Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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

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She was worried about the dollars. She was worried about the tipping,
and the luggage, and the arrival, and Uncle Arthur's friends, whose
names were Mr. and Mrs. Clouston K. Sack; so naturally she was
irritable. One is. And nobody knew and understood this better than
Anna-Felicitas.

"Let's go and put on our hats and get ready," she said, after a moment's
pause during which she wondered whether, in the interests of Anna-Rose's
restoration to calm, she mightn't have to be sick again. She did hope
she wouldn't have to. She had supposed she had done with that. It is
true there were now no waves, but she knew she had only to go near the
engines and smell the oil. "Let's go and put on our hats," she
suggested, slipping her hand through Anna-Rose's arm.

Anna-Rose let herself be led away, and they went to their cabin; and
when they came out of it half an hour later, no longer with that bald
look their caps had given them, the sun catching the little rings of
pale gold hair that showed for the first time, and clad, instead of in
the disreputable jerseys that they loved, in neat black coats and
skirts--for they still wore mourning when properly dressed--with
everything exactly as Aunt Alice had directed for their arrival, the
young men of the second class could hardly believe their eyes.

"You'll excuse me saying so," said one of them to Anna-Felicitas as she
passed him, "but you're looking very well to-day."

"I expect that's because I _am_ well," said Anna-Felicitas amiably.

Mr. Twist, when he saw them, threw up his hands and ejaculated "My!"

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas, who was herself puzzled by the difference
the clothes had made in Anna-Rose after ten solid days of cap and
jersey, "I think it's our hats. They do somehow seem very splendid."

"Splendid?" echoed Mr. Twist. "Why, they'd make the very angels jealous,
and get pulling off their haloes and kicking them over the edge of
heaven."

"What is so wonderful is that Aunt Alice should ever have squeezed them
out of Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Rose, gazing lost in admiration at
Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't disgorge nice hats easily at all."

And one of the German ladies muttered to the other, as her eye fell on
Anna-Felicitas, "_Ja, ja, die hat Rasse._"

And it was only because it was the other German lady's hair that spent
the night in a different part of the cabin from her head and had been
seen doing it by Anna-Felicitas, that she cavilled and was grudging.
"_Gewiss_," she muttered back, "_bis auf der Nase. Die Nase aber
entfremdet mich. Die ist keine echte Junkernase_."

So that the Twinklers had quite a success, and their hearts came a
little way out of their boots; only a little way, though, for there were
the Clouston K. Sacks looming bigger into their lives every minute now.

Really it was a beautiful day, and, as Aunt Alice used to say, that does
make such a difference. A clear pale loveliness of light lay over New
York, and there was a funny sprightliness in the air, a delicate dry
crispness. The trees on the shore, when they got close, were delicate
too--delicate pale gold, and green, and brown, and they seemed so
composed and calm, the twins thought, standing there quietly after the
upheavals and fidgetiness of the Atlantic. New York was well into the
Fall, the time of year when it gets nearest to beauty. The beauty was
entirely in the atmosphere, and the lights and shadows it made. It was
like an exquisite veil flung over an ugly woman, hiding, softening,
encouraging hopes.

Everybody on the ship was crowding eagerly to the sides. Everybody was
exhilarated, and excited, and ready to be friendly and talkative. They
all waved whenever another boat passed. Those who knew America pointed
out the landmarks to those who didn't. Mr. Twist pointed them out to the
twins, and so did the young man who had remarked favourably on
Anna-Felicitas's looks, and as they did it simultaneously and there was
so much to look at and so many boats to wave to, it wasn't till they had
actually got to the statue of Liberty that Anna-Rose remembered her L10
and the dollars.

The young man was saying how much the statue of Liberty had cost, and
the word dollars made Anna-Rose turn with a jump to Mr. Twist.

"Oh," she exclaimed, clutching at her chamois leather bag where it very
visibly bulged out beneath her waistband, "I forgot--I must get change.
And how much do you think we ought to tip the stewardess? I've never
tipped anybody yet ever, and I wish--I wish I hadn't to."

She got quite red. It seemed to her dreadful to offer money to someone
so much older than herself and who till almost that very morning had
treated her and Anna-Felicitas like the naughtiest of tiresome children.
Surely she would be most offended at being tipped by people such years
younger than herself?

Mr. Twist thought not.

"A dollar," said the young man. "One dollar. That's the figure. Not a
cent more, or you girls'll get inflating prices and Wall Street'll bust
up."

