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Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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




But Mr. Twist, arriving with his hands full, was staggered to find Mrs.
Bilton not talking. An icy fear seized his heart. She was going to
refuse to stay with them. And she would be within her rights if she did,
for certainly what she called her itinerary had promised her a
first-rate hotel, in which she was to continue till a finished and
comfortable house was stepped into.

"I wish you'd say something," he said, plumping down the bags he was
carrying on the kitchen floor.

The twins from the doorway looked at him and then at each other in great
surprise. Fancy _asking_ Mrs. Bilton to say something.

"They would come," said Mr. Twist, resentfully, jerking his head toward
the Annas in the doorway.

"It's worse upstairs," he went on desperately as Mrs. Bilton still was
dumb.

"Worse upstairs?" cried the twins, as one woman.

"It's perfect upstairs," said Anna-Felicitas.

"It's like camping out without _being_ out," said Anna-Rose.

"The only drawback is that there are rather a lot of beds in our room,"
said Anna-Felicitas, "but that of course"--she turned to Mr.
Twist--"might easily be arranged--"

"I wish you'd _say_ something, Mrs. Bilton," he interrupted quickly and
loud.

Mrs. Bilton drew a deep breath and looked round her. She looked round
the room, and she looked up at the ceiling, which the upright feather in
her hat was tickling, and she looked at the faces of the twins, lit
flickeringly by the uncertain light of the lanterns. Then, woman of
grit, wife who had never failed him of Bruce D. Bilton, widow who had
remained poised and indomitable on a small income in a circle of
well-off friends, she spoke; and she said:

"Mr. Twist, I can't say what this means, and you'll furnish me no doubt
with information, but whatever it is I'm not the woman to put my hand to
a plough and then turn back again. That type of behaviour may have been
good enough for Pharisees and Sadducees, who if I remember rightly had
to be specially warned against the practice, but it isn't good enough
for me. You've conducted me to a shack instead of the hotel I was
promised, and I await your explanation. Meanwhile, is there any supper?"




CHAPTER XXVII


It was only a fortnight after this that the inn was ready to be opened,
and it was only during the first days of this fortnight that the party
in the shanty had to endure any serious discomfort. The twins didn't
mind the physical discomfort at all; what they minded, and began to mind
almost immediately, was the spiritual discomfort of being at such close
quarters with Mrs. Bilton. They hardly noticed the physical side of that
close association in such a lovely climate, where the whole of
out-of-doors can be used as one's living-room; and their morning
dressing, a difficult business in the shanty for anybody less young and
more needing to be careful, was rather like the getting up of a dog
after its night's sleep--they seemed just to shake themselves, and there
they were.

They got up before Mrs. Bilton, who was, however, always awake and
talking to them while they dressed, and they went to bed before she did,
though she came up with them after the first night and read aloud to
them while they undressed; so that as regarded the mysteries of Mrs.
Bilton's toilette they were not, after all, much in her way. It was like
caravaning or camping out: you managed your movements and moments
skilfully, and if you were Mrs. Bilton you had a curtain slung across
your part of the room, in case your younger charges shouldn't always be
asleep when they looked as if they were.

Gradually one alleviation was added to another, and Mrs. Bilton forgot
the rigours of the beginning. Li Koo arrived, for instance, fetched by a
telegram, and under a tent in the eucalyptus grove at the back of the
house set up an old iron stove and produced, with no apparent exertion,
extraordinarily interesting and amusing food. He went into Acapulco at
daylight every morning and did the marketing. He began almost
immediately to do everything else in the way of housekeeping. He was
exquisitely clean, and saw to it that the shanty matched him in
cleanliness. To the surprise and gratification of the twins, who had
supposed it would be their lot to go on doing the housework of the
shanty, he took it over as a matter of course, dusting, sweeping, and
tidying like a practised and very excellent housemaid. The only thing he
refused to do was to touch the three beds in the upper chamber. "Me no
make lady-beds," he said briefly.

