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Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

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




"_Mein Kind_," said her father, standing her up on a convenient tomb so
that her eyes were level with his, "is it then true about the cold
potato?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas patting his face, pleased at what her legs
were feeling like again.

"_Mein Kind_," said her father, "do you not know it is wrong to lie?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas placidly, the heavenly blue of her eyes,
gazing straight into his, exactly like the mild sky above the trees.

"No?" echoed her father, staring at her. "But, _Kind_, you know what a
lie is?"

"No," said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him tenderly in her satisfaction at
being restored to a decent pair of legs; and as he still stood staring
at her she put her hands one on each of his cheeks and squeezed his face
together and murmured, "Oh, I do _love_ you."




CHAPTER X


Lost in the contemplation of a distant past Anna-Felicitas sat with her
eyes shut long after she needn't have.

She had forgotten about the German ladies, and America, and the future
so instantly pressing on her, and was away on the shores of the Baltic
again, where bits of amber where washed up after a storm, and the pale
rushes grew in shallow sunny water that was hardly salt, and the air
seemed for ever sweet with lilac. All the cottage gardens in the little
village that clustered round a clearing in the trees had lilac bushes in
them, for there was something in the soil that made lilacs be more
wonderful there than anywhere else in the world, and in May the whole
forest as far as one could walk was soaked with the smell of it. After
rain on a May evening, what a wonder it was; what a wonder, that running
down the black, oozing forest paths between wet pine stems, out on to
the shore to look at the sun setting below the great sullen clouds of
the afternoon over on one's left where Denmark was, and that lifting of
one's face to the exquisite mingling of the delicate sea smell and the
lilac. And then there was home to come back to when the forest began to
look too dark and its deep silence made one's flesh creep--home, and a
light in the window where ones mother was. Incredible the security of
those days, the safe warmth of them, the careless roominess....

"You know if you _could_ manage to feel a little better, Anna-F.," said
Anna-Rose's voice entreatingly in her ear, "it's time we began to get
off this ship."

Anna-Felicitas opened her eyes, and got up all confused and
self-reproachful. Everybody had melted away from that part of the deck
except herself and Anna-Rose. The ship was lying quiet at last alongside
the wharf. She had over-done being ill this time. She was ashamed of
herself for having wandered off so easily and comfortably into the past,
and left poor Christopher alone in the difficult present.

"I'm so sorry," she said smiling apologetically, and giving her hat a
tug of determination symbolic of her being ready for anything,
especially America. "I think I must have gone to sleep. Have you--" she
hesitated and dropped her voice. "Are they--are the Clouston Sacks
visible yet?"

"I thought I saw them," said Anna-Rose, dropping her voice too, and
looking round uneasily over her shoulder. "I'd have come here sooner to
see how you were getting on, but I thought I saw them, and they looked
so like what I think they will look like that I went into our cabin
again for a few minutes. But it wasn't them. They've found the people
they were after, and have gone."

"There's a great crowd waiting," said Mr. Twist, coming up, "and I think
we ought to go and look for your friends. As you don't know what they're
like and they don't know what you're like it may be difficult. Heaven
forbid," he continued, "that I should hurry you, but I have to catch a
train if I'm to get home to-night, and I don't intend to catch it until
I've handed you over safely to the Sacks."

"Those Sacks--" began Anna-Rose; and then she finished irrelevantly by
remarking that it was the details of life that were discouraging,--from
which Anna Felicitas knew that Christopher's heart was once more in her
boots.

"Come along," said Mr. Twist, urging them to wards the gangway.
"Anything you've got to say about life I shall be glad to hear, but at
some time when we're more at leisure."

