Christopher and Columbus (25 page)

"He isn't dead and settled
down
," said Anna-Rose.

"Not
that
sort of being dead," said Anna-Felicitas.
"He's
just
dead."

"Just got to the stage when he has a funeral," said
Anna-Rose.

"His funeral, it seems, is imminent," said
Anna-Felicitas. "Did you not give us to understand," she
asked, turning to the driver, "that it was imminent?"

"I don't know about imminent," said the driver,
who wasn't going to waste valuable time with words like that,
"but it's to-morrow."

"And you see what that means for us," said
Anna-Felicitas, turning to Mr. Twist.

Mr. Twist did.

He again wiped his forehead, but not this time because the night
was hot.

Manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into a house where
there is going to be a funeral next day, even if one has come all
the way from New York and has nowhere else to go. Equally
manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into it after the
funeral till a decent interval has elapsed. But what the devil, Mr.
Twist asked himself in language become regrettably natural to him
since his sojourn at the front, is a decent interval?

This Mr. Twist asked himself late that night, pacing up and down
the sea-shore in the warm and tranquil darkness in front of the
Cosmopolitan Hotel, while the twins, utterly tired out by their
journey and the emotions at the end of it, crept silently into
bed.

How long does it take a widow to recover her composure? Recover,
that is, the first beginnings of it? At what stage in her mourning
is it legitimate to intrude on her with reminders of obligations
incurred before she was a widow,--with, in fact, the Twinklers?
Delicacy itself would shrink from doing it under a week thought Mr.
Twist, or even under a fortnight, or even if you came to that,
under a month; and meanwhile what was he to do with the
Twinklers?

Mr. Twist, being of the artistic temperament for otherwise he
wouldn't have been so sympathetic nor would he have minded, as
he so passionately did mind, his Uncle Charles's teapot
dribbling on to the tablecloth--was sometimes swept by brief but
tempestuous revulsions of feeling, and though he loved the
Twinklers he did at this moment describe them mentally and without
knowing it in the very words of Uncle Arthur, as those accursed
twins. It was quite unjust, he knew. They couldn't help the
death of the man Dellogg. They were the victims, from first to
last, of a cruel and pursuing fate; but it is natural to turn on
victims, and Mr. Twist was for an instant, out of the very depth of
his helpless sympathy, impatient with the Twinklers.

He walked up and down the sands frowning and pulling his mouth
together, while the Pacific sighed sympathetically at his feet.
Across the road the huge hotel standing in its gardens was pierced
by a thousand lights. Very few people were about and no one at all
was on the sands. There was an immense noise of what sounded like
grasshoppers or crickets, and also at intervals distant choruses of
frogs, but these sounds seemed altogether beneficent,--so warm, and
southern, and far away from less happy places where in October cold
winds perpetually torment the world. Even in the dark Mr. Twist
knew he had got to somewhere that was beautiful. He could imagine
nothing more agreeable than, having handed over the twins safely to
the Delloggs, staying on a week or two in this place and seeing
them every day,--perhaps even, as he had pictured to himself on the
journey, being invited to stay with the Delloggs. Now all that was
knocked on the head. He supposed the man Dellogg couldn't help
being dead but he, Mr. Twist, equally couldn't help resenting
it. It was so awkward; so exceedingly awkward. And it was so like
what one of that creature Uncle Arthur's friends would do.

Mr. Twist, it will be seen, was frankly unreasonable, but then
he was very much taken aback and annoyed. What was he to do with
the Annas? He was obviously not a relation of theirs--and indeed no
profiles could have been less alike--and he didn't suppose
Acapulco was behind other parts of America in curiosity and gossip.
If he stayed on at the Cosmopolitan with the twins till Mrs.
Dellogg was approachable again, whenever that might be, every sort
of question would be being asked in whispers about who they were
and what was their relationship, and presently whenever they sat
down anywhere the chairs all round them would empty. Mr. Twist had
seen the kind of thing happening in hotels before to other
people,--never to himself; never had he been in any situation till
now that was not luminously regular. And quite soon after this with
the chairs had begun to happen, the people who created these
vacancies were told by the manager--firmly in America, politely in
England, and sympathetically in France--that their rooms had been
engaged a long time ago for the very next day, and no others were
available.

