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.
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.
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.
They felt uncomfortably sure that if they were in prison they would write a diary very much on these lines. For three evenings they had to listen to it, their eyes on Mr. Twist's door. Why didn't he come out and save them? What happy, what glorious evenings they used to have at the Cosmopolitan, spent in intelligent conversation, in a decent give and take—not this button-holing business, this being got into a corner and held down; and alas, how little they had appreciated them! They used to get sleepy and break them off and go to bed. If only he would come out now and talk to them they would sit up all night. They wriggled with impatience in their seats beneath the épanchements of the young girl, the strangely and distressingly familiar épanchements. The diary was published in a magazine, and after the second evening, when Mrs. Bilton on laying it down announced she would go on with it while they were dressing next morning, they got up very early before Mrs. Bilton was awake and crept out and hid it.
But Li Koo found it and restored it.
Li Koo found everything. He found Mrs. Bilton's outdoor shoes the third morning, although the twins had hidden them most carefully. Their idea was that while she, rendered immobile, waited indoors, they would zealously look for them in all the places where they well knew that they weren't, and perhaps get some conversation with Mr. Twist.
But Li Koo found everything. He found the twins themselves the fourth morning, when, unable any longer to bear Mrs. Bilton's voice, they ran into the woods instead of coming in to breakfast. He seemed to find them at once, to walk unswervingly to their remote and bramble-filled ditch.
In order to save their dignity they said as they scrambled out that they were picking flowers for Mrs. Bilton's breakfast, though the ditch had nothing in it but stones and thorns. Li Koo made no comment. He never did make comments; and his silence and his ubiquitous efficiency made the twins as fidgety with him as they were with Mrs. Bilton for the opposite reason. They had an uncomfortable feeling that he was rather like the liebe Gott,—he saw everything, knew everything, and said nothing. In vain they tried, on that walk back as at other times, to pierce his impassivity with genialities. Li Koo—again, they silently reflected, like the liebe Gott—had a different sense of geniality from theirs; he couldn't apparently smile; they doubted if he even ever wanted to. Their genialities faltered and froze on their lips.
Besides, they were deeply humiliated by having been found hiding, and were ashamed to find themselves trying anxiously in this manner to conciliate Li Koo. Their dignity on the walk back to the shanty seemed painfully shrunk. They ought never to have condescended to do the childish things they had been doing during the last three days. If they hadn't been found out it would, of course, have remained a private matter between them and their Maker, and then one doesn't mind so much; but they had been found out, and by Li Koo, their own servant. It was intolerable. All the blood of all the Twinklers, Junkers from time immemorial and properly sensitive to humiliation, surged within them. They hadn't felt so naughty and so young for years. They were sure Li Koo didn't believe them about the ditch. They had a dreadful sensation of being led back to Mrs. Bilton by the ear.
If only they could sack Mrs. Bilton!
This thought, immense and startling, came to Anna-Rose, who far more than Anna-Felicitas resented being cut off from Mr. Twist, besides being more naturally impetuous; and as they walked in silence side by side, with Li Koo a little ahead of them, she turned her head and looked at Anna-Felicitas. "Let's give her notice," she murmured, under her breath.
Anna-Felicitas was so much taken aback that she stopped in her walk and stared at Anna-Rose's flushed face.
She too hardly breathed it. The suggestion seemed fantastic in its monstrousness. How could they give anybody so old, so sure of herself, so determined as Mrs. Bilton, notice?
"Give her notice?" she repeated.
A chill ran down Anna-Felicitas's spine. Give Mrs. Bilton notice! It was a great, a breath-taking idea, magnificent in its assertion of independence, of rights; but it needed, she felt, to be approached with caution. They had never given anybody notice in their lives, and they had always thought it must be a most painful thing to do—far, far worse than tipping. Uncle Arthur usedn't to mind it a bit; did it, indeed, with gusto. But Aunt Alice hadn't liked it at all, and came out in a cold perspiration and bewailed her lot to them and wished that people would behave and not place her in such a painful position.
