Christopher and Columbus

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.”

“I’m not minding leaving England,” said Anna-Rose quickly.  “At least, not more than’s just proper.”

“Oh, no more am I, of course,” said Anna-Felicitas airily.  “Except what’s proper.”

“And even if we were feeling it dreadfully,” said Anna-Rose, with a little catch in her voice, “which, of course, we’re not, dinner wouldn’t make any difference.  Dinner doesn’t alter fundamentals.”

“But it helps one to bear them,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“Bear!” repeated Anna-Rose, her chin in the air.  “We haven’t got much to bear.  Don’t let me hear you talk of bearing things, Anna-F.”

“I won’t after dinner,” promised Anna-Felicitas.

They thought perhaps they had better ask somebody whether there wouldn’t soon be something to eat, but the other passengers had all disappeared.  They were by themselves on the gloomy deck, and there were no lights.  The row of cabin windows along the wall were closely shuttered, and the door they had come through when first they came on deck was shut too, and they couldn’t find it in the dark.  It seemed so odd to be feeling along a wall for a door they knew was there and not be able to find it, that they began to laugh; and the undiscoverable door cheered them up more than anything that had happened since seeing the last of Uncle Arthur.

“It’s like a game,” said Anna-Rose, patting her hands softly and vainly along the wall beneath the shuttered windows.

“It’s like something in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” said Anna-Felicitas, following in her tracks.

A figure loomed through the mist and came toward them.  They left off patting, and stiffened into straight and motionless dignity against the wall till it should have passed.  But it didn’t pass.  It was a male figure in a peaked cap, probably a steward, they thought, and it stopped in front of them and said in an American voice, “Hello.”

Anna-Rose cast rapidly about in her mind for the proper form of reply to Hello.

Anna-Felicitas, instinctively responsive to example murmured “Hello” back again.

Anna-Rose, feeling sure that nobody ought to say just Hello to people they had never seen before, and that Aunt Alice would think they had brought it on themselves by being conspicuous, decided that perhaps “Good-evening” would regulate the situation, and said it.

“You ought to be at dinner,” said the man, taking no notice of this.

“That’s what we think,” agreed Anna-Felicitas earnestly.

“Can you please tell us how to get there?” asked Anna-Rose, still distant, but polite, for she too very much wanted to know.

“But don’t tell us to ask the Captain,” said Anna-Felicitas, even more earnestly.

“No,” said Anna-Rose, “because we won’t.”

The man laughed.  “Come right along with me,” he said, striding on; and they followed him as obediently as though such persons as possible böse Buben didn’t exist.

“First voyage I guess,” said the man over his shoulder.

“Yes,” said the twins a little breathlessly, for the man’s legs were long and they could hardly keep up with him.

“English?” said the man.

“Ye—­es,” said Anna-Rose.

“That’s to say, practically,” panted the conscientious Anna-Felicitas.

“What say?” said the man, still striding on.  “I said,” Anna-Felicitas endeavoured to explain, hurrying breathlessly after him so as to keep within reach of his ear, “practically.”

“Ah,” said the man; and after a silence, broken only by the pantings for breath of the twins, he added:  “Mother with you?”

They didn’t say anything to that, it seemed such a dreadful question to have to answer, and luckily he didn’t repeat it, but, having got to the door they had been searching for, opened it and stepped into the bright light inside, and putting out his arm behind him pulled them in one after the other over the high wooden door-frame.

Inside was the same stewardess they had seen earlier in the afternoon, engaged in heatedly describing what sounded like grievances to an official in buttons, who seemed indifferent.  She stopped suddenly when the man appeared, and the official took his hands out of his pockets and became alert and attentive, and the stewardess hastily picked up a tray she had set down and began to move away along a passage.

The man, however, briefly called “Hi,” and she turned round and came back even more quickly than she had tried to go.

“You see,” explained Anna-Rose in a pleased whisper to Anna-Felicitas, “it’s Hi she answers to.”

“Yes,” agreed Anna-Felicitas.  “It’s waste of good circumlocutions to throw them away on her.”

“Show these young ladies the dining-room,” said the man.

“Yes, sir,” said the stewardess, as polite as you please.

He nodded to them with a smile that developed for some reason into a laugh, and turned away and beckoned to the official to follow him, and went out again into the night.

“Who was that nice man?” inquired Anna-Rose, following the stewardess down a broad flight of stairs that smelt of india-rubber and machine-oil and cooking all mixed up together.

“And please,” said Anna-Felicitas with mild severity, “don’t tell us to ask the Captain, because we really do know better than that.”

“I thought you must be relations,” said the stewardess.

“We are,” said Anna-Rose.  “We’re twins.”

The stewardess stared.  “Twins what of?” she asked.

“What of?” echoed Anna-Rose.  “Why, of each other, of course.”

“I meant relations of the Captain’s,” said the stewardess shortly, eyeing them with more disfavour than ever.

“You seem to have the Captain greatly on your mind,” said
Anna-Felicitas.  “He is no relation of ours.”

“You’re not even friends, then?” asked the stewardess, pausing to stare round at them at a turn in the stairs as they followed her down arm-in-arm.

“Of course we’re friends,” said Anna-Rose with some heat.  “Do you suppose we quarrel?”

“No, I didn’t suppose you quarrelled with the Captain,” said the stewardess tartly.  “Not on board this ship anyway.”

She didn’t know which of the two she disliked most, the short girl or the long girl.

“You seem to be greatly obsessed by the Captain,” said Anna-Felicitas gently.  “Obsessed!” repeated the stewardess, tossing her head.  She was unacquainted with the word, but instantly suspected it of containing a reflection on her respectability.  “I’ve been a widow off and on for ten years now,” she said angrily, “and I guess it would take more than even the Captain to obsess me.”

They had reached the glass doors leading into the dining-room, and the stewardess, having carried out her orders, paused before indignantly leaving them and going upstairs again to say, “If you’re friends, what do you want to know his name for, then?”

“Whose name?” asked Anna-Felicitas.

“The Captain’s,” said the stewardess.

“We don’t want to know the Captain’s name,” said Anna-Felicitas patiently.  “We don’t want to know anything about the Captain.”

“Then—­” began the stewardess.  She restrained herself, however, and merely bitterly remarking:  “That gentleman was the Captain,” went upstairs and left them.

Anna-Rose was the first to recover.  “You see we took your advice,” she called up after her, trying to soften her heart, for it was evident that for some reason her heart was hardened, by flattery.  “You told us to ask the Captain.”