Anna-Rose, not heeding him and clutching nervously the place where her
bag was, told Mr. Twist that the stewardess hadn't seemed to mind them
quite so much last night, and still less that morning, and perhaps some
little memento--something that wasn't money--

"Give her those caps of yours," said the young man, bursting into
hilarity; but indeed it wasn't his fault that he was a low young man.

Mr. Twist, shutting him out of the conversation by interposing a
shoulder, told Anna-Rose he had noticed stewardesses, and also stewards,
softened when journeys drew near their end, but that it didn't mean they
wanted mementos. They wanted money; and he would do the tipping for her
if she liked.

Anna-Rose jumped at it. This tipping of the stewardess had haunted her
at intervals throughout the journey whenever she woke up at night. She
felt that, not having yet in her life tipped anybody, it was very hard
that she couldn't begin with somebody more her own size.

"Then if you don't mind coming behind the funnel," she said, "I can give
you my L5 notes, and perhaps you would get them changed for me and
deduct what you think the stewardess ought to have."

Mr. Twist, and also Anna-Felicitas, who wasn't allowed to stay behind
with the exuberant young man though she was quite unconscious of his
presence, went with Anna-Rose behind the funnel, where after a great
deal of private fumbling, her back turned to them, she produced the two
much-crumpled L5 notes.

"The steward ought to have something too," said Mr. Twist.

"Oh, I'd be glad if you'd do him as well," said Anna-Rose eagerly. "I
don't think I _could_ offer him a tip. He has been so fatherly to us.
And imagine offering to tip one's father."

Mr. Twist laughed, and said she would get over this feeling in time. He
promised to do what was right, and to make it clear that the tips he
bestowed were Twinkler tips; and presently he came back with messages of
thanks from the tipped--such polite ones from the stewardess that the
twins were astonished--and gave Anna-Rose a packet of very dirty-looking
slices of green paper, which were dollar bills, he said, besides a
variety of strange coins which he spread out on a ledge and explained to
her.

"The exchange was favourable to you to-day," said Mr. Twist, counting
out the money.

"How nice of it," said Anna-Rose politely. "Did you keep your eye on
its variations?" she added a little loudly, with a view to rousing
respect in Anna-Felicitas who was lounging against a seat and showing a
total absence of every kind of appropriate emotion.

"Certainly," said Mr. Twist after a slight pause. "I kept both my eyes
on all of them."

Mr. Twist had, it appeared, presented the steward and stewardess each
with a dollar on behalf of the Misses Twinkler, but because the exchange
was so favourable this had made no difference to the L5 notes. Reducing
each L5 note into German marks, which was the way the Twinklers, in
spite of a year in England, still dealt in their heads with money before
they could get a clear idea of it, there would have been two hundred
marks; and as it took, roughly, four marks to make a dollar, the two
hundred marks would have to be divided by four; which, leaving aside
that extra complication of variations in the exchange, and regarding the
exchange for a moment and for purposes of simplification as keeping
quiet for a bit and resting, should produce, also roughly, said
Anna-Rose a little out of breath as she got to the end of her
calculation, fifty dollars.

"Correct," said Mr. Twist, who had listened with respectful attention.
"Here they are."

"I said roughly," said Anna-Rose. "It can't be _exactly_ fifty dollars.
The tips anyhow would alter that."

"Yes, but you forget the exchange."

Anna-Rose was silent. She didn't want to go into that before
Anna-Felicitas. Of the two, she was supposed to be the least bad at
sums. Their mother had put it that way, refusing to say, as Anna-Rose
industriously tried to trap her into saying, that she was the better of
the two. But even so, the difference entitled her to authority on the
subject with Anna-Felicitas, and by dint of doing all her calculations
roughly, as she was careful to describe her method, she allowed room for
withdrawal and escape where otherwise the inflexibility of figures might
have caught her tight and held her down while Anna-Felicitas looked on
and was unable to respect her.

Evidently the exchange was something beneficent. She decided to rejoice
in it in silence, accept whatever it did, and refrain from asking
questions.

"So I did. Of course. The exchange," she said, after a little.

She gathered up the dollar bills and began packing them into her bag.
They wouldn't all go in, and she had to put the rest into her pocket,
for which also there were too many; but she refused Anna-Felicitas's
offer to put some of them in hers on the ground that sooner or later she
would be sure to forget they weren't her handkerchief and would blow her
nose with them.

