Christopher and Columbus Part 36

The manager went away. And so, two hours later, did Mr. Twist and the twins.

"I don't know what you've been saying," he said in an extremely exasperated voice, as he sat opposite them in the taxi with their grips, considerably added to and crowned by the canary who was singing, piled up round him.

"Saying?" echoed the twins, their eyes very round.

"But whatever it was you'd have done better to say something else.

Confound that bird. Doesn't it ever stop screeching?"

It was the twins, however, who were confounded. So much confounded by what they considered his unjust severity that they didn't attempt to defend themselves, but sat looking at him with proud hurt eyes.

By this time they both had become very fond of Mr. Twist, and accordingly he was able to hurt them. Anna-Rose, indeed, was so fond of him that she actually thought him handsome. She had boldly said so to the astonished Anna-Felicitas about a week before; and when Anna-Felicitas was silent, being unable to agree, Anna-Rose had heatedly explained that there was handsomeness, and there was the higher handsomeness, and that that was the one Mr. Twist had. It was infinitely better than mere handsomeness, said Anna-Rose--curly hair and a straight nose and the rest of the silly stuff--because it was real and lasting; and it was real and lasting because it lay in the play of the features and not in their exact position and shape.

Anna-Felicitas couldn't see that Mr. Twist's features played. She looked at him now in the taxi while he angrily stared out of the window, and even though he was evidently greatly stirred his features weren't playing. She didn't particularly want them to play. She was fond of and trusted Mr. Twist, and would never even have thought whether he had features or not ii Anna-Rose hadn't taken lately to talking so much about them. And she couldn't help remembering how this very Christopher, so voluble now on the higher handsomeness, had said on board the _St.

Luke_ when first commenting on Mr. Twist that G.o.d must have got tired of making him by the time his head was reached. Well, Christopher had always been an idealist. When she was eleven she had violently loved the coachman. Anna-Felicitas hadn't ever violently loved anybody yet, and seeing Anna-Rose like this now about Mr. Twist made her wonder when she too was going to begin. Surely it was time. She hoped her inability to begin wasn't perhaps because she had no heart. Still, she couldn't begin if she didn't see anybody to begin on.

She sat silent in the taxi, with Christopher equally silent beside her, both of them observing Mr. Twist through lowered eyelashes. Anna-Rose watched him with hurt and anxious eyes like a devoted dog who has been kicked without cause. Anna-Felicitas watched him in a more detached spirit. She had a real affection for him, but it was not, she was sure and rather regretted, an affection that would ever be likely to get the better of her reason. It wasn't because he was so old, of course, she thought, for one could love the oldest people, beginning with that standard example of age, the _liebe Gott_; it was because she liked him so much.

How could one get sentimental over and love somebody one so thoroughly liked? The two things on reflection didn't seem to combine well. She was sure, for instance, that Aunt Alice had loved Uncle Arthur, amazing as it seemed, but she was equally sure she hadn't liked him. And look at the _liebe Gott_. One loves the _liebe Gott_, but it would be going too far, she thought, to say that one likes him.

These were the reflections of Anna-Felicitas in the taxi, as she observed through her eyelashes the object of Anna-Rose's idealization.

She envied Anna-Rose; for here she had been steadily expanding every day more and more like a flower under the influence of her own power of idealization. She used to sparkle and grow rosy like that for the coachman. Perhaps after all it didn't much matter what you loved, so long as you loved immensely. It was, perhaps, thought Anna-Felicitas approaching this subject with some caution and diffidence, the quant.i.ty of one's love that mattered rather than the quality of its object. Not that Mr. Twist wasn't of the very first quality, except to look at; but what after all were faces? The coachman had been, as it were, nothing else but face, so handsome was he and so without any other recommendation. He couldn't even drive; and her father had very soon kicked him out with the vigour and absence of hesitation peculiar to Junkers when it comes to kicking and Anna-Rose had wept all over her bread and b.u.t.ter at tea that day, and was understood to say that she knew at last what it must be like to be a widow.

Mr. Twist, for all that he was looking out of the taxi window with an angry and worried face, his attention irritably concentrated, so it seemed, on the objects pa.s.sing in the road, very well knew he was being observed. He wouldn't, however, allow his eye to be caught. He wasn't going to become entangled at this juncture in argument with the Annas.