Mrs. Bilton couldn't be said not to have behaved. Quite the contrary. She had behaved too persistently; and they had to endure it the whole twenty-four hours. For Mrs. Bilton had no turn, it appeared, in spite of what she had said at Los Angeles, for solitary contemplation, and after the confusion of the first night, when once she had had time to envisage the situation thoroughly, as she said, she had found that to sit alone downstairs in the uncertain light of the lanterns while the twins went to bed and Mr. Twist wouldn't come out of his room, was not good for her psyche; so she had followed the twins upstairs, and continued to read the young girl's diary to them during their undressing and till the noises coming from their beds convinced her that it was useless to go on any longer. And that morning, the morning they hid in the ditch, she had even done this while they were getting up.
"It isn't to be borne," said Anna-Rose under her breath, one eye on Li Koo's ear which, a little in front of her, seemed slightly slanted backward and sideways in the direction of her voice. "And why should it be? We're not in her power."
"No," said Anna-Felicitas, also under her breath and also watching Li Koo's ear, "but it feels extraordinarily as if we were."
"Yes. And that's intolerable. And it forces us to do silly baby things, wholly unsuited either to our age or our position. Who would have thought we'd ever hide from somebody in a ditch again!" Anna-Rose's voice was almost a sob at the humiliation.
"It all comes from sleeping in the same room," said Anna-Felicitas. "Nobody can stand a thing that doesn't end at night either."
"Of course they can't," said Anna-Rose. "It isn't fair. If you have to have a person all day you oughtn't to have to have the same person all night. Some one else should step in and relieve you then. Just as they do in hospitals."
"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "Mr. Twist ought to. He ought to remove her forcibly from our room by marriage.
"No he oughtn't," said Anna-Rose hastily, "because we can remove her ourselves by the simple process of giving her notice."
"I don't believe it's simple," said Anna-Felicia again feeling a chill trickling down her spine.
"Of course it is. We just go to her very politely and inform her that the engagement is terminated on a basis of mutual esteem but inflexible determination."
"And suppose she doesn't stop talking enough to hear?"
"Then we'll hand it to her in writing."
The rest of the way they walked in silence, Anna-Rose with her chin thrust out in defiance, Anna-Felicitas dragging her feet along with a certain reluctance and doubt.
Mrs. Bilton had finished her breakfast when they got back, having seen no sense in letting good food get cold, and was ready to sit and chat to them while they had theirs. She was so busy telling them what she had supposed they were probably doing, that she was unable to listen to their attempted account of what they had done. Thus they were saved from telling humiliating and youthful fibs; but they were also prevented, as by a wall of rock, from getting the speech through to her ear that Anna-Rose, trembling in spite of her defiance, had ready to launch at her. It was impossible to shout at Mrs. Bilton in the way Mr. Twist, when in extremity of necessity, had done. Ladies didn't shout; especially not when they were giving other ladies notice. Anna-Rose, who was quite cold and clammy at the prospect of her speech, couldn't help feeling relieved when breakfast was over and no opportunity for it had been given.
"We'll write it," she whispered to Anna-Felicitas beneath the cover of a lively account Mrs. Bilton was giving them, à propos of their being late for breakfast, of the time it took her, after Mr. Bilton's passing, to get used to his unpunctuality at meals.
That Mr. Bilton, who had breakfasted and dined with her steadily for years, should suddenly leave off being punctual freshly astonished her every day, she said. The clock struck, yet Mr. Bilton continued late. It was poignant, said Mrs. Bilton, this way of being reminded of her loss. Each day she would instinctively expect; each day would come the stab of recollection. The vacancy these non-appearances had made in her life was beyond any words of hers. In fact she didn't possess such words, and doubted if the completest dictionary did either. Everything went just vacant, she said. No need any more to hurry down in the morning, so as to be behind the coffee pot half a minute before the gong went and Mr. Bilton simultaneously appeared. No need any more to think of him when ordering meals. No need any more to eat the dish he had been so fond of and she had found so difficult to digest, Boston baked beans and bacon; yet she found herself ordering it continually after his departure, and choking memorially over the mouthfuls—"And people in Europe," cried Mrs Bilton, herself struck as she talked by this extreme devotion, "say that American women are incapable of passion!"
