Christopher and Columbus (32 page)

She said nothing really; she merely asked questions; and not one
of the questions, now they were put to him, did the manager find he
could answer. No doubt everything was all right. Everybody knew
about Mr. Twist, and it wasn't likely he would choose an hotel
of so high a class to stay in if his relations to the Miss
Twinklers were anything but regular. And a lady companion, he
understood, was joining the party shortly; and besides, there was
the house being got ready, a permanent place of residence he
gathered, in which the party would settle down, and experience had
taught him that genuine illicitness was never permanent. Still, the
manager himself hadn't really cared about the Twinklers since
the canary came. He could fill the hotel very easily, and there was
no need to accommodate people who spoilt carpets. Also, the moment
the least doubt or question arose among his guests, all of whom he
knew and most of whom came back regularly every year, as to the
social or moral status of any new arrivals, then those arrivals
must go. Miss Heap evidently had doubts. Her standard, it is true,
was the almost impossibly high one of the unmarried lady of riper
years, but Mrs. Ridding, he understood, had doubts too; and once
doubts started in an hotel he knew from experience that they ran
through it like measles. The time had come for him to act.

Next morning, therefore, he briskly appeared in Mr. Twist's
room as he was pulling on his boots, and cheerfully hoped he was
bearing in mind what he had been told the day he took the rooms,
that they were engaged for the date of the month now arrived
at.

Mr. Twist paused with a boot half on. "I'm not bearing
it in mind," he said, "because you didn't tell
me."

"Oh yes I did, Mr. Twist," said the manager briskly.
"It isn't likely I'd make a mistake about that. The
rooms are taken every year for this date by the same people. Mrs.
Hart of Boston has this one, and Mr. and Mrs.--"

Mr. Twist heard no more. He finished lacing his boots in
silence. What he had been so much afraid of had happened: he and
the twins had got under a cloud.

The twins had been saying things. Last night they told him they
had made some friends. He had been uneasy at that, and questioned
them. But it appeared they had talked chiefly of their Uncle
Arthur. Well, damnable as Uncle Arthur was as a man he was safe
enough as a topic of conversation. He was English. He was known to
people in America like the Delloggs and the Sacks. But it was now
clear they must have said things besides that. Probably they had
expatiated on Uncle Arthur from some point of view undesirable to
American ears. The American ear was very susceptible. He hadn't
been born in New England without becoming aware of that.

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."