Christopher and Columbus (17 page)

The train journey delighted them. To sit so comfortably and
privately in chairs that twisted round, so that if a passenger
should start staring at Anna-Felicitas one could make her turn her
back altogether on him; to have one's feet on footstools when
they were the sort of feet that don't reach the ground; to see
the lovely autumn country flying past, hills and woods and fields
and gardens golden in the October sun, while the horrible Atlantic
was nowhere in sight; to pass through towns so queerly reminiscent
of English and German towns shaken up together and yet not a bit
like either; to be able to have the window wide open without
getting soot in one's eyes because one of the ministering
angels--clad, this one, appropriately to heaven, in white, though
otherwise black--pulled up the same sort of wire screen they used
to have in the windows at home to keep out the mosquitoes; to
imitate about twelve, when they grew bold because they were so
hungry, the other passengers and cause the black angel to spread a
little table between them and bring clam broth, which they ordered
in a spirit of adventure and curiosity and concealed from each
other that they didn't like; to have the young man who passed
up and down with the candy, and whose mouth was full of it, grow so
friendly that he offered them toffee from his own private supply at
last when they had refused regretfully a dozen suggestions to
buy--"Have a bit," he said, thrusting it under their
noses. "As a gentleman to ladies--no pecuniary
obligations--come on, now;" all this was to the twins too
interesting and delightful for words.

They accepted the toffee in the spirit in which it was offered,
and since nobody can eat somebody's toffee without being
pleasant in return, intermittent amenities passed between them and
the young man as he journeyed up and down through the cars.

"First visit to the States?" he inquired, when with
some reluctance, for presently it appeared to the twins that the
clam broth and the toffee didn't seem to be liking each other
now they had got together inside them, and also for fear of hurting
his feelings if they refused, they took some more.

They nodded and smiled stickily.

"English, I guess."

They hesitated, covering their hesitation with the earnest
working of their toffee-filled jaws.

Then Anna-Felicitas, her cheek distorted, gave him the answer
she had given the captain of the
St. Luke,
and said, "Practically."

"Ah," said the young man, turning this over in his
mind, the r in "practically" having rolled as no English
or American r ever did; but the conductor appearing in the doorway
he continued on his way.

"It's evident," said Anna-Rose, speaking with
difficulty, for her jaws clave together because of the toffee,
"that we're going to be asked that the first thing every
time a fresh person speaks to us. We'd better decide what
we're going to say, and practise saying it without
hesitation."

Anna-Felicitas made a sound of assent.

"That answer of yours about practically," continued
Anna-Rose, swallowing her bit of toffee by accident and for one
moment afraid it would stick somewhere and make her die,
"causes first surprise, then reflection, and then
suspicion."

"But," said Anna-Felicitas after a pause during which
she had disentangled her jaws, "it's going to be difficult
to say one is German when America seems to be so very neutral and
doesn't like Germans. Besides, it's only in the eye of the
law that we are. In God's eye we're not, and that's the
principal eye after all."

Her own eyes grew thoughtful. "I don't believe,"
she said, "that parents when they marry have any idea of all
the difficulties they're going to place their children
in."

"I don't believe they think about it at all," said
Anna-Rose. "I mean," she added quickly, lest she should
be supposed to be questioning the perfect love and forethought of
their mother, "fathers don't."

They were silent a little after this, each thinking things
tinged to sobriety by the effect of the inner conflict going on
between the clam broth and the toffee. Also Boston was rushing
towards them, and the Clouston Sacks. Quite soon they would have to
leave the peaceful security of the train and begin to be active
again, and quick and clever. Anna-Felicitas, who was slow, found it
difficult ever to be clever till about the week after, and
Anna-Rose, who was impetuous, was so impetuous that she entirely
outstripped her scanty store of cleverness and landed panting and
surprised in situations she hadn't an idea what to do with. The
Clouston Sacks, now--Aunt Alice had said, "You must take care
to be very tactful with Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack;" and when
Anna-Rose, her forehead as much puckered as Mr. Twist's in her
desire to get exactly at what tactful was in order to be able
diligently to be it, asked for definitions, Aunt Alice only said it
was what gentlewomen were instinctively.

