Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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.

  CHAPTER XIV

  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.”

  “Do you mean to say—” Anna-Rose stopped with a catch of her breath. “Do you mean,” she went on in an awe-struck voice, “that one of them — one of them is dead?”

  “Dead? Bless you, no. Anything but dead. The exact opposite. Gone. Left. Got,” said the boy.

  “Oh,” said Anna-Rose greatly relieved, passing over his last word, whose meaning escaped her, “oh — you mean just gone to meet us. And missed us. You see,” she said, turning to Anna-Felicitas, “they did try to after all.”

  Anna-Felicitas said nothing, but reflected that whichever Sack had tried to must have a quite unusual gift for missing people.

  “Gone to meet you?” repeated the boy, as one surprised by a new point of view. “Well, I don’t know about that—”

  “We’ll go up and explain,” said Anna-Rose. “Is it Mr. or Mrs. Clouston Sack who is here?”

  “Mr.,” said the boy.

  “Very well then. Please bring in our things.” And Anna-Rose proceeded, followed by Anna-Felicitas, to walk into the house.

  The boy, instead of bringing them in, picked up the articles lying on the pavement and put them back again into the taxi. “No hurry about them, I guess,” he said to the driver. “Time enough to take them up when the gurls ask again—” and he darted after the gurls to hand them over to his colleague who worked what he called the elevator.

  “Why do you call it the elevator,” inquired Anna-Felicitas, mildly inquisitive, of this boy, who on hearing that they wished to see Mr. Sack stared at them with profound and unblinking interest all the way up, “when it is really a lift?”

  “Because it is an elevator,” said the boy briefly.

  “But we, you see,” said Anna-Felicitas, “are equally convinced that it’s a lift.”

  The boy didn’t answer this. He was as silent as the other one wasn’t; but there was a thrill about him too, something electric and tense. He stared at Anna-Felicitas, then turned quickly and stared at Anna-Rose, then quickly back to Anna-Felicitas, and so on all the way up. He was obviously extraordinarily interested. He seemed to have got hold of an idea that had not struck the squib-like boy downstairs, who was entertaining the taxi-driver with descriptions of the domestic life of the Sacks.

  The lift stopped at what the twins supposed was going to be the door of a landing or public corridor, but it was, they discovered, the actual door of the Sack flat. At any moment the Sacks, if they wished to commit suicide, could do so simply by stepping out of their own front door. They would then fall, infinitely far, on to the roof of the lift lurking at the bottom.

  The lift-boy pressed a bell, the door opened, and there, at once exposed to the twins, was the square hall of the Sack flat with a manservant standing in it staring at them.

  Obsessed by his idea, the lift-boy immediately stepped out of his lift, approached the servant, introduced his passengers to him by saying, “Young ladies to see Mr. Sack,” took a step
closer, and whispered in his ear, but perfectly audibly to the twins who, however, regarded it as some expression peculiarly American and were left unmoved by it, “The co-respondents.”

  The servant stared uncertainly at them. His mistress had only been gone a few hours, and the flat was still warm with her presence and authority. She wouldn’t, he well knew, have permitted co-respondents to be about the place if she had been there, but on the other hand she wasn’t there. Mr. Sack was in sole possession now. Nobody knew where Mrs. Sack was. Letters and telegrams lay on the table for her unopened, among them Mr. Twist’s announcing the arrival of the Twinklers. In his heart the servant sided with Mr. Sack, but only in his heart, for the servant’s wife was the cook, and she, as she frequently explained, was all for strict monogamy. He stared therefore uncertainly at the twins, his brain revolving round their colossal impudence in coming there before Mrs. Sack’s rooms had so much as had time to get, as it were, cold.

  “We want to see Mr. Clouston Sack,” began Anna-Rose in her clear little voice; and no sooner did she begin to speak than a door was pulled open and the gentleman himself appeared.

  “I heard a noise of arrival—” he said, stopping suddenly when he saw them. “I heard a noise of arrival, and a woman’s voice—”

  “It’s us,” said Anna-Rose, her face covering itself with the bright conciliatory smiles of the arriving guest. “Are you Mr. Clouston Sack?”

