Next morning, I was standing on the railings at the starboard bow, waving my hat into the wind and singing “A Life On the Ocean Wave” to cheer myself up, when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed Ryerson Rainsmith. The instant he spotted me, he sheared off and went astern.
Which pretty well set the tone for the rest of the voyage.
A couple of days later, as we approached the harbor at Halifax, Dorsey told me to wipe my nose. That was my first glimpse of the New World.
At Quebec City, we disembarked. A Canadian customs officer in black suit and cap asked me the purpose of my visit.
“Penal colony,” I told him. He raised his eyebrows, gave the Rainsmiths a sympathetic shake of his head, and stamped my passport.
Only then—at that very instant—did I realize how far from home I was. Alone in a foreign country.
Unaccountably, I burst into tears.
“There, there,” said Ryerson Rainsmith, looking not at me, but rather at the customs officer. The words came out as “They-ahh, they-ahh,” and I realized, in spite of my tears, that the farther west we traveled, the more pronounced his fake English accent was becoming.
“The little English girl is homesick,” the customs officer said, kneeling down and dabbing at my eyes with an enormous white handkerchief.
No great detective work there: He had already examined our passports and knew that I was not their child.
What was he up to, then? Was this close-up inspection part of his routine search for contraband?
For just an instant I flirted with the idea of faking a faint, then calling aloud for a restorative shot from one of the six bottles of Gordon’s Gin that—among other things—were hidden under the false bottom of the Rainsmiths’ steamer trunk.
Don’t ask me how I know that: There are a few things in my life of which I am still not proud.
“Chin up!” the customs officer said, lifting my face with a folded finger and looking into my eyes. He smiled at the Rainsmiths. “I have one just like her at home.”
Somehow I doubted it, but I forced a weak grin.
But what an inane remark! Even if he had a hundred daughters at home crying into a hundred silken handkerchiefs, what did I care? How could it possibly matter?
One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.
I have observed this again and again in adults with whom I am acquainted. When all else failed, a good old cry was guaranteed to get them off the hook. It was not just instinct: No, it was more than that. It was something to do with the oleaginous chemical essences given off by a crying human: some supersensor in the nose designed to detect the altered hormone and protein levels in the emotional weeping of humans—and of the human female, in particular.
I had been thinking of producing a paper on this fascinating subject—Tears and the Test Tube—but had been forced to shelve the idea when I was flung, without ceremony, out of my ancestral home. The very thought of being cut off from my late uncle Tarquin’s splendid chemical laboratory, with its gleaming glassware, its lovely old Leitz microscope, its rows upon rows of bottled chemicals and pretty poisons, was enough to reduce me to tears again, so that I was right back where I started.
It had been in that quiet room, by the light of its tall casement windows, that, with the assistance of Uncle Tar’s notebooks and library, I had taught myself chemistry, and by so doing had set myself apart forever from the rest of the human race.
No matter that I had been a mere child when I began. I was now twelve, and remarkably proficient in juggling what Uncle Tar had once called “the crumbs of the universe.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was overcome. Forgive me.”
The trance was broken. The moment had passed and we were back again in the cold, cold world.
The customs officer got to his feet, and looked hastily round to see that no one had observed his momentary weakness.
“Next!” he shouted as he scratched his chalk mark on our luggage.
As Ryerson Rainsmith queued for tickets in the railway booking office, I helped myself to a map and timetable from a handy rack. The distance from Quebec City to Toronto, I saw, was five hundred miles: more than half the distance from Land’s End to John o’Groats.
It was going to take about nine hours, and we would not arrive in Toronto until late—eleven o’clock in the evening.
Dorsey Rainsmith had fortified herself with a paperback novel from the news agent’s kiosk: Vengeance Is Mine, by Mickey Spillane. She tried to conceal it in a folded copy of the Montreal Gazette, but not before I had a chance to see the cover illustration: a man in trench coat and floppy hat lugging in his arms what appeared to be a dead blonde, whose white silk dress was rucked up to somewhere in the neighborhood of her tonsils.
I recognized the title as a quotation from the Bible: a quotation I had several times mulled over myself as I planned various schemes to teach my sisters a lesson. Slashed across the book’s cover were adverts for other volumes by the same author, such as I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick.
There was something vaguely but deeply satisfying about these titles, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“All aboard!” the conductor shouted.
I was learning quickly. Back home in England, trains had guards while buses and trams had conductors. Here in Canada, the guard was a conductor, and the carriages, called cars, were built with seats on both sides of a center aisle, rather than having compartments, each of which opened directly onto the platform.
It was like falling asleep and awakening as Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. Everything was larger than life and everyone drove on the wrong side of the road.
One could easily see why they called it the “New World.”
At last, the train jolted into motion and we were on our way. I was made to sit facing the Rainsmiths, as if I were in the dock at the Old Bailey facing a pair of sour old magistrates.
After about fifty miles of blessed silence, Ryerson Rainsmith decided to become instructive. He unfolded a railway map and began reading aloud the names of each town through which we should next be passing. “Val-Alain, Villeroy … Parisville … St. Wenceslas …”
I stifled a yawn.