"Then," observed Anna-Felicitas, when on nearing
Boston Anna-Rose repeated Aunt Alice's admonishment and at the
same time provided Anna-Felicitas for her guidance with the
definition, "seeing that we're supposed to be gentlewomen,
all we've got to do is to behave according to our
instincts."

But Anna-Rose wasn't sure. She doubted their instincts,
especially Anna-Felicitas's. She thought her own were better,
being older, but even hers were extraordinarily apt to develop in
unexpected directions according to the other person's
behaviour. Her instinct, for instance, when engaged by Uncle Arthur
in conversation had usually been to hit him. Was that tact? Yet she
knew she was a gentlewoman. She had heard that, since first she had
heard words at all, from every servant, teacher, visitor and
relation--except her mother--in her Prussian home. Indeed, over
there she had been told she was more than a gentlewoman, for she
was a noblewoman and therefore her instincts ought positively to
drip tact.

"Mr. Dodson," Aunt Alice had said one afternoon
towards the end, when the twins came in from a walk and found the
rector having tea, "says that you can't be too tactful in
America. He's been there."

"Sensitive--sensitive," said Mr. Dodson, shaking his
head at his cup. "Splendidly sensitive, just as they are
splendidly whatever else they are. A great country. Everything on a
vast scale, including sensitiveness. It has to be met vastly. But
quite easy really---" He raised a pedagogic finger at the
twins. "You merely add half as much again to the quantity of
your tact as the quantity you encounter of their sensitiveness, and
it's all right."

"Be sure you remember that now," said Aunt Alice,
pleased.

As Boston got nearer, Anna-Rose, trying to learn Mr.
Dodson's recipe for social success by heart, became more
silent. On the ship, when the meeting with the Sacks was imminent,
she had fled in sudden panic to her cabin to hide from them. That
couldn't have been tact. But it was instinct. And she was a
gentlewoman. Now once again dread took possession of her and she
wanted to hide, not to get there, to stay in the train and go on
and on. She said nothing, of course, of her dread to Anna-Felicitas
in order not to undermine that young person's
morale
, but she did very much wish that principles
weren't such important things and one needn't have cut
oneself off from the protecting figure of Mr. Twist.

"Now remember what Aunt Alice said," she whispered
severely to Anna-Felicitas, gripping her arm as they stood jammed
in the narrow passage to the door waiting to be let out at
Boston.

On the platform, they both thought, would be the
Sacks,--certainly one Sack, and they had feverishly made themselves
tidy and composed their faces into pleasant smiles preparatory to
the meeting. But once again no Sacks were there. The platform
emptied itself just as the great hall of the landing-stage had
emptied itself, and nobody came to claim the Twinklers.

"These Sacks," remarked Anna-Felicitas patiently at
last, when it was finally plain that there weren't any,
"don't seem to have acquired the meeting habit."

"No," said Anna-Rose, vexed but relieved.
"They're like what Aunt Alice used to complain about the
housemaids,--neither punctual nor methodical."

"But it doesn't matter," said Anna-Felicitas.
"They shall not escape us. I'm getting quite hungry for
the Sacks as a result of not having them. We will now proceed to
track them to their lair."

For one instant Anna-Rose looked longingly at the train. It was
still there. It was going on further and further away from the
Sacks. Happy train. One little jump, and they'd be in it again.
But she resisted, and engaged a porter.

Even as soon as this the twins were far less helpless than they
had been the day before. The Sack address was in Anna-Rose's
hand, and they knew what an American porter looked like. The porter
and a taxi were engaged with comparative ease and assurance, and on
giving the porter, who had staggered beneath the number of their
grips, a dime, and seeing a cloud on his face, they doubled it
instantly sooner than have trouble, and trebled it equally quickly
on his displaying yet further dissatisfaction, and they departed
for the Sacks, their grips piled up round them in the taxi as far
as their chins, congratulating themselves on how much easier it was
to get away from a train than to get into one.

