Christopher and Columbus (4 page)

Uncle Arthur reflected for a moment with extreme disgust on the
insensibility of the American palate. "Lost their chance,
that's what
they've
done," he said to himself--for this was
1916, and America had not yet made her magnificent entry into the
war--as he had already said to himself a hundred times. "Lost
their chance of coming in on the side of civilization, and helping
sweep the world up tidy of barbarism. Shoulder to shoulder with us,
that's where
they
ought to have been. English-speaking races--duty to
the world--" He then damned the Americans; but was suddenly
interrupted by perceiving that if they had been shoulder to
shoulder with him and England he wouldn't have been able to
send them his wife's German nieces to take care of. There was,
he conceded, that advantage resulting from their attitude. He could
not, however, concede any others.

At luncheon he was very nearly gay. It was terrible to see Uncle
Arthur very nearly gay, and both his wife and the twins were most
uncomfortable. "I wonder what's the matter now,"
sighed Aunt Alice to herself, as she nervously crumbled her
toast.

It could mean nothing good, Arthur in such spirits on a wet
Sunday, when he hadn't been able to get his golf and the cook
had overdone the joint.

And so, on a late September afternoon, the
St. Luke
, sliding away from her moorings, relieved Uncle
Arthur of his burden.

It was final this time, for the two alien enemies once out of it
would not be let into England again till after the war. The enemies
themselves knew it was final; and the same knowledge that made
Uncle Arthur feel so pleasant as he walked home across his park
from golf to tea that for a moment he was actually of a mind to
kiss Aunt Alice when he got in, and perhaps even address her in the
language of resuscitated passion, which in Uncle Arthur's mouth
was Old Girl,--an idea he abandoned, however, in case it should
make her self-satisfied and tiresome--the same knowledge that
produced these amiable effects in Uncle Arthur, made his alien
nieces cling very close together as they leaned over the side of
the
St. Luke
hungrily watching the people on the wharf.

For they loved England. They loved it with the love of youth
whose enthusiasms have been led by an adored teacher always in one
direction. And they were leaving that adored teacher, their mother,
in England. It seemed like losing her a second time to go away, so
far away, and leave her there. It was nonsense, they knew, to feel
like that. She was with them just the same; wherever they went now
she would be with them, and they could hear her saying at that very
moment, "Little darlings,
don't
cry...." But it was a gloomy, drizzling
afternoon, the sort of afternoon anybody might be expected to cry
on, and not one of the people waving handkerchiefs were waving
handkerchiefs to them.

"We ought to have hired somebody," thought Anna-Rose,
eyeing the handkerchiefs with miserable little eyes.

"I believe I've gone and caught a cold," remarked
Anna-Felicitas in her gentle, staid voice, for she was having a
good deal of bother with her eyes and her nose, and could no longer
conceal the fact that she was sniffing.

Anna-Rose discreetly didn't look at her. Then she suddenly
whipped out her handkerchief and waved it violently.

Anna-Felicitas forgot her eyes and nose and craned her head
forward. "Who are you waving to?" she asked,
astonished.

"Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose, waving, "Good-bye!
Good-bye!"

"Who? Where? Who are you talking to?" asked
Anna-Felicitas. "Has any one come to see us off?"

"Good-bye! Good-bye!" cried Anna-Rose.

The figures on the wharf were getting smaller, but not until
they had faded into a blur did Anna-Rose leave off waving. Then she
turned round and put her arm through Anna-Felicitas's and held
on to her very tight for a minute.

"There wasn't anybody," she said. "Of course
there wasn't. But do you suppose I was going to have us
looking
like people who aren't seen off?"

And she drew Anna-Felicitas away to the chairs, and when they
were safely in them and rolled up to their chins in the rug, she
added, "That man--" and then stopped. "What
man?"

"Standing just behind us--"

"Was there a man?" asked Anna-Felicitas, who never saw
men any more than she, in her brief career at the hospital, had
seen pails.

"Yes. Looking as if in another moment he'd be sorry for
us," said Anna-Rose.

"Sorry for us!" repeated Anna-Felicitas, roused to
indignation.

"Yes. Did you ever?"

