Christopher and Columbus

By superhuman exertions and a lavish expenditure of money, the rooms Li Koo was later on to inhabit were ready to be slept in by the time Mrs. Bilton arrived.  They were in an outbuilding at the back of the house, and consisted of a living-room with a cooking-stove in it, a bedroom behind it, and up a narrow and curly staircase a larger room running the whole length and width of the shanty.  This sounds spacious, but it wasn’t.  The amount of length and width was small, and it was only just possible to get three camp-beds into it and a washstand.  The beds nearly touched each other.  Anna-Felicitas thought she and Anna-Rose were going to be regrettably close to Mrs. Bilton in them, and again urged on Mr. Twist’s consideration the question of removing Mrs. Bilton from the room by marriage; but Anna-Rose said it was all perfect, and that there was lots of room, and she was sure Mrs. Bilton, used to the camp life so extensively practised in America, would thoroughly enjoy herself.

They worked without stopping all the rest of the day at making the little place habitable, nailing up some of the curtains intended for the other house, unpacking cushions, and fetching in great bunches of the pale pink and mauve geraniums that scrambled about everywhere in the garden and hiding the worst places in the rooms with them.  Mr. Twist was in Acapulco most of the time, getting together the necessary temporary furniture and cooking utensils, but the twins didn’t miss him, for they were helped with zeal by the architect, the electrical expert, the garden expert and the chief plumber.

These young men—­they were all young, and very go-ahead—­abandoned the main building that day to the undirected labours of the workmen they were supposed to control, and turned to on the shanty as soon as they realized what it was to be used for with a joyous energy that delighted the twins.  They swept and they garnished.  They cleaned the dust off the windows and the rust off the stove.  They fetched out the parcels with the curtains and cushions in them from the barn where all parcels and packages had been put till the house was ready, and extracted various other comforts from the piled up packing-cases,—­a rug or two, an easy chair for Mrs. Bilton, a looking-glass.  They screwed in hooks behind the doors for clothes to be hung on, and they tied the canary to a neighbouring eucalyptus tree where it could be seen and hardly heard.  The chief plumber found buckets and filled them with water, and the electrical expert rigged up a series of lanterns inside the shanty, even illuminating its tortuous staircase.  There was much badinage, but as it was all in American, a language of which the twins were not yet able to apprehend the full flavour, they responded only with pleasant smiles.  But their smiles were so pleasant and the family dimple so engaging that the hours flew, and the young men were sorry indeed when Mr. Twist came back.

He came back laden, among other things, with food for the twins, whom he had left in his hurry high and dry at the cottage with nothing at all to eat; and he found them looking particularly comfortable and well-nourished, having eaten, as they explained when they refused his sandwiches and fruit, the chief plumber’s dinner.

They were sitting on the stump of an oak tree when he arrived, resting from their labours, and the grass at their feet was dotted with the four experts.  It was the twins now who were talking, and the experts who were smiling.  Mr. Twist wondered uneasily what they were saying.  It wouldn’t have added to his comfort if he had heard, for they were giving the experts an account of their attempt to go and live with the Sacks, and interweaving with it some general reflections of a philosophical nature suggested by the Sack ménage.  The experts were keenly interested, and everybody looked very happy, and Mr. Twist was annoyed; for clearly if the experts were sitting there on the grass they weren’t directing the workmen placed under their orders.  Mr. Twist perceived a drawback to the twins living on the spot while the place was being finished; another drawback.  He had perceived several already, but not this one.  Well, Mrs. Bilton would soon be there.  He now counted the hours to Mrs. Bilton.  He positively longed for her.

When they saw him coming, the experts moved away.  “Here’s the boss,” they said, nodding and winking at the twins as they got up quickly and departed.  Winking was not within the traditions of the Twinkler family, but no doubt, they thought, it was the custom of the country to wink, and they wondered whether they ought to have winked back.  The young men were certainly deserving of every friendliness in return for all they had done.  They decided they would ask Mrs. Bilton, and then they could wink at them if necessary the first thing to-morrow morning.