It had never occurred to either of the twins that the Clouston Sacks
would not meet them. They had taken it for granted from the beginning
that some form of Sack, either male or female, or at least their
plenipotentiary, would be on the wharf to take them away to the Sack
lair, as Anna-Felicitas alluded to the family mansion. It was, they
knew, in Boston, but Boston conveyed nothing to them. Only Mr. Twist
knew how far away it was. He had always supposed the Sacks would meet
their young charges, stay that night in New York, and continue on to
Boston next day. The twins were so certain they would be met that Mr.
Twist was certain too. He had concluded, with a growingly empty feeling
in his heart as the time of separation drew near, that all that now
remained for him to do on behalf of the Twinklers was to hand them over
to the Sacks. And then leave them. And then go home to that mother he
loved but had for some time known he didn't like,--go home a bereft and
lonely man.

But out of the crowd on the pier, any of whom might have been Sacks for
all the Twinklers, eagerly scanning faces, knew, nobody in fact seemed
to be Sacks. At least, nobody came forward and said, "Are you the
Twinklers?" Other people fell into each other's arms; the air was full
of the noise of kissing, the loud legitimate kissing of relations; but
nobody took any notice of the twins. For a long while they stood
waiting. Their luggage was examined, and Mr. Twist's luggage--only his
was baggage--was examined, and the kissing and exclaiming crowd swayed
hither and thither, and broke up into groups, and was shot through by
interviewers, and got packed off into taxis, and grew thinner and
thinner, and at last was so thin that the concealment of the Sacks in it
was no longer possible.

There were no Sacks.

To the last few groups of people left in the great glass-roofed hall
piled with bags of wool and sulphur, Mr. Twist went up boldly and asked
if they were intending to meet some young ladies called Twinkler. His
tone, owing to perturbation, was rather more than one of inquiry, it
almost sounded menacing; and the answers he got were cold. He wandered
about uncertainly from group to group, his soft felt hat on the back of
his head and his brow getting more and more puckered; and Anna-Rose,
anxiously looking on from afar, became impatient at last of these
refusals of everybody to be Sacks, and thought that perhaps Mr. Twist
wasn't making himself clear.

Impetuous by nature and little given to calm waiting, she approached a
group on her own account and asked them, enunciating her words very
clearly, whether they were by any chance Mr. and Mrs. Clouston Sack.

The group, which was entirely female, stared round and down at her in
astonished silence, and shook its heads; and as she saw Mr. Twist being
turned away for the fifth time in the distance a wave of red despair
came over her, and she said, reproach in her voice and tears in her
eyes, "But _somebody's_ got to be the Sacks."

Upon which the group she was addressing stared at her in a more
astonished silence than ever.

Mr. Twist came up mopping his brow and took he arm and led her back to
Anna-Felicitas, who was taking care of the luggage and had sat down
philosophically to await developments on a bag of sulphur. She didn't
yet know what sulphur looked like on one's clothes after one has sat on
it, and smiled cheerfully and encouragingly at Anna-Rose as she came
towards her.

"There _are_ no Sacks," said Anna-Rose, facing the truth.

"It's exactly like that Uncle Arthur of yours," said Mr. Twist, mopping
his forehead and speaking almost vindictively. "Exactly like him. A man
like that _would_ have the sort of friends that don't meet one."

"Well, we must do without the Sacks," said Anna-Felicitas, rising from
the sulphur bag with the look of serene courage that can only dwell on
the face of one who is free from care as to what has happened to him
behind. "And it isn't," she added sweetly to Mr. Twist, "as if we hadn't
got _you_."

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, suddenly seeing daylight. "Of course. What do
Sacks really matter? I mean, for a day or two? You'll take us somewhere
where we can wait till we've found them."

"Yes," said Anna-Felicitas. "Some nice quiet old-fashioned coffee-house
sort of place, like the one the Brontes went to in St. Paul's Churchyard
the first time they were launched into the world."

"Yes. Some inexpensive place."

"Suited to the frugal."

"Because although we've got L200, even that will need watching or it
will go."

During this conversation Mr. Twist stood mopping his forehead. As often
as he mopped it it broke out afresh and had to be mopped again. They
were the only passengers left now, and had become very conspicuous. He
couldn't but perceive that a group of officials with grim,
locked-up-looking mouths were eyeing him and the Twinklers attentively.