Anna-Felicitas said, with a great deal of energy while she put
her handkerchief finally and sternly away, that she didn't
ever; and after a pause Anna-Rose, remembering one of her many new
responsibilities and anxieties--she had so many that sometimes for
a time she didn't remember some of them--turned her head to
Anna-Felicitas, and fixing a worried eye on her said, "You
won't go forgetting your Bible, will you, Anna F.?"

"My Bible?" repeated Anna-Felicitas, looking
blank.

"Your German Bible. The bit about
wenn die bösen Buben locken, so folge sie nicht
."

Anna-Felicitas continued to look blank, but Anna-Rose with a
troubled brow said again, "You won't go and forget that,
will you, Anna F.?"

For Anna-Felicitas was very pretty. In most people's eyes
she was very pretty, but in Anna-Rose's she was the most
exquisite creature God had yet succeeded in turning out. Anna-Rose
concealed this conviction from her. She wouldn't have told her
for worlds. She considered it wouldn't have been at all good
for her; and she had, up to this, and ever since they could both
remember, jeered in a thoroughly sisterly fashion at her defects,
concentrating particularly on her nose, on her leanness, and on the
way, unless constantly reminded not to, she drooped.

But Anna-Rose secretly considered that the same nose that on her
own face made no sort of a show at all, directly it got on to
Anna-Felicitas's somehow was the dearest nose; and that her
leanness was lovely,--the same sort of slender grace her mother had
had in the days before the heart-breaking emaciation that was its
last phase; and that her head was set so charmingly on her neck
that when she drooped and forgot her father's constant
injunction to sit up,--"For," had said her father at
monotonously regular intervals, "a maiden should be as
straight as a fir-tree,"--she only seemed to fall into even
more attractive lines than when she didn't. And now that
Anna-Rose alone had the charge of looking after this abstracted and
so charming younger sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey
to her while tactfully avoiding putting ideas into the poor
child's head which might make her conceited, that it behoved
her to conduct herself with discretion.

But she found tact a ticklish thing, the most difficult thing of
all to handle successfully; and on this occasion hers was so
elaborate, and so carefully wrapped up in Scriptural language, and
German Scripture at that, that Anna-Felicitas's slow mind
didn't succeed in disentangling her meaning, and after a space
of staring at her with a mild inquiry in her eyes, she decided that
perhaps she hadn't got one. She was much too polite though, to
say so, and they sat in silence under the rug till the
St. Luke
whistled and stopped, and Anna-Rose began hastily
to make conversation about Christopher and Columbus.

She was ashamed of having shown so much of her woe at leaving
England. She hoped Anna-Felicitas hadn't noticed. She certainly
wasn't going on like that. When the
St. Luke
whistled, she was ashamed that it wasn't only
Anna-Felicitas who jumped. And the amount of brightness she put
into her voice when she told Anna-Felicitas it was pleasant to go
and discover America was such that that young lady, who if slow was
sure, said to herself, "Poor little Anna-R., she's really
taking it dreadfully to heart."

The
St. Luke
was only dropping anchor for the night in the
Mersey, and would go on at daybreak. They gathered this from the
talk of passengers walking up and down the deck in twos and threes
and passing and repassing the chairs containing the silent figures
with the round heads that might be either the heads of boys or of
girls, and they were greatly relieved to think they wouldn't
have to begin and be sea-sick for some hours yet. "So
couldn't we walk about a little?" suggested
Anna-Felicitas, who was already stiff from sitting on the hard cane
chair.

But Aunt Alice had told them that the thing to do on board a
ship if they wished, as she was sure they did, not only to avoid
being sick but also conspicuous, was to sit down in chairs the
moment the ship got under way, and not move out of them till it
stopped again. "Or, at least, as rarely as possible,"
amended Aunt Alice, who had never herself been further on a ship
than to Calais, but recognized that it might be difficult to avoid
moving sooner or later if it was New York you were going to.
"Two such young girls travelling alone should be seen as
seldom as ever you can manage. Your Uncle is sending you
second-class for that very reason, because it is so much less
conspicuous."

