Uncle Arthur was the husband of Aunt Alice. He didn't like foreigners,
and said so. He never had liked them and had always said so. It wasn't
the war at all, it was the foreigners. But as the war went on, and these
German nieces of his wife became more and more, as he told her, a
blighted nuisance, so did he become more and more pointed, and said he
didn't mind French foreigners, nor Russian foreigners; and a few weeks
later, that it wasn't Italian foreigners either that he minded; and
still later, that nor was it foreigners indigenous to the soil of
countries called neutral. These things he said aloud at meals in a
general way. To his wife when alone he said much more.
Anna-Rose, who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to soften his
heart by offering to read aloud to him in the evenings when he came home
weary from his daily avocations, which were golf. Her own suggestion
instantly projected a touching picture on her impressionable imagination
of youth, grateful for a roof over its head, in return alleviating the
tedium of crabbed age by introducing its uncle, who from his remarks was
evidently unacquainted with them, to the best productions of the great
masters of English literature.
But Uncle Arthur merely stared at her with a lacklustre eye when she
proposed it, from his wide-legged position on the hearthrug, where he
was moving money about in trouser-pockets of the best material. And
later on she discovered that he had always supposed the "Faery Queen,"
and "Adonais," and "In Memoriam," names he had heard at intervals during
his life, for he was fifty and such things do sometimes get mentioned
were well-known racehorses.
Uncle Arthur, like Onkel Col, was a very good man, and though he said
things about foreigners he did stick to these unfortunate alien nieces
longer than one would have supposed possible if one had overheard what
he said to Aunt Alice in the seclusion of their bed. His ordered
existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew, was shaken in its
innermost parts, in its very marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans.
Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned; but
who but he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans? And he
couldn't groan, because they were, besides being motherless creatures,
his own wife's flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he groan; but
he could and did do it in bed. Why on earth that silly mother of theirs
couldn't have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian sand-heap where she
belonged, instead of coming gallivanting over to England, and then when
she had got there not even decently staying alive and seeing to her
children herself, he at frequent intervals told Aunt Alice in bed that
he would like to know.
Aunt Alice, who after twenty years of life with Uncle Arthur was both
silent and sleek (for he fed her well), sighed and said nothing. She
herself was quietly going through very much on behalf of her nieces.
Jessup didn't like handing dishes to Germans. The tradespeople twitted
the cook with having to cook for them and were facetious about sausages
and asked how one made sauerkraut. Her acquaintances told her they were
very sorry for her, and said they supposed she knew what she was doing
and that it was all right about spies, but really one heard such strange
things, one never could possibly tell even with children; and regularly
the local policeman bicycled over to see if the aliens, who were
registered at the county-town police-station, were still safe. And then
they looked so very German, Aunt Alice felt. There was no mistaking
them. And every time they opened their mouths there were all those r's
rolling about. She hardly liked callers to find her nieces in her
drawing-room at tea-time, they were so difficult to explain; yet they
were too old to shut up in a nursery.
After three months of them, Uncle Arthur suggested sending them back to
Germany; but their consternation had been so great and their entreaties
to be kept where they were so desperate that he said no more about that.
Besides, they told him that if they went back there they would be sure
to be shot as spies, for over there nobody would believe they were
German, just as over here nobody would believe they were English; and
besides, this was in those days of the war when England was still
regarding Germany as more mistaken than vicious, and was as full as ever
of the tradition of great and elaborate indulgence and generosity toward
a foe, and Uncle Arthur, whatever he might say, was not going to be
behind his country in generosity.
Yet as time passed, and feeling tightened, and the hideous necklace of
war grew more and more frightful with each fresh bead of horror strung
upon it, Uncle Arthur, though still in principle remaining good, in
practice found himself vindictive. He was saddled; that's what he was.
Saddled with this monstrous unmerited burden. He, the most patriotic of
Britons, looked at askance by his best friends, being given notice by
his old servants, having particular attention paid his house at night by
the police, getting anonymous letters about lights seen in his upper
windows the nights; the Zeppelins came, which were the windows of the
floor those blighted twins slept on, and all because he had married Aunt
Alice.
At this period Aunt Alice went to bed with reluctance. It was not a
place she had ever gone to very willingly since she married Uncle
Arthur, for he was the kind of husband who rebukes in bed; but now she
was downright reluctant. It was painful to her to be told that she had
brought this disturbance into Uncle Arthur's life by having let him
marry her. Inquiring backwards into her recollections it appeared to her
that she had had no say at all about being married, but that Uncle
Arthur had told her she was going to be, and then that she had been.
