Christopher and Columbus (34 page)

"Do you think she talks in her sleep?" Anna-Rose
anxiously whispered back.

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?"

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.