Christopher and Columbus. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