Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

C >> Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim >> Christopher and Columbus

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The twins, however, were not listening. They were looking at each other
in dismay. How extraordinary, how terrible, the way Uncle Arthur's
friends gave out. They seemed to melt away at one's mere approach.
People who had been living with their husbands all their lives ran away
just as the twins came on the scene; people who had been alive all their
lives went and died, also at that very moment. It almost seemed as if
directly anybody knew that they, the Twinklers, were coming to stay with
them they became bent on escape. They could only look at each other in
stricken astonishment at this latest blow of Fate. They heard no more of
what the driver said. They could only sit and look at each other.

And then Mr. Twist came hurrying across from the baggage office, wiping
his forehead, for the night was hot. Behind him came the porter,
ruefully balancing the piled-up grips on his truck.

"I'm sorry to have been so--" began Mr. Twist, smiling cheerfully: but
he stopped short in his sentence and left off smiling when he saw the
expression in the four eyes fixed on him. "What has happened?" he asked
quickly.

"Only what we might have expected," said Anna-Rose.

"Mr. Dellogg's dead," said Anna-Felicitas.

"You don't say," said Mr. Twist; and after a pause he said again, "You
don't say."

Then he recovered himself. "I'm very sorry to hear it, of course," he
said briskly, picking himself up, as it were, from this sudden and
unexpected tumble, "but I don't see that it matters to you so long as
Mrs. Dellogg isn't dead too."

"Yes, but--" began Anna-Rose.

"Mr. Dellogg isn't _very_ dead, you see," said Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist looked from them to the driver, but finding no elucidation
there and only disapproval, looked back again.

"He isn't dead and settled _down_," said Anna-Rose.

"Not _that_ sort of being dead," said Anna-Felicitas. "He's _just_
dead."

"Just got to the stage when he has a funeral," said Anna-Rose.

"His funeral, it seems, is imminent," said Anna-Felicitas. "Did you not
give us to understand," she asked, turning to the driver, "that it was
imminent?"

"I don't know about imminent," said the driver, who wasn't going to
waste valuable time with words like that, "but it's to-morrow."

"And you see what that means for us," said Anna-Felicitas, turning to
Mr. Twist.

Mr. Twist did.

He again wiped his forehead, but not this time because the night was
hot.

CHAPTER XX

Manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into a house where there
is going to be a funeral next day, even if one has come all the way from
New York and has nowhere else to go. Equally manifestly it is impossible
to thrust oneself into it after the funeral till a decent interval has
elapsed. But what the devil, Mr. Twist asked himself in language become
regrettably natural to him since his sojourn at the front, is a decent
interval?

This Mr. Twist asked himself late that night, pacing up and down the
sea-shore in the warm and tranquil darkness in front of the Cosmopolitan
Hotel, while the twins, utterly tired out by their journey and the
emotions at the end of it, crept silently into bed.

How long does it take a widow to recover her composure? Recover, that
is, the first beginnings of it? At what stage in her mourning is it
legitimate to intrude on her with reminders of obligations incurred
before she was a widow,--with, in fact, the Twinklers? Delicacy itself
would shrink from doing it under a week thought Mr. Twist, or even under
a fortnight, or even if you came to that, under a month; and meanwhile
what was he to do with the Twinklers?

Mr. Twist, being of the artistic temperament for otherwise he wouldn't
have been so sympathetic nor would he have minded, as he so passionately
did mind, his Uncle Charles's teapot dribbling on to the tablecloth--was
sometimes swept by brief but tempestuous revulsions of feeling, and
though he loved the Twinklers he did at this moment describe them
mentally and without knowing it in the very words of Uncle Arthur, as
those accursed twins. It was quite unjust, he knew. They couldn't help
the death of the man Dellogg. They were the victims, from first to last,
of a cruel and pursuing fate; but it is natural to turn on victims, and
Mr. Twist was for an instant, out of the very depth of his helpless
sympathy, impatient with the Twinklers.

