Chapter 33

In the office Anna-Rose found Mr. Twist walking up and down.

“See here,” he said, turning on her when she came in, “I’m about tired of looking on at all this twittering round that lot in there. You’re through with that for to-day, and maybe for to-morrow and the day after as well.”

He waved his arm at the deep chair that had been provided for his business meditations. “You’ll sit down in that chair now,” he said severely, “and stay put.”

Anna-Rose looked at him with a quivering lip. She went rather unsteadily to the chair and tumbled into it. “I don’t know if you’re angry or being kind,” she said tremulously, “but whichever it is I—I wish you wouldn’t. I—I wish you’d manage to be something that isn’t either.” And, as she had feared, she began to cry.

“Anna-Rose,” said Mr. Twist, staring down at her in concern mixed with irritation—out there all those Germans, in here the weeping child; what a day he was having—”for heaven’s sake don’t do that.”

“I know,” sobbed Anna-Rose. “I don’t want to. It’s awful being so natu—natu—naturally liquid.”

“But what’s the matter?” asked Mr. Twist helplessly.

“Nothing,” sobbed Anna-Rose.

He stood over her in silence for a minute, his hands in his pockets. If he took them out he was afraid he might start stroking her, and she seemed to him to be exactly between the ages when such a form of comfort would be legitimate. If she were younger ... but she was a great girl now; if she were older ... ah, if she were older, Mr. Twist could imagine...

“You’re overtired,” he said aloofly. “That’s what you are.”

“No,” sobbed Anna-Rose.

“And the Germans have been too much for you.”

“They haven’t,” sobbed Anna-Rose, her pride up at the suggestion that anybody could ever be that.

“But they’re not going to get the chance again,” said Mr. Twist, setting his teeth as much as they would set, which wasn’t, owing to his natural kindliness, anything particular. “Mrs. Bilton and me—” Then he remembered Anna-Felicitas. “Why doesn’t she come?” he asked.

“Who?” choked Anna-Rose.

“The other one. Anna II. Columbus.”

“I haven’t seen her for ages,” sobbed Anna-Rose, who had been much upset by Anna-Felicitas’s prolonged disappearance and had suspected her, though she couldn’t understand it after last night’s finishings up, of secret unworthy conduct in a corner with ice-cream.

Mr. Twist went to the door quickly and looked through. “I can’t see her either,” he said. “Confound them—what have they done to her? Worn her out too, I daresay. I shouldn’t wonder if she’d crawled off somewhere and were crying too.”

“Anna-F.—doesn’t crawl,” sobbed Anna-Rose, “and she—doesn’t cry but—I wish you’d find—her.”

“Well, will you stay where you are while I’m away, then?” he said, looking at her from the door uncertainly.

And she seemed so extra small over there in the enormous chair, and somehow so extra motherless as she obediently gurgled and choked a promise not to move, that he found himself unable to resist going back to her for a minute in order to pat her head. “There, there,” said Mr. Twist, very gently patting her head, his heart yearning over her; and it yearned the more that, the minute he patted, her sobs got worse; and also the more because of the feel of her dear little head.

“You little bit of blessedness,” murmured Mr. Twist before he knew what he was saying; at which her sobs grew louder than ever, —grew, indeed, almost into small howls, so long was it since anybody had said things like that to her. It was her mother who used to say things like that; things almost exactly like that.

“Hush,” said Mr. Twist in much distress, and with one anxious eye on the half-open door, for Anna-Rose’s sobs were threatening to outdo the noise of teacups and ice-cream plates, “hush, hush—here’s a clean handkerchief—you just wipe up your eyes while I fetch Anna II. She’ll worry, you know, if she sees you like this, —hush now, hush—there, there—and I expect she’s being miserable enough already, hiding away in some corner. You wouldn’t like to make her more miserable, would you—”

And he pressed the handkerchief into Anna-Rose’s hands, and feeling much flurried went away to search for the other one who was somewhere, he was sure, in a state of equal distress.

He hadn’t however to search. He found her immediately. As he came out of the door of his office into the tea-room he saw her come into the tea-room from the door of the verandah, and proceed across it towards the pantry. Why the verandah? wondered Mr. Twist. He hurried to intercept her. Anyhow she wasn’t either about to cry or getting over having done it. He saw that at once with relief. Nor was she, it would seem, in any sort of distress. On the contrary, Anna-Felicitas looked particularly smug. He saw that once too, with surprise, —why smug? wondered Mr. Twist. She had a pleased look of complete satisfaction on her face. She was oblivious, he noticed, as she passed between the tables, of the guests who tried in vain to attract her attention and detain her with orders. She wasn’t at all hot, as Anna-Rose had been, nor rattled, nor in any way discomposed; she was just smug. And also she was unusually, extraordinarily pretty. How dared they all stare up at her like that as she passed? And try to stop her. And want to talk to her. And Wangelbecker actually laying his hand—no, his paw; in his annoyance Mr. Twist wouldn’t admit that the object at the end of Mr. Wangelbecker’s arm was anything but a paw—on her wrist to get her to listen to some confounded order or other. She took no notice of that either, but walked on towards the pantry. Placidly. Steadily. Obvious. Smug.