Christopher and Columbus (14 page)

Lost in the contemplation of a distant past Anna-Felicitas sat
with her eyes shut long after she needn't have.

She had forgotten about the German ladies, and America, and the
future so instantly pressing on her, and was away on the shores of
the Baltic again, where bits of amber where washed up after a
storm, and the pale rushes grew in shallow sunny water that was
hardly salt, and the air seemed for ever sweet with lilac. All the
cottage gardens in the little village that clustered round a
clearing in the trees had lilac bushes in them, for there was
something in the soil that made lilacs be more wonderful there than
anywhere else in the world, and in May the whole forest as far as
one could walk was soaked with the smell of it. After rain on a May
evening, what a wonder it was; what a wonder, that running down the
black, oozing forest paths between wet pine stems, out on to the
shore to look at the sun setting below the great sullen clouds of
the afternoon over on one's left where Denmark was, and that
lifting of one's face to the exquisite mingling of the delicate
sea smell and the lilac. And then there was home to come back to
when the forest began to look too dark and its deep silence made
one's flesh creep--home, and a light in the window where ones
mother was. Incredible the security of those days, the safe warmth
of them, the careless roominess....

"You know if you
could
manage to feel a little better, Anna-F.," said
Anna-Rose's voice entreatingly in her ear, "it's time
we began to get off this ship."

Anna-Felicitas opened her eyes, and got up all confused and
self-reproachful. Everybody had melted away from that part of the
deck except herself and Anna-Rose. The ship was lying quiet at last
alongside the wharf. She had over-done being ill this time. She was
ashamed of herself for having wandered off so easily and
comfortably into the past, and left poor Christopher alone in the
difficult present.

"I'm so sorry," she said smiling apologetically,
and giving her hat a tug of determination symbolic of her being
ready for anything, especially America. "I think I must have
gone to sleep. Have you--" she hesitated and dropped her
voice. "Are they--are the Clouston Sacks visible
yet?"

"I thought I saw them," said Anna-Rose, dropping her
voice too, and looking round uneasily over her shoulder.
"I'd have come here sooner to see how you were getting on,
but I thought I saw them, and they looked so like what I think they
will look like that I went into our cabin again for a few minutes.
But it wasn't them. They've found the people they were
after, and have gone."

"There's a great crowd waiting," said Mr. Twist,
coming up, "and I think we ought to go and look for your
friends. As you don't know what they're like and they
don't know what you're like it may be difficult. Heaven
forbid," he continued, "that I should hurry you, but I
have to catch a train if I'm to get home to-night, and I
don't intend to catch it until I've handed you over safely
to the Sacks."

"Those Sacks--" began Anna-Rose; and then she finished
irrelevantly by remarking that it was the details of life that were
discouraging,--from which Anna Felicitas knew that
Christopher's heart was once more in her boots.

"Come along," said Mr. Twist, urging them to wards the
gangway. "Anything you've got to say about life I shall be
glad to hear, but at some time when we're more at
leisure."

It had never occurred to either of the twins that the Clouston
Sacks would not meet them. They had taken it for granted from the
beginning that some form of Sack, either male or female, or at
least their plenipotentiary, would be on the wharf to take them
away to the Sack lair, as Anna-Felicitas alluded to the family
mansion. It was, they knew, in Boston, but Boston conveyed nothing
to them. Only Mr. Twist knew how far away it was. He had always
supposed the Sacks would meet their young charges, stay that night
in New York, and continue on to Boston next day. The twins were so
certain they would be met that Mr. Twist was certain too. He had
concluded, with a growingly empty feeling in his heart as the time
of separation drew near, that all that now remained for him to do
on behalf of the Twinklers was to hand them over to the Sacks. And
then leave them. And then go home to that mother he loved but had
for some time known he didn't like,--go home a bereft and
lonely man.

