Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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The last few days before the opening were as full of present joy and
promise of yet greater joys to come as the last few days of a happy
betrothal. They reminded Anna-Felicitas of those days in April, those
enchanting days she had always loved the best, when the bees get busy
for the first time, and suddenly there are wallflowers and a flowering
currant bush and the sound of the lawn being mown and the smell of cut
grass. How one's heart leaps up to greet them, she thought. What a
thrill of delight rushes through one's body, of new hope, of delicious
expectation.

Even Li Koo, the wooden-faced, the brief and rare of speech seemed to
feel the prevailing satisfaction and harmony and could be heard in the
evenings singing strange songs among his pots. And what he was singing,
only nobody knew it, were soft Chinese hymns of praise of the two
white-lily girls, whose hair was woven sunlight, and whose eyes were
deep and blue even as the waters that washed about the shores of his
father's dwelling-place. For Li Koo, the impassive and inarticulate, in
secret seethed with passion. Which was why his cakes were so wonderful.
He had to express himself somehow.

But while up on their sun-lit, eucalyptus-crowned slopes Mr. Twist and
his party--he always thought of them as his party--were innocently and
happily busy full of hopefulness and mutual goodwill, down in the town
and in the houses scattered over the lovely country round the town,
people were talking. Everybody knew about the house Teapot Twist was
doing up, for the daily paper had told them that Mr. Edward A. Twist had
bought the long uninhabited farmhouse in Pepper Lane known as Batt's,
and was converting it into a little _ventre-a-terre_ for his widowed
mother--launching once more into French, as though there were something
about Mr. Twist magnetic to that language. Everybody knew this, and it
was perfectly natural for a well-off Easterner to have a little place
out West, even if the choice of the little place was whimsical. But what
about the Miss Twinklers? Who and what were they? And also, Why?

There were three weeks between the departure of the Twist party from the
Cosmopolitan and the opening of the inn, and in that time much had been
done in the way of conjecture. The first waves of it flowed out from the
Cosmopolitan, and were met almost at once by waves flowing in from the
town. Good-natured curiosity gave place to excited curiosity when the
rumour got about that the Cosmopolitan had been obliged to ask Mr.
Twist to take his _entourage_ somewhere else. Was it possible the cute
little girls, so well known by sight on Main Street going from shop to
shop, were secretly scandalous? It seemed almost unbelievable, but
luckily nothing was really unbelievable.

The manager of the hotel, dropped in upon casually by one guest after
the other, and interviewed as well by determined gentlemen from the
local press, was not to be drawn. His reserve was most interesting. Miss
Heap knitted and knitted and was persistently enigmatic. Her silence was
most exciting. On the other hand, Mrs. Ridding's attitude was merely one
of contempt, dismissing the Twinklers with a heavy gesture. Why think or
trouble about a pair of chits like that? They had gone; Albert was quiet
again; and wasn't that the gong for dinner?

But doubts as to the private morals of the Twist _entourage_ presently
were superseded by much graver and more perturbing doubts. Nobody knew
when exactly this development took place. Acapulco had been enjoying the
first set of doubts. There was no denying that doubts about somebody
else's morals were not unpleasant. They did give one, if one examined
one's sensations carefully, a distinct agreeable tickle; they did add
the kick to lives which, if they had been virtuous for a very long time
like the lives of the Riddings, or virgin for a very long time like the
life of Miss Heap, were apt to be flat. But from the doubts that
presently appeared and overshadowed the earlier ones, one got nothing
but genuine discomfort and uneasiness. Nobody knew how or when they
started. Quite suddenly they were there.

This was in the November before America's coming into the war. The
feeling in Acapulco was violently anti-German. The great majority of the
inhabitants, permanent and temporary, were deeply concerned at the
conduct of their country in not having, immediately after the torpedoing
of the _Lusitania_, joined the Allies. They found it difficult to
understand, and were puzzled and suspicious, as well as humiliated in
their national pride. Germans who lived in the neighbourhood, or who
came across from the East for the winter, were politely tolerated, but
the attitude toward them was one of growing watchfulness and distrust;
and week by week the whispered stories of spies and gun-emplacements and
secret stores of arms in these people's cellars or back gardens, grew
more insistent and detailed. There certainly had been at least one spy,
a real authentic one, afterward shot in England, who had stayed near-by,
and the nerves of the inhabitants had that jumpiness on this subject
with which the inhabitants of other countries have long been familiar.
All the customary inexplicable lights were seen; all the customary
mysterious big motor cars rushed at forbidden and yet unhindered speeds
along unusual roads at unaccountable hours; all the customary signalling
out to sea was observed and passionately sworn to by otherwise calm
people. It was possible, the inhabitants found, to believe with ease
things about Germans--those who were having difficulty with religion
wished it were equally easy to believe things about God. There was
nothing Germans wouldn't think of in the way of plotting, and nothing
they wouldn't, having thought of it, carry out with deadly thoroughness
and patience.

