Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

C >> Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim >> Christopher and Columbus

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"But you have to _have_ a face," said Anna-Felicitas, who didn't think
it much mattered what sort it was so long as you could eat with it and
see out of it.

"And as long as one is as kind as Mr. Twist," said Anna-Rose; but
secretly she thought that having been begun so successfully at his feet,
and carried upwards with such grace of long limbs and happy proportions,
he might as well have gone on equally felicitously for the last little
bit.

"I expect God got tired of him over that last bit," she mused, "and just
put on any sort of head."

"Yes--that happened to be lying about," agreed Anna-Felicitas. "In a
hurry to get done with him."

"Anyway he's very kind," said Anna-Rose, a slight touch of defiance in
her voice.

"Oh, _very_ kind," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And it doesn't matter about faces for being kind," said Anna-Rose.

"Not in the least," agreed Anna-Felicitas.

"And if it hadn't been for the submarine we shouldn't have got to know
him. So you see," said Anna-Rose,--and again produced her favourite
remark about good coming out of evil.

Those were the days in mid-Atlantic when England was lost in its own
peculiar mists, and the sunshine of America was stretching out towards
them. The sea was getting calmer and bluer every hour, and submarines
more and more unlikely. If a ship could be pleasant, which
Anna-Felicitas doubted, for she still found difficulty in dressing and
undressing without being sea-sick and was unpopular in the cabin, this
ship was pleasant. You lay in a deck-chair all day long, staring at the
blue sky and blue sea that enclosed you as if you were living in the
middle of a jewel, and tried not to remember--oh, there were heaps of
things it was best not to remember; and when the rail of the ship moved
up across the horizon too far into the sky, or moved down across it and
showed too much water, you just shut your eyes and then it didn't
matter; and the sun shone warm and steady on your face, and the wind
tickled the tassel on the top of your German-knitted cap, and Mr. Twist
came and read aloud to you, which sent you to sleep quicker than
anything you had ever known.

The book he read out of and carried about with him his pocket was called
"Masterpieces You Must Master," and was an American collection of
English poetry, professing in its preface to be a Short Cut to Culture;
and he would read with what at that time, it being new to them, seemed
to the twins a strange exotic pronunciation, Wordsworth's "Ode to
Dooty," and the effect was as if someone should dig a majestic Gregorian
psalm in its ribs, and make it leap and giggle.

Anna-Rose, who had no reason to shut her eyes, for she didn't mind what
the ship's rail did with the horizon, opened them very round when first
Mr. Twist started on his Masterpieces. She was used to hearing them read
by her mother in the adorable husky voice that sent such thrills through
one, but she listened with the courtesy and final gratitude due to the
efforts to entertain her of so amiable a friend, and only the roundness
of her eyes showed her astonishment at this waltzing round, as it
appeared to her, of Mr. Twist with the Stern Daughter of the Voice of
God. He also read "Lycidas" to her, that same "Lycidas" Uncle Arthur
took for a Derby winner, and only Anna-Rose's politeness enabled her to
refrain from stopping up her ears. As it was, she fidgeted to the point
of having to explain, on Mr. Twist's pausing to gaze at her
questioningly through the smoke-coloured spectacles he wore on deck,
which made him look so like a gigantic dragon-fly, that it was because
her deck-chair was so very much harder than she was.

Anna-Felicitas, who considered that, if these things were short-cuts to
anywhere, seeing she knew them all by heart she must have long ago got
there, snoozed complacently. Sometimes for a few moments she would drop
off really to sleep, and then her mouth would fall open, which worried
Anna-Rose, who couldn't bear her to look even for a moment less
beautiful than she knew she was, so that she fidgeted more than ever,
unable, pinned down by politeness and the culture being administered, to
make her shut her mouth and look beautiful again by taking and shaking
her. Also Anna-Felicitas had a trick of waking up suddenly and
forgetting to be polite, as one does when first one wakes up and hasn't
had time to remember one is a lady. "To-morrow to fresh woods and
pastures noo," Mr. Twist would finish, for instance, with a sort of gulp
of satisfaction at having swallowed yet another solid slab of culture;
and Anna-Felicitas, returning suddenly to consciousness, would murmur,
with her eyes still shut and her head lolling limply, things like,
"After all, it _does_ rhyme with blue. I wonder why, then, one still
doesn't like it."

