Christopher and Columbus

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Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim, Illustrated by Arthur Litle

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Title: Christopher and Columbus

Author: Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

Release Date: January 10, 2005 [eBook #14646]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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COLUMBUS***

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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.]

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
endimanché
.