Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

C >> Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim >> Christopher and Columbus

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

Freed from their luggage, and for a moment from all care, the twins went
up the hill. It was the nicest thing in the world to be going to see
their friend again in quite a few minutes. They had, ever since the
collapse of the Sack arrangements, been missing him very much. As they
hurried on through the scented woods, past quiet fields, between
yellow-leaved hedges, the evening sky growing duskier and the beckoning
star lighter, they remembered Mr. Twist's extraordinary kindness, his
devoted and unfailing care, with the warmest feelings of gratitude and
affection. Even Anna-Felicitas felt warm. How often had he rearranged
her head when it was hopelessly rolling about; how often had he fed her
when she felt better enough to be hungry. Anna-Felicitas was very
hungry. She still thought highly of pride and independence, but now
considered their proper place was after a good meal. And Anna-Rose, with
all the shameless cheerfulness of one who for a little has got rid of
her pride and is feeling very much more comfortable in consequence
remarked that one mustn't overdo independence.

"Let's hurry," said Anna-Felicitas. "I'm so dreadfully hungry. I do so
terribly want supper. And I'm sure it's supper-time, and the Twists will
have finished and we mightn't get any."

"As though Mr. Twist wouldn't see to that!" exclaimed Anna-Rose, proud
and confident.

But she did begin to run, for she too was very hungry, and they raced
the rest of the way; which is why they arrived on the Twist doorstep
panting, and couldn't at first answer Amanda the head maid's surprised
and ungarnished inquiry as to what they wanted, when she opened the door
and found them there.

"We want Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose, as soon as she could speak.

Amanda eyed them. "You from the village?" she asked, thinking perhaps
they might be a deputation of elder school children sent to recite
welcoming poems to Mr. Twist on his safe return from the seat of war.
Yet she knew all the school children and everybody else in Clark, and
none of them were these.

"No--from the station," panted Anna-Rose.

"We didn't see any village," panted Anna-Felicitas.

"We want Mr. Twist please," said Anna-Rose struggling with her breath.

Amanda eyed them. "Having supper," she said curtly.

"Fortunate creature," gasped Anna-Felicitas, "I hope he isn't eating it
all."

"Will you announce us please?" said Anna-Rose putting on her dignity.
"The Miss Twinklers."

"The who?" said Amanda.

"The Miss Twinklers," said Anna-Rose, putting on still more dignity, for
there was that in Amanda's manner which roused the Junker in her.

"Can't disturb him at supper," said Amanda briefly.

"I assure you," said Anna-Felicitas, with the earnestness of conviction,
"that he'll like it. I think I can undertake to promise he'll show no
resentment whatever."

Amanda half shut the door.

"We'll come in please," said Anna-Rose, inserting herself into what was
left of the opening. "Will you kindly bear in mind that we're totally
unaccustomed to the doorstep?"

Amanda, doubtful, but unpractised in such a situation, permitted
herself, in spite of having as she well knew the whole of free and equal
America behind her, to be cowed. Well, perhaps not cowed, but taken
aback. It was the long words and the awful politeness that did it. She
wasn't used to beautiful long words like that, except on Sundays when
the clergyman read the prayers in church, and she wasn't used to
politeness. That so much of it should come out of objects so young
rendered Amanda temporarily dumb.

She wavered with the door. Instantly Anna-Rose slipped through it;
instantly Anna-Felicitas followed her.

"Kindly tell your master the Miss Twinklers have arrived," said
Anna-Rose, looking every inch a Junker. There weren't many inches of
Anna-Rose, but every one of them at that moment, faced by Amanda's want
of discipline, was sheer Junker.

Amanda, who had never met a Junker in her happy democratic life, was
stirred into bristling emotion by the word master. She was about to
fling the insult of it from her by an impetuous and ill-considered
assertion that if he was her master she was his mistress and so there
now, when the bell which had rung once already since they had been
standing parleying rang again and more impatiently, and the dining-room
door opened and a head appeared. The twins didn't know that it was
Edith's head, but it was.

"Amanda--" began Edith, in the appealing voice that was the nearest
she ever dared get to rebuke without Amanda giving notice; but she
stopped on seeing what, in the dusk of the hall, looked like a crowd.
"Oh--" said Edith, taken aback. "Oh--" And was for withdrawing her head
and shutting the door.

But the twins advanced towards her and the stream of light shining
behind her and the agreeable smell streaming past her, with outstretched
hands.