"We'll write it," whispered Anna-Rose to Anna-Felicitas.
"Write what?" asked Anna-Felicitas abstractedly, who as usual when Mrs. Bilton narrated her reminiscences was absorbed in listening to them and trying to get some clear image of Mr. Bilton.
But she remembered the next moment, and it was like waking up to the recollection that this is the day you have to have a tooth pulled out. The idea of not having the tooth any more, of being free from it charmed and thrilled her, but how painful, how alarming was the prospect of pulling it out!
There was one good thing to be said for Mrs. Bilton's talk, and that was that under its voluminous cover they could themselves whisper occasionally to each other. Anna-Rose decided that if Mrs. Bilton didn't notice that they whispered neither probably would she notice if she wrote. She therefore under Mrs. Bilton's very nose got a pencil and a piece of paper, and with many pauses and an unsteady hand wrote the following:
DEAR MRS. BILTON—For some time past my sister and I have felt that we aren't suited to you, and if you don't mind would you mind regarding the engagement as terminated? We hope you won't think this abrupt, because it isn't really, for we seem to have lived ages since you came, and we've been thinking this over ripely ever since. And we hope you won't take it as anything personal either, because it isn't really. It's only that we feel we're unsuitable, and we're sure we'll go on getting more and more unsuitable. Nobody can help being unsuitable, and we're fearfully sorry. But on the other hand we're inflexible.—Yours affectionately,
ANNA-ROSE and ANNA-FELICITAS TWINKLER
With a beating heart she cautiously pushed the letter across the table under cover of the breakfast débris to Anna-Felicitas, who read it with a beating heart and cautiously pushed it back.
Anna-Felicitas felt sure Christopher was being terribly impetuous, and she felt sure she ought to stop her. But what a joy to be without Mrs. Bilton! The thought of going to bed in the placid sluggishness dear to her heart, without having to listen, to be attentive, to remember to be tidy because if she weren't there would be no room for Mrs. Bilton's things, was too much for her. Authority pursuing her into her bedroom was what she had found most difficult to bear. There must be respite. There must be intervals in every activity or endurance. Even the liebe Gott, otherwise so indefatigable, had felt this and arranged for the relaxation of Sundays.
She pushed the letter back with a beating heart, and told herself that she couldn't and never had been able to stop Christopher when she was in this mood of her chin sticking out. What could she do in face of such a chin? And besides, Mrs. Bilton's friends must be missing her very much and ought to have her back. One should always live only with one's own sort of people. Every other way of living, Anna-Felicitas was sure even at this early stage of her existence, was bound to come to a bad end. One could be fond of almost anybody, she held, if they were somewhere else. Even of Uncle Arthur. Even he somehow seemed softened by distance. But for living-together purposes there was only one kind of people possible, and that was one's own kind. Unexpected and various were the exteriors of one's own kind and the places one found them in, but one always knew them. One felt comfortable with them at once; comfortable and placid. Whatever else Mrs. Bilton might be feeling she wasn't feeling placid. That was evident; and it was because she too wasn't with her own kind. With her eyes fixed nervously on Mrs. Bilton who was talking on happily, Anna-Felicitas reasoned with herself in the above manner as she pushed back the letter, instead of, as at the back of her mind she felt she ought to have done, tearing it up.
Anna-Rose folded it and addressed it to Mrs. Bilton. Then she got up and held it out to her.
Anna-Felicitas got up too, her inside feeling strangely unsteady and stirred round and round.
"Would you mind reading this?" said Anna-Rose faintly to Mrs. Bilton, who took the letter mechanically and held it in her hand without apparently noticing it, so much engaged was she by what she was saying.
"We're going out a moment to speak to Mr. Twist," Anna-Rose then said, making for the door and beckoning to Anna-Felicitas, who still stood hesitating.
