“Within a week, then,” he called out quickly, holding up the breaking of the wave for an instant while he hastened to and opened the door. “And goodmorning Mrs. Bilton — my apologies, my sincere apologies, but we have to hurry away—”
The cook was engaged that afternoon. Mr. Twist appeared to have mixed up the answers to his advertisement, for when, after paying the luncheon-bill, he went to join the twins in the sitting-room, he found them waiting for him in the passage outside the door looking excited.
“The cook’s come,” whispered Anna-Rose, jerking her head towards the shut door. “She’s a man.”
“She’s a Chinaman,” whispered Anna-Felicitas.
Mr. Twist was surprised. He thought he had an appointment with a woman, — a coloured lady from South Carolina who was a specialist in pastries and had immaculate references, but the Chinaman assured him that he hadn’t, and that his appointment was with him alone, with him, Li Koo. In proof of it, he said, spreading out his hands, here he was. “We make cakies — li’l cakies — many, lovely li’l cakies,” said Li Koo, observing doubt on the gentleman’s face; and from somewhere on his person he whipped out a paper bag of them as a conjurer whips a rabbit out of a hat, and offered them to the twins.
They ate. He was engaged. It took five minutes.
After he had gone, and punctually to the minute of her appointment, an over-flowing Negress appeared and announced that she was the coloured lady from South Carolina to whom the gentleman had written.
Mr. Twist uncomfortably felt that Li Koo had somehow been clever. Impossible, however, to go back on him, having eaten his cakes. Besides, they were perfect cakes, blown together apparently out of flowers and honey and cream, — cakes which, combined with Mrs. Bilton’s hair, would make the fortune of The Open Arms.
The coloured lady, therefore, was sent away, disappointed in spite of the douceur and fair words Mr. Twist gave her; and she was so much disappointed that they could hear her being it out loud all the way along the passage and down the stairs, and the nature of her expression of her disappointment was such that Mr. Twist, as he tried by animated conversation to prevent it reaching the twins’ ears, could only be thankful after all that Li Koo had been so clever. It did, however, reach the twins’ ears, but they didn’t turn a hair because of Uncle Arthur. They merely expressed surprise at its redness, seeing that it came out of somebody so black.
Directly after this trip to Los Angeles advertisements began to creep over the countryside. They crept along the roads where motorists were frequent and peeped at passing cars round corners and over hedges. They were taciturn advertisements, and just said three words in big, straight, plain white letters on a sea-blue ground:
THE OPEN ARMS
People passing in their cars saw them, and vaguely thought it must be the name of a book. They had better get it. Other people would have got it. It couldn’t be a medicine nor anything to eat, and was probably a religious novel. Novels about feet or arms were usually religious. A few considered it sounded a little improper, and as though the book, far from being religious, would not be altogether nice; but only very proper people who distrusted everything, even arms took this view.
After a week the same advertisements appeared with three lines added:
THE OPEN ARMS
YES
BUT
WHY? WHERE? WHAT?
and then ten days after that came fresh ones:
THE OPEN ARMS
WILL OPEN
WIDE
On November 20th at Four P.M.
N.B. WATCH THE SIGNPOSTS.
And while the countryside — an idle countryside, engaged almost wholly in holiday-making and glad of any new distraction — began to be interested and asked questions, Mr. Twist was working day and night at getting the thing ready.
All day long he was in Acapulco or out at the cottage, urging, hurrying, criticizing, encouraging, praising and admonishing. His heart and soul and brain was in this, his business instincts and his soft domestic side. His brain, after working at top speed during the day with the architect, the painter and decorator, the furnisher, the garden expert, the plumbing expert, the electric-light expert, the lawyer, the estate agent, and numberless other persons, during the night meditated and evolved advertisements. There was to be a continual stream week by week after the inn was opened of ingenious advertisements. Altogether Mr. Twist had his hands full.