Always zealous in the cause of virtue, America provided her wharves and
landing-places with officials specially appointed to guard the purity of
family life. Family life obviously cannot be pure without a marriage
being either in it or having at some time or other passed through it.
The officials engaged in eyeing Mr. Twist and the twins were all married
themselves, and were well acquainted with that awful purity. But eye the
Twist and Twinkler party as they might, they could see no trace of
marriage anywhere about it.

On the contrary, the man of the party looked so uneasy that it amounted
to conscious illegality.

"Sisters?" said the chief official, stepping forward abruptly.

"Eh?" said Mr. Twist, pausing in the wiping of his forehead.

"These here--" said the official, jerking his thumb at the twins. "They
your sisters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with one voice. "Do you think we look like him?"

"Daughters?"

"No," said Mr. Twist stiffly.

"No," said the twins, with an ever greater vigour of repudiation. "You
_can't_ really think we look as much like him as all that?"

"Wife and sister-in-law?"

Then the Twinklers laughed. They laughed aloud, even Anna-Rose
forgetting her cares for a moment. But they were flattered, because it
was at least a proof that they looked thoroughly grown-up.

"Then if they ain't your sisters, and they ain't your daughters, and
they ain't your wife and sister-in-law, p'raps you'll tell me--"

"These young ladies are not anything at all of mine, sir," said Mr.
Twist vehemently.

"Don't you get sir-ing me, now," said the official sticking out his jaw.
"This is a free country, and I'll have no darned cheek."

"These young ladies in no way belong to me," said Mr. Twist more
patiently. "They're my friends."

"Oh. Friends, are they? Then p'raps you'll tell me what you're going to
do with them next."

"Do with them?" repeated Mr. Twist, as he stared with puckered brow at
the twins. "That's exactly what I wish I knew."

The official scanned him from head to foot with triumphant contempt. He
had got one of them, anyhow. He felt quite refreshed already. There had
been a slump in sinners the past week, and he was as full of suppressed
energy and as much tormented by it as an unexercised and overfed horse.
"Step this way," he ordered curtly, waving Mr. Twist towards a wooden
erection that was apparently an office. "Oh, don't you worry about the
girls," he added, as his prey seemed disinclined to leave them.

But Mr. Twist did worry. He saw Ellis Island looming up behind the two
figures that were looking on in an astonishment that had not yet had
time to turn into dismay as he was marched off out of sight. "I'll be
back in a minute," he called over his shoulder.

"That's as may be," remarked the official grimly.

But he was back; if not in a minute in a little more than five minutes,
still accompanied by the official, but an official magically changed
into tameness and amiability, desirous to help, instructing his
inferiors to carry Mr. Twist's and the young ladies' baggage to a taxi.

It was the teapot that had saved him,--that blessed teapot that was
always protruding itself benevolently into his life. Mr. Twist had
identified himself with it, and it had instantly saved him. In the
shelter of his teapot Mr. Twist could go anywhere and do anything in
America. Everybody had it. Everybody knew it. It was as pervasive of
America as Ford's cars, but cosily, quietly pervasive. It was only less
visible because it stayed at home. It was more like a wife than Ford's
cars were. From a sinner caught red-handed, Mr. Twist, its amiable
creator, leapt to the position of one who can do no wrong, for he had
not only placed his teapot between himself and judgment but had
accompanied his proofs of identity by a suitable number of dollar bills,
pressed inconspicuously into the official's conveniently placed hand.

The twins found themselves being treated with distinction. They were
helped into the taxi by the official himself, and what was to happen to
them next was left entirely to the decision and discretion of Mr.
Twist--a man so much worried that at that moment he hadn't any of
either. He couldn't even answer when asked where the taxi was to go to.
He had missed his train, and he tried not to think of his mother's
disappointment, the thought was so upsetting. But he wouldn't have
caught it if he could, for how could he leave these two poor children?

