Christopher and Columbus Read Free

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 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