Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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 gla
ncing 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 lo
cal 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.