Li Koo's salary was enormous, but Mr. Twist, with a sound instinct,
cared nothing what he paid so long as he got the right man. He was,
indeed, much satisfied with his two employees, and congratulated himself
on his luck. It is true in regard to Mrs. Bilton his satisfaction was
rather of the sorrowful sort that a fresh ache in a different part of
one's body from the first ache gives: it relieved him from one by
substituting another. Mrs. Bilton overwhelmed him; but so had the Annas
begun to. Her overwhelming, however, was different, and freed him from
that other worse one. He felt safe now about the Annas, and after all
there were parts of the building in which Mrs. Bilton wasn't. There was
his bedroom, for instance. Thank God for bedrooms, thought Mr. Twist. He
grew to love his. What a haven that poky and silent place was; what a
blessing the conventions were, and the proprieties. Supposing
civilization were so far advanced that people could no longer see the
harm there is in a bedroom, what would have become of him? Mr. Twist
could perfectly account for Bruce D. Bilton's death. It wasn't diabetes,
as Mrs. Bilton said; it was just bedroom.

Still, Mrs. Bilton was an undoubted find, and did immediately in those
rushed days take the Annas off his mind. He could leave them with her in
the comfortable certitude that whatever else they did to Mrs. Bilton
they couldn't talk to her. Never would she know the peculiar ease of the
Twinkler attitude toward subjects Americans approach with care. Never
would they be able to tell her things about Uncle Arthur, the kind of
things that had caused the Cosmopolitan to grow so suddenly cool. There
was, most happily for this particular case, no arguing with Mrs. Bilton.
The twins couldn't draw her out because she was already, as it were, so
completely out. This was a great thing, Mr. Twist felt, and made up for
any personal suffocation he had to bear; and when on the afternoon of
Mrs. Bilton's first day the twins appeared without her in the main
building in search of him, having obviously given her the slip, and said
they were sorry to disturb him but they wanted his advice, for though
they had been trying hard all day, remembering they were ladies and
practically hostesses, they hadn't yet succeeded in saying anything at
all to Mrs. Bilton and doubted whether they ever would, he merely smiled
happily at them and said to Anna-Rose, "See how good comes out of
evil"--a remark that they didn't like when they had had time to think
over it.

But they went on struggling. It seemed so unnatural to be all alone all
day long with someone and only listen. Mrs. Bilton never left their
side, regarding it as proper and merely fulfilling her part of the
bargain, in these first confused days when there was nothing for ladies
to do but look on while perspiring workmen laboured at apparently
producing more and more chaos, to become thoroughly acquainted with her
young charges. This she did by imparting to them intimate and meticulous
information about her own life, with the whole of the various uplifts,
as she put it, her psyche had during its unfolding experienced. There
was so much to tell about herself that she never got to inquiring about
the twins. She knew they were orphans, and that this was a good work,
and for the moment had no time for more.

The twins were profoundly bored by her psyche, chiefly because they
didn't know what part of her it was, and it was no use asking for she
didn't answer; but they listened with real interest to her concrete
experiences, and especially to the experiences connected with Mr.
Bilton. They particularly wished to ask questions about Mr. Bilton, and
find out what he had thought of things. Mrs. Bilton was lavish in her
details of what she had thought herself, but Mr. Bilton's thoughts
remained impenetrable. It seemed to the twins that he must have thought
a lot, and have come to the conclusion that there was much to be said
for death.

The Biltons, it appeared, had been the opposite of the Clouston-Sacks,
and had never been separated for a single day during the whole of their
married life. This seemed to the twins very strange, and needing a great
deal of explanation. In order to get light thrown on it the first thing
they wanted to find out was how long the marriage had lasted; but Mrs.
Bilton was deaf to their inquiries, and having described Mr. Bilton's
last moments and obsequies--obsequies scheduled by her, she said, with
so tender a regard for his memory that she insisted on a horse-drawn
hearse instead of the more fashionable automobile conveyance, on the
ground that a motor hearse didn't seem sorry enough even on first
speed--she washed along with an easy flow to descriptions of the
dreadfulness of the early days of widowhood, when one's crepe veil keeps
on catching in everything--chairs, overhanging branches, and passers-by,
including it appeared on one occasion a policeman. She inquired of the
twins whether they had ever seen a new-made widow in a wind. Chicago,
she said, was a windy place, and Mr. Bilton passed in its windiest
month. Her long veil, as she proceeded down the streets on the daily
constitutional she considered it her duty toward the living to take, for
one owes it to one's friends to keep oneself fit and not give way, was
blown hither and thither in the buffeting cross-currents of that uneasy
climate, and her walk in the busier streets was a series of
entanglements. Embarrassing entanglements, said Mrs. Bilton. Fortunately
the persons she got caught in were delicacy and sympathy itself; often,
indeed, seeming quite overcome by the peculiar poignancy of the
situation, covered with confusion, profuse in apologies. Sometimes the
wind would cause her veil for a few moments to rear straight up above
her head in a monstrous black column of woe. Sometimes, if she stopped a
moment waiting to cross the street, it would whip round the body of any
one who happened to be near, like a cord. It did this once about the
body of the policeman directing the traffic, by whose side she had
paused, and she had to walk round him backwards before it could be
unwound. The Chicago evening papers, prompt on the track of a sensation,
had caused her friends much painful if only short-lived amazement by
coming out with huge equivocal headlines:

