Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS

By the Author of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_

Frontispiece by Arthur Litle

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1919

[Illustration: "Oh, yes. You're both very fond of me," said Mr. Twist,
pulling his mouth into a crooked and unhappy smile.

"We love you." said Anna-Felicitas simply.]

CHAPTER I

Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas; but they decided,
as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the
American liner _St. Luke_, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey
slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist,
and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn't got a
father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realized
that in front of them lay a great deal of gray, uneasy, dreadfully wet
sea, endless stretches of it, days and days of it, with waves on top of
it to make them sick and submarines beneath it to kill them if they
could, and knew that they hadn't the remotest idea, not the very
remotest, what was before them when and if they did get across to the
other side, and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two
wretched little Germans who were neither really Germans nor really
English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both,--they
decided, looking very calm and determined and sitting very close
together beneath the rug their English aunt had given them to put round
their miserable alien legs, that what they really were, were Christopher
and Columbus, because they were setting out to discover a New World.

"It's very pleasant," said Anna-Rose. "It's very pleasant to go and
discover America. All for ourselves."

It was Anna-Rosa who suggested their being Christopher and Columbus. She
was the elder by twenty minutes. Both had had their seventeenth
birthday--and what a birthday: no cake, no candles, no kisses and
wreaths and home-made poems; but then, as Anna-Felicitas pointed out, to
comfort Anna-Rose who was taking it hard, you can't get blood out of an
aunt--only a month before. Both were very German outside and very
English inside. Both had fair hair, and the sorts of chins Germans have,
and eyes the colour of the sky in August along the shores of the Baltic.
Their noses were brief, and had been objected to in Germany, where, if
you are a Junker's daughter, you are expected to show it in your nose.
Anna-Rose had a tight little body, inclined to the round.
Anna-Felicitas, in spite of being a twin, seemed to have made the most
of her twenty extra minutes to grow more in; anyhow she was tall and
thin, and she drooped; and having perhaps grown quicker made her eyes
more dreamy, and her thoughts more slow. And both held their heads up
with a great air of calm whenever anybody on the ship looked at them, as
who should say serenely, "We're _thoroughly_ happy, and having the time
of our lives."

For worlds they wouldn't have admitted to each other that they were even
aware of such a thing as being anxious or wanting to cry. Like other
persons of English blood, they never were so cheerful nor pretended to
be so much amused as when they were right down on the very bottom of
their luck. Like other persons of German blood, they had the squashiest
corners deep in their hearts, where they secretly clung to cakes and
Christmas trees, and fought a tendency to celebrate every possible
anniversary, both dead and alive.

The gulls, circling white against the gloomy sky over the rubbish that
floated on the Mersey, made them feel extraordinarily forlorn. Empty
boxes, bits of straw, orange-peel, a variety of dismal dirtiness lay
about on the sullen water; England was slipping away, England, their
mother's country, the country of their dreams ever since they could
remember--and the _St. Luke_ with a loud screech had suddenly stopped.

Neither of them could help jumping a little at that and getting an inch
closer together beneath the rug. Surely it wasn't a submarine already?

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, changing as it
were the unspoken conversation.

As the eldest she had a great sense of her responsibility toward her
twin, and considered it one of her first duties to cheer and encourage
her. Their mother had always cheered and encouraged them, and hadn't
seemed to mind anything, however awful it was, that happened to
her,--such as, for instance, when the war began and they three, their
father having died some years before, left their home up by the Baltic,
just as there was the most heavenly weather going on, and the garden was
a dream, and the blue Chinchilla cat had produced four perfect kittens
that very day,--all of whom had to be left to what Anna-Felicitas, whose
thoughts if slow were picturesque once she had got them, called the
tender mercies of a savage and licentious soldiery,--and came by slow
and difficult stages to England; or such as when their mother began
catching cold and didn't seem at last ever able to leave off catching
cold, and though she tried to pretend she didn't mind colds and that
they didn't matter, it was plain that these colds did at last matter
very much, for between them they killed her.

Their mother had always been cheerful and full of hope. Now that she was
dead, it was clearly Anna-Rose's duty, as the next eldest in the family,
to carry on the tradition and discountenance too much drooping in
Anna-Felicitas. Anna-Felicitas was staring much too thoughtfully at the
deepening gloom of the late afternoon sky and the rubbish brooding on
the face of the waters, and she had jumped rather excessively when the
_St. Luke_ stopped so suddenly, just as if it were putting on the brake
hard, and emitted that agonized whistle.

"We're Christopher and Columbus," said Anna-Rose quickly, "and we're
going to discover America."

"Very well," said Anna-Felicitas. "I'll be Christopher."

"No. I'll be Christopher," said Anna-Rose.

"Very well," said Anna-Felicitas, who was the most amiable, acquiescent
person in the world. "Then I suppose I'll have to be Columbus. But I
think Christopher sounds prettier."

