Christopher and Columbus Part 12

Mr. Twist, and also Anna-Felicitas, who wasn't allowed to stay behind with the exuberant young man though she was quite unconscious of his presence, went with Anna-Rose behind the funnel, where after a great deal of private fumbling, her back turned to them, she produced the two much-crumpled 5 notes.

"The steward ought to have something too," said Mr. Twist.

"Oh, I'd be glad if you'd do him as well," said Anna-Rose eagerly. "I don't think I _could_ offer him a tip. He has been so fatherly to us.

And imagine offering to tip one's father."

Mr. Twist laughed, and said she would get over this feeling in time. He promised to do what was right, and to make it clear that the tips he bestowed were Twinkler tips; and presently he came back with messages of thanks from the tipped--such polite ones from the stewardess that the twins were astonished--and gave Anna-Rose a packet of very dirty-looking slices of green paper, which were dollar bills, he said, besides a variety of strange coins which he spread out on a ledge and explained to her.

"The exchange was favourable to you to-day," said Mr. Twist, counting out the money.

"How nice of it," said Anna-Rose politely. "Did you keep your eye on its variations?" she added a little loudly, with a view to rousing respect in Anna-Felicitas who was lounging against a seat and showing a total absence of every kind of appropriate emotion.

"Certainly," said Mr. Twist after a slight pause. "I kept both my eyes on all of them."

Mr. Twist had, it appeared, presented the steward and stewardess each with a dollar on behalf of the Misses Twinkler, but because the exchange was so favourable this had made no difference to the 5 notes. Reducing each 5 note into German marks, which was the way the Twinklers, in spite of a year in England, still dealt in their heads with money before they could get a clear idea of it, there would have been two hundred marks; and as it took, roughly, four marks to make a dollar, the two hundred marks would have to be divided by four; which, leaving aside that extra complication of variations in the exchange, and regarding the exchange for a moment and for purposes of simplification as keeping quiet for a bit and resting, should produce, also roughly, said Anna-Rose a little out of breath as she got to the end of her calculation, fifty dollars.

"Correct," said Mr. Twist, who had listened with respectful attention.

"Here they are."

"I said roughly," said Anna-Rose. "It can't be _exactly_ fifty dollars.

The tips anyhow would alter that."

"Yes, but you forget the exchange."

Anna-Rose was silent. She didn't want to go into that before Anna-Felicitas. Of the two, she was supposed to be the least bad at sums. Their mother had put it that way, refusing to say, as Anna-Rose industriously tried to trap her into saying, that she was the better of the two. But even so, the difference ent.i.tled her to authority on the subject with Anna-Felicitas, and by dint of doing all her calculations roughly, as she was careful to describe her method, she allowed room for withdrawal and escape where otherwise the inflexibility of figures might have caught her tight and held her down while Anna-Felicitas looked on and was unable to respect her.

Evidently the exchange was something beneficent. She decided to rejoice in it in silence, accept whatever it did, and refrain from asking questions.

"So I did. Of course. The exchange," she said, after a little.

She gathered up the dollar bills and began packing them into her bag.

They wouldn't all go in, and she had to put the rest into her pocket, for which also there were too many; but she refused Anna-Felicitas's offer to put some of them in hers on the ground that sooner or later she would be sure to forget they weren't her handkerchief and would blow her nose with them.

"Thank you very much for being so kind," she said to Mr. Twist, as she stuffed her pocket full and tried by vigorous patting to get it to look inconspicuous. "We're never going to forget you, Anna-F. and me. We'll write to you often, and we'll come and see you as often as you like."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas dreamily, as she watched the sh.o.r.e of Long Island sliding past. "Of course you've got your relations, but relations soon pall, and you may be quite glad after a while of a little fresh blood."

Mr. Twist thought this very likely, and agreed with several other things Anna-Felicitas, generalizing from Uncle Arthur, said about relations, again with that air of addressing n.o.body specially and meaning nothing in particular, while Anna-Rose wrestled with the obesity of her pocket.

"Whether you come to see me or not," said Mr. Twist, whose misgivings as to the effect of the Twinklers on his mother grew rather than subsided, "I shall certainly come to see you."