WELL-KNOWN SOCIETY WIDOW AND POLICEMAN CAUGHT TOGETHER

and beginning their description of the occurrence by printing her name
in full. So that for the first sentence or two her friends were a prey
to horror and distress, which turned to indignation on discovering there
was nothing in it after all.

The twins, their eyes on Mrs. Bilton's face, their hands clasped round
their knees, their bodies sitting on the grass at her feet, occasionally
felt as they followed her narrative that they were somehow out of their
depth and didn't quite understand. It was extraordinarily exasperating
to them to be so completely muzzled. They were accustomed to elucidate
points they didn't understand by immediate inquiry; they had a habit of
asking for information, and then delivering comments on it.

This condition of repression made them most uncomfortable. The ilex tree
in the field below the house, to which Mrs. Bilton shepherded them each
morning and afternoon for the first three days, became to them, in spite
of its beauty with the view from under its dark shade across the sunny
fields to the sea and the delicate distant islands, a painful spot. The
beauty all round them was under these conditions exasperating. Only once
did Mrs. Bilton leave them, and that was the first afternoon, when they
instantly fled to seek out Mr. Twist; and she only left them then--for
it wasn't just her sense of duty that was strong, but also her dislike
of being alone--because something unexpectedly gave way in the upper
part of her dress, she being of a tight well-held-in figure, depending
much on its buttons; and she had very hastily to go in search of a
needle.

After that they didn't see Mr. Twist alone for several days. They hardly
indeed saw him at all. The only meal he shared with them was supper, and
on finding the first evening that Mrs. Bilton read aloud to people after
supper, he made the excuse of accounts to go through and went into his
bedroom, repeating this each night.

The twins watched him go with agonized eyes. They considered themselves
deserted; shamefully abandoned to a miserable fate.

"And it isn't as if he didn't _like_ reading aloud," whispered
Anna-Rose, bewildered and indignant as she remembered the "Ode to
Dooty."

"Perhaps he's one of those people who only like it if they do it
themselves," Anna-Felicitas whispered back, trying to explain his base
behaviour.

And while they whispered, Mrs. Bilton with great enjoyment
declaimed--she had had a course of elocution lessons during Mr. Bilton's
life so as to be able to place the best literature advantageously before
him--the diary of a young girl written in prison. The young girl had
been wrongfully incarcerated, Mrs. Bilton explained, and her pure soul
only found release by the demise of her body. The twins hated the young
girl from the first paragraph. She wrote her diary every day till her
demise stopped her. As nothing happens in prisons that hasn't happened
the day before, she could only write her reflections; and the twins
hated her reflections, because they were so very like what in their
secret moments of slush they were apt to reflect themselves. Their
mother had had a horror of slush. There had been none anywhere about
her; but it is in the air in Germany, in people's blood, everywhere; and
though the twins, owing to the English part of them, had a horror of it
too, there it was in them, and they knew it,--genuine German slush.

They felt uncomfortably sure that if they were in prison they would
write a diary very much on these lines. For three evenings they had to
listen to it, their eyes on Mr. Twist's door. Why didn't he come out and
save them? What happy, what glorious evenings they used to have at the
Cosmopolitan, spent in intelligent conversation, in a decent give and
take--not this button-holing business, this being got into a corner and
held down; and alas, how little they had appreciated them! They used to
get sleepy and break them off and go to bed. If only he would come out
now and talk to them they would sit up all night. They wriggled with
impatience in their seats beneath the _epanchements_ of the young girl,
the strangely and distressingly familiar _epanchements_. The diary was
published in a magazine, and after the second evening, when Mrs. Bilton
on laying it down announced she would go on with it while they were
dressing next morning, they got up very early before Mrs. Bilton was
awake and crept out and hid it.

But Li Koo found it and restored it.

Li Koo found everything. He found Mrs. Bilton's outdoor shoes the third
morning, although the twins had hidden them most carefully. Their idea
was that while she, rendered immobile, waited indoors, they would
zealously look for them in all the places where they well knew that they
weren't, and perhaps get some conversation with Mr. Twist.

