding the
exchange for a moment and for purposes of simplification as keeping
quiet for a bit and resting, should produce, also roughly, said
Anna-Rose a little out of breath as she got to the end of her
calculation, fifty dollars.

"Correct," said Mr. Twist, who had listened with respectful attention.
"Here they are."

"I said roughly," said Anna-Rose. "It can't be _exactly_ fifty dollars.
The tips anyhow would alter that."

"Yes, but you forget the exchange."

Anna-Rose was silent. She didn't want to go into that before
Anna-Felicitas. Of the two, she was supposed to be the least bad at
sums. Their mother had put it that way, refusing to say, as Anna-Rose
industriously tried to trap her into saying, that she was the better of
the two. But even so, the difference entitled her to authority on the
subject with Anna-Felicitas, and by dint of doing all her calculations
roughly, as she was careful to describe her method, she allowed room for
withdrawal and escape where otherwise the inflexibility of figures might
have caught her tight and held her down while Anna-Felicitas looked on
and was unable to respect her.

Evidently the exchange was something beneficent. She decided to rejoice
in it in silence, accept whatever it did, and refrain from asking
questions.

"So I did. Of course. The exchange," she said, after a little.

She gathered up the dollar bills and began packing them into her bag.
They wouldn't all go in, and she had to put the rest into her pocket,
for which also there were too many; but she refused Anna-Felicitas's
offer to put some of them in hers on the ground that sooner or later she
would be sure to forget they weren't her handkerchief and would blow her
nose with them.

"Thank you very much for being so kind," she said to Mr. Twist, as she
stuffed her pocket full and tried by vigorous patting to get it to look
inconspicuous. "We're never going to forget you, Anna-F. and me. We'll
write to you often, and we'll come and see you as often as you like."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas dreamily, as she watched the shore of Long
Island sliding past. "Of course you've got your relations, but relations
soon pall, and you may be quite glad after a while of a little fresh
blood."

Mr. Twist thought this very likely, and agreed with several other things
Anna-Felicitas, generalizing from Uncle Arthur, said about relations,
again with that air of addressing nobody specially and meaning nothing
in particular, while Anna-Rose wrestled with the obesity of her pocket.

"Whether you come to see me or not," said Mr. Twist, whose misgivings as
to the effect of the Twinklers on his mother grew rather than subsided,
"I shall certainly come to see you."

"Perhaps Mr. Sack won't allow followers," said Anna-Felicitas, her eyes
far away. "Uncle Arthur didn't. He wouldn't let the maids have any, so
they had to go out and do the following themselves. We had a follower
once, didn't we, Anna-R.?" she continued her voice pensive and
reminiscent. "He was a friend of Uncle Arthur's. Quite old. At least
thirty or forty. I shouldn't have thought he _could_ follow. But he did.
And he used to come home to tea with Uncle Arthur and produce boxes of
chocolate for us out of his pockets when Uncle Arthur wasn't looking. We
ate them and felt perfectly well disposed toward him till one day he
tried to kiss one of us--I forget which. And that, combined with the
chocolates, revealed him in his true colours as a follower, and we told
him they weren't allowed in that house and urged him to go to some place
where they were, or he would certainly be overtaken by Uncle Arthur's
vengeance, and we said how surprised we were, because he was so old and
we didn't know followers were as old as that ever."

"It seemed a very shady thing," said Anna-Rose, having subdued the
swollenness of her pocket, "to eat his chocolates and then not want to
kiss him, but we don't hold with kissing, Anna-F. and me. Still, we were
full of his chocolates; there was no getting away from that. So we
talked it over after he had gone, and decided that next day when he came
we'd tell him he might kiss one of us if he still wanted to, and we drew
lots which it was to be, and it was me, and I filled myself to the brim
with chocolates so as to feel grateful enough to bear it, but he didn't
come."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't come again for a long while, and
when he did there was no follow left in him. Quite the contrary."

