Christopher and Columbus

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

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.