Christopher and Columbus (38 page)

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.

These articles hadn't appeared so very long ago, and the
impression survived and was general that Mr. Twist's
antecedents were unimpeachable. If it were true that the house was
for his mother and she was shortly arriving, then, although still
very odd and unintelligible, it was probable that his being there
now with the two Germans was after all capable of explanation. Not
much of an explanation, though. Even the moderates who took this
view felt this. One wasn't with Germans these days if one could
help it. There was no getting away from that simple fact. The
inevitable deduction was that Mr. Twist couldn't help it. Why
couldn't he help it? Was he enslaved by a scandalous passion
for them, a passion cold-bloodedly planned for him by the German
Government, which was known to have lists of the notable citizens
of the United States with photographs and details of their probable
weaknesses, and was exactly informed of their movements? He had met
the Twinklers, so it was reported, on a steamer coming over from
England. Of course. All arranged by the German Government. That was
the peculiar evil greatness of this dangerous people, announced the
serious section of Acapulco, again with the
drinking-fountain-presentation air, that nothing was too private or
too petty to escape their attention, to be turned to their own
wicked uses. They were as economical of the smallest scraps of
possible usefulness as a French cook of the smallest scraps and
leavings of food. Everything was turned to account. Nothing was
wasted. Even the mosquitoes in Germany were not wasted. They
contained juices, Germans had discovered, especially after having
been in contact with human beings, and with these juices the
talented but unscrupulous Germans made explosives. Could one
sufficiently distrust a nation that did things like that? asked the
serious section of Acapulco.

People were so much preoccupied by the Twinkler problem that
they were less interested than they otherwise would have been in
the sea-blue advertisements, and when the one appeared announcing
that The Open Arms would open wide on the 29th of the month and
exhorting the public to watch the signposts, they merely remarked
that it wasn't, then, the title of a book after all. Mr. Twist
would have been surprised and nettled if he had known how little
curiosity his advertisements were exciting; he would have been
horrified if he had known the reason. As it was, he didn't know
anything. He was too busy, too deeply absorbed, to be vulnerable to
rumour; he, and the twins, and Mrs. Bilton were safe from it inside
their magic circle of
Arbeit und Liebe
.

Sometimes he was seen in Main Street, that street in Acapulco
through which everybody passes at certain hours of the morning,
looking as though he had a great deal to do and very little time to
do it in; and once or twice the Twinklers were seen there, also
apparently very busy, but they didn't now come alone. Mrs.
Bilton, the lady from Los Angeles--Acapulco knew all about her and
admitted she was a lady of strictest integrity and unimpeachable
character, but this only made the Twinkler problem more
obscure--came too, and seemed, judging from the animation of her
talk, to be on the best of terms with her charges.

But once an idea has got into people's heads, remarked the
lawyer, who was nudged by the friend he was walking with as the
attractive trio were seen approaching,--Mrs. Bilton with her black
dress and her snowy hair setting off, as they in their turn set her
off, the twins in their clean white frocks and shining youth,--once
an idea has got into people's heads it sticks. It is slow to
get in, and impossible to get out. Yet on the face of it, was it
likely that Mrs. Bilton--

"Say," interrupted his friend, "since when have
you joined up with the water-blooded
believe-nothing-but-good-ites?"

And only his personal affection for the lawyer restrained him
from using the terrible word pro-German; but it had been in his
mind.

The day before the opening, Miss Heap heard from an acquaintance
in the East to whom she had written in her uneasiness, and who was
staying with some people living in Clark. Miss Heap wrote soon
after the departure--she didn't see why she shouldn't call
it by its proper name and say right out expulsion--of the Twist
party from the Cosmopolitan, but letters take a long time to get
East and answers take the same long time to come back in, and
messages are sometimes slow in being delivered if the other person
doesn't realize, as one does oneself, the tremendous interests
that are at stake. What could be a more tremendous interest, and
one more adapted to the American genius, than safe-guarding public
morals? Miss Heap wrote before the sinister rumours of German
machinations had got about; she was still merely at the stage of
uneasiness in regard to the morals of the Twist party; she
couldn't sleep at night for thinking of them. Of course if it
were true that his mother was coming out ... but was she? Miss Heap
somehow felt unable to believe it. "Do tell your friends in
Clark," she wrote, "how
delighted
we all are to hear that Mrs. Twist is going to
be one of us in our sunny refuge here this winter. A real warm
welcome awaits her. Her son is working day and night getting the
house ready for her, helped indefatigably by the two Miss
Twinklers."