And into this uneasy hotbed of readiness to believe the worst, arrived
the Twinkler twins, rolling their r's about.

It needed but a few inquiries to discover that none of the young
ladies' schools in the neighbourhood had been approached on their
behalf; hardly inquiries,--mere casual talk was sufficient, ordinary
chatting with the principals of these establishments when one met them
at the lectures and instructive evenings the more serious members of the
community organized and supported. Not many of the winter visitors went
to these meetings, but Miss Heap did. Miss Heap had a restless soul. It
was restless because it was worried by perpetual thirst,--she couldn't
herself tell after what; it wasn't righteousness, for she knew she was
still worldly, so perhaps it was culture. Anyhow she would give culture
a chance, and accordingly she went to the instructive evenings. Here she
met that other side of Acapulco which doesn't play bridge and is proud
to know nothing of polo, which believes in education, and goes in for
mind training and welfare work; which isn't, that is, well off.

Nobody here had been asked to educate the Twinklers. No classes had been
joined by them.

Miss Heap was so enigmatic, she who was naturally of an unquiet and
exercise-loving tongue, that this graver, more occupied section of the
inhabitants was instantly as much pervaded by suspicions as the idlest
of the visitors in the hotels and country houses. It waved aside the
innocent appearance and obvious extreme youth of the suspects. Useless
to look like cherubs if it were German cherubs you looked like. Useless
being very nearly children if it were German children you very nearly
were. Why, precisely these qualities would be selected by those terribly
clever Germans for the furtherance of their nefarious schemes. It would
be quite in keeping with the German national character, that character
of bottomless artfulness, to pick out two such young girls with just
that type of empty, baby face, and send them over to help weave the
gigantic invisible web with which America was presently to be choked
dead.

The serious section of Acapulco, the section that thought, hit on this
explanation of the Twinklers with no difficulty whatever once its
suspicions were roused because it was used to being able to explain
everything instantly. It was proud of its explanation, and presented it
to the town with much the same air of deprecating but conscious
achievement with which one presents drinking-fountains.

Then there was the lawyer to whom Mr. Twist had gone about the
guardianship. He said nothing, but he was clear in his mind that the
girls were German and that Mr. Twist wanted to hide it. He had thought
more highly of Mr. Twist's intelligence than this. Why hide it? America
was a neutral country; technically she was neutral, and Germans could
come and go as they pleased. Why unnecessarily set tongues wagging? He
did not, being of a continuous shrewd alertness himself, a continuous
wide-awakeness and minute consideration of consequences, realize, and if
he had he wouldn't have believed, the affectionate simplicity and
unworldliness of Mr. Twist. If it had been pointed out to him he would
have dismissed it as a pose; for a man who makes money in any quantity
worth handling isn't affectionately simple and unworldly--he is
calculating and steely.

The lawyer was puzzled. How did Mr. Twist manage to have a forehead and
a fortune like that, and yet be a fool? True, he had a funny sort of
face on him once you got down to the nose part and what came after,--a
family sort of face, thought the lawyer; a sort of rice pudding,
wet-nurse face. The lawyer listened intently to all the talk and
rumours, while himself saying nothing. In spite of being a married man,
his scruples about honour hadn't been blunted by the urge to personal
freedom and the necessity for daily self-defence that sometimes afflicts
those who have wives. He remained honourably silent, as he had said he
would, but he listened; and he came to the conclusion that either there
was a quite incredible amount of stupidity about the Twist party, or
that there was something queer.

