Christopher and Columbus (20 page)

Mrs. Twist had been relieved, for she lived in dread of
Edward's becoming, as she put it to herself, entangled with
ladies. Sin would be bad enough--for Mrs. Twist was obliged
reluctantly to know that even with ladies it is possible to
sin--but marriage for Edward would be even worse, because it lasted
longer. Sin, terrible though it was, had at least this to be said
for it, that it could be repented of and done with, and repentance
after all was a creditable activity; but there was no repenting of
marriage with any credit. It was a holy thing, and you don't
repent of holy things,--at least, you oughtn't to. If, as
ill-advised young men so often would, Edward wanted as years went
on to marry in spite of his already having an affectionate and
sympathetic home with feminine society in it, then it seemed to
Mrs. Twist most important, most vital to the future comfort of the
family, that it should be someone she had chosen herself. She had
observed him from infancy, and knew much better than he what was
needed for his happiness; and she also knew, if there must be a
wife, what was needed for the happiness of his mother and sister.
She had not thought to inquire about the second-class passengers,
for it never occurred to her that a son of hers could drift out of
his natural first-class sphere into the slums of a ship, and Mr.
Twist had seen no reason for hurrying the Twinklers into her mental
range. Not during those first hours, anyhow. There would be plenty
of hours, and he felt that sufficient unto the day would be the
Twinklers thereof.

But the part that was really making his ears red was that he had
said nothing about the evening with the twins in New York. When his
mother asked with the fondness of the occasion what had detained
him, he said as many another honest man, pressed by the searching
affection of relations, has said before him, that it was business.
Now it appeared that he would have to go into the dining-room and
say, "No. It wasn't business. It was these."

His ears glowed just to think of it. He hated to lie. Specially
he hated to have lied,--at the moment, one plunged in spurred by
sudden necessity, and then was left sorrowfully contemplating
one's degradation. His own desire was always to be candid; but
his mother, he well knew, could not bear the pains candour gave
her. She had been so terribly hurt, so grievously wounded when,
fresh from praying,--for before he went to Harvard he used to
pray--he had on one or two occasions for a few minutes endeavoured
not to lie to her that sheer fright at the effect of his
unfiliality made him apologize and beg her to forget it and forgive
him. Now she was going to be still more wounded by his having
lied.

The meticulous tortuousness of family life struck Mr. Twist with
a sudden great impatience. After that large life over there in
France, to come back to this dreary petticoat lying, this feeling
one's way about among tender places ...

"Who is it, Edward?" called the voice inside for the
third time.

"There's someone in there seems quite particularly to
want to know who we are," said Anna-Felicitas. "Why not
tell her?"

"I expect it's your mother," said Anna-Rose,
feeling the full satisfaction of having got to a house from which
the lady hadn't run anywhere.

"It is," said Mr. Twist briefly.

"Edith!" called the voice, much more peremptorily.

Edith started and half went in, but hesitated and quite stayed
out. She was gazing at the Twinklers with the same kind eyes her
brother had, but without the disfiguring spectacles. Astonishment
and perplexity and anxiety were mixed with the kindness. Amanda
also gazed; and if the twins hadn't been so sure of their
welcome, even they might gradually have begun to perceive that it
wasn't exactly open-armed.

"Edith--Edward--Amanda," called the voice, this time
with unmistakable anger.

For one more moment Mr. Twist stood uncertain, looking down at
the happy confident faces turned up to him exactly, as
Anna-Felicitas had just said, like flowers turning to the sun.
Visions of France flashed before him, visions of what he had known,
what he had just come back from. His friends over there, the gay
courage, the helpfulness, the ready, uninquiring affection, the
breadth of outlook, the quick friendliness, the careless assumption
that one was decent, that one's intentions were good,--why
shouldn't he pull some of the splendid stuff into his poor,
lame little home? Why should he let himself drop back from heights
like those to the old ridiculous timidities, the miserable habit of
avoiding the truth? Rebellion, hope, determination, seized Mr.
Twist. His eyes shone behind his spectacles. His ears were two red
flags of revolution. He gripped hold of the twins, one under each
arm.

