"Yep. And I"ll say it again. I"ll go on saying it till you"ve done it."
""Well, if that"s all you"ve got to offer as a suggestion for a way out--"
But Mr. Twist wasn"t angry this time; he was too much battered by events; he hadn"t the spirits to be angry.
"You"ve--got to--marry--one--of--those--girls," said the lawyer, at each word smiting the table with his open palm. "Turn her into an American.
Get her out of this being a German business. And be able at the same time to protect the one who"ll be your sister in-law. Why, even if you didn"t want to, which is sheer nonsense, for of course any man would want to--I know what I"m talking about because I"ve seen them--it"s your plain duty, having got them into this mess."
"But--marry which?" asked Mr. Twist, with increased helplessness and yet a manifest profound anxiety for further advice.
For the first time the lawyer showed impatience "Oh--either or both," he said. "For G.o.d"s sake don"t be such a--"
He pulled up short.
"I didn"t quite mean that," he resumed, again calm. "The end of that sentence was, as no doubt you guess, fool. I withdraw it, and will subst.i.tute something milder. Have you any objection to ninny?"
No, Mr. Twist didn"t mind ninny, or any other word the lawyer might choose, he was in such a condition of mental groping about. He took out his handkerchief and wiped away the beads on his forehead and round his mouth.
"I"m thirty-five," he said, looking terribly worried.
Propose to an Anna? The lawyer may have seen them, but he hadn"t heard them; and the probable nature of their comments if Mr. Twist proposed to them--to one, he meant of course, but both would comment, the one he proposed to and the one he didn"t--caused his imagination to reel. He hadn"t much imagination; he knew that now, after his conduct of this whole affair, but all there was of it reeled.
"I"m thirty-five," he said helplessly.
"Pooh," said the lawyer, indicating the negligibleness of this by a movement of his shoulder.
"They"re seventeen," said Mr. Twist.
"Pooh," said the lawyer again, again indicating negligibleness. "My wife was--"
"I know. You told me that last time. Oh, I know all _that_" said Mr.
Twist with sudden pa.s.sion. "But these are children. I tell you they"re _children_--"
"Pooh," said the lawyer a third time, a third time indicating negligibleness.
Then he got up and held out his hand. "Well, I"ve told you," he said.
"You wanted to know, and I"ve told you. And I"ll tell you one thing more, Mr. Twist. Whichever of those girls takes you, you"ll have the sweetest, prettiest wife of any man in the world except one, and that"s the man who has the luck to get the other one. Why, sweetest and prettiest are poor words. She"ll be the most delectable, the most--"
Mr. Twist rose from his chair in such haste that he pushed the table crooked. His ears flamed.
"See here," he said very loud. "I won"t have you talk familiarly like that about my wife."
CHAPTER x.x.xVI
Wife. The word had a remarkable effect on him. It churned him all up.
His thoughts were a chaotic jumble, and his driving on the way home matched them. He had at least three narrow shaves at cross streets before he got out of the town and for an entire mile afterwards he was on the wrong side of the road. During this period, deep as he was in confused thought, he couldn"t but vaguely notice the anger on the faces of the other drivers and the variety and fury of their gesticulations, and it roused a dim wonder in him.
Wife. How arid existence had been for him up to then in regard to the affections, how k.n.o.bbly the sort of kisses he had received in Clark.
They weren"t kisses; they were disapproving pecks. Always disapproving.
Always as if he hadn"t done enough, or been enough, or was suspected of not going to do or be enough.
His wife. Mr. Twist dreadfully longed to kiss somebody,--somebody kind and soft, who would let herself be adored. She needn"t even love him,--he knew he wasn"t the sort of man to set pa.s.sion alight; she need only be kind, and a little fond of him, and let him love her, and be his very own.
His own little wife. How sweet. How almost painfully sweet. Yes. But the Annas....
When he thought of the Annas, Mr. Twist went damp. He might propose--indeed, everything pointed to his simply having got to--but wouldn"t they very quickly dispose? And then what? That lawyer seemed to think all he had to do was to marry them right away; not them, of course,--one; but they were so very plural in his mind. Funny man, thought Mr. Twist; funny man,--yet otherwise so sagacious. It is true he need only propose to one of them, for which he thanked G.o.d, but he could imagine what that one, and what the other one too, who would be sure to be somewhere quite near would ... no, he couldn"t imagine; he preferred not to imagine.
Mr. Twist"s dampness increased, and a pa.s.sing car got his mud-guard. It was a big car which crackled with language as it whizzed on its way, and Mr. Twist, slewed by the impact half across the road, then perceived on which side he had been driving.
The lane up to the inn was in its middle-day emptiness and somnolence.