What he didn't know, and what nobody knew, was that the house being got
ready with such haste was to be an inn. He, like the rest of the world,
took the newspapers _ventre-a-terre_ theory of the house for granted,
and it was only the expectation of the arrival of that respectable lady,
the widowed Mrs. Twist, which kept the suspicions a little damped down.
They smouldered, hesitating, beneath this expectation; for Teapot
Twist's family life had been voluminously described in the entire
American press when first his invention caught on, and it was known to
be pure. There had been snapshots of the home at Clark where he had been
born, of the home at Clark (west aspect) where he would die--Mr. Twist
read with mild surprise that his liveliest wish was to die in the old
home--of the corner in the Clark churchyard where he would probably be
entombed, with an inset showing his father's gravestone on which would
clearly be read the announcement that he was the Resurrection and the
Life. And there was an inset of his mother, swathed in the black symbols
of ungluttable grief,--a most creditable mother. And there were accounts
of the activities of another near relative, that Uncle Charles who
presided over the Church of Heavenly Refreshment in New York, and a
snapshot of his macerated and unrefreshed body in a cassock,--a most
creditable uncle.

These articles hadn't appeared so very long ago, and the impression
survived and was general that Mr. Twist's antecedents were
unimpeachable. If it were true that the house was for his mother and she
was shortly arriving, then, although still very odd and unintelligible,
it was probable that his being there now with the two Germans was after
all capable of explanation. Not much of an explanation, though. Even the
moderates who took this view felt this. One wasn't with Germans these
days if one could help it. There was no getting away from that simple
fact. The inevitable deduction was that Mr. Twist couldn't help it. Why
couldn't he help it? Was he enslaved by a scandalous passion for them, a
passion cold-bloodedly planned for him by the German Government, which
was known to have lists of the notable citizens of the United States
with photographs and details of their probable weaknesses, and was
exactly informed of their movements? He had met the Twinklers, so it was
reported, on a steamer coming over from England. Of course. All arranged
by the German Government. That was the peculiar evil greatness of this
dangerous people, announced the serious section of Acapulco, again with
the drinking-fountain-presentation air, that nothing was too private or
too petty to escape their attention, to be turned to their own wicked
uses. They were as economical of the smallest scraps of possible
usefulness as a French cook of the smallest scraps and leavings of food.
Everything was turned to account. Nothing was wasted. Even the
mosquitoes in Germany were not wasted. They contained juices, Germans
had discovered, especially after having been in contact with human
beings, and with these juices the talented but unscrupulous Germans made
explosives. Could one sufficiently distrust a nation that did things
like that? asked the serious section of Acapulco.

CHAPTER XXX

People were so much preoccupied by the Twinkler problem that they were
less interested than they otherwise would have been in the sea-blue
advertisements, and when the one appeared announcing that The Open Arms
would open wide on the 29th of the month and exhorting the public to
watch the signposts, they merely remarked that it wasn't, then, the
title of a book after all. Mr. Twist would have been surprised and
nettled if he had known how little curiosity his advertisements were
exciting; he would have been horrified if he had known the reason. As it
was, he didn't know anything. He was too busy, too deeply absorbed, to
be vulnerable to rumour; he, and the twins, and Mrs. Bilton were safe
from it inside their magic circle of _Arbeit und Liebe_.

Sometimes he was seen in Main Street, that street in Acapulco through
which everybody passes at certain hours of the morning, looking as
though he had a great deal to do and very little time to do it in; and
once or twice the Twinklers were seen there, also apparently very busy,
but they didn't now come alone. Mrs. Bilton, the lady from Los
Angeles--Acapulco knew all about her and admitted she was a lady of
strictest integrity and unimpeachable character, but this only made the
Twinkler problem more obscure--came too, and seemed, judging from the
animation of her talk, to be on the best of terms with her charges.

But once an idea has got into people's heads, remarked the lawyer, who
was nudged by the friend he was walking with as the attractive trio were
seen approaching,--Mrs. Bilton with her black dress and her snowy hair
setting off, as they in their turn set her off, the twins in their clean
white frocks and shining youth,--once an idea has got into people's
heads it sticks. It is slow to get in, and impossible to get out. Yet on
the face of it, was it likely that Mrs. Bilton--

"Say," interrupted his friend, "since when have you joined up with the
water-blooded believe-nothing-but-good-ites?"

And only his personal affection for the lawyer restrained him from using
the terrible word pro-German; but it had been in his mind.

