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!”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 191