Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

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Mr. Twist tied his bootlaces with such annoyance that he got them into
knots. He ought never to have come with the Annas to a big hotel. Yet
lodgings would have been worse. Why hadn't that white-haired gasbag,
Mrs. Bilton--Mr. Twist's thoughts were sometimes unjust--joined them
sooner? Why had that shirker Dellogg died? He got his bootlaces
hopelessly into knots.

"I'd like to start right in getting the rooms fixed up, Mr. Twist," said
the manager pleasantly. "Mrs. Hart of Boston is very--"

"See here," said Mr. Twist, straightening himself and turning the full
light of his big spectacles on to him, "I don't care a curse for Mrs.
Hart of Boston."

The manager expressed regret that Mr. Twist should connect a curse with
a lady. It wasn't American to do that. Mrs. Hart--

"Damn Mrs. Hart," said Mr. Twist, who had become full-bodied of speech
while in France, and when he was goaded let it all out.

The manager went away. And so, two hours later, did Mr. Twist and the
twins.

"I don't know what you've been saying," he said in an extremely
exasperated voice, as he sat opposite them in the taxi with their grips,
considerably added to and crowned by the canary who was singing, piled
up round him.

"Saying?" echoed the twins, their eyes very round.

"But whatever it was you'd have done better to say something else.
Confound that bird. Doesn't it ever stop screeching?"

It was the twins, however, who were confounded. So much confounded by
what they considered his unjust severity that they didn't attempt to
defend themselves, but sat looking at him with proud hurt eyes.

By this time they both had become very fond of Mr. Twist, and
accordingly he was able to hurt them. Anna-Rose, indeed, was so fond of
him that she actually thought him handsome. She had boldly said so to
the astonished Anna-Felicitas about a week before; and when
Anna-Felicitas was silent, being unable to agree, Anna-Rose had heatedly
explained that there was handsomeness, and there was the higher
handsomeness, and that that was the one Mr. Twist had. It was infinitely
better than mere handsomeness, said Anna-Rose--curly hair and a straight
nose and the rest of the silly stuff--because it was real and lasting;
and it was real and lasting because it lay in the play of the features
and not in their exact position and shape.

Anna-Felicitas couldn't see that Mr. Twist's features played. She looked
at him now in the taxi while he angrily stared out of the window, and
even though he was evidently greatly stirred his features weren't
playing. She didn't particularly want them to play. She was fond of and
trusted Mr. Twist, and would never even have thought whether he had
features or not ii Anna-Rose hadn't taken lately to talking so much
about them. And she couldn't help remembering how this very Christopher,
so voluble now on the higher handsomeness, had said on board the _St.
Luke_ when first commenting on Mr. Twist that God must have got tired of
making him by the time his head was reached. Well, Christopher had
always been an idealist. When she was eleven she had violently loved the
coachman. Anna-Felicitas hadn't ever violently loved anybody yet, and
seeing Anna-Rose like this now about Mr. Twist made her wonder when she
too was going to begin. Surely it was time. She hoped her inability to
begin wasn't perhaps because she had no heart. Still, she couldn't begin
if she didn't see anybody to begin on.

She sat silent in the taxi, with Christopher equally silent beside her,
both of them observing Mr. Twist through lowered eyelashes. Anna-Rose
watched him with hurt and anxious eyes like a devoted dog who has been
kicked without cause. Anna-Felicitas watched him in a more detached
spirit. She had a real affection for him, but it was not, she was sure
and rather regretted, an affection that would ever be likely to get the
better of her reason. It wasn't because he was so old, of course, she
thought, for one could love the oldest people, beginning with that
standard example of age, the _liebe Gott_; it was because she liked him
so much.

How could one get sentimental over and love somebody one so thoroughly
liked? The two things on reflection didn't seem to combine well. She was
sure, for instance, that Aunt Alice had loved Uncle Arthur, amazing as
it seemed, but she was equally sure she hadn't liked him. And look at
the _liebe Gott_. One loves the _liebe Gott_, but it would be going too
far, she thought, to say that one likes him.

