Chapter 9

When the St. Luke was so near its journey’s end that people were packing up, and the word Nantucket was frequent in the scraps of talk the twins heard, they woke up from the unworried condition of mind Mr. Twist’s kindness and the dreamy monotony of the days had produced in them, and began to consider their prospects with more attention. This attention soon resulted in anxiety. Anna-Rose showed hers by being irritable. Anna-Felicitas didn’t show hers at all.

It was all very well, so long as they were far away from America and never quite sure that a submarine mightn’t settle their future for them once and for all, to feel big, vague, heroic things about a new life and a new world and they two Twinklers going to conquer it; but when the new world was really upon them, and the new life, with all the multitudinous details that would have to be tackled, going to begin in a few hours, their hearts became uneasy and sank within them. England hadn’t liked them. Suppose America didn’t like them either? Uncle Arthur hadn’t liked them. Suppose Uncle Arthur’s friends didn’t like them either? Their hearts sank to, and remained in, their boots.

Round Anna-Rose’s waist, safely concealed beneath her skirt from what Anna-Felicitas called the predatory instincts of their fellow-passengers, was a chamois-leather bag containing their passports, a letter to the bank where their £200 was, a letter to those friends of Uncle Arthur’s who were to be tried first, a letter to those other friends of his who were to be the second line of defence supposing the first one failed, and ten pounds in two £5 notes.

Uncle Arthur, grievously grumbling, and having previously used in bed most of those vulgar words that made Aunt Alice so miserable, had given Anna-Rose one of the £5 notes for the extra expenses of the journey till, in New York, she should be able to draw on the £200, though what expenses there could be for a couple of girls whose passage was paid Uncle Arthur was damned, he alleged, if he knew; and Aunt Alice had secretly added the other. This was all Anna-Rose’s ready money, and it would have to be changed into dollars before reaching New York so as to be ready for emergencies on arrival. She judged from the growing restlessness of the passengers that it would soon be time to go and change it. How many dollars ought she to get?

Mr. Twist was absent, packing his things. She ought to have asked him long ago, but they seemed so suddenly to have reached the end of their journey. Only yesterday there was the same old limitless sea everywhere, the same old feeling that they were never going to arrive. Now the waves had all gone, and one could actually see land. The New World. The place all their happiness or unhappiness would depend on.

She laid hold of Anna-Felicitas, who was walking about just as if she had never been prostrate on a deck-chair in her life, and was going to say something appropriate and encouraging on the Christopher and Columbus lines; but Anna-Felicitas, who had been pondering the £5 notes problem, wouldn’t listen.

“A dollar,” said Anna-Felicitas, worrying it out, “isn’t like a shilling or a mark, but on the other hand neither is it like a pound.”

“No,” said Anna-Rose, brought back to her immediate business.

“It’s four times more than one, and five times less than the other,” said Anna-Felicitas. “That’s how you’ve got to count. That’s what Aunt Alice said.”

“Yes. And then there’s the exchange,” said Anna-Rose, frowning. “As if it wasn’t complicated enough already, there’s the exchange. Uncle Arthur said we weren’t to forget that.”

Anna-Felicitas wanted to know what was meant by the exchange, and Anna-Rose, unwilling to admit ignorance to Anna-Felicitas, who had to be kept in her proper place, especially when one was just getting to America and she might easily become above herself, said that it was something that varied. (“The exchange, you know, varies,” Uncle Arthur had said when he gave her the £5 note. “You must keep your eye on the variations.” Anna-Rose was all eagerness to keep her eye on them, if only she had known what and where they were. But one never asked questions of Uncle Arthur. His answers, if one did, were confined to expressions of anger and amazement that one didn’t, at one’s age, already know.)

“Oh,” said Anna-Felicitas, for a moment glancing at Anna-Rose out of the corner of her eye, considerately not pressing her further.

“I wish Mr. Twist would come,” said Anna-Rose uneasily, looking in the direction he usually appeared from.

“We won’t always have him” remarked Anna-Felicitas.

“I never said we would,” said Anna-Rose shortly.

The young lady of the nails appeared at that moment in a hat so gorgeous that the twins stopped dead to stare. She had a veil on and white gloves, and looked as if she were going for a walk in Fifth Avenue the very next minute.

“Perhaps we ought to be getting ready too,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“Yes. I wish Mr. Twist would come—”

“Perhaps we’d better begin and practise not having Mr. Twist,” said Anna-Felicitas, as one who addresses nobody specially and means nothing in particular.

“If anybody’s got to practise that, it’ll be you,” said Anna-Rose. “There’ll be no one to roll you up in rugs now, remember. I won’t.”

“But I don’t want to be rolled up in rugs,” said Anna-Felicitas mildly. “I shall be walking about New York.”

“Oh, you’ll see,” said Anna-Rose irritably.

She was worried about the dollars. She was worried about the tipping, and the luggage, and the arrival, and Uncle Arthur’s friends, whose names were Mr. and Mrs. Clouston K. Sack; so naturally she was irritable. One is. And nobody knew and understood this better than Anna-Felicitas.

“Let’s go and put on our hats and get ready,” she said, after a moment’s pause during which she wondered whether, in the interests of Anna-Rose’s restoration to calm, she mightn’t have to be sick again. She did hope she wouldn’t have to. She had supposed she had done with that. It is true there were now no waves, but she knew she had only to go near the engines and smell the oil. “Let’s go and put on our hats,” she suggested, slipping her hand through Anna-Rose’s arm.

Anna-Rose let herself be led away, and they went to their cabin; and when they came out of it half an hour later, no longer with that bald look their caps had given them, the sun catching the little rings of pale gold hair that showed for the first time, and clad, instead of in the disreputable jerseys that they loved, in neat black coats and skirts—for they still wore mourning when properly dressed—with everything exactly as Aunt Alice had directed for their arrival, the young men of the second class could hardly believe their eyes.

“You’ll excuse me saying so,” said one of them to Anna-Felicitas as she passed him, “but you’re looking very well to-day.”

“I expect that’s because I am well,” said Anna-Felicitas amiably.

Mr. Twist, when he saw them, threw up his hands and ejaculated “My!”

“Yes,” said Anna-Felicitas, who was herself puzzled by the difference the clothes had made in Anna-Rose after ten solid days of cap and jersey, “I think it’s our hats. They do somehow seem very splendid.”

“Splendid?” echoed Mr. Twist. “Why, they’d make the very angels jealous, and get pulling off their haloes and kicking them over the edge of heaven.”

“What is so wonderful is that Aunt Alice should ever have squeezed them out of Uncle Arthur,” said Anna-Rose, gazing lost in admiration at Anna-Felicitas. “He didn’t disgorge nice hats easily at all.”

And one of the German ladies muttered to the other, as her eye fell on Anna-Felicitas, “Ja, ja, die hat Rasse.”

And it was only because it was the other German lady’s hair that spent the night in a different part of the cabin from her head and had been seen doing it by Anna-Felicitas, that she cavilled and was grudging. “Gewiss,” she muttered back, “bis auf der Nase. Die Nase aber entfremdet mich. Die ist keine echte Junkernase.”

So that the Twinklers had quite a success, and their hearts came a little way out of their boots; only a little way, though, for there were the Clouston K. Sacks looming bigger into their lives every minute now.