  She went up to him and held out her hand. They both went up to him and held out their hands.

  “We’re the Twinklers,” said Anna-Rose.

  “We’ve come,” said Anna-Felicitas, in case he shouldn’t have noticed it.

  Mr. Sack let his hand be shaken, and it was a moist hand. He looked like a Gibson young man who has grown elderly. He had the manly profile and shoulders, but they sagged and stooped. There was a dilapidation about him, a look of blurred edges. His hair lay on his forehead in disorder, and his tie had been put on carelessly and had wriggled up to the rim of his collar.

  “The Twinklers,” he repeated. “The Twinklers. Do I remember, I wonder?”

  “There hasn’t been much time to forget,” said Anna-Felicitas. “It’s less than two months since there were all those letters.”

  “Letters?” echoed Mr. Sack. “Letters?”

  “So now we’ve got here,” said Anna-Rose, the more brightly that she was unnerved.

  “Yes. We’ve come,” said Anna-Felicitas, also with feverish brightness.

  Bewildered, Mr. Sack, who felt that he had had enough to bear the last few hours, stood staring at them. Then he caught sight of the lift-boy, lingering and he further saw the expression on his servant’s face Even to his bewilderment it was clear what he was thinking.

  Mr. Sack turned round quickly and led the way into the dining-room. “Come in, come in,” he said distractedly.

  They went in. He shut the door. The lift-boy and the servant lingered a moment making faces at each other; then the lift-boy dropped away in his lift, and the servant retired to the kitchen. “I’m darned,” was all he could articulate. “I’m darned.”

  “There’s our luggage,” said Anna-Rose, turning to Mr. Sack on getting inside the room, her voice gone a little shrill in her determined cheerfulness. “Can it be brought up?”

  “Luggage?” repeated Mr. Sack, putting his hand to his forehead. “Excuse me, but I’ve got such a racking headache to-day — it makes me stupid—”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry,” said Anna-Rose solicitously.

  “And so am I — very,” said Anna-Felicitas, equally solicitous. “Have you tried aspirin? Sometimes some simple remedy like that—”

  “Oh thank you — it’s good of you, it’s good of you. The effect, you see, is that I can’t think very clearly. But do tell me — why luggage? Luggage — luggage. You mean, I suppose, baggage.”

  “Why luggage?” asked Anna-Rose nervously. “Isn’t there — isn’t there always luggage in America too when people come to stay with one?”

  “You’ve come to stay with me,” said Mr. Sack, putting his hand to his forehead again.

  “You see,” said Anna-Felicitas, “we’re the Twinklers.”

  “Yes, yes — I know. You’ve told me that.”

  “So naturally we’ve come.”

  “But is it natural?” asked Mr. Sack, looking at them distractedly.

  “We sent you a telegram,” said Anna-Rose, “or rather one to Mrs. Sack, which is the same thing—”

  “It isn’t, it isn’t,” said the distressed Mr. Sack. “I wish it were. It ought to be. Mrs. Sack isn’t here—”

  “Yes — we’re very sorry to have missed her. Did she go to meet us in New York, or where?”

  “Mrs. Sack didn’t go to meet you. She’s — gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Oh,” cried Mr. Sack, “somewhere else, but not to meet you. Oh,” he went on after a moment in which, while the twins gazed at him, he fought with and overcame emotion, “when I heard you speaking in the hall I thought — I had a moment’s hope — for a minute I believed — she had come back. So I went out. Else I couldn’t have seen you. I’m not fit to see strangers—”

  The things Mr. Sack said, and his fluttering, unhappy voice, were so much at variance with the stern lines of his Gibson profile that the twins viewed him with the utmost surprise. They came to no conclusion and passed no judgment because they didn’t know but what if one was an American one naturally behaved like that.

  “I don’t think,” said Anna-Felicitas gently, “that you can call us strangers. We’re the Twinklers.”

  “Yes, yes — I know — you keep on telling me that,” said Mr. Sack. “But I can’t call to mind—”

  “Don’t you remember all Uncle Arthur’s letters about us? We’re the nieces he asked you to be kind to for a bit — as I’m sure,” Anna-Felicitas added politely, “you’re admirably adapted for being.”