Mr. Twist listened with the more interest to this story because it was
the first time Anna-Felicitas had talked since he knew her. He was used
to the inspiriting and voluble conversation of Anna-Rose who had looked
upon him as her best friend since the day he had wiped up her tears; but
Anna-Felicitas had been too unwell to talk. She had uttered languid and
brief observations from time to time with her eyes shut and her head
lolling loosely on her neck, but this was the first time she had been,
as it were, an ordinary human being, standing upright on her feet,
walking about, looking intelligently if pensively at the scenery, and in
a condition of affable readiness, it appeared, to converse.

Mr. Twist was a born mother. The more trouble he was given the more
attached he became. He had rolled Anna-Felicitas up in rugs so often
that to be not going to roll her up any more was depressing to him. He
was beginning to perceive this motherliness in him himself, and he gazed
through his spectacles at Anna-Felicitas while she sketched the rise and
fall of the follower, and wondered with an almost painful solicitude
what her fate would be in the hands of the Clouston Sacks.

Equally he wondered as to the other one's fate; for he could not think
of one Twinkler without thinking of the other. They were inextricably
mixed together in the impression they had produced on him, and they
dwelt together in his thoughts as one person called, generally,
Twinklers. He stood gazing at them, his motherly instincts uppermost,
his hearty yearning over them now that the hour of parting was so near
and his carefully tended chickens were going to be torn from beneath his
wing. Mr. Twist was domestic. He was affectionate. He would have loved,
though he had never known it, the sensation of pattering feet about his
house, and small hands clinging to the apron he would never wear. And it
was entirely characteristic of him that his invention, the invention
that brought him his fortune, should have had to do with a teapot.

But if his heart was uneasy within him at the prospect of parting from
his charges their hearts were equally uneasy, though not in the same
way. The very name of Clouston K. Sack was repugnant to Anna-Rose; and
Anna-Felicitas, less quick at disliking, turned it over cautiously in
her mind as one who turns over an unknown and distasteful object with
the nose of his umbrella. Even she couldn't quite believe that any good
thing could come out of a name like that, especially when it had got
into their lives through Uncle Arthur. Mr. Twist had never heard of the
Clouston Sacks, which made Anna-Rose still more distrustful. She wasn't
in the least encouraged when he explained the bigness of America and
that nobody in it ever knew everybody--she just said that everybody had
heard of Mr. Roosevelt, and her heart was too doubtful within her even
to mind being told, as he did immediately tell her within ear-shot of
Anna-Felicitas, that her reply was unreasonable.

Just at the end, as they were all three straining their eyes, no one
with more anxiety than Mr. Twist, to try and guess which of the crowd on
the landing-stage were the Clouston Sacks, they passed on their other
side the _Vaterland_, the great interned German liner at its moorings,
and the young man who had previously been so very familiar, as Anna-Rose
said, but who was only, Mr. Twist explained, being American, came
hurrying boldly up.

"You mustn't miss this," he said to Anna-Felicitas, actually seizing her
by the arm. "Here's something that'll make you feel home-like right
away."

And he led her off, and would have dragged her off but for
Anna-Felicitas's perfect non-resistance.

"He _is_ being familiar," said Anna-Rose to Mr. Twist, turning very red
and following quickly after him. "That's not just being American.
Everybody decent knows that if there's any laying hold of people's arms
to be done one begins with the eldest sister."

"Perhaps he doesn't realize that you _are_ the elder," said Mr. Twist.
"Strangers judge, roughly, by size."

"I'm afraid I'm going to have trouble with her," said Anna-Rose, not
heeding his consolations. "It isn't a sinecure, I assure you, being left
sole guardian and protector of somebody as pretty as all that. And the
worst of it is she's going on getting prettier. She hasn't nearly come
to the end of what she can do in that direction. I see it growing on
her. Every Sunday she's inches prettier than she was the Sunday before.
And wherever I take her to live, and however out of the way it is, I'm
sure the path to our front door is going to be black with suitors."

This dreadful picture so much perturbed her, and she looked up at Mr.
Twist with such worried eyes, that he couldn't refrain from patting her
on her shoulder.

"There, there," said Mr. Twist, and he begged her to be sure to
let him know directly she was in the least difficulty, or even
perplexity,--"about the suitors, for instance, or anything else.
You must let me be of some use in the world, you know," he said.