She slipped out; and Anna-Felicitas, suddenly panic-stricken lest she should be buttonholed all by herself fled after her.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Mr. Twist, his mind at ease, was in the charming room that was to be the tea-room. It was full of scattered fittings and the noise of hammering, but even so anybody could see what a delightful place it would presently turn into.
The Open Arms was to make a specialty of wet days. Those were the days, those consecutive days of downpour that came in the winter and lasted without interruption for a fortnight at a time, when visitors in the hotels were bored beyond expression and ready to welcome anything that could distract them for an hour from the dripping of the rain on the windows. Bridge was their one solace, and they played it from after breakfast till bedtime; but on the fourth or fifth day of doing this, just the mere steady sitting became grievous to them. They ached with weariness. They wilted with boredom. All their natural kindness got damped out of them, and they were cross. Even when they won they were cross, and when they lost it was really distressing. They wouldn't, of course, have been in California at all at such a time if it were possible to know beforehand when the rains would begin, but one never did know, and often it was glorious weather right up to and beyond Christmas. And then how glorious! What a golden place of light and warmth to be in, while in the East one's friends were being battered by blizzards.
Mr. Twist intended to provide a break in the day each afternoon for these victims of the rain. He would come to their rescue. He made up his mind, clear and firm on such matters, that it should become the habit of these unhappy people during the bad weather to motor out to The Open Arms for tea; and, full of forethought, he had had a covered way made, by which one could get out of a car and into the house without being touched by a drop of rain, and he had had a huge open fireplace made across the end of the tea-room, which would crackle and blaze a welcome that would cheer the most dispirited arrival. The cakes, at all times wonderful were on wet days to be more than wonderful. Li Koo had a secret receipt, given him, he said, by his mother for cakes of a quite peculiar and original charm, and these were to be reserved for the rainy season only, and be made its specialty. They were to become known and endeared to the public under the brief designation of Wet Day Cakes. Mr. Twist felt there was something thoroughly American about this name—plain and business-like, and attractively in contrast to the subtle, the almost immoral exquisiteness of the article itself. This cake had been one of those produced by Li Koo from the folds of his garments the day in Los Angeles, and Mr. Twist had happened to be the one of his party who ate it. He therefore knew what he was doing when he decided to call it and its like simply Wet Day Cakes.
The twins found him experimenting with a fire in the fireplace so as to be sure it didn't smoke, and the architect and he were in their shirt sleeves, deftly manipulating wood shavings and logs. There was such a hammering being made by the workmen fixing in the latticed windows, and such a crackling being made by the logs Mr. Twist and the architect kept on throwing on the fire, that only from the sudden broad smile on the architect's face as he turned to pick up another log did Mr. Twist realize that something that hadn't to do with work was happening behind his back.
He looked round and saw the Annas picking their way toward him. They seemed in a hurry.
"Hello," he called out.
They made no reply to this, but continued hurriedly to pick their way among the obstacles in their path. They appeared to be much perturbed. What, he wondered, had they done with Mrs. Bilton? He soon knew.
"We've given Mrs. Bilton notice," panted Anna-Rose as soon as she got near enough to his ear for him to hear her in the prevailing noise.
Her face, as usual when she was moved and excited, was scarlet, her eyes looking bluer and brighter than ever by contrast.
"We simply can't stand it any longer," she went on as Mr. Twist only stared at her.
"And you wouldn't either if you were us," she continued, the more passionately as he still didn't say anything.
"Of course," said Anna-Felicitas, taking a high line, though her heart was full of doubt, "it's your fault really. We could have borne it if we hadn't had to have her at night."
"Come outside," said Mr. Twist, walking toward the door that led on to the verandah.
They followed him, Anna-Rose shaking with excitement, Anna-Felicitas trying to persuade herself that they had acted in the only way consistent with real wisdom.
The architect stood with a log in each hand looking after them and smiling all by himself. There was something about the Twinklers that lightened his heart whenever he caught sight of them. He and his fellow experts had deplored the absence of opportunities since Mrs. Bilton came of developing the friendship begun the first day, and talked of them on their way home in the afternoons with affectionate and respectful familiarity as The Cutes.