He was hastily making up his mind, and there wasn't much time to do it in. He had had no explanation with the twins since the manager's visit to his room, and he didn't want to have any. He had issued brief orders to them, told them to pack, declined to answer questions, and had got them safely into the taxi with a minimum waste of time and words. They were now on their way to the station to meet Mrs. Bilton. Her train from Los Angeles was not due till that evening at six. Never mind. The station was a secure place to deposit the twins and the baggage in till she came. He wished he could deposit the twins in the parcel-room as easily as he could their grips--neatly labelled, put away safely on a shelf till called for.

Rapidly, as he stared out of the window, he arrived at decisions. He would leave the twins in the waiting room at the station till Mrs.

Bilton was due, and meanwhile go out and find lodgings for them and her.

He himself would get a room in another and less critical hotel, and stay in it till the cottage was habitable. So would una.s.sailable respectability once more descend like a white garment upon the party and cover it up.

But he was nettled; nettled; nettled by the _contretemps_ that had occurred on the very last day, when Mrs. Bilton was so nearly there; nettled and exasperated. So immensely did he want the twins to be happy, to float serenely in the unclouded suns.h.i.+ne and sweetness he felt was their due, that he was furious with them for doing anything to make it difficult. And, jerkily, his angry thoughts pounced, as they so often did, on Uncle Arthur. Fancy kicking two little things like that out into the world, two little breakable things like that, made to be cherished and watched over. Mr. Twist was pure American in his instinct to regard the female as an object to be taken care of, to be placed securely in a charming setting and kept brightly free from dust. If Uncle Arthur had had a shred of humanity in him, he angrily reflected, the Annas would have stayed under his roof throughout the war, whatever the feeling was against aliens. Never would a decent man have chucked them out.

He turned involuntarily from the window and looked at the twins. Their eyes were fixed, affectionate and anxious, on his face. With the quick change of mood of those whose chins are weak and whose hearts are warm, a flood of love for them gushed up within him and put out his anger.

After all, if Uncle Arthur had been decent he, Edward A. Twist, never would have met these blessed children. He would now have been at Clark; leading lightless days; hopelessly involved with his mother.

His loose, unsteady mouth broke into a big smile. Instantly the two faces opposite cleared into something s.h.i.+ning.

"Oh dear," said Anna-Felicitas with a sigh of relief, "it _is_ refres.h.i.+ng when you leave off being cross."

"We're fearfully sorry if we've said anything we oughtn't to have," said Anna-Rose, "and if you tell us what it is we won't say it again."

"I can't tell you, because I don't know what it was," said Mr. Twist, in his usual kind voice. "I only see the results. And the results are that the Cosmopolitan is tired of us, and we've got to find lodgings."

"Lodgings?"

"Till we can move into the cottage. I'm going to put you and Mrs. Bilton in an apartment in Acapulco, and go myself to some hotel."

The twins stared at him a moment in silence. Then Anna-Rose said with sudden pa.s.sion, "You're not."

"How's that?" asked Mr. Twist; but she was prevented answering by the arrival of the taxi at the station.

There followed ten minutes' tangle and confusion, at the end of which the twins found themselves free of their grips and being piloted into the waiting-room by Mr. Twist.

"There," he said. "You sit here quiet and good. I'll come back about one o'clock with sandwiches and candy for your dinner, and maybe a story-book or two. You mustn't leave this, do you hear? I'm going to hunt for those lodgings."

And he was in the act of taking off his hat valedictorily when Anna-Rose again said with the same pa.s.sion, "You're not."

"Not what?" inquired Mr. Twist, pausing with his hat in mid-air.

"Going to hunt for lodgings. We won't go to them."

"Of course we won't," said Anna-Felicitas, with no pa.s.sion but with an infinitely rock-like determination.

"And pray--" began Mr. Twist.

"Go into lodgings alone with Mrs. Bilton?" interrupted Anna-Rose her face scarlet, her whole small body giving the impression of indignant feathers standing up on end. "While you're somewhere else? Away from us?

We won't."

"Of course we won't," said Anna-Felicitas again, an almost placid quality in her determination, it was so final and so unshakable. "Would you?"

"See here--" began Mr. Twist.

"We won't see anywhere," said Anna-Rose.

"Would you," inquired Anna-Felicitas, again reasoning with him, "like being alone in lodgings with Mrs. Bilton?"

"This is no time for conversation," said Mr. Twist, making for the door.

"You've got to do what I think best on this occasion. And that's all about it."

"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."