Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

Then it was that, contemplating this with discomfort and distaste, as
well as the place they were sitting in and its rocking-chairs and marble
and rugs, Anna-Felicitas was suddenly smitten by her idea.

It fell upon her like a blow. It struck her fairly, as it were, between
the eyes. She wasn't used to ideas, and she stopped dead in the middle
of a piece of toast and looked at the others. They stopped too in their
eating and looked at her.

"What's the matter?" asked Anna-Rose. "Has another button come off?"

At this Mr. Twist considered it wisest to turn his head away, for
experience had taught him that Anna-Felicitas easily came undone.

"I've thought of something," said Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist turned his head back again. "You don't say," he said, mildly
sarcastic.

"_Ich gratuliere_," said Anna-Rose, also mildly sarcastic.

"I've got an idea," said Anna-Felicitas. "But it's so luminous," she
said, looking from one to the other in a kind of surprise. "Of course.
That's what we'll do. Ridiculous to waste time bothering about schools."

There was a new expression on her face that silenced the comments rising
to Anna-Rose's and Mr. Twist's tongues, both of whom had tired feet and
were therefore disposed to sarcasm.

Anna-Felicitas looked at them, and they looked at her, and her face
continued to become visibly more and more illuminated, just as if a
curtain were being pulled up. Animation and interest shone in her
usually dreamy eyes. Her drooping body sat up quite straight. She
reminded Anna-Rose, who had a biblically well-furnished mind, of Moses
when he came down from receiving the Law on the mountain.

"Well, tell us," said Anna-Rose. "But not," she added, thinking of
Moses, "if it's only more commandments."

Anna-Felicitas dropped the piece of toast she was still holding in her
fingers, and pushed back her cup. "Come out on to the rocks," she said
getting up--"where we sat this morning." And she marched out, followed
by the other two with the odd submissiveness people show towards any one
who is thoroughly determined.

It was dark and dinner-time before they got back to the hotel.
Throughout the sunset Anna-Felicitas sat on her rock, the same rock she
had sat on so unsatisfactorily eight hours earlier, and expounded her
idea. She couldn't talk fast enough. She, so slow and listless, for once
was shaken into burning activity. She threw off her hat directly she got
on to the sands, climbed up the rock as if it were a pulpit, and with
her hands clasped round her knees poured out her plan, the long shafts
of the setting sun bathing her in bright flames and making her more like
Moses than ever,--if, that is, one could imagine Moses as beautiful as
Anna-F., thought Anna-Rose, and as felicitously without his nose and
beard.

It was wonderful how complete Anna-Felicitas's inspiration was. It
reminded Mr. Twist of his own about the teapot. It was, of course, a far
more complicated matter than that little device of his, and would have
to be thought out very carefully and approached very judiciously, but
the wealth of detail she was already ready with immensely impressed him.
She even had a name for the thing; and it was when he heard this name,
when it flashed into her talk with the unpremeditatedness of an
inspiration, that Mr. Twist became definitely enthusiastic.

He had an American eye for advertisement. Respect for it was in his
blood. He instantly saw the possibilities contained in the name. He saw
what could be done with it, properly worked. He saw it on hoarding-on
signposts, in a thousand contrivances for catching the public attention
and sticking there.

The idea, of course, was fantastic, unconventional, definitely outside
what his mother and that man Uncle Arthur would consider proper, but it
was outside the standards of such people that life and fruitfulness and
interest and joy began. He had escaped from the death-like grip of his
mother, and Uncle Arthur had himself forcibly expulsed the Annas from
his, and now that they were all so far away, instead of still timorously
trying to go on living up to those distant sterile ideas why shouldn't
they boldly go out into the light and colour that was waiting everywhere
for the free of spirit?

Mr. Twist had often observed how perplexingly much there is to be said
for the opposite sides of a question. He was now, but with no
perplexity, for Anna-Felicitas had roused his enthusiasm, himself taking
the very opposite view as to the proper thing for the twins to do from
the one he had taken in the night and on the rocks that morning. School?
Nonsense. Absurd to bury these bright shoots of everlastingness--this is
what they looked like to him, afire with enthusiasm and the setting
sun--in such a place of ink. If the plan, owing to the extreme youth of
the Annas, were unconventional, conventionality could be secured by
giving a big enough salary to a middle-aged lady to come and preside. He
himself would hover beneficently in the background over the undertaking.