He walked up and down the sands frowning and pulling his mouth together,
while the Pacific sighed sympathetically at his feet. Across the road
the huge hotel standing in its gardens was pierced by a thousand lights.
Very few people were about and no one at all was on the sands. There was
an immense noise of what sounded like grasshoppers or crickets, and also
at intervals distant choruses of frogs, but these sounds seemed
altogether beneficent,--so warm, and southern, and far away from less
happy places where in October cold winds perpetually torment the world.
Even in the dark Mr. Twist knew he had got to somewhere that was
beautiful. He could imagine nothing more agreeable than, having handed
over the twins safely to the Delloggs, staying on a week or two in this
place and seeing them every day,--perhaps even, as he had pictured to
himself on the journey, being invited to stay with the Delloggs. Now all
that was knocked on the head. He supposed the man Dellogg couldn't help
being dead but he, Mr. Twist, equally couldn't help resenting it. It was
so awkward; so exceedingly awkward. And it was so like what one of that
creature Uncle Arthur's friends would do.

Mr. Twist, it will be seen, was frankly unreasonable, but then he was
very much taken aback and annoyed. What was he to do with the Annas? He
was obviously not a relation of theirs--and indeed no profiles could
have been less alike--and he didn't suppose Acapulco was behind other
parts of America in curiosity and gossip. If he stayed on at the
Cosmopolitan with the twins till Mrs. Dellogg was approachable again,
whenever that might be, every sort of question would be being asked in
whispers about who they were and what was their relationship, and
presently whenever they sat down anywhere the chairs all round them
would empty. Mr. Twist had seen the kind of thing happening in hotels
before to other people,--never to himself; never had he been in any
situation till now that was not luminously regular. And quite soon after
this with the chairs had begun to happen, the people who created these
vacancies were told by the manager--firmly in America, politely in
England, and sympathetically in France--that their rooms had been
engaged a long time ago for the very next day, and no others were
available.

The Cosmopolitan was clearly an hotel frequented by the virtuous rich.
Mr. Twist felt that he and the Annas wouldn't, in their eyes, come under
this heading, not, that is, when the other guests became aware of the
entire absence of any relationship between him and the twins. Well, for
a day or two nothing could happen; for a day or two, before his party
had had time to sink into the hotel consciousness and the manager
appeared to tell him the rooms were engaged, he could think things out
and talk them over with his companions. Perhaps he might even see Mrs.
Dellogg. The funeral, he had heard on inquiring of the hall porter was
next day. It was to be a brilliant affair, said the porter. Mr. Dellogg
had been a prominent inhabitant, free with his money, a supporter of
anything there was to support. The porter talked of him as the
taxi-driver had done, regretfully and respectfully; and Mr. Twist went
to bed angrier than ever with a man who, being so valuable and so
necessary, should have neglected at such a moment to go on living.

Mr. Twist didn't sleep very well that night. He lay in his rosy room,
under a pink silk quilt, and most of the time stared out through the
open French windows with their pink brocade curtains at the great starry
night, thinking.

In that soft bed, so rosy and so silken as to have been worthy of the
relaxations of, at least, a prima donna, he looked like some lean and
alien bird nesting temporarily where he had no business to. He hadn't
thought of buying silk pyjamas when the success of his teapot put him in
the right position for doing so, because his soul was too simple for him
to desire or think of anything less candid to wear in bed than flannel,
and he still wore the blue flannel pyjamas of a careful bringing up. In
that beautiful bed his pyjamas didn't seem appropriate. Also his head,
so frugal of hair, didn't do justice to the lace and linen of a pillow
prepared for the hairier head of, again at least, a prima donna. And
finding he couldn't sleep, and wishing to see the stars he put on his
spectacles, and then looked more out of place than ever. But as nobody
was there to see him,--which, Mr. Twist sometimes thought when he caught
sight of himself in his pyjamas at bed-time, is one of the comforts of
being virtuously unmarried,--nobody minded.

His reflections were many and various, and they conflicted with and
contradicted each other as the reflections of persons in a difficult
position who have Mr. Twist's sort of temperament often do. Faced by a
dribbling teapot, an object which touched none of the softer emotions,
Mr. Twist soared undisturbed in the calm heights of a detached and
concentrated intelligence, and quickly knew what to do with it; faced by
the derelict Annas his heart and his tenderness got in the ways of any
clear vision.

About three o'clock in the morning, when his mind was choked and strewn
with much pulled-about and finally discarded plans, he suddenly had an
idea. A real one. As far as he could see, a real good one. He would
place the Annas in a school.

Why shouldn't they go to school? he asked himself, starting off
answering any possible objections. A year at a first-rate school would
give them and everybody else time to consider. They ought never to have
left school. It was the very place for luxuriant and overflowing natures
like theirs. No doubt Acapulco had such a thing as a finishing school
for young ladies in it, and into it the Annas should go, and once in it
there they should stay put, thought Mr. Twist in vigorous American,
gathering up his mouth defiantly.

