Christopher and Columbus

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Four young men came in. Mr. Ridding didn't know them. No class, he thought, looking them over; and was seized with a feeling of sulky vexation suitable to twenty when he saw with what enthusiasm the Twinklers flew to meet them. They behaved, thought Mr. Ridding crossly, as if they were the oldest and dearest friends.

"Who are they?" he asked curtly of Mr. Twist, cutting into the long things he was saying.

"Only the different experts who helped me rebuild the place," said Mr. Twist a little impatiently; he too had pricked up his ears in expectation at the sound of all those feet, and was disappointed.

He continued what Mr. Ridding, watching the group of young people, called sulkily to himself his rigmarole, but continued more abstractedly. He also was watching the Annas and the experts. The young men were evidently in the highest spirits, and were walking round the Annas admiring their get-up and expressing their admiration in laughter and exclamations. One would have thought they had known each other all their lives. The twins were wreathed in smiles. They looked as pleased, Mr. Twist thought, as cats that are being stroked. Almost he could hear them purring. He glanced helplessly across to where Mrs. Bilton sat, as he had told her, bent pen in hand over the ledger. She didn't move. It was true he had told her to sit like that, but hadn't the woman any imagination? What she ought to do now was to bustle forward and take that laughing group in charge.

"As I was telling you—" resumed Mr. Twist, returning with an effort to Mr. Ridding, only to find his eyes fixed on the young people and catch an unmistakably thwarted look in his face.

In a flash Mr. Twist realized what he had come for,—it was solely to see and talk to the twins. He must have noticed them at the Cosmopolitan, and come out just for them. Just for that. "Unprincipled old scoundrel," said Mr. Twist under his breath, his ears flaming. Aloud he said, "As I was telling you—" and went on distractedly with his rigmarole.

Then some more people came in. They had motored, but the noise the experts were making had drowned the sound of their arrival. Mr. Ridding and Mr. Twist, both occupied in glowering at the group in the middle of the room, were made aware of their presence by Anna-Felicitas suddenly dropping the pencil and tablets she had been provided with for writing down orders and taking an uncertain and obviously timid step forward.

They both looked round in the direction of her reluctant step, and saw a man and two women standing on the threshold. Mr. Twist, of course, didn't know them; he hardly knew anybody, even by sight. But Mr. Ridding did. That is, he knew them well by sight and had carefully avoided knowing them any other way, for they were Germans.

Mr. Ridding was one of those who didn't like Germans. He was a man who liked or disliked what his daily paper told him to, and his daily paper was anti-German. For reasons natural to one who disliked Germans and yet at the same time had a thirstily affectionate disposition, he declined to believe the prevailing theory about the Twinklers. Besides, he didn't believe it anyhow. At that age people were truthful, and he had heard them explain they had come from England and had acquired their rolling r's during a sojourn abroad. Why should he doubt? But he refrained from declaring his belief in their innocence of the unpopular nationality, owing to a desire to avoid trouble in that bedroom he couldn't call his but was obliged so humiliatingly to speak of as ours. Except, however, for the Twinklers, for all other persons of whom it was said that they were Germans, naturalized or not, immediate or remote, he had, instructed by his newspaper, what his called a healthy instinctive abhorrence.

"And she's got it too," he thought, much gratified at this bond between them, as he noted Anna-Felicitas's hesitating and reluctant advance to meet the new guests. "There's proof that people are wrong."