Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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.”

  “Well, I’ve thought of a plan too,” said Mr. Twist firmly, feeling sure that the twins’ plan would be the sort that ought to be instantly nipped in the bud.

  He was therefore greatly astonished when Anna-Rose said, “Have you? Is it about schools?”

  He stared at her in silence. “Yes,” he then said slowly, for he was very much surprised. “It is.”

  “So is ours,” said Anna-Rose.

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Twist.

  “Yes,” said Anna-Felicitas. “We don’t think much of it, but it will tide us over.”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Twist, still more astonished at this perfect harmony of ideas.

  “Tide us over till Mrs. Dellogg is—” began Anna-Rose in her clear little voice that carried like a flute to all the tables round them.

  Mr. Twist got up quickly. “If you’ve finished let us go out of doors,” he said; for he perceived that silence had fallen on the other tables, and attentiveness to what Anna-Rose was going to say next.

  “Yes. On the sands,” said the twins, getting up too.

  On the sands, however, Mr. Twist soon discovered that the harmony of ideas was not as complete as he had supposed; indeed, something very like heated argument began almost as soon as they were seated on some rocks round the corner of the shore to the west of the hotel and they became aware, through conversation, of the vital difference in the two plans.

  The Twinkler plan, which they expounded at much length and with a profusion of optimistic detail, was to search for and find a school in the neighbourhood for the daughters of gentlemen, and go to it for three months, or six months, or whatever time Mrs. Dellogg wanted to recover in.

  Up to this point the harmony was complete, and Mr. Twist could only nod approval. Beyond it all was confusion, for it appeared that the twins didn’t dream of entering a school in any capacity except as teachers. Professors, they said; professors of languages and literatures. They could speak German, as they pointed out, very much better than most people, and had, as Mr. Twist had sometimes himself remarked, an extensive vocabulary in English. They would give lessons in English and German literature. They would be able to teach quite a lot about Heine, for instance, the whole of whose poetry they knew by heart and whose sad life in Paris —

  “It’s no good running on like that,” interrupted Mr. Twist. “You’re not old enough.”

  Not old enough? The Twinklers, from their separate rocks, looked at each other in surprised indignation.

  “Not old enough?” repeated Anna-Rose. “We’re grown up. And I don’t see how one can be more than grown up. One either is or isn’t grown up. And there can be no doubt as to which we are.”

  And this the very man who so respectfully had been holding their chairs for them only a few minutes before! As if people did things like that for children.

  “You’re not old enough I say,” said Mr. Twist again, bringing his hand down with a slap on the rock to emphasize his words. “Nobody would take you. Why, you’ve got perambulator faces, the pair of you—”

  “Perambulator — ?”

  “And what school is going to want two teachers both teaching the same thing, anyway?”

  And h
e then quickly got out his plan, and the conversation became so heated that for a time it was molten.

  The Twinklers were shocked by his plan. More; they were outraged. Go to school? To a place they had never been to even in their suitable years? They, two independent grown-ups with £200 in the bank and nobody with any right to stop their doing anything they wanted to? Go to school now, like a couple of little suck-a-thumbs?

  It was Anna-Rose, very flushed and bright of eye, who flung this expression at Mr. Twist from her rock. He might think they had perambulator faces if he liked — they didn’t care, but they did desire him to bear in mind that if it hadn’t been for the war they would be now taking their proper place in society, that they had already done a course of nursing in a hospital, an activity not open to any but adults, and that Uncle Arthur had certainly not given them all that money to fritter away on paying for belated schooling.

  “We would be anachronisms,” said Anna-Felicitas, winding up the discussion with a firmness so unusual in her that it showed how completely she had been stirred.

  “Are you aware that we are marriageable?” inquired Anna-Rose icily.

  “And don’t you think it’s bad enough for us to be aliens and undesirables,” asked Anna-Felicitas, “without getting chronologically confused as well?”