"But we shouldn't like it at all if we thought you were practising being
useful on us," said Anna-Rose "It's wholly foreign to our natures to
enjoy being the objects of anybody's philanthropy."

"Now I just wonder where you get all your long words from," said Mr.
Twist soothingly; and Anna-Rose laughed, and there was only one dimple
in the Twinkler family and Anna-Rose had got it.

"What do you want to get looking at _that_ for?" she
asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd
staring at the _Vaterland_, and got to where Anna-Felicitas
stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang
the young man was treating her to,--that terse, surprising, swift
hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was
hearing in such abundance for the first time.

The American passengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the
impotence of the great ship. Every one of them seemed to be violently
pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the _Vaterland_ as
every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and
presently arrived again,--the same ships she had seen depart coming back
unharmed, unhindered by her country's submarines. Only the two German
ladies, once more ignoring their American allegiance, looked angry. It
was incredible to them, simply _unfassbar_ as they said in their
thoughts, that any nation should dare inconvenience Germans, should dare
lay a finger, even the merest friendliest detaining one, on anything
belonging to the mighty, the inviolable Empire. Well, these Americans,
these dollar-grubbing Yankees, would soon get taught a sharp, deserved
lesson--but at this point they suddenly remembered they were Americans
themselves, and pulled up their thoughts violently, as it were, on their
haunches.

They turned, however, bitterly to the Twinkler girl as she pushed her
way through to her sister,--those renegade Junkers, those contemptible
little apostates--and asked her, after hearing her question to
Anna-Felicitas, with an extraordinary breaking out of pent-up emotion
where she, then, supposed she would have been at that moment if it
hadn't been for Germany.

"Not here I think," said Anna-Rose, instantly and fatally ready as she
always was to answer back and attempt what she called reasoned
conversation. "There wouldn't have been a war, so of course I wouldn't
have been here."

"Why, you wouldn't so much as have been born without Germany," said the
lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake
this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English
lie as to who began the war. "You owe your very existence to Germany.
You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of
life, instead of jeering at this representative--" she flung a finger
out toward the _Vaterland_--"this patient and dignified-in
-temporary-misfortune representative, of her power."

"I wasn't jeering," said Anna-Rose, defending herself and clutching at
Anna-Felicitas's sleeve to pull her away.

"You wouldn't have had a father at all but for Germany," said the other
lady, the one whose hair grew.

"And perhaps you will tell me," said the first one, "where you would
have been _then_."

"I don't believe," said Anna-Rose, her nose in the air, "I don't
believe I'd have ever been at a loss for a father."

The ladies, left speechless a moment by the arrogance as well as several
other things about this answer gave Anna-Rose an opportunity for further
reasoning with them, which she was unable to resist. "There are lots of
fathers," she said, "in England, who would I'm sure have been delighted
to take me on if Germany had failed me."

"England!"

"Take you on!"

"An English father for you? For a subject of the King of Prussia?"

"I--I'm afraid I--I'm going to be sick," gasped Anna-Felicitas suddenly.

"You're never going to be sick in this bit of bathwater, Miss Twinkler?"
exclaimed the young man, with the instant ungrudging admiration of one
who is confronted by real talent. "My, what a gift!"

Anna-Rose darted at Anna-Felicitas's drooping head, that which she had
been going to say back to the German ladies dissolving on her tongue.
"Oh no--_no_--" she wailed. "Oh _no_--not in your best hat, Columbus
darling--you can't--it's not done--and your hat'll shake off into the
water, and then there'll only be one between us and we shall never be
able to go out paying calls and things at the same time--come away and
sit down--Mr. Twist--Mr. Twist--oh, please come--"

Anna-Felicitas allowed herself to be led away, just in time as she
murmured, and sat down on the nearest seat and shut her eyes. She was
thankful Anna-Rose's attention had been diverted to her so instantly,
for it would have been very difficult to be sick with the ship as quiet
as one's own bedroom. Nothing short of the engine-room could have made
her sick now. She sat keeping her eyes shut and Anna-Rose's attention
riveted, wondering what she would do when there was no ship and
Anna-Rose was on the verge of hasty and unfortunate argument. Would she
have to learn to faint? But that would terrify poor Christopher so
dreadfully.

