Chapter 19

After this brief éclaircissement 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 Fé,