Christopher and Columbus Part 26

"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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.s, and said, "You'll miss Mr. Dellogg."

"Oh?" said Anna-Rose, p.r.i.c.king 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 repet.i.tion 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 h.e.l.l, 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.