These were the reflections of Anna-Felicitas in the taxi, as she
observed through her eyelashes the object of Anna-Rose's idealization.
She envied Anna-Rose; for here she had been steadily expanding every day
more and more like a flower under the influence of her own power of
idealization. She used to sparkle and grow rosy like that for the
coachman. Perhaps after all it didn't much matter what you loved, so
long as you loved immensely. It was, perhaps, thought Anna-Felicitas
approaching this subject with some caution and diffidence, the quantity
of one's love that mattered rather than the quality of its object. Not
that Mr. Twist wasn't of the very first quality, except to look at; but
what after all were faces? The coachman had been, as it were, nothing
else but face, so handsome was he and so without any other
recommendation. He couldn't even drive; and her father had very soon
kicked him out with the vigour and absence of hesitation peculiar to
Junkers when it comes to kicking and Anna-Rose had wept all over her
bread and butter at tea that day, and was understood to say that she
knew at last what it must be like to be a widow.

Mr. Twist, for all that he was looking out of the taxi window with an
angry and worried face, his attention irritably concentrated, so it
seemed, on the objects passing in the road, very well knew he was being
observed. He wouldn't, however, allow his eye to be caught. He wasn't
going to become entangled at this juncture in argument with the Annas.
He was hastily making up his mind, and there wasn't much time to do it
in. He had had no explanation with the twins since the manager's visit
to his room, and he didn't want to have any. He had issued brief orders
to them, told them to pack, declined to answer questions, and had got
them safely into the taxi with a minimum waste of time and words. They
were now on their way to the station to meet Mrs. Bilton. Her train from
Los Angeles was not due till that evening at six. Never mind. The
station was a secure place to deposit the twins and the baggage in till
she came. He wished he could deposit the twins in the parcel-room as
easily as he could their grips--neatly labelled, put away safely on a
shelf till called for.

Rapidly, as he stared out of the window, he arrived at decisions. He
would leave the twins in the waiting room at the station till Mrs.
Bilton was due, and meanwhile go out and find lodgings for them and her.
He himself would get a room in another and less critical hotel, and stay
in it till the cottage was habitable. So would unassailable
respectability once more descend like a white garment upon the party and
cover it up.

But he was nettled; nettled; nettled by the _contretemps_ that had
occurred on the very last day, when Mrs. Bilton was so nearly there;
nettled and exasperated. So immensely did he want the twins to be happy,
to float serenely in the unclouded sunshine and sweetness he felt was
their due, that he was furious with them for doing anything to make it
difficult. And, jerkily, his angry thoughts pounced, as they so often
did, on Uncle Arthur. Fancy kicking two little things like that out into
the world, two little breakable things like that, made to be cherished
and watched over. Mr. Twist was pure American in his instinct to regard
the female as an object to be taken care of, to be placed securely in a
charming setting and kept brightly free from dust. If Uncle Arthur had
had a shred of humanity in him, he angrily reflected, the Annas would
have stayed under his roof throughout the war, whatever the feeling was
against aliens. Never would a decent man have chucked them out.

He turned involuntarily from the window and looked at the twins. Their
eyes were fixed, affectionate and anxious, on his face. With the quick
change of mood of those whose chins are weak and whose hearts are warm,
a flood of love for them gushed up within him and put out his anger.
After all, if Uncle Arthur had been decent he, Edward A. Twist, never
would have met these blessed children. He would now have been at Clark;
leading lightless days; hopelessly involved with his mother.

His loose, unsteady mouth broke into a big smile. Instantly the two
faces opposite cleared into something shining.

"Oh dear," said Anna-Felicitas with a sigh of relief, "it _is_
refreshing when you leave off being cross."

"We're fearfully sorry if we've said anything we oughtn't to have," said
Anna-Rose, "and if you tell us what it is we won't say it again."

"I can't tell you, because I don't know what it was," said Mr. Twist, in
his usual kind voice. "I only see the results. And the results are that
the Cosmopolitan is tired of us, and we've got to find lodgings."

"Lodgings?"

"Till we can move into the cottage. I'm going to put you and Mrs. Bilton
in an apartment in Acapulco, and go myself to some hotel."

The twins stared at him a moment in silence. Then Anna-Rose said with
sudden passion, "You're not."

"How's that?" asked Mr. Twist; but she was prevented answering by the
arrival of the taxi at the station.

There followed ten minutes' tangle and confusion, at the end of which
the twins found themselves free of their grips and being piloted into
the waiting-room by Mr. Twist.

"There," he said. "You sit here quiet and good. I'll come back about one
o'clock with sandwiches and candy for your dinner, and maybe a
story-book or two. You mustn't leave this, do you hear? I'm going to
hunt for those lodgings."

And he was in the act of taking off his hat valedictorily when Anna-Rose
again said with the same passion, "You're not."

"Not what?" inquired Mr. Twist, pausing with his hat in mid-air.