Anna-Felicitas pondered, her eyes shut, on this situation. Up to now in
her life she had always found that situations solved themselves. Given
time. And sometimes a little assistance. So, no doubt, would this one.
Anna-Rose would ripen and mellow. The German ladies would depart hence
and be no more seen; and it was unlikely she and Anna-Rose would meet at
such close quarters as a ship's cabin any persons so peculiarly and
unusually afflicting again. All situations solved themselves; or, if
they showed signs of not going to, one adopted the gentle methods that
helped them to get solved. Early in life she had discovered that objects
which cannot be removed or climbed over can be walked round. A little
deviousness, and the thing was done. She herself had in the most
masterly manner when she was four escaped church-going for several years
by a simple method, that seemed to her looking back very like an
inspiration, of getting round it. She had never objected to going, had
never put into words the powerful if vague dislike with which it filled
her when Sunday after Sunday she had to go and dangle her legs
helplessly for two hours from the chair she was put on in the enclosed
pew reserved for the _hohe gräfliche Herrschaften_ from the Slosh.

Her father, a strict observer of the correct and a pious believer in
God for other people, attended Divine Service as regularly as he wound
the clocks and paid the accounts. He _repräsentierte_, as the German
phrase went; and his wife and children were expected to _repräsentieren_
too. Which they did uncomplainingly; for when one has to do with
determined husbands and fathers it is quickest not to complain. But the
pins and needles that patient child endured, Anna-Felicitas remembered,
looking back through the years at the bunched-up figure on the chair as
at a stranger, were something awful. The edge of the chair just caught
her legs in the pins and needles place. If she had been a little bigger
or a little smaller it wouldn't have happened; as it was, St. Paul
wrestling with beasts at Ephesus wasn't more heroic than Anna-Felicitas
perceived that distant child to have been, silently Sunday after Sunday
bearing her legs. Then one Sunday something snapped inside her, and she
heard her own voice floating out into the void above the heads of the
mumbling worshippers, and it said with a terrible distinctness in a sort
of monotonous wail: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a
second time, in the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon
this: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a third time she
opened her mouth to repeat the outrageous statement, regardless of her
mother's startled hand laid on her arm, and of Anna-Rose's petrified
stare, and of the lifted faces of the congregation, and of the bent,
scandalized brows of the pastor,--impelled by something that possessed
her, unable to do anything but obey it; but her father, a man of deeds,
rose up in his place, took her in his arms, and carried her down the
stairs and out of the church. And the minute she found herself really
rescued, and out where the sun and wind, her well-known friends, were
larking about among the tombstones, she laid her cheek as affectionately
against her father's head as if she were a daughter to be proud of, and
would have purred if she had had had a purr as loudly as the most
satisfied and virtuous of cats.

"_Mein Kind_," said her father, standing her up on a convenient tomb so
that her eyes were level with his, "is it then true about the cold
potato?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas patting his face, pleased at what her legs
were feeling like again.

"_Mein Kind_," said her father, "do you not know it is wrong to lie?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas placidly, the heavenly blue of her eyes,
gazing straight into his, exactly like the mild sky above the trees.

"No?" echoed her father, staring at her. "But, _Kind_, you know what a
lie is?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him tenderly in her satisfaction at
being restored to a decent pair of legs; and as he still stood staring
at her she put her hands one on each of his cheeks and squeezed his face
together and murmured, "Oh, I do _love_ you."




CHAPTER X


Lost in the contemplation of a distant past Anna-Felicitas sat with her
eyes shut long after she needn't have.