But Li Koo found everything. He found the twins themselves the fourth
morning, when, unable any longer to bear Mrs. Bilton's voice, they ran
into the woods instead of coming in to breakfast. He seemed to find them
at once, to walk unswervingly to their remote and bramble-filled ditch.

In order to save their dignity they said as they scrambled out that they
were picking flowers for Mrs. Bilton's breakfast, though the ditch had
nothing in it but stones and thorns. Li Koo made no comment. He never
did make comments; and his silence and his ubiquitous efficiency made
the twins as fidgety with him as they were with Mrs. Bilton for the
opposite reason. They had an uncomfortable feeling that he was rather
like the _liebe Gott_,--he saw everything, knew everything, and said
nothing. In vain they tried, on that walk back as at other times, to
pierce his impassivity with genialities. Li Koo--again, they silently
reflected, like the _liebe Gott_--had a different sense of geniality
from theirs; he couldn't apparently smile; they doubted if he even ever
wanted to. Their genialities faltered and froze on their lips.

Besides, they were deeply humiliated by having been found hiding, and
were ashamed to find themselves trying anxiously in this manner to
conciliate Li Koo. Their dignity on the walk back to the shanty seemed
painfully shrunk. They ought never to have condescended to do the
childish things they had been doing during the last three days. If they
hadn't been found out it would, of course, have remained a private
matter between them and their Maker, and then one doesn't mind so much;
but they had been found out, and by Li Koo, their own servant. It was
intolerable. All the blood of all the Twinklers, Junkers from time
immemorial and properly sensitive to humiliation, surged within them.
They hadn't felt so naughty and so young for years. They were sure Li
Koo didn't believe them about the ditch. They had a dreadful sensation
of being led back to Mrs. Bilton by the ear.

If only they could sack Mrs. Bilton!

This thought, immense and startling, came to Anna-Rose, who far more
than Anna-Felicitas resented being cut off from Mr. Twist, besides being
more naturally impetuous; and as they walked in silence side by side,
with Li Koo a little ahead of them, she turned her head and looked at
Anna-Felicitas. "Let's give her notice," she murmured, under her breath.

Anna-Felicitas was so much taken aback that she stopped in her walk and
stared at Anna-Rose's flushed face.

She too hardly breathed it. The suggestion seemed fantastic in its
monstrousness. How could they give anybody so old, so sure of herself,
so determined as Mrs. Bilton, notice?

"Give her notice?" she repeated.

A chill ran down Anna-Felicitas's spine. Give Mrs. Bilton notice! It was
a great, a breath-taking idea, magnificent in its assertion of
independence, of rights; but it needed, she felt, to be approached with
caution. They had never given anybody notice in their lives, and they
had always thought it must be a most painful thing to do--far, far worse
than tipping. Uncle Arthur usedn't to mind it a bit; did it, indeed,
with gusto. But Aunt Alice hadn't liked it at all, and came out in a
cold perspiration and bewailed her lot to them and wished that people
would behave and not place her in such a painful position.

Mrs. Bilton couldn't be said not to have behaved. Quite the contrary.
She had behaved too persistently; and they had to endure it the whole
twenty-four hours. For Mrs. Bilton had no turn, it appeared, in spite
of what she had said at Los Angeles, for solitary contemplation, and
after the confusion of the first night, when once she had had time to
envisage the situation thoroughly, as she said, she had found that to
sit alone downstairs in the uncertain light of the lanterns while the
twins went to bed and Mr. Twist wouldn't come out of his room, was not
good for her psyche; so she had followed the twins upstairs, and
continued to read the young girl's diary to them during their undressing
and till the noises coming from their beds convinced her that it was
useless to go on any longer. And that morning, the morning they hid in
the ditch, she had even done this while they were getting up.

"It isn't to be borne," said Anna-Rose under her breath, one eye on Li
Koo's ear which, a little in front of her, seemed slightly slanted
backward and sideways in the direction of her voice. "And why should it
be? We're not in her power."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, also under her breath and also watching Li
Koo's ear, "but it feels extraordinarily as if we were."

"Yes. And that's intolerable. And it forces us to do silly baby things,
wholly unsuited either to our age or our position. Who would have
thought we'd ever hide from somebody in a ditch again!" Anna-Rose's
voice was almost a sob at the humiliation.

"It all comes from sleeping in the same room," said Anna-Felicitas.
"Nobody can stand a thing that doesn't end at night either."