It was also very much less expensive, and Uncle Arthur's
generosities were of the kind that suddenly grow impatient and
leave off. Just as in eating he was as he said, for plain roast and
boiled, and messes be damned, so in benefactions he was for lump
sums and done with it; and the extras, the driblets, the here a
little and there a little that were necessary, or were alleged by
Aunt Alice to be necessary, before he finally got rid of those
blasted twins, annoyed him so profoundly that when it came to
taking their passage he could hardly be got not to send them in the
steerage. This was too much, however, for Aunt Alice, whose maid
was going with them as far as Euston and therefore would know what
sort of tickets they had, and she insisted with such quiet
obstinacy that they should be sent first-class that Uncle Arthur at
last split the difference and consented to make it second. To her
maid Aunt Alice also explained that second-class was less
conspicuous.

Anna-Rose, mindful of Aunt Alice's words, hesitated as to
the wisdom of walking about and beginning to be conspicuous
already, but she too was stiff, and anything the matter with
one's body has a wonderful effect, as she had already in her
brief career had numerous occasions to observe, in doing away with
prudent determinations. So, after cautiously looking round the
corners to see if the man who was on the verge of being sorry for
them were nowhere in sight, they walked up and down the damp, dark
deck; and the motionlessness, and silence, and mist gave them a
sensation of being hung mid-air in some strange empty Hades between
two worlds.

Far down below there was a faint splash every now and then
against the side of the
St. Luke
when some other steamer, invisible in the mist,
felt her way slowly by. Out ahead lay the sea, the immense uneasy
sea that was to last ten days and nights before they got to the
other side, hour after hour of it, hour after hour of tossing
across it further and further away; and forlorn and ghostly as the
ship felt, it yet, because on either side of it were still the
shores of England, didn't seem as forlorn and ghostly as the
unknown land they were bound for. For suppose, Anna-Felicitas
inquired of Anna-Rose, who had been privately asking herself the
same thing, America didn't like them? Suppose the same sort of
difficulties were waiting for them over there that had dogged their
footsteps in England?

"First of all," said Anna-Rose promptly, for she
prided herself on the readiness and clearness of her explanations,
"America will like us, because I don't see why it
shouldn't. We're going over to it in exactly the same
pleasant spirit, Anna-F.,--and don't you go forgetting it and
showing your disagreeable side--that the dove was in when it flew
across the waters to the ark, and with olive branches in our beaks
just the same as the dove's, only they're those two letters
to Uncle Arthur's friends."

"But do you think Uncle Arthur's friends--" began
Anna-Felicitas, who had great doubts as to everything connected
with Uncle Arthur.

"And secondly," continued Anna-Rose a little louder,
for she wasn't going to be interrupted, and having been asked a
question liked to give all the information in her power,
"secondly, America is the greatest of the neutrals except the
liebe Gott
, and is bound particularly to prize us because
we're so unusually and peculiarly neutral. What ever was more
neutral than you and me? We're neither one thing nor the other,
and yet at the same time we're both." Anna-Felicitas
remarked that it sounded rather as if they were the Athanasian
Creed.

"And thirdly," went on Anna-Rose, waving this aside,
"there's £200 waiting for us over there, which is a very
nice warm thing to think of. We never had £200 waiting for us
anywhere in our lives before, did we,--so you remember that, and
don't get grumbling."

Anna-Felicitas mildly said that she wasn't grumbling but
that she couldn't help thinking what a great deal depended on
the goodwill of Uncle Arthur's friends, and wished it had been
Aunt Alice's friends they had letters to instead, because Aunt
Alice's friends were more likely to like her.

Anna-Rose rebuked her, and said that the proper spirit in which
to start on a great adventure was one of faith and enthusiasm, and
that one didn't have doubts.

Anna-Felicitas said she hadn't any doubts really, but that
she was very hungry, not having had anything that could be called a
meal since breakfast, and that she felt like the sheep in
"Lycidas," the hungry ones who looked up and were not
fed, and she quoted the lines in case Anna-Rose didn't
recollect them (which Anna-Rose deplored, for she knew the lines by
heart, and if there was any quoting to be done liked to do it
herself), and said she felt just like that,--"Empty,"
said Anna-Felicitas, "and yet swollen. When do you suppose
people have food on board ships? I don't believe we'd mind
nearly so much about--oh well, about leaving England, if it was
after dinner."