"How do you do," they both said cordially. "_Don't_ go away again."

Edith, feeling that here was something to protect her quietly feeding
mother from, came rather hastily through the door and held it to behind
her, while her unresponsive and surprised hand was taken and shaken even
as Mr. Sack's had been.

"We've come to see Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose.

"He's our friend," said Anna-Felicitas.

"He's our best friend," said Anna-Rose.

"Is he in there?" asked Anna-Felicitas, appreciatively moving her nose,
a particularly delicate instrument, round among the various really
heavenly smells that were issuing from the dining-room and sorting them
out and guessing what they probably represented, the while water rushed
into her mouth.

The sound of a chair being hastily pushed back was heard and Mr. Twist
suddenly appeared in the doorway.

"What is it, Edward?" a voice inside said.

Mr. Twist was a pale man, whose skin under no circumstances changed
colour except in his ears. These turned red when he was stirred, and
they were red now, and seemed translucent with the bright light behind
him shining through them.

The twins flew to him. It was wonderful how much pleased they were to
see him again. It was as if for years they had been separated from their
dearest friend. The few hours since the night before had been enough to
turn their friendship and esteem for him into a warm proprietary
affection. They felt that Mr. Twist belonged to them. Even
Anna-Felicitas felt it, and her eyes as she beheld him were bright with
pleasure.

"Oh there you are," cried Anna-Rose darting forward, gladness in her
voice, and catching hold of his arm.

"We've come," said Anna-Felicitas, beaming and catching hold of his
other arm.

"We got into difficulties," said Anna-Rose.

"We got into them at once," said Anna-Felicitas.

"They weren't our difficulties--"

"They were the Sacks'--"

"But they reacted on us--"

"And so here we are."

"Who is it, Edward?" asked the voice inside.

"Mrs. Sack ran away yesterday from Mr. Sack," went on Anna-Rose eagerly.

"Mr. Sack was still quite warm and moist from it when we got there,"
said Anna-Felicitas.

"Aunt Alice said we weren't ever to stay in a house where they did
that," said Anna-Rose.

"Where there wasn't a lady," said Anna-Felicitas

"So when we saw that she wasn't there because she'd gone, we turned
straight round to you," said Anna. Rose.

"Like flowers turning to the sun," said Anna-Felicitas, even in that
moment of excitement not without complacency at her own aptness.

"And left our things at the station," Anna-Rose rushed on.

"And ran practically the whole way," said Anna-Felicitas, "because of
perhaps being late for supper and you're having eaten it all, and we so
dreadfully hungry--"

"Who is it, Edward?" again called the voice inside, louder and more
insistently.

Mr. Twist didn't answer. He was quickly turning over the situation in
his mind.

He had not mentioned the twins to his mother, which would have been
natural, seeing how very few hours he had of reunion with her, if she
hadn't happened to have questioned him particularly as to his
fellow-passengers on the boat. Her questions had been confined to the
first-class passengers, and he had said, truthfully, that he had hardly
spoken to one of them, and not at all to any of the women.

Mrs. Twist had been relieved, for she lived in dread of Edward's
becoming, as she put it to herself, entangled with ladies. Sin would be
bad enough--for Mrs. Twist was obliged reluctantly to know that even
with ladies it is possible to sin--but marriage for Edward would be even
worse, because it lasted longer. Sin, terrible though it was, had at
least this to be said for it, that it could be repented of and done
with, and repentance after all was a creditable activity; but there was
no repenting of marriage with any credit. It was a holy thing, and you
don't repent of holy things,--at least, you oughtn't to. If, as
ill-advised young men so often would, Edward wanted as years went on to
marry in spite of his already having an affectionate and sympathetic
home with feminine society in it, then it seemed to Mrs. Twist most
important, most vital to the future comfort of the family, that it
should be someone she had chosen herself. She had observed him from
infancy, and knew much better than he what was needed for his happiness;
and she also knew, if there must be a wife, what was needed for the
happiness of his mother and sister. She had not thought to inquire about
the second-class passengers, for it never occurred to her that a son of
hers could drift out of his natural first-class sphere into the slums of
a ship, and Mr. Twist had seen no reason for hurrying the Twinklers into
her mental range. Not during those first hours, anyhow. There would be
plenty of hours, and he felt that sufficient unto the day would be the
Twinklers thereof.