Then Mr. Twist would turn his spectacles towards her in mild inquiry,
and Anna-Rose, as always, would rush in and elaborately explain what
Anna-Felicitas meant, which was so remote from anything resembling what
she had said that Mr. Twist looked more mildly inquiring than ever.

Usually Anna-Felicitas didn't contradict Anna-Rose, being too sleepy or
too lazy, but sometimes she did, and then Anna-Rose got angry, and would
get what the Germans call a red head and look at Anna-Felicitas very
severely and say things, and Mr. Twist would close his book and watch
with that alert, cocked-up-ear look of a sympathetic and highly
interested terrier; but sooner or later the ship would always give a
roll, and Anna-Felicitas would shut her eyes and fade to paleness and
become the helpless bundle of sickness that nobody could possibly go on
being severe with.

The passengers in the second class were more generally friendly than
those in the first class. The first class sorted itself out into little
groups, and whispered about each other, as Anna-Rose observed, watching
their movements across the rope that separated her from them. The second
class remained to the end one big group, frayed out just a little at the
edge in one or two places.

The chief fraying out was where the Twinkler kids, as the second-class
young men, who knew no better, dared to call them, interrupted the
circle by talking apart with Mr. Twist. Mr. Twist had no business there.
He was a plutocrat of the first class; but in spite of the regulations
which cut off the classes from communicating, with a view apparently to
the continued sanitariness of the first class, the implication being
that the second class was easily infectious and probably overrun, there
he was every day and several times in every day. He must have heavily
squared the officials, the second-class young men thought until the day
when Mr. Twist let it somehow be understood that he had known the
Twinkler young ladies for years, dandled them in their not very remote
infancy on his already full-grown knee, and had been specially appointed
to look after them on this journey.

Mr. Twist did not specify who had appointed him, except to the Twinkler
young ladies themselves, and to them he announced that it was no less a
thing, being, or creature, than Providence. The second-class young men,
therefore, in spite of their rising spirits as danger lay further
behind, and their increasing tendency, peculiar to those who go on
ships, to become affectionate, found themselves no further on in
acquaintance with the Misses Twinkler the last day of the voyage than
they had been the first. Not that, under any other conditions, they
would have so much as noticed the existence of the Twinkler kids. In
their blue caps, pulled down tight to their eyebrows and hiding every
trace of hair, they looked like bald babies. They never came to meals;
their assiduous guardian, or whatever he was, feeding them on deck with
the care of a mother-bird for its fledglings, so that nobody except the
two German ladies in their cabin had seen them without the caps. The
young men put them down as half-grown only, somewhere about fourteen
they thought, and nothing but what, if they were boys instead of girls,
would have been called louts.

Still, a ship is a ship, and it is wonderful what can be managed in the
way of dalliance if one is shut up on one long enough; and the Misses
Twinkler, in spite of their loutishness, their apparent baldness, and
their constant round-eyed solemnity, would no doubt have been the
objects of advances before New York was reached if it hadn't been for
Mr. Twist. There wasn't a girl under forty in the second class on that
voyage, the young men resentfully pointed out to each other, except
these two kids who were too much under it, and a young lady of thirty
who sat manicuring her nails most of the day with her back supported by
a life-boat, and polishing them with red stuff till they flashed rosily
in the sun. This young lady was avoided for the first two days, while
the young men still remembered their mothers, because of what she looked
like; but was greatly loved for the rest of the voyage precisely for
that reason.

Still, every one couldn't get near her. She was only one; and there
were at least a dozen active, cooped-up young men taking lithe,
imprisoned exercise in long, swift steps up and down the deck, ready for
any sort of enterprise, bursting with energy and sea-air and spirits. So
that at last the left-overs, those of the young men the lady of the rosy
nails was less kind to, actually in their despair attempted ghastly
flirtations with the two German ladies. They approached them with a kind
of angry amorousness. They tucked them up roughly in rugs. They brought
them cushions as though they were curses. And it was through this
_rapprochement_, in the icy warmth of which the German ladies expanded
like bulky flowers and grew at least ten years younger, the ten years
they shed being their most respectable ones, that the ship became aware
of the nationality of the Misses Twinkler.

