Christopher and Columbus (15 page)

"An hotel called Ritz sounds very expensive," she
said. "I've heard Uncle Arthur talk of one there is in
London and one there is in Paris, and he said that only damned
American millionaires could afford to stay in them. Anna-Felicitas
and me aren't American millionaires--"

"Or damned," put in Anna-Felicitas.

"--but quite the contrary," said Anna-Rose,
"hadn't you better take us somewhere else?"

"Somewhere like where the Brontes stayed in London,"
said Anna-Felicitas harping on this idea. "Where cheapness is
combined with historical associations."

"Oh Lord, it don't matter," said Mr. Twist, who
for the first time in their friendship seemed ruffled.

"Indeed it does," said Anna-Rose anxiously.

"You forget we've got to husband our resources,"
said Anna-Felicitas.

"You mustn't run away with the idea that because
we've got £200 we're the same as millionaires," said
Anna-Rose.

"Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, "frequently
told us that £200 is a very vast sum; but he equally frequently
told us that it isn't."

"It was when he was talking about having given to us that
he said it was such a lot," said Anna-Rose.

"He said that as long as we had it we would be rich,"
said Anna-Felicitas, "but directly we hadn't it we would
be poor."

"So we'd rather not go to the Ritz, please," said
Anna-Rose, "if you don't mind."

The taxi was stopped, and Mr. Twist got out and consulted the
driver. The thought of his Uncle Charles as a temporary refuge for
the twins floated across his brain, but was rejected because Uncle
Charles would speak to no woman under fifty except from his pulpit,
and approached those he did speak to with caution till they were
sixty. He regarded them as one of the chief causes of modern
unrest. He liked them so much that he hated them. He could practise
abstinence, but not temperance. Uncle Charles was no good as a
refuge.

"Well now, see here," said the driver at last, after
Mr. Twist had rejected such varied suggestions of something small
and quiet as the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Biltmore,
"you tell me where you want to go to and I'll take you
there."

"I want to go to the place your mother would stay in if she
came up for a day or two from the country," said Mr. Twist
helplessly.

"Get right in then, and I'll take you back to the
Ritz," said the driver.

But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity
he was unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy
pleasantries with him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in
a street off the less desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of
him.

It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are
both noisy and expensive. It was full of foreigners,--real
foreigners, the twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like
themselves, but people with yellow faces and black eyes. They
looked very seedy and shabby, and smoked very much, and talked
volubly in unknown tongues. The entrance hall, a place of mottled
marble, with clerks behind a counter all of whose faces looked as
if they were masks, was thick with them; and it was when they
turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas passed and Anna-Rose
was thinking proudly, "Yes, you don't see anything like
that every day, do you," and herself looked fondly at her
Columbus, that she saw that it wasn't Columbus's beauty at
all but the sulphur on the back of her skirt.

This spoilt Anna-Rose's arrival in New York. All the way up
in the lift to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was
trying to brush it off, for the dress was Anna-F.'s very best
one.

"That's all your grips, ain't it?" said the
youth in buttons who had come up with them, dumping their bags down
on the bedroom floor.

"Our what?" said Anna-Rose, to whom the expression was
new. "Do you mean our bags?"

"No. Grips. These here," said the youth.

"Is that what they're called in America?" asked
Anna-Felicitas, with the intelligent interest of a traveller
determined to understand and appreciate everything, while
Anna-Rose, still greatly upset by the condition of the best skirt
but unwilling to expatiate upon it before the youth, continued to
brush her down as best she could with her handkerchief.

"I don't call them. It's what they are," said
the youth. "What I want to know is, are they all
here?"

"How interesting that you don't drop your
h's," said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him. "The rest
of you is so
like
no h's."

The youth said nothing to that, the line of thought being one he
didn't follow.

"Those
are
all our--grips, I think," said Anna-Rose counting
them round the corner of Anna-Felicitas's skirt. "Thank
you very much," she added after a pause, as he still
lingered.

But this didn't cause him to disappear as it would have in
England. Instead, he picked up a metal bottle with a stopper off
the table, and shook it and announced that their ice-water bottle
was empty. "Want some ice water?" he inquired.

"What for?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"What for?" echoed the youth.

"Thank you," said Anna-Rose, who didn't care about
the youth's manner which seemed to her familiar, "we
don't want ice water, but we should be glad of a little hot
water."

"You'll get all you want of that in there," said
the youth, jerking his head towards a door that led into a
bathroom. "It's ice water and ink that you get out of
me."

"Really?" said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him with even
more intelligent interest, almost as if she were prepared, it being
America, a country, she had heard, of considerable mechanical
ingenuity, to find his person bristling with taps which only needed
turning.

"We don't want either, thank you," said
Anna-Rose.

The youth lingered. Anna-Rose's brushing began to grow
vehement. Why didn't he go? She didn't want to have to be
rude to him and hurt his feelings by asking him to go, but why
didn't he? Anna-Felicitas, who was much too pleasantly
detached, thought Anna-Rose, for such a situation, the door being
wide open to the passage and the ungetridable youth standing there
staring, was leisurely taking off her hat and smoothing her
hair.

"Suppose you're new to this country," said the
youth after a pause.

"Brand," said Anna-Felicitas pleasantly.

"Then p'raps," said the youth, "you don't
know that the feller who brings up your grips gets a tip."

"Of course we know that," said Anna-Rose, standing up
straight and trying to look stately.

"Then if you know why don't you do it?"

"Do it?" she repeated, endeavouring to chill him into
respectfulness by haughtily throwing back her head. "Of course
we shall do it. At the proper time and place."

"Which is, as you must have noticed," added
Anna-Felicitas gently, "departure and the front
door."

"That's all right," said the youth, "but
that's only one of the times and places. That's the last
one. Where we've got to now is the first one."

