Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

C >> Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim >> Christopher and Columbus

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They left Chicago in the evening; a raw, wintery October evening with
cold rain in the air, and the twins, going early to bed in their
compartment, a place that seemed to them so enchanting that their
spirits couldn't fail to rise, saw no more of him till breakfast next
morning. They then noticed that the cloud had lifted a little; and as
the day went on it lifted still more. They were going to be three days
together in that train, and it would be impossible for Mr. Twist, they
were sure, to go on being taciturn as long as that. It wasn't his
nature. His nature was conversational. And besides, shut up like that in
a train, the sheer getting tired of reading all day would make him want
to talk.

So after lunch, when they were all three on the platform of the
observation car, though there was nothing to observe except limitless
flat stretches of bleak and empty country, the twins suggested that he
should now begin to talk again. They pointed out that his body was
bound to get stiff on that long journey from want of exercise, but that
his mind needn't, and he had better stretch it by conversing agreeably
with them as he used to before the day, which seemed so curiously long
ago, when they landed in America.

"It does indeed seem long ago," agreed Mr. Twist, lighting another
cigarette. "I have difficulty in realizing it isn't a week yet."

And he reflected that the Annas had managed to produce pretty serious
havoc in America considering they had only been in it five days. He and
his mother permanently estranged; Edith left alone at Clark sitting
there in the ruins of her loving preparations for his return, with
nothing at all that he could see to look forward to and live for except
the hourly fulfilment of what she regarded as duty; every plan upset;
the lives, indeed, of his mother and of his sister and of himself
completely altered,--it was a pretty big bag in the time, he thought,
flinging the match back towards Chicago.

Mr. Twist felt sore. He felt like somebody who had had a bad tumble, and
is sore and a little dizzy; but he recognized that these great ruptures
cannot take place without aches and doubts. He ached, and he doubted and
he also knew through his aches and doubts that he was free at last from
what of late years he had so grievously writhed under--the shame of
pretence. And the immediate cause of his being set free was, precisely,
the Annas.

It had been a violent, a painful setting free, but it had happened; and
who knew if, without their sudden appearance at Clark and the immediate
effect they produced on his mother, he wouldn't have lapsed after all,
in spite of the feelings and determinations he had brought back with
him from Europe, into the old ways again under the old influence, and
gone on ignobly pretending to agree, to approve, to enjoy, to love, when
he was never for an instant doing anything of the sort? He might have
trailed on like that for years--Mr. Twist didn't like the picture of his
own weakness, but he was determined to look at himself as he
was--trailed along languidly when he was at home, living another life
when he was away, getting what he absolutely must have, the irreducible
minimum of personal freedom necessary to sanity, by means of small and
shabby deceits. My goodness, how he hated deceits, how tired he was of
the littleness of them!

He turned his head and looked at the profiles of the Annas sitting
alongside him. His heart suddenly grew warm within him. They had on the
blue caps again which made them look so bald and cherubic, and their
eyes were fixed on the straight narrowing lines of rails that went back
and back to a point in the distance. The dear little things; the dear,
dear little things,--so straightforward, so blessedly straight and
simple, thought Mr. Twist. Fancy his mother losing a chance like this.
Fancy _anybody_, thought the affectionate and kind man, missing an
opportunity of helping such unfortunately placed children.

The twins felt he was looking at them, and together they turned and
looked at him. When they saw his expression they knew the cloud had
lifted still more, and their faces broke into broad smiles of welcome.

"It's pleasant to see you back again," said Anna-Felicitas heartily, who
was next to him.

"We've missed you very much," said Anna-Rose.

"It hasn't been like the same place, the world hasn't," said
Anna-Felicitas, "since you've been away."

"Since you walked out of the dining-room that night at Clark," said
Anna-Rose.

"Of course we know you can't always be with us," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Which we deeply regret," interjected Anna-Rose.

"But while you are with us," said Anna-Felicitas, "for these last few
days, I would suggest that we should be happy. As happy as we used to be
on the _St. Luke_ when we weren't being sea-sick." And she thought she
might even go so far as to enjoy hearing the "Ode to Dooty," now.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, leaning forward. "In three days we shall have
disappeared into the maw of the Delloggs. Do let us be happy while we
can. Who knows what their maw will be like? But whatever it's like," she
added firmly, "we're going to stick in it."

"And perhaps," said Anna-Felicitas, "now that you're a little restored
to your normal condition, you'll tell us what has been the matter."

"For it's quite clear," said Anna-Rose, "that something _has_ been the
matter."

"We've been talking it over," said Anna-Felicitas, "and putting two and
two together, and perhaps you'll tell us what it was, and then we shall
know if we're right."

"Perhaps I will," said Mr. Twist, cogitating, as he continued
benevolently to gaze at them. "Let's see--" He hesitated, and pushed
his hat off his forehead. "I wonder if you'd understand--"

"We'll give our minds to it," Anna-Felicitas assured him.

"These caps make us look more stupid than we are," Anna-Rose assured
him, deducing her own appearance from that of Anna-Felicitas.

Encouraged, but doubtful of their capabilities of comprehension on
this particular point, Mr. Twist embarked rather gingerly on his
explanations. He was going to be candid from now on for the rest of his
days, but the preliminary plunges were, he found, after all a little
difficult. Even with the pellucidly candid Annas, all ready with ears
pricked up attentively and benevolently and minds impartial, he found it
difficult. It was because, on the subject of mothers, he feared he was
up against their one prejudice. He felt rather than knew that their
attitude on this one point might be uncompromising,--mothers were
mothers, and there was an end of it; that sort of attitude, coupled with
extreme reprobation of himself for supposing anything else.

He was surprised and relieved to find he was wrong. Directly they got
wind of the line his explanations were taking, which was very soon for
they were giving their minds to it as they promised and Mr. Twist's
hesitations were illuminating, they interrupted.

"So we were right," they said to each other.

"But you don't know yet what I'm going to say," said Mr. Twist. "I've
only started on the preliminaries."

"Yes we do. You fell out with your mother," said Anna-Rose.

"Quarrelled," said Anna-Felicitas, nodding

"We didn't think so at the time," said Anna-Rose.

"We just felt there was an atmosphere of strain about Clark," said
Anna-Felicitas.

"But talking it over privately, we concluded that was what had
happened."

Mr. Twist was so much surprised that for a moment he could only say
"Oh." Then he said, "And you're terribly shocked, I suppose."

"Oh no," they said airily and together.

"No?"

"You see--" began Anna-Felicitas.

"You see--" began Anna-Rose.

"You see, as a general principle," said Anna-Felicitas, "it's
reprehensible to quarrel with one's mother."

"But we've not been able to escape observing--" said Anna-Rose.

"In the course of our brief and inglorious career," put in
Anna-Felicitas.

"--that there are mothers and mothers," said Anna-Rose.

"Yes," said Mr. Twist; and as they didn't go on he presently added,
"Yes?"

"Oh, that's all," said the twins, once more airily and together.

CHAPTER XIX

After this brief _eclaircissement_ 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 Fe, 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 L200 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--"

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