Christopher and Columbus (33 page)

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

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

"It isn't the devil, it's Mrs. Bilton," said
Anna-Felicitas. "Would you yourself like--"

'But you've got to have Mrs. Bilton with you anyhow from
to-day on."

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

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

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

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

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

"And we--we wouldn't be--sep--separated," said
Anna-Rose, getting it out with a gasp.

Mr. Twist stood looking at them.

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

"We don't mind that as long as you're in the other
one," said Anna-Rose.

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

Mr. Twist's spectacles stared enormously at her.

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

"I guess if I married Mrs. Bilton I'd be more
uncomfortable," remarked Mr. Twist with considerable
dryness.

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

"Oh,
don't
say that," said the twins together, with
all and more of their usual urbanity.

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.