"Perhaps Mr. Sack won't allow followers," said Anna-Felicitas, her eyes far away. "Uncle Arthur didn't. He wouldn't let the maids have any, so they had to go out and do the following themselves. We had a follower once, didn't we, Anna-R.?" she continued her voice pensive and reminiscent. "He was a friend of Uncle Arthur's. Quite old. At least thirty or forty. I shouldn't have thought he _could_ follow. But he did.

And he used to come home to tea with Uncle Arthur and produce boxes of chocolate for us out of his pockets when Uncle Arthur wasn't looking. We ate them and felt perfectly well disposed toward him till one day he tried to kiss one of us--I forget which. And that, combined with the chocolates, revealed him in his true colours as a follower, and we told him they weren't allowed in that house and urged him to go to some place where they were, or he would certainly be overtaken by Uncle Arthur's vengeance, and we said how surprised we were, because he was so old and we didn't know followers were as old as that ever."

"It seemed a very shady thing," said Anna-Rose, having subdued the swollenness of her pocket, "to eat his chocolates and then not want to kiss him, but we don't hold with kissing, Anna-F. and me. Still, we were full of his chocolates; there was no getting away from that. So we talked it over after he had gone, and decided that next day when he came we'd tell him he might kiss one of us if he still wanted to, and we drew lots which it was to be, and it was me, and I filled myself to the brim with chocolates so as to feel grateful enough to bear it, but he didn't come."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't come again for a long while, and when he did there was no follow left in him. Quite the contrary."

Mr. Twist listened with the more interest to this story because it was the first time Anna-Felicitas had talked since he knew her. He was used to the inspiriting and voluble conversation of Anna-Rose who had looked upon him as her best friend since the day he had wiped up her tears; but Anna-Felicitas had been too unwell to talk. She had uttered languid and brief observations from time to time with her eyes shut and her head lolling loosely on her neck, but this was the first time she had been, as it were, an ordinary human being, standing upright on her feet, walking about, looking intelligently if pensively at the scenery, and in a condition of affable readiness, it appeared, to converse.

Mr. Twist was a born mother. The more trouble he was given the more attached he became. He had rolled Anna-Felicitas up in rugs so often that to be not going to roll her up any more was depressing to him. He was beginning to perceive this motherliness in him himself, and he gazed through his spectacles at Anna-Felicitas while she sketched the rise and fall of the follower, and wondered with an almost painful solicitude what her fate would be in the hands of the Clouston Sacks.

Equally he wondered as to the other one's fate; for he could not think of one Twinkler without thinking of the other. They were inextricably mixed together in the impression they had produced on him, and they dwelt together in his thoughts as one person called, generally, Twinklers. He stood gazing at them, his motherly instincts uppermost, his hearty yearning over them now that the hour of parting was so near and his carefully tended chickens were going to be torn from beneath his wing. Mr. Twist was domestic. He was affectionate. He would have loved, though he had never known it, the sensation of pattering feet about his house, and small hands clinging to the ap.r.o.n he would never wear. And it was entirely characteristic of him that his invention, the invention that brought him his fortune, should have had to do with a teapot.

But if his heart was uneasy within him at the prospect of parting from his charges their hearts were equally uneasy, though not in the same way. The very name of Clouston K. Sack was repugnant to Anna-Rose; and Anna-Felicitas, less quick at disliking, turned it over cautiously in her mind as one who turns over an unknown and distasteful object with the nose of his umbrella. Even she couldn't quite believe that any good thing could come out of a name like that, especially when it had got into their lives through Uncle Arthur. Mr. Twist had never heard of the Clouston Sacks, which made Anna-Rose still more distrustful. She wasn't in the least encouraged when he explained the bigness of America and that n.o.body in it ever knew everybody--she just said that everybody had heard of Mr. Roosevelt, and her heart was too doubtful within her even to mind being told, as he did immediately tell her within ear-shot of Anna-Felicitas, that her reply was unreasonable.