Anna-Felicitas's idea was to use Uncle Arthur's L200 in renting one of
the little wooden cottages that seemed to be plentiful, preferably one
about five miles out in the country, make it look inside like an English
cottage, all pewter and chintz and valances, make it look outside like
the more innocent type of German wayside inn, with green tables and
spreading trees, get a cook who would concentrate on cakes, real lovely
ones, various, poetic, wonderful cakes, and start an inn for tea alone
that should become the fashion. It ought to be so arranged that it
became the fashion. She and Anna-Rose would do the waiting. The prices
would be very high, indeed exorbitant--this Mr. Twist regarded as
another inspiration,--so that it should be a distinction, give people a
_cachet_, to have had tea at their cottage; and in a prominent position
in the road in front of it, where every motor-car would be bound to see
it, there would be a real wayside inn signboard, such as inns in England
always have, with its name on it.

"If people here were really neutral you might have the Imperial arms of
Germany and England emblazoned on it," interrupted Mr. Twist, "just to
show your own extreme and peculiar neutrality."

"We might call it The Christopher and Columbus," interrupted Anna-Rose,
who had been sitting open-mouthed hanging on Anna-Felicitas's words.

"Or you might call it The Cup and Saucer," said Mr. Twist, "and have a
big cup brimming with tea and cream painted on it--"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas. "It is The Open Arms. That is its name."

And Mr. Twist, inclined to smile and criticise up to this, bowed his
head in instantaneous recognition and acceptance.

He became definitely enthusiastic. Of course he would see to it that not
a shadow of ambiguousness was allowed to rest on such a name. The whole
thing as he saw it, his mind working rapidly while Anna-Felicitas still
talked, would be a happy joke, a joyous, gay little assault on the
purses of millionaires, in whom the district abounded judging from the
beautiful houses and gardens he had passed that day,--but a joke and a
gay assault that would at the same time employ and support the Annas;
solve them, in fact, saw Mr. Twist, who all day long had been regarding
them much as one does a difficult mathematical problem.

It was Mr. Twist who added the final inspiration to Anna-Felicitas's
many, when at last she paused for want of breath. The inn, he said,
should be run as a war philanthropy. All that was over after the
expenses were paid and a proper percentage reserved by the Annas as
interest on their invested capital--they listened with eager respect to
these business-like expressions--would be handed over to the American
Red Cross. "That," explained Mr. Twist, "would seal the inn as both
respectable and fashionable, which is exactly what we would want to make
it."

And he then announced, and they accepted without argument or questioning
in the general excitement, that he would have himself appointed their
legal guardian.

They didn't go back to the Cosmopolitan till dinnertime, there was so
much to say, and after dinner, a meal at which Mr. Twist had to suppress
them a good deal because The Open Arms kept on bursting through into
their talk and, as at breakfast, the people at the tables round them
were obviously trying to hear, they went out once again on to the
sea-front and walked up and down till late continuing the discussion,
mostly simultaneously as regards the twins, while Mr. Twist chimed in
with practical suggestions whenever they stopped to take breath.

He had to drive them indoors to bed at last, for the lights were going
out one by one in the Cosmopolitan bedroom windows, where the virtuous
rich, exhausted by their day of virtue, were subsiding, prostrate with
boredom and respectability, into their various legitimate lairs, and he
stayed alone out by the sea rapidly sketching out his activities for the
next day.

There was the guardianship to be arranged, the cottage to be found, and
the middle-aged lady to be advertised for. She, indeed, must be secured
at once; got to come at once to the Cosmopolitan and preside over the
twins until they all proceeded in due season to The Open Arms. She must
be a motherly middle-aged lady, decided Mr. Twist, affectionate, skilled
in managing a cook, business-like, intellectual, and obedient. Her
feminine tact would enable her to appear to preside while she was in
reality obeying. She must understand that she was there for the Annas,
and that the Annas were not there for her. She must approach the
situation in the spirit of the enlightened king of a democratic country,
who receives its honours, accepts its respect, but does not lose sight
of the fact that he is merely the Chief Servant of the people. Mr. Twist
didn't want a female Uncle Arthur let loose upon those blessed little
girls; besides, they would have the dangerous weapon in their hands of
being able to give her notice, and it would considerably dim the
reputation of The Open Arms if there were a too frequent departure from
it of middle-aged ladies.

