Christopher and Columbus (2 page)

"Of course," nodded Anna-Rose; but even she dropped
her voice a little. She peeped about among the bushes a moment,
then put her mouth close to Anna-Felicitas's ear, and
whispered, "Stark."

They stared at one another for a space with awe and horror in
their eyes.

"You see," then went on Anna-Rose rather quickly,
hurrying away from the awful vision, "one knows one
doesn't have clothes in heaven because they don't have the
moth there. It says so in the Bible. And you can't have the
moth without having anything for it to go into."

"Then they don't have to have naphthalin either,"
said Anna-Felicitas, "and don't all have to smell horrid
in the autumn when they take their furs out."

"No. And thieves don't break in and steal either in
heaven," continued Anna-Rose, "and the reason why is that
there
isn't
anything to steal."

"There's angels," suggested Anna-Felicitas after a
pause, for she didn't like to think there was nothing really
valuable in heaven.

"Oh, nobody ever steals
them
," said Anna-Rose.

Anna-Felicitas's slow thoughts revolved round this new
uncomfortable view of heaven. It seemed, if Anna-Rose were right,
and she always was right for she said so herself, that heaven
couldn't be such a safe place after all, nor such a kind place.
Thieves could break in and steal if they wanted to. She had a
proper horror of thieves. She was sure the night would certainly
come when they would break into her father's
Schloss
, or, as her English nurse called it, her dear
Papa's slosh; and she was worried that poor Onkel Col should be
being snubbed up there, and without anything to put on, which would
make being snubbed so much worse, for clothes did somehow comfort
one.

She took her worries to the nursemaid, and choosing a moment
when she knew Anna-Rose wished to be unnoticed, it being her hour
for inconspicuously eating unripe apples at the bottom of the
orchard, an exercise Anna-Felicitas only didn't indulge in
because she had learned through affliction that her inside, fond
and proud of it as she was, was yet not of that superior and
blessed kind that suffers green apples gladly--she sought out the
nursemaid, whose name, too, confusingly, was Anna, and led the
conversation up to heaven and the possible conditions prevailing in
it by asking her to tell her, in strict confidence and as woman to
woman, what she thought Onkel Col exactly looked like at that
moment.

"Unrecognizable," said the nursemaid promptly.

"Unrecognizable?" echoed Anna-Felicitas.

And the nursemaid, after glancing over her shoulder to see if
the governess were nowhere in sight, told Anna-Felicitas the true
story of Onkel Col's end: which is so bad that it isn't fit
to be put in any book except one with an appendix.

A stewardess passed just as Anna-Felicitas was asking Anna-Rose
not to remind her of these grim portions of the past by calling her
Col, a stewardess in such a very clean white cap that she looked
both reliable and benevolent, while secretly she was neither.

"Can you please tell us why we're stopping?"
Anna-Rose inquired of her politely, leaning forward to catch her
attention as she hurried by.

The stewardess allowed her roving eye to alight for a moment on
the two objects beneath the rug. Their chairs were close together,
and the rug covered them both up to their chins. Over the top of it
their heads appeared, exactly alike as far as she could see in the
dusk; round heads, each with a blue knitted cap pulled well over
its ears, and round eyes staring at her with what anybody except
the stewardess would have recognized as a passionate desire for
some sort of reassurance. They might have been seven instead of
seventeen for all the stewardess could tell. They looked younger
than anything she had yet seen sitting alone on a deck and asking
questions. But she was an exasperated widow, who had never had
children and wasn't to be touched by anything except a tip,
besides despising, because she was herself a second-class
stewardess, all second-class passengers,--"As one does,"
Anna-Rose explained later on to Anna-Felicitas, "and the same
principle applies to Jews." So she said with an acidity
completely at variance with the promise of her cap, "Ask the
Captain," and disappeared.

The twins looked at each other. They knew very well that
captains on ships were mighty beings who were not asked
questions.

"She's trifling with us," murmured
Anna-Felicitas.