Down these lines of thought his relieved mind cantered easily. He would
seek out a lawyer the next morning, regularize his position to the twins
by turning himself into their guardian, and then get them at once into
the best school there was. As their guardian he could then pay all their
expenses, and faced by this legal fact they would, he hoped, be soon
persuaded of the propriety of his paying whatever there was to pay.

Mr. Twist was so much pleased by his idea that he was able to go to
sleep after that. Even three months' school--the period he gave Mrs.
Dellogg for her acutest grief--would do. Tide them over. Give them room
to turn round in. It was a great solution. He took off his spectacles,
snuggled down into his rosy nest, and fell asleep with the
instantaneousness of one whose mind is suddenly relieved.

But when he went down to breakfast he didn't feel quite so sure. The
twins didn't look, somehow, as though they would want to go to school.
They had been busy with their luggage, and had unpacked one of the
trunks for the first time since leaving Aunt Alice, and in honour of the
heat and sunshine and the heavenly smell of heliotrope that was in the
warm air, had put on white summer frocks.

Impossible to imagine anything cooler, sweeter, prettier and more
angelically good than those two Annas looked as they came out on to the
great verandah of the hotel to join Mr. Twist at breakfast. They
instantly sank into the hotel consciousness. Mr. Twist had thought this
wouldn't happen for a day or two, but he now perceived his mistake. Not
a head that wasn't turned to look at them, not a newspaper that wasn't
lowered. They were immediate objects of interest and curiosity, entirely
benevolent interest and curiosity because nobody yet knew anything about
them, and the wives of the rich husbands--those halves of the
virtuous-rich unions which provided the virtuousness--smiled as they
passed, and murmured nice words to each other like cute and cunning.

Mr. Twist, being a good American, stood up and held the twins' chairs
for them when they appeared. They loved this; it seemed so respectful,
and made them feel so old and looked-up to. He had done it that night in
New York at supper, and at all the meals in the train in spite of the
train being so wobbly and each time they had loved it. "It makes one
have such self-respect," they agreed, commenting on this agreeable
practice in private.

They sat down in the chairs with the gracious face of the properly
treated, and inquired, with an amiability and a solicitous politeness on
a par with their treatment how Mr. Twist had slept. They themselves had
obviously slept well, for their faces were cherubic in their bland
placidity, and already after one night wore what Mr. Twist later came to
recognize as the Californian look, a look of complete unworriedness.

Yet they ought to have been worried. Mr. Twist had been terribly worried
up to the moment in the night when he got his great idea, and he was
worried again, now that he saw the twins, by doubts. They didn't look as
though they would easily be put to school. His idea still seemed to him
magnificent, a great solution, but would the Annas be able to see it?
They might turn out impervious to it; not rejecting it, but simply
non-absorbent. As they slowly and contentedly ate their grape-fruit,
gazing out between the spoonfuls at the sea shining across the road
through palm trees, and looking unruffled itself, he felt it was going
to be rather like suggesting to two cherubs to leave their serene
occupation of adoring eternal beauty and learn lessons instead. Still,
it was the one way out, as far as Mr. Twist could see, of the situation
produced by the death of the man Dellogg. "When you've done breakfast,"
he said, pulling himself together on their reaching the waffle stage,
"we must have a talk."

"When we've done breakfast," said Anna-Rose, "we must have a walk."

"Down there," said Anna-Felicitas, pointing with her spoon. "On the
sands. Round the curve to where the pink hills begin."

"Mr. Dellogg's death," said Mr. Twist, deciding it was necessary at once
to wake them up out of the kind of happy somnolescence they seemed to be
falling into, "has of course completely changed--"

"How unfortunate," interrupted Anna-Rose, her eyes on the palms and the
sea and the exquisite distant mountains along the back of the bay, "to
have to be dead on a day like this."

"It's not only his missing the fine weather that makes it unfortunate,"
said Mr. Twist.

"You mean," said Anna-Rose, "it's our missing him."

"Precisely," said Mr. Twist.

"Well, we know that," said Anna-Felicitas placidly.

"We knew it last night, and it worried us," said Anna-Rose. "Then we
went to sleep and it didn't worry us. And this morning it still
doesn't."

