That evening, while the twins were undressing, a message came up from
the office that the manager would be obliged if the Miss Twinklers'
canary wouldn't sing.
"But it can't help it," said Anna-Felicitas through the crack of door
she held open; she was already in her nightgown. "You wouldn't either if
you were a canary," she added, reasoning with the messenger.
"It's just got to help it," said he.
"But why shouldn't it sing?"
"Complaints."
"But it always has sung."
"That is so. And it has sung once too often. It's unpopular in this
hotel, that canary of yours. It's just got to rest a while. Take it
easy. Sit quiet on its perch and think."
"But it won't sit quiet and think."
"Well, I've told you," he said, going away.
This was the bird that had been seen arriving at the Cosmopolitan about
a week before by the lawyer, and it had piercingly sung ever since. It
sang, that is, as long as there was any light, real or artificial, to
sing by. The boy who carried it from the shop for the twins said its
cage was to be hung in a window in the sun, or it couldn't do itself
justice. But electric light also enabled it to do itself justice, the
twins discovered, and if they sat up late the canary sat up late too,
singing as loudly and as mechanically as if it hadn't been a real
canary at all, but something clever and American with a machine inside
it.
Secretly the twins didn't like it. Shocked at its loud behaviour, they
had very soon agreed that it was no lady, but Anna-Rose was determined
to have it at The Open Arms because of her conviction that no house
showing the trail of a woman's hand was without a canary. That, and a
workbag. She bought them both the same day. The workbag didn't matter,
because it kept quiet; but the canary was a very big, very yellow bird,
much bigger and yellower than the frailer canaries of a more exhausted
civilization, and quite incapable, unless it was pitch dark, of keeping
quiet for a minute. Evidently, as Anna-Felicitas said, it had a great
many lungs. Her idea of lungs, in spite of her time among them and
similar objects at a hospital, was what it had always been: that they
were things like pink macaroni strung across a frame of bones on the
principle of a lyre or harp, and producing noises. She thought the
canary had unusual numbers of these pink strings, and all of them of the
biggest and dearest kind of macaroni.
The other guests at the Cosmopolitan had been rather restive from the
first on account of this bird, but felt so indulgent toward its owners,
those cute little relations or charges or whatever they were of Teapot
Twist's, that they bore its singing without complaint. But on the
evening of the day the Annas had the interesting conversation with Mr.
and Mrs. Ridding and Miss Heap, two definite complaints were lodged in
the office, and one was from Mrs. Ridding and the other was from Miss
Heap.
The manager, as has been said, was already sensitive about the canary.
Its cage was straining his electric light cord, and its food,
assiduously administered in quantities exceeding its capacity, littered
the expensive pink pile carpet. He therefore lent a ready ear and sent
up a peremptory message; and while the message was going up, Miss Heap,
who had come herself with her complaint, stayed on discussing the Twist
and Twinkler party.
She said nothing really; she merely asked questions; and not one of the
questions, now they were put to him, did the manager find he could
answer. No doubt everything was all right. Everybody knew about Mr.
Twist, and it wasn't likely he would choose an hotel of so high a class
to stay in if his relations to the Miss Twinklers were anything but
regular. And a lady companion, he understood, was joining the party
shortly; and besides, there was the house being got ready, a permanent
place of residence he gathered, in which the party would settle down,
and experience had taught him that genuine illicitness was never
permanent. Still, the manager himself hadn't really cared about the
Twinklers since the canary came. He could fill the hotel very easily,
and there was no need to accommodate people who spoilt carpets. Also,
the moment the least doubt or question arose among his guests, all of
whom he knew and most of whom came back regularly every year, as to the
social or moral status of any new arrivals, then those arrivals must go.
Miss Heap evidently had doubts. Her standard, it is true, was the almost
impossibly high one of the unmarried lady of riper years, but Mrs.
Ridding, he understood, had doubts too; and once doubts started in an
hotel he knew from experience that they ran through it like measles. The
time had come for him to act.
Next morning, therefore, he briskly appeared in Mr. Twist's room as he
was pulling on his boots, and cheerfully hoped he was bearing in mind
what he had been told the day he took the rooms, that they were engaged
for the date of the month now arrived at.
Mr. Twist paused with a boot half on. "I'm not bearing it in mind," he
said, "because you didn't tell me."
"Oh yes I did, Mr. Twist," said the manager briskly. "It isn't likely
I'd make a mistake about that. The rooms are taken every year for this
date by the same people. Mrs. Hart of Boston has this one, and Mr. and
Mrs.--"
Mr. Twist heard no more. He finished lacing his boots in silence. What
he had been so much afraid of had happened: he and the twins had got
under a cloud.
The twins had been saying things. Last night they told him they had made
some friends. He had been uneasy at that, and questioned them. But it
appeared they had talked chiefly of their Uncle Arthur. Well, damnable
as Uncle Arthur was as a man he was safe enough as a topic of
conversation. He was English. He was known to people in America like the
Delloggs and the Sacks. But it was now clear they must have said things
besides that. Probably they had expatiated on Uncle Arthur from some
point of view undesirable to American ears. The American ear was very
susceptible. He hadn't been born in New England without becoming aware
of that.
Mr. Twist tied his bootlaces with such annoyance that he got them into
knots. He ought never to have come with the Annas to a big hotel. Yet
lodgings would have been worse. Why hadn't that white-haired gasbag,
Mrs. Bilton--Mr. Twist's thoughts were sometimes unjust--joined them
sooner? Why had that shirker Dellogg died? He got his bootlaces
hopelessly into knots.
"I'd like to start right in getting the rooms fixed up, Mr. Twist," said
the manager pleasantly. "Mrs. Hart of Boston is very--"
"See here," said Mr. Twist, straightening himself and turning the full
light of his big spectacles on to him, "I don't care a curse for Mrs.
Hart of Boston."
The manager expressed regret that Mr. Twist should connect a curse with
a lady. It wasn't American to do that. Mrs. Hart--
"Damn Mrs. Hart," said Mr. Twist, who had become full-bodied of speech
while in France, and when he was goaded let it all out.
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 God 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 quantity
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 butter 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 passing 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 unassailable
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 sunshine 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 shining.
"Oh dear," said Anna-Felicitas with a sigh of relief, "it _is_
refreshing 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 passion, "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 passion, "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 passion 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."
"And we--we wouldn't be--sep--separated," said Anna-Rose, getting it out
with a gasp.
Mr. Twist stood looking at them.
"Well, of all the--" he began, pushing his hat back. "Are you aware,"
he went on more calmly, "that there are only two rooms over that
kitchen, and that you and Mrs. Bilton will have to be all together in
one of them?"
"We don't mind that as long as you're in the other one," said Anna-Rose.
"Of course," suggested Anna-Felicitas, "if you were to happen to marry
Mrs. Bilton it would make a fairer division."
Mr. Twist's spectacles stared enormously at her.
"No, no," said Anna-Rose quickly. "Marriage is a sacred thing, and you
can't just marry so as to be more comfortable."
"I guess if I married Mrs. Bilton I'd be more uncomfortable," remarked
Mr. Twist with considerable dryness.
He seemed however to be quieted by the bare suggestion, for he fixed his
hat properly on his head and said, sobriety in his voice and manner,
"Come along, then. We'll get a taxi and anyway go out and have a look at
the rooms. But I shouldn't be surprised," he added, "if before I've done
with you you'll have driven me sheer out of my wits."
"Oh, _don't_ say that," said the twins together, with all and more of
their usual urbanity.