Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

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Directly after this trip to Los Angeles advertisements began to creep
over the countryside. They crept along the roads where motorists were
frequent and peeped at passing cars round corners and over hedges. They
were taciturn advertisements, and just said three words in big,
straight, plain white letters on a sea-blue ground:

THE OPEN ARMS

People passing in their cars saw them, and vaguely thought it must be
the name of a book. They had better get it. Other people would have got
it. It couldn't be a medicine nor anything to eat, and was probably a
religious novel. Novels about feet or arms were usually religious. A few
considered it sounded a little improper, and as though the book, far
from being religious, would not be altogether nice; but only very proper
people who distrusted everything, even arms took this view.

After a week the same advertisements appeared with three lines added:

THE OPEN ARMS
YES
BUT
WHY? WHERE? WHAT?

and then ten days after that came fresh ones:

THE OPEN ARMS
WILL OPEN
WIDE

On November 20th at Four P.M.

N.B. WATCH THE SIGNPOSTS.

And while the countryside--an idle countryside, engaged almost wholly in
holiday-making and glad of any new distraction--began to be interested
and asked questions, Mr. Twist was working day and night at getting the
thing ready.

All day long he was in Acapulco or out at the cottage, urging, hurrying,
criticizing, encouraging, praising and admonishing. His heart and soul
and brain was in this, his business instincts and his soft domestic
side. His brain, after working at top speed during the day with the
architect, the painter and decorator, the furnisher, the garden expert,
the plumbing expert, the electric-light expert, the lawyer, the estate
agent, and numberless other persons, during the night meditated and
evolved advertisements. There was to be a continual stream week by week
after the inn was opened of ingenious advertisements. Altogether Mr.
Twist had his hands full.

The inn was to look artless and simple and small, while actually being
the last word in roomy and sophisticated comfort. It was to be as like
an old English inn to look at as it could possibly be got to be going on
his own and the twins' recollections and the sensationally coloured
Elizabethan pictures in the architect's portfolio. It didn't disturb Mr.
Twist's unprejudiced American mind that an English inn embowered in
heliotrope and arum lilies and eucalyptus trees would be odd and
unnatural, and it wouldn't disturb anybody else there either. Were not
Swiss mountain chalets to be found in the fertile plains along the
Pacific, complete with fir trees specially imported and uprooted in
their maturity and brought down with tons of their own earth attached to
their roots and replanted among carefully disposed, apparently Swiss
rocks, so that what one day had been a place smiling with orange-groves
was the next a bit of frowning northern landscape? And were there not
Italian villas dotted about also? But these looked happier and more at
home than the chalets. And there were buildings too, like small Gothic
cathedrals, looking as uncomfortable and depressed as a woman who has
come to a party in the wrong clothes. But no matter. Nobody minded. So
that an English inn added to this company, with a little German
beer-garden--only there wasn't to be any beer--wouldn't cause the least
surprise or discomfort to anybody.

In the end, the sole resemblance the cottage had to an English inn was
the signboard out in the road. With the best will in the world, and the
liveliest financial encouragement from Mr. Twist, the architect couldn't
in three weeks turn a wooden Californian cottage into an ancient
red-brick Elizabethan pothouse. He got a thatched roof on to it by a
miracle of hustle, but the wooden walls remained; he also found a real
antique heavy oak front door studded with big rusty nailheads in a San
Francisco curiosity shop, that would serve, he said, as a basis for any
wished-for hark-back later on when there was more time to the old girl's
epoch--thus did he refer to Great Eliza and her spacious days--and
meanwhile it gave the building, he alleged, a considerable air; but as
this door in that fine climate was hooked open all day long it didn't
disturb the gay, the almost jocose appearance of the place when
everything was finished.

Houses have their expressions, their distinctive faces, very much as
people have, meditated Mr. Twist the morning of the opening, as he sat
astride a green chair at the bottom of the little garden, where a hedge
of sweetbriar beautifully separated the Twinkler domain from the rolling
fields that lay between it and the Pacific, and stared at his handiwork;
and the conclusion was forced upon him--reluctantly, for it was the last
thing he had wanted The Open Arms to do--that the thing looked as if it
were winking at him.