Both rolled their r's incurably. It was evidently in their blood, for
nothing, no amount of teaching and admonishment, could get them out of
it. Before they were able to talk at all, in those happy days when
parents make astounding assertions to other parents about the
intelligence and certain future brilliancy of their offspring, and the
other parents, however much they may pity such self-deception, can't
contradict, because after all it just possibly may be so, the most
foolish people occasionally producing geniuses,--in those happy days of
undisturbed bright castle-building, the mother, who was English, of the
two derelicts now huddled on the dank deck of the _St. Luke_, said to
the father, who was German, "At any rate these two blessed little
bundles of deliciousness"--she had one on each arm and was tickling
their noses alternately with her eyelashes, and they were screaming for
joy--"won't have to learn either German or English. They'll just _know_
them."

"Perhaps," said the father, who was a cautious man.

"They're born bi-lingual," said the mother; and the twins wheezed and
choked with laughter, for she was tickling them beneath their chins,
softly fluttering her eyelashes along the creases of fat she thought so
adorable.

"Perhaps," said the father.

"It gives them a tremendous start," said the mother; and the twins
squirmed in a dreadful ecstasy, for she had now got to their ears.

"Perhaps," said the father.

But what happened was that they didn't speak either language. Not, that
is, as a native should. Their German bristled with mistakes. They spoke
it with a foreign accent. It was copious, but incorrect. Almost the last
thing their father, an accurate man, said to them as he lay dying, had
to do with a misplaced dative. And when they talked English it rolled
about uncontrollably on its r's, and had a great many long words in it
got from Milton, and Dr. Johnson, and people like that, whom their
mother had particularly loved, but as they talked far more to their
mother than to their father, who was a man of much briefness in words
though not in temper, they were better on the whole at English than
German.

Their mother, who loved England more the longer she lived away from
it,--"As one does; and the same principle," Anna-Rose explained to
Anna-Felicitas when they had lived some time with their aunt and uncle,
"applies to relations, aunts' husbands, and the clergy,"--never tired of
telling her children about it, and its poetry, and its spirit, and the
greatness and glory of its points of view. They drank it all in and
believed every word of it, for so did their mother; and as they grew up
they flung themselves on all the English books they could lay hands
upon, and they read with their mother and learned by heart most of the
obviously beautiful things; and because she glowed with enthusiasm they
glowed too--Anna-Rose in a flare and a flash, Anna-Felicitas slow and
steadily. They adored their mother. Whatever she loved they loved
blindly. It was a pity she died. She died soon after the war began. They
had been so happy, so _dreadfully_ happy....

"You can't be Christopher," said Anna-Rose, giving herself a shake, for
here she was thinking of her mother, and it didn't do to think of one's
mother, she found; at least, not when one is off to a new life and
everything is all promise because it isn't anything else, and not if
one's mother happened to have been so--well, so fearfully sweet. "You
can't be Christopher, because, you see, I'm the eldest."

Anna-Felicitas didn't see what being the eldest had to do with it, but
she only said, "Very well," in her soft voice, and expressed a hope that
Anna-Rose would see her way not to call her Col for short. "I'm afraid
you will, though," she added, "and then I shall feel so like Onkel
Nicolas."

This was their German uncle, known during his life-time, which had
abruptly left off when the twins were ten, as Onkel Col; a very ancient
person, older by far even than their father, who had seemed so very old.
But Onkel Col had been older than anybody at all, except the pictures of
the _liebe Gott_ in Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job. He came to
a bad end. Neither their father nor their mother told them anything
except that Onkel Col was dead; and their father put a black band round
the left sleeve of his tweed country suit and was more good-tempered
than ever, and their mother, when they questioned her, just said that
poor Onkel Col had gone to heaven, and that in future they would speak
of him as Onkel Nicolas, because it was more respectful.

"But why does mummy call him poor, when he's gone to heaven?"
Anna-Felicitas asked Anna-Rose privately, in the recesses of the garden.

"First of all," said Anna-Rose, who, being the eldest, as she so often
explained to her sister, naturally knew more about everything, "because
the angels won't like him. Nobody _could_ like Onkel Col. Even if
they're angels. And though they're obliged to have him there because he
was such a very good man, they won't talk to him much or notice him much
when God isn't looking. And second of all, because you _are_ poor when
you get to heaven. Everybody is poor in heaven. Nobody takes their
things with them, and all Onkel Col's money is still on earth. He
couldn't even take his clothes with him."

"Then is he quite--did Onkel Col go there quite--"

Anna-Felicitas stopped. The word seemed too awful in connection with
Onkel Col, that terrifying old gentleman who had roared at them from the
folds of so many wonderful wadded garments whenever they were led in,
trembling, to see him, for he had gout and was very terrible; and it
seemed particularly awful when one thought of Onkel Col going to heaven,
which was surely of all places the most _endimanche_.

"Of course," nodded Anna-Rose; but even she dropped her voice a little.
She peeped about among the bushes a moment, then put her mouth close to
Anna-Felicitas's ear, and whispered, "Stark."

They stared at one another for a space with awe and horror in their
eyes.

