Part 12 (1/2)

Mr. Twist, and also Anna-Felicitas, who wasn't allowed to stay behind with the exuberant young man though she was quite unconscious of his presence, went with Anna-Rose behind the funnel, where after a great deal of private fumbling, her back turned to them, she produced the two much-crumpled 5 notes.

”The steward ought to have something too,” said Mr. Twist.

”Oh, I'd be glad if you'd do him as well,” said Anna-Rose eagerly. ”I don't think I _could_ offer him a tip. He has been so fatherly to us.

And imagine offering to tip one's father.”

Mr. Twist laughed, and said she would get over this feeling in time. He promised to do what was right, and to make it clear that the tips he bestowed were Twinkler tips; and presently he came back with messages of thanks from the tipped--such polite ones from the stewardess that the twins were astonished--and gave Anna-Rose a packet of very dirty-looking slices of green paper, which were dollar bills, he said, besides a variety of strange coins which he spread out on a ledge and explained to her.

”The exchange was favourable to you to-day,” said Mr. Twist, counting out the money.

”How nice of it,” said Anna-Rose politely. ”Did you keep your eye on its variations?” she added a little loudly, with a view to rousing respect in Anna-Felicitas who was lounging against a seat and showing a total absence of every kind of appropriate emotion.

”Certainly,” said Mr. Twist after a slight pause. ”I kept both my eyes on all of them.”

Mr. Twist had, it appeared, presented the steward and stewardess each with a dollar on behalf of the Misses Twinkler, but because the exchange was so favourable this had made no difference to the 5 notes. Reducing each 5 note into German marks, which was the way the Twinklers, in spite of a year in England, still dealt in their heads with money before they could get a clear idea of it, there would have been two hundred marks; and as it took, roughly, four marks to make a dollar, the two hundred marks would have to be divided by four; which, leaving aside that extra complication of variations in the exchange, and regarding the exchange for a moment and for purposes of simplification as keeping quiet for a bit and resting, should produce, also roughly, said Anna-Rose a little out of breath as she got to the end of her calculation, fifty dollars.

”Correct,” said Mr. Twist, who had listened with respectful attention.

”Here they are.”

”I said roughly,” said Anna-Rose. ”It can't be _exactly_ fifty dollars.

The tips anyhow would alter that.”

”Yes, but you forget the exchange.”

Anna-Rose was silent. She didn't want to go into that before Anna-Felicitas. Of the two, she was supposed to be the least bad at sums. Their mother had put it that way, refusing to say, as Anna-Rose industriously tried to trap her into saying, that she was the better of the two. But even so, the difference ent.i.tled her to authority on the subject with Anna-Felicitas, and by dint of doing all her calculations roughly, as she was careful to describe her method, she allowed room for withdrawal and escape where otherwise the inflexibility of figures might have caught her tight and held her down while Anna-Felicitas looked on and was unable to respect her.

Evidently the exchange was something beneficent. She decided to rejoice in it in silence, accept whatever it did, and refrain from asking questions.

”So I did. Of course. The exchange,” she said, after a little.

She gathered up the dollar bills and began packing them into her bag.

They wouldn't all go in, and she had to put the rest into her pocket, for which also there were too many; but she refused Anna-Felicitas's offer to put some of them in hers on the ground that sooner or later she would be sure to forget they weren't her handkerchief and would blow her nose with them.

”Thank you very much for being so kind,” she said to Mr. Twist, as she stuffed her pocket full and tried by vigorous patting to get it to look inconspicuous. ”We're never going to forget you, Anna-F. and me. We'll write to you often, and we'll come and see you as often as you like.”

”Yes,” said Anna-Felicitas dreamily, as she watched the sh.o.r.e of Long Island sliding past. ”Of course you've got your relations, but relations soon pall, and you may be quite glad after a while of a little fresh blood.”

Mr. Twist thought this very likely, and agreed with several other things Anna-Felicitas, generalizing from Uncle Arthur, said about relations, again with that air of addressing n.o.body specially and meaning nothing in particular, while Anna-Rose wrestled with the obesity of her pocket.

”Whether you come to see me or not,” said Mr. Twist, whose misgivings as to the effect of the Twinklers on his mother grew rather than subsided, ”I shall certainly come to see you.”

”Perhaps Mr. Sack won't allow followers,” said Anna-Felicitas, her eyes far away. ”Uncle Arthur didn't. He wouldn't let the maids have any, so they had to go out and do the following themselves. We had a follower once, didn't we, Anna-R.?” she continued her voice pensive and reminiscent. ”He was a friend of Uncle Arthur's. Quite old. At least thirty or forty. I shouldn't have thought he _could_ follow. But he did.

And he used to come home to tea with Uncle Arthur and produce boxes of chocolate for us out of his pockets when Uncle Arthur wasn't looking. We ate them and felt perfectly well disposed toward him till one day he tried to kiss one of us--I forget which. And that, combined with the chocolates, revealed him in his true colours as a follower, and we told him they weren't allowed in that house and urged him to go to some place where they were, or he would certainly be overtaken by Uncle Arthur's vengeance, and we said how surprised we were, because he was so old and we didn't know followers were as old as that ever.”

”It seemed a very shady thing,” said Anna-Rose, having subdued the swollenness of her pocket, ”to eat his chocolates and then not want to kiss him, but we don't hold with kissing, Anna-F. and me. Still, we were full of his chocolates; there was no getting away from that. So we talked it over after he had gone, and decided that next day when he came we'd tell him he might kiss one of us if he still wanted to, and we drew lots which it was to be, and it was me, and I filled myself to the brim with chocolates so as to feel grateful enough to bear it, but he didn't come.”

”No,” said Anna-Felicitas. ”He didn't come again for a long while, and when he did there was no follow left in him. Quite the contrary.”

Mr. Twist listened with the more interest to this story because it was the first time Anna-Felicitas had talked since he knew her. He was used to the inspiriting and voluble conversation of Anna-Rose who had looked upon him as her best friend since the day he had wiped up her tears; but Anna-Felicitas had been too unwell to talk. She had uttered languid and brief observations from time to time with her eyes shut and her head lolling loosely on her neck, but this was the first time she had been, as it were, an ordinary human being, standing upright on her feet, walking about, looking intelligently if pensively at the scenery, and in a condition of affable readiness, it appeared, to converse.

Mr. Twist was a born mother. The more trouble he was given the more attached he became. He had rolled Anna-Felicitas up in rugs so often that to be not going to roll her up any more was depressing to him. He was beginning to perceive this motherliness in him himself, and he gazed through his spectacles at Anna-Felicitas while she sketched the rise and fall of the follower, and wondered with an almost painful solicitude what her fate would be in the hands of the Clouston Sacks.