Christopher and Columbus

After this brief éclaircissement the rest of the journey was happy.  Indeed, it is doubtful if any one can journey to California and not be happy.

Mr. Twist had never been further west than Chicago and break up or no break up of his home he couldn’t but have a pleasant feeling of adventure.  Every now and then the realization of this feeling gave his conscience a twinge, and wrung out of it a rebuke.  He was having the best of it in this business; he was the party in the quarrel who went away, who left the dreariness of the scene of battle with all its corpses of dead illusions, and got off to fresh places and people who had never heard of him.  Just being in a train, he found, and rushing on to somewhere else was extraordinarily nerve-soothing.  At Clark there would be gloom and stagnation, the heavy brooding of a storm that has burst but not moved on, a continued anger on his mother’s side, naturally increasing with her inactivity, with her impotence.  He was gone, and she could say and do nothing more to him.  In a quarrel, thought Mr. Twist, the morning he pushed up his blinds and saw the desert at sunrise, an exquisite soft thing just being touched into faint colours,—­in a quarrel the one who goes has quite unfairly the best of it.  Beautiful new places come and laugh at him, people who don’t know him and haven’t yet judged and condemned him are ready to be friendly.  He must, of course, go far enough; not stay near at hand in some familiar place and be so lonely that he ends by being remorseful.  Well, he was going far enough.  Thanks to the Annas he was going about as far as he could go.  Certainly he was having the best of it in being the one in the quarrel who went; and he was shocked to find himself cynically thinking, on top of that, that one should always, then, take care to be the one who did go.

But the desert has a peculiarly exhilarating air.  It came in everywhere, and seemed to tickle him out of the uneasy mood proper to one who has been cutting himself off for good and all from his early home.  For the life of him he couldn’t help feeling extraordinarily light and free.  Edith—­yes, there was Edith, but some day he would make up to Edith for everything.  There was no helping her now:  she was fast bound in misery and iron, and didn’t even seem to know it.  So would he have been, he supposed, if he had never left home at all.  As it was, it was bound to come, this upheaval.  Just the mere fact of inevitable growth would have burst the bands sooner or later.  There oughtn’t, of course, to have been any bands; or, there being bands, he ought long ago to have burst them.

He pulled his kind slack mouth firmly together and looked determined.  Long ago, repeated Mr. Twist, shaking his head at his own weak past.  Well, it was done at last, and never again—­never, never again, he said to himself, sniffing in through his open window the cold air of the desert at sunrise.

By that route, the Santa Fé, it is not till two or three hours before you get to the end of the journey that summer meets you.  It is waiting for you at a place called San Bernardino.  There is no trace of it before.  Up to then you are still in October; and then you get to the top of the pass, and with a burst it is June,—­brilliant, windless, orange-scented.

The twins and Mr. Twist were in the restaurant-car lunching when the miracle happened.  Suddenly the door opened and in came summer, with a great warm breath of roses.  In a moment the car was invaded by the scent of flowers and fruit and of something else strange and new and very aromatic.  The electric fans were set twirling, the black waiters began to perspire, the passengers called for cold things to eat, and the twins pulled off their knitted caps and jerseys.

From that point on to the end of the line in Los Angeles the twins could only conclude they were in heaven.  It was the light that did it, the extraordinary glow of radiance.  Of course there were orchards after orchards of orange trees covered with fruit, white houses smothered in flowers, gardens overrun with roses, tall groups of eucalyptus trees giving an impression of elegant nakedness, long lines of pepper trees with frail fern-like branches, and these things continued for the rest of the way; but they would have been as nothing without that beautiful, great bland light.  The twins had had their hot summers in Pomerania, and their July days in England, but had not yet seen anything like this.  Here was summer without sultriness, without gnats, mosquitoes, threatening thunderstorms, or anything to spoil it; it was summer as it might be in the Elysian fields, perfectly clear, and calm, and radiant.  When the train stopped they could see how not a breath of wind stirred the dust on the quiet white roads, and the leaves of the magnolia trees glistened motionless in the sun.  The train went slowly and stopped often, for there seemed to be one long succession of gardens and villages.  After the empty, wind-driven plains they had come through, those vast cold expanses without a house or living creature in sight, what a laughing plenty, what a gracious fruitfulness, was here.  And when they went back to their compartment it too was full of summer smells,—­the smell of fruit, and roses, and honey.