Which was what had indeed happened; for Aunt Alice was a round little
woman even in those days, nicely though not obtrusively padded with
agreeable fat at the corners, and her skin, just as now, had the moist
delicacy that comes from eating a great many chickens. Also she
suggested, just as now, most of the things most men want to come home
to,--slippers, and drawn curtains, and a blazing fire, and peace within
one's borders, and even, as Anna-Rose pointed out privately to
Anna-Felicitas after they had come across them for the first time, she
suggested muffins; and so, being in these varied fashions succulent, she
was doomed to make some good man happy. But she did find it real hard
work.
It grew plain to Aunt Alice after another month of them that Uncle
Arthur would not much longer endure his nieces, and that even if he did
she would not be able to endure Uncle Arthur. The thought was very
dreadful to her that she was being forced to choose between two duties,
and that she could not fulfil both. It came to this at last, that she
must either stand by her nieces, her dead sister's fatherless children,
and face all the difficulties and discomforts of such a standing by, go
away with them, take care of them, till the war was over; or she must
stand by Arthur.
She chose Arthur.
How could she, for nieces she had hardly seen, abandon her husband?
Besides, he had scolded her so steadily during the whole of their
married life that she was now unalterably attached to him. Sometimes a
wild thought did for a moment illuminate the soothing dusk of her mind,
the thought of doing the heroic thing, leaving him for them, and helping
and protecting the two poor aliens till happier days should return. If
there were any good stuff in Arthur would he not recognize, however
angry he might be, that she was doing at least a Christian thing? But
this illumination would soon die out. Her comforts choked it. She was
too well-fed. After twenty years of it, she no longer had the figure for
lean and dangerous enterprises.
And having definitely chosen Arthur, she concentrated what she had of
determination in finding an employment for her nieces that would remove
them beyond the range of his growing wrath. She found it in a children's
hospital as far away as Worcestershire, a hospital subscribed to very
largely by Arthur, for being a good man he subscribed to hospitals. The
matron objected, but Aunt Alice overrode the matron; and from January to
April Uncle Arthur's house was pure from Germans.
Then they came back again.
It had been impossible to keep them. The nurses wouldn't work with them.
The sick children had relapses when they discovered who it was who
brought them their food, and cried for their mothers. It had been
arranged between Aunt Alice and the matron that the unfortunate
nationality of her nieces should not be mentioned. They were just to be
Aunt Alice's nieces, the Miss Twinklers,--("We will leave out the von,"
said Aunt Alice, full of unnatural cunning. "They have a von, you know,
poor things--such a very labelling thing to have. But Twinkler without
it might quite well be English. Who can possibly tell? It isn't as
though they had had some shocking name like Bismarck.")
Nothing, however, availed against the damning evidence of the rolled
r's. Combined with the silvery fair hair and the determined little
mouths and chins, it was irresistible. Clearly they were foreigners, and
equally clearly they were not Italians, or Russians, or French. Within a
week the nurses spoke of them in private as Fritz and Franz. Within a
fortnight a deputation of staff sisters went to the matron and asked, on
patriotic grounds, for the removal of the Misses Twinkler. The matron,
with the fear of Uncle Arthur in her heart, for he was altogether the
biggest subscriber, sharply sent the deputation about its business; and
being a matron of great competence and courage she would probably have
continued to be able to force the new probationers upon the nurses if it
had not been for the inability, which was conspicuous, of the younger
Miss Twinkler to acquire efficiency.
In vain did Anna-Rose try to make up for Anna-Felicitas's shortcomings
by a double zeal, a double willingness and cheerfulness. Anna-Felicitas
was a born dreamer, a born bungler with her hands and feet. She not only
never from first to last succeeded in filling the thirty hot-water
bottles, which were her care, in thirty minutes, which was her duty, but
every time she met a pail standing about she knocked against it and it
fell over. Patients and nurses watched her approach with apprehension.
Her ward was in a constant condition of flood.
"It's because she's thinking of something else," Anna-Rose tried eagerly
to explain to the indignant sister-in-charge.
"Thinking of something else!" echoed the sister.
"She reads, you see, a lot--whenever she gets the chance she reads--"
"Reads!" echoed the sister.
"And then, you see, she gets thinking--"
"Thinking! Reading doesn't make _me_ think."
"With much regret," wrote the matron to Aunt Alice, "I am obliged to
dismiss your younger niece, Nurse Twinkler II. She has no vocation for
nursing. On the other hand, your elder niece is shaping well and I shall
be pleased to keep her on."
"But I can't stop on," Anna-Rose said to the matron when she announced
these decisions to her. "I can't be separated from my sister. I'd like
very much to know what would become of that poor child without me to
look after her. You forget I'm the eldest."