But the part that was really making his ears red was that he had said
nothing about the evening with the twins in New York. When his mother
asked with the fondness of the occasion what had detained him, he said
as many another honest man, pressed by the searching affection of
relations, has said before him, that it was business. Now it appeared
that he would have to go into the dining-room and say, "No. It wasn't
business. It was these."

His ears glowed just to think of it. He hated to lie. Specially he hated
to have lied,--at the moment, one plunged in spurred by sudden
necessity, and then was left sorrowfully contemplating one's
degradation. His own desire was always to be candid; but his mother, he
well knew, could not bear the pains candour gave her. She had been so
terribly hurt, so grievously wounded when, fresh from praying,--for
before he went to Harvard he used to pray--he had on one or two
occasions for a few minutes endeavoured not to lie to her that sheer
fright at the effect of his unfiliality made him apologize and beg her
to forget it and forgive him. Now she was going to be still more wounded
by his having lied.

The meticulous tortuousness of family life struck Mr. Twist with a
sudden great impatience. After that large life over there in France, to
come back to this dreary petticoat lying, this feeling one's way about
among tender places ...

"Who is it, Edward?" called the voice inside for the third time.

"There's someone in there seems quite particularly to want to know who
we are," said Anna-Felicitas. "Why not tell her?"

"I expect it's your mother," said Anna-Rose, feeling the full
satisfaction of having got to a house from which the lady hadn't run
anywhere.

"It is," said Mr. Twist briefly.

"Edith!" called the voice, much more peremptorily.

Edith started and half went in, but hesitated and quite stayed out. She
was gazing at the Twinklers with the same kind eyes her brother had,
but without the disfiguring spectacles. Astonishment and perplexity and
anxiety were mixed with the kindness. Amanda also gazed; and if the
twins hadn't been so sure of their welcome, even they might gradually
have begun to perceive that it wasn't exactly open-armed.

"Edith--Edward--Amanda," called the voice, this time with unmistakable
anger.

For one more moment Mr. Twist stood uncertain, looking down at the happy
confident faces turned up to him exactly, as Anna-Felicitas had just
said, like flowers turning to the sun. Visions of France flashed before
him, visions of what he had known, what he had just come back from. His
friends over there, the gay courage, the helpfulness, the ready,
uninquiring affection, the breadth of outlook, the quick friendliness,
the careless assumption that one was decent, that one's intentions were
good,--why shouldn't he pull some of the splendid stuff into his poor,
lame little home? Why should he let himself drop back from heights like
those to the old ridiculous timidities, the miserable habit of avoiding
the truth? Rebellion, hope, determination, seized Mr. Twist. His eyes
shone behind his spectacles. His ears were two red flags of revolution.
He gripped hold of the twins, one under each arm.

"You come right in," he said, louder than he had ever spoken in his
life. "Edith, see these girls? They're the two Annas. Their other name
is Twinkler, but Anna'll see you through. They want supper, and they
want beds, and they want affection, and they're going to get it all. So
hustle with the food, and send the Cadillac for their baggage, and fix
up things for them as comfortably as you know how. And as for Mrs.
Sack," he said, looking first at one twin and then at the other, "if it
hadn't been for her running away from her worthless husband--I'm
convinced that fellow Sack is worthless--you might never have come here
at all. So you see," he finished, laughing at Anna-Rose, "how good comes
out of evil."

And with the sound of these words preceding him he pushed open the
dining-room door and marched them in.

CHAPTER XVI

At the head of the table sat his mother; long, straight, and grave. She
was in the seat of authority, the one with its back to the windows and
its face to the door, from whence she could see what everybody did,
especially Amanda. Having seen what Amanda did, she then complained to
Edith. She didn't complain direct to Amanda, because Amanda could and
did give notice.

Her eyes were fixed on the door. Between it and her was the table,
covered with admirable things to eat, it being supper and therefore,
according to a Twist tradition surviving from penurious days, all the
food, hot and cold, sweet and salt, being brought in together, and
Amanda only attending when rung for. Half-eaten oyster patties lay on
Mrs. Twist's plate. In her glass neglected champagne had bubbled itself
flat. Her hand still held her fork, but loosely, as an object that had
lost its interest, and her eyes and ears for the last five minutes had
not departed from the door.