"Going to hunt for lodgings. We won't go to them."

"Of course we won't," said Anna-Felicitas, with no passion but with an
infinitely rock-like determination.

"And pray--" began Mr. Twist.

"Go into lodgings alone with Mrs. Bilton?" interrupted Anna-Rose her
face scarlet, her whole small body giving the impression of indignant
feathers standing up on end. "While you're somewhere else? Away from us?
We won't."

"Of course we won't," said Anna-Felicitas again, an almost placid
quality in her determination, it was so final and so unshakable. "Would
you?"

"See here--" began Mr. Twist.

"We won't see anywhere," said Anna-Rose.

"Would you," inquired Anna-Felicitas, again reasoning with him, "like
being alone in lodgings with Mrs. Bilton?"

"This is no time for conversation," said Mr. Twist, making for the door.
"You've got to do what I think best on this occasion. And that's all
about it."

"We won't," repeated Anna-Rose, on the verge of those tears which always
with her so quickly followed any sort of emotion.

Mr. Twist paused on his way to the door. "Well now what the devil's the
matter with lodgings?" he asked angrily.

"It isn't the devil, it's Mrs. Bilton," said Anna-Felicitas. "Would you
yourself like--"

'But you've got to have Mrs. Bilton with you anyhow from to-day on."

"But not unadulterated Mrs. Bilton. You were to have been with us too.
We can't be drowned all by ourselves in Mrs. Bilton. _You_ wouldn't like
it."

"Of course I wouldn't. But it's only for a few days anyhow," said Mr.
Twist, who had been quite unprepared for opposition to his very
sensible arrangement.

"I shouldn't wonder if it's only a few days now before we can all
squeeze into some part of the cottage. If you don't mind dust and noise
and workmen about all day long."

A light pierced the gloom that had gathered round Anna-Felicitas's soul.

"We'll go into it to-day," she said firmly, "Why not? We can camp out.
We can live in those little rooms at the back over the kitchen,--the
ones you got ready for Li Koo. We'd be on the spot. We wouldn't mind
anything. It would just be a picnic."

"And we--we wouldn't be--sep--separated," said Anna-Rose, getting it out
with a gasp.

Mr. Twist stood looking at them.

"Well, of all the--" he began, pushing his hat back. "Are you aware,"
he went on more calmly, "that there are only two rooms over that
kitchen, and that you and Mrs. Bilton will have to be all together in
one of them?"

"We don't mind that as long as you're in the other one," said Anna-Rose.

"Of course," suggested Anna-Felicitas, "if you were to happen to marry
Mrs. Bilton it would make a fairer division."

Mr. Twist's spectacles stared enormously at her.

"No, no," said Anna-Rose quickly. "Marriage is a sacred thing, and you
can't just marry so as to be more comfortable."

"I guess if I married Mrs. Bilton I'd be more uncomfortable," remarked
Mr. Twist with considerable dryness.

He seemed however to be quieted by the bare suggestion, for he fixed his
hat properly on his head and said, sobriety in his voice and manner,
"Come along, then. We'll get a taxi and anyway go out and have a look at
the rooms. But I shouldn't be surprised," he added, "if before I've done
with you you'll have driven me sheer out of my wits."

"Oh, _don't_ say that," said the twins together, with all and more of
their usual urbanity.

CHAPTER XXVI

By superhuman exertions and a lavish expenditure of money, the rooms Li
Koo was later on to inhabit were ready to be slept in by the time Mrs.
Bilton arrived. They were in an outbuilding at the back of the house,
and consisted of a living-room with a cooking-stove in it, a bedroom
behind it, and up a narrow and curly staircase a larger room running the
whole length and width of the shanty. This sounds spacious, but it
wasn't. The amount of length and width was small, and it was only just
possible to get three camp-beds into it and a washstand. The beds nearly
touched each other. Anna-Felicitas thought she and Anna-Rose were going
to be regrettably close to Mrs. Bilton in them, and again urged on Mr.
Twist's consideration the question of removing Mrs. Bilton from the room
by marriage; but Anna-Rose said it was all perfect, and that there was
lots of room, and she was sure Mrs. Bilton, used to the camp life so
extensively practised in America, would thoroughly enjoy herself.