"Now," said Mr. Twist, having passed through the verandah and led the twins to the bottom of the garden where he turned and faced them, "perhaps you'll tell me exactly what you've done."
"You should rather inquire what Mrs. Bilton has done," said Anna-Felicitas, pulling herself up as straight and tall as she would go. She couldn't but perceive that the excess of Christopher's emotion was putting her at a disadvantage in the matter of dignity.
"I can guess pretty much what she has done," said Mr. Twist.
"You can't—you can't," burst out Anna-Rose. "Nobody could—nobody ever could—who hadn't been with her day and night."
"She's just been Mrs. Bilton," said Mr. Twist, lighting a cigarette to give himself an appearance of calm.
"Exactly," said Anna-Felicitas. "So you won't be surprised at our having just been Twinklers."
"Oh Lord," groaned Mr. Twist, in spite of his cigarette, "oh, Lord."
"We've given Mrs. Bilton notice," continued Anna-Felicitas, making a gesture of great dignity with her hand, "because we find with regret that she and we are incompatible."
"Was she aware that you were giving it her?" asked Mr. Twist, endeavouring to keep calm.
"Has she read it?"
"We put it into her hand, and then came away so that she should have an opportunity of quietly considering it."
"You shouldn't have left us alone with her like this," burst out Anna-Rose again, "you shouldn't really. It was cruel, it was wrong, leaving us high and dry—never seeing you—leaving us to be talked to day and night—to be read to—would you like to be read to while you're undressing by somebody still in all their clothes? We've never been able to open our mouths. We've been taken into the field for our airing and brought in again as if we were newborns, or people in prams, or flocks and herds, or prisoners suspected of wanting to escape. We haven't had a minute to ourselves day or night. There hasn't been a single exchange of ideas, not a shred of recognition that we're grown up. We've been followed, watched, talked to—oh, oh, how awful it has been! Oh, oh, how awful! Forced to be dumb for days—losing our power of speech—"
"Anna-Rose Twinkler," interrupted Mr. Twist sternly, "you haven't lost it. And you not only haven't, but that power of yours has increased tenfold during its days of rest."
He spoke with the exasperation in his voice that they had already heard several times since they landed in America. Each time it took them aback, for Mr. Twist was firmly fixed in their minds as the kindest and gentlest of creatures, and these sudden kickings of his each time astonished them.
On this occasion, however, only Anna-Rose was astonished. Anna-Felicitas all along had had an uncomfortable conviction in the depth of her heart that Mr. Twist wouldn't like what they had done. He would be upset, she felt, as her reluctant feet followed Anna-Rose in search of him. He would be, she was afraid very much upset. And so he was. He was appalled by what had happened. Lose Mrs. Bilton? Lose the very foundation of the party's respectability? And how could he find somebody else at the eleventh hour and where and how could the twins and he live, unchaperoned as they would be, till he had? What a peculiar talent these Annas had for getting themselves and him into impossible situations! Of course at their age they ought to be safe under the wing of a wise and unusually determined mother. Well, poor little wretches, they couldn't help not being under it; but that aunt of theirs ought to have stuck to them—faced up to her husband, and stuck to them.
"I suppose," he said angrily, "being you and not being able to see farther than the ends of your noses, you haven't got any sort of an idea of what you've done."
"We—"
"She—"
"And I don't suppose it's much use my trying to explain, either. Hasn't it ever occurred to you, though I'd be real grateful if you'd give me information on this point—that maybe you don't know everything?"
"She—"
"We—"
"And that till you do know everything, which I take it won't be for some time yet, judging from the samples I've had of your perspicacity, you'd do well not to act without first asking some one's advice? Mine, for instance?"
"She—" began Anna-Rose again; but her voice was trembling, for she couldn't bear Mr. Twist's anger. She was too fond of him. When he looked at her like that her own anger was blown out as if by an icy draught and she could only look back at him piteously.
