Christopher and Columbus | Page 4

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