Christopher and Columbus. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