Christopher and Columbus (8 page)

Mr. Twist expressed surprise at this way of describing marriage,
and inquired of Anna-Felicitas what she knew about Germans.

"The moment you leave off being sea-sick, Anna-F.,"
said Anna-Rose, turning to her severely, "you start being
indiscreet. Well, I suppose," she added with a sigh to Mr.
Twist, "you'd have had to know sooner or later. Our name
is Twinkler."

She watched him to see the effect of this, and Mr. Twist,
perceiving he was expected to say something, said that he
didn't mind that anyhow, and that he could bear something worse
in the way of revelations.

"Does it convey nothing to you?" asked Anna-Rose,
astonished, for in Germany the name of Twinkler was a mighty name,
and even in England it was well known.

Mr. Twist shook his head. "Only that it sounds
cheerful," he said.

Anna-Rose watched his face. "It isn't only
Twinkler," she said, speaking very distinctly. "It's
von
Twinkler."

"That's German," said Mr. Twist; but his face
remained serene.

"Yes. And so are we. That is, we would be if it didn't
happen that we weren't."

"I don't think I quite follow," said Mr.
Twist.

"It
is
very difficult," agreed Anna-Rose. "You see,
we used to have a German father."

"But only because our mother married him," explained
Anna-Felicitas. "Else we wouldn't have."

"And though she only did it once," said Anna-Rose,
"ages ago, it has dogged our footsteps ever since."

"It's very surprising," mused Anna-Felicitas,
"what marrying anybody does. You go into a church, and before
you know where you are, you're all tangled up with
posterity."

"And much worse than that," said Anna-Rose, staring
wide-eyed at her own past experiences, "posterity's all
tangled up with you. It's really simply awful sometimes for
posterity. Look at us."

"If there hadn't been a war we'd have been all
right," said Anna-Felicitas. "But directly there's a
war, whoever it is you've married, if it isn't one of your
own countrymen, rises up against you, just as if he were too many
meringues you'd had for dinner."

"Living or dead," said Anna-Rose, nodding, "he
rises up against you."

"Till the war we never thought at all about it," said
Anna-Felicitas.

"Either one way or the other," said Anna-Rose.

"We never used to bother about what we were," said
Anna-Felicitas. "We were just human beings, and so was
everybody else just human beings."

"We didn't mind a bit about being Germans, or about
other people not being Germans."

"But you mustn't think we mind now either," said
Anna-Felicitas, "because, you see, we're not."

Mr. Twist looked at them in turn. His ears were a little
prominent and pointed, and they gave him rather the air, when he
put his head on one side and looked at them, of an attentive
fox-terrier. "I don't think I quite follow," he said
again.

"It
is
very difficult," agreed Anna-Rose.

"It's because you've got into your head that
we're German because of our father," said Anna-Felicitas.
"But what's a father, when all's said and
done?"

"Well," said Mr. Twist, "one has to have
him."

"But having got him he isn't anything like as important
as a mother," said Anna-Rose.

"One hardly sees one's father," said
Anna-Felicitas. "He's always busy. He's always
thinking of something else."

"Except when he looks at one and tells one to sit up
straight," said Anna-Rose pointedly to Anna-Felicitas, whose
habit of drooping still persisted in spite of her father's
admonishments.

"Of course he's very kind and benevolent when he
happens to remember that one is there," said Anna-Felicitas,
sitting up beautifully for a moment, "but that's about
everything."

"And of course," said Anna-Rose, "one's
father's intentions are perfectly sound and good, but his
attention seems to wander. Whereas one's mother--"

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas, "one's
mother--"

They broke off and looked straight in front of them. It
didn't bear speaking of. It didn't bear thinking of.

Suddenly Anna-Felicitas, weak from excessive sea-sickness, began
to cry. The tears just slopped over as though no resistance of any
sort were possible.

Anna-Rose stared at her a moment horror-struck. "Look here,
Anna-F.," she exclaimed, wrath in her voice, "I won't
have
you be sentimental--I won't
have
you be sentimental...."

And then she too began to cry.

Well, once having hopelessly disgraced and exposed themselves,
there was nothing for it but to take Mr. Twist into their uttermost
confidence. It was dreadful. It was awful. Before that strange man.
A person they hardly knew. Other strangers passing. Exposing their
feelings. Showing their innermost miserable places.

