Christopher and Columbus (37 page)

This was the last of Mr. Twist's worries before the opening
day.

Remorseful that he should have shirked helping the Annas to bear
Mrs. Bilton, besides having had a severe fright on perceiving how
near his shirking had brought the party to disaster, he now had his
meals with the others and spent the evenings with them as well. He
was immensely grateful to Mrs. Bilton. Her grit had saved them. He
esteemed and respected her. Indeed, he shook hands with her then
and there at the end of her speech, and told her he did, and the
least he could do after that was to come to dinner. But this very
genuine appreciation didn't prevent his finding her at close
quarters what Anna-Rose, greatly chastened, now only called
temperately "a little much," and the result was a really
frantic hurrying on of the work. He had rather taken, those first
four days of being relieved of responsibility in regard to the
twins, to finnicking with details, to dwelling lovingly on them
with a sense of having a margin to his time, and things accordingly
had considerably slowed down; but after twenty-four hours of Mrs.
Bilton they hurried up again, and after forty-eight of her the
speed was headlong. At the end of forty-eight hours it seemed to
Mr. Twist more urgent than anything he had ever known that he
should get out of the shanty, get into somewhere with space in it,
and sound-proof walls--lots of walls--and long passages between
people's doors; and before the rooms in the inn were anything
like finished he insisted on moving in.

"You must turn to on this last lap and help fix them
up," he said to the twins. "It'll be a bit
uncomfortable at first, but you must just take off your coats to it
and not mind."

Mind? Turn to? It was what they were languishing for. It was
what, in the arid hours under the ilex tree, collected so
ignominiously round Mrs. Bilton's knee they had been panting
for, like thirsty dogs with their tongues out. And such is the
peculiar blessedness of work that instantly, the moment there was
any to be done, everything that was tangled and irritating fell
quite naturally into its proper place. Magically life straightened
itself out smooth, and left off being difficult.
Arbeit und Liebe
, as their mother used to say, dropping
into German whenever a sentence seemed to her to sound better that
way--
Arbeit und Liebe
: these were the two great things of life;
the two great angels, as she assured them, under whose spread-out
wings lay happiness.

With a hungry zeal, with the violent energy of reaction, the
Annas fell upon work. They started unpacking. All the things they
had bought in Acapulco, the linen, the china, the teaspoons, the
feminine touches that had been piled up waiting in the barn, were
pulled out and undone and carried indoors. They sorted, and they
counted, and they arranged on shelves. Anna-Rose flew in and out
with her arms full. Anna-Felicitas slouched zealously after her,
her arms full too when she started, but not nearly so full when she
got there owing to the way things had of slipping through them and
dropping on to the floor. They were in a blissful, busy confusion.
Their faces shone with heat and happiness. Here was liberty; here
was freedom; here was true dignity--
Arbeit und Liebe
....

When Mr. Twist, as he did whenever he could, came and looked on
for a moment in his shirt sleeves, with his hat on the back of his
head and his big, benevolent spectacles so kind, Anna-Rose's
cup seemed full. Her dimple never disappeared for a moment. It was
there all day long now; and even when she was asleep it still
lurked in the corner of her mouth.
Arbeit und Liebe
.

Immense was the reaction of self-respect that took hold of the
twins. They couldn't believe they were the people who had been
so crude and ill-conditioned as to hide Mrs. Bilton's
belongings, and actually finally to hide themselves. How absurd.
How like children. How unpardonably undignified. Anna-Rose held
forth volubly to this effect while she arranged the china, and
Anna-Felicitas listened assentingly, with a kind of grave, ashamed
sheepishness.

The result of this reaction was that Mrs. Bilton, whose pressure
on them was relieved by the necessity of her too being in several
places at once, and who was displaying her customary grit, now
became the definite object of their courtesy. They were the
mistresses of a house, they began to realize, and as such owed her
every consideration. This bland attitude was greatly helped by
their not having to sleep with her any more, and they found that
the mere coming fresh to her each morning made them feel polite and
well-disposed. Besides, they were thoroughly and finally grown-up
now, Anna-Rose declared--never, never to lapse again. They had had
their lesson, she said, gone through a crisis, and done that which
Aunt Alice used to say people did after severe trials, aged
considerably.

Anna-Felicitas wasn't quite so sure. Her own recent
behaviour had shaken and shocked her too much. Who would have
thought she would have gone like that? Gone all to pieces, back to
sheer naughtiness, on the first provocation? It was quite easy, she
reflected while she worked, and cups kept on detaching themselves
mysteriously from her fingers, and tables tumbling over at her
approach, to be polite and considerate to somebody you saw very
little of, and even, as she found herself doing, to get fond of the
person; but suppose circumstances threw one again into the
person's continual society, made one again have to sleep in the
same room? Anna-Felicitas doubted whether it would be possible for
her to stand such a test, in spite of her earnest desire to behave;
she doubted, indeed, whether anybody ever did stand that test
successfully. Look at husbands.

Meanwhile there seemed no likelihood of its being applied again.
Each of them had now a separate bedroom, and Mrs. Bilton had, in
the lavish American fashion, her own bathroom, so that even at that
point there was no collision. The twins' rooms were connected
by a bathroom all to themselves, with no other door into it except
the doors from their bedrooms, and Mr. Twist, who dwelt discreetly
at the other end of the house, also had a bathroom of his own. It
seemed as natural for American architects to drop bathrooms about,
thought Anna-Rose, as for the little clouds in the psalms to drop
fatness. They shed them just as easily, and the results were just
as refreshing. To persons hailing from Pomerania, a place arid of
bathrooms, it was the last word of luxury and comfort to have
one's own. Their pride in theirs amused Mr. Twist, used from
childhood to these civilized arrangements; but then, as they
pointed out to him, he hadn't lived in Pomerania, where nothing
stood between you and being dirty except the pump.

But it wasn't only the bathrooms that made the inn as
planned by Mr. Twist and the architect seem to the twins the most
perfect, the most wonderful magic little house in the world: the
intelligent American spirit was in every corner, and it was full of
clever, simple devices for saving labour--so full that it almost
seemed to the Annas as if it would get up quite unaided at six
every morning and do itself; and they were sure that if the
smallest encouragement were given to the kitchen-stove it would
cook and dish up a dinner all alone. Everything in the house was on
these lines. The arrangements for serving innumerable teas with
ease were admirable. They were marvels of economy and clever
thinking-out. The architect was surprised at the attention and
thought Mr. Twist concentrated on this particular part of the
future housekeeping. "You seem sheer crazy on teas," he
remarked; to which Mr. Twist merely replied that he was.

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-à-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.