"I'm more than ever convinced," he said, pushing his hat still further
off his forehead, and staring at the back of the Twinkler trunks piled
up in front of him next to the driver, while the disregarded official at
the door still went on asking him where he wished the cab to go to,
"that children should all have parents."




CHAPTER XI


The hotel they were finally sent to by the official, goaded at
last by Mr. Twist's want of a made-up mind into independent
instructions to the cabman, was the Ritz. He thought this very
suitable for the evolver of Twist's Non-Trickler, and it was only
when they were being rushed along at what the twins, used to the
behaviour of London taxis and not altogether unacquainted with
the prudent and police-supervised deliberation of the taxis of
Berlin, regarded as a skid-collision-and-mutilation-provoking
speed, that a protest from Anna-Rose conveyed to Mr. Twist where
they were heading for.

"An hotel called Ritz sounds very expensive," she said. "I've heard
Uncle Arthur talk of one there is in London and one there is in Paris,
and he said that only damned American millionaires could afford to stay
in them. Anna-Felicitas and me aren't American millionaires--"

"Or damned," put in Anna-Felicitas.

"--but quite the contrary," said Anna-Rose, "hadn't you better take us
somewhere else?"

"Somewhere like where the Brontes stayed in London," said Anna-Felicitas
harping on this idea. "Where cheapness is combined with historical
associations."

"Oh Lord, it don't matter," said Mr. Twist, who for the first time in
their friendship seemed ruffled.

"Indeed it does," said Anna-Rose anxiously.

"You forget we've got to husband our resources," said Anna-Felicitas.

"You mustn't run away with the idea that because we've got L200 we're
the same as millionaires," said Anna-Rose.

"Uncle Arthur," said Anna-Felicitas, "frequently told us that L200 is a
very vast sum; but he equally frequently told us that it isn't."

"It was when he was talking about having given to us that he said it was
such a lot," said Anna-Rose.

"He said that as long as we had it we would be rich," said
Anna-Felicitas, "but directly we hadn't it we would be poor."

"So we'd rather not go to the Ritz, please," said Anna-Rose, "if you
don't mind."

The taxi was stopped, and Mr. Twist got out and consulted the driver.
The thought of his Uncle Charles as a temporary refuge for the twins
floated across his brain, but was rejected because Uncle Charles would
speak to no woman under fifty except from his pulpit, and approached
those he did speak to with caution till they were sixty. He regarded
them as one of the chief causes of modern unrest. He liked them so much
that he hated them. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.
Uncle Charles was no good as a refuge.

"Well now, see here," said the driver at last, after Mr. Twist had
rejected such varied suggestions of something small and quiet as the
Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Biltmore, "you tell me where you want
to go to and I'll take you there."

"I want to go to the place your mother would stay in if she came up for
a day or two from the country," said Mr. Twist helplessly.

"Get right in then, and I'll take you back to the Ritz," said the
driver.

But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity he was
unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy pleasantries with
him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in a street off the less
desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of him.

It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are both
noisy and expensive. It was full of foreigners,--real foreigners, the
twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like themselves, but
people with yellow faces and black eyes. They looked very seedy and
shabby, and smoked very much, and talked volubly in unknown tongues. The
entrance hall, a place of mottled marble, with clerks behind a counter
all of whose faces looked as if they were masks, was thick with them;
and it was when they turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas
passed and Anna-Rose was thinking proudly, "Yes, you don't see anything
like that every day, do you," and herself looked fondly at her Columbus,
that she saw that it wasn't Columbus's beauty at all but the sulphur on
the back of her skirt.

This spoilt Anna-Rose's arrival in New York. All the way up in the lift
to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was trying to brush
it off, for the dress was Anna-F.'s very best one.

"That's all your grips, ain't it?" said the youth in buttons who had
come up with them, dumping their bags down on the bedroom floor.

"Our what?" said Anna-Rose, to whom the expression was new. "Do you mean
our bags?"

"No. Grips. These here," said the youth.

