Christopher and Columbus (13 page)

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 apron 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 nobody 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 passed 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 assure 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 passengers 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
unfassbar
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
."

"I don't believe," said Anna-Rose, her nose in the
air, "I don't believe I'd have ever been at a loss for
a father."

The ladies, left speechless a moment by the arrogance as well as
several other things about this answer gave Anna-Rose an
opportunity for further reasoning with them, which she was unable
to resist. "There are lots of fathers," she said,
"in England, who would I'm sure have been delighted to
take me on if Germany had failed me."

"England!"

"Take you on!"

"An English father for you? For a subject of the King of
Prussia?"

"I--I'm afraid I--I'm going to be sick,"
gasped Anna-Felicitas suddenly.

"You're never going to be sick in this bit of
bathwater, Miss Twinkler?" exclaimed the young man, with the
instant ungrudging admiration of one who is confronted by real
talent. "My, what a gift!"

Anna-Rose darted at Anna-Felicitas's drooping head, that
which she had been going to say back to the German ladies
dissolving on her tongue. "Oh no--
no
--" she wailed. "Oh
no
--not in your best hat, Columbus darling--you
can't--it's not done--and your hat'll shake off into
the water, and then there'll only be one between us and we
shall never be able to go out paying calls and things at the same
time--come away and sit down--Mr. Twist--Mr. Twist--oh, please
come--"

Anna-Felicitas allowed herself to be led away, just in time as
she murmured, and sat down on the nearest seat and shut her eyes.
She was thankful Anna-Rose's attention had been diverted to her
so instantly, for it would have been very difficult to be sick with
the ship as quiet as one's own bedroom. Nothing short of the
engine-room could have made her sick now. She sat keeping her eyes
shut and Anna-Rose's attention riveted, wondering what she
would do when there was no ship and Anna-Rose was on the verge of
hasty and unfortunate argument. Would she have to learn to faint?
But that would terrify poor Christopher so dreadfully.

Anna-Felicitas pondered, her eyes shut, on this situation. Up to
now in her life she had always found that situations solved
themselves. Given time. And sometimes a little assistance. So, no
doubt, would this one. Anna-Rose would ripen and mellow. The German
ladies would depart hence and be no more seen; and it was unlikely
she and Anna-Rose would meet at such close quarters as a ship's
cabin any persons so peculiarly and unusually afflicting again. All
situations solved themselves; or, if they showed signs of not going
to, one adopted the gentle methods that helped them to get solved.
Early in life she had discovered that objects which cannot be
removed or climbed over can be walked round. A little deviousness,
and the thing was done. She herself had in the most masterly manner
when she was four escaped church-going for several years by a
simple method, that seemed to her looking back very like an
inspiration, of getting round it. She had never objected to going,
had never put into words the powerful if vague dislike with which
it filled her when Sunday after Sunday she had to go and dangle her
legs helplessly for two hours from the chair she was put on in the
enclosed pew reserved for the
hohe gräfliche Herrschaften
from the Slosh.

Her father, a strict observer of the correct and a pious
believer in God for other people, attended Divine Service as
regularly as he wound the clocks and paid the accounts. He
repräsentierte
, as the German phrase went; and his wife
and children were expected to
repräsentieren
too. Which they did uncomplainingly; for
when one has to do with determined husbands and fathers it is
quickest not to complain. But the pins and needles that patient
child endured, Anna-Felicitas remembered, looking back through the
years at the bunched-up figure on the chair as at a stranger, were
something awful. The edge of the chair just caught her legs in the
pins and needles place. If she had been a little bigger or a little
smaller it wouldn't have happened; as it was, St. Paul
wrestling with beasts at Ephesus wasn't more heroic than
Anna-Felicitas perceived that distant child to have been, silently
Sunday after Sunday bearing her legs. Then one Sunday something
snapped inside her, and she heard her own voice floating out into
the void above the heads of the mumbling worshippers, and it said
with a terrible distinctness in a sort of monotonous wail: "I
only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a second time, in
the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon this:
"I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a third
time she opened her mouth to repeat the outrageous statement,
regardless of her mother's startled hand laid on her arm, and
of Anna-Rose's petrified stare, and of the lifted faces of the
congregation, and of the bent, scandalized brows of the
pastor,--impelled by something that possessed her, unable to do
anything but obey it; but her father, a man of deeds, rose up in
his place, took her in his arms, and carried her down the stairs
and out of the church. And the minute she found herself really
rescued, and out where the sun and wind, her well-known friends,
were larking about among the tombstones, she laid her cheek as
affectionately against her father's head as if she were a
daughter to be proud of, and would have purred if she had had had a
purr as loudly as the most satisfied and virtuous of cats.

"
Mein Kind
," said her father, standing her up on a
convenient tomb so that her eyes were level with his, "is it
then true about the cold potato?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas patting his face, pleased at
what her legs were feeling like again.

"
Mein Kind
," said her father, "do you not know it
is wrong to lie?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas placidly, the heavenly blue
of her eyes, gazing straight into his, exactly like the mild sky
above the trees.

"No?" echoed her father, staring at her. "But,
Kind
, you know what a lie is?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him tenderly in
her satisfaction at being restored to a decent pair of legs; and as
he still stood staring at her she put her hands one on each of his
cheeks and squeezed his face together and murmured, "Oh, I do
love
you."