"Do I understand," said Anna-Rose, trying to be very
dignified, while her heart shrank within her, for what sort of sum
did one offer people like this?--"that to America one tips at
the beginning as well?"

"Yep," said the youth. "And in the middle too.
Right along through. Never miss an opportunity, is as good a slogan
as you'll get when it comes to tipping."

"I believe you'd have liked Kipps," said
Anna-Felicitas meditatively, shaking some dust off her hat and
remembering the orgy of tipping that immortal young man went in for
at the seaside hotel.

"What I like now," said the youth, growing more easy
before their manifest youth and ignorance, "is tips. Guess you
can call it Kipps if it pleases you."

Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse "It's
horrid, I think, to ask for presents," she said to the youth
in deep humiliation, more on his account than hers.

"Presents? I'm not asking for presents. I'm telling
you what's done," said the youth. And he had spots on his
face. And he was repugnant to her.

Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a shilling. He took it, and
remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it, went away; and
Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist
knocked and asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.

"He might have said thank you," she said indignantly
to Anna-Felicitas, giving a final desperate brushing to the
sulphur.

"I expect he'll come to a bad end," said
Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing
such a thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables
laid for dinner. It wasn't the custom much in America,
explained Mr. Twist, to have tea, and no preparations were made for
it in hotels of that sort. The very waiters, feeling it was a meal
to be discouraged, were showing their detachment from it by sitting
in a corner of the room playing dominoes. It was a big room, all
looking-glasses and windows, and the street outside was badly paved
and a great noise of passing motor-vans came in and drowned most of
what Mr. Twist was saying. It was an unlovely place, a place in
which one might easily feel homesick and that the world was empty
of affection, if one let oneself go that way. The twins
wouldn't. They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be
daunted by these externals. For there was Mr. Twist, their friend
and stand-by, still with them, and hadn't they got each other?
But they felt uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied
them with buttered toast and macaroons and was as attentive as
usual, had a somnambulatory quality in his attention. He looked
like a man who is doing things in a dream. He looked like one who
is absorbed in something else. His forehead still was puckered, and
what could it be puckered about, seeing that he had got home, and
was going back to his mother, and had a clear and uncomplicated
future ahead of him, and anyhow was a man?

"Have you got something on your mind?" asked Anna-Rose
at last, when he hadn't even heard a question she asked,--he,
the polite, the interested, the sympathetic friend of the journey
across.

Mr. Twist, sitting tilted back in his chair, his hands deep in
his pockets, looked up from the macaroons he had been staring at
and said, "Yes."

"Tell us what it is," suggested Anna-Felicitas.

"You," said Mr. Twist.

"Me?"

"Both of you. You both of you go together. You're in
one lump in my mind. And on it too," finished Mr. Twist
ruefully.

"That's only because," explained Anna-Felicitas,
"you've got the idea we want such a lot of taking care of.
Get rid of that, and you'll feel quite comfortable again. Why
not regard us merely as pleasant friends?"

Mr. Twist looked at her in silence.

"Not as objects to be protected," continued Anna
Felicitas, "but as co-equals. Of a reasonable soul and human
flesh subsisting."

Mr. Twist continued to look at her in silence.

"We didn't come to America to be on anybody's
mind," said Anna-Rose, supporting Anna-Felicitas.

"We had a good deal of that in England," said
Anna-Felicitas. "For instance, we're quite familiar with
Uncle Arthur's mind, we were on it so heavily and so
long."

"It's our fixed determination," said Anna-Rose,
"now that we're starting a new life, to get off any mind
we find ourselves on
instantly
."

"We wish to carve out our own destinies," said
Anna-Felicitas.

"We more than wish to," corrected Anna-Rose, "we
intend to. What were we made in God's image for if it
wasn't to stand upright on our own feet?"

"Anna-Rose and I had given this a good deal of
thought," said Anna-Felicitas, "first and last, and
we're prepared to be friends with everybody, but only as
co-equals and of a reasonable soul and human flesh
subsisting."

"I don't know exactly," said Mr. Twist, "what
that means, but it seems to give you a lot of
satisfaction."

"It does. It's out of the Athanasian Creed, and
suggests such perfect equality. If you'll regard us as
co-equals instead of as objects to be looked after, you'll see
how happy we shall all be."

"Not," said Anna-Rose, growing tender, for indeed in
her heart she loved and clung to Mr. Twist, "that we
haven't very much liked all you've done for us and the way
you were so kind to us on the boat,--we've been
most
obliged to you, and we shall miss you very much
indeed, I know."

"But we'll get over that of course in time," put
in Anna-Felicitas, "and we've got to start life now in
earnest."

"Well then," said Mr. Twist, "will you two Annas
kindly tell me what it is you propose to do next?"

"Next? After tea? Go and look at the sights."

"I mean to-morrow," said Mr. Twist.

"To-morrow," said Anna-Rose, "we proceed to
Boston."

"To track the Clouston Sacks to their lair," said
Anna-Felicitas.

"Ah. You've made up your minds to do that. They've
behaved abominably," said Mr. Twist.

"Perhaps they missed the train," said Anna-Felicitas
mildly.

"It's the proper course to pursue," said
Anna-Rose. "To proceed to Boston."

"I suppose it is," said Mr. Twist, again thinking that
the really proper and natural course was for him to have been able
to take them to his mother. Pity one's mother wasn't--

He pulled himself up on the brink of an unfiliality. He was on
the verge of thinking it a pity one's mother wasn't a
different one.

"Then," said Mr. Twist, "if this is all
you're going to see of New York, this one evening, let us go
and look at it."

He beckoned to the waiter who came up with the bill. Anna-Rose
pulled out her purse. Mr. Twist put up his hand with severe
determination.