The Cosmopolitan was clearly an hotel frequented by the virtuous
rich. Mr. Twist felt that he and the Annas wouldn't, in their
eyes, come under this heading, not, that is, when the other guests
became aware of the entire absence of any relationship between him
and the twins. Well, for a day or two nothing could happen; for a
day or two, before his party had had time to sink into the hotel
consciousness and the manager appeared to tell him the rooms were
engaged, he could think things out and talk them over with his
companions. Perhaps he might even see Mrs. Dellogg. The funeral, he
had heard on inquiring of the hall porter was next day. It was to
be a brilliant affair, said the porter. Mr. Dellogg had been a
prominent inhabitant, free with his money, a supporter of anything
there was to support. The porter talked of him as the taxi-driver
had done, regretfully and respectfully; and Mr. Twist went to bed
angrier than ever with a man who, being so valuable and so
necessary, should have neglected at such a moment to go on
living.

Mr. Twist didn't sleep very well that night. He lay in his
rosy room, under a pink silk quilt, and most of the time stared out
through the open French windows with their pink brocade curtains at
the great starry night, thinking.

In that soft bed, so rosy and so silken as to have been worthy
of the relaxations of, at least, a prima donna, he looked like some
lean and alien bird nesting temporarily where he had no business
to. He hadn't thought of buying silk pyjamas when the success
of his teapot put him in the right position for doing so, because
his soul was too simple for him to desire or think of anything less
candid to wear in bed than flannel, and he still wore the blue
flannel pyjamas of a careful bringing up. In that beautiful bed his
pyjamas didn't seem appropriate. Also his head, so frugal of
hair, didn't do justice to the lace and linen of a pillow
prepared for the hairier head of, again at least, a prima donna.
And finding he couldn't sleep, and wishing to see the stars he
put on his spectacles, and then looked more out of place than ever.
But as nobody was there to see him,--which, Mr. Twist sometimes
thought when he caught sight of himself in his pyjamas at bed-time,
is one of the comforts of being virtuously unmarried,--nobody
minded.

His reflections were many and various, and they conflicted with
and contradicted each other as the reflections of persons in a
difficult position who have Mr. Twist's sort of temperament
often do. Faced by a dribbling teapot, an object which touched none
of the softer emotions, Mr. Twist soared undisturbed in the calm
heights of a detached and concentrated intelligence, and quickly
knew what to do with it; faced by the derelict Annas his heart and
his tenderness got in the ways of any clear vision.

About three o'clock in the morning, when his mind was choked
and strewn with much pulled-about and finally discarded plans, he
suddenly had an idea. A real one. As far as he could see, a real
good one. He would place the Annas in a school.

Why shouldn't they go to school? he asked himself, starting
off answering any possible objections. A year at a first-rate
school would give them and everybody else time to consider. They
ought never to have left school. It was the very place for
luxuriant and overflowing natures like theirs. No doubt Acapulco
had such a thing as a finishing school for young ladies in it, and
into it the Annas should go, and once in it there they should stay
put, thought Mr. Twist in vigorous American, gathering up his mouth
defiantly.

Down these lines of thought his relieved mind cantered easily.
He would seek out a lawyer the next morning, regularize his
position to the twins by turning himself into their guardian, and
then get them at once into the best school there was. As their
guardian he could then pay all their expenses, and faced by this
legal fact they would, he hoped, be soon persuaded of the propriety
of his paying whatever there was to pay.

Mr. Twist was so much pleased by his idea that he was able to go
to sleep after that. Even three months' school--the period he
gave Mrs. Dellogg for her acutest grief--would do. Tide them over.
Give them room to turn round in. It was a great solution. He took
off his spectacles, snuggled down into his rosy nest, and fell
asleep with the instantaneousness of one whose mind is suddenly
relieved.

