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.
"An hotel called Ritz sounds very expensive," she said. "I've heard
Uncle Arthur talk of one there is in London and one there is in Paris,
and he said that only damned American millionaires could afford to stay
in them. Anna-Felicitas and me aren't American millionaires--"
"Or damned," put in Anna-Felicitas.
"--but quite the contrary," said Anna-Rose, "hadn't you better take us
somewhere else?"
"Somewhere like where the Brontes stayed in London," said Anna-Felicitas
harping on this idea. "Where cheapness is combined with historical
associations."
"Oh Lord, it don't matter," said Mr. Twist, who for the first time in
their friendship seemed ruffled.
"Indeed it does," said Anna-Rose anxiously.
"You forget we've got to husband our resources," said Anna-Felicitas.
"You mustn't run away with the idea that because we've got £200 we're
the same as millionaires," said Anna-Rose.
"Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, "frequently told us that £200 is a
very vast sum; but he equally frequently told us that it isn't."
"It was when he was talking about having given to us that he said it was
such a lot," said Anna-Rose.
"He said that as long as we had it we would be rich," said
Anna-Felicitas, "but directly we hadn't it we would be poor."
"So we'd rather not go to the Ritz, please," said Anna-Rose, "if you
don't mind."
The taxi was stopped, and Mr. Twist got out and consulted the driver.
The thought of his Uncle Charles as a temporary refuge for the twins
floated across his brain, but was rejected because Uncle Charles would
speak to no woman under fifty except from his pulpit, and approached
those he did speak to with caution till they were sixty. He regarded
them as one of the chief causes of modern unrest. He liked them so much
that he hated them. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.
Uncle Charles was no good as a refuge.
"Well now, see here," said the driver at last, after Mr. Twist had
rejected such varied suggestions of something small and quiet as the
Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Biltmore, "you tell me where you want
to go to and I'll take you there."
"I want to go to the place your mother would stay in if she came up for
a day or two from the country," said Mr. Twist helplessly.
"Get right in then, and I'll take you back to the Ritz," said the
driver.
But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity he was
unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy pleasantries with
him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in a street off the less
desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of him.
It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are both
noisy and expensive. It was full of foreigners,--real foreigners, the
twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like themselves, but
people with yellow faces and black eyes. They looked very seedy and
shabby, and smoked very much, and talked volubly in unknown tongues. The
entrance hall, a place of mottled marble, with clerks behind a counter
all of whose faces looked as if they were masks, was thick with them;
and it was when they turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas
passed and Anna-Rose was thinking proudly, "Yes, you don't see anything
like that every day, do you," and herself looked fondly at her Columbus,
that she saw that it wasn't Columbus's beauty at all but the sulphur on
the back of her skirt.
This spoilt Anna-Rose's arrival in New York. All the way up in the lift
to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was trying to brush
it off, for the dress was Anna-F.'s very best one.
"That's all your grips, ain't it?" said the youth in buttons who had
come up with them, dumping their bags down on the bedroom floor.
"Our what?" said Anna-Rose, to whom the expression was new. "Do you mean
our bags?"
"No. Grips. These here," said the youth.
"Is that what they're called in America?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with the
intelligent interest of a traveller determined to understand and
appreciate everything, while Anna-Rose, still greatly upset by the
condition of the best skirt but unwilling to expatiate upon it before
the youth, continued to brush her down as best she could with her
handkerchief.
"I don't call them. It's what they are," said the youth. "What I want to
know is, are they all here?"
"How interesting that you don't drop your h's," said Anna-Felicitas,
gazing at him. "The rest of you is so _like_ no h's."
The youth said nothing to that, the line of thought being one he didn't
follow.
"Those _are_ all our--grips, I think," said Anna-Rose counting them
round the corner of Anna-Felicitas's skirt. "Thank you very much," she
added after a pause, as he still lingered.
But this didn't cause him to disappear as it would have in England.
Instead, he picked up a metal bottle with a stopper off the table, and
shook it and announced that their ice-water bottle was empty. "Want some
ice water?" he inquired.
"What for?" asked Anna-Felicitas.
"What for?" echoed the youth.
"Thank you," said Anna-Rose, who didn't care about the youth's manner
which seemed to her familiar, "we don't want ice water, but we should be
glad of a little hot water."
"You'll get all you want of that in there," said the youth, jerking his
head towards a door that led into a bathroom. "It's ice water and ink
that you get out of me."
"Really?" said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him with even more intelligent
interest, almost as if she were prepared, it being America, a country,
she had heard, of considerable mechanical ingenuity, to find his person
bristling with taps which only needed turning.
"We don't want either, thank you," said Anna-Rose.
The youth lingered. Anna-Rose's brushing began to grow vehement. Why
didn't he go? She didn't want to have to be rude to him and hurt his
feelings by asking him to go, but why didn't he? Anna-Felicitas, who was
much too pleasantly detached, thought Anna-Rose, for such a situation,
the door being wide open to the passage and the ungetridable youth
standing there staring, was leisurely taking off her hat and smoothing
her hair.
"Suppose you're new to this country," said the youth after a pause.
"Brand," said Anna-Felicitas pleasantly.
"Then p'raps," said the youth, "you don't know that the feller who
brings up your grips gets a tip."
"Of course we know that," said Anna-Rose, standing up straight and
trying to look stately.
"Then if you know why don't you do it?"
"Do it?" she repeated, endeavouring to chill him into respectfulness by
haughtily throwing back her head. "Of course we shall do it. At the
proper time and place."