The German ladies were not really German, as they explained directly
there were no more submarines about, for a good woman, they said,
becomes automatically merged into her husband, and they, therefore, were
merged into Americans, both of them, and as loyal as you could find, but
the Twinklers were the real thing, they said,--real, unadulterated,
arrogant Junkers, which is why they wouldn't talk to anybody; for no
Junker, said the German ladies, thinks anybody good enough to be talked
to except another Junker. The German ladies themselves had by sheer luck
not been born Junkers. They had missed it very narrowly, but they had
missed it, for which they were very thankful seeing what believers they
were, under the affectionate manipulation of their husbands, in
democracy; but they came from the part of Germany where Junkers most
abound, and knew the sort of thing well.

It seemed to Mr. Twist, who caught scraps of conversation as he came
and went, that in the cabin the Twinklers must have alienated sympathy.
They had. They had done more; they had got themselves actively disliked.

From the first moment when Anna-Rose had dared to peep into their
shrouded bunks the ladies had been prejudiced, and this prejudice had
later flared up into a great and justified dislike. The ladies, to begin
with, hadn't known that they were von Twinklers, but had supposed them
mere Twinklers, and the von, as every German knows, makes all the
difference, especially in the case of Twinklers, who, without it, were a
race, the ladies knew, of small shopkeepers, laundresses and postmen in
the Westphalian district, but with it were one of the oldest families in
Prussia; known to all Germans; possessed of a name ensuring subservience
wherever it went.

In this stage of preliminary ignorance the ladies had treated the two
apparently ordinary Twinklers with the severity their conduct, age, and
obvious want of means deserved; and when, goaded by their questionings,
the smaller and more active Twinkler had let out her von at them much as
one lets loose a dog when one is alone and weak against the attacks of
an enemy, instead of falling in harmoniously with the natural change of
attitude of the ladies, which became immediately perfectly polite and
conciliatory, as well as motherly in its interest and curiosity, the two
young Junkers went dumb. They would have nothing to do with the most
motherly questioning. And just in proportion as the German ladies found
themselves full of eager milk of kindness, only asking to be permitted
to nourish, so did they find themselves subsequently, after a day or
two of such uncloaked repugnance to it, left with quantities of it
useless on their hands and all going sour.

From first to last the Twinklers annoyed them. As plain Twinklers they
had been tiresome in a hundred ways in the cabin, and as von Twinklers
they were intolerable in their high-nosed indifference.

It had naturally been expected by the elder ladies at the beginning of
the journey, that two obscure Twinklers of such manifest youth should
rise politely and considerately each morning very early, and get
themselves dressed and out of the way in at the most ten minutes,
leaving the cabin clear for the slow and careful putting together bit by
bit of that which ultimately emerged a perfect specimen of a lady of
riper years, but the weedy Twinkler insisted on lying in her berth so
late that if the ladies wished to be in time for the best parts of
breakfast, which they naturally and passionately did wish, they were
forced to dress in her presence, which was most annoying and awkward.

It is true she lay with closed eyes, apparently apathetic, but you never
know with persons of that age. Experience teaches not to trust them.
They shut their eyes, and yet seem, later on, to have seen; they
apparently sleep, and afterwards are heard asking their spectacled
American friend what people do on a ship, a place of so much gustiness,
if their hair gets blown off into the sea. Also the weedy one had a most
tiresome trick of being sick instantly every time Odol was used, or a
little brandy was drunk. Odol is most refreshing; it has a lovely smell,
without which no German bedroom is complete. And the brandy was not
common schnaps, but an old expensive brandy that, regarded as a smell,
was a credit to anybody's cabin.

The German ladies would have persisted, and indeed did persist in using
Odol and drinking a little brandy, indifferent to the feeble prayer from
the upper berth which floated down entreating them not to, but in their
own interests they were forced to give it up. The objectionable child
did not pray a second time; she passed immediately from prayer to
performance. Of two disagreeables wise women choose the lesser, but they
remain resentful.

The other Twinkler, the small active one, did get up early and take
herself off, but she frequently mixed up her own articles of toilet with
those belonging to the ladies, and would pin up her hair, preparatory to
washing her face, with their hairpins.

When they discovered this they hid them, and she, not finding any,
having come to the end of her own, lost no time in irresolution but
picked up their nail-scissors and pinned up her pigtails with that.

It was a particularly sacred pair of nail-scissors that almost
everything blunted. To use them for anything but nails was an outrage,
but the grossest outrage was to touch them at all. When they told her
sharply that the scissors were very delicate and she was instantly to
take them out of her hair, she tugged them out in a silence that was
itself impertinent, and pinned up her pigtails with their buttonhook
instead.