"Thank you very much for being so kind," she said to Mr. Twist, as she
stuffed her pocket full and tried by vigorous patting to get it to look
inconspicuous. "We're never going to forget you, Anna-F. and me. We'll
write to you often, and we'll come and see you as often as you like."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas dreamily, as she watched the shore of Long
Island sliding past. "Of course you've got your relations, but relations
soon pall, and you may be quite glad after a while of a little fresh
blood."

Mr. Twist thought this very likely, and agreed with several other things
Anna-Felicitas, generalizing from Uncle Arthur, said about relations,
again with that air of addressing nobody specially and meaning nothing
in particular, while Anna-Rose wrestled with the obesity of her pocket.

"Whether you come to see me or not," said Mr. Twist, whose misgivings as
to the effect of the Twinklers on his mother grew rather than subsided,
"I shall certainly come to see you."

"Perhaps Mr. Sack won't allow followers," said Anna-Felicitas, her eyes
far away. "Uncle Arthur didn't. He wouldn't let the maids have any, so
they had to go out and do the following themselves. We had a follower
once, didn't we, Anna-R.?" she continued her voice pensive and
reminiscent. "He was a friend of Uncle Arthur's. Quite old. At least
thirty or forty. I shouldn't have thought he _could_ follow. But he did.
And he used to come home to tea with Uncle Arthur and produce boxes of
chocolate for us out of his pockets when Uncle Arthur wasn't looking. We
ate them and felt perfectly well disposed toward him till one day he
tried to kiss one of us--I forget which. And that, combined with the
chocolates, revealed him in his true colours as a follower, and we told
him they weren't allowed in that house and urged him to go to some place
where they were, or he would certainly be overtaken by Uncle Arthur's
vengeance, and we said how surprised we were, because he was so old and
we didn't know followers were as old as that ever."

"It seemed a very shady thing," said Anna-Rose, having subdued the
swollenness of her pocket, "to eat his chocolates and then not want to
kiss him, but we don't hold with kissing, Anna-F. and me. Still, we were
full of his chocolates; there was no getting away from that. So we
talked it over after he had gone, and decided that next day when he came
we'd tell him he might kiss one of us if he still wanted to, and we drew
lots which it was to be, and it was me, and I filled myself to the brim
with chocolates so as to feel grateful enough to bear it, but he didn't
come."

"No," said Anna-Felicitas. "He didn't come again for a long while, and
when he did there was no follow left in him. Quite the contrary."

Mr. Twist listened with the more interest to this story because it was
the first time Anna-Felicitas had talked since he knew her. He was used
to the inspiriting and voluble conversation of Anna-Rose who had looked
upon him as her best friend since the day he had wiped up her tears; but
Anna-Felicitas had been too unwell to talk. She had uttered languid and
brief observations from time to time with her eyes shut and her head
lolling loosely on her neck, but this was the first time she had been,
as it were, an ordinary human being, standing upright on her feet,
walking about, looking intelligently if pensively at the scenery, and in
a condition of affable readiness, it appeared, to converse.

Mr. Twist was a born mother. The more trouble he was given the more
attached he became. He had rolled Anna-Felicitas up in rugs so often
that to be not going to roll her up any more was depressing to him. He
was beginning to perceive this motherliness in him himself, and he gazed
through his spectacles at Anna-Felicitas while she sketched the rise and
fall of the follower, and wondered with an almost painful solicitude
what her fate would be in the hands of the Clouston Sacks.

Equally he wondered as to the other one's fate; for he could not think
of one Twinkler without thinking of the other. They were inextricably
mixed together in the impression they had produced on him, and they
dwelt together in his thoughts as one person called, generally,
Twinklers. He stood gazing at them, his motherly instincts uppermost,
his hearty yearning over them now that the hour of parting was so near
and his carefully tended chickens were going to be torn from beneath his
wing. Mr. Twist was domestic. He was affectionate. He would have loved,
though he had never known it, the sensation of pattering feet about his
house, and small hands clinging to the apron he would never wear. And it
was entirely characteristic of him that his invention, the invention
that brought him his fortune, should have had to do with a teapot.

But if his heart was uneasy within him at the prospect of parting from
his charges their hearts were equally uneasy, though not in the same
way. The very name of Clouston K. Sack was repugnant to Anna-Rose; and
Anna-Felicitas, less quick at disliking, turned it over cautiously in
her mind as one who turns over an unknown and distasteful object with
the nose of his umbrella. Even she couldn't quite believe that any good
thing could come out of a name like that, especially when it had got
into their lives through Uncle Arthur. Mr. Twist had never heard of the
Clouston Sacks, which made Anna-Rose still more distrustful. She wasn't
in the least encouraged when he explained the bigness of America and
that nobody in it ever knew everybody--she just said that everybody had
heard of Mr. Roosevelt, and her heart was too doubtful within her even
to mind being told, as he did immediately tell her within ear-shot of
Anna-Felicitas, that her reply was unreasonable.