"No," said Mr. Twist dryly. "You don't look particularly worried, I must
say."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, "we're not. People who find they've got to
heaven aren't usually worried, are they."

"And having got to heaven," said Anna-Rose, "we've thought of a plan to
enable us to stay in it."

"Oh have you," said Mr. Twist, pricking up his ears.

"The plan seemed to think of us rather than we of it," explained
Anna-Felicitas. "It came and inserted itself, as it were, into our minds
while we were dressing."

"Well, I've thought of a plan too," said Mr. Twist firmly, feeling sure
that the twins' plan would be the sort that ought to be instantly nipped
in the bud.

He was therefore greatly astonished when Anna-Rose said, "Have you? Is
it about schools?"

He stared at her in silence. "Yes," he then said slowly, for he was
very much surprised. "It is."

"So is ours," said Anna-Rose.

"Indeed," said Mr. Twist.

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "We don't think much of it, but it will tide
us over."

"Exactly," said Mr. Twist, still more astonished at this perfect harmony
of ideas.

"Tide us over till Mrs. Dellogg is---" began Anna-Rose in her clear
little voice that carried like a flute to all the tables round them.

Mr. Twist got up quickly. "If you've finished let us go out of doors,"
he said; for he perceived that silence had fallen on the other tables,
and attentiveness to what Anna-Rose was going to say next.

"Yes. On the sands," said the twins, getting up too.

On the sands, however, Mr. Twist soon discovered that the harmony of
ideas was not as complete as he had supposed; indeed, something very
like heated argument began almost as soon as they were seated on some
rocks round the corner of the shore to the west of the hotel and they
became aware, through conversation, of the vital difference in the two
plans.

The Twinkler plan, which they expounded at much length and with a
profusion of optimistic detail, was to search for and find a school in
the neighbourhood for the daughters of gentlemen, and go to it for three
months, or six months, or whatever time Mrs. Dellogg wanted to recover
in.

Up to this point the harmony was complete, and Mr. Twist could only nod
approval. Beyond it all was confusion, for it appeared that the twins
didn't dream of entering a school in any capacity except as teachers.
Professors, they said; professors of languages and literatures. They
could speak German, as they pointed out, very much better than most
people, and had, as Mr. Twist had sometimes himself remarked, an
extensive vocabulary in English. They would give lessons in English and
German literature. They would be able to teach quite a lot about Heine,
for instance, the whole of whose poetry they knew by heart and whose sad
life in Paris--

"It's no good running on like that," interrupted Mr. Twist. "You're not
old enough."

Not old enough? The Twinklers, from their separate rocks, looked at each
other in surprised indignation.

"Not old enough?" repeated Anna-Rose. "We're grown up. And I don't see
how one can be more than grown up. One either is or isn't grown up. And
there can be no doubt as to which we are."

And this the very man who so respectfully had been holding their chairs
for them only a few minutes before! As if people did things like that
for children.

"You're not old enough I say," said Mr. Twist again, bringing his hand
down with a slap on the rock to emphasize his words. "Nobody would take
you. Why, you've got perambulator faces, the pair of you--"

"Perambulator--?"

"And what school is going to want two teachers both teaching the same
thing, anyway?"

And he then quickly got out his plan, and the conversation became so
heated that for a time it was molten.

The Twinklers were shocked by his plan. More; they were outraged. Go to
school? To a place they had never been to even in their suitable years?
They, two independent grown-ups with L200 in the bank and nobody with
any right to stop their doing anything they wanted to? Go to school now,
like a couple of little suck-a-thumbs?

It was Anna-Rose, very flushed and bright of eye, who flung this
expression at Mr. Twist from her rock. He might think they had
perambulator faces if he liked--they didn't care, but they did desire
him to bear in mind that if it hadn't been for the war they would be now
taking their proper place in society, that they had already done a
course of nursing in a hospital, an activity not open to any but adults,
and that Uncle Arthur had certainly not given them all that money to
fritter away on paying for belated schooling.

"We would be anachronisms," said Anna-Felicitas, winding up the
discussion with a firmness so unusual in her that it showed how
completely she had been stirred.

"Are you aware that we are marriageable?" inquired Anna-Rose icily.

"And don't you think it's bad enough for us to be aliens and
undesirables," asked Anna-Felicitas, "without getting chronologically
confused as well?"