"You come right in," he said, louder than he had ever
spoken in his life. "Edith, see these girls? They're the
two Annas. Their other name is Twinkler, but Anna'll see you
through. They want supper, and they want beds, and they want
affection, and they're going to get it all. So hustle with the
food, and send the Cadillac for their baggage, and fix up things
for them as comfortably as you know how. And as for Mrs.
Sack," he said, looking first at one twin and then at the
other, "if it hadn't been for her running away from her
worthless husband--I'm convinced that fellow Sack is
worthless--you might never have come here at all. So you see,"
he finished, laughing at Anna-Rose, "how good comes out of
evil."

And with the sound of these words preceding him he pushed open
the dining-room door and marched them in.

At the head of the table sat his mother; long, straight, and
grave. She was in the seat of authority, the one with its back to
the windows and its face to the door, from whence she could see
what everybody did, especially Amanda. Having seen what Amanda did,
she then complained to Edith. She didn't complain direct to
Amanda, because Amanda could and did give notice.

Her eyes were fixed on the door. Between it and her was the
table, covered with admirable things to eat, it being supper and
therefore, according to a Twist tradition surviving from penurious
days, all the food, hot and cold, sweet and salt, being brought in
together, and Amanda only attending when rung for. Half-eaten
oyster patties lay on Mrs. Twist's plate. In her glass
neglected champagne had bubbled itself flat. Her hand still held
her fork, but loosely, as an object that had lost its interest, and
her eyes and ears for the last five minutes had not departed from
the door.

At first she had felt mere resigned annoyance that Amanda
shouldn't have answered the bell, but she didn't wish to
cast a shadow over Edward's homecoming by drawing poor
Edith's attention before him to how very badly she trained the
helps, and therefore she said nothing at the moment; then, when
Edith, going in search of Amanda, had opened the door and let in
sounds of argument, she was surprised, for she knew no one so
intimately that they would be likely to call at such an hour; but
when Edward too leapt up, and went out and stayed out and failed to
answer her repeated calls, she was first astonished, then
indignant, and then suddenly was overcome by a cold foreboding.

Mrs. Twist often had forebodings, and they were always cold.
They seized her with bleak fingers; and one of Edith's chief
functions was to comfort and reassure her for as long a while each
time as was required to reach the stage of being able to shake them
off. Here was one, however, too icily convincing to be shaken off.
It fell upon her with the swiftness of a revelation. Something
unpleasant was going to happen to her; something perhaps worse than
unpleasant,--disastrous. And something immediate.

Those excited voices out in the hall,--they were young, surely,
and they were feminine. Also they sounded most intimate with
Edward. What had he been concealing from her? What disgracefulness
had penetrated through him, through the son the neighbourhood
thought so much of, into her very home? She was a widow. He was her
only son. Impossible to believe he would betray so sacred a
position, that he whom she had so lovingly and proudly welcomed a
few hours before would allow his--well, she really didn't know
what to call them, but anyhow female friends of whom she had been
told nothing, to enter that place which to every decent human being
is inviolable, his mother's home. Yet Mrs. Twist did instantly
believe it.

Then Edward's voice, raised and defiant--surely
defiant?--came through the crack in the door, and every word he
said was quite distinct. Anna; supper; affection ... Mrs. Twist sat
frozen. And then the door was flung open and Edward tumultuously
entered, his ears crimson, his face as she had never seen it and in
each hand, held tightly by the arm, a girl.

Edward had been deceiving her.

"Mother--" he began.

"How do you do," said the girls together, and actually
with smiles.

Edward had been deceiving her. That whole afternoon how quiet he
had been, how listless. Quite gentle, quite affectionate, but
listless and untalkative. She had thought he must be tired; worn
out with his long journey across from Europe. She had made
allowances for him; been sympathetic, been considerate. And look at
him now. Never had she seen him with a face like that. He was--Mrs.
Twist groped for the word and reluctantly found it--rollicking.
Yes; that was the word that exactly described him--rollicking. If
she hadn't observed his languor up to a few minutes ago at
supper, and seen him with her own eyes refuse champagne and turn
his back on cocktails, she would have been forced to the
conclusion, dreadful though it was to a mother, that he had been
drinking. And the girls! Two of them. And so young.