"Which is, as you must have noticed," added Anna-Felicitas gently,
"departure and the front door."
"That's all right," said the youth, "but that's only one of the times
and places. That's the last one. Where we've got to now is the first
one."
"Do I understand," said Anna-Rose, trying to be very dignified, while
her heart shrank within her, for what sort of sum did one offer people
like this?--"that to America one tips at the beginning as well?"
"Yep," said the youth. "And in the middle too. Right along through.
Never miss an opportunity, is as good a slogan as you'll get when it
comes to tipping."
"I believe you'd have liked Kipps," said Anna-Felicitas meditatively,
shaking some dust off her hat and remembering the orgy of tipping that
immortal young man went in for at the seaside hotel.
"What I like now," said the youth, growing more easy before their
manifest youth and ignorance, "is tips. Guess you can call it Kipps if
it pleases you."
Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse "It's horrid, I think,
to ask for presents," she said to the youth in deep humiliation, more on
his account than hers.
"Presents? I'm not asking for presents. I'm telling you what's done,"
said the youth. And he had spots on his face. And he was repugnant to
her.
Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a shilling. He took it, and
remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it, went away; and
Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist knocked and
asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.
"He might have said thank you," she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas,
giving a final desperate brushing to the sulphur.
"I expect he'll come to a bad end," said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.
They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a
thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables laid for
dinner. It wasn't the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to
have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort.
The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing
their detachment from it by sitting in a corner of the room playing
dominoes. It was a big room, all looking-glasses and windows, and the
street outside was badly paved and a great noise of passing motor-vans
came in and drowned most of what Mr. Twist was saying. It was an
unlovely place, a place in which one might easily feel homesick and that
the world was empty of affection, if one let oneself go that way. The
twins wouldn't. They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be
daunted by these externals. For there was Mr. Twist, their friend and
stand-by, still with them, and hadn't they got each other? But they felt
uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied them with buttered
toast and macaroons and was as attentive as usual, had a somnambulatory
quality in his attention. He looked like a man who is doing things in a
dream. He looked like one who is absorbed in something else. His
forehead still was puckered, and what could it be puckered about, seeing
that he had got home, and was going back to his mother, and had a clear
and uncomplicated future ahead of him, and anyhow was a man?
"Have you got something on your mind?" asked Anna-Rose at last, when he
hadn't even heard a question she asked,--he, the polite, the interested,
the sympathetic friend of the journey across.
Mr. Twist, sitting tilted back in his chair, his hands deep in his
pockets, looked up from the macaroons he had been staring at and said,
"Yes."
"Tell us what it is," suggested Anna-Felicitas.
"You," said Mr. Twist.
"Me?"
"Both of you. You both of you go together. You're in one lump in my
mind. And on it too," finished Mr. Twist ruefully.
"That's only because," explained Anna-Felicitas, "you've got the idea
we want such a lot of taking care of. Get rid of that, and you'll feel
quite comfortable again. Why not regard us merely as pleasant friends?"
Mr. Twist looked at her in silence.
"Not as objects to be protected," continued Anna Felicitas, "but as
co-equals. Of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting."
Mr. Twist continued to look at her in silence.
"We didn't come to America to be on anybody's mind," said Anna-Rose,
supporting Anna-Felicitas.
"We had a good deal of that in England," said Anna-Felicitas. "For
instance, we're quite familiar with Uncle Arthur's mind, we were on it
so heavily and so long."
"It's our fixed determination," said Anna-Rose, "now that we're starting
a new life, to get off any mind we find ourselves on _instantly_."
"We wish to carve out our own destinies," said Anna-Felicitas.
"We more than wish to," corrected Anna-Rose, "we intend to. What were we
made in God's image for if it wasn't to stand upright on our own feet?"
"Anna-Rose and I had given this a good deal of thought," said
Anna-Felicitas, "first and last, and we're prepared to be friends with
everybody, but only as co-equals and of a reasonable soul and human
flesh subsisting."
"I don't know exactly," said Mr. Twist, "what that means, but it seems
to give you a lot of satisfaction."
"It does. It's out of the Athanasian Creed, and suggests such perfect
equality. If you'll regard us as co-equals instead of as objects to be
looked after, you'll see how happy we shall all be."
"Not," said Anna-Rose, growing tender, for indeed in her heart she
loved and clung to Mr. Twist, "that we haven't very much liked all
you've done for us and the way you were so kind to us on the
boat,--we've been _most_ obliged to you, and we shall miss you very much
indeed, I know."
"But we'll get over that of course in time," put in Anna-Felicitas, "and
we've got to start life now in earnest."
"Well then," said Mr. Twist, "will you two Annas kindly tell me what it
is you propose to do next?"
"Next? After tea? Go and look at the sights."
"I mean to-morrow," said Mr. Twist.
"To-morrow," said Anna-Rose, "we proceed to Boston."
"To track the Clouston Sacks to their lair," said Anna-Felicitas.
"Ah. You've made up your minds to do that. They've behaved abominably,"
said Mr. Twist.
"Perhaps they missed the train," said Anna-Felicitas mildly.
"It's the proper course to pursue," said Anna-Rose. "To proceed to
Boston."
"I suppose it is," said Mr. Twist, again thinking that the really proper
and natural course was for him to have been able to take them to his
mother. Pity one's mother wasn't--
He pulled himself up on the brink of an unfiliality. He was on the verge
of thinking it a pity one's mother wasn't a different one.