She had to wait over a fortnight for the answer, and by the time
she got it those other more terrible doubts had arisen, the doubts
as to the exact position occupied by the Twinklers and Mr. Twist in
the German secret plans for, first, the pervasion, and, second, the
invasion of America; and on reading the opening lines of the letter
Miss Heap found she had to sit down, for her legs gave way beneath
her.

It appeared that Mrs. Twist hadn't known where her son was
till Miss Heap's letter came. He had left Clark in company of
the two girls mentioned, and about whom his mother knew nothing,
the very morning after his arrival home from his long absence in
Europe. That was all his mother knew. She was quite broken. Coming
on the top of all her other sorrow her only son's behaviour had
been a fearful, perhaps a finishing blow, but she was such a good
woman that she still prayed for him. Clark was horrified. His
mother had decided at first she would try to shield him and say
nothing, but when she found that nobody had the least idea of what
he had done she felt she owed it to her friends to be open and have
no secrets from them. Whatever it cost her in suffering and
humiliation she would be frank. Anything was better than keeping up
false appearances to friends who believed in you. She was a brave
woman, a splendid woman. The girls--poor Mrs. Twist--were
Germans.

On reading this Miss Heap was all of a tingle. Her worst
suspicions hadn't been half bad enough. Here was everything
just about as black as it could be; and Mr Twist, a well-known and
universally respected American citizen, had been turned, by means
of those girls playing upon weaknesses she shuddered to think of
but that she had reason to believe, from books she had studied and
conversations she had reluctantly taken part in, were not
altogether uncommon, into a cat's-paw of the German
Government.

What should she do? What should she say? To whom should she go?
Which was the proper line of warning for her to take? It seemed to
her that the presence of these people on the Pacific coast was a
real menace to its safety, moral and physical; but how get rid of
them? And if they were got rid of wouldn't it only be exposing
some other part of America, less watchful, less perhaps able to
take care of itself, to the ripening and furtherance of their
schemes, whatever their schemes might be? Even at that moment Miss
Heap unconsciously felt that to let the Twinklers go would be to
lose thrills. And she was really thrilled. She prickled with
excitement and horror. Her circulation hadn't been so good for
years. She wasn't one to dissect her feelings, so she had no
idea of how thoroughly she was enjoying herself. And it was while
she sat alone in her bedroom, her fingers clasping and unclasping
the arms of her chair, her feet nervously nibbing up and down on
the thick soft carpet, hesitating as to the best course for her to
take, holding her knowledge meanwhile tight, hugging it for a
little altogether to herself, her very own, shared as yet by no
one,--it was while she sat there, that people out of doors in
Acapulco itself, along the main roads, out in the country towards
Zamora on the north and San Blas on the south, became suddenly
aware of new signposts.

They hadn't been there the day before. They all turned
towards the spot at the foot of the mountains where Pepper Lane
was. They all pointed, with a long white finger, in that direction.
And on them all was written in plain, sea-blue letters, beneath
which the distance in miles or fractions of a mile was clearly
marked,
To The Open Arms
.

Curiosity was roused at last. People meeting each other in Main
Street stopped to talk about these Arms wondered where and what
they were, and decided to follow the signposts that afternoon in
their cars and track them down. They made up parties to go and
track together. It would be a relief to have something a little
different to do. What on earth could The Open Arms be? Hopes were
expressed that they weren't something religious. Awful to
follow signposts out into the country only to find they landed you
in a meeting-house.