Christopher and Columbus (7 page)

The man laughed, and said there would be no drowning, and that
they had a splendid captain, and were outdistancing the submarine
hand over fist. Anna-Rose didn't believe him, and suspected him
of supposing her to be in need of cheering, but a gleam of comfort
did in spite of herself steal into her heart.

He went away, and presently came back with a blanket and some
pillows.

"If you
will
sit on the floor," he said, stuffing the pillows
behind their backs, during which Anna-Felicitas didn't open her
eyes, and her head hung about so limply that it looked as if it
might at any moment roll off, "you may at least be as
comfortable as you can."

Anna-Rose pointed out, while she helped him arrange
Anna-Felicitas's indifferent head on the pillow, that she saw
little use in being comfortable just a minute or two before
drowning. "Drowning be hanged," said the man.

"That's how Uncle Arthur used to talk," said
Anna-Rose, feeling suddenly quite at home, "except that
he
would have said 'Drowning be damned.'"

The man laughed. "Is he dead?" he asked, busy with
Anna-Felicitas's head, which defied their united efforts to
make it hold itself up.

"Dead?" echoed Anna-Rose, to whom the idea of Uncle
Arthur's ever being anything so quiet as dead and not able to
say any swear words for such a long time as eternity seemed very
odd.

"You said he
used
to talk like that."

"Oh, no he's not dead at all. Quite the
contrary."

The man laughed again, and having got Anna-Felicitas's head
arranged in a position that at least, as Anna-Rose pointed out, had
some sort of self-respect in it, he asked who they were with.

Anna-Rose looked at him with as much defiant independence as she
could manage to somebody who was putting a pillow behind her back.
He was going to be sorry for them. She saw it coming. He was going
to say "You poor things," or words to that effect.
That's what the people round Uncle Arthur's had said to
them. That's what everybody had said to them since the war
began, and Aunt Alice's friends had said it to her too, because
she had to have her nieces live with her, and no doubt Uncle
Arthur's friends who played golf with him had said it to him as
well, except that probably they put in a damn so as to make it
clearer for him and said "You poor damned thing," or
something like that, and she was sick of the very words poor
things. Poor things, indeed! "We're with each other,"
she said briefly, lifting her chin.

"Well, I don't think that's enough," said the
man. "Not half enough. You ought to have a mother or
something."

"
Everybody
can't have mothers," said Anna-Rose
very defiantly indeed, tears rushing into her eyes.

The man tucked the blanket round their resistless legs.
"There now," he said. "That's better. What's
the good of catching your deaths?"

Anna-Rose, glad that he hadn't gone on about mothers, said
that with so much death imminent, catching any of it no longer
seemed to her particularly to matter, and the man laughed and
pulled over a chair and sat down beside her.

She didn't know what he saw anywhere in that dreadful
situation to laugh at, but just the sound of a laugh was
extraordinarily comforting. It made one feel quite different.
Wholesome again. Like waking up to sunshine and one's morning
bath and breakfast after a nightmare. He seemed altogether a very
comforting man. She liked him to sit near them. She hoped he was a
good man. Aunt Alice had said there were very few good men, hardly
any in fact except one's husband, but this one did seem one of
the few exceptions. And she thought that by now, he having brought
them all those pillows, he could no longer come under the heading
of strange men. When he wasn't looking she put out her hand
secretly and touched his coat where he wouldn't feel it. It
comforted her to touch his coat. She hoped Aunt Alice wouldn't
have disapproved of seeing her sitting side by side with him and
liking it.

Aunt Alice had been, as her custom was, vague, when Anna-Rose,
having given her the desired promise not to talk or let
Anna-Felicitas talk to strange men, and desiring to collect any
available information for her guidance in her new responsible
position had asked, "But when are men
not
strange?"

"When you've married them," said Aunt Alice.
"After that, of course, you love them."

And she sighed heavily, for it was bed-time.

Nothing more was seen of the submarine.