Positively, thought Mr. Twist, his hat on the back of his head, staring,
that was what it seemed to be doing. How was that? He studied it
profoundly, his head on one side. Was it that it was so very gay? He
hadn't meant it to be gay like that. He had intended a restrained and
disciplined simplicity, a Puritan unpretentiousness, with those sweet
maidens, the Twinkler twins, flitting like modest doves in and out among
its tea-tables; but one small thing had been added to another small
thing at their suggestion, each small thing taken separately apparently
not mattering at all and here it was almost--he hoped it was only his
imagination--winking at him. It looked a familiar little house; jocular;
very open indeed about the arms.

CHAPTER XXIII

Various things had happened, however, before this morning of the great
day was reached, and Mr. Twist had had some harassing experiences.

One of the first things he had done after the visit to Los Angeles was
to take steps in the matter of the guardianship. He had written to Mrs.
Bilton that he was the Miss Twinklers' guardian, though it was not at
that moment true. It was clear, he thought, that it should be made true
as quickly as possible, and he therefore sought out a lawyer in Acapulco
the morning after the interview. This was not the same lawyer who did
his estate business for him; Mr. Twist thought it best to have a
separate one for more personal affairs.

On hearing Mr. Twist's name announced, the lawyer greeted him as an old
friend. He knew, of course, all about the teapot, for the Non-Trickler
was as frequent in American families as the Bible and much more
regularly used; but he also knew about the cottage at the foot of the
hills, what it had cost--which was little--and what it would cost--which
was enormous--before it was fit to live in. The only thing he didn't
know was that it was to be used for anything except an ordinary
_pied-a-terre_. He had heard, too, of the presence at the Cosmopolitan
of the twins, and on this point, like the rest of Acapulco, was a little
curious.

The social column of the Acapulco daily paper hadn't been able to give
any accurate description of the relationship of the Twinklers to Mr.
Twist. Its paragraph announcing his arrival had been obliged merely to
say, while awaiting more detailed information, that Mr. Edward A. Twist,
the well-known Breakfast Table Benefactor and gifted inventor of the
famous Non-Trickler Teapot, had arrived from New York and was staying at
the Cosmopolitan Hotel with _entourage_; and the day after this the
lawyer, who got about a bit, as everybody else did in that encouraging
climate, happening to look in at the Cosmopolitan to have a talk with a
friend, had seen the _entourage_.

It was in the act of passing through the hall on its way upstairs,
followed by a boy carrying a canary in a cage. Even without the boy and
the canary it was a conspicuous object. The lawyer asked his friend who
the cute little girls were, and was interested to hear he was beholding
Mr. Edward A. Twist's _entourage_. His friend told him that opinion in
the hotel was divided about the precise nature of this _entourage_ and
its relationship to Mr. Twist, but it finally came to be generally
supposed that the Miss Twinklers had been placed in his charge by
parents living far away in order that he might safely see them put to
one of the young ladies' finishing schools in that agreeable district.
The house Mr. Twist was taking was not connected in the Cosmopolitan
mind with the Twinklers. Houses were always being taken in that paradise
by wealthy persons from unkinder climates. He would live in it three
months in the year, thought the Cosmopolitan, bring his mother, and keep
in this way an occasional eye on his charges. The hotel guests regarded
the Twinklers at this stage with nothing but benevolence and goodwill,
for they had up to then only been seen and not heard; and as one of
their leading characteristics was a desire to explain, especially if
anybody looked a little surprised, which everybody usually did quite
early in conversation with them, this was at that moment, the delicate
moment before Mrs. Bilton's arrival, fortunate.

The lawyer, then, who appreciated the young and pretty as much as other
honest men, began the interview with Mr. Twist by warmly congratulating
him, when he heard what he had come for, on his taste in wards.

Mr. Twist received this a little coldly, and said it was not a matter of
taste but of necessity. The Miss Twinklers were orphans, and he had been
asked--he cleared his throat--asked by their relatives, by, in fact,
their uncle in England, to take over their guardianship and see that
they came to no harm.

The lawyer nodded intelligently, and said that if a man had wards at all
they might as well be cute wards.

Mr. Twist didn't like this either, and said briefly that he had had no
choice.

The lawyer said, "Quite so. Quite so," and continued to look at him
intelligently.

Mr. Twist then explained that he had come to him rather than, as might
have been more natural, to the solicitor who had arranged the purchase
of the cottage because this was a private and personal matter--

"Quite so. Quite so," interrupted the lawyer, with really almost too
much intelligence.