The matron put down her pen,--she was a woman who made many notes--and
stared at Nurse Twinkler. Not in this fashion did her nurses speak to
her. But Anna-Rose, having been brought up in a spot remote from
everything except love and laughter, had all the fearlessness of
ignorance; and in her extreme youth and smallness, with her eyes shining
and her face heated she appeared to the matron rather like an indignant
kitten.
"Very well," said the matron gravely, suppressing a smile. "One should
always do what one considers one's first duty."
So the Twinklers went back to Uncle Arthur, and the matron was greatly
relieved, for she certainly didn't want them, and Uncle Arthur said
Damn.
"Arthur," gently reproved his wife.
"I say Damn and I mean Damn," said Uncle Arthur. "What the hell can
we--"
"Arthur," said his wife.
"I say, what the hell can we do with a couple of Germans? If people
wouldn't swallow them last winter are they going to swallow them any
better now? God, what troubles a man lets himself in for when he
marries!"
"I do beg you, Arthur, not to use those coarse words," said Aunt Alice,
tears in her gentle eyes.
There followed a period of desperate exertion on the part of Aunt Alice.
She answered advertisements and offered the twins as nursery
governesses, as cheerful companions, as mothers' helps, even as orphans
willing to be adopted. She relinquished every claim on salaries, she
offered them for nothing, and at last she offered them accompanied by a
bonus. "Their mother was English. They are quite English," wrote Aunt
Alice innumerable times in innumerable letters. "I feel bound, however,
to tell you that they once had a German father, but of course it was
through no fault of their own," etc., etc. Aunt Alice's hand ached with
writing letters; and any solution of the problem that might possibly
have been arrived at came to nothing because Anna-Rose would not be
separated from Anna-Felicitas, and if it was difficult to find anybody
who would take on one German nobody at all could be found to take on
two.
Meanwhile Uncle Arthur grew nightly more dreadful in bed. Aunt Alice was
at her wits' end, and took to crying helplessly. The twins racked their
brains to find a way out, quite as anxious to relieve Uncle Arthur of
their presence as he was to be relieved. If only they could be
independent, do something, work, go as housemaids,--anything.
They concocted an anonymous-advertisement and secretly sent it to _The
Times_, clubbing their pocket-money together to pay for it. The
advertisement was:
Energetic Sisters of belligerent ancestry but unimpeachable
Sympathies wish for any sort of work consistent with respectability.
No objection to being demeaned.
Anna-Felicitas inquired what that last word meant for it was Anna-Rose's
word, and Anna-Rose explained that it meant not minding things like
being housemaids. "Which we don't," said Anna-Rose. "Upper and Under.
I'll be Upper, of course, because I'm the eldest."
Anna-Felicitas suggested putting in what it meant then, for she regarded
it with some doubt, but Anna-Rose, it being her word, liked it, and
explained that it Put a whole sentence into a nut-shell, and wouldn't
change it.
No one answered this advertisement except a society in London for
helping alien enemies in distress.
"Charity," said Anna-Rose, turning up her nose.
"And fancy thinking _us_ enemies," said Anna-Felicitas, "Us. While
mummy--" Her eyes filled with tears. She kept them back, however,
behind convenient long eye-lashes.
Then they saw an advertisement in the front page of _The Times_ that
they instantly answered without saying a word to Aunt Alice. The
advertisement was:
Slightly wounded Officer would be glad to find intelligent and
interesting companion who can drive a 14 h.p. Humber. Emoluments by
arrangement.
"We'll _tell_ him we're intelligent and interesting," said Anna-Rose,
eagerly.
"Yes--who knows if we wouldn't be really, if we were given a chance?"
said Anna-Felicitas, quite flushed with excitement.
"And if he engages us we'll take him on in turns, so that the emoluments
won't have to be doubled."
"Yes--because he mightn't like paying twice over."
"Yes--and while the preliminaries are being settled we could be learning
to drive Uncle Arthur's car."
"Yes--except that it's a Daimler, and aren't they different?"
"Yes--but only about the same difference as there is between a man and a
woman. A man and a woman are both human beings, you know. And Daimlers
and Humbers are both cars."
"I see," said Anna-Felicitas; but she didn't.
They wrote an enthusiastic answer that very day.
The only thing they were in doubt about, they explained toward the end
of the fourth sheet, when they had got to politenesses and were
requesting the slightly wounded officer to allow them to express their
sympathy with his wounds, was that they had not yet had an opportunity
of driving a Humber car, but that this opportunity, of course, would be
instantly provided by his engaging them. Also, would he kindly tell them
if it was a male companion he desired to have, because if so it was very
unfortunate, for neither of them were males, but quite the contrary.