But Anna-Felicitas, being free from the weaknesses inherent in adoration, besides continuing to perceive how Christopher's feelings put her at a disadvantage, drew Mr. Twist's attention from her by saying with gentleness, "But why add to the general discomfort by being bitter?"
"Bitter!" cried Mr. Twist, still glaring at Anna-Rose.
"Do you dispute that God made us?" inquired Anna-Felicitas, placing herself as it were like a shield between Mr. Twist's wrathful concentration on Christopher and that unfortunate young person's emotion.
"See here," said Mr. Twist turning on her, "I'm not going to argue with you—not about anything. Least of all about God."
"I only wanted to point out to you," said Anna-Felicitas mildly, "that that being so, and we not able to help it, there seems little use in being bitter with us because we're not different. In regard to anything fundamental about us that you deplore I'm afraid we must refer you to Providence."
"Say," said Mr. Twist, not in the least appeased by this reasoning but, as Anna-Felicitas couldn't but notice, quite the contrary, "used you to talk like this to that Uncle Arthur of yours? Because if you did, upon my word I don't wonder—"
But what Mr. Twist didn't wonder was fortunately concealed from the twins by the appearance at that moment of Mrs. Bilton, who, emerging from the shades of the verandah and looking about her, caught sight of them and came rapidly down the garden.
They watched her bearing down on them without a word. It was a most unpleasant moment. Mr. Twist re-lit his cigarette to give himself a countenance, but the thought of all that Mrs. Bilton would probably say was dreadful to him, and his hand couldn't help shaking a little. Anna-Rose showed a guilty tendency to slink behind him. Anna-Felicitas stood motionless, awaiting the deluge. All Mr. Twist's sympathies were with Mrs. Bilton, and he was ashamed that she should have been treated so. He felt that nothing she could say would be severe enough, and he was extraordinarily angry with the Annas. Yet when he saw the injured lady bearing down on them, if he only could he would have picked up an Anna under each arm, guilty as they were, and run and run; so much did he prefer them to Mrs. Bilton and so terribly did he want, at this moment, to be somewhere where that lady wasn't.
There they stood then, anxiously watching the approaching figure, and the letter in Mrs. Bilton's hand bobbed up and down as she walked, white and conspicuous in the sun against her black dress. What was their amazement to see as she drew nearer that she was looking just as pleasant as ever. They stared at her with mouths falling open. Was it possible, thought the twins, that she was longing to leave but hadn't liked to say so, and the letter had come as a release? Was it possible, thought Mr. Twist with a leap of hope in his heart, that she was taking the letter from a non-serious point of view?
And Mr. Twist, to his infinite relief, was right. For Mrs. Bilton, woman of grit and tenacity, was not in the habit of allowing herself to be dislodged or even discouraged. This was the opening sentence of her remarks when she had arrived, smiling, in their midst. Had she not explained the first night that she was one who, having put her hand to the plough, held on to it however lively the movements of the plough might be? She would not conceal from them, she said, that even Mr Bilton had not, especially, at first, been entirely without such movements. He had settled down, however on finding he could trust her to know better than he did what he wanted. Don't wise wives always? she inquired. And the result had been that no man ever had a more devoted wife while he was alive, or a more devoted widow after he wasn't. She had told him one day, when he was drawing near the latter condition and she was conversing with him, as was only right, on the subject of wills, and he said that his affairs had gone wrong and as far as he could see she would be left a widow and that was about all she would be left—she had told him that if it was any comfort to him to know it, he might rely on it that he would have the most devoted widow any man had ever had, and he said—Mr. Bilton had odd fancies, especially toward the end—that a widow was the one thing a man never could have because he wasn't there by the time he had got her. Yes, Mr. Bilton had odd fancies. And if she had managed, as she did manage, to steer successfully among them, he being a man of ripe parts and character, was it likely that encountering odd fancies in two very young and unformed girls—oh, it wasn't their fault that they were unformed, it was merely because they hadn't had time enough yet—she would be unable, experienced as she was, to steer among them too? Besides, she had a heart for orphans; orphans and dumb animals always had had a special appeal for her. "No, no, Mr. Twist," Mrs. Bilton wound up, putting a hand affectionately on Anna-Rose's shoulder as a more convenient one than Anna-Felicitas's, "my young charges aren't going to be left in the lurch, you may rely on that. I don't undertake a duty without carrying it out. Why, I feel a lasting affection for them already. We've made real progress these few days in intimacy. And I just love to sit and listen to all their fresh young chatter."
