Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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 m
ourn. 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 the
m 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.