Then they raised themselves on their elbows in their berths and asked
her what sort of a bringing up she could have had, and they raised their
voices as well, for though they were grateful, as they later on
declared, for not having been born Junkers, they had nevertheless
acquired by practice in imitation some of the more salient Junker
characteristics.

"You are _salop_," said the upper berth lady,--which is untranslatable,
not on grounds of propriety but of idiom. It is not, however, a term of
praise.

"Yes, that is what you are--_salop_," echoed the lower berth lady. "And
your sister is _salop_ too--lying in bed till all hours."

"It is shameful for girls to be _salop_," said the upper berth.

"I didn't know it was your buttonhook. I thought it was ours," said
Anna-Rose, pulling this out too with vehemence.

"That is because you are _salop_," said the lower berth.

"And I didn't know it wasn't our scissors either."

"_Salop, salop_," said the lower berth, beating her hand on the wooden
edge of her bunk.

"And--and I'm sorry."

Anna-Rose's face was very red. She didn't look sorry, she looked angry.
And so she was; but it was with herself, for having failed in
discernment and grown-upness. She ought to have noticed that the
scissors and buttonhook were not hers. She had pounced on them with the
ill-considered haste of twelve years old. She hadn't been a lady,--she
whose business it was to be an example and mainstay to Anna-Felicitas,
in all things going first, showing her the way.

She picked up the sponge and plunged it into the water, and was just
going to plunge her annoyed and heated face in after it when the upper
berth lady said: "Your mother should be ashamed of herself to have
brought you up so badly."

"And send you off like this before she has taught you even the ABC of
manners," said the lower berth.

"Evidently," said the upper berth, "she can have none herself."

"Evidently," said the lower berth, "she is herself _salop_."

The sponge, dripping with water, came quickly out of the basin in
Anna-Rose's clenched fist. For one awful instant she stood there in her
nightgown, like some bird of judgment poised for dreadful flight, her
eyes flaming, her knotted pigtails bristling on the top of her head.

The wet sponge twitched in her hand. The ladies did not realize the
significance of that twitching, and continued to offer large angry faces
as a target. One of the faces would certainly have received the sponge
and Anna-Rose have been disgraced for ever, if it hadn't been for the
prompt and skilful intervention of Anna-Felicitas.

For Anna-Felicitas, roused from her morning languor by the unusual
loudness of the German ladies' voices, and smitten into attention and
opening of her eyes, heard the awful things they were saying and saw the
sponge. Instantly she knew, seeing it was Anna-Rose who held it, where
it would be in another second, and hastily putting out a shaking little
hand from her top berth, caught hold feebly but obstinately of the
upright ends of Anna-Rose's knotted pigtails.

"I'm going to be sick," she announced with great presence of mind and
entire absence of candour.

She knew, however, that she only had to sit up in order to be sick, and
the excellent child--_das gute Kind_, as her father used to call her
because she, so conveniently from the parental point of view, invariably
never wanted to be or do anything particularly--without hesitation
sacrificed herself in order to save her sister's honour, and sat up and
immediately was.

By the time Anna-Rose had done attending to her, all fury had died out.
She never could see Anna Felicitas lying back pale and exhausted after
one of these attacks without forgiving her and everybody else
everything.

She climbed up on the wooden steps to smoothe her pillow and tuck her
blanket round her, and when Anna-Felicitas, her eyes shut, murmured,
"Christopher--don't mind _them_--" and she suddenly realized, for they
never called each other by those names except in great moments of
emotion when it was necessary to cheer and encourage, what
Anna-Felicitas had saved her from, and that it had been done
deliberately, she could only whisper back, because she was so afraid of
crying, "No, no, Columbus dear--of course--who really cares about
_them_--" and came down off the steps with no fight left in her.

Also the wrath of the ladies was considerably assuaged. They had
retreated behind their curtains until the so terribly unsettled Twinkler
should be quiet again, and when once more they drew them a crack apart
in order to keep an eye on what the other one might be going to do next
and saw her doing nothing except, with meekness, getting dressed, they
merely inquired what part of Westphalia she came from, and only in the
tone they asked it did they convey that whatever part it was, it was
anyhow a contemptible one.