Just at the end, as they were all three straining their eyes, no one
with more anxiety than Mr. Twist, to try and guess which of the crowd on
the landing-stage were the Clouston Sacks, they passed on their other
side the _Vaterland_, the great interned German liner at its moorings,
and the young man who had previously been so very familiar, as Anna-Rose
said, but who was only, Mr. Twist explained, being American, came
hurrying boldly up.

"You mustn't miss this," he said to Anna-Felicitas, actually seizing her
by the arm. "Here's something that'll make you feel home-like right
away."

And he led her off, and would have dragged her off but for
Anna-Felicitas's perfect non-resistance.

"He _is_ being familiar," said Anna-Rose to Mr. Twist, turning very red
and following quickly after him. "That's not just being American.
Everybody decent knows that if there's any laying hold of people's arms
to be done one begins with the eldest sister."

"Perhaps he doesn't realize that you _are_ the elder," said Mr. Twist.
"Strangers judge, roughly, by size."

"I'm afraid I'm going to have trouble with her," said Anna-Rose, not
heeding his consolations. "It isn't a sinecure, I assure you, being left
sole guardian and protector of somebody as pretty as all that. And the
worst of it is she's going on getting prettier. She hasn't nearly come
to the end of what she can do in that direction. I see it growing on
her. Every Sunday she's inches prettier than she was the Sunday before.
And wherever I take her to live, and however out of the way it is, I'm
sure the path to our front door is going to be black with suitors."

This dreadful picture so much perturbed her, and she looked up at Mr.
Twist with such worried eyes, that he couldn't refrain from patting her
on her shoulder.

"There, there," said Mr. Twist, and he begged her to be sure to
let him know directly she was in the least difficulty, or even
perplexity,--"about the suitors, for instance, or anything else.
You must let me be of some use in the world, you know," he said.

"But we shouldn't like it at all if we thought you were practising being
useful on us," said Anna-Rose "It's wholly foreign to our natures to
enjoy being the objects of anybody's philanthropy."

"Now I just wonder where you get all your long words from," said Mr.
Twist soothingly; and Anna-Rose laughed, and there was only one dimple
in the Twinkler family and Anna-Rose had got it.

"What do you want to get looking at _that_ for?" she
asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd
staring at the _Vaterland_, and got to where Anna-Felicitas
stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang
the young man was treating her to,--that terse, surprising, swift
hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was
hearing in such abundance for the first time.

The American passengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the
impotence of the great ship. Every one of them seemed to be violently
pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the _Vaterland_ as
every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and
presently arrived again,--the same ships she had seen depart coming back
unharmed, unhindered by her country's submarines. Only the two German
ladies, once more ignoring their American allegiance, looked angry. It
was incredible to them, simply _unfassbar_ as they said in their
thoughts, that any nation should dare inconvenience Germans, should dare
lay a finger, even the merest friendliest detaining one, on anything
belonging to the mighty, the inviolable Empire. Well, these Americans,
these dollar-grubbing Yankees, would soon get taught a sharp, deserved
lesson--but at this point they suddenly remembered they were Americans
themselves, and pulled up their thoughts violently, as it were, on their
haunches.

They turned, however, bitterly to the Twinkler girl as she pushed her
way through to her sister,--those renegade Junkers, those contemptible
little apostates--and asked her, after hearing her question to
Anna-Felicitas, with an extraordinary breaking out of pent-up emotion
where she, then, supposed she would have been at that moment if it
hadn't been for Germany.

"Not here I think," said Anna-Rose, instantly and fatally ready as she
always was to answer back and attempt what she called reasoned
conversation. "There wouldn't have been a war, so of course I wouldn't
have been here."

"Why, you wouldn't so much as have been born without Germany," said the
lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake
this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English
lie as to who began the war. "You owe your very existence to Germany.
You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of
life, instead of jeering at this representative--" she flung a finger
out toward the _Vaterland_--"this patient and dignified-in
-temporary-misfortune representative, of her power."

"I wasn't jeering," said Anna-Rose, defending herself and clutching at
Anna-Felicitas's sleeve to pull her away.

"You wouldn't have had a father at all but for Germany," said the other
lady, the one whose hair grew.

"And perhaps you will tell me," said the first one, "where you would
have been _then_."

