She arrived therefore at the cottage unconscious of the change in her fate.
Now Mrs. Bilton was as fond of comfort as any other woman who has been deprived for some years of that substitute for comfort, a husband. She had looked forward to the enveloping joys of the Cosmopolitan, its bath, its soft bed and good food, with frank satisfaction. She thought it admirable that before embarking on active duties she should for a space rest luxuriously in an excellent hotel, with no care in regard to expense, and exchange ideas while she rested with the interesting people she would be sure to meet in it. Before the interview in Los Angeles, Mr. Twist had explained to her by letter and under the seal of confidence the philanthropic nature of the project he and the Miss Twinklers were engaged upon, and she was prepared, in return for the very considerable salary she had accepted, to do her duty loyally and unremittingly; but after the stress and hard work of her last days in Los Angeles she had certainly looked forward with a particular pleasure to two or three weeks’ delicious wallowing in flesh-pots for which she had not to pay. She was also, however, a lady of grit; and she possessed, as she said her friends often told her, a redoubtable psyche, a genuine American free and fearless psyche; so that when, talking ceaselessly, her thoughts eagerly jostling each other as they streamed through her brain to get first to the exit of her tongue, she caught her foot in some builder’s débris carelessly left on the path up to the cottage and received in this way positively her first intimation that this couldn’t be the Cosmopolitan, she did not, as a more timid female soul well might have, become alarmed and suppose that Mr. Twist, whom after all she didn’t know, had brought her to this solitary place for purposes of assassination, but stopped firmly just where she was, and turning her head in the darkness toward him said, “Now Mr. Twist, I’ll stand right here till you’re able to apply some sort of illumination to what’s at my feet. I can’t say what it is I’ve walked against but I’m not going any further with this promenade till I can say. And when you’ve thrown light on the subject perhaps you’ll oblige me with information as to where that hotel is I was told I was coming to.”
“Information?” cried Mr. Twist. “Haven’t I been trying to give it you ever since I met you? Haven’t I been trying to stop your getting out of the taxi till I’d fetched a lantern? Haven’t I been trying to offer you my arm along the path—”
“Then why didn’t you say so, Mr. Twist?” asked Mrs. Bilton.
“Say so!” cried Mr. Twist.
At that moment the flash of an electric torch was seen jerking up and down as the person carrying it ran toward them. It was the electrical expert who, most fortunately, happened still to be about.
Mrs. Bilton welcomed him warmly, and taking his torch from him first examined what she called the location of her feet, then gave it back to him and put her hand through his arm. “Now guide me to whatever it is has been substituted without my knowledge for that hotel,” she said; and while Mr. Twist went back to the taxi to deal with her grips, she walked carefully toward the shanty on the expert’s arm, expressing, in an immense number of words, the astonishment she felt at Mr. Twist’s not having told her of the disappearance of the Cosmopolitan from her itinerary.
The electrical expert tried to speak, but was drowned without further struggle. Anna-Rose, unable to listen any longer without answering to the insistent inquiries as to why Mr. Twist had kept her in the dark, raised her voice at last and called out, “But he wanted to — he wanted to all the time — you wouldn’t listen — you wouldn’t stop—”
Mrs. Bilton did stop however when she got inside the shanty. Her tongue and her feet stopped dead together. The electrical expert had lit all the lanterns, and coming upon it in the darkness its lighted windows gave it a cheerful, welcoming look. But inside no amount of light and bunches of pink geraniums could conceal its discomforts, its dreadful smallness; besides, pink geraniums, which the twins were accustomed to regard as precious, as things brought up lovingly in pots, were nothing but weeds to Mrs. Bilton’s experienced Californian eye.
She stared round her in silence. Her sudden quiet fell on the twins with a great sense of refreshment. Standing in the doorway — for Mrs. Bilton and the electrical expert between them filled up most of the kitchen — they heaved a deep sigh. “And see how beautiful the stars are,” whispered Anna-Felicitas in Anna-Rose’s ear; she hadn’t been able to see them before somehow, Mrs. Bilton’s voice had so much ruffled the night.
“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?”
CHAPTER XXVII
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.
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.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 214