The inn was to look artless and simple and small, while actually being the last word in roomy and sophisticated comfort. It was to be as like an old English inn to look at as it could possibly be got to be going on his own and the twins’ recollections and the sensationally coloured Elizabethan pictures in the architect’s portfolio. It didn’t disturb Mr. Twist’s unprejudiced American mind that an English inn embowered in heliotrope and arum lilies and eucalyptus trees would be odd and unnatural, and it wouldn’t disturb anybody else there either. Were not Swiss mountain chalets to be found in the fertile plains along the Pacific, complete with fir trees specially imported and uprooted in their maturity and brought down with tons of their own earth attached to their roots and replanted among carefully disposed, apparently Swiss rocks, so that what one day had been a place smiling with orange-groves was the next a bit of frowning northern landscape? And were there not Italian villas dotted about also? But these looked happier and more at home than the chalets. And there were buildings too, like small Gothic cathedrals, looking as uncomfortable and depressed as a woman who has come to a party in the wrong clothes. But no matter. Nobody minded. So that an English inn added to this company, with a little German beer-garden — only there wasn’t to be any beer — wouldn’t cause the least surprise or discomfort to anybody.
In the end, the sole resemblance the cottage had to an English inn was the signboard out in the road. With the best will in the world, and the liveliest financial encouragement from Mr. Twist, the architect couldn’t in three weeks turn a wooden Californian cottage into an ancient red-brick Elizabethan pothouse. He got a thatched roof on to it by a miracle of hustle, but the wooden walls remained; he also found a real antique heavy oak front door studded with big rusty nailheads in a San Francisco curiosity shop, that would serve, he said, as a basis for any wished-for hark-back later on when there was more time to the old girl’s epoch — thus did he refer to Great Eliza and her spacious days — and meanwhile it gave the building, he alleged, a considerable air; but as this door in that fine climate was hooked open all day long it didn’t disturb the gay, the almost jocose appearance of the place when everything was finished.
Houses have their expressions, their distinctive faces, very much as people have, meditated Mr. Twist the morning of the opening, as he sat astride a green chair at the bottom of the little garden, where a hedge of sweetbriar beautifully separated the Twinkler domain from the rolling fields that lay between it and the Pacific, and stared at his handiwork; and the conclusion was forced upon him — reluctantly, for it was the last thing he had wanted The Open Arms to do — that the thing looked as if it were winking at him.
Positively, thought Mr. Twist, his hat on the back of his head, staring, that was what it seemed to be doing. How was that? He studied it profoundly, his head on one side. Was it that it was so very gay? He hadn’t meant it to be gay like that. He had intended a restrained and disciplined simplicity, a Puritan unpretentiousness, with those sweet maidens, the Twinkler twins, flitting like modest doves in and out among its tea-tables; but one small thing had been added to another small thing at their suggestion, each small thing taken separately apparently not mattering at all and here it was almost — he hoped it was only his imagination — winking at him. It looked a familiar little house; jocular; very open indeed about the arms.
CHAPTER XXIII
Various things had happened, however, before this morning of the great day was reached, and Mr. Twist had had some harassing experiences.
One of the first things he had done after the visit to Los Angeles was to ta
ke steps in the matter of the guardianship. He had written to Mrs. Bilton that he was the Miss Twinklers’ guardian, though it was not at that moment true. It was clear, he thought, that it should be made true as quickly as possible, and he therefore sought out a lawyer in Acapulco the morning after the interview. This was not the same lawyer who did his estate business for him; Mr. Twist thought it best to have a separate one for more personal affairs.
On hearing Mr. Twist’s name announced, the lawyer greeted him as an old friend. He knew, of course, all about the teapot, for the Non-Trickler was as frequent in American families as the Bible and much more regularly used; but he also knew about the cottage at the foot of the hills, what it had cost — which was little — and what it would cost — which was enormous — before it was fit to live in. The only thing he didn’t know was that it was to be used for anything except an ordinary pied-à-terre. He had heard, too, of the presence at the Cosmopolitan of the twins, and on this point, like the rest of Acapulco, was a little curious.