"I don't believe," said Anna-Rose, her nose in the air, "I don't
believe I'd have ever been at a loss for a father."

The ladies, left speechless a moment by the arrogance as well as several
other things about this answer gave Anna-Rose an opportunity for further
reasoning with them, which she was unable to resist. "There are lots of
fathers," she said, "in England, who would I'm sure have been delighted
to take me on if Germany had failed me."

"England!"

"Take you on!"

"An English father for you? For a subject of the King of Prussia?"

"I--I'm afraid I--I'm going to be sick," gasped Anna-Felicitas suddenly.

"You're never going to be sick in this bit of bathwater, Miss Twinkler?"
exclaimed the young man, with the instant ungrudging admiration of one
who is confronted by real talent. "My, what a gift!"

Anna-Rose darted at Anna-Felicitas's drooping head, that which she had
been going to say back to the German ladies dissolving on her tongue.
"Oh no--_no_--" she wailed. "Oh _no_--not in your best hat, Columbus
darling--you can't--it's not done--and your hat'll shake off into the
water, and then there'll only be one between us and we shall never be
able to go out paying calls and things at the same time--come away and
sit down--Mr. Twist--Mr. Twist--oh, please come--"

Anna-Felicitas allowed herself to be led away, just in time as she
murmured, and sat down on the nearest seat and shut her eyes. She was
thankful Anna-Rose's attention had been diverted to her so instantly,
for it would have been very difficult to be sick with the ship as quiet
as one's own bedroom. Nothing short of the engine-room could have made
her sick now. She sat keeping her eyes shut and Anna-Rose's attention
riveted, wondering what she would do when there was no ship and
Anna-Rose was on the verge of hasty and unfortunate argument. Would she
have to learn to faint? But that would terrify poor Christopher so
dreadfully.

Anna-Felicitas pondered, her eyes shut, on this situation. Up to now in
her life she had always found that situations solved themselves. Given
time. And sometimes a little assistance. So, no doubt, would this one.
Anna-Rose would ripen and mellow. The German ladies would depart hence
and be no more seen; and it was unlikely she and Anna-Rose would meet at
such close quarters as a ship's cabin any persons so peculiarly and
unusually afflicting again. All situations solved themselves; or, if
they showed signs of not going to, one adopted the gentle methods that
helped them to get solved. Early in life she had discovered that objects
which cannot be removed or climbed over can be walked round. A little
deviousness, and the thing was done. She herself had in the most
masterly manner when she was four escaped church-going for several years
by a simple method, that seemed to her looking back very like an
inspiration, of getting round it. She had never objected to going, had
never put into words the powerful if vague dislike with which it filled
her when Sunday after Sunday she had to go and dangle her legs
helplessly for two hours from the chair she was put on in the enclosed
pew reserved for the _hohe graefliche Herrschaften_ from the Slosh.

Her father, a strict observer of the correct and a pious believer in
God for other people, attended Divine Service as regularly as he wound
the clocks and paid the accounts. He _repraesentierte_, as the German
phrase went; and his wife and children were expected to _repraesentieren_
too. Which they did uncomplainingly; for when one has to do with
determined husbands and fathers it is quickest not to complain. But the
pins and needles that patient child endured, Anna-Felicitas remembered,
looking back through the years at the bunched-up figure on the chair as
at a stranger, were something awful. The edge of the chair just caught
her legs in the pins and needles place. If she had been a little bigger
or a little smaller it wouldn't have happened; as it was, St. Paul
wrestling with beasts at Ephesus wasn't more heroic than Anna-Felicitas
perceived that distant child to have been, silently Sunday after Sunday
bearing her legs. Then one Sunday something snapped inside her, and she
heard her own voice floating out into the void above the heads of the
mumbling worshippers, and it said with a terrible distinctness in a sort
of monotonous wail: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a
second time, in the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon
this: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"--and a third time she
opened her mouth to repeat the outrageous statement, regardless of her
mother's startled hand laid on her arm, and of Anna-Rose's petrified
stare, and of the lifted faces of the congregation, and of the bent,
scandalized brows of the pastor,--impelled by something that possessed
her, unable to do anything but obey it; but her father, a man of deeds,
rose up in his place, took her in his arms, and carried her down the
stairs and out of the church. And the minute she found herself really
rescued, and out where the sun and wind, her well-known friends, were
larking about among the tombstones, she laid her cheek as affectionately
against her father's head as if she were a daughter to be proud of, and
would have purred if she had had had a purr as loudly as the most
satisfied and virtuous of cats.

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