"We don't come from Westphalia," said Anna-Rose, bristling a little, in
spite of herself, at their persistent baiting.

Anna-Felicitas listened in cold anxiousness. She didn't want to have to
be sick again. She doubted whether she could bear it.

"You must come from somewhere," said the lower berth, "and being a
Twinkler it must be Westphalia."

"We don't really," said Anna-Rose, mindful of Anna-Felicitas's words
and making a great effort to speak politely. "We come from England."

"England!" cried the lower berth, annoyed by this quibbling. "You were
born in Westphalia. All Twinklers are born in Westphalia."

"Invariably they are," said the upper berth. "The only circumstance that
stops them is if their mothers happen to be temporarily absent."

"But we weren't, really," said Anna-Rose, continuing her efforts to
remain bland.

"Are you pretending--pretending to _us_," said the lower berth lady,
again beating her hand on the edge of her bunk, "that you are not
German?"

"Our father was German," said Anna-Rose, driven into a corner, "but I
don't suppose he is now. I shouldn't think he'd want to go on being one
directly he got to a really neutral place."

"Has he fled his country?" inquired the lower berth sternly, scenting
what she had from the first suspected, something sinister in the
Twinkler background.

"I suppose one might call it that," said Anna-Rose after a pause of
consideration, tying her shoe-laces.

"Do you mean to say," said the ladies with one voice, feeling themselves
now on the very edge of a scandal, "he was forced to fly from
Westphalia?"

"I suppose one might put it that way," said Anna-Rose, again
considering.

She took her cap off its hook and adjusted it over her hair with a
deliberation intended to assure Anna-Felicitas that she was remaining
calm. "Except that it wasn't from Westphalia he flew, but Prussia," she
said.

"Prussia?" cried the ladies as one woman, again rising themselves on
their elbows.

"That's where our father lived," said Anna-Rose, staring at them in her
surprise at their surprise. "So of course, as he lived there, when he
died he did that there too."

"Prussia?" cried the ladies again. "He died? You said your father fled
his country."

"No. _You_ said that," said Anna-Rose.

She gave her cap a final tug down over her ears and turned to the door.
She felt as if she quite soon again in spite of Anna-Felicitas, might
not be able to be a lady.

"After all, it _is_ what you do when you go to heaven," she said as she
opened the door, unable to resist, according to her custom, having the
last word.

"But Prussia?" they still cried, still button-holing her, as it were,
from afar. "Then--you were born in Prussia?"

"Yes, but we couldn't help it," said Anna-Rose; and shut the door
quickly behind her.

CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Twist, who was never able to be anything but kind--he had the most
amiable mouth and chin in the world, and his name was Edward--took a
lively interest in the plans and probable future of the two Annas. He
also took a lively and solicitous interest in their present, and a
profoundly sympathetic one in their past. In fact, their three tenses
interested him to the exclusion of almost everything else, and his chief
desire was to see them safely through any shoals there might be waiting
them in the shape of Uncle Arthur's friends--he distrusted Uncle Arthur,
and therefore his friends--into the safe and pleasant waters of real
American hospitality and kindliness.

He knew that such waters abounded for those who could find the tap. He
reminded himself of that which he had been taught since childhood, of
the mighty heart of America which, once touched, would take persons like
the twins right in and never let them out again. But it had to be
touched. It had, as it were, to be put in connection with them by means
of advertisement. America, he reflected, was a little deaf. She had to
be shouted to. But once she heard, once she thoroughly grasped ...

He cogitated much in his cabin--one with a private bathroom, for Mr.
Twist had what Aunt Alice called ample means--on these two defenceless
children. If they had been Belgians now, or Serbians, or any persons
plainly in need of relief! As it was, America would be likely, he
feared, to consider that either Germany or England ought to be looking
after them, and might conceivably remain chilly and uninterested.

Uncle Arthur, it appeared, hadn't many friends in America, and those he
had didn't like him. At least that was what Mr. Twist gathered from the
conversation of Anna-Rose. She didn't positively assert but she very
candidly conjectured, and Mr. Twist could quite believe that Uncle
Arthur's friends wouldn't be warm ones. Their hospitality he could
imagine fleeting and perfunctory. They would pass on the Twinklers as
soon as possible, as indeed why should they not? And presently some
dreary small job would be found for them, some job as pupil-teacher or
girls' companion in the sterile atmosphere of a young ladies' school.

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