The social column of the Acapulco daily paper hadn’t been able to give any accurate description of the relationship of the Twinklers to Mr. Twist. Its paragraph announcing his arrival had been obliged merely to say, while awaiting more detailed information, that Mr. Edward A. Twist, the well-known Breakfast Table Benefactor and gifted inventor of the famous Non-Trickler Teapot, had arrived from New York and was staying at the Cosmopolitan Hotel with entourage; and the day after this the lawyer, who got about a bit, as everybody else did in that encouraging climate, happening to look in at the Cosmopolitan to have a talk with a friend, had seen the entourage.
It was in the act of passing through the hall on its way upstairs, followed by a boy carrying a canary in a cage. Even without the boy and the canary it was a conspicuous object. The lawyer asked his friend who the cute little girls were, and was interested to hear he was beholding Mr. Edward A. Twist’s entourage. His friend told him that opinion in the hotel was divided about the precise nature of this entourage and its relationship to Mr. Twist, but it finally came to be generally supposed that the Miss Twinklers had been placed in his charge by parents living far away in order that he might safely see them put to one of the young ladies’ finishing schools in that agreeable district. The house Mr. Twist was taking was not connected in the Cosmopolitan mind with the Twinklers. Houses were always being taken in that paradise by wealthy persons from unkinder climates. He would live in it three months in the year, thought the Cosmopolitan, bring his mother, and keep in this way an occasional eye on his charges. The hotel guests regarded the Twinklers at this stage with nothing but benevolence and goodwill, for they had up to then only been seen and not heard; and as one of their leading characteristics was a desire to explain, especially if anybody looked a little surprised, which everybody usually did quite early in conversation with them, this was at that moment, the delicate moment before Mrs. Bilton’s arrival, fortunate.
The lawyer, then, who appreciated the young and pretty as much as other honest men, began the interview with Mr. Twist by warmly congratulating him, when he heard what he had come for, on his taste in wards.
Mr. Twist received this a little coldly, and said it was not a matter of taste but of necessity. The Miss Twinklers were orphans, and he had been asked — he cleared his throat — asked by their relatives, by, in fact, their uncle in England, to take over their guardianship and see that they came to no harm.
The lawyer nodded intelligently, and said that if a man had wards at all they might as well be cute wards.
Mr. Twist didn’t like this either, and said briefly that he had had no choice.
The lawyer said, “Quite so. Quite so,” and continued to look at him intelligently.
Mr. Twist then explained that he had come to him rather than, as might have been more natural, to the solicitor who had arranged the purchase of the cottage because this was a private and personal matter —
“Quite so. Quite so,” interrupted the lawyer, with really almost too much intelligence.
Mr. Twist felt the excess of it, and tried to look dignified, but the lawyer was bent on being friendly and frank. Friendliness was natural to him when visited for the first time by a new client, and that there should be frankness between lawyers and clients he considered essential. If, he held, the client wouldn’t be frank, then the lawyer must be; and he must go on being so till the client came out of his reserve.
Mr. Twist, however, was so obstinate in his reserve that the lawyer cheerfully and unhesitatingly jumped to the conclusion that the entourage must have some very weak spots about it somewhere.
“There’s another way out of it of course, Mr. Twist,” he said, when he had done rapidly describing the different steps to be taken. There were not many steps. The process of turning oneself into a guardian was surprisingly simple and swift.
“Out of it?” said Mr. Twist, his spectacles looking very big and astonished. “Out of what?”
“Out of your little difficulty. I wonder it hasn’t occurred to you. Upon my word now, I do wonder.”
“But I’m not in any little diff—” began Mr. Twist.
“The elder of these two girls, now—”
“There isn’t an elder,” said Mr. Twist.
“Come, come,” said the lawyer patiently, waiting for him to be sensible.
“There isn’t an elder,” repeated Mr. Twist, “They’re twins.”
