Christopher and Columbus | Page 9

the letter at the end. "You've no idea what it's like getting letters from home out here. Write and tell me what you do and what the garden is like these fine afternoons. The lilacs must be nearly done, but I'm sure there's the smell of them still about, and I'm sure you have a beautiful green close-cut lawn, and tea is brought out on to it, and there's no sound, no sort of sound, except birds, and you two laughing, and I daresay a jolly dog barking somewhere just for fun and not because he's angry."
The letter was signed (Captain) John Desmond, and there was a scrawl in the corner at the end: "It's for jolly little English kids like you that we're fighting, God bless you. Write to me again soon."
"English kids like us!"
They looked at each other. They had not mentioned their belligerent ancestry in their letter. They felt uncomfortable, and as if Captain Desmond were fighting for them, as it were, under false pretences. They also wondered why he should conclude they were kids.
They wrote to him again, explaining that they were not exactly what could be described as English, but on the other hand neither were they exactly what could be described as German. "We would be very glad indeed if we were really something," they added.
But after their letter had been gone only a few days they saw in the list of casualties in The Times that Captain John Desmond had been killed.
And then one day the real solution was revealed, and it was revealed to Uncle Arthur as he sat in his library on a wet Sunday morning considering his troubles in detail.
Like most great ideas it sprang full-fledged into being,--obvious, unquestionable, splendidly simple,--out of a trifle. For, chancing to raise his heavy and disgusted eyes to the bookshelves in front of him, they rested on one particular book, and on the back of this book stood out in big gilt letters the word
AMERICA
There were other words on its back, but this one alone stood out, and it had all the effect of a revelation.
There. That was it. Of course. That was the way out. Why the devil hadn't Alice thought of _that_? He knew some Americans; he didn't like them, but he knew them; and he would write to them, or Alice would write to them, and tell them the twins were coming. He would give the twins ￡200,--damn it, nobody could say that wasn't handsome, especially in war-time, and for a couple of girls who had no earthly sort of claim on him, whatever Alice might choose to think they had on her. Yet it was such a confounded mixed-up situation that he wasn't at all sure he wouldn't come under the Defence of the Realm Act, by giving them money, as aiding the enemy. Well, he would risk that. He would risk anything to be rid of them. Ship 'em off, that was the thing to do. They would fall on their feet right enough over there. America still swallowed Germans without making a face.
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.
CHAPTER III
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