Mr. Twist felt himself very responsible and full of anxieties as he
paced up and down alone, but he was really enjoying himself. That
youthful side of him, so usual in the artistic temperament, which leaped
about at the least pleasant provocation like a happy lamb when the
sunshine tickles it, was feeling that this was great fun; and the
business side of him was feeling that it was not only great fun but
probably an extraordinarily productive piece of money-making.

The ignorant Annas--bless their little hearts, he thought, he who only
the night before on that very spot had been calling them
accursed--believed that their L200 was easily going to do everything.
This was lucky, for otherwise there would have been some thorny paths of
argument and convincing to be got through before they would have allowed
him to help finance the undertaking; probably they never would have, in
their scrupulous independence. Mr. Twist reflected with satisfaction on
the usefulness of his teapot. At last he was going to be able to do
something, thanks to it, that gave him real gladness. His ambulance to
France--that was duty. His lavishness to his mother--that again was
duty. But here was delight, here at last was what his lonely heart had
always longed for,--a chance to help and make happy, and be with and
watch being made happy, dear women-things, dear soft sweet kind
women-things, dear sister-things, dear children-things....

It has been said somewhere before that Mr. Twist was meant by Nature to
be a mother; but Nature, when she was half-way through him, forgot and
turned him into a man.

CHAPTER XXII

The very next morning they set out house-hunting, and two days later
they had found what they wanted. Not exactly what they wanted of course,
for the reason, as Anna-Felicitas explained that nothing ever is
_exactly_, but full of possibilities to the eye of imagination, and
there were six of this sort of eye gazing at the little house.

It stood at right angles to a road much used by motorists because of its
beauty, and hidden from it by trees on the top of a slope of green
fields scattered over with live oaks that gently descended down towards
the sea. Its back windows, and those parts of it that a house is ashamed
of, were close up to a thick grove of eucalyptus which continued to the
foot of the mountains. It had an overrun little garden in front,
separated from the fields by a riotous hedge of sweetbriar. It had a few
orange, and lemon, and peach trees on its west side, the survivors of
what had once been intended for an orchard, and a line of pepper trees
on the other, between it and the road. Neglected roses and a huge
wistaria clambered over its dilapidated face. Somebody had once planted
syringas, and snowballs, and lilacs along the inside of the line of
pepper trees, and they had grown extravagantly and were an impenetrable
screen, even without the sweeping pepper trees from the road.

It hadn't been lived in for years, and it was well on in decay, being
made of wood, but the situation was perfect for The Open Arms. Every
motorist coming up that road would see the signboard outside the pepper
trees, and would certainly want to stop at the neat little gate, and
pass through the flowery tunnel that would be cut through the syringas,
and see what was inside. Other houses were offered of a far higher
class, for this one had never been lived in by gentry, said the
house-agent endeavouring to put them off a thing so broken down. A
farmer had had it years back, he told them, and instead of confining
himself to drinking the milk from his own cows, which was the only
appropriate drink for a farmer the agent maintained--he was the
president of the local Anti-Vice-In-All-Its-Forms League--he put his
money as he earned it into gin, and the gin into himself, and so after a
bit was done for.

The other houses the agent pressed on them were superior in every way
except situation; but situation being the first consideration, Mr. Twist
agreed with the twins, who had fallen in love with the neglected little
house whose shabbiness was being so industriously hidden by roses, that
this was the place, and a week later it and its garden had been
bought--Mr. Twist didn't tell the twins he had bought it, in order to
avoid argument, but it was manifestly the simple thing to do--and over
and round and through it swarmed workmen all day long, like so many
diligent and determined ants. Also, before the week was out, the
middle-aged lady had been found and engaged, and a cook of gifts in the
matter of cakes. This is the way you do things in America. You decide
what it is that you really want, and you start right away and get it.
"And everything so cheap too!" exclaimed the twins gleefully, whose L200
was behaving, it appeared, very like the widow's cruse.

This belief, however, received a blow when they went without Mr. Twist,
who was too busy now for any extra expeditions, to choose and buy
chintzes, and it was finally shattered when the various middle-aged
ladies who responded to Mr. Twist's cry for help in the advertising
columns of the Acapulco and Los Angeles press one and all demanded as
salary more than the whole Twinkler capital.