The day before the opening, Miss Heap heard from an acquaintance in the
East to whom she had written in her uneasiness, and who was staying with
some people living in Clark. Miss Heap wrote soon after the
departure--she didn't see why she shouldn't call it by its proper name
and say right out expulsion--of the Twist party from the Cosmopolitan,
but letters take a long time to get East and answers take the same long
time to come back in, and messages are sometimes slow in being delivered
if the other person doesn't realize, as one does oneself, the tremendous
interests that are at stake. What could be a more tremendous interest,
and one more adapted to the American genius, than safe-guarding public
morals? Miss Heap wrote before the sinister rumours of German
machinations had got about; she was still merely at the stage of
uneasiness in regard to the morals of the Twist party; she couldn't
sleep at night for thinking of them. Of course if it were true that his
mother was coming out ... but was she? Miss Heap somehow felt unable to
believe it. "Do tell your friends in Clark," she wrote, "how
_delighted_ we all are to hear that Mrs. Twist is going to be one of us
in our sunny refuge here this winter. A real warm welcome awaits her.
Her son is working day and night getting the house ready for her, helped
indefatigably by the two Miss Twinklers."

She had to wait over a fortnight for the answer, and by the time she got
it those other more terrible doubts had arisen, the doubts as to the
exact position occupied by the Twinklers and Mr. Twist in the German
secret plans for, first, the pervasion, and, second, the invasion of
America; and on reading the opening lines of the letter Miss Heap found
she had to sit down, for her legs gave way beneath her.

It appeared that Mrs. Twist hadn't known where her son was till Miss
Heap's letter came. He had left Clark in company of the two girls
mentioned, and about whom his mother knew nothing, the very morning
after his arrival home from his long absence in Europe. That was all his
mother knew. She was quite broken. Coming on the top of all her other
sorrow her only son's behaviour had been a fearful, perhaps a finishing
blow, but she was such a good woman that she still prayed for him. Clark
was horrified. His mother had decided at first she would try to shield
him and say nothing, but when she found that nobody had the least idea
of what he had done she felt she owed it to her friends to be open and
have no secrets from them. Whatever it cost her in suffering and
humiliation she would be frank. Anything was better than keeping up
false appearances to friends who believed in you. She was a brave woman,
a splendid woman. The girls--poor Mrs. Twist--were Germans.

On reading this Miss Heap was all of a tingle. Her worst suspicions
hadn't been half bad enough. Here was everything just about as black as
it could be; and Mr Twist, a well-known and universally respected
American citizen, had been turned, by means of those girls playing upon
weaknesses she shuddered to think of but that she had reason to believe,
from books she had studied and conversations she had reluctantly taken
part in, were not altogether uncommon, into a cat's-paw of the German
Government.

What should she do? What should she say? To whom should she go? Which
was the proper line of warning for her to take? It seemed to her that
the presence of these people on the Pacific coast was a real menace to
its safety, moral and physical; but how get rid of them? And if they
were got rid of wouldn't it only be exposing some other part of America,
less watchful, less perhaps able to take care of itself, to the ripening
and furtherance of their schemes, whatever their schemes might be? Even
at that moment Miss Heap unconsciously felt that to let the Twinklers go
would be to lose thrills. And she was really thrilled. She prickled with
excitement and horror. Her circulation hadn't been so good for years.
She wasn't one to dissect her feelings, so she had no idea of how
thoroughly she was enjoying herself. And it was while she sat alone in
her bedroom, her fingers clasping and unclasping the arms of her chair,
her feet nervously nibbing up and down on the thick soft carpet,
hesitating as to the best course for her to take, holding her knowledge
meanwhile tight, hugging it for a little altogether to herself, her very
own, shared as yet by no one,--it was while she sat there, that people
out of doors in Acapulco itself, along the main roads, out in the
country towards Zamora on the north and San Blas on the south, became
suddenly aware of new signposts.

They hadn't been there the day before. They all turned towards the spot
at the foot of the mountains where Pepper Lane was. They all pointed,
with a long white finger, in that direction. And on them all was written
in plain, sea-blue letters, beneath which the distance in miles or
fractions of a mile was clearly marked, _To The Open Arms_.