"You see," then went on Anna-Rose rather quickly, hurrying away from the
awful vision, "one knows one doesn't have clothes in heaven because they
don't have the moth there. It says so in the Bible. And you can't have
the moth without having anything for it to go into."

"Then they don't have to have naphthalin either," said Anna-Felicitas,
"and don't all have to smell horrid in the autumn when they take their
furs out."

"No. And thieves don't break in and steal either in heaven," continued
Anna-Rose, "and the reason why is that there _isn't_ anything to steal."

"There's angels," suggested Anna-Felicitas after a pause, for she didn't
like to think there was nothing really valuable in heaven.

"Oh, nobody ever steals _them_," said Anna-Rose.

Anna-Felicitas's slow thoughts revolved round this new uncomfortable
view of heaven. It seemed, if Anna-Rose were right, and she always was
right for she said so herself, that heaven couldn't be such a safe place
after all, nor such a kind place. Thieves could break in and steal if
they wanted to. She had a proper horror of thieves. She was sure the
night would certainly come when they would break into her father's
_Schloss_, or, as her English nurse called it, her dear Papa's slosh;
and she was worried that poor Onkel Col should be being snubbed up
there, and without anything to put on, which would make being snubbed so
much worse, for clothes did somehow comfort one.

She took her worries to the nursemaid, and choosing a moment when she
knew Anna-Rose wished to be unnoticed, it being her hour for
inconspicuously eating unripe apples at the bottom of the orchard, an
exercise Anna-Felicitas only didn't indulge in because she had learned
through affliction that her inside, fond and proud of it as she was, was
yet not of that superior and blessed kind that suffers green apples
gladly--she sought out the nursemaid, whose name, too, confusingly, was
Anna, and led the conversation up to heaven and the possible conditions
prevailing in it by asking her to tell her, in strict confidence and as
woman to woman, what she thought Onkel Col exactly looked like at that
moment.

"Unrecognizable," said the nursemaid promptly.

"Unrecognizable?" echoed Anna-Felicitas.

And the nursemaid, after glancing over her shoulder to see if the
governess were nowhere in sight, told Anna-Felicitas the true story of
Onkel Col's end: which is so bad that it isn't fit to be put in any book
except one with an appendix.

A stewardess passed just as Anna-Felicitas was asking Anna-Rose not to
remind her of these grim portions of the past by calling her Col, a
stewardess in such a very clean white cap that she looked both reliable
and benevolent, while secretly she was neither.

"Can you please tell us why we're stopping?" Anna-Rose inquired of her
politely, leaning forward to catch her attention as she hurried by.

The stewardess allowed her roving eye to alight for a moment on the two
objects beneath the rug. Their chairs were close together, and the rug
covered them both up to their chins. Over the top of it their heads
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 pupae 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 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 so difficult to explain; yet they
were too old to shut up in a nursery.

After three months of them, Uncle Arthur suggested sending them back to
Germany; but their consternation had been so great and their entreaties
to be kept where they were so desperate that he said no more about that.
Besides, they told him that if they went back there they would be sure
to be shot as spies, for over there nobody would believe they were
German, just as over here nobody would believe they were English; and
besides, this was in those days of the war when England was still
regarding Germany as more mistaken than vicious, and was as full as ever
of the tradition of great and elaborate indulgence and generosity toward
a foe, and Uncle Arthur, whatever he might say, was not going to be
behind his country in generosity.

Yet as time passed, and feeling tightened, and the hideous necklace of
war grew more and more frightful with each fresh bead of horror strung
upon it, Uncle Arthur, though still in principle remaining good, in
practice found himself vindictive. He was saddled; that's what he was.
Saddled with this monstrous unmerited burden. He, the most patriotic of
Britons, looked at askance by his best friends, being given notice by
his old servants, having particular attention paid his house at night by
the police, getting anonymous letters about lights seen in his upper
windows the nights; the Zeppelins came, which were the windows of the
floor those blighted twins slept on, and all because he had married Aunt
Alice.

At this period Aunt Alice went to bed with reluctance. It was not a
place she had ever gone to very willingly since she married Uncle
Arthur, for he was the kind of husband who rebukes in bed; but now she
was downright reluctant. It was painful to her to be told that she had
brought this disturbance into Uncle Arthur's life by having let him
marry her. Inquiring backwards into her recollections it appeared to her
that she had had no say at all about being married, but that Uncle
Arthur had told her she was going to be, and then that she had been.
Which was what had indeed happened; for Aunt Alice was a round little
woman even in those days, nicely though not obtrusively padded with
agreeable fat at the corners, and her skin, just as now, had the moist
delicacy that comes from eating a great many chickens. Also she
suggested, just as now, most of the things most men want to come home
to,--slippers, and drawn curtains, and a blazing fire, and peace within
one's borders, and even, as Anna-Rose pointed out privately to
Anna-Felicitas after they had come across them for the first time, she
suggested muffins; and so, being in these varied fashions succulent, she
was doomed to make some good man happy. But she did find it real hard
work.

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