For the first time since the war began and with it their wanderings, the twins felt completely happy.  It was as though the loveliness wrapped them round and they stretched themselves in it and forgot.  No fear of the future, no doubt of it at all, they thought, gazing out of the window, the soft air patting their faces, could possibly bother them here.  They never, for instance, could be cold here, or go hungry.  A great confidence in life invaded them.  The Delloggs, sun-soaked and orange-fed for years in this place, couldn’t but be gentle too, and kind and calm.  Impossible not to get a sort of refulgence oneself, they thought, living here, and absorb it and give it out again.  They pictured the Delloggs as bland pillars of light coming forward effulgently to greet them, and bathing them in the beams of their hospitality.  And the feeling of responsibility and anxiety that had never left Anna-Rose since she last saw Aunt Alice dropped off her in this place, and she felt that sun and oranges, backed by £200 in the bank, would be difficult things for misfortune to get at.

As for Mr. Twist, he was even more entranced than the twins as he gazed out of the window, for being older he had had time to see more ugly things, had got more used to them and to taking them as principally making up life.  He stared at what he saw, and thought with wonder of his mother’s drawing-room at Clark, of its gloomy, velvet-upholstered discomforts, of the cold mist creeping round the house, and of that last scene in it, with her black figure in the middle of it, tall and thin and shaking with bitterness.  He had certainly been in that drawing-room and heard her so terribly denouncing him, but it was very difficult to believe; it seemed so exactly like a nightmare, and this the happy normal waking up in the morning.

They all three were in the highest spirits when they got out at Los Angeles and drove across to the Southern Pacific station—­the name alone made their hearts leap—­to catch the afternoon train on to where the Delloggs lived, and their spirits were the kind one can imagine in released souls on their first arriving in paradise,—­high, yet subdued; happy, but reverential; a sort of rollicking awe.  They were subdued, in fact, by beauty.  And the journey along the edge of the Pacific to Acapulco, where the Delloggs lived, encouraged and developed this kind of spirits, for the sun began to set, and, as the train ran for miles close to the water with nothing but a strip of sand between it and the surf, they saw their first Pacific sunset.  It happened to be even in that land of wonderful sunsets an unusually wonderful one, and none of the three had ever seen anything in the least like it.  They could but sit silent and stare.  The great sea, that little line of lovely islands flung down on it like a chain of amethysts, that vast flame of sky, that heaving water passionately reflecting it, and on the other side, through the other windows, a sharp wall of black mountains,—­it was fantastically beautiful, like something in a poem or a dream.

By the time they got to Acapulco it was dark.  Night followed upon the sunset with a suddenness that astonished the twins, used to the leisurely methods of twilight on the Baltic; and the only light in the country outside the town as they got near it was the light from myriads of great stars.

No Delloggs were at the station, but the twins were used now to not being met and had not particularly expected them; besides, Mr. Twist was with them this time, and he would see that if the Delloggs didn’t come to them they would get safely to the Delloggs.

The usual telegram had been sent announcing their arrival, and the taxi-driver, who seemed to know the Dellogg house well when Mr. Twist told him where they wanted to go, apparently also thought it natural they should want to go exactly there.  In him, indeed, there did seem to be a trace of expecting them,—­almost as if he had been told to look out for them; for hardly had Mr. Twist begun to give him the address than glancing at the twins he said, “I guess you’re wanting Mrs. Dellogg”; and got down and actually opened the door for them, an attention so unusual in the taxi-drivers the twins had up to then met in America that they were more than ever convinced that nothing in the way of unfriendliness or unkindness could stand up against sun and oranges.

“Relations?” he asked them through the window as he shut the door gently and carefully, while Mr. Twist went with a porter to see about the luggage.

“I beg your pardon?” said Anna-Rose.

“Relations of Delloggses?”

“No,” said Anna-Rose.  “Friends.”

“At least,” amended Anna-Felicitas, “practically.”

“Ah,” said the driver, leaning with both his arms on the window-sill in the friendliest possible manner, and chewing gum and eyeing them with thoughtful interest.

Then he said, after a pause during which his jaw rolled regularly from side to side and the twins watched the rolling with an interest equal to his interest in them, “From Los Angeles?”