But the minute their activities were over and they had time to
think, silence fell upon them again. They were both nervous. They
both composed their faces to indifference to hide that they were
nervous, examining the streets they passed through with a calm and
blasé
stare worthy of a lorgnette. It was the tact part of
the coming encounter that was chiefly unnerving Anna-Rose, and
Anna-Felicitas was dejected by her conviction that nobody who was a
friend of Uncle Arthur's could possibly be agreeable. "By
their friends ye shall know them," thought Anna-Felicitas,
staring out of the window at the Boston buildings. Also the
persistence of the Sacks in not being on piers and railway stations
was discouraging. There was no eagerness about this persistence;
there wasn't even friendliness. Perhaps they didn't like
her and Anna-Rose being German.

This was always the twins' first thought when anybody
wasn't particularly cordial. Their experiences in England had
made them a little jumpy. They were conscious of this weak spot,
and like a hurt finger it seemed always to be getting in the way
and being knocked. Anna-Felicitas once more pondered on the
inscrutable behaviour of Providence which had led their mother, so
safely and admirably English, to leave that blessed shelter and go
and marry somebody who wasn't. Of course there was this to be
said for it, that she wasn't their mother then. If she had
been, Anna-Felicitas felt sure she wouldn't have. Then,
perceiving that her thoughts were getting difficult to follow she
gave them up, and slid her hand through Anna-Rose's arm and
gave it a squeeze.

"Now for the New World, Christopher," she said,
pretending to be very eager and brave and like the real Columbus,
as the taxi stopped.

The taxi had stopped in front of a handsome apartment house, and
almost before it was quiet a boy in buttons darted out across the
intervening wide pavement and thrust his face through the
window.

"Who do you want?" he said, or rather jerked out.

He then saw the contents of the taxi, and his mouth fell open;
for it seemed to him that grips and passengers were piled up inside
it in a seething mass.

"We want Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack," said Anna-Rose
in her most grown-up voice. "They're expecting
us."

"They ain't," said the boy promptly.

"They ain't?" repeated Anna-Rose, echoing his
language in her surprise.

"How do you know?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"That they ain't? Because they ain't," said
the boy. "I bet you my Sunday shirt they ain't."

The twins stared at him. They were not accustomed in their
conversations with the lower classes to be talked to about
shirts.

The boy seemed extraordinarily vital. His speech was so quick
that it flew out with the urgency and haste of squibs going
off.

"Please open the door," said Anna-Rose recovering
herself. "We'll go up and see for ourselves."

"You won't see," said the boy.

"Kindly open the door," repeated Anna-Rose.

"You won't see," he said, pulling it open,
"but you can look. If you do see Sacks up there I'm a
Hun."

The minute the door opened, grips fell out. There were two
umbrellas, two coats, a knapsack of a disreputable bulged
appearance repugnant to American ideas of baggage which run on big
simple lines of huge trunks, an
attaché
case, a suit case, a hold-all, a basket and a
hat-box. Outside beside the driver were two such small and modest
trunks that they might almost as well have been grips
themselves.

"Do you mind taking those in?" asked Anna-Rose,
getting out with difficulty over the umbrella that had fallen
across the doorway, and pointing to the gutter in which the other
umbrella and the knapsack lay and into which the basket, now that
her body no longer kept it in, was rolling.

"In where?" crackled the boy.

"In," said Anna-Rose severely. "In to wherever
Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack are."

"It's no good your saying they are when they
ain't," said the boy, increasing the loudness of his
crackling.

"Do you mean they don't live here?" asked
Anna-Felicitas, in her turn disentangling herself from that which
was still inside the taxi, and immediately followed on to the
pavement by the hold-all and the
attaché
case.

"They did live here till yesterday," said the boy,
"but now they don't. One does. But that's not the same
as two. Which is what I meant when you said they're expecting
you and I said they ain't."