“Twins, are they? Well I must say we manage to match up our twins better than that over here. But come now — hasn’t it occurred to you you might marry one of them, and so become quite naturally related to them both?”
Mr. Twist’s spectacles seemed to grow gigantic.
“Marry one of them?” he repeated, his mouth helplessly opening.
“Yep,” said the lawyer, giving him a lead in free-and-easiness.
“Look here,” said Mr. Twist suddenly gathering his mouth together, “cut that line of joke out. I’m here on serious business. I haven’t come to be facetious. Least of all about those children—”
“Quite so, quite so,” interrupted the lawyer pleasantly. “Children, you call them. How old are they? Seventeen? My wife was sixteen when we married. Oh quite so, quite so. Certainly. By all means. Well then, they’re to be your wards. And you don’t want it known how recently they’ve become your wards—”
“I didn’t say that,” said Mr. Twist.
“Quite so, quite so. But it’s your wish, isn’t it. The relationship is to look as grass-grown as possible. Well, I shall be dumb of course, but most things get into the press here. Let me see—” He pulled a sheet of paper towards him and took up his fountain pen. “Just oblige me with particulars. Date of birth. Place of birth. Parentage—”
He looked up ready to write, waiting for the answers.
None came.
“I can’t tell you off hand,” said Mr. Twist presently, his forehead puckered.
“Ah,” said the lawyer, laying down his pen. “Quite so. Not known your young friends long enough yet.”
“I’ve known them quite long enough,” said Mr. Twist stiffly, “but we happen to have found more alive topics of conversation than dates and parents.”
“Ah. Parents not alive.”
“Unfortunately they are not. If they were, these poor children wouldn’t be knocking about in a strange country.”
“Where would they be?” asked the lawyer, balancing his pen across his forefinger.
Mr. Twist looked at him very straight. Vividly he remembered his mother’s peculiar horror when he told her the girls he was throwing away his home life for and breaking her heart over were Germans. It had acted upon her like the last straw. And since then he had felt everywhere, with every one he talked to, in every newspaper he read, the same strong hostility to Germans, so much stronger than when he left America the year before.
Mr. Twist began to perceive that he had been impetuous in this matter of the guardianship. He hadn’t considered it enough. He suddenly saw innumerable difficu
lties for the twins and for The Open Arms if it was known it was run by Germans. Better abandon the guardianship idea than that such difficulties should arise. He hadn’t thought; he hadn’t had time properly to think; he had been so hustled and busy the last few days....
“They come from England,” he said, looking at the lawyer very straight.
“Ah,” said the lawyer.
Mr. Twist wasn’t going to lie about the twins, but merely, by evading, he hoped to put off the day when their nationality would be known. Perhaps it never would be known; or if known, known later on when everybody, as everybody must who knew them, loved them for themselves and accordingly wouldn’t care.
“Quite so,” said the lawyer again, nodding. “I asked because I overheard them talking the other day as they passed through the hall of your hotel. They were talking about a canary. The r in the word seemed a little rough. Not quite English, Mr. Twist? Not quite American?”
“Not quite,” agreed Mr. Twist. “They’ve been a good deal abroad.”
“Quite so. At school, no doubt.”
He was silent a moment, intelligently balancing his pen on his forefinger.
“Then these particulars,” he went on, looking up at Mr. Twist,— “could you let me have them soon? I tell you what. You’re in a hurry to fix this. I’ll call round to-night at the hotel, and get them direct from your young friends. Save time. And make me acquainted with a pair of charming girls.”
“No,” said Mr. Twist. He got on to his feet and held out his hand. “Not to-night. We’re engaged to-night. To-morrow will be soon enough. I’ll send round. I’ll let you know. I believe I’m going to think it over a bit. There isn’t any such terrible hurry, anyhow.”
“There isn’t? I understood—”
“I mean, a day or two more or less don’t figure out at much in the long run.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said the lawyer, getting up too. “Well, I’m always at your service, at any time.” And he shook hands heartily with Mr. Twist and politely opened the door for him.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 210