The German ladies were certain the captain had somehow let them
know he had them on board, and were as full of the credit of having
saved the ship as if it had been Sodom and Gomorrah instead of a
ship, and they the one just man whose presence would have saved
those cities if he had been in them; and the American passengers
were equally sure that the submarine, on thinking it over, had
decided that President Wilson was not a man to be trifled with, and
had gone in search of some prey which would not have the might and
majesty of America at its back.

As the day went on, and the
St. Luke
left off zig-zagging, the relief of those on
board was the relief of a reprieve from death. Almost everybody was
cured of sea-sickness, and quite everybody was ready to overwhelm
his neighbour with cordiality and benevolence. Rich people
didn't mind poor people, and came along from the first class
and talked to them just as if they had been the same flesh and
blood as themselves. A billionairess native to Chicago, who had
crossed the Atlantic forty times without speaking to a soul, an
achievement she was as justly proud of as an artist is of his best
creations, actually asked somebody in a dingy mackintosh, whose
little boy still looked pale, if he had been frightened; and an
exclusive young man from Boston talked quite a long while to an
English lady without first having made sure that she was
well-connected. What could have been more like heaven? The tone on
the
St. Luke
that day was very like what the tone in the
kingdom of heaven must be in its simple politeness. "And so
you see," said Anna-Rose, who was fond of philosophizing in
season and out of season, and particularly out of season, "how
good comes out of evil."

She made this observation about four o'clock in the
afternoon to Anna-Felicitas in an interval of absence on the part
of Mr. Twist--such, the amiable stranger had told them, was his
name--who had gone to see about tea being brought up to them; and
Anna-Felicitas, able by now to sit up and take notice, the hours of
fresh air having done their work, smiled the ready, watery,
foolishly happy smile of the convalescent. It was so nice not to
feel ill; it was so nice not to have to be saved. If she had been
able to talk much, she would have philosophized too, about the
number and size of one's negative blessings--all the things one
hasn't got, all the very horrid things; why, there's no end
to them once you begin to count up, she thought, waterily happy,
and yet people grumble.

Anna-Felicitas was in that cleaned-out, beatific, convalescent
mood in which one is sure one will never grumble again. She smiled
at anybody who happened to pass by and catch her eye. She would
have smiled just like that, with just that friendly, boneless
familiarity at the devil if he had appeared, or even at Uncle
Arthur himself.

The twins, as a result of the submarine's activities, were
having the pleasantest day they had had for months. It was the
realization of this that caused Anna-Rose's remark about good
coming out of evil. The background, she could not but perceive, was
a very odd one for their pleasantest day for months--a rolling
steamer and a cold wind flicking at them round the corner; but
backgrounds, she pointed out to Anna-Felicitas, who smiled her
agreement broadly and instantly, are negligible things: it is what
goes on in front of them that matters. Of what earthly use, for
instance, had been those splendid summer afternoons in the perfect
woods and gardens that so beautifully framed in Uncle Arthur?

No use, agreed Anna-Felicitas, smiling fatuously.

In the middle of them was Uncle Arthur. You always got to him in
the end.

Anna-Felicitas nodded and shook her head and was all feeble
agreement.

She and Anna-Felicitas had been more hopelessly miserable,
Anna-Rose remarked, wandering about the loveliness that belonged to
him than they could ever have dreamed was possible. She reminded
Anna-Felicitas how they used to rub their eyes to try and see more
clearly, for surely these means of happiness, these elaborate
arrangements for it all round them, couldn't be for nothing?
There must be some of it somewhere, if only they could discover
where? And there was none. Not a trace of it. Not even the faintest
little swish of its skirts.

Anna-Rose left off talking, and became lost in memories. For a
long time, she remembered, she had told herself it was her
mother's death blotting the light out of life, but one day
Anna-Felicitas said aloud that it was Uncle Arthur, and Anna-Rose
knew it was true. Their mother's death was something so tender,
so beautiful, that terrible as it was to them to be left without
her they yet felt raised up by it somehow, raised on to a higher
level than where they had been before, closer in their hearts to
real things, to real values. But Uncle Arthur came into possession
of their lives as a consequence of that death, and he had towered
up between them and every glimpse of the sun. Suddenly there was no
such thing as freedom and laughter. Suddenly everything one said
and did was wrong. "And you needn't think,"
Anna-Felicitas had said wisely, "that he's like that
because we're Germans--or
seem
to be Germans," she amended. "It's
because he's Uncle Arthur. Look at Aunt Alice.
She's
not a German. And yet look at her."