  Mr. Twist was quiet for a bit. He couldn’t compete with the Twinklers when it came to sheer language. He sat hunched on his rock, his face supported by his two fists, staring out to sea while the twins watched him indignantly. School indeed! Then presently he pushed his hat back and began slowly to rub his ear.

  “Well, I’m blest if I know what to do with you, then,” he said, continuing to rub his ear and stare out to sea.

  The twins opened their mouths simultaneously at this to protest against any necessity for such knowledge on his part, but he interrupted them. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to resume this discussion when you’re both a little more composed.”

  “We’re perfectly composed,” said Anna-Felicitas.

  “Less ruffled, then.”

  “We’re quite unruffled,” said Anna-Rose.

  “Well, you don’t look it, and you don’t sound like it. But as this is important I’d be glad to resume the discussion, say, to-morrow. I suggest we spend to-day exploring the neighbourhood and steadying our minds—”

  “Our minds are perfectly steady, thank you.”

  “ — and to-morrow we’ll have another go at this question. I haven’t told you all my plan yet” — Mr. Twist hadn’t had time to inform them of his wish to become their guardian, owing to the swiftness with which he had been engulfed in their indignation,— “but whether you approve of it or not, what is quite certain is that we can’t stay on at the hotel much longer.”

  “Because it’s so dear?”

  “Oh, it isn’t so much that, — the proprietor is a friend of mine, or anyhow he very well might be—”

  “It looks very dear,” said Anna-Rose, visions of their splendid bedroom and bathroom rising before her. They too had slept in silken beds, and the taps in their bathroom they had judged to be pure gold.

  “And it’s because we can’t afford to be in a dear place spending money,” said Anna-Felicitas, “that it’s so important we should find a salaried position in a school without loss of time.”

  “And it’s because we can’t afford reckless squandering that we ought to start looking for such a situation at once” said Anna-Rose.

  “Not to-day,” said Mr. Twist firmly, for he wouldn’t give up the hope of getting them, once they were used to it, to come round to his plan. “To-day, this one day, we’ll give ourselves up to enjoyment. It’ll do us all good. Besides, we don’t often get to a place like this, do we. And it has taken some getting to, hasn’t it.”

  He rose from his rock and offered his hand to help them off theirs.

  “To-day enjoyment,” he said, “to-morrow business. I’m crazy,” he added artfully, “to see what the country is like away up in those hills.”

  And so it was that about five o’clock that afternoon, having spent the whole day exploring the charming environs of Acapulco, — having been seen at different periods going over the Old Mission in tow of a monk who wouldn’t look at them but kept his eyes carefully fixed on the ground, sitting on high stools eating strange and enchanting ices at the shop in the town that has the best ices, bathing deliciously in the warm sea at the foot of a cliff along the top of which a great hedge of rose-coloured geraniums flared against the sky, lunching under a grove of ilexes on the contents of a basket produced by Mr. Twist from somewhere in the car he had hired, wandering afterwards up through eucalyptus woods across the fields towards the foot of the mountains, — they came about five o’clock, thirsty and thinking of tea, to a delightful group of flowery cottages clustering round a restaurant and forming collectively, as Mr. Twist explained, one of the many American forms of hotel. “To which,” he said, “people not living in the cottages can come and have meals at the restaurant, so we’ll go right in and have tea.”

  And it was just because they couldn’t get tea — any other meal, the proprietress said, but no teas were served, owing to the Domestic Help Eight Hours Bill which obliged her to do without domestics during the afternoon hours — that Anna-Felicitas came by her great idea.

  CHAPTER XXI

  But she didn’t come by it at once.

  They got into the car first, which was waiting for them in the scented road at the bottom of the field they had walked across, and they got into it in silence and were driven back to their hotel for tea, and her brain was still unvisited by inspiration.