But out of the crowd on the pier, any of whom might have been
Sacks for all the Twinklers, eagerly scanning faces, knew, nobody
in fact seemed to be Sacks. At least, nobody came forward and said,
"Are you the Twinklers?" Other people fell into each
other's arms; the air was full of the noise of kissing, the
loud legitimate kissing of relations; but nobody took any notice of
the twins. For a long while they stood waiting. Their luggage was
examined, and Mr. Twist's luggage--only his was baggage--was
examined, and the kissing and exclaiming crowd swayed hither and
thither, and broke up into groups, and was shot through by
interviewers, and got packed off into taxis, and grew thinner and
thinner, and at last was so thin that the concealment of the Sacks
in it was no longer possible.

There were no Sacks.

To the last few groups of people left in the great glass-roofed
hall piled with bags of wool and sulphur, Mr. Twist went up boldly
and asked if they were intending to meet some young ladies called
Twinkler. His tone, owing to perturbation, was rather more than one
of inquiry, it almost sounded menacing; and the answers he got were
cold. He wandered about uncertainly from group to group, his soft
felt hat on the back of his head and his brow getting more and more
puckered; and Anna-Rose, anxiously looking on from afar, became
impatient at last of these refusals of everybody to be Sacks, and
thought that perhaps Mr. Twist wasn't making himself clear.

Impetuous by nature and little given to calm waiting, she
approached a group on her own account and asked them, enunciating
her words very clearly, whether they were by any chance Mr. and
Mrs. Clouston Sack.

The group, which was entirely female, stared round and down at
her in astonished silence, and shook its heads; and as she saw Mr.
Twist being turned away for the fifth time in the distance a wave
of red despair came over her, and she said, reproach in her voice
and tears in her eyes, "But
somebody's
got to be the Sacks."

Upon which the group she was addressing stared at her in a more
astonished silence than ever.

Mr. Twist came up mopping his brow and took he arm and led her
back to Anna-Felicitas, who was taking care of the luggage and had
sat down philosophically to await developments on a bag of sulphur.
She didn't yet know what sulphur looked like on one's
clothes after one has sat on it, and smiled cheerfully and
encouragingly at Anna-Rose as she came towards her.

"There
are
no Sacks," said Anna-Rose, facing the truth.

"It's exactly like that Uncle Arthur of yours,"
said Mr. Twist, mopping his forehead and speaking almost
vindictively. "Exactly like him. A man like that
would
have the sort of friends that don't meet
one."

"Well, we must do without the Sacks," said
Anna-Felicitas, rising from the sulphur bag with the look of serene
courage that can only dwell on the face of one who is free from
care as to what has happened to him behind. "And it
isn't," she added sweetly to Mr. Twist, "as if we
hadn't got
you
."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, suddenly seeing daylight.
"Of course. What do Sacks really matter? I mean, for a day or
two? You'll take us somewhere where we can wait till we've
found them."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "Some nice quiet
old-fashioned coffee-house sort of place, like the one the Brontes
went to in St. Paul's Churchyard the first time they were
launched into the world."

"Yes. Some inexpensive place."

"Suited to the frugal."

"Because although we've got £200, even that will need
watching or it will go."

During this conversation Mr. Twist stood mopping his forehead.
As often as he mopped it it broke out afresh and had to be mopped
again. They were the only passengers left now, and had become very
conspicuous. He couldn't but perceive that a group of officials
with grim, locked-up-looking mouths were eyeing him and the
Twinklers attentively.

Always zealous in the cause of virtue, America provided her
wharves and landing-places with officials specially appointed to
guard the purity of family life. Family life obviously cannot be
pure without a marriage being either in it or having at some time
or other passed through it. The officials engaged in eyeing Mr.
Twist and the twins were all married themselves, and were well
acquainted with that awful purity. But eye the Twist and Twinkler
party as they might, they could see no trace of marriage anywhere
about it.

On the contrary, the man of the party looked so uneasy that it
amounted to conscious illegality.

"Sisters?" said the chief official, stepping forward
abruptly.

"Eh?" said Mr. Twist, pausing in the wiping of his
forehead.

