ay, and you've got to be present."
Anna-Felicitas, her eyes shut, again murmured that she didn't care.
"Come, come," said the stewardess. "Orders are orders. Every soul on the
ship, sick or not, has got to be present at life-boat drill."
"Oh, I'm not a soul," murmured Anna-Felicitas, who felt at that moment
how particularly she was a body, while the opposite berths redoubled
their groans.
"Come, come--" said the stewardess.
Then the _St. Luke_ whistled five times, and the stewardess turned pale.
For a brief space, before they understood what had happened, the twins
supposed she was going to be sick. But it wasn't that that was the
matter with her, for after a moment's staring at nothing with horror on
her face she pounced on them and pulled them bodily out of their berths,
regardless by which end, and threw them on the floor anyhow. Then she
plunged about and produced life-jackets; then she rushed down the
passage flinging open the doors of the other cabins; then she whirled
back again and tried to tie the twins into their life-jackets, but with
hands that shook so that the strings immediately came undone again; and
all the time she was calling out "Quick--quick--quick--" There was a
great tramping of feet on deck and cries and shouting.
The curtains of the opposite berths yawned asunder and out came the
Germans, astonishingly cured of their sea-sickness, and struggled
vigorously into their life-jackets and then into fur coats, and had the
fur coats instantly pulled off again by a very energetic steward who ran
in and said fur coats in the water were death-traps,--a steward so much
bent on saving people that he began to pull off the other things the
German ladies had on as well, saying while he pulled, disregarding their
protests, that in the water Mother Nature was the best. "Mother
Nature--Mother Nature," said the steward, pulling; and he was only
stopped just in the nick of time by the stewardess rushing in again and
seeing what was happening to the helpless Germans.
Anna-Rose, even at that moment explanatory, pointed out to
Anna-Felicitas, who had already grasped the fact, that no doubt there
was a submarine somewhere about. The German ladies, seizing their
valuables from beneath their pillows, in spite of the steward assuring
them they wouldn't want them in the water, demanded to be taken up and
somehow signalled to the submarine, which would never dare do anything
to a ship containing its own flesh a
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