Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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 M
r. 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.”

  “We won’t,” repeated Anna-Rose, on the verge of those tears which always with her so quickly followed any sort of emotion.

  Mr. Twist paused on his way to the door. “Well now what the devil’s the matter with lodgings?” he asked angrily.

  “It isn’t the devil, it’s Mrs. Bilton,” said Anna-Felicitas. “Would you yourself like—”

  ‘But you’ve got to have Mrs. Bilton with you anyhow from to-day on.”

  “But not unadulterated Mrs. Bilton. You were to have been with us too. We can’t be drowned all by ourselves in Mrs. Bilton. You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t. But it’s only for a few days anyhow,” said Mr. Twist, who had been quite unprepared for opposition to his very sensible arrangement.

  “I shouldn’t wonder if it’s only a few days now before we can all squeeze into some part of the cottage. If you don’t mind dust and noise and workmen about all day long.”

  A light pierced the gloom that had gathered round Anna-Felicitas’s soul.

  “We’ll go into it to-day,” she said firmly, “Why not? We can camp out. We can live in those little rooms at the back over the kitchen, — the ones you got ready for Li Koo. We’d be on the spot. We wouldn’t mind anything. It would just be a picnic.”

  “And we — we wouldn’t be — sep — separated,” said Anna-Rose, getting it out with a gasp.

  Mr. Twist stood looking at them.

  “Well, of all the—” he began, pushing his hat back. “Are you aware,” he went on more calmly, “that there are only two rooms over that kitchen, and that you and Mrs. Bilton will have to be all together in one of them?”

  “We don’t mind that as long as you’re in the other one,” said Anna-Rose.

  “Of course,” suggested Anna-Felicitas, “if you were to happen to marry Mrs. Bilton it would make a fairer division.”

  Mr. Twist’s spectacles stared enormously at her.

  “No, no,” said Anna-Rose quickly. “Marriage is a sacred thing, and you can’t just marry so as to be more comfortable.”

  “I guess if I married Mrs. Bilton I’d be more uncomfortable,” remarked Mr. Twist with considerable dryness.

  He seemed however to be quieted by the bare suggestion, for he fixed his hat properly on his head and said, sobriety in his voice and manner, “Come along, then. We’ll get a taxi and anyway go out and have a look at the rooms. But I shouldn’t be surprised,” he added, “if before I’ve done with you you’ll have driven me sheer out of my wits.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” said the twins together, with all and more of their usual urbanity.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  By superhuman exertions and a lavish expenditure of money, the rooms Li Koo was later on to inhabit were ready to be slept in by the time Mrs. Bilton arrived. They were in an outbuilding at the back of the house, and consisted of a living-room with a cooking-stove in it, a bedroom behind it, and up a narrow and curly staircase a larger room running the whole length and width of the shanty. This sounds spacious, but it wasn’t. The amount of length and width was small, and it was only just possible to get three camp-beds into it and a washstand. The beds nearly touched each other. Anna-Felicitas thought she and Anna-Rose were going to be regrettably close to Mrs. Bilton in them, and again urged on Mr. Twist’s consideration the question of removing Mrs. Bilton from the room by marriage; but Anna-Rose said it was all perfect, and that there was lots of room, and she was sure Mrs. Bilton, used to the camp life so extensively practised in America, would thoroughly enjoy herself.

  They worked without stopping all the rest of the day at making the little place habitable, nailing up some of the curtains intended for the other house, unpacking cushions, and fetching in great bunches of the pale pink and mauve geraniums that scrambled about everywhere in the garden and hiding the worst places in the rooms with them. Mr. Twist was in Acapulco most of the time, getting together the necessary temporary furniture and cooking utensils, but the twins didn’t miss him, for they were helped with zeal by the architect, the electrical expert, the garden expert and the chief plumber.

