Christopher and Columbus (27 page)

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

Anna-Felicitas's idea was to use Uncle Arthur's £200 in
renting one of the little wooden cottages that seemed to be
plentiful, preferably one about five miles out in the country, make
it look inside like an English cottage, all pewter and chintz and
valances, make it look outside like the more innocent type of
German wayside inn, with green tables and spreading trees, get a
cook who would concentrate on cakes, real lovely ones, various,
poetic, wonderful cakes, and start an inn for tea alone that should
become the fashion. It ought to be so arranged that it became the
fashion. She and Anna-Rose would do the waiting. The prices would
be very high, indeed exorbitant--this Mr. Twist regarded as another
inspiration,--so that it should be a distinction, give people a
cachet
, to have had tea at their cottage; and in a
prominent position in the road in front of it, where every
motor-car would be bound to see it, there would be a real wayside
inn signboard, such as inns in England always have, with its name
on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ignorant Annas--bless their little hearts, he thought, he
who only the night before on that very spot had been calling them
accursed--believed that their £200 was easily going to do
everything. This was lucky, for otherwise there would have been
some thorny paths of argument and convincing to be got through
before they would have allowed him to help finance the undertaking;
probably they never would have, in their scrupulous independence.
Mr. Twist reflected with satisfaction on the usefulness of his
teapot. At last he was going to be able to do something, thanks to
it, that gave him real gladness. His ambulance to France--that was
duty. His lavishness to his mother--that again was duty. But here
was delight, here at last was what his lonely heart had always
longed for,--a chance to help and make happy, and be with and watch
being made happy, dear women-things, dear soft sweet kind
women-things, dear sister-things, dear children-things....

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

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

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

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

The other houses the agent pressed on them were superior in
every way except situation; but situation being the first
consideration, Mr. Twist agreed with the twins, who had fallen in
love with the neglected little house whose shabbiness was being so
industriously hidden by roses, that this was the place, and a week
later it and its garden had been bought--Mr. Twist didn't tell
the twins he had bought it, in order to avoid argument, but it was
manifestly the simple thing to do--and over and round and through
it swarmed workmen all day long, like so many diligent and
determined ants. Also, before the week was out, the middle-aged
lady had been found and engaged, and a cook of gifts in the matter
of cakes. This is the way you do things in America. You decide what
it is that you really want, and you start right away and get it.
"And everything so cheap too!" exclaimed the twins
gleefully, whose £200 was behaving, it appeared, very like the
widow's cruse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes but--"

"Well, then."

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

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

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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