They worked without stopping all the rest of the day at making the
little place habitable, nailing up some of the curtains intended for the
other house, unpacking cushions, and fetching in great bunches of the
pale pink and mauve geraniums that scrambled about everywhere in the
garden and hiding the worst places in the rooms with them. Mr. Twist was
in Acapulco most of the time, getting together the necessary temporary
furniture and cooking utensils, but the twins didn't miss him, for they
were helped with zeal by the architect, the electrical expert, the
garden expert and the chief plumber.

These young men--they were all young, and very go-ahead--abandoned the
main building that day to the undirected labours of the workmen they
were supposed to control, and turned to on the shanty as soon as they
realized what it was to be used for with a joyous energy that delighted
the twins. They swept and they garnished. They cleaned the dust off the
windows and the rust off the stove. They fetched out the parcels with
the curtains and cushions in them from the barn where all parcels and
packages had been put till the house was ready, and extracted various
other comforts from the piled up packing-cases,--a rug or two, an easy
chair for Mrs. Bilton, a looking-glass. They screwed in hooks behind the
doors for clothes to be hung on, and they tied the canary to a
neighbouring eucalyptus tree where it could be seen and hardly heard.
The chief plumber found buckets and filled them with water, and the
electrical expert rigged up a series of lanterns inside the shanty, even
illuminating its tortuous staircase. There was much _badinage_, but as
it was all in American, a language of which the twins were not yet able
to apprehend the full flavour, they responded only with pleasant smiles.
But their smiles were so pleasant and the family dimple so engaging that
the hours flew, and the young men were sorry indeed when Mr. Twist came
back.

He came back laden, among other things, with food for the twins, whom he
had left in his hurry high and dry at the cottage with nothing at all to
eat; and he found them looking particularly comfortable and
well-nourished, having eaten, as they explained when they refused his
sandwiches and fruit, the chief plumber's dinner.

They were sitting on the stump of an oak tree when he arrived, resting
from their labours, and the grass at their feet was dotted with the four
experts. It was the twins now who were talking, and the experts who were
smiling. Mr. Twist wondered uneasily what they were saying. It wouldn't
have added to his comfort if he had heard, for they were giving the
experts an account of their attempt to go and live with the Sacks, and
interweaving with it some general reflections of a philosophical nature
suggested by the Sack _menage_. The experts were keenly interested, and
everybody looked very happy, and Mr. Twist was annoyed; for clearly if
the experts were sitting there on the grass they weren't directing the
workmen placed under their orders. Mr. Twist perceived a drawback to the
twins living on the spot while the place was being finished; another
drawback. He had perceived several already, but not this one. Well, Mrs.
Bilton would soon be there. He now counted the hours to Mrs. Bilton. He
positively longed for her.

When they saw him coming, the experts moved away. "Here's the boss,"
they said, nodding and winking at the twins as they got up quickly and
departed. Winking was not within the traditions of the Twinkler family,
but no doubt, they thought, it was the custom of the country to wink,
and they wondered whether they ought to have winked back. The young men
were certainly deserving of every friendliness in return for all they
had done. They decided they would ask Mrs. Bilton, and then they could
wink at them if necessary the first thing to-morrow morning.

Mr. Twist took them with him when he went down to the station to meet
the Los Angeles train. It was dark at six, and the workmen had gone home
by then, but the experts still seemed to be busy. He had been astonished
at the amount the twins had accomplished in his absence in the town till
they explained to him how very active the experts had been, whereupon he
said, "Now isn't that nice," and briefly informed them they would go
with him to the station.

"That's waste of time," said Anna-Felicitas. "We could be giving
finishing touches if we stayed here."

"You will come with me to the station," said Mr. Twist.

Mrs. Bilton arrived in a thick cloud of conversation. She supposed she
was going to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, as indeed she originally was, and
all the way back in the taxi Mr. Twist was trying to tell her she
wasn't; but Mrs. Bilton had so much to say about her journey, and her
last days among her friends, and all the pleasant new acquaintances she
had made on the train, and her speech was so very close-knit, that he
felt he was like a rabbit on the wrong side of a thick-set hedge running
desperately up and down searching for a gap to get through. It was
nothing short of amazing how Mrs. Bilton talked; positively, there
wasn't at any moment the smallest pause in the flow.

"It's a disease," thought Anna-Rose, who had several things she wanted
to say herself, and found herself hopelessly muzzled.

"No wonder Mr. Bilton preferred heaven," thought Anna-Felicitas, also a
little restless at the completeness of her muzzling.

"Anyhow she'll never hear the Annas saying anything," thought Mr. Twist,
consoling himself.