Mr. Twist felt the excess of it, and tried to look dignified, but the
lawyer was bent on being friendly and frank. Friendliness was natural to
him when visited for the first time by a new client, and that there
should be frankness between lawyers and clients he considered essential.
If, he held, the client wouldn't be frank, then the lawyer must be; and
he must go on being so till the client came out of his reserve.

Mr. Twist, however, was so obstinate in his reserve that the lawyer
cheerfully and unhesitatingly jumped to the conclusion that the
_entourage_ must have some very weak spots about it somewhere.

"There's another way out of it of course, Mr. Twist," he said, when he
had done rapidly describing the different steps to be taken. There were
not many steps. The process of turning oneself into a guardian was
surprisingly simple and swift.

"Out of it?" said Mr. Twist, his spectacles looking very big and
astonished. "Out of what?"

"Out of your little difficulty. I wonder it hasn't occurred to you. Upon
my word now, I do wonder."

"But I'm not in any little diff--" began Mr. Twist.

"The elder of these two girls, now--"

"There isn't an elder," said Mr. Twist.

"Come, come," said the lawyer patiently, waiting for him to be sensible.

"There isn't an elder," repeated Mr. Twist, "They're twins."

"Twins, are they? Well I must say we manage to match up our twins better
than that over here. But come now--hasn't it occurred to you you might
marry one of them, and so become quite naturally related to them both?"

Mr. Twist's spectacles seemed to grow gigantic.

"Marry one of them?" he repeated, his mouth helplessly opening.

"Yep," said the lawyer, giving him a lead in free-and-easiness.

"Look here," said Mr. Twist suddenly gathering his mouth together, "cut
that line of joke out. I'm here on serious business. I haven't come to
be facetious. Least of all about those children--"

"Quite so, quite so," interrupted the lawyer pleasantly. "Children, you
call them. How old are they? Seventeen? My wife was sixteen when we
married. Oh quite so, quite so. Certainly. By all means. Well then,
they're to be your wards. And you don't want it known how recently
they've become your wards--"

"I didn't say that," said Mr. Twist.

"Quite so, quite so. But it's your wish, isn't it. The relationship is
to look as grass-grown as possible. Well, I shall be dumb of course, but
most things get into the press here. Let me see--" He pulled a sheet
of paper towards him and took up his fountain pen. "Just oblige me with
particulars. Date of birth. Place of birth. Parentage--"

He looked up ready to write, waiting for the answers.

None came.

"I can't tell you off hand," said Mr. Twist presently, his forehead
puckered.

"Ah," said the lawyer, laying down his pen. "Quite so. Not known your
young friends long enough yet."

"I've known them quite long enough," said Mr. Twist stiffly, "but we
happen to have found more alive topics of conversation than dates and
parents."

"Ah. Parents not alive."

"Unfortunately they are not. If they were, these poor children wouldn't
be knocking about in a strange country."

"Where would they be?" asked the lawyer, balancing his pen across his
forefinger.

Mr. Twist looked at him very straight. Vividly he remembered his
mother's peculiar horror when he told her the girls he was throwing away
his home life for and breaking her heart over were Germans. It had acted
upon her like the last straw. And since then he had felt everywhere,
with every one he talked to, in every newspaper he read, the same strong
hostility to Germans, so much stronger than when he left America the
year before.

Mr. Twist began to perceive that he had been impetuous in this matter of
the guardianship. He hadn't considered it enough. He suddenly saw
innumerable difficulties for the twins and for The Open Arms if it was
known it was run by Germans. Better abandon the guardianship idea than
that such difficulties should arise. He hadn't thought; he hadn't had
time properly to think; he had been so hustled and busy the last few
days....

"They come from England," he said, looking at the lawyer very straight.

"Ah," said the lawyer.

Mr. Twist wasn't going to lie about the twins, but merely, by evading,
he hoped to put off the day when their nationality would be known.
Perhaps it never would be known; or if known, known later on when
everybody, as everybody must who knew them, loved them for themselves
and accordingly wouldn't care.

"Quite so," said the lawyer again, nodding. "I asked because I overheard
them talking the other day as they passed through the hall of your
hotel. They were talking about a canary. The r in the word seemed a
little rough. Not quite English, Mr. Twist? Not quite American?"

"Not quite," agreed Mr. Twist. "They've been a good deal abroad."

"Quite so. At school, no doubt."

He was silent a moment, intelligently balancing his pen on his
forefinger.