"These here--" said the official, jerking his thumb at
the twins. "They your sisters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with one voice. "Do you
think we look like him?"

"Daughters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with an ever greater vigour of
repudiation. "You
can't
really think we look as much like him as all
that?"

"Wife and sister-in-law?"

Then the Twinklers laughed. They laughed aloud, even Anna-Rose
forgetting her cares for a moment. But they were flattered, because
it was at least a proof that they looked thoroughly grown-up.

"Then if they ain't your sisters, and they ain't
your daughters, and they ain't your wife and sister-in-law,
p'raps you'll tell me--"

"These young ladies are not anything at all of mine,
sir," said Mr. Twist vehemently.

"Don't you get sir-ing me, now," said the official
sticking out his jaw. "This is a free country, and I'll
have no darned cheek."

"These young ladies in no way belong to me," said Mr.
Twist more patiently. "They're my friends."

"Oh. Friends, are they? Then p'raps you'll tell me
what you're going to do with them next."

"Do with them?" repeated Mr. Twist, as he stared with
puckered brow at the twins. "That's exactly what I wish I
knew."

The official scanned him from head to foot with triumphant
contempt. He had got one of them, anyhow. He felt quite refreshed
already. There had been a slump in sinners the past week, and he
was as full of suppressed energy and as much tormented by it as an
unexercised and overfed horse. "Step this way," he
ordered curtly, waving Mr. Twist towards a wooden erection that was
apparently an office. "Oh, don't you worry about the
girls," he added, as his prey seemed disinclined to leave
them.

But Mr. Twist did worry. He saw Ellis Island looming up behind
the two figures that were looking on in an astonishment that had
not yet had time to turn into dismay as he was marched off out of
sight. "I'll be back in a minute," he called over his
shoulder.

"That's as may be," remarked the official
grimly.

But he was back; if not in a minute in a little more than five
minutes, still accompanied by the official, but an official
magically changed into tameness and amiability, desirous to help,
instructing his inferiors to carry Mr. Twist's and the young
ladies' baggage to a taxi.

It was the teapot that had saved him,--that blessed teapot that
was always protruding itself benevolently into his life. Mr. Twist
had identified himself with it, and it had instantly saved him. In
the shelter of his teapot Mr. Twist could go anywhere and do
anything in America. Everybody had it. Everybody knew it. It was as
pervasive of America as Ford's cars, but cosily, quietly
pervasive. It was only less visible because it stayed at home. It
was more like a wife than Ford's cars were. From a sinner
caught red-handed, Mr. Twist, its amiable creator, leapt to the
position of one who can do no wrong, for he had not only placed his
teapot between himself and judgment but had accompanied his proofs
of identity by a suitable number of dollar bills, pressed
inconspicuously into the official's conveniently placed
hand.

The twins found themselves being treated with distinction. They
were helped into the taxi by the official himself, and what was to
happen to them next was left entirely to the decision and
discretion of Mr. Twist--a man so much worried that at that moment
he hadn't any of either. He couldn't even answer when asked
where the taxi was to go to. He had missed his train, and he tried
not to think of his mother's disappointment, the thought was so
upsetting. But he wouldn't have caught it if he could, for how
could he leave these two poor children?

"I'm more than ever convinced," he said, pushing
his hat still further off his forehead, and staring at the back of
the Twinkler trunks piled up in front of him next to the driver,
while the disregarded official at the door still went on asking him
where he wished the cab to go to, "that children should all
have parents."

The hotel they were finally sent to by the official, goaded at
last by Mr. Twist's want of a made-up mind into independent
instructions to the cabman, was the Ritz. He thought this very
suitable for the evolver of Twist's Non-Trickler, and it was
only when they were being rushed along at what the twins, used to
the behaviour of London taxis and not altogether unacquainted with
the prudent and police-supervised deliberation of the taxis of
Berlin, regarded as a skid-collision-and-mutilation-provoking
speed, that a protest from Anna-Rose conveyed to Mr. Twist where
they were heading for.