  These young men — they were all young, and very go-ahead — abandoned the main building that day to the undirected labours of the workmen they were supposed to control, and turned to on the shanty as soon as they realized what it was to be used for with a joyous energy that delighted the twins. They swept and they garnished. They cleaned the dust off the windows and the rust off the stove. They fetched out the parcels with the curtains and cushions in them from the barn where all parcels and packages had been put till the house was ready, and extracted various other comforts from the piled up packing-cases, — a rug or two, an easy chair for Mrs. Bilton, a looking-glass. They screwed in hooks behind the doors for clothes to be hung on, and they tied the canary to a neighbouring eucalyptus tree where it could be seen and hardly heard. The chief plumber found buckets and filled them with water, and the electrical expert rigged up a series of lanterns inside the shanty, even illuminating its tortuous staircase. There was much badinage, but as it was all in American, a language of which the twins were not yet able to apprehend the full flavour, they responded only with pleasant smiles. But their smiles were so pleasant and the family dimple so engaging that the hours flew, and the young men were sorry indeed when Mr. Twist came back.

  He came back laden, among other things, with food for the twins, whom he had left in his hurry high and dry at the cottage with nothing at all to eat; and he found them looking particularly comfortable and well-nourished, having eaten, as they explained when they refused his sandwiches and fruit, the chief plumber’s dinner.

  They were sitting on the stump of an oak tree when he arrived, resting from their labours, and the grass at their feet was dotted with the four experts. It was the twins now who were talking, and the experts who were smiling. Mr. Twist wondered uneasily what they were saying. It wouldn’t have added to his comfort if he had heard, for they were giving the experts an account of their attempt to go and live with the Sacks, and interweaving with it some general reflections of a philosophical nature suggested by the Sack ménage. The experts were keenly interested, and everybody looked very happy, and Mr. Twist was annoyed; for clearly if the experts were sitting there on the grass they weren’t directing the workmen placed under their orders. Mr. Twist perceived a drawback to the twins living on the spot while the place was being finished; another drawback. He had perceived several already, but not this one. Well, Mrs. Bilton would soon be there. He now counted the hours to Mrs. Bilton. He positively longed for her.

  When they saw him coming, the experts moved away. “Here’s the boss,” they said, nodding and winking at the twins as they got up quickly and departed. Winking was not within the traditions of the Twinkler family, but no doubt, they thought, it was the custom of the country to wink, and they wondered whether they ought to have winked back. The young men were certainly deserving of every friendliness in return for all
they had done. They decided they would ask Mrs. Bilton, and then they could wink at them if necessary the first thing to-morrow morning.

  Mr. Twist took them with him when he went down to the station to meet the Los Angeles train. It was dark at six, and the workmen had gone home by then, but the experts still seemed to be busy. He had been astonished at the amount the twins had accomplished in his absence in the town till they explained to him how very active the experts had been, whereupon he said, “Now isn’t that nice,” and briefly informed them they would go with him to the station.

  “That’s waste of time,” said Anna-Felicitas. “We could be giving finishing touches if we stayed here.”

  “You will come with me to the station,” said Mr. Twist.

  Mrs. Bilton arrived in a thick cloud of conversation. She supposed she was going to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, as indeed she originally was, and all the way back in the taxi Mr. Twist was trying to tell her she wasn’t; but Mrs. Bilton had so much to say about her journey, and her last days among her friends, and all the pleasant new acquaintances she had made on the train, and her speech was so very close-knit, that he felt he was like a rabbit on the wrong side of a thick-set hedge running desperately up and down searching for a gap to get through. It was nothing short of amazing how Mrs. Bilton talked; positively, there wasn’t at any moment the smallest pause in the flow.

  “It’s a disease,” thought Anna-Rose, who had several things she wanted to say herself, and found herself hopelessly muzzled.

  “No wonder Mr. Bilton preferred heaven,” thought Anna-Felicitas, also a little restless at the completeness of her muzzling.

  “Anyhow she’ll never hear the Annas saying anything,” thought Mr. Twist, consoling himself.

  “This hotel we’re going to seems to be located at some distance from the station,” said Mrs. Bilton presently, in the middle of several pages of rapid unpunctuated monologue. “Isolated, surely—” and off she went again to other matters, just as Mr. Twist had got his mouth open to explain at last.