The twins had a bad moment of chill fear and misgiving, and then once
more were saved by an inspiration,--this time Anna-Rose's.

"I know," she exclaimed, her face clearing. "We'll make it
Co-operative."

Mr. Twist, whose brow too had been puckered in the effort to think out a
way of persuading the twins to let him help them openly with his money,
for in spite of his going to be their guardian they remained difficult
on this point, jumped at the idea. He couldn't, of course, tell what in
Anna-Rose's mind the word co-operative stood for, but felt confident
that whatever it stood for he could manipulate it into covering his
difficulties.

"What is co-operative?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with a new respect for a
sister who could suddenly produce a business word like that and seem to
know all about it. She had heard the word herself, but it sat very
loosely in her head, at no point touching anything else.

"Haven't you heard of Co-operative Stores?" inquired Anna-Rose.

"Yes but--"

"Well, then."

"Yes, but what would a co-operative inn be?" persisted Anna-Felicitas.

"One run on co-operative lines, of course," said Anna-Rose grandly.
"Everybody pays for everything, so that nobody particular pays for
anything."

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas.

"I mean," said Anna-Rose, who felt herself that this might be clearer,
"it's when you pay the servants and the rent and the cakes and things
out of what you get."

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas. "And will they wait quite quietly till we've
got it?"

"Of course, if we're all co-operative."

"I see," said Anna-Felicitas, who saw as little as before, but knew of
old that Anna-Rose grew irascible when pressed.

"See here now," said Mr. Twist weightily, "if that isn't an idea. Only
you've got hold of the wrong word. The word you want is profit-sharing.
And as this undertaking is going to be a big success there will be big
profits, and any amount of cakes and salaries will be paid for as glibly
and easily as you can say your ABC."

And he explained that till they were fairly started he was going to stay
in California, and that he intended during this time to be book-keeper,
secretary, and treasurer to The Open Arms, besides Advertiser-in-Chief,
which was, he said, the most important post of all; and if they would be
so good as to leave this side of it unquestioningly to him, who had had
a business training, he would undertake that the Red Cross, American or
British, whichever they decided to support, should profit handsomely.

Thus did Mr. Twist artfully obtain a free hand as financial backer of
The Open Arms. The profit-sharing system seemed to the twins admirable.
It cleared away every scruple and every difficulty, they now bought
chintzes and pewter pots in the faith of it without a qualm, and even
ceased to blench at the salary of the lady engaged to be their
background,--indeed her very expensiveness pleased them, for it gave
them confidence that she must at such a price be the right one, because
nobody, they agreed, who knew herself not to be the right one would have
the face to demand so much.

This lady, the widow of Bruce D. Bilton of Chicago of whom of course,
she said, the Miss Twinklers had heard--the Miss Twinklers blushed and
felt ashamed of themselves because they hadn't, and indistinctly
murmured something about having heard of Cornelius K. Vanderbilt,
though, and wouldn't he do--had a great deal of very beautiful
snow-white hair, while at the same time she was only middle-aged. She
firmly announced, when she perceived Mr. Twist's spectacles dwelling on
her hair, that she wasn't yet forty, and her one fear was that she
mightn't be middle-aged enough. The advertisement had particularly
mentioned middle-aged; and though she was aware that her brains and
fingers and feet couldn't possibly be described as coming under that
heading, she said her hair, on the other hand, might well be regarded as
having overshot the mark. But its turning white had nothing to do with
age. It had done that when Mr. Bilton passed over. No hair could have
stood such grief as hers when Mr. Bilton took that final step. She had
been considering the question of age, she informed Mr. Twist, from every
aspect before coming to the interview, for she didn't want to make a
mistake herself nor allow the Miss Twinklers to make a mistake; and she
had arrived at the conclusion that what with her hair being too old and
the rest of her being too young, taken altogether she struck an absolute
average and perfectly fulfilled the condition required; and as she
wished to live in the country, town life disturbing her psychically too
much, she was willing to give up her home and her circle--it was a real
sacrifice--and accept the position offered by the Miss Twinklers. She
was, she said, very quiet, and yet at the same time she was very active.
She liked to fly round among duties, and she liked to retire into her
own mentality and think. She was all for equilibrium, for the right
balancing of body and mind in a proper alternation of suitable action.
Thus she attained poise,--she was one of the most poised women her
friends knew, they told her. Also she had a warm heart, and liked both
philanthropy and orphans. Especially if they were war ones.