"Yes," Anna-Rose was obliged to admit, though the
thought was repugnant to her that they should look like people a
stewardess would dare trifle with.

"Perhaps she thinks we're younger than we are,"
she said after a silence.

"Yes. She couldn't see how long our dresses are,
because of the rug."

"No. And it's only that end of us that really shows
we're grown up."

"Yes. She ought to have seen us six months ago."

Indeed she ought. Even the stewardess would have been surprised
at the activities and complete appearance of the two pupæ now
rolled motionless in the rug. For, six months ago, they had both
been probationers in a children's hospital in Worcestershire,
arrayed, even as the stewardess, in spotless caps, hurrying hither
and thither with trays of food, sweeping and washing up, learning
to make beds in a given time, and be deft, and quick, and never
tired, and always punctual.

This place had been got them by the efforts and influence of
their Aunt Alice, that aunt who had given them the rug on their
departure and who had omitted to celebrate their birthday. She was
an amiable aunt, but she didn't understand about birthdays. It
was the first one they had had since they were complete orphans,
and so they were rather sensitive about it. But they hadn't
cried, because since their mother's death they had done with
crying. What could there ever again be in the world bad enough to
cry about after that? And besides, just before she dropped away
from them into the unconsciousness out of which she never came
back, but instead just dropped a little further into death, she had
opened her eyes unexpectedly and caught them sitting together in a
row by her bed, two images of agony, with tears rolling down their
swollen faces and their noses in a hopeless state, and after
looking at them a moment as if she had slowly come up from some
vast depth and distance and were gradually recognizing them, she
had whispered with a flicker of the old encouraging smile that had
comforted every hurt and bruise they had ever had, "
Don't cry
... little darlings,
don't
cry...."

But on that first birthday after her death they had got more and
more solemn as time passed, and breakfast was cleared away, and
there were no sounds, prick up their ears as they might, of subdued
preparations in the next room, no stealthy going up and down stairs
to fetch the presents, and at last no hope at all of the final
glorious flinging open of the door and the vision inside of two
cakes all glittering with candles, each on a table covered with
flowers and all the things one has most wanted.

Their aunt didn't know. How should she? England was a great
and beloved country, but it didn't have proper birthdays.

"Every country has one drawback," Anna-Rose explained
to Anna-Felicitas when the morning was finally over, in case she
should by any chance be thinking badly of the dear country that had
produced their mother as well as Shakespeare, "and not knowing
about birthdays is England's."

"There's Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, whose
honest mind groped continually after accuracy.

"Yes," Anna-Rose admitted after a pause. "Yes.
There's Uncle Arthur."

Uncle Arthur was the husband of Aunt Alice. He didn't like
foreigners, and said so. He never had liked them and had always
said so. It wasn't the war at all, it was the foreigners. But
as the war went on, and these German nieces of his wife became more
and more, as he told her, a blighted nuisance, so did he become
more and more pointed, and said he didn't mind French
foreigners, nor Russian foreigners; and a few weeks later, that it
wasn't Italian foreigners either that he minded; and still
later, that nor was it foreigners indigenous to the soil of
countries called neutral. These things he said aloud at meals in a
general way. To his wife when alone he said much more.

Anna-Rose, who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to
soften his heart by offering to read aloud to him in the evenings
when he came home weary from his daily avocations, which were golf.
Her own suggestion instantly projected a touching picture on her
impressionable imagination of youth, grateful for a roof over its
head, in return alleviating the tedium of crabbed age by
introducing its uncle, who from his remarks was evidently
unacquainted with them, to the best productions of the great
masters of English literature.

But Uncle Arthur merely stared at her with a lacklustre eye when
she proposed it, from his wide-legged position on the hearthrug,
where he was moving money about in trouser-pockets of the best
material. And later on she discovered that he had always supposed
the "Faery Queen," and "Adonais," and "In
Memoriam," names he had heard at intervals during his life,
for he was fifty and such things do sometimes get mentioned were
well-known racehorses.