Curiosity was roused at last. People meeting each other in Main Street
stopped to talk about these Arms wondered where and what they were, and
decided to follow the signposts that afternoon in their cars and track
them down. They made up parties to go and track together. It would be a
relief to have something a little different to do. What on earth could
The Open Arms be? Hopes were expressed that they weren't something
religious. Awful to follow signposts out into the country only to find
they landed you in a meeting-house.

At lunch in the hotels, and everywhere where people were together, the
signposts were discussed. Miss Heap heard them being discussed from her
solitary table, but was so much taken up with her own exciting thoughts
that she hardly noticed. After lunch, however, as she was passing out of
the restaurant, still full of her unshared news and still uncertain as
to whom she should tell it first, Mr. Ridding called out from his table
and said he supposed she was going too.

They had been a little chilly to each other since the afternoon of the
conversation with the Twinklers, but he would have called out to any one
at that moment. He was sitting waiting while Mrs. Ridding finished her
lunch, his own lunch finished long ago, and was in the condition of
muffled but extreme exasperation which the unoccupied watching of Mrs.
Ridding at meals produced. Every day three times this happened, that Mr.
Ridding got through his meal first by at least twenty minutes and then
sat trying not to mind Mrs. Ridding. She wasn't aware of these efforts.
They would greatly have shocked her; for to try not to mind one's wife
surely isn't what decent, loving husbands ever have to do.

"Going where?" asked Miss Heap, stopping by the table; whereupon Mr.
Ridding had the slight relief of getting up.

Mrs. Ridding continued to eat impassively.

"Following these new signposts that are all over the place," said Mr.
Ridding. "Sort of paper-chase business."

"Yes. I'd like to. Were you thinking of going, Mrs. Ridding?"

"After our nap," said Mrs. Ridding, steadily eating. "I'll take you. Car
at four o'clock, Albert."

She didn't raise her eyes from her plate, and as Miss Heap well knew
that Mrs. Ridding was not open to conversation during meals and as she
had nothing to say to Mr. Ridding, she expressed her thanks and
pleasure, and temporarily left them.

This was a day of shocks and thrills. When the big limousine--symbol of
Mrs. Ridding's power, for Mr. Ridding couldn't for the life of him see
why he should have to provide a strange old lady with cars, and yet did
so on an increasing scale of splendour--arrived at the turn on the main
road to San Blas which leads into Pepper Lane and was confronted by the
final signpost pointing up it, for the first time The Open Arms and the
Twist and Twinkler party entered Miss Heap's mind in company. So too
did they enter Mr. Ridding's mind; and they only remained outside Mrs.
Ridding's because of her profound uninterest. Her thoughts were merged
in aspic. That was the worst of aspic when it was as good as it was at
the Cosmopolitan; one wasn't able to leave off eating it quite in time,
and then, unfortunately, had to go on thinking of it afterwards.

The Twist house, remembered her companions simultaneously, was in Pepper
Lane. Odd that this other thing, whatever it was, should happen to be
there too. Miss Heap said nothing, but sat very straight and alert, her
eyes everywhere. Mr. Ridding of course said nothing either. Not for
worlds would he have mentioned the word Twist, which so instantly and
inevitably suggested that other and highly controversial word Twinkler.
But he too sat all eyes; for anyhow he might in passing get a glimpse of
the place containing those cunning little bits of youngness, the
Twinkler sisters, and even with any luck a glimpse of their very selves.

Up the lane went the limousine, slowly because of the cars in front of
it. It was one of a string of cars, for the day was lovely, there was no
polo, and nobody happened to be giving a party. All the way out from
Acapulco they had only had to follow other cars. Cars were going, and
cars were coming back. The cars going were full of solemn people,
pathetically anxious to be interested. The cars coming back were full of
animated people who evidently had achieved interest.

Miss Heap became more and more alert as they approached the bend in the
lane round which the Twist house was situated. She had been there
before, making a point of getting a friend to motor her past it in
order to see what she could for herself, but Mr. Ridding, in spite of
his desire to go and have a look too, had always, each time he tried to,
found Mrs. Ridding barring the way. So that he didn't exactly know where
it was; and when on turning the corner the car suddenly stopped, and
putting his head out--he was sitting backwards--- he saw a great,
old-fashioned signboard, such as he was accustomed to in pictures of
ancient English village greens, with

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