They got no answer to this for three weeks, and had given up all hope
and come to the depressing conclusion that they must have betrayed their
want of intelligence and interestingness right away, when one day a
letter came from General Headquarters in France, addressed _To Both the
Miss Twinklers_, and it was a long letter, pages long, from the slightly
wounded officer, telling them he had been patched up again and sent back
to the front, and their answer to his advertisement had been forwarded
to him there, and that he had had heaps of other answers to it, and that
the one he had liked best of all was theirs; and that some day he hoped
when he was back again, and able to drive himself, to show them how
glorious motoring was, if their mother would bring them,--quick motoring
in his racing car, sixty miles an hour motoring, flashing through the
wonders of the New Forest, where he lived. And then there was a long bit
about what the New Forest must be looking like just then, all quiet in
the spring sunshine, with lovely dappled bits of shade underneath the
big beeches, and the heather just coming alive, and all the winding
solitary roads so full of peace, so empty of noise.
"Write to me, you two children," said the letter at the end. "You've no
idea what it's like getting letters from home out here. Write and tell
me what you do and what the garden is like these fine afternoons. The
lilacs must be nearly done, but I'm sure there's the smell of them
still about, and I'm sure you have a beautiful green close-cut lawn, and
tea is brought out on to it, and there's no sound, no sort of sound,
except birds, and you two laughing, and I daresay a jolly dog barking
somewhere just for fun and not because he's angry."
The letter was signed (Captain) John Desmond, and there was a scrawl in
the corner at the end: "It's for jolly little English kids like you that
we're fighting, God bless you. Write to me again soon."
"English kids like us!"
They looked at each other. They had not mentioned their belligerent
ancestry in their letter. They felt uncomfortable, and as if Captain
Desmond were fighting for them, as it were, under false pretences. They
also wondered why he should conclude they were kids.
They wrote to him again, explaining that they were not exactly what
could be described as English, but on the other hand neither were they
exactly what could be described as German. "We would be very glad indeed
if we were really _something_," they added.
But after their letter had been gone only a few days they saw in the
list of casualties in _The Times_ that Captain John Desmond had been
killed.
And then one day the real solution was revealed, and it was revealed to
Uncle Arthur as he sat in his library on a wet Sunday morning
considering his troubles in detail.
Like most great ideas it sprang full-fledged into being,--obvious,
unquestionable, splendidly simple,--out of a trifle. For, chancing to
raise his heavy and disgusted eyes to the bookshelves in front of him,
they rested on one particular book, and on the back of this book stood
out in big gilt letters the word
AMERICA
There were other words on its back, but this one alone stood out, and it
had all the effect of a revelation.
There. That was it. Of course. That was the way out. Why the devil
hadn't Alice thought of _that_? He knew some Americans; he didn't like
them, but he knew them; and he would write to them, or Alice would write
to them, and tell them the twins were coming. He would give the twins
£200,--damn it, nobody could say that wasn't handsome, especially in
war-time, and for a couple of girls who had no earthly sort of claim on
him, whatever Alice might choose to think they had on her. Yet it was
such a confounded mixed-up situation that he wasn't at all sure he
wouldn't come under the Defence of the Realm Act, by giving them money,
as aiding the enemy. Well, he would risk that. He would risk anything to
be rid of them. Ship 'em off, that was the thing to do. They would fall
on their feet right enough over there. America still swallowed Germans
without making a face.
Uncle Arthur reflected for a moment with extreme disgust on the
insensibility of the American palate. "Lost their chance, that's what
_they've_ done," he said to himself--for this was 1916, and America had
not yet made her magnificent entry into the war--as he had already said
to himself a hundred times. "Lost their chance of coming in on the side
of civilization, and helping sweep the world up tidy of barbarism.
Shoulder to shoulder with us, that's where _they_ ought to have been.
English-speaking races--duty to the world--" He then damned the
Americans; but was suddenly interrupted by perceiving that if they had
been shoulder to shoulder with him and England he wouldn't have been
able to send them his wife's German nieces to take care of. There was,
he conceded, that advantage resulting from their attitude. He could not,
however, concede any others.
At luncheon he was very nearly gay. It was terrible to see Uncle
Arthur very nearly gay, and both his wife and the twins were most
uncomfortable. "I wonder what's the matter now," sighed Aunt Alice
to herself, as she nervously crumbled her toast.
It could mean nothing good, Arthur in such spirits on a wet Sunday, when
he hadn't been able to get his golf and the cook had overdone the joint.