"Then these particulars," he went on, looking up at Mr. Twist,--"could
you let me have them soon? I tell you what. You're in a hurry to fix
this. I'll call round to-night at the hotel, and get them direct from
your young friends. Save time. And make me acquainted with a pair of
charming girls."

"No," said Mr. Twist. He got on to his feet and held out his hand. "Not
to-night. We're engaged to-night. To-morrow will be soon enough. I'll
send round. I'll let you know. I believe I'm going to think it over a
bit. There isn't any such terrible hurry, anyhow."

"There isn't? I understood--"

"I mean, a day or two more or less don't figure out at much in the long
run."

"Quite so, quite so," said the lawyer, getting up too. "Well, I'm always
at your service, at any time." And he shook hands heartily with Mr.
Twist and politely opened the door for him.

Then he went back to his writing-table more convinced than ever that
there was something very weak somewhere about the _entourage_.

As for Mr. Twist, he perceived he had been a fool. Why had he gone to
the lawyer at all? Why not simply have announced to the world that he
was the Twinkler guardian? The twins themselves would have believed it
if he had come in one day and said it was settled, and nobody outside
would ever have dreamed of questioning it. After all, you couldn't see
if a man was a guardian or not just by looking at him. Well, he would do
no more about it, it was much too difficult. Bother it. Let Mrs. Bilton
go on supposing he was the legal guardian of her charges. Anyway he had
all the intentions of a guardian. What a fool he had been to go to the
lawyer. Curse that lawyer. Now he knew, however distinctly and
frequently he, Mr. Twist, might say he was the Twinkler guardian, that
he wasn't.

It harassed Mr. Twist to perceive, as he did perceive with clearness,
that he had been a fool; but the twins, when he told them that evening
that owing to technical difficulties, with the details of which he
wouldn't trouble them, the guardianship was off, were pleased.

"We want to be bound to you," said Anna-Felicitas her eyes very soft and
her voice very gentle, "only by ties of affection and gratitude."

And Anna-Rose, turning red, opened her mouth as though she were going to
say something handsome like that too, but seemed unable after all to get
it out, and only said, rather inaudibly, "Yes."

CHAPTER XXIV

Yet another harassing experience awaited Mr. Twist before the end of
that week.

It had been from the first his anxious concern that nothing should occur
at the Cosmopolitan to get his party under a cloud; yet it did get under
a cloud, and on the very last afternoon, too, before Mrs. Bilton's
arrival. Only twenty-four hours more and her snowy-haired respectability
would have spread over the twins like a white whig. They would have been
safe. His party would have been unassailable. But no; those Twinklers,
in spite of his exhortation whenever he had a minute left to exhort in,
couldn't, it seemed, refrain from twinkling,--the word in Mr. Twist's
mind covered the whole of their easy friendliness, their flow of
language, their affable desire to explain.

He had kept them with him as much as he could, and luckily the excited
interest they took in the progress of the inn made them happy to hang
about it most of the time of the delicate and dangerous week before Mrs.
Bilton came; but they too had things to do,--shopping in Acapulco
choosing the sea-blue linen frocks and muslin caps and aprons in which
they were to wait at tea, and buying the cushions and flower-pots and
canary that came under the general heading, in Anna-Rose's speech, of
feminine touches. So they sometimes left him; and he never saw them go
without a qualm.

"Mind and not say anything to anybody about this, won't you," he would
say hastily, making a comprehensive gesture towards the cottage as they
went.

"Of course we won't."

"I meant, nobody is to know what it's really going to be. They're to
think it's just a _pied-a-terre._ It would most ruin my advertisement
scheme if they--"

"But of _course_ we won't. Have we ever?" the twins would answer,
looking very smug and sure of themselves.

"No. Not yet. But--"

And the hustled man would plunge again into technicalities with
whichever expert was at that moment with him, leaving the twins, as he
needs must, to God and their own discretion.

Discretion, he already amply knew, was not a Twinkler characteristic.
But the week passed, Mrs. Bilton's arrival grew near, and nothing had
happened. It was plain to the watchful Mr. Twist, from the pleasant
looks of the other guests when the twins went in and out of the
restaurant to meals, that nothing had happened. His heart grew lighter.
On the last afternoon, when Mrs. Bilton was actually due next day, his
heart was quite light, and he saw them leave him to go back and rest at
the hotel, because they were tired by the accumulated standing about of
the week, altogether unconcernedly.