And Anna-Rose had looked at Aunt Alice, though only in her
mind's eye, for at that moment the twins were three miles away
in a wood picnicking, and Aunt Alice was at home recovering from a
tête-à-tête
luncheon with Uncle Arthur who hadn't said
a word from start to finish; and though she didn't like most of
his words when he did say them, she liked them still less when he
didn't say them, for then she imagined them, and what she
imagined was simply awful,--Anna-Rose had, I say, looked at Aunt
Alice in her mind's eye, and knew that this too was true.

Mr. Twist reappeared, followed by the brisk steward with a tray
of tea and cake, and their corner became very like a cheerful
picnic.

Mr. Twist was most pleasant and polite. Anna-Rose had told him
quite soon after he began to talk to her, in order, as she said, to
clear his mind of misconceptions, that she and Anna-Felicitas,
though their clothes at that moment, and the pigtails in which
their flair was done, might be misleading, were no longer children,
but quite the contrary; that they were, in fact, persons who were
almost ripe for going to dances, and certainly in another year
would be perfectly ripe for dances supposing there were any.

Mr. Twist listened attentively, and begged her to tell him any
other little thing she might think of as useful to him in his
capacity of friend and attendant,--both of which, said Mr. Twist,
he intended to be till he had seen them safely landed in New
York.

"I hope you don't think we
need
anybody," said Anna-Rose. "We shall like
being friends with you very much, but only on terms of perfect
equality."

"Sure," said Mr. Twist, who was an American.

"I thought--"

She hesitated a moment.

"You thought?" encouraged Mr. Twist politely.

"I thought at Liverpool you looked as if you were being
sorry for us."

"Sorry?" said Mr. Twist, in the tone of one who
repudiates.

"Yes. When we were waving good-bye to--to our
friends."

"Sorry?" repeated Mr. Twist.

"Which was great waste of your time."

"I should think so," said Mr. Twist with
heartiness.

Anna-Rose, having cleared the ground of misunderstandings, an
activity in which at all times she took pleasure, accepted Mr.
Twist's attentions in the spirit in which they were offered,
which was, as he said, one of mutual friendliness and esteem. As he
was never sea-sick, he could move about and do things for them that
might be difficult to do for themselves; as he knew a great deal
about stewardesses, he could tell them what sort of tip theirs
expected; as he was American, he could illuminate them about that
country. He had been doing Red Cross work with an American
ambulance in France for ten months, and was going home for a short
visit to see how his mother, who, Anna-Rose gathered, was ancient
and widowed, was getting on. His mother, he said, lived in
seclusion in a New England village with his sister, who had not
married.

"Then she's got it all before her," said
Anna-Rose.

"Like us," said Anna-Felicitas.

"I shouldn't think she'd got as much of it before
her as you," said Mr. Twist, "because she's
considerably more grown up--I mean," he added hastily, as
Anna-Rose's mouth opened, "she's less--well, less
completely young."

"We're not completely young," said Anna-Rose with
dignity. "People are completely young the day they're
born, and ever after that they spend their time becoming less
so."

"Exactly. And my sister has been becoming less so longer
than you have. I assure you that's all I meant. She's less
so even than I am."

"Then," said Anna-Rose, glancing at that part of Mr.
Twist's head where it appeared to be coming through his hair,
"she must have got to the stage when one is called a maiden
lady."

"And if she were a German," said Anna-Felicitas
suddenly, who hadn't till then said anything to Mr. Twist but
only smiled widely at him whenever he happened to look her way,
"she wouldn't be either a lady or a maiden, but just an
It. It's very rude of Germans, I think," went on
Anna-Felicitas, abstractedly smiling at the cake Mr. Twist was
offering her, "never to let us be anything but Its till
we've taken on some men."