“Take a look at that patch of dahlia over there. Those reddish-purple flowers in the square plot.”
“I like dahlia.” Sylvia said. “They float.”
The flowers filled a square about six by six feet. In front of the patch was a sign:
DAHLIA
MULTIFLORA DAHL
23: 91;616
Rhumpartet Alternate
“So that’s how you knew they were dahlia. I agree, it’s a garden.”
“Onward!”
* * * *
“Ohhh....”
“Chester! Michael! Come look at this,” yelled one of the girls, from around the next bend in the road.
We ran.
“What?” I demanded, looking around.
“That!” Sylvia pointed up.
I looked up. And up. We had entered a grove of sempervirens. Redwoods. The trees that aren’t grown up until a thousand years and at last five hundred feet have passed under them.
“Look at them!” Sylvia breathed. “Now I know what an oak looks like to an ant.”
“This grove must be about two thousand years old,” I said, looking at the girth of a nearby tree and remembering a dated slice I’d seen at a museum. “These trees were young when Julius Caesar marched against Gaul.”
Chester whacked his stick against a tree, producing a satisfyingly solid thunk. “Now, if these were planted in rows, I’d worry.”
We walked through the grove of giants as through a living cathedral, and our footsteps on the brick echoed among the spires and were lost.
We traveled past smaller, younger redwoods, then back to oak, and finally came to a field. It was a sort of tree kindergarten, where the saplings stood in closely-ordered rows waiting to be transplanted to their spot in the forest behind us. Across the field, some hundreds of yards away, there was a road.
“There,” Chester said, pointing to where the road T’d our path. “A road. People. A town. Restaurants. Hotels. Food. Sleep. Hurray!”
I suddenly realized how tired I was, and how hungry. I stopped. “Let’s rest for a minute before we go on.”
Sylvia leaned against me. “Yes, let’s.”
“Nonsense!” Dorothy snapped. “Buck up. At least get to the road before you sit down. Here, have a lemon drop.” She produced a package of lemon drops from somewhere and passed it to us.
“Right,” I said, sucking on my lemon drop. “Onward and upward. Excelsior! To the road or bust.” And so our tired little band traversed the field of midget trees and made it to the Great Road.
The great dirt road.
I sat down by the side of the road. “That’s kind of disappointing: our main road turns out to be dirt.”
“Pace,” Chester said, raising his walking stick in benediction. “It’s still a main road, even if dirt. They do things differently in this world, or this time, or whatever.”
I stretched myself out on the grass by the side of the road and prepared to make myself comfortable. “How do you mean?” I asked Chester, who was knocking around clods of dirt, with his stick.
“This road’s been traveled over by heavy carriages. Heavy, horse-drawn carriages. Which makes it a main road, since horse roads are seldom paved. The horses don’t like it .”
“How do you know all this?”
“Elementary, my dear Theodore Bear. The depth of the rut made by the wheels and their distance apart. As to their being drawn by horses....” Chester kicked one of the clods over to where I was resting.
“Horses,” I agreed. “What makes you so smart?”
“I have my image to maintain.”
“Here comes someone,” Sylvia announced. She stood on tiptoe with her hands on her forehead shielding her eyes, like a James Fenimore Cooper Indian scout. If you can picture a leggy Indian scout in a minitunic, then you’ve got it.
Approaching us, pulled by two white horses and closely followed by a thick wave of dust, was a large, open carriage. As it got closer, we could make out the details. And the details—driver, footman and two passengers—could make us out. The carriage was white with gold trim and shaped roughly like one of Columbus’s ships on large wheels. The driver and footman were perched like red and gold masts: one in front and the other in back. From inside the carriage, peering over the high sides, a male and female head regarded us. The male head was topped by a hat that looked like a golf cap six sizes too large. The female head was wearing a yellow sunbonnet with great, stiff lace fringes.
Behind the carriage, centered in the middle of the dust cloud, rode a flatbed wagon pulled by a large, angry-looking horse and steered by a small, unhappy-looking man.
The carriage pulled to a stop in front of us. The wagon, its driver screaming a word I couldn’t quite hear, jerked to a stop behind. All was quiet on the road as the golf cap looked at us and we looked at it and the dust slowly settled. Then the capped head barked a sharp “Yimmons!” and the footman jumped down and opened the carriage door. The wearer of the head stood up, revealing a slender body cased in a black suit, vest and bowtie. Taking a step forward to the door of the carriage, he pleasantly looked down his nose at us.
“Could it be that I have found here on the edge of the wood, while going on my Tuesday morning trip to town for the week’s provisions—to be loaded into the wagon behind—some travelers, perchance hikers, who have misplaced their supplies and lost their way in the wood, becoming, perhaps, weary, hungry and thirsty and despairing of ever finding their way back to the company of gentlefolk (for surely, by their dress and manner they are of the gentry), after long hours, mayhap days, of their ordeal?”
He looked from one to the other of us and we stared blankly back at him.
“Well, could it be?” he barked.
“Robin, Robin,” a bored female voice called from inside the coach, and the other head appeared, nodding sadly. “You’re losing control.”
I thought so myself.
Robin’s female companion was a young woman, dressed in one of my great grandmother’s dresses and carrying herself with an air that was popular when my great grandmother was a young woman. She was very handsome, in a straight-laced, old-fashioned sort of way. She, Robin and the carriage complemented each other.
Chester leaned toward me and whispered without moving his lips—one of his best tricks—”Early Victorian. Cave. We may have fallen into a Gothic novel.”
The young man turned his nose toward his female companion. “Losing control? How so, Aunt?”
Aunt? She wasn’t any older than he. Well, she didn’t look any older.
She tilted her head up to what seemed to be the proper angle for conversation. “The current passion and vogue among the gentlefolk for creating and using sentences of exceeding length and complexity adds immeasurably to the pleasure of conversation when the technique is understood and properly utilized, if one can be said to utilize a vogue, and competently executed, if one can be said to execute a passion; but this is an art that should be practiced in the solitude of one’s own chamber, perhaps is front of a mirror, before introducing it in public, for fear of losing one’s way amidst the ebb and flow of modifiers, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and other parts of speech within the clauses, phrases and the like that make up the sentence, and losing control of the thought that impels the word, the fact that the fancy of language can, at best, merely analog, and bubbling off into incoherence.
“In other, simpler, shorter and more direct words....”