Christopher and Columbus (24 page)

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.