Just at the end, as they were all three straining their eyes, no one with more anxiety than Mr. Twist, to try and guess which of the crowd on the landing-stage were the Clouston Sacks, they pa.s.sed on their other side the _Vaterland_, the great interned German liner at its moorings, and the young man who had previously been so very familiar, as Anna-Rose said, but who was only, Mr. Twist explained, being American, came hurrying boldly up.

"You mustn't miss this," he said to Anna-Felicitas, actually seizing her by the arm. "Here's something that'll make you feel home-like right away."

And he led her off, and would have dragged her off but for Anna-Felicitas's perfect non-resistance.

"He _is_ being familiar," said Anna-Rose to Mr. Twist, turning very red and following quickly after him. "That's not just being American.

Everybody decent knows that if there's any laying hold of people's arms to be done one begins with the eldest sister."

"Perhaps he doesn't realize that you _are_ the elder," said Mr. Twist.

"Strangers judge, roughly, by size."

"I'm afraid I'm going to have trouble with her," said Anna-Rose, not heeding his consolations. "It isn't a sinecure, I a.s.sure you, being left sole guardian and protector of somebody as pretty as all that. And the worst of it is she's going on getting prettier. She hasn't nearly come to the end of what she can do in that direction. I see it growing on her. Every Sunday she's inches prettier than she was the Sunday before.

And wherever I take her to live, and however out of the way it is, I'm sure the path to our front door is going to be black with suitors."

This dreadful picture so much perturbed her, and she looked up at Mr.

Twist with such worried eyes, that he couldn't refrain from patting her on her shoulder.

"There, there," said Mr. Twist, and he begged her to be sure to let him know directly she was in the least difficulty, or even perplexity,--"about the suitors, for instance, or anything else.

You must let me be of some use in the world, you know," he said.

"But we shouldn't like it at all if we thought you were practising being useful on us," said Anna-Rose "It's wholly foreign to our natures to enjoy being the objects of anybody's philanthropy."

"Now I just wonder where you get all your long words from," said Mr.

Twist soothingly; and Anna-Rose laughed, and there was only one dimple in the Twinkler family and Anna-Rose had got it.

"What do you want to get looking at _that_ for?" she asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd staring at the _Vaterland_, and got to where Anna-Felicitas stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang the young man was treating her to,--that terse, surprising, swift hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was hearing in such abundance for the first time.

The American pa.s.sengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the impotence of the great ship. Every one of them seemed to be violently pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the _Vaterland_ as every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and presently arrived again,--the same ships she had seen depart coming back unharmed, unhindered by her country's submarines. Only the two German ladies, once more ignoring their American allegiance, looked angry. It was incredible to them, simply _unfa.s.sbar_ as they said in their thoughts, that any nation should dare inconvenience Germans, should dare lay a finger, even the merest friendliest detaining one, on anything belonging to the mighty, the inviolable Empire. Well, these Americans, these dollar-grubbing Yankees, would soon get taught a sharp, deserved lesson--but at this point they suddenly remembered they were Americans themselves, and pulled up their thoughts violently, as it were, on their haunches.

They turned, however, bitterly to the Twinkler girl as she pushed her way through to her sister,--those renegade Junkers, those contemptible little apostates--and asked her, after hearing her question to Anna-Felicitas, with an extraordinary breaking out of pent-up emotion where she, then, supposed she would have been at that moment if it hadn't been for Germany.

"Not here I think," said Anna-Rose, instantly and fatally ready as she always was to answer back and attempt what she called reasoned conversation. "There wouldn't have been a war, so of course I wouldn't have been here."

"Why, you wouldn't so much as have been born without Germany," said the lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English lie as to who began the war. "You owe your very existence to Germany.

You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of life, instead of jeering at this representative--" she flung a finger out toward the _Vaterland_--"this patient and dignified-in -temporary-misfortune representative, of her power."

"I wasn't jeering," said Anna-Rose, defending herself and clutching at Anna-Felicitas's sleeve to pull her away.

"You wouldn't have had a father at all but for Germany," said the other lady, the one whose hair grew.

"And perhaps you will tell me," said the first one, "where you would have been _then_."