She had forgotten about the German ladies, and America, and the future
so instantly pressing on her, and was away on the shores of the Baltic
again, where bits of amber where washed up after a storm, and the pale
rushes grew in shallow sunny water that was hardly salt, and the air
seemed for ever sweet with lilac. All the cottage gardens in the little
village that clustered round a clearing in the trees had lilac bushes in
them, for there was something in the soil that made lilacs be more
wonderful there than anywhere else in the world, and in May the whole
forest as far as one could walk was soaked with the smell of it. After
rain on a May evening, what a wonder it was; what a wonder, that running
down the black, oozing forest paths between wet pine stems, out on to
the shore to look at the sun setting below the great sullen clouds of
the afternoon over on one's left where Denmark was, and that lifting of
one's face to the exquisite mingling of the delicate sea smell and the
lilac. And then there was home to come back to when the forest began to
look too dark and its deep silence made one's flesh creep--home, and a
light in the window where ones mother was. Incredible the security of
those days, the safe warmth of them, the careless roominess....

"You know if you _could_ manage to feel a little better, Anna-F.," said
Anna-Rose's voice entreatingly in her ear, "it's time we began to get
off this ship."

Anna-Felicitas opened her eyes, and got up all confused and
self-reproachful. Everybody had melted away from that part of the deck
except herself and Anna-Rose. The ship was lying quiet at last alongside
the wharf. She had over-done being ill this time. She was ashamed of
herself for having wandered off so easily and comfortably into the past,
and left poor Christopher alone in the difficult present.

"I'm so sorry," she said smiling apologetically, and giving her hat a
tug of determination symbolic of her being ready for anything,
especially America. "I think I must have gone to sleep. Have you--" she
hesitated and dropped her voice. "Are they--are the Clouston Sacks
visible yet?"

"I thought I saw them," said Anna-Rose, dropping her voice too, and
looking round uneasily over her shoulder. "I'd have come here sooner to
see how you were getting on, but I thought I saw them, and they looked
so like what I think they will look like that I went into our cabin
again for a few minutes. But it wasn't them. They've found the people
they were after, and have gone."

"There's a great crowd waiting," said Mr. Twist, coming up, "and I think
we ought to go and look for your friends. As you don't know what they're
like and they don't know what you're like it may be difficult. Heaven
forbid," he continued, "that I should hurry you, but I have to catch a
train if I'm to get home to-night, and I don't intend to catch it until
I've handed you over safely to the Sacks."

"Those Sacks--" began Anna-Rose; and then she finished irrelevantly by
remarking that it was the details of life that were discouraging,--from
which Anna Felicitas knew that Christopher's heart was once more in her
boots.

"Come along," said Mr. Twist, urging them to wards the gangway.
"Anything you've got to say about life I shall be glad to hear, but at
some time when we're more at leisure."

It had never occurred to either of the twins that the Clouston Sacks
would not meet them. They had taken it for granted from the beginning
that some form of Sack, either male or female, or at least their
plenipotentiary, would be on the wharf to take them away to the Sack
lair, as Anna-Felicitas alluded to the family mansion. It was, they
knew, in Boston, but Boston conveyed nothing to them. Only Mr. Twist
knew how far away it was. He had always supposed the Sacks would meet
their young charges, stay that night in New York, and continue on to
Boston next day. The twins were so certain they would be met that Mr.
Twist was certain too. He had concluded, with a growingly empty feeling
in his heart as the time of separation drew near, that all that now
remained for him to do on behalf of the Twinklers was to hand them over
to the Sacks. And then leave them. And then go home to that mother he
loved but had for some time known he didn't like,--go home a bereft and
lonely man.

But out of the crowd on the pier, any of whom might have been Sacks for
all the Twinklers, eagerly scanning faces, knew, nobody in fact seemed
to be Sacks. At least, nobody came forward and said, "Are you the
Twinklers?" Other people fell into each other's arms; the air was full
of the noise of kissing, the loud legitimate kissing of relations; but
nobody took any notice of the twins. For a long while they stood
waiting. Their luggage was examined, and Mr. Twist's luggage--only his
was baggage--was examined, and the kissing and exclaiming crowd swayed
hither and thither, and broke up into groups, and was shot through by
interviewers, and got packed off into taxis, and grew thinner and
thinner, and at last was so thin that the concealment of the Sacks in it
was no longer possible.

