3
After a month of drinking, Edwin leaves Reginald on his new farm and continues west to meet up with his brother Niall's school friend Thomas, who entered the continent via New York City and sped west immediately. The train through the Rocky Mountains takes Edwin's breath away. He presses his forehead to the window, like a child, and openly gapes. The beauty is overwhelming. He may have taken the drinking a little far, back in Saskatchewan. He'll be a better man in British Columbia, he decides. The sunlight hurts his eyes.
After all that wild splendor, it's an odd jolt to find himself in Victoria, in those tamed and pretty streets. There are Englishmen everywhere; he steps out of the train and the accents of his homeland surround him. He could stay here for a while, he thinks.
Edwin finds Thomas in a tidy little hotel in the city center, where Thomas has taken the best room, and they order tea with scones in the restaurant downstairs. They haven't seen one another in three or four years, but Thomas has changed very little. He has the same reddish complexion he's had since childhood, that perpetual impression of just having stepped in off the rugby pitch. He's trying to become a member of the Victoria business community, but he's vague on what kind of business he wants to be in.
"And how's your brother?" Thomas asks, changing the subject. He means Niall.
"Making a go of it in Australia," Edwin says. "He seems happy enough, judging by his letters."
"Well, that's more than most of us can say," Thomas says. "No small thing, happiness. What's he doing down there?"
"Drinking away his remittance money, I'd imagine," Edwin says, which is ungentlemanly but also the probable truth. They have a table by the window, and his gaze keeps drifting to the street, the shop fronts, and—visible in the distance—the unfathomable wilderness, dark towering trees crowding in around the periphery. There's something ludicrous about the idea that the wilderness belongs to Britain, but he quickly suppresses this thought, because it reminds him of his last dinner party in England.
