Christopher and Columbus
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 21
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 mountain.
“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?
Mr. Twist had often observed how perplexingly much there is to be said for the opposite sides of a question. He was now, but with no perplexity, for Anna-Felicitas had roused his enthusiasm, himself taking the very opposite view as to the proper thing for the twins to do from the one he had taken in the night and on the rocks that morning. School? Nonsense. Absurd to bury these bright shoots of everlastingness—this is what they looked like to him, afire with enthusiasm and the setting sun—in such a place of ink. If the plan, owing to the extreme youth of the Annas, were unconventional, conventionality could be secured by giving a big enough salary to a middle-aged lady to come and preside. He himself would hover beneficently in the background over the undertaking.
Anna-Felicitas’s idea was to use Uncle Arthur’s £200 in renting one of the little wooden cottages that seemed to be plentiful, preferably one about five miles out in the country, make it look inside like an English cottage, all pewter and chintz and valances, make it look outside like the more innocent type of German wayside inn, with green tables and spreading trees, get a cook who would concentrate on cakes, real lovely ones, various, poetic, wonderful cakes, and start an inn for tea alone that should become the fashion. It ought to be so arranged that it became the fashion. She and Anna-Rose would do the waiting. The prices would be very high, indeed exorbitant—this Mr. Twist regarded as another inspiration, —so that it should be a distinction, give people a cachet, to have had tea at their cottage; and in a prominent position in the road in front of it, where every motor-car would be bound to see it, there would be a real wayside inn signboard, such as inns in England always have, with its name on it.
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