Christopher and Columbus (10 page)

"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.

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.