Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  “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.