Part 26 (1/2)

”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.