Christopher and Columbus | Page 5

tears rolling down their swollen faces
and their noses in a hopeless state, and after looking at them a moment
as if she had slowly come up from some vast depth and distance and
were gradually recognizing them, she had whispered with a flicker of
the old encouraging smile that had comforted every hurt and bruise
they had ever had, "_Don't cry_ ... little darlings, _don't_ cry...."
But on that first birthday after her death they had got more and more

solemn as time passed, and breakfast was cleared away, and there were
no sounds, prick up their ears as they might, of subdued preparations in
the next room, no stealthy going up and down stairs to fetch the
presents, and at last no hope at all of the final glorious flinging open of
the door and the vision inside of two cakes all glittering with candles,
each on a table covered with flowers and all the things one has most
wanted.
Their aunt didn't know. How should she? England was a great and
beloved country, but it didn't have proper birthdays.
"Every country has one drawback," Anna-Rose explained to
Anna-Felicitas when the morning was finally over, in case she should
by any chance be thinking badly of the dear country that had produced
their mother as well as Shakespeare, "and not knowing about birthdays
is England's."
"There's Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, whose honest mind groped
continually after accuracy.
"Yes," Anna-Rose admitted after a pause. "Yes. There's Uncle Arthur."
CHAPTER II
Uncle Arthur was the husband of Aunt Alice. He didn't like foreigners,
and said so. He never had liked them and had always said so. It wasn't
the war at all, it was the foreigners. But as the war went on, and these
German nieces of his wife became more and more, as he told her, a
blighted nuisance, so did he become more and more pointed, and said
he didn't mind French foreigners, nor Russian foreigners; and a few
weeks later, that it wasn't Italian foreigners either that he minded; and
still later, that nor was it foreigners indigenous to the soil of countries
called neutral. These things he said aloud at meals in a general way. To
his wife when alone he said much more.
Anna-Rose, who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to soften his
heart by offering to read aloud to him in the evenings when he came
home weary from his daily avocations, which were golf. Her own

suggestion instantly projected a touching picture on her impressionable
imagination of youth, grateful for a roof over its head, in return
alleviating the tedium of crabbed age by introducing its uncle, who
from his remarks was evidently unacquainted with them, to the best
productions of the great masters of English literature.
But Uncle Arthur merely stared at her with a lacklustre eye when she
proposed it, from his wide-legged position on the hearthrug, where he
was moving money about in trouser-pockets of the best material. And
later on she discovered that he had always supposed the "Faery Queen,"
and "Adonais," and "In Memoriam," names he had heard at intervals
during his life, for he was fifty and such things do sometimes get
mentioned were well-known racehorses.
Uncle Arthur, like Onkel Col, was a very good man, and though he said
things about foreigners he did stick to these unfortunate alien nieces
longer than one would have supposed possible if one had overheard
what he said to Aunt Alice in the seclusion of their bed. His ordered
existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew, was shaken in its
innermost parts, in its very marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans.
Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned;
but who but he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans?
And he couldn't groan, because they were, besides being motherless
creatures, his own wife's flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he
groan; but he could and did do it in bed. Why on earth that silly mother
of theirs couldn't have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian sand-heap
where she belonged, instead of coming gallivanting over to England,
and then when she had got there not even decently staying alive and
seeing to her children herself, he at frequent intervals told Aunt Alice in
bed that he would like to know.
Aunt Alice, who after twenty years of life with Uncle Arthur was both
silent and sleek (for he fed her well), sighed and said nothing. She
herself was quietly going through very much on behalf of her nieces.
Jessup didn't like handing dishes to Germans. The tradespeople twitted
the cook with having to cook for them and were facetious about
sausages and asked how one made sauerkraut. Her acquaintances told

her