"Is that what they're called in America?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with the
intelligent interest of a traveller determined to understand and
appreciate everything, while Anna-Rose, still greatly upset by the
condition of the best skirt but unwilling to expatiate upon it before
the youth, continued to brush her down as best she could with her
handkerchief.

"I don't call them. It's what they are," said the youth. "What I want to
know is, are they all here?"

"How interesting that you don't drop your h's," said Anna-Felicitas,
gazing at him. "The rest of you is so _like_ no h's."

The youth said nothing to that, the line of thought being one he didn't
follow.

"Those _are_ all our--grips, I think," said Anna-Rose counting them
round the corner of Anna-Felicitas's skirt. "Thank you very much," she
added after a pause, as he still lingered.

But this didn't cause him to disappear as it would have in England.
Instead, he picked up a metal bottle with a stopper off the table, and
shook it and announced that their ice-water bottle was empty. "Want some
ice water?" he inquired.

"What for?" asked Anna-Felicitas.

"What for?" echoed the youth.

"Thank you," said Anna-Rose, who didn't care about the youth's manner
which seemed to her familiar, "we don't want ice water, but we should be
glad of a little hot water."

"You'll get all you want of that in there," said the youth, jerking his
head towards a door that led into a bathroom. "It's ice water and ink
that you get out of me."

"Really?" said Anna-Felicitas, gazing at him with even more intelligent
interest, almost as if she were prepared, it being America, a country,
she had heard, of considerable mechanical ingenuity, to find his person
bristling with taps which only needed turning.

"We don't want either, thank you," said Anna-Rose.

The youth lingered. Anna-Rose's brushing began to grow vehement. Why
didn't he go? She didn't want to have to be rude to him and hurt his
feelings by asking him to go, but why didn't he? Anna-Felicitas, who was
much too pleasantly detached, thought Anna-Rose, for such a situation,
the door being wide open to the passage and the ungetridable youth
standing there staring, was leisurely taking off her hat and smoothing
her hair.

"Suppose you're new to this country," said the youth after a pause.

"Brand," said Anna-Felicitas pleasantly.

"Then p'raps," said the youth, "you don't know that the feller who
brings up your grips gets a tip."

"Of course we know that," said Anna-Rose, standing up straight and
trying to look stately.

"Then if you know why don't you do it?"

"Do it?" she repeated, endeavouring to chill him into respectfulness by
haughtily throwing back her head. "Of course we shall do it. At the
proper time and place."

"Which is, as you must have noticed," added Anna-Felicitas gently,
"departure and the front door."

"That's all right," said the youth, "but that's only one of the times
and places. That's the last one. Where we've got to now is the first
one."

"Do I understand," said Anna-Rose, trying to be very dignified, while
her heart shrank within her, for what sort of sum did one offer people
like this?--"that to America one tips at the beginning as well?"

"Yep," said the youth. "And in the middle too. Right along through.
Never miss an opportunity, is as good a slogan as you'll get when it
comes to tipping."

"I believe you'd have liked Kipps," said Anna-Felicitas meditatively,
shaking some dust off her hat and remembering the orgy of tipping that
immortal young man went in for at the seaside hotel.

"What I like now," said the youth, growing more easy before their
manifest youth and ignorance, "is tips. Guess you can call it Kipps if
it pleases you."

Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse "It's horrid, I think,
to ask for presents," she said to the youth in deep humiliation, more on
his account than hers.

"Presents? I'm not asking for presents. I'm telling you what's done,"
said the youth. And he had spots on his face. And he was repugnant to
her.

Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a shilling. He took it, and
remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it, went away; and
Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist knocked and
asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.

"He might have said thank you," she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas,
giving a final desperate brushing to the sulphur.