"This hotel we're going to seems to be located at some distance from
the station," said Mrs. Bilton presently, in the middle of several pages
of rapid unpunctuated monologue. "Isolated, surely--" and off she went
again to other matters, just as Mr. Twist had got his mouth open to
explain at last.

She arrived therefore at the cottage unconscious of the change in her
fate.

Now Mrs. Bilton was as fond of comfort as any other woman who has been
deprived for some years of that substitute for comfort, a husband. She
had looked forward to the enveloping joys of the Cosmopolitan, its bath,
its soft bed and good food, with frank satisfaction. She thought it
admirable that before embarking on active duties she should for a space
rest luxuriously in an excellent hotel, with no care in regard to
expense, and exchange ideas while she rested with the interesting people
she would be sure to meet in it. Before the interview in Los Angeles,
Mr. Twist had explained to her by letter and under the seal of
confidence the philanthropic nature of the project he and the Miss
Twinklers were engaged upon, and she was prepared, in return for the
very considerable salary she had accepted, to do her duty loyally and
unremittingly; but after the stress and hard work of her last days in
Los Angeles she had certainly looked forward with a particular pleasure
to two or three weeks' delicious wallowing in flesh-pots for which she
had not to pay. She was also, however, a lady of grit; and she
possessed, as she said her friends often told her, a redoubtable psyche,
a genuine American free and fearless psyche; so that when, talking
ceaselessly, her thoughts eagerly jostling each other as they streamed
through her brain to get first to the exit of her tongue, she caught her
foot in some builder's debris carelessly left on the path up to the
cottage and received in this way positively her first intimation that
this couldn't be the Cosmopolitan, she did not, as a more timid female
soul well might have, become alarmed and suppose that Mr. Twist, whom
after all she didn't know, had brought her to this solitary place for
purposes of assassination, but stopped firmly just where she was, and
turning her head in the darkness toward him said, "Now Mr. Twist, I'll
stand right here till you're able to apply some sort of illumination to
what's at my feet. I can't say what it is I've walked against but I'm
not going any further with this promenade till I can say. And when
you've thrown light on the subject perhaps you'll oblige me with
information as to where that hotel is I was told I was coming to."

"Information?" cried Mr. Twist. "Haven't I been trying to give it you
ever since I met you? Haven't I been trying to stop your getting out of
the taxi till I'd fetched a lantern? Haven't I been trying to offer you
my arm along the path--"

"Then why didn't you say so, Mr. Twist?" asked Mrs. Bilton.

"Say so!" cried Mr. Twist.

At that moment the flash of an electric torch was seen jerking up and
down as the person carrying it ran toward them. It was the electrical
expert who, most fortunately, happened still to be about.

Mrs. Bilton welcomed him warmly, and taking his torch from him first
examined what she called the location of her feet, then gave it back to
him and put her hand through his arm. "Now guide me to whatever it is
has been substituted without my knowledge for that hotel," she said; and
while Mr. Twist went back to the taxi to deal with her grips, she walked
carefully toward the shanty on the expert's arm, expressing, in an
immense number of words, the astonishment she felt at Mr. Twist's not
having told her of the disappearance of the Cosmopolitan from her
itinerary.

The electrical expert tried to speak, but was drowned without further
struggle. Anna-Rose, unable to listen any longer without answering to
the insistent inquiries as to why Mr. Twist had kept her in the dark,
raised her voice at last and called out, "But he wanted to--he wanted to
all the time--you wouldn't listen--you wouldn't stop--"

Mrs. Bilton did stop however when she got inside the shanty. Her tongue
and her feet stopped dead together. The electrical expert had lit all
the lanterns, and coming upon it in the darkness its lighted windows
gave it a cheerful, welcoming look. But inside no amount of light and
bunches of pink geraniums could conceal its discomforts, its dreadful
smallness; besides, pink geraniums, which the twins were accustomed to
regard as precious, as things brought up lovingly in pots, were nothing
but weeds to Mrs. Bilton's experienced Californian eye.

She stared round her in silence. Her sudden quiet fell on the twins with
a great sense of refreshment. Standing in the doorway--for Mrs. Bilton
and the electrical expert between them filled up most of the
kitchen--they heaved a deep sigh. "And see how beautiful the stars are,"
whispered Anna-Felicitas in Anna-Rose's ear; she hadn't been able to see
them before somehow, Mrs. Bilton's voice had so much ruffled the night.

"Do you think she talks in her sleep?" Anna-Rose anxiously whispered
back.

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