There were no Sacks.

To the last few groups of people left in the great glass-roofed hall
piled with bags of wool and sulphur, Mr. Twist went up boldly and asked
if they were intending to meet some young ladies called Twinkler. His
tone, owing to perturbation, was rather more than one of inquiry, it
almost sounded menacing; and the answers he got were cold. He wandered
about uncertainly from group to group, his soft felt hat on the back of
his head and his brow getting more and more puckered; and Anna-Rose,
anxiously looking on from afar, became impatient at last of these
refusals of everybody to be Sacks, and thought that perhaps Mr. Twist
wasn't making himself clear.

Impetuous by nature and little given to calm waiting, she approached a
group on her own account and asked them, enunciating her words very
clearly, whether they were by any chance Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack.

The group, which was entirely female, stared round and down at her in
astonished silence, and shook its heads; and as she saw Mr. Twist being
turned away for the fifth time in the distance a wave of red despair
came over her, and she said, reproach in her voice and tears in her
eyes, "But _somebody's_ got to be the Sacks."

Upon which the group she was addressing stared at her in a more
astonished silence than ever.

Mr. Twist came up mopping his brow and took he arm and led her back to
Anna-Felicitas, who was taking care of the luggage and had sat down
philosophically to await developments on a bag of sulphur. She didn't
yet know what sulphur looked like on one's clothes after one has sat on
it, and smiled cheerfully and encouragingly at Anna-Rose as she came
towards her.

"There _are_ no Sacks," said Anna-Rose, facing the truth.

"It's exactly like that Uncle Arthur of yours," said Mr. Twist, mopping
his forehead and speaking almost vindictively. "Exactly like him. A man
like that _would_ have the sort of friends that don't meet one."

"Well, we must do without the Sacks," said Anna-Felicitas, rising from
the sulphur bag with the look of serene courage that can only dwell on
the face of one who is free from care as to what has happened to him
behind. "And it isn't," she added sweetly to Mr. Twist, "as if we hadn't
got _you_."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, suddenly seeing daylight. "Of course. What do
Sacks really matter? I mean, for a day or two? You'll take us somewhere
where we can wait till we've found them."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "Some nice quiet old-fashioned coffee-house
sort of place, like the one the Brontes went to in St. Paul's Churchyard
the first time they were launched into the world."

"Yes. Some inexpensive place."

"Suited to the frugal."

"Because although we've got £200, even that will need watching or it
will go."

During this conversation Mr. Twist stood mopping his forehead. As often
as he mopped it it broke out afresh and had to be mopped again. They
were the only passengers left now, and had become very conspicuous. He
couldn't but perceive that a group of officials with grim,
locked-up-looking mouths were eyeing him and the Twinklers attentively.

Always zealous in the cause of virtue, America provided her wharves and
landing-places with officials specially appointed to guard the purity of
family life. Family life obviously cannot be pure without a marriage
being either in it or having at some time or other passed through it.
The officials engaged in eyeing Mr. Twist and the twins were all married
themselves, and were well acquainted with that awful purity. But eye the
Twist and Twinkler party as they might, they could see no trace of
marriage anywhere about it.

On the contrary, the man of the party looked so uneasy that it amounted
to conscious illegality.

"Sisters?" said the chief official, stepping forward abruptly.

"Eh?" said Mr. Twist, pausing in the wiping of his forehead.

"These here--" said the official, jerking his thumb at the twins. "They
your sisters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with one voice. "Do you think we look like him?"

"Daughters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with an ever greater vigour of repudiation. "You
_can't_ really think we look as much like him as all that?"

"Wife and sister-in-law?"

Then the Twinklers laughed. They laughed aloud, even Anna-Rose
forgetting her cares for a moment. But they were flattered, because it
was at least a proof that they looked thoroughly grown-up.

"Then if they ain't your sisters, and they ain't your daughters, and
they ain't your wife and sister-in-law, p'raps you'll tell me--"

"These young ladies are not anything at all of mine, sir," said Mr.
Twist vehemently.

"Don't you get sir-ing me, now," said the official sticking out his jaw.
"This is a free country, and I'll have no darned cheek."