Mr. Twist took them with him when he went down to the station to meet the Los Angeles train.  It was dark at six, and the workmen had gone home by then, but the experts still seemed to be busy.  He had been astonished at the amount the twins had accomplished in his absence in the town till they explained to him how very active the experts had been, whereupon he said, “Now isn’t that nice,” and briefly informed them they would go with him to the station.

“That’s waste of time,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “We could be giving finishing touches if we stayed here.”

“You will come with me to the station,” said Mr. Twist.

Mrs. Bilton arrived in a thick cloud of conversation.  She supposed she was going to the Cosmopolitan Hotel, as indeed she originally was, and all the way back in the taxi Mr. Twist was trying to tell her she wasn’t; but Mrs. Bilton had so much to say about her journey, and her last days among her friends, and all the pleasant new acquaintances she had made on the train, and her speech was so very close-knit, that he felt he was like a rabbit on the wrong side of a thick-set hedge running desperately up and down searching for a gap to get through.  It was nothing short of amazing how Mrs. Bilton talked; positively, there wasn’t at any moment the smallest pause in the flow.

“It’s a disease,” thought Anna-Rose, who had several things she wanted to say herself, and found herself hopelessly muzzled.

“No wonder Mr. Bilton preferred heaven,” thought Anna-Felicitas, also a little restless at the completeness of her muzzling.

“Anyhow she’ll never hear the Annas saying anything,” thought Mr. Twist, consoling himself.

“This hotel we’re going to seems to be located at some distance from the station,” said Mrs. Bilton presently, in the middle of several pages of rapid unpunctuated monologue.  “Isolated, surely—­” and off she went again to other matters, just as Mr. Twist had got his mouth open to explain at last.

She arrived therefore at the cottage unconscious of the change in her fate.

Now Mrs. Bilton was as fond of comfort as any other woman who has been deprived for some years of that substitute for comfort, a husband.  She had looked forward to the enveloping joys of the Cosmopolitan, its bath, its soft bed and good food, with frank satisfaction.  She thought it admirable that before embarking on active duties she should for a space rest luxuriously in an excellent hotel, with no care in regard to expense, and exchange ideas while she rested with the interesting people she would be sure to meet in it.  Before the interview in Los Angeles, Mr. Twist had explained to her by letter and under the seal of confidence the philanthropic nature of the project he and the Miss Twinklers were engaged upon, and she was prepared, in return for the very considerable salary she had accepted, to do her duty loyally and unremittingly; but after the stress and hard work of her last days in Los Angeles she had certainly looked forward with a particular pleasure to two or three weeks’ delicious wallowing in flesh-pots for which she had not to pay.  She was also, however, a lady of grit; and she possessed, as she said her friends often told her, a redoubtable psyche, a genuine American free and fearless psyche; so that when, talking ceaselessly, her thoughts eagerly jostling each other as they streamed through her brain to get first to the exit of her tongue, she caught her foot in some builder’s débris carelessly left on the path up to the cottage and received in this way positively her first intimation that this couldn’t be the Cosmopolitan, she did not, as a more timid female soul well might have, become alarmed and suppose that Mr. Twist, whom after all she didn’t know, had brought her to this solitary place for purposes of assassination, but stopped firmly just where she was, and turning her head in the darkness toward him said, “Now Mr. Twist, I’ll stand right here till you’re able to apply some sort of illumination to what’s at my feet.  I can’t say what it is I’ve walked against but I’m not going any further with this promenade till I can say.  And when you’ve thrown light on the subject perhaps you’ll oblige me with information as to where that hotel is I was told I was coming to.”

“Information?” cried Mr. Twist.  “Haven’t I been trying to give it you ever since I met you?  Haven’t I been trying to stop your getting out of the taxi till I’d fetched a lantern?  Haven’t I been trying to offer you my arm along the path—­”

“Then why didn’t you say so, Mr. Twist?” asked Mrs. Bilton.