Where Anna-Felicitas and Elliott had been sitting cool and shaded when he pa.s.sed before, there was only the pressed-down gra.s.s and crushed flowers in a glare of sun. She had gone home long ago of course. She said she was going to be very busy. Secretly he wished she hadn"t gone home, and that little Christopher too might for a bit be somewhere else, so that when he arrived he wouldn"t immediately have to face everybody at once. He wanted to think; he wanted to have time to think; time before four o"clock came, and with four o"clock, if he hadn"t come to any conclusion about shutting up the inn--and how could he if n.o.body gave him time to think?--those accursed, swarming Germans. It was they who had done all this. Mr. Twist blazed into sudden fury. They and their blasted war....
At the gate stood Anna-Rose. Her face looked quite pale in the green shade of the tunnelled-out syringa bushes. She as peering out down the lane watching him approach. This was awful, thought Mr. Twist. At the very gate one of them. Confronted at once. No time, not a minute"s time given him to think.
"Oh," cried out Anna-Rose the instant he pulled up, for she had waved to him to stop when he tried to drive straight on round to the stable, "she isn"t with you?"
"Who isn"t?" asked Mr. Twist.
Anna-Rose became paler than ever. "She has been kidnapped," she said.
"How"s that?" said Mr. Twist, staring at her from the car.
"Kidnapped," repeated Anna-Rose, with wide-open horror-stricken eyes; for from her nursery she carried with her at the bottom of her mind, half-forgotten but ready to fly up to the top at any moment of panic, an impression that the chief activities and recreations of all those Americans who weren"t really good were two: they lynched, and they kidnapped. They lynched you if they didn"t like you enough, and if they liked you too much they kidnapped you. Anna-Felicitas, exquisite and unsuspecting, had been kidnapped. Some American"s concupiscent eye had alighted on her, observed her beauty, and marked her down. No other explanation was possible of a whole morning"s absence from duties of one so conscientious and painstaking as Anna-Felicitas. She never shirked; that is, she never had been base enough to shirk alone. If there was any shirking to be done they had always done it together. As the hours pa.s.sed and she didn"t appear, Anna-Rose had tried to persuade herself that she must have motored into Acapulco with Mr. Twist, strange and unnatural and reprehensible and ign.o.ble as such arch shirking would have been; and now that the car had come back empty except for Mr. Twist she was convinced the worst had happened--her beautiful, her precious Columbus had been kidnapped.
"Kidnapped," she said again, wringing her hands.
Mr. Twist was horror-struck too, for he thought she was announcing the kidnapping of Mrs. Bilton. Somehow he didn"t think of Anna-Felicitas; he had seen her too recently. But that Mrs. Bilton should be kidnapped seemed to him to touch the lowest depths of American criminal enterprise and depravity. At the same time though he recoiled before this fresh blow a thought did fan through his mind with a wonderful effect of coolness and silence,--"Then they"ll gag her," he said.
"What?" cried Anna-Rose, as though a whip had lashed her. "Gag her?" And pulling open the gate and running out to him as one possessed she cried again, "Gag Columbus?"
"Oh that"s it, is it," said Mr. Twist, with relief but also with disappointment, "Well, if it"s that way I can tell you--"
He stopped; there was no need to tell her; for round the bend of the lane, walking bare-headed in the chequered light and shade as leisurely as if such things as tours of absence didn"t exist, or a distracted household, or an anguished Christopher, with indeed, a complete, an extraordinary serenity, advanced Anna-Felicitas.
Always placid, her placidity at this moment had a shining quality. Still smug, she was now of a glorified smugness. If one could imagine a lily turned into a G.o.d, or a young G.o.d turned into a lily and walking down the middle of a sun-flecked Californian lane, it wouldn"t be far out, thought Mr. Twist, as an image of the advancing Twinkler. The G.o.d would be so young that he was still a boy, and he wouldn"t be worrying much about anything in the past or in the future, and he"d just be coming along like that with the corners of his mouth a little turned up, and his fair hair a little ruffled, and his charming young face full of a sober and abstracted radiance.
"Not much kidnapping there, I guess," said Mr. Twist with a jerk of his thumb. "And you take it from me, Anna I.," he added quickly, leaning over towards her, determined to get off to the garage before he found himself faced by both twins together, "that when next your imagination gets the jumps the best thing you can do is to hold on to it hard till it settles down again, instead of wasting your time and ruining your const.i.tution going pale."
And he started the Ford with a bound, and got away round the corner into the yard.
Here, in the yard, was peace; at least for the moment. The only living thing in it was a cat the twins had acquired, through the services of one of the experts, as an indispensable object in a really homey home.
The first thing this cat had done had been to eat the canary, which gave the twins much unacknowledged relief. It was, they thought secretly, quite a good plan to have one"s pets inside each other,--it kept them so quiet. She now sat unmoved in the middle of the yard, carefully cleaning her whiskers while Mr. Twist did some difficult fancy driving in order to get into the stable without inconveniencing her.
Admirable picture of peace, thought Mr. Twist with a sigh of envy.