Uncle Arthur, like Onkel Col, was a very good man, and though he
said things about foreigners he did stick to these unfortunate
alien nieces longer than one would have supposed possible if one
had overheard what he said to Aunt Alice in the seclusion of their
bed. His ordered existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew,
was shaken in its innermost parts, in its very marrow, by the
arrival of the two Germans. Other people round about had Belgians
in their homes, and groaned; but who but he, the most immensely
British of anybody, had Germans? And he couldn't groan, because
they were, besides being motherless creatures, his own wife's
flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he groan; but he could
and did do it in bed. Why on earth that silly mother of theirs
couldn't have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian sand-heap where
she belonged, instead of coming gallivanting over to England, and
then when she had got there not even decently staying alive and
seeing to her children herself, he at frequent intervals told Aunt
Alice in bed that he would like to know.

Aunt Alice, who after twenty years of life with Uncle Arthur was
both silent and sleek (for he fed her well), sighed and said
nothing. She herself was quietly going through very much on behalf
of her nieces. Jessup didn't like handing dishes to Germans.
The tradespeople twitted the cook with having to cook for them and
were facetious about sausages and asked how one made sauerkraut.
Her acquaintances told her they were very sorry for her, and said
they supposed she knew what she was doing and that it was all right
about spies, but really one heard such strange things, one never
could possibly tell even with children; and regularly the local
policeman bicycled over to see if the aliens, who were registered
at the county-town police-station, were still safe. And then they
looked so very German, Aunt Alice felt. There was no mistaking
them. And every time they opened their mouths there were all those
r's rolling about. She hardly liked callers to find her nieces
in her drawing-room at tea-time, they were so difficult to explain;
yet they were too old to shut up in a nursery.

After three months of them, Uncle Arthur suggested sending them
back to Germany; but their consternation had been so great and
their entreaties to be kept where they were so desperate that he
said no more about that. Besides, they told him that if they went
back there they would be sure to be shot as spies, for over there
nobody would believe they were German, just as over here nobody
would believe they were English; and besides, this was in those
days of the war when England was still regarding Germany as more
mistaken than vicious, and was as full as ever of the tradition of
great and elaborate indulgence and generosity toward a foe, and
Uncle Arthur, whatever he might say, was not going to be behind his
country in generosity.

Yet as time passed, and feeling tightened, and the hideous
necklace of war grew more and more frightful with each fresh bead
of horror strung upon it, Uncle Arthur, though still in principle
remaining good, in practice found himself vindictive. He was
saddled; that's what he was. Saddled with this monstrous
unmerited burden. He, the most patriotic of Britons, looked at
askance by his best friends, being given notice by his old
servants, having particular attention paid his house at night by
the police, getting anonymous letters about lights seen in his
upper windows the nights; the Zeppelins came, which were the
windows of the floor those blighted twins slept on, and all because
he had married Aunt Alice.

At this period Aunt Alice went to bed with reluctance. It was
not a place she had ever gone to very willingly since she married
Uncle Arthur, for he was the kind of husband who rebukes in bed;
but now she was downright reluctant. It was painful to her to be
told that she had brought this disturbance into Uncle Arthur's
life by having let him marry her. Inquiring backwards into her
recollections it appeared to her that she had had no say at all
about being married, but that Uncle Arthur had told her she was
going to be, and then that she had been. Which was what had indeed
happened; for Aunt Alice was a round little woman even in those
days, nicely though not obtrusively padded with agreeable fat at
the corners, and her skin, just as now, had the moist delicacy that
comes from eating a great many chickens. Also she suggested, just
as now, most of the things most men want to come home
to,--slippers, and drawn curtains, and a blazing fire, and peace
within one's borders, and even, as Anna-Rose pointed out
privately to Anna-Felicitas after they had come across them for the
first time, she suggested muffins; and so, being in these varied
fashions succulent, she was doomed to make some good man happy. But
she did find it real hard work.