Mr. Twist was quiet for a bit. He couldn't compete with the Twinklers
when it came to sheer language. He sat hunched on his rock, his face
supported by his two fists, staring out to sea while the twins watched
him indignantly. School indeed! Then presently he pushed his hat back
and began slowly to rub his ear.

"Well, I'm blest if I know what to do with you, then," he said,
continuing to rub his ear and stare out to sea.

The twins opened their mouths simultaneously at this to protest against
any necessity for such knowledge on his part, but he interrupted them.
"If you don't mind," he said, "I'd like to resume this discussion when
you're both a little more composed."

"We're perfectly composed," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Less ruffled, then."

"We're quite unruffled," said Anna-Rose.

"Well, you don't look it, and you don't sound like it. But as this is
important I'd be glad to resume the discussion, say, to-morrow. I
suggest we spend to-day exploring the neighbourhood and steadying our
minds--"

"Our minds are perfectly steady, thank you."

"--and to-morrow we'll have another go at this question. I haven't told
you all my plan yet"--Mr. Twist hadn't had time to inform them of his
wish to become their guardian, owing to the swiftness with which he had
been engulfed in their indignation,--"but whether you approve of it or
not, what is quite certain is that we can't stay on at the hotel much
longer."

"Because it's so dear?"

"Oh, it isn't so much _that_,--the proprietor is a friend of mine, or
anyhow he very well might be--"

"It looks very dear," said Anna-Rose, visions of their splendid bedroom
and bathroom rising before her. They too had slept in silken beds, and
the taps in their bathroom they had judged to be pure gold.

"And it's because we can't afford to be in a dear place spending money,"
said Anna-Felicitas, "that it's so important we should find a salaried
position in a school without loss of time."

"And it's because we can't afford reckless squandering that we ought to
start looking for such a situation at once" said Anna-Rose.

"Not to-day," said Mr. Twist firmly, for he wouldn't give up the hope
of getting them, once they were used to it, to come round to his plan.
"To-day, this one day, we'll give ourselves up to enjoyment. It'll do us
all good. Besides, we don't often get to a place like this, do we. And
it has taken some getting to, hasn't it."

He rose from his rock and offered his hand to help them off theirs.

"To-day enjoyment," he said, "to-morrow business. I'm crazy," he added
artfully, "to see what the country is like away up in those hills."

And so it was that about five o'clock that afternoon, having spent the
whole day exploring the charming environs of Acapulco,--having been seen
at different periods going over the Old Mission in tow of a monk who
wouldn't look at them but kept his eyes carefully fixed on the ground,
sitting on high stools eating strange and enchanting ices at the shop in
the town that has the best ices, bathing deliciously in the warm sea at
the foot of a cliff along the top of which a great hedge of
rose-coloured geraniums flared against the sky, lunching under a grove
of ilexes on the contents of a basket produced by Mr. Twist from
somewhere in the car he had hired, wandering afterwards up through
eucalyptus woods across the fields towards the foot of the
mountains,--they came about five o'clock, thirsty and thinking of tea,
to a delightful group of flowery cottages clustering round a restaurant
and forming collectively, as Mr. Twist explained, one of the many
American forms of hotel. "To which," he said, "people not living in the
cottages can come and have meals at the restaurant, so we'll go right in
and have tea."

And it was just because they couldn't get tea--any other meal, the
proprietress said, but no teas were served, owing to the Domestic Help
Eight Hours Bill which obliged her to do without domestics during the
afternoon hours--that Anna-Felicitas came by her great idea.

CHAPTER XXI

But she didn't come by it at once.

They got into the car first, which was waiting for them in the scented
road at the bottom of the field they had walked across, and they got
into it in silence and were driven back to their hotel for tea, and her
brain was still unvisited by inspiration.

They were all tired and thirsty, and were disappointed at being thwarted
in their desire to sit at a little green table under whispering trees
and rest, and drink tea, and had no sort of wish to have it at the
Cosmopolitan. But both Mr. Twist, who had been corrupted by Europe, and
the twins, who had the habits of their mother, couldn't imagine doing
without it in the afternoon, and they would have it in the hotel sooner
than not have it at all. It was brought to them after a long time of
waiting. Nobody else was having any at that hour, and the waiter, when
at last one was found, had difficulty apparently in believing that they
were serious. When at last he did bring it, it was toast and marmalade
and table-napkins, for all the world as though it had been breakfast.

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