"Of course they can't," said Anna-Rose. "It isn't fair. If you have to
have a person all day you oughtn't to have to have the same person all
night. Some one else should step in and relieve you then. Just as they
do in hospitals."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "Mr. Twist ought to. He ought to remove her
forcibly from our room by marriage.

"No he oughtn't," said Anna-Rose hastily, "because we can remove her
ourselves by the simple process of giving her notice."

"I don't believe it's simple," said Anna-Felicia again feeling a chill
trickling down her spine.

"Of course it is. We just go to her very politely and inform her that
the engagement is terminated on a basis of mutual esteem but inflexible
determination."

"And suppose she doesn't stop talking enough to hear?"

"Then we'll hand it to her in writing."

The rest of the way they walked in silence, Anna-Rose with her chin
thrust out in defiance, Anna-Felicitas dragging her feet along with a
certain reluctance and doubt.

Mrs. Bilton had finished her breakfast when they got back, having seen
no sense in letting good food get cold, and was ready to sit and chat to
them while they had theirs. She was so busy telling them what she had
supposed they were probably doing, that she was unable to listen to
their attempted account of what they had done. Thus they were saved from
telling humiliating and youthful fibs; but they were also prevented, as
by a wall of rock, from getting the speech through to her ear that
Anna-Rose, trembling in spite of her defiance, had ready to launch at
her. It was impossible to shout at Mrs. Bilton in the way Mr. Twist,
when in extremity of necessity, had done. Ladies didn't shout;
especially not when they were giving other ladies notice. Anna-Rose,
who was quite cold and clammy at the prospect of her speech, couldn't
help feeling relieved when breakfast was over and no opportunity for it
had been given.

"We'll write it," she whispered to Anna-Felicitas beneath the cover of a
lively account Mrs. Bilton was giving them, _a propos_ of their being
late for breakfast, of the time it took her, after Mr. Bilton's passing,
to get used to his unpunctuality at meals.

That Mr. Bilton, who had breakfasted and dined with her steadily for
years, should suddenly leave off being punctual freshly astonished her
every day, she said. The clock struck, yet Mr. Bilton continued late. It
was poignant, said Mrs. Bilton, this way of being reminded of her loss.
Each day she would instinctively expect; each day would come the stab of
recollection. The vacancy these non-appearances had made in her life was
beyond any words of hers. In fact she didn't possess such words, and
doubted if the completest dictionary did either. Everything went just
vacant, she said. No need any more to hurry down in the morning, so as
to be behind the coffee pot half a minute before the gong went and Mr.
Bilton simultaneously appeared. No need any more to think of him when
ordering meals. No need any more to eat the dish he had been so fond of
and she had found so difficult to digest, Boston baked beans and bacon;
yet she found herself ordering it continually after his departure, and
choking memorially over the mouthfuls--"And people in Europe," cried Mrs
Bilton, herself struck as she talked by this extreme devotion, "say that
American women are incapable of passion!"

"We'll write it," whispered Anna-Rose to Anna-Felicitas.

"Write what?" asked Anna-Felicitas abstractedly, who as usual when Mrs.
Bilton narrated her reminiscences was absorbed in listening to them and
trying to get some clear image of Mr. Bilton.

But she remembered the next moment, and it was like waking up to the
recollection that this is the day you have to have a tooth pulled out.
The idea of not having the tooth any more, of being free from it charmed
and thrilled her, but how painful, how alarming was the prospect of
pulling it out!

There was one good thing to be said for Mrs. Bilton's talk, and that was
that under its voluminous cover they could themselves whisper
occasionally to each other. Anna-Rose decided that if Mrs. Bilton didn't
notice that they whispered neither probably would she notice if she
wrote. She therefore under Mrs. Bilton's very nose got a pencil and a
piece of paper, and with many pauses and an unsteady hand wrote the
following:

DEAR MRS. BILTON--For some time past my sister and I have felt that we
aren't suited to you, and if you don't mind would you mind regarding the
engagement as terminated? We hope you won't think this abrupt, because
it isn't really, for we seem to have lived ages since you came, and
we've been thinking this over ripely ever since. And we hope you won't
take it as anything personal either, because it isn't really. It's only
that we feel we're unsuitable, and we're sure we'll go on getting more
and more unsuitable. Nobody can help being unsuitable, and we're
fearfully sorry. But on the other hand we're inflexible.--Yours
affectionately,

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