  They were all tired and thirsty, and were disappointed at being thwarted in their desire to sit at a little green table under whispering trees and rest, and drink tea, and had no sort of wish to have it at the Cosmopolitan. But both Mr. Twist, who had been corrupted by Europe, and the twins, who had the habits of their mother, couldn’t imagine doing without it in the afternoon, and they would have it in the hotel sooner than not have it at all. It was brought to them after a long time of waiting. Nobody else was having any at that hour, and the waiter, when at last one was found, had difficulty apparently in believing that they were serious. When at last he did bring it, it was toast and marmalade and table-napkins, for all the world as though it had been breakfast.

  Then it was that, contemplating this with discomfort and distaste, as well as the place they were sitting in and its rocking-chairs and marble and rugs, Anna-Felicitas was suddenly smitten by her idea.

  It fell upon her like a blow. It struck her fairly, as it were, between the eyes. She wasn’t used to ideas, and she stopped dead in the middle of a piece of toast and looked at the others. They stopped too in their eating and looked at her.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Anna-Rose. “Has another button come off?”

  At this Mr. Twist considered it wisest to turn his head away, for experience had taught him that Anna-Felicitas easily came undone.

  “I’ve thought of something,” said Anna-Felicitas.

  Mr. Twist turned his head back again. “You don’t say,” he said, mildly sarcastic.

  “Ich gratuliere,” said Anna-Rose, also mildly sarcastic.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Anna-Felicitas. “But it’s so luminous,” she said, looking from one to the other in a kind of surprise. “Of course. That’s what we’ll do. Ridiculous to waste time bothering about schools.”

  There was a new expression on her face that silenced the comments rising to Anna-Rose’s and Mr. Twist’s tongues, both of whom had tired feet and were therefore disposed to sarcasm.

  Anna-Felicitas looked at them, and they looked at her, and her face continued to become visibly more and more illuminated, just as if a curtain were being pulled up. Animation and interest shone in her usually dreamy eyes. Her drooping body sat up quite straight. She reminded Anna-Rose, who had a biblically well-furnished mind, of Moses when he came down from receiving the Law on the mounta
in.

  “Well, tell us,” said Anna-Rose. “But not,” she added, thinking of Moses, “if it’s only more commandments.”

  Anna-Felicitas dropped the piece of toast she was still holding in her fingers, and pushed back her cup. “Come out on to the rocks,” she said getting up— “where we sat this morning.” And she marched out, followed by the other two with the odd submissiveness people show towards any one who is thoroughly determined.

  It was dark and dinner-time before they got back to the hotel. Throughout the sunset Anna-Felicitas sat on her rock, the same rock she had sat on so unsatisfactorily eight hours earlier, and expounded her idea. She couldn’t talk fast enough. She, so slow and listless, for once was shaken into burning activity. She threw off her hat directly she got on to the sands, climbed up the rock as if it were a pulpit, and with her hands clasped round her knees poured out her plan, the long shafts of the setting sun bathing her in bright flames and making her more like Moses than ever, — if, that is, one could imagine Moses as beautiful as Anna-F., thought Anna-Rose, and as felicitously without his nose and beard.

  It was wonderful how complete Anna-Felicitas’s inspiration was. It reminded Mr. Twist of his own about the teapot. It was, of course, a far more complicated matter than that little device of his, and would have to be thought out very carefully and approached very judiciously, but the wealth of detail she was already ready with immensely impressed him. She even had a name for the thing; and it was when he heard this name, when it flashed into her talk with the unpremeditatedness of an inspiration, that Mr. Twist became definitely enthusiastic.

  He had an American eye for advertisement. Respect for it was in his blood. He instantly saw the possibilities contained in the name. He saw what could be done with it, properly worked. He saw it on hoarding-on signposts, in a thousand contrivances for catching the public attention and sticking there.

  The idea, of course, was fantastic, unconventional, definitely outside what his mother and that man Uncle Arthur would consider proper, but it was outside the standards of such people that life and fruitfulness and interest and joy began. He had escaped from the death-like grip of his mother, and Uncle Arthur had himself forcibly expulsed the Annas from his, and now that they were all so far away, instead of still timorously trying to go on living up to those distant sterile ideas why shouldn’t they boldly go out into the light and colour that was waiting everywhere for the free of spirit?