“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 thei
r 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.
CHAPTER XX
Manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into a house where there is going to be a funeral next day, even if one has come all the way from New York and has nowhere else to go. Equally manifestly it is impossible to thrust oneself into it after the funeral till a decent interval has elapsed. But what the devil, Mr. Twist asked himself in language become regrettably natural to him since his sojourn at the front, is a decent interval?
This Mr. Twist asked himself late that night, pacing up and down the sea-shore in the warm and tranquil darkness in front of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, while the twins, utterly tired out by their journey and the emotions at the end of it, crept silently into bed.
How long does it take a widow to recover her composure? Recover, that is, the first beginnings of it? At what stage in her mourning is it legitimate to intrude on her with reminders of obligations incurred before she was a widow, — with, in fact, the Twinklers? Delicacy itself would shrink from doing it under a week thought Mr. Twist, or even under a fortnight, or even if you came to that, under a month; and meanwhile what was he to do with the Twinklers?
Mr. Twist, being of the artistic temperament for otherwise he wouldn’t have been so sympathetic nor would he have minded, as he so passionately did mind, his Uncle Charles’s teapot dribbling on to the tablecloth — was sometimes swept by brief but tempestuous revulsions of feeling, and though he loved the Twinklers he did at this moment describe them mentally and without knowing it in the very words of Uncle Arthur, as those accursed twins. It was quite unjust, he knew. They couldn’t help the death of the man Dellogg. They were the victims, from first to last, of a cruel and pursuing fate; but it is natural to turn on victims, and Mr. Twist was for an instant, out of the very depth of his helpless sympathy, impatient with the Twinklers.
He walked up and down the sands frowning and pulling his mouth together, while the Pacific sighed sympathetically at his feet. Across the road the huge hotel standing in its gardens was pierced by a thousand lights. Very few people were about and no one at all was on the sands. There was an immense noise of what sounded like grasshoppers or crickets, and also at intervals distant choruses of frogs, but these sounds seemed altogether beneficent, — so warm, and southern, and far away from less happy places where in October cold winds perpetually torment the world. Even in the dark Mr. Twist knew he had got to somewhere that was beautiful. He could imagine nothing more agreeable than, having handed over the twins safely to the Delloggs, staying on a week or two in this place and seeing them every day, — perhaps even, as he had pictured to himself on the journey, being invited to stay with the Delloggs. Now all that was knocked on the head. He supposed the man Dellogg couldn’t help being dead but he, Mr. Twist, equally couldn’t help resenting it. It was so awkward; so exceedingly awkward. And it was so like what one of that creature Uncle Arthur’s friends would do.
Mr. Twist, it will be seen, was frankly unreasonable, but then he was very much taken aback and annoyed. What was he to do with the Annas? He was obviously not a relation of theirs — and indeed no profiles could have been less alike — and he didn’t suppose Acapulco was behind other parts of America in curiosity and gossip. If he stayed on at the Cosmopolitan with the twins till Mrs. Dellogg was approachable again, whenever that might be, every sort of question would be being asked in whispers about who they were and what was their relationship, and presently whenever they sat down anywhere the chairs all round them would empty. Mr. Twist had seen the kind of thing happening in hotels before to other people, — never to himself; never had he been in any situation till now that was not luminously regular. And quite soon after this with the chairs had begun to happen, the people who created these vacancies were told by the manager — firmly in America, politely in England, and sympathetically in France — that their rooms had been engaged a long time ago for the very next day, and no others were available.
The Cosmopolitan was clearly an hotel frequented by the virtuous rich. Mr. Twist felt that he and the Annas wouldn’t, in their eyes, come under this heading, not, that is, when the other guests became aware of the entire absence of any relationship between him and the twins. Well, for a day or two nothing could happen; for a day or two, before his party had had time to sink into the hotel consciousness and the manager appeared to tell him the rooms were engaged, he could think things out and talk them over with his companions. Perhaps he might even see Mrs. Dellogg. The funeral, he had heard on inquiring of the hall porter was next day. It was to be a brilliant affair, said the porter. Mr. Dellogg had been a prominent inhabitant, free with his money, a supporter of anything there was to support. The porter talked of him as the taxi-driver had done, regretfully and respectfully; and Mr. Twist went to bed angrier than ever with a man who, being so valuable and so necessary, should have neglected at such a moment to go on living.
Mr. Twist didn’t sleep very well that night. He lay in his rosy room, under a pink silk quilt, and most of the time stared out through the open French windows with their pink brocade curtains at the great starry night, thinking.
In that soft bed, so rosy and so silken as to have been worthy of the relaxations of, at least, a prima donna, he looked like some lean and alien bird nesting temporarily where he had no business to. He hadn’t thought of buying silk pyjamas when the success of his teapot put him in the right position for doing so, because his soul was too simple for him to desire or think of anything less candid to wear in bed than flannel, and he still wore the blue flannel pyjamas of a careful bringing up. In that beautiful bed his pyjamas didn’t seem appropriate. Also his head, so frugal of hair, didn’t do justice to the lace and linen of a pillow prepared for the hairier head of, again at least, a prima donna. And finding he couldn’t sleep, and wishing to see the stars he put on his spectacles, and then looked more out o
f place than ever. But as nobody was there to see him, — which, Mr. Twist sometimes thought when he caught sight of himself in his pyjamas at bed-time, is one of the comforts of being virtuously unmarried, — nobody minded.
His reflections were many and various, and they conflicted with and contradicted each other as the reflections of persons in a difficult position who have Mr. Twist’s sort of temperament often do. Faced by a dribbling teapot, an object which touched none of the softer emotions, Mr. Twist soared undisturbed in the calm heights of a detached and concentrated intelligence, and quickly knew what to do with it; faced by the derelict Annas his heart and his tenderness got in the ways of any clear vision.
About three o’clock in the morning, when his mind was choked and strewn with much pulled-about and finally discarded plans, he suddenly had an idea. A real one. As far as he could see, a real good one. He would place the Annas in a school.
Why shouldn’t they go to school? he asked himself, starting off answering any possible objections. A year at a first-rate school would give them and everybody else time to consider. They ought never to have left school. It was the very place for luxuriant and overflowing natures like theirs. No doubt Acapulco had such a thing as a finishing school for young ladies in it, and into it the Annas should go, and once in it there they should stay put, thought Mr. Twist in vigorous American, gathering up his mouth defiantly.
Down these lines of thought his relieved mind cantered easily. He would seek out a lawyer the next morning, regularize his position to the twins by turning himself into their guardian, and then get them at once into the best school there was. As their guardian he could then pay all their expenses, and faced by this legal fact they would, he hoped, be soon persuaded of the propriety of his paying whatever there was to pay.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 207