"I expect he'll come to a bad end," said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a
thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables laid for
dinner. It wasn't the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to
have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort.
The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing
their detachment from it by sitting in a corner of the room playing
dominoes. It was a big room, all looking-glasses and windows, and the
street outside was badly paved and a great noise of passing motor-vans
came in and drowned most of what Mr. Twist was saying. It was an
unlovely place, a place in which one might easily feel homesick and that
the world was empty of affection, if one let oneself go that way. The
twins wouldn't. They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be
daunted by these externals. For there was Mr. Twist, their friend and
stand-by, still with them, and hadn't they got each other? But they felt
uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied them with buttered
toast and macaroons and was as attentive as usual, had a somnambulatory
quality in his attention. He looked like a man who is doing things in a
dream. He looked like one who is absorbed in something else. His
forehead still was puckered, and what could it be puckered about, seeing
that he had got home, and was going back to his mother, and had a clear
and uncomplicated future ahead of him, and anyhow was a man?

"Have you got something on your mind?" asked Anna-Rose at last, when he
hadn't even heard a question she asked,--he, the polite, the interested,
the sympathetic friend of the journey across.

Mr. Twist, sitting tilted back in his chair, his hands deep in his
pockets, looked up from the macaroons he had been staring at and said,
"Yes."

"Tell us what it is," suggested Anna-Felicitas.

"You," said Mr. Twist.

"Me?"

"Both of you. You both of you go together. You're in one lump in my
mind. And on it too," finished Mr. Twist ruefully.

"That's only because," explained Anna-Felicitas, "you've got the idea
we want such a lot of taking care of. Get rid of that, and you'll feel
quite comfortable again. Why not regard us merely as pleasant friends?"

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

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Fidel and Che: a revolutionary friendship
Articles published by guardian.co.uk Books

Despite red faces over its fictional content, the Holocaust memoir that impressed Oprah Winfrey is still to be published
When Argentinian doctor Che Guevara and Cuban lawyer Fidel Castro met in Mexico City, it was the beginning of a friendship that would change the world. Simon Reid-Henry talks about the contrasting personalities of the leading men in his groundbreaking dual biography, Fidel and Che

Obituary: Donald Westlake

The disputed Holocaust memoir which was dropped from Penguin Group's publication schedule at the end of December is set to appear as a work of fiction.

Herman Rosenblat's memoir - which Oprah Winfrey called "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television - recounted how as a teenage boy in a Nazi concentration camp, he was kept alive by the food which was thrown to him by a young girl, Roma Radzicky. Penguin's US imprint Berkley Books had planned to publish the story, which sees Rosenblat reunited with Radzicky on a blind date years later, as Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived, next month.

But a Holocaust historian said it would have been impossible to approach the fence in the Schlieben concentration camp to throw food over it, concluding that this part of the story was made-up. Berkley initially defended the book, saying it was a work of memory, but then decided to cancel its planned publication, and demanded the return of the advance it had made to Rosenblat. A $25m film based on the book, to be called The Flower of the Fence, is still going ahead, with production due to start this year.

Publisher York House Press based in White Plains, New York, has entered into a tentative agreement with the film production company to publish a novel based on the film script early this spring. It said the book would be "grounded in fact", and would rise "to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility".

A spokesperson for York House Press condemned the attacks which were made on the 80-year-old Rosenblat after the veracity of his story was questioned, describing them as a "savage" response to what was otherwise "a credible, heart-wrenching, and verifiable account" of his time in the concentration camp.

"No deliberate untruth is permissible, but beneath any fabrication is motivation and intent. We believe Mr. Rosenblat's motivations were very human, understandable and forgivable," the spokesperson said. "It is beyond our expertise to know how Holocaust survivors cope with their trauma. Do they deny, try to forget, rationalise or fantasise and promote fiction along with truth? Perhaps the coping mechanisms are as individual as the survivors themselves."

The president of the company producing the film, Harris Salomon from Atlantic Overseas Productions, said the book, "regardless of its shortcomings", would "challenge, educate and enlighten" readers about the horrors of the Holocaust. "The documented fact, acknowledged by his critics, is that Herman is a survivor of concentration camps," he said.

But Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst, said that neither she nor Rosenblat were involved with this version of his story. "Usually book rights from films come out after the movie is released," she told guardian.co.uk. "I think the timing on this is very insensitive."

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