"These young ladies in no way belong to me," said Mr. Twist more
patiently. "They're my friends."

"Oh. Friends, are they? Then p'raps you'll tell me what you're going to
do with them next."

"Do with them?" repeated Mr. Twist, as he stared with puckered brow at
the twins. "That's exactly what I wish I knew."

The official scanned him from head to foot with triumphant contempt. He
had got one of them, anyhow. He felt quite refreshed already. There had
been a slump in sinners the past week, and he was as full of suppressed
energy and as much tormented by it as an unexercised and overfed horse.
"Step this way," he ordered curtly, waving Mr. Twist towards a wooden
erection that was apparently an office. "Oh, don't you worry about the
girls," he added, as his prey seemed disinclined to leave them.

But Mr. Twist did worry. He saw Ellis Island looming up behind the two
figures that were looking on in an astonishment that had not yet had
time to turn into dismay as he was marched off out of sight. "I'll be
back in a minute," he called over his shoulder.

"That's as may be," remarked the official grimly.

But he was back; if not in a minute in a little more than five minutes,
still accompanied by the official, but an official magically changed
into tameness and amiability, desirous to help, instructing his
inferiors to carry Mr. Twist's and the young ladies' baggage to a taxi.

It was the teapot that had saved him,--that blessed teapot that was
always protruding itself benevolently into his life. Mr. Twist had
identified himself with it, and it had instantly saved him. In the
shelter of his teapot Mr. Twist could go anywhere and do anything in
America. Everybody had it. Everybody knew it. It was as pervasive of
America as Ford's cars, but cosily, quietly pervasive. It was only less
visible because it stayed at home. It was more like a wife than Ford's
cars were. From a sinner caught red-handed, Mr. Twist, its amiable
creator, leapt to the position of one who can do no wrong, for he had
not only placed his teapot between himself and judgment but had
accompanied his proofs of identity by a suitable number of dollar bills,
pressed inconspicuously into the official's conveniently placed hand.

The twins found themselves being treated with distinction. They were
helped into the taxi by the official himself, and what was to happen to
them next was left entirely to the decision and discretion of Mr.
Twist--a man so much worried that at that moment he hadn't any of
either. He couldn't even answer when asked where the taxi was to go to.
He had missed his train, and he tried not to think of his mother's
disappointment, the thought was so upsetting. But he wouldn't have
caught it if he could, for how could he leave these two poor children?

"I'm more than ever convinced," he said, pushing his hat still further
off his forehead, and staring at the back of the Twinkler trunks piled
up in front of him next to the driver, while the disregarded official at
the door still went on asking him where he wished the cab to go to,
"that children should all have parents."




CHAPTER XI


The hotel they were finally sent to by the official, goaded at
last by Mr. Twist's want of a made-up mind into independent
instructions to the cabman, was the Ritz. He thought this very
suitable for the evolver of Twist's Non-Trickler, and it was only
when they were being rushed along at what the twins, used to the
behaviour of London taxis and not altogether unacquainted with
the prudent and police-supervised deliberation of the taxis of
Berlin, regarded as a skid-collision-and-mutilation-provoking
speed, that a protest from Anna-Rose conveyed to Mr. Twist where
they were heading for.

"An hotel called Ritz sounds very expensive," she said. "I've heard
Uncle Arthur talk of one there is in London and one there is in Paris,
and he said that only damned American millionaires could afford to stay
in them. Anna-Felicitas and me aren't American millionaires--"

"Or damned," put in Anna-Felicitas.

"--but quite the contrary," said Anna-Rose, "hadn't you better take us
somewhere else?"

"Somewhere like where the Brontes stayed in London," said Anna-Felicitas
harping on this idea. "Where cheapness is combined with historical
associations."

"Oh Lord, it don't matter," said Mr. Twist, who for the first time in
their friendship seemed ruffled.

"Indeed it does," said Anna-Rose anxiously.

"You forget we've got to husband our resources," said Anna-Felicitas.

"You mustn't run away with the idea that because we've got £200 we're
the same as millionaires," said Anna-Rose.

"Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, "frequently told us that £200 is a
very vast sum; but he equally frequently told us that it isn't."

"It was when he was talking about having given to us that he said it was
such a lot," said Anna-Rose.

"He said that as long as we had it we would be rich," said
Anna-Felicitas, "but directly we hadn't it we would be poor."

"So we'd rather not go to the Ritz, please," said Anna-Rose, "if you
don't mind."

The taxi was stopped, and Mr. Twist got out and consulted the driver.
The thought of his Uncle Charles as a temporary refuge for the twins
floated across his brain, but was rejected because Uncle Charles would
speak to no woman under fifty except from his pulpit, and approached
those he did speak to with caution till they were sixty. He regarded
them as one of the chief causes of modern unrest. He liked them so much
that he hated them. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.
Uncle Charles was no good as a refuge.

"Well now, see here," said the driver at last, after Mr. Twist had
rejected such varied suggestions of something small and quiet as the
Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Biltmore, "you tell me where you want
to go to and I'll take you there."

"I want to go to the place your mother would stay in if she came up for
a day or two from the country," said Mr. Twist helplessly.

"Get right in then, and I'll take you back to the Ritz," said the
driver.

But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity he was
unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy pleasantries with
him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in a street off the less
desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of him.

It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are both
noisy and expensive. It was full of foreigners,--real foreigners, the
twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like themselves, but
people with yellow faces and black eyes. They looked very seedy and
shabby, and smoked very much, and talked volubly in unknown tongues. The
entrance hall, a place of mottled marble, with clerks behind a counter
all of whose faces looked as if they were masks, was thick with them;
and it was when they turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas
passed and Anna-Rose was thinking proudly, "Yes, you don't see anything
like that every day, do you," and herself looked fondly at her Columbus,
that she saw that it wasn't Columbus's beauty at all but the sulphur on
the back of her skirt.

This spoilt Anna-Rose's arrival in New York. All the way up in the lift
to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was trying to brush
it off, for the dress was Anna-F.'s very best one.

"That's all your grips, ain't it?" said the youth in buttons who had
come up with them, dumping their bags down on the bedroom floor.

"Our what?" said Anna-Rose, to whom the expression was new. "Do you mean
our bags?"

"No. Grips. These here," said the youth.

"Is that what they're called in America?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with the
intelligent interest of a traveller determined to understand and
appreciate everything, while Anna-Rose, still greatly upset by the
condition of the best skirt but unwilling to expatiate upon it before
the youth, continued to brush her down as best she could with her
handkerchief.

"I don't call them. It's what they are," said the youth. "What I want to
know is, are they all here?"

"How interesting that you don't drop your h's," said Anna-Felicitas,
gazing at him. "The rest of you is so _like_ no h's."

The youth said nothing to that, the line of thought being one he didn't
follow.

"Those _are_ all our--grips, I think," said Anna-Rose counting them
round the corner of Anna-Felicitas's skirt. "Thank you very much," she
added after a pause, as he still lingered.

But this didn't cause him to disappear as it would have in England.
Instead, he picked up a metal bottle with a stopper off the table, and
shook it and announced that their ice-water bottle was empty. "Want some
ice water?" he inquired.

"What for?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"What for?" echoed the youth.

"Thank you," said Anna-Rose, who didn't care about the youth's manner
which seemed to her familiar, "we don't want ice water, but we should be
glad of a little hot water."

"You'll get all you want of that in there," said the youth, jerking his
head towards a door that led into a bathroom. "It's ice water and ink
that you get out of me."

"Really?" said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him with even more intelligent
interest, almost as if she were prepared, it being America, a country,
she had heard, of considerable mechanical ingenuity, to find his person
bristling with taps which only needed turning.

"We don't want either, thank you," said Anna-Rose.

The youth lingered. Anna-Rose's brushing began to grow vehement. Why
didn't he go? She didn't want to have to be rude to him and hurt his
feelings by asking him to go, but why didn't he? Anna-Felicitas, who was
much too pleasantly detached, thought Anna-Rose, for such a si

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