The attitude of the Cosmopolitan guests towards the twins was, indeed,
one of complete benevolence. They didn't even mind the canary. Who would
not be indulgent towards two such sweet little girls and their pet bird,
even if it did sing all day and most of the night without stopping? The
Twinkler girls were like two little bits of snapped-off sunlight, or
bits of white blossom blowing in and out of the hotel in their shining
youth and it was impossible not to regard them indulgently. But if the
guests were indulgent, they were also inquisitive. Everybody knew who
Mr. Twist was; who, however, were the Twinklers? Were they relations of
his? _Protegees_? Charges?

The social column of the Acapulco daily paper, from which information as
to new arrivals was usually got, had, as we know, in its embarrassment
at being ignorant to take refuge in French, because French may so easily
be supposed to mean something. The paper had little knowledge of, but
much confidence in, French. _Entourage_ had seemed to it as good a word
as any other, as indeed did _clientele_. It had hesitated between the
two, but finally chose _entourage_ because there happened to be no
accent in its stock of type. The Cosmopolitan guests were amused at the
word, and though inquisitive were altogether amiable; and, until the
last afternoon, only the manager didn't like the Twinklers. He didn't
like them because of the canary. His sympathies had been alienated from
the Miss Twinklers the moment he heard through the chambermaid that they
had tied the heavy canary cage on to the hanging electric light in their
bedroom. He said nothing, of course. One doesn't say anything if one is
an hotel manager, until the unique and final moment when one says
everything.

On the last afternoon before Mrs. Bilton's advent the twins, tired of
standing about for days at the cottage and in shops, appeared in the
hall of the hotel and sat down to rest. They didn't go to their room to
rest because they didn't feel inclined for the canary, and they sat down
very happily in the comfortable rocking-chairs with which the big hall
abounded, and, propping their dusty feet on the lower bar of a small
table, with friendly and interested eyes they observed the other guests.

The other guests also observed them.

It was the first time the _entourage_ had appeared without its
companion, and the other guests were dying to know details about it. It
hadn't been sitting in the hall five minutes before a genial old
gentleman caught Anna-Felicitas's friendly eye and instantly drew up his
chair.

"Uncle gone off by himself to-day?" he asked; for he was of the party in
the hotel which inclined, in spite of the marked difference in profiles,
to the relationship theory, and he made a shot at the relationship being
that of uncle.

"We haven't got an uncle nearer than England," said Anna-Felicitas
affably.

"And we only got him by accident," said Anna-Rose, equally affably.

"It was an unfortunate accident," said Anna-Felicitas, considering her
memories.

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "Indeed. How was that?"

"By the usual method, if an uncle isn't a blood uncle," said Anna-Rose.
"We happened to have a marriageable aunt, and he married her. So we have
to have him."

"It was sheer bad luck," said Anna-Felicitas, again brooding on that
distant image.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose. "Just bad luck. He might so easily have married
some one else's aunt. But no. His roving glance must needs go and fall
on ours."

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "Indeed." And he ruminated on this,
with an affectionate eye--he was affectionate--resting in turn on each
Anna.

"Then Mr. Twist," he went on presently--"we all know him of course--a
public benefactor--"

"Yes, _isn't_ he," said Anna-Rose radiantly.

"A boon to the breakfast-table--"

"Yes, _isn't_ he," said Anna-Rose again, all asparkle. "He _is_ so
pleasant at breakfast."

"Then he--Mr. Twist--Teapot Twist we call him where I live--"

"Teapot Twist?" said Anna-Rose. "I think that's irreverent."

"Not at all. It's a pet name. A sign of our affection and gratitude.
Then he isn't your uncle?"

"We haven't got a real uncle nearer than heaven," said Anna-Felicitas,
her cheek on her hand, dreamily reconstructing the image of Onkel Col.

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "Indeed." And he ruminated, on this
too, his thirsty heart--he had a thirsty heart, and found difficulty in
slaking it because of his wife--very indulgent toward the twins.

Then he said: "That's a long way off."

"What is?" asked Anna-Rose.

"The place your uncle's in."

"Not too far really," said Anna-Felicitas softly. "He's safe there. He
was very old, and was difficult to look after. Why, he got there at last
through his own carelessness."

"Indeed," said the old gentleman.

"Sheer carelessness," said Anna-Rose.

"Indeed," said the old gentleman. "How was that?"

"Well, you see where we lived they didn't have electric light," began
Anna-Rose, "and one night--the the night he went to heaven--he put the
petroleum lamp--"

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