Christopher and Columbus (28 page)

This lady, the widow of Bruce D. Bilton of Chicago of whom of
course, she said, the Miss Twinklers had heard--the Miss Twinklers
blushed and felt ashamed of themselves because they hadn't, and
indistinctly murmured something about having heard of Cornelius K.
Vanderbilt, though, and wouldn't he do--had a great deal of
very beautiful snow-white hair, while at the same time she was only
middle-aged. She firmly announced, when she perceived Mr.
Twist's spectacles dwelling on her hair, that she wasn't
yet forty, and her one fear was that she mightn't be
middle-aged enough. The advertisement had particularly mentioned
middle-aged; and though she was aware that her brains and fingers
and feet couldn't possibly be described as coming under that
heading, she said her hair, on the other hand, might well be
regarded as having overshot the mark. But its turning white had
nothing to do with age. It had done that when Mr. Bilton passed
over. No hair could have stood such grief as hers when Mr. Bilton
took that final step. She had been considering the question of age,
she informed Mr. Twist, from every aspect before coming to the
interview, for she didn't want to make a mistake herself nor
allow the Miss Twinklers to make a mistake; and she had arrived at
the conclusion that what with her hair being too old and the rest
of her being too young, taken altogether she struck an absolute
average and perfectly fulfilled the condition required; and as she
wished to live in the country, town life disturbing her psychically
too much, she was willing to give up her home and her circle--it
was a real sacrifice--and accept the position offered by the Miss
Twinklers. She was, she said, very quiet, and yet at the same time
she was very active. She liked to fly round among duties, and she
liked to retire into her own mentality and think. She was all for
equilibrium, for the right balancing of body and mind in a proper
alternation of suitable action. Thus she attained poise,--she was
one of the most poised women her friends knew, they told her. Also
she had a warm heart, and liked both philanthropy and orphans.
Especially if they were war ones.

Mrs. Bilton talked so quickly and so profusely that it took
quite a long time to engage her. There never seemed to be a pause
in which one could do it. It was in Los Angeles, in an hotel to
which Mr. Twist had motored the twins, starting at daybreak that
morning in order to see this lady, that the personal interview took
place, and by lunch-time they had been personally interviewing her
for three hours without stopping. It seemed years. The twins longed
to engage her, if only to keep her quiet; but Mrs. Bilton's
spirited description of life as she saw it and of the way it
affected something she called her psyche, was without punctuation
and without even the tiny gap of a comma in it through which one
might have dexterously slipped a definite offer. She had to be
interrupted at last, in spite of the discomfort this gave to the
Twinkler and Twist politeness, because a cook was coming to be
interviewed directly after lunch, and they were dying for some
food.

The moment Mr. Twist saw Mrs. Bilton's beautiful white hair
he knew she was the one. That hair was what The Open Arms wanted
and must have; that hair, with a well-made black dress to go with
it, would be a shield through which no breath of misunderstanding
as to the singleness of purpose with which the inn was run would
ever penetrate. He would have settled it with her in five minutes
if she could have been got to listen, but Mrs. Bilton couldn't
be got to listen; and when it became clear that no amount of
patient waiting would bring him any nearer the end of what she had
to say Mr. Twist was forced to take off his coat, as it were, and
plunge abruptly into the very middle of her flow of words and
convey to her as quickly as possible, as one swimming for his life
against the stream, that she was engaged. "Engaged, Mrs.
Bilton,"--he called out, raising his voice above the sound of
Mrs. Bilton's rushing words, "engaged." She would be
expected at the Cosmopolitan, swiftly continued Mr. Twist, who was
as particularly anxious to have her at the Cosmopolitan as the
twins were particularly anxious not to,--for for the life of them
they couldn't see why Mrs. Bilton should be stirred up before
they started inhabiting the cottage,--within three days--

"Mr. Twist, it can't be done," broke in Mrs.
Bilton a fresh and mountainous wave of speech gathering above Mr.
Twist's head. "It absolutely--"

"Within a week, then," he called out quickly, holding
up the breaking of the wave for an instant while he hastened to and
opened the door. "And goodmorning Mrs. Bilton--my apologies,
my sincere apologies, but we have to hurry away--"

The cook was engaged that afternoon. Mr. Twist appeared to have
mixed up the answers to his advertisement, for when, after paying
the luncheon-bill, he went to join the twins in the sitting-room,
he found them waiting for him in the passage outside the door
looking excited.

"The cook's come," whispered Anna-Rose, jerking
her head towards the shut door. "She's a man."

"She's a Chinaman," whispered Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist was surprised. He thought he had an appointment with a
woman,--a coloured lady from South Carolina who was a specialist in
pastries and had immaculate references, but the Chinaman assured
him that he hadn't, and that his appointment was with him
alone, with him, Li Koo. In proof of it, he said, spreading out his
hands, here he was. "We make cakies--li'l cakies--many,
lovely li'l cakies," said Li Koo, observing doubt on the
gentleman's face; and from somewhere on his person he whipped
out a paper bag of them as a conjurer whips a rabbit out of a hat,
and offered them to the twins.

They ate. He was engaged. It took five minutes.

After he had gone, and punctually to the minute of her
appointment, an over-flowing Negress appeared and announced that
she was the coloured lady from South Carolina to whom the gentleman
had written.

Mr. Twist uncomfortably felt that Li Koo had somehow been
clever. Impossible, however, to go back on him, having eaten his
cakes. Besides, they were perfect cakes, blown together apparently
out of flowers and honey and cream,--cakes which, combined with
Mrs. Bilton's hair, would make the fortune of The Open
Arms.

The coloured lady, therefore, was sent away, disappointed in
spite of the
douceur
and fair words Mr. Twist gave her; and she was so
much disappointed that they could hear her being it out loud all
the way along the passage and down the stairs, and the nature of
her expression of her disappointment was such that Mr. Twist, as he
tried by animated conversation to prevent it reaching the
twins' ears, could only be thankful after all that Li Koo had
been so clever. It did, however, reach the twins' ears, but
they didn't turn a hair because of Uncle Arthur. They merely
expressed surprise at its redness, seeing that it came out of
somebody so black.

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.

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-à-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.