  Mr. Sack turned his bewildered eyes on to her. “Oh, aren’t you a pretty girl,” he said, in the same distressed voice.

  “You mustn’t make her vain,” said Anna-Rose, trying not to smile all over her face, while Anna-Felicitas remained as manifestly unvain as a person intent on something else would be.

  “We know you got Uncle Arthur’s letters about us,” she continued, “because he showed us your answers back. You invited us to come and stay with you. And, as you perceive, we’ve done it.”

  “Then it must have been months ago — months ago,” said Mr. Sack, “before all this — do I remember something about it? I’ve had such trouble since — I’ve been so distracted one way and another — it may have slipped away out of my memory under the stress — Mrs. Sack—” He paused and looked round the room helplessly. “Mrs. Sack — well, Mrs. Sack isn’t here now.”

  “We’re very sorry you’ve had trouble,” said Anna-Felicitas sympathetically. “It’s what everybody has, though. Man that is born of woman is full of misery. That’s what the Burial Service says, and it ought to know.”

  Mr. Sack again turned bewildered eyes on to her. “Oh, aren’t you a pretty—” he again began.

  “When do you think Mrs. Sack will be back?” interrupted Anna-Rose.

  “I wish I knew — I wish I could hope — but she’s gone for a long while, I’m afraid—”

  “Gone not to come back at all, do you mean?” asked Anna-Felicitas.

  Mr. Sack gulped. “I’m afraid that is her intention,” he said miserably.

  There was a silence, in which they all stood looking at each other.

  “Didn’t she like you?” then inquired Anna-Felicitas.

  Anna-Rose, sure that this wasn’t tactful, gave her sleeve a little pull.

  “Were you unkind to her?” asked Anna-Felicitas, disregarding the warning.

  Mr. Sack, his fingers clasping and unclasping themselves behind his back, started walking up and down the room. Anna-Felicitas, forgetful of what Aunt Alice would have said, sat down on the edge of the table and began to be interested i
n Mrs. Sack.

  “The wives I’ve seen,” she remarked, watching Mr. Sack with friendly and interested eyes, “who were chiefly Aunt Alice — that’s Uncle Arthur’s wife, the one we’re the nieces of — seemed to put up with the utmost contumely from their husbands and yet didn’t budge. You must have been something awful to yours.”

  “I worshipped Mrs. Sack,” burst out Mr. Sack. “I worshipped her. I do worship her. She was the handsomest, brightest woman in Boston. I was as proud of her as any man has ever been of his wife.”

  “Then why did she go?” asked Anna-Felicitas.

  “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you should ask,” rebuked Anna-Rose.

  “But if I don’t ask I won’t be told,” said Ann Felicitas, “and I’m interested.”

  “Mrs. Sack went because I was able — I was so constructed — that I could be fond of other people as well as of her,” said Mr. Sack.

  “Well, that’s nothing unusual,” said Anna-Felicitas.

  “No,” said Anna-Rose, “I don’t see anything in that.”

  “I think it shows a humane and friendly spirit,” said Anna-Felicitas.

  “Besides, it’s enjoined in the Bible,” said Anna-Rose.

  “I’m sure when we meet Mrs. Sack,” said Anna-Felicitas very politely indeed, “much as we expect to like her we shall nevertheless continue to like other people as well. You, for instance. Will she mind that?”

  “It wasn’t so much that I liked other people,” said Mr. Sack, walking about and thinking tumultuously aloud rather than addressing anybody, “but that I liked other people so much.”

  “I see,” said Anna-Felicitas, nodding. “You overdid it. Like over-eating whipped cream. Only it wasn’t you but Mrs. Sack who got the resulting ache.”

  “And aren’t I aching? Aren’t I suffering?”

  “Yes, but you did the over-eating,” said Anna-Felicitas.

  “The world,” said the unhappy Mr. Sack, quickening his pace, “is so full of charming and delightful people. Is one to shut one’s eyes to them?”