But when he went down to breakfast he didn't feel quite so
sure. The twins didn't look, somehow, as though they would want
to go to school. They had been busy with their luggage, and had
unpacked one of the trunks for the first time since leaving Aunt
Alice, and in honour of the heat and sunshine and the heavenly
smell of heliotrope that was in the warm air, had put on white
summer frocks.

Impossible to imagine anything cooler, sweeter, prettier and
more angelically good than those two Annas looked as they came out
on to the great verandah of the hotel to join Mr. Twist at
breakfast. They instantly sank into the hotel consciousness. Mr.
Twist had thought this wouldn't happen for a day or two, but he
now perceived his mistake. Not a head that wasn't turned to
look at them, not a newspaper that wasn't lowered. They were
immediate objects of interest and curiosity, entirely benevolent
interest and curiosity because nobody yet knew anything about them,
and the wives of the rich husbands--those halves of the
virtuous-rich unions which provided the virtuousness--smiled as
they passed, and murmured nice words to each other like cute and
cunning.

Mr. Twist, being a good American, stood up and held the
twins' chairs for them when they appeared. They loved this; it
seemed so respectful, and made them feel so old and looked-up to.
He had done it that night in New York at supper, and at all the
meals in the train in spite of the train being so wobbly and each
time they had loved it. "It makes one have such
self-respect," they agreed, commenting on this agreeable
practice in private.

They sat down in the chairs with the gracious face of the
properly treated, and inquired, with an amiability and a solicitous
politeness on a par with their treatment how Mr. Twist had slept.
They themselves had obviously slept well, for their faces were
cherubic in their bland placidity, and already after one night wore
what Mr. Twist later came to recognize as the Californian look, a
look of complete unworriedness.

Yet they ought to have been worried. Mr. Twist had been terribly
worried up to the moment in the night when he got his great idea,
and he was worried again, now that he saw the twins, by doubts.
They didn't look as though they would easily be put to school.
His idea still seemed to him magnificent, a great solution, but
would the Annas be able to see it? They might turn out impervious
to it; not rejecting it, but simply non-absorbent. As they slowly
and contentedly ate their grape-fruit, gazing out between the
spoonfuls at the sea shining across the road through palm trees,
and looking unruffled itself, he felt it was going to be rather
like suggesting to two cherubs to leave their serene occupation of
adoring eternal beauty and learn lessons instead. Still, it was the
one way out, as far as Mr. Twist could see, of the situation
produced by the death of the man Dellogg. "When you've
done breakfast," he said, pulling himself together on their
reaching the waffle stage, "we must have a talk."

"When we've done breakfast," said Anna-Rose,
"we must have a walk."

"Down there," said Anna-Felicitas, pointing with her
spoon. "On the sands. Round the curve to where the pink hills
begin."

"Mr. Dellogg's death," said Mr. Twist, deciding it
was necessary at once to wake them up out of the kind of happy
somnolescence they seemed to be falling into, "has of course
completely changed--"

"How unfortunate," interrupted Anna-Rose, her eyes on
the palms and the sea and the exquisite distant mountains along the
back of the bay, "to have to be dead on a day like
this."

"It's not only his missing the fine weather that makes
it unfortunate," said Mr. Twist.

"You mean," said Anna-Rose, "it's our missing
him."

"Precisely," said Mr. Twist.

"Well, we know that," said Anna-Felicitas
placidly.

"We knew it last night, and it worried us," said
Anna-Rose. "Then we went to sleep and it didn't worry us.
And this morning it still doesn't."

"No," said Mr. Twist dryly. "You don't look
particularly worried, I must say."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, "we're not. People
who find they've got to heaven aren't usually worried, are
they."

"And having got to heaven," said Anna-Rose,
"we've thought of a plan to enable us to stay in
it."

"Oh have you," said Mr. Twist, pricking up his
ears.

"The plan seemed to think of us rather than we of it,"
explained Anna-Felicitas. "It came and inserted itself, as it
were, into our minds while we were dressing."