They writhed and struggled in their efforts to stop, to pretend
they weren't crying, that it was really nothing but just
tears,--odd ones left over from last time, which was years and
years ago,--"But
really
years and years ago," sobbed Anna-Rose,
anxiously explaining,--"the years one falls down on garden
paths in, and cuts one's knees, and one's mother--one's
mother--c-c-c-comforts one--"

"See here," said Mr. Twist, interrupting these
incoherences, and pulling out a beautiful clean pocket-handkerchief
which hadn't even been unfolded yet, "you've got to
tell me all about it right away."

And he shook out the handkerchief, and with the first-aid
promptness his Red Cross experience had taught him, started
competently wiping up their faces.

There was that about Mr. Twist which, once one had begun them,
encouraged confidences; something kind about his eyes, something
not too determined about his chin. He bore no resemblance to those
pictures of efficient Americans in advertisements with which Europe
is familiar,--eagle-faced gentlemen with intimidatingly firm mouths
and chins, wiry creatures, physically and mentally perfect,
offering in capital letters to make you Just Like Them. Mr. Twist
was the reverse of eagle-faced. He was also the reverse of
good-looking; that is, he would have been very handsome indeed, as
Anna-Rose remarked several days later to Anna-Felicitas, when the
friendship had become a settled thing,--which indeed it did as soon
as Mr. Twist had finished wiping their eyes and noses that first
afternoon, it being impossible, they discovered, to have one's
eyes and noses wiped by somebody without being friends afterwards
(for such an activity, said Anna-Felicitas, belonged to the same
order of events as rescue from fire, lions, or drowning, after
which in books you married him; but this having only been wiping,
said Anna-Rose, the case was adequately met by friendship)--he
would have been very handsome indeed if he hadn't had a
face.

"But you have to
have
a face," said Anna-Felicitas, who didn't
think it much mattered what sort it was so long as you could eat
with it and see out of it.

"And as long as one is as kind as Mr. Twist," said
Anna-Rose; but secretly she thought that having been begun so
successfully at his feet, and carried upwards with such grace of
long limbs and happy proportions, he might as well have gone on
equally felicitously for the last little bit.

"I expect God got tired of him over that last bit,"
she mused, "and just put on any sort of head."

"Yes--that happened to be lying about," agreed
Anna-Felicitas. "In a hurry to get done with him."

"Anyway he's very kind," said Anna-Rose, a slight
touch of defiance in her voice.

"Oh,
very
kind," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And it doesn't matter about faces for being
kind," said Anna-Rose.

"Not in the least," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And if it hadn't been for the submarine we
shouldn't have got to know him. So you see," said
Anna-Rose,--and again produced her favourite remark about good
coming out of evil.

Those were the days in mid-Atlantic when England was lost in its
own peculiar mists, and the sunshine of America was stretching out
towards them. The sea was getting calmer and bluer every hour, and
submarines more and more unlikely. If a ship could be pleasant,
which Anna-Felicitas doubted, for she still found difficulty in
dressing and undressing without being sea-sick and was unpopular in
the cabin, this ship was pleasant. You lay in a deck-chair all day
long, staring at the blue sky and blue sea that enclosed you as if
you were living in the middle of a jewel, and tried not to
remember--oh, there were heaps of things it was best not to
remember; and when the rail of the ship moved up across the horizon
too far into the sky, or moved down across it and showed too much
water, you just shut your eyes and then it didn't matter; and
the sun shone warm and steady on your face, and the wind tickled
the tassel on the top of your German-knitted cap, and Mr. Twist
came and read aloud to you, which sent you to sleep quicker than
anything you had ever known.

The book he read out of and carried about with him his pocket
was called "Masterpieces You Must Master," and was an
American collection of English poetry, professing in its preface to
be a Short Cut to Culture; and he would read with what at that
time, it being new to them, seemed to the twins a strange exotic
pronunciation, Wordsworth's "Ode to Dooty," and the
effect was as if someone should dig a majestic Gregorian psalm in
its ribs, and make it leap and giggle.