“Say so!” cried Mr. Twist.

At that moment the flash of an electric torch was seen jerking up and down as the person carrying it ran toward them.  It was the electrical expert who, most fortunately, happened still to be about.

Mrs. Bilton welcomed him warmly, and taking his torch from him first examined what she called the location of her feet, then gave it back to him and put her hand through his arm.  “Now guide me to whatever it is has been substituted without my knowledge for that hotel,” she said; and while Mr. Twist went back to the taxi to deal with her grips, she walked carefully toward the shanty on the expert’s arm, expressing, in an immense number of words, the astonishment she felt at Mr. Twist’s not having told her of the disappearance of the Cosmopolitan from her itinerary.

The electrical expert tried to speak, but was drowned without further struggle.  Anna-Rose, unable to listen any longer without answering to the insistent inquiries as to why Mr. Twist had kept her in the dark, raised her voice at last and called out, “But he wanted to—­he wanted to all the time—­you wouldn’t listen—­you wouldn’t stop—­”

Mrs. Bilton did stop however when she got inside the shanty.  Her tongue and her feet stopped dead together.  The electrical expert had lit all the lanterns, and coming upon it in the darkness its lighted windows gave it a cheerful, welcoming look.  But inside no amount of light and bunches of pink geraniums could conceal its discomforts, its dreadful smallness; besides, pink geraniums, which the twins were accustomed to regard as precious, as things brought up lovingly in pots, were nothing but weeds to Mrs. Bilton’s experienced Californian eye.

She stared round her in silence.  Her sudden quiet fell on the twins with a great sense of refreshment.  Standing in the doorway—­for Mrs. Bilton and the electrical expert between them filled up most of the kitchen—­they heaved a deep sigh.  “And see how beautiful the stars are,” whispered Anna-Felicitas in Anna-Rose’s ear; she hadn’t been able to see them before somehow, Mrs. Bilton’s voice had so much ruffled the night.

“Do you think she talks in her sleep?” Anna-Rose anxiously whispered back.

But Mr. Twist, arriving with his hands full, was staggered to find Mrs. Bilton not talking.  An icy fear seized his heart.  She was going to refuse to stay with them.  And she would be within her rights if she did, for certainly what she called her itinerary had promised her a first-rate hotel, in which she was to continue till a finished and comfortable house was stepped into.

“I wish you’d say something,” he said, plumping down the bags he was carrying on the kitchen floor.

The twins from the doorway looked at him and then at each other in great surprise.  Fancy asking Mrs. Bilton to say something.

“They would come,” said Mr. Twist, resentfully, jerking his head toward the Annas in the doorway.

“It’s worse upstairs,” he went on desperately as Mrs. Bilton still was dumb.

“Worse upstairs?” cried the twins, as one woman.

“It’s perfect upstairs,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“It’s like camping out without being out,” said Anna-Rose.

“The only drawback is that there are rather a lot of beds in our room,” said Anna-Felicitas, “but that of course”—­she turned to Mr. Twist—­“might easily be arranged—­”

“I wish you’d say something, Mrs. Bilton,” he interrupted quickly and loud.

Mrs. Bilton drew a deep breath and looked round her.  She looked round the room, and she looked up at the ceiling, which the upright feather in her hat was tickling, and she looked at the faces of the twins, lit flickeringly by the uncertain light of the lanterns.  Then, woman of grit, wife who had never failed him of Bruce D. Bilton, widow who had remained poised and indomitable on a small income in a circle of well-off friends, she spoke; and she said: 

“Mr. Twist, I can’t say what this means, and you’ll furnish me no doubt with information, but whatever it is I’m not the woman to put my hand to a plough and then turn back again.  That type of behaviour may have been good enough for Pharisees and Sadducees, who if I remember rightly had to be specially warned against the practice, but it isn’t good enough for me.  You’ve conducted me to a shack instead of the hotel I was promised, and I await your explanation.  Meanwhile, is there any supper?”