Christopher and Columbus (35 page)

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.