Christopher and Columbus Part 10

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 a.s.sert 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.siduous 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 cla.s.ses. Aunt Alice would have described such an income as ample means; Mrs. Twist called it straitened circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble; 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 a.s.sistant, 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 pa.s.sed from her straitened circ.u.mstances 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-cla.s.s, and was received into the lower upper-cla.s.s, the upper part of this upper-cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce a little to the south.

Being naturally, however, inclined to deprecation, when every other reason for it was finally removed by her a.s.siduous 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 a.s.sisted 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 hea.r.s.e-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 n.o.body 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 l.u.s.ty 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 mourn. 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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