At first she had felt mere resigned annoyance that Amanda shouldn't have
answered the bell, but she didn't wish to cast a shadow over Edward's
homecoming by drawing poor Edith's attention before him to how very
badly she trained the helps, and therefore she said nothing at the
moment; then, when Edith, going in search of Amanda, had opened the door
and let in sounds of argument, she was surprised, for she knew no one so
intimately that they would be likely to call at such an hour; but when
Edward too leapt up, and went out and stayed out and failed to answer
her repeated calls, she was first astonished, then indignant, and then
suddenly was overcome by a cold foreboding.

Mrs. Twist often had forebodings, and they were always cold. They seized
her with bleak fingers; and one of Edith's chief functions was to
comfort and reassure her for as long a while each time as was required
to reach the stage of being able to shake them off. Here was one,
however, too icily convincing to be shaken off. It fell upon her with
the swiftness of a revelation. Something unpleasant was going to happen
to her; something perhaps worse than unpleasant,--disastrous. And
something immediate.

Those excited voices out in the hall,--they were young, surely, and they
were feminine. Also they sounded most intimate with Edward. What had he
been concealing from her? What disgracefulness had penetrated through
him, through the son the neighbourhood thought so much of, into her very
home? She was a widow. He was her only son. Impossible to believe he
would betray so sacred a position, that he whom she had so lovingly and
proudly welcomed a few hours before would allow his--well, she really
didn't know what to call them, but anyhow female friends of whom she had
been told nothing, to enter that place which to every decent human being
is inviolable, his mother's home. Yet Mrs. Twist did instantly believe
it.

Then Edward's voice, raised and defiant--surely defiant?--came through
the crack in the door, and every word he said was quite distinct. Anna;
supper; affection ... Mrs. Twist sat frozen. And then the door was
flung open and Edward tumultuously entered, his ears crimson, his face
as she had never seen it and in each hand, held tightly by the arm, a
girl.

Edward had been deceiving her.

"Mother--" he began.

"How do you do," said the girls together, and actually with smiles.

Edward had been deceiving her. That whole afternoon how quiet he had
been, how listless. Quite gentle, quite affectionate, but listless and
untalkative. She had thought he must be tired; worn out with his long
journey across from Europe. She had made allowances for him; been
sympathetic, been considerate. And look at him now. Never had she seen
him with a face like that. He was--Mrs. Twist groped for the word and
reluctantly found it--rollicking. Yes; that was the word that exactly
described him--rollicking. If she hadn't observed his languor up to a
few minutes ago at supper, and seen him with her own eyes refuse
champagne and turn his back on cocktails, she would have been forced to
the conclusion, dreadful though it was to a mother, that he had been
drinking. And the girls! Two of them. And so young.

Mrs. Twist had known Edward, as she sometimes informed Edith, all his
life, and had not yet found anything in his morals which was not
blameless. Watch him with what loving care she might she had found
nothing; and she was sure her mother's instinct would not have failed
her. Nevertheless, even with that white past before her--he hadn't told
her about "Madame Bovary"--she now instantly believed the worst.

It was the habit of Clark to believe the worst. Clark was very small,
and therefore also very virtuous. Each inhabitant was the careful
guardian of his neighhour's conduct. Nobody there ever did anything
that was wrong; there wasn't a chance. But as Nature insists on a
balance, the minds of Clark dwelt curiously on evil. They were minds
active in suspicion. They leapt with an instantaneous agility at the
worst conclusions. Nothing was ever said in Clark, but everything was
thought. The older inhabitants, made fast prisoners in their mould of
virtue by age, watched with jealous care the behaviour of those still
young enough to attract temptation. The younger ones, brought up in
inhibitions, settled down to wakefulness in regard to each other.
Everything was provided and encouraged in Clark, a place of pleasant
orchards and gentle fields, except the things that had to do with love.
Husbands were there; and there was a public library, and social
afternoons, and an Emerson society. The husbands died before the wives,
being less able to cope with virtue; and a street in Clark of smaller
houses into which their widows gravitated had been christened by the
stationmaster--a more worldly man because of his three miles off and all
the trains--Lamentation Lane.

In this village Mrs. Twist had lived since her marriage, full of dignity
and honour. As a wife she had been full of it, for the elder Mr. Twist
had been good even when alive, and as a widow she had been still fuller,
for the elder Mr. Twist positively improved by being dead. Not a breath
had ever touched her and her children. Not the most daring and
distrustful Clark mind had ever thought of her except respectfully. And
now here was this happening to her; at her age; when she was least able
to bear it.