“No,” said Anna-Rose.  “From New York.”

“At least,” amended Anna-Felicitas, “practically.”

“Well I call that a real compliment,” said the driver slowly and deliberately because of his jaw going on rolling.  “To come all that way, and without being relations—­I call that a real compliment, and a friendship that’s worth something.  Anybody can come along from Los Angeles, but it takes a real friend to come from New York,” and he eyed them now with admiration.

The twins for their part eyed him.  Not only did his rolling jaws fascinate them, but the things he was saying seemed to them quaint.

“But we wanted to come,” said Anna-Rose, after a pause.

“Of course.  Does you credit,” said the driver.

The twins thought this over.

The bright station lights shone on their faces, which stood out very white in the black setting of their best mourning.  Before getting to Los Angeles they had dressed themselves carefully in what Anna-Felicitas called their favourable-impression-on-arrival garments,—­those garments Aunt Alice had bought for them on their mother’s death, expressing the wave of sympathy in which she found herself momentarily engulfed by going to a very good and expensive dressmaker; and in the black perfection of these clothes the twins looked like two well-got-up and very attractive young crows.  These were the clothes they had put on on leaving the ship, and had been so obviously admired in, to the uneasiness of Mr. Twist, by the public; it was in these clothes that they had arrived within range of Mr. Sack’s distracted but still appreciative vision, and in them that they later roused the suspicions and dislike of Mrs. Twist.  It was in these clothes that they were now about to start what they hoped would be a lasting friendship with the Delloggs, and remembering they had them on they decided that perhaps it wasn’t only sun and oranges making the taxi-driver so attentive, but also the effect on him of their grown-up and awe-inspiring hats.

This was confirmed by what he said next.  “I guess you’re old friends, then,” he remarked, after a period of reflective jaw-rolling.  “Must be, to come all that way.”

“Well—­not exactly,” said Anna-Rose, divided between her respect for truth and her gratification at being thought old enough to be somebody’s old friend.

“You see,” explained Anna-Felicitas, who was never divided in her respect for truth, “we’re not particularly old anything.”

The driver in his turn thought this over, and finding he had no observations he wished to make on it he let it pass, and said, “You’ll miss Mr. Dellogg.”

“Oh?” said Anna-Rose, pricking up her ears, “Shall we?”

“We don’t mind missing Mr. Dellogg,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “It’s Mrs. Dellogg we wouldn’t like to miss.”

The driver looked puzzled.

“Yes—­that would be too awful,” said Anna-Rose, who didn’t want a repetition of the Sack dilemma.  “You did say,” she asked anxiously, “didn’t you, that we were going to miss Mr. Dellogg?”

The driver, looking first at one of them and then at the other, said, “Well, and who wouldn’t?”

And this answer seemed so odd to the twins that they could only as they stared at him suppose it was some recondite form of American slang, provided with its own particular repartee which, being unacquainted with the language, they were not in a position to supply.  Perhaps, they thought, it was of the same order of mysterious idioms as in England such sentences as I don’t think, and Not half,—­forms of speech whose exact meaning and proper use had never been mastered by them.

“There won’t be another like Mr. Dellogg in these parts for many a year,” said the driver, shaking his head.  “Ah no.  And that’s so.”

“Isn’t he coming back?” asked Anna-Rose.

The driver’s jaws ceased for a moment to roll.  He stared at Anna-Rose with unblinking eyes.  Then he turned his head away and spat along the station, and then, again fixing his eyes on Anna-Rose, he said, “Young gurl, you may be a spiritualist, and a table-turner, and a psychic-rummager, and a ghost-fancier, and anything else you please, and get what comfort you can out of your coming backs and the rest of the blessed truck, but I know better.  And what I know, being a Christian, is that once a man’s dead he’s either in heaven or he’s in hell, and whichever it is he’s in, in it he stops.”

Anna-Felicitas was the first to speak.  “Are we to understand,” she inquired, “that Mr. Dellogg—­” She broke off.

“That Mr. Dellogg is—­” Anna-Rose continued for her, but broke off too.

“That Mr. Dellogg isn’t—­” resumed Anna-Felicitas with determination, “well, that he isn’t alive?”