CHAPTER XXIX
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.
Nobody here had been asked to educate the Twinklers. No classes had been joined by them.
Miss Heap was so enigmatic, she who was naturally of an unquiet and exercise-loving tongue, that this graver, more occupied section of the inhabitants was instantly as much pervaded by suspicions as the idlest of the visitors in the hotels and country houses. It waved aside the innocent appearance and obvious extreme youth of the suspects. Useless to look like cherubs if it were German cherubs you looked like. Useless being very nearly children if it were German children you very nearly were. Why, precisely these qualities would be selected by those terribly clever Germans for the furtherance of their nefarious schemes. It would be quite in keeping with the German national character, that character of bottomless artfulness, to pick out two such young girls with just that type of empty, baby face, and send them over to help weave the gigantic invisible web with which America was presently to be choked dead.
The serious section of Acapulco, the section that thought, hit on this explanation of the Twinklers with no difficulty whatever once its suspicions were roused because it was used to being able to explain everything instantly. It was proud of its explanation, and presented it to the town with much the same air of deprecating but conscious achievement with which one presents drinking-fountains.
Then there was the lawyer to whom Mr. Twist had gone about the guardianship. He said nothing, but he was clear in his mind that the girls were German and that Mr. Twist wanted to hide it. He had thought more highly of Mr. Twist's intelligence than this. Why hide it? America was a neutral country; technically she was neutral, and Germans could come and go as they pleased. Why unnecessarily set tongues wagging? He did not, being of a continuous shrewd alertness himself, a continuous wide-awakeness and minute consideration of consequences, realize, and if he had he wouldn't have believed, the affectionate simplicity and unworldliness of Mr. Twist. If it had been pointed out to him he would have dismissed it as a pose; for a man who makes money in any quantity worth handling isn't affectionately simple and unworldly—he is calculating and steely.
The lawyer was puzzled. How did Mr. Twist manage to have a forehead and a fortune like that, and yet be a fool? True, he had a funny sort of face on him once you got down to the nose part and what came after,—a family sort of face, thought the lawyer; a sort of rice pudding, wet-nurse face. The lawyer listened intently to all the talk and rumours, while himself saying nothing. In spite of being a married man, his scruples about honour hadn't been blunted by the urge to personal freedom and the necessity for daily self-defence that sometimes afflicts those who have wives. He remained honourably silent, as he had said he would, but he listened; and he came to the conclusion that either there was a quite incredible amount of stupidity about the Twist party, or that there was something queer.
What he didn't know, and what nobody knew, was that the house being got ready with such haste was to be an inn. He, like the rest of the world, took the newspapers ventre-à-terre theory of the house for granted, and it was only the expectation of the arrival of that respectable lady, the widowed Mrs. Twist, which kept the suspicions a little damped down. They smouldered, hesitating, beneath this expectation; for Teapot Twist's family life had been voluminously described in the entire American press when first his invention caught on, and it was known to be pure. There had been snapshots of the home at Clark where he had been born, of the home at Clark (west aspect) where he would die—Mr. Twist read with mild surprise that his liveliest wish was to die in the old home—of the corner in the Clark churchyard where he would probably be entombed, with an inset showing his father's gravestone on which would clearly be read the announcement that he was the Resurrection and the Life. And there was an inset of his mother, swathed in the black symbols of ungluttable grief,—a most creditable mother. And there were accounts of the activities of another near relative, that Uncle Charles who presided over the Church of Heavenly Refreshment in New York, and a snapshot of his macerated and unrefreshed body in a cassock,—a most creditable uncle.