Mrs. Twist had known Edward, as she sometimes informed Edith,
all his life, and had not yet found anything in his morals which
was not blameless. Watch him with what loving care she might she
had found nothing; and she was sure her mother's instinct would
not have failed her. Nevertheless, even with that white past before
her--he hadn't told her about "Madame Bovary"--she
now instantly believed the worst.

It was the habit of Clark to believe the worst. Clark was very
small, and therefore also very virtuous. Each inhabitant was the
careful guardian of his neighhour's conduct. Nobody there ever
did anything that was wrong; there wasn't a chance. But as
Nature insists on a balance, the minds of Clark dwelt curiously on
evil. They were minds active in suspicion. They leapt with an
instantaneous agility at the worst conclusions. Nothing was ever
said in Clark, but everything was thought. The older inhabitants,
made fast prisoners in their mould of virtue by age, watched with
jealous care the behaviour of those still young enough to attract
temptation. The younger ones, brought up in inhibitions, settled
down to wakefulness in regard to each other. Everything was
provided and encouraged in Clark, a place of pleasant orchards and
gentle fields, except the things that had to do with love. Husbands
were there; and there was a public library, and social afternoons,
and an Emerson society. The husbands died before the wives, being
less able to cope with virtue; and a street in Clark of smaller
houses into which their widows gravitated had been christened by
the stationmaster--a more worldly man because of his three miles
off and all the trains--Lamentation Lane.

In this village Mrs. Twist had lived since her marriage, full of
dignity and honour. As a wife she had been full of it, for the
elder Mr. Twist had been good even when alive, and as a widow she
had been still fuller, for the elder Mr. Twist positively improved
by being dead. Not a breath had ever touched her and her children.
Not the most daring and distrustful Clark mind had ever thought of
her except respectfully. And now here was this happening to her; at
her age; when she was least able to bear it.

She sat in silence, staring with sombre eyes at the three
figures.

"Mother--" began Edward again; but was again
interrupted by the twins, who said together, as they had now got
into the habit of saying when confronted by silent and surprised
Americans, "We've come."

It wasn't that they thought it a particularly good
conversational opening, it was because silence and surprise on the
part of the other person seemed to call for explanation on theirs,
and they were constitutionally desirous of giving all the
information in their power.

"How do you do," they then repeated, loosening
themselves from Mr. Twist and advancing down the room with
outstretched hands.

Mr. Twist came with them. "Mother," he said,
"these are the Twinkler girls. Their name's Twinkler.
They---"

Freed as he felt he was from his old bonds, determined as he
felt he was on emulating the perfect candour and simplicity of the
twins and the perfect candour and simplicity of his comrades in
France, his mother's dead want of the smallest reaction to this
announcement tripped him up for a moment and prevented his going
on.

But nothing ever prevented the twins going on. If they were
pleased and excited they went on with cheerful gusto, and if they
were unnerved and frightened they still went on,--perhaps even more
volubly, anxiously seeking cover behind a multitude of words.

Mrs. Twist had not yet unnerved and frightened them, because
they were too much delighted that they had got to her at all. The
relief Anna-Rose experienced at having safely piloted that
difficult craft, the clumsy if adorable Columbus, into a
respectable Port was so immense that it immediately vented itself
in words of warmest welcome to the lady in the chair to her own
home.

"We're
so
glad to see you here," she said, smiling till her
dimple seemed to be everywhere at once hardly able to refrain from
giving the lady a welcome hug instead of just inhospitably shaking
her hand. She couldn't even shake her hand, however, because it
still held, immovably, the fork. "It would have been too
awful," Anna-Rose therefore finished, putting the heartiness
of the handshake she wanted to give into her voice instead,
"if
you
had happened to have run away too."