She sat in silence, staring with sombre eyes at the three figures.

"Mother--" began Edward again; but was again interrupted by the
twins, who said together, as they had now got into the habit of saying
when confronted by silent and surprised Americans, "We've come."

It wasn't that they thought it a particularly good conversational
opening, it was because silence and surprise on the part of the other
person seemed to call for explanation on theirs, and they were
constitutionally desirous of giving all the information in their power.

"How do you do," they then repeated, loosening themselves from Mr. Twist
and advancing down the room with outstretched hands.

Mr. Twist came with them. "Mother," he said, "these are the Twinkler
girls. Their name's Twinkler. They---"

Freed as he felt he was from his old bonds, determined as he felt he was
on emulating the perfect candour and simplicity of the twins and the
perfect candour and simplicity of his comrades in France, his mother's
dead want of the smallest reaction to this announcement tripped him up
for a moment and prevented his going on.

But nothing ever prevented the twins going on. If they were pleased and
excited they went on with cheerful gusto, and if they were unnerved and
frightened they still went on,--perhaps even more volubly, anxiously
seeking cover behind a multitude of words.

Mrs. Twist had not yet unnerved and frightened them, because they were
too much delighted that they had got to her at all. The relief Anna-Rose
experienced at having safely piloted that difficult craft, the clumsy if
adorable Columbus, into a respectable Port was so immense that it
immediately vented itself in words of warmest welcome to the lady in the
chair to her own home.

"We're _so_ glad to see you here," she said, smiling till her dimple
seemed to be everywhere at once hardly able to refrain from giving the
lady a welcome hug instead of just inhospitably shaking her hand. She
couldn't even shake her hand, however, because it still held, immovably,
the fork. "It would have been too awful," Anna-Rose therefore finished,
putting the heartiness of the handshake she wanted to give into her
voice instead, "if _you_ had happened to have run away too."

"As Mrs. Sack has done from her husband," Anna-Felicitas explained,
smiling too, benevolently, at the black lady who actually having got
oyster patties on her plate hadn't bothered to eat them. "But of course
you couldn't," she went on, remembering in time to be tactful and make a
Sympathetic reference to the lady's weeds; which, indeed, considering
Mr. Twist had told her and Anna-Rose that his father had died when he
was ten, nearly a quarter of a century ago, seemed to have kept their
heads up astonishingly and stayed very fresh. And true to her German
training, and undaunted by the fork, she did that which Anna-Rose in her
contentment had forgotten, and catching up Mrs. Twist's right hand, fork
and all, to her lips gave it the brief ceremonious kiss of a well
brought up Junker.

Like Amanda's, Mrs. Twist's life had been up to this empty of Junkers.
She had never even heard of them till the war, and pronounced their
name, and so did the rest of Clark following her lead, as if it had been
junket, only with an r instead of a t at the end. She didn't therefore
recognize the action; but even she, outraged as she was, could not but
see its grace. And looking up in sombre hostility at the little head
bent over her hand and at the dark line of eyelashes on the the flushed
face, she thought swiftly, "_She's_ the one."

"You see, mother," said Mr. Twist, pulling a chair vigorously and
sitting on it with determination, "it's like this. (Sit down, you two,
and get eating. Start on anything you see in this show that hits your
fancy. Edith'll be fetching you something hot, I expect--soup, or
something--but meanwhile here's enough stuff to go on with.) You see,
mother--" he resumed, turning squarely to her, while the twins obeyed
him with immense alacrity and sat down and began to eat whatever
happened to be nearest them, "these two girls--well, to start with
they're twins--"

Mr. Twist was stopped again by his mother's face. She couldn't conceive
why he should lie. Twins the world over matched in size and features; it
was notorious that they did. Also, it was the custom for them to match
in age, and the tall one of these was at least a year older than the
other one. But still, thought Mrs. Twist, let that pass. She would
suffer whatever it was she had to suffer in silence.

The twins too were silent, because they were so busy eating. Perfectly
at home under the wing they knew so well, they behaved with an easy
naturalness that appeared to Mrs. Twist outrageous. But still--let that
too pass. These strangers helped themselves and helped each other, as if
everything belonged to them; and the tall one actually asked her--her,
the mistress of the house--if she could get _her_ anything. Well, let
that pass too.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27