“Alive?” repeated the driver.  He let his hand drop heavily on the window-sill.  “If that don’t beat all,” he said, staring at her.  “What do you come his funeral for, then?”

“His funeral?”

“Yes, if you don’t know that he ain’t?”

“Ain’t—­isn’t what?”

“Alive, of course.  No, I mean dead.  You’re getting me all tangled up.”

“But we haven’t.”

“But we didn’t.”

“We had a letter from him only last month.”

“At least, an uncle we’ve got had.”

“And he didn’t say a word in it about being dead—­I mean, there was no sign of his being going to be—­I mean, he wasn’t a bit ill or anything in his letter—­”

“Now see here,” interrupted the driver, sarcasm in his voice, “it ain’t exactly usual is it—­I put it to you squarely, and say it ain’t exactly usual (there may be exceptions, but it ain’t exactly usual) to come to a gentleman’s funeral, and especially not all the way from New York, without some sort of an idea that he’s dead.  Some sort of a general idea, anyhow,” he added still more sarcastically; for his admiration for the twins had given way to doubt and discomfort, and a suspicion was growing on him that with incredible and horrible levity, seeing what the moment was and what the occasion, they were filling up the time waiting for their baggage, among which were no doubt funeral wreaths, by making game of him.

“Gurls like you shouldn’t behave that way,” he went on, his voice aggrieved as he remembered how sympathetically he had got down from his seat when he saw their mourning clothes and tired white faces and helped them into his taxi,—­only for genuine mourners, real sorry ones, going to pay their last respects to a gentleman like Mr. Dellogg, would he, a free American have done that.  “Nicely dressed gurls, well-cared for gurls.  Daughters of decent people.  Here you come all this way, I guess sent by your parents to represent them properly, and properly fitted out in nice black clothes and all, and you start making fun.  Pretending.  Playing kind of hide-and-seek with me about the funeral.  Messing me up in a lot of words.  I don’t like it.  I’m a father myself, and I don’t like it.  I don’t like to see daughters going on like this when their father ain’t looking.  It don’t seem decent to me.  But I suppose you Easterners—­”

The twins, however, were not listening.  They were looking at each other in dismay.  How extraordinary, how terrible, the way Uncle Arthur’s friends gave out.  They seemed to melt away at one’s mere approach.  People who had been living with their husbands all their lives ran away just as the twins came on the scene; people who had been alive all their lives went and died, also at that very moment.  It almost seemed as if directly anybody knew that they, the Twinklers, were coming to stay with them they became bent on escape.  They could only look at each other in stricken astonishment at this latest blow of Fate.  They heard no more of what the driver said.  They could only sit and look at each other.

And then Mr. Twist came hurrying across from the baggage office, wiping his forehead, for the night was hot.  Behind him came the porter, ruefully balancing the piled-up grips on his truck.

“I’m sorry to have been so—­” began Mr. Twist, smiling cheerfully:  but he stopped short in his sentence and left off smiling when he saw the expression in the four eyes fixed on him.  “What has happened?” he asked quickly.

“Only what we might have expected,” said Anna-Rose.

“Mr. Dellogg’s dead,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“You don’t say,” said Mr. Twist; and after a pause he said again, “You don’t say.”

Then he recovered himself.  “I’m very sorry to hear it, of course,” he said briskly, picking himself up, as it were, from this sudden and unexpected tumble, “but I don’t see that it matters to you so long as Mrs. Dellogg isn’t dead too.”

“Yes, but—­” began Anna-Rose.

“Mr. Dellogg isn’t very dead, you see,” said Anna-Felicitas.

Mr. Twist looked from them to the driver, but finding no elucidation there and only disapproval, looked back again.

“He isn’t dead and settled down,” said Anna-Rose.

“Not that sort of being dead,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “He’s just dead.”

“Just got to the stage when he has a funeral,” said Anna-Rose.

“His funeral, it seems, is imminent,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “Did you not give us to understand,” she asked, turning to the driver, “that it was imminent?”

“I don’t know about imminent,” said the driver, who wasn’t going to waste valuable time with words like that, “but it’s to-morrow.”

“And you see what that means for us,” said Anna-Felicitas, turning to Mr. Twist.

Mr. Twist did.

He again wiped his forehead, but not this time because the night was hot.