Mrs. Bilton talked so quickly and so profusely that it took quite a long
time to engage her. There never seemed to be a pause in which one could
do it. It was in Los Angeles, in an hotel to which Mr. Twist had motored
the twins, starting at daybreak that morning in order to see this lady,
that the personal interview took place, and by lunch-time they had been
personally interviewing her for three hours without stopping. It seemed
years. The twins longed to engage her, if only to keep her quiet; but
Mrs. Bilton's spirited description of life as she saw it and of the way
it affected something she called her psyche, was without punctuation and
without even the tiny gap of a comma in it through which one might have
dexterously slipped a definite offer. She had to be interrupted at last,
in spite of the discomfort this gave to the Twinkler and Twist
politeness, because a cook was coming to be interviewed directly after
lunch, and they were dying for some food.

The moment Mr. Twist saw Mrs. Bilton's beautiful white hair he knew she
was the one. That hair was what The Open Arms wanted and must have; that
hair, with a well-made black dress to go with it, would be a shield
through which no breath of misunderstanding as to the singleness of
purpose with which the inn was run would ever penetrate. He would have
settled it with her in five minutes if she could have been got to
listen, but Mrs. Bilton couldn't be got to listen; and when it became
clear that no amount of patient waiting would bring him any nearer the
end of what she had to say Mr. Twist was forced to take off his coat, as
it were, and plunge abruptly into the very middle of her flow of words
and convey to her as quickly as possible, as one swimming for his life
against the stream, that she was engaged. "Engaged, Mrs. Bilton,"--he
called out, raising his voice above the sound of Mrs. Bilton's rushing
words, "engaged." She would be expected at the Cosmopolitan, swiftly
continued Mr. Twist, who was as particularly anxious to have her at the
Cosmopolitan as the twins were particularly anxious not to,--for for the
life of them they couldn't see why Mrs. Bilton should be stirred up
before they started inhabiting the cottage,--within three days--

"Mr. Twist, it can't be done," broke in Mrs. Bilton a fresh and
mountainous wave of speech gathering above Mr. Twist's head. "It
absolutely--"

"Within a week, then," he called out quickly, holding up the breaking of
the wave for an instant while he hastened to and opened the door. "And
goodmorning Mrs. Bilton--my apologies, my sincere apologies, but we
have to hurry away--"

The cook was engaged that afternoon. Mr. Twist appeared to have mixed up
the answers to his advertisement, for when, after paying the
luncheon-bill, he went to join the twins in the sitting-room, he found
them waiting for him in the passage outside the door looking excited.

"The cook's come," whispered Anna-Rose, jerking her head towards the
shut door. "She's a man."

"She's a Chinaman," whispered Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist was surprised. He thought he had an appointment with a
woman,--a coloured lady from South Carolina who was a specialist in
pastries and had immaculate references, but the Chinaman assured him
that he hadn't, and that his appointment was with him alone, with him,
Li Koo. In proof of it, he said, spreading out his hands, here he was.
"We make cakies--li'l cakies--many, lovely li'l cakies," said Li Koo,
observing doubt on the gentleman's face; and from somewhere on his
person he whipped out a paper bag of them as a conjurer whips a rabbit
out of a hat, and offered them to the twins.

They ate. He was engaged. It took five minutes.

After he had gone, and punctually to the minute of her appointment, an
over-flowing Negress appeared and announced that she was the coloured
lady from South Carolina to whom the gentleman had written.

Mr. Twist uncomfortably felt that Li Koo had somehow been clever.
Impossible, however, to go back on him, having eaten his cakes. Besides,
they were perfect cakes, blown together apparently out of flowers and
honey and cream,--cakes which, combined with Mrs. Bilton's hair, would
make the fortune of The Open Arms.

The coloured lady, therefore, was sent away, disappointed in spite of
the _douceur_ and fair words Mr. Twist gave her; and she was so much
disappointed that they could hear her being it out loud all the way
along the passage and down the stairs, and the nature of her expression
of her disappointment was such that Mr. Twist, as he tried by animated
conversation to prevent it reaching the twins' ears, could only be
thankful after all that Li Koo had been so clever. It did, however,
reach the twins' ears, but they didn't turn a hair because of Uncle
Arthur. They merely expressed surprise at its redness, seeing that it
came out of somebody so black.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27