Anna-Rose, who had no reason to shut her eyes, for she
didn't mind what the ship's rail did with the horizon,
opened them very round when first Mr. Twist started on his
Masterpieces. She was used to hearing them read by her mother in
the adorable husky voice that sent such thrills through one, but
she listened with the courtesy and final gratitude due to the
efforts to entertain her of so amiable a friend, and only the
roundness of her eyes showed her astonishment at this waltzing
round, as it appeared to her, of Mr. Twist with the Stern Daughter
of the Voice of God. He also read "Lycidas" to her, that
same "Lycidas" Uncle Arthur took for a Derby winner, and
only Anna-Rose's politeness enabled her to refrain from
stopping up her ears. As it was, she fidgeted to the point of
having to explain, on Mr. Twist's pausing to gaze at her
questioningly through the smoke-coloured spectacles he wore on
deck, which made him look so like a gigantic dragon-fly, that it
was because her deck-chair was so very much harder than she
was.

Anna-Felicitas, who considered that, if these things were
short-cuts to anywhere, seeing she knew them all by heart she must
have long ago got there, snoozed complacently. Sometimes for a few
moments she would drop off really to sleep, and then her mouth
would fall open, which worried Anna-Rose, who couldn't bear her
to look even for a moment less beautiful than she knew she was, so
that she fidgeted more than ever, unable, pinned down by politeness
and the culture being administered, to make her shut her mouth and
look beautiful again by taking and shaking her. Also Anna-Felicitas
had a trick of waking up suddenly and forgetting to be polite, as
one does when first one wakes up and hasn't had time to
remember one is a lady. "To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures
noo," Mr. Twist would finish, for instance, with a sort of
gulp of satisfaction at having swallowed yet another solid slab of
culture; and Anna-Felicitas, returning suddenly to consciousness,
would murmur, with her eyes still shut and her head lolling limply,
things like, "After all, it
does
rhyme with blue. I wonder why, then, one still
doesn't like it."

Then Mr. Twist would turn his spectacles towards her in mild
inquiry, and Anna-Rose, as always, would rush in and elaborately
explain what Anna-Felicitas meant, which was so remote from
anything resembling what she had said that Mr. Twist looked more
mildly inquiring than ever.

Usually Anna-Felicitas didn't contradict Anna-Rose, being
too sleepy or too lazy, but sometimes she did, and then Anna-Rose
got angry, and would get what the Germans call a red head and look
at Anna-Felicitas very severely and say things, and Mr. Twist would
close his book and watch with that alert, cocked-up-ear look of a
sympathetic and highly interested terrier; but sooner or later the
ship would always give a roll, and Anna-Felicitas would shut her
eyes and fade to paleness and become the helpless bundle of
sickness that nobody could possibly go on being severe with.

The passengers in the second class were more generally friendly
than those in the first class. The first class sorted itself out
into little groups, and whispered about each other, as Anna-Rose
observed, watching their movements across the rope that separated
her from them. The second class remained to the end one big group,
frayed out just a little at the edge in one or two places.

The chief fraying out was where the Twinkler kids, as the
second-class young men, who knew no better, dared to call them,
interrupted the circle by talking apart with Mr. Twist. Mr. Twist
had no business there. He was a plutocrat of the first class; but
in spite of the regulations which cut off the classes from
communicating, with a view apparently to the continued sanitariness
of the first class, the implication being that the second class was
easily infectious and probably overrun, there he was every day and
several times in every day. He must have heavily squared the
officials, the second-class young men thought until the day when
Mr. Twist let it somehow be understood that he had known the
Twinkler young ladies for years, dandled them in their not very
remote infancy on his already full-grown knee, and had been
specially appointed to look after them on this journey.

Mr. Twist did not specify who had appointed him, except to the
Twinkler young ladies themselves, and to them he announced that it
was no less a thing, being, or creature, than Providence. The
second-class young men, therefore, in spite of their rising spirits
as danger lay further behind, and their increasing tendency,
peculiar to those who go on ships, to become affectionate, found
themselves no further on in acquaintance with the Misses Twinkler
the last day of the voyage than they had been the first. Not that,
under any other conditions, they would have so much as noticed the
existence of the Twinkler kids. In their blue caps, pulled down
tight to their eyebrows and hiding every trace of hair, they looked
like bald babies. They never came to meals; their assiduous
guardian, or whatever he was, feeding them on deck with the care of
a mother-bird for its fledglings, so that nobody except the two
German ladies in their cabin had seen them without the caps. The
young men put them down as half-grown only, somewhere about
fourteen they thought, and nothing but what, if they were boys
instead of girls, would have been called louts.