Christopher and Columbus Read Free Page A

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 they were very sorry for her, and said
they supposed she knew what she was doing and that it was all right
about spies, but really one heard such strange things, one never
could possibly tell even with children; and regularly the local
policeman bicycled over to see if the aliens, who were registered
at the county-town police-station, were still safe. And then they
looked so very German, Aunt Alice felt. There was no mistaking
them. And every time they opened their mouths there were all those
r's rolling about. She hardly liked callers to find her nieces
in her drawing-room at tea-time, they were