Christopher And Columbus

Book 392: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Action & Adventure; World War I; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

As the First World War looms, Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas, seventeen-year-old orphan twins, are thrust upon relatives. But Uncle Arthur, a blustering patriot, is a reluctant guardian: the twins are half-German and, who knows, they could be spying from the nursery window... Packed off to America, they meet Mr Twist, a wealthy engineer with a tendency to motherliness, who befriends them on the voyage. However, he has failed to consider the pitfalls of taking such young and beautiful women under his wing, especially two who will continue to require this protection long after the ship has docked, and who are incapable of behaving with tact. Many adventures ensue (and befall them) in this sparklingly witty, romantic novel in which Elizabeth von Armin explores the suspicions cast upon the two Annas and Mr Twist in a country poised for war.

Release date: March 6, 2014

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 272

Sample

(1866–1941) was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Sydney, Australia, and brought up in England. Travelling in Italy with her
father in 1889, she met her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. They were married in London the following
year and lived in Berlin. After five years of marriage the von Arnims moved to their family estate, Nassenheide, in Pomerania:
Elizabeth’s experience and deep love of Nassenheide were to be wittily encapsulated in her first and most famous novel, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898. The twenty-one books she then went on to write were signed ‘By the author of Elizabeth and
Her German Garden’, and later simply ‘By Elizabeth’.


Elizabeth von Arnim gave birth to four daughters and a son, whose tutors at Nassenheide included E. M. Forster and Hugh Walpole.
Her idyllic Prussian days were, however, to be abruptly ended when, in 1908, debt forced the von Arnims to sell the estate.
They moved to England, and in 1910 Count von Arnim died. Buying a site in Switzerland, Elizabeth built the Château Soleil
where she worked on her books and entertained such friends as H. G. Wells (with whom she had an affair), Katherine Mansfield
(her cousin), John Middleton Murry and Frank Swinnerton. On the outbreak of war she managed to escape to England, but she
was unable to rescue her daughter Felicitas, who died in Germany. In 1916 Elizabeth von Arnim married Francis, second Earl
Russell, brother of Bertrand Russell, whom she had met three years previously. This proved to be a disastrous union: in the
first year of marriage Elizabeth ran away to America, and in 1919 the couple finally separated.


A greatly admired literary figure of her time, described by Alice Meynell as ‘one of the three finest wits of her day’, Elizabeth
spent her later years in Switzerland, London, and the French Riviera where she wrote her autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (Virago 1995) in 1936. On the outbreak of the Second World War she moved to America, where she died two years later at the
age of seventy-five.


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
realised that in front of them lay a great deal of grey, 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-Rose 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 perhaps having 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 towards 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 agonised 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 lifetime, 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.


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


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

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


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


‘No. And thieves don’t break in and steal either in heaven,’ continued Anna - Rose, ‘and the reason why is that there isn’t anything to steal.’


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


‘Oh, nobody ever steals them,’ said Anna-Rose.


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


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


‘Unrecognisable,’ said the nursemaid promptly.

‘Unrecognisable?’ echoed Anna-Felicitas.

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


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


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


The stewardess allowed her roving eye to alight for a moment on the two objects beneath the rug. Their chairs were close together,
and the rug covered them both up to their chins. Over the top of it their heads appeared, exactly alike as far as she could
see in the dusk; round heads, each with a blue knitted cap pulled well over its ears, and round eyes staring at her with what
anybody except the stewardess would have recognised as a passionate desire for some sort of reassurance. They might have been
seven instead of seventeen for all the stewardess could tell. They looked younger than anything she had yet seen sitting alone
on a deck and asking questions. But she was an exasperated widow, who had never had children and wasn’t to be touched by anything
except a tip, besides despising, because she was herself a second-class stewardess, all second-class passengers,—‘As one does,’ Anna-Rose explained later on to Anna-Felicitas, ‘and the same principle applies to Jews.’ So she
said with an acidity completely at variance with the promise of her cap, ‘Ask the Captain,’ and disappeared.


The twins looked at each other. They knew very well that captains on ships were mighty beings who were not asked questions.

‘She’s trifling with us,’ murmured Anna-Felicitas.

‘Yes,’ Anna - Rose was obliged to admit, though the thought was repugnant to her that they should look like people a stewardess
would dare trifle with.


‘Perhaps she thinks we’re younger than we are,’ she said after a silence.

‘Yes. She couldn’t see how long our dresses are, because of the rug.’

‘No. And it’s only that end of us that really shows we’re grown up.’

‘Yes. She ought to have seen us six months ago.’

Indeed she ought. Even the stewardess would have been surprised at the activities and complete appearance of the two pupæ
now rolled motionless in the rug. For, six months ago, they had both been probationers in a children’s hospital in Worcestershire,
arrayed, even as the stewardess, in spotless caps, hurrying hither and thither with trays of food, sweeping and washing up,
learning to make beds in a given time, and be deft, and quick, and never tired, and always punctual.


This place had been got them by the efforts and influence of their Aunt Alice, that aunt who had given them the rug on their
departure and who had omitted to celebrate their birthday. She was an amiable aunt, but she didn’t understand about birthdays.
It was the first one they had had since they were complete orphans, and so they were rather sensitive about it. But they hadn’t
cried, because since their mother’s death they had done with crying. What could there ever again be in the world bad enough
to cry about after that? And besides, just before she dropped away from them into the unconsciousness out of which she never
came back, but instead just dropped a little further into death, she had opened her eyes unexpectedly and caught them sitting
together in a row by her bed, two images of agony, with tears rolling down their swollen faces and their noses in a hopeless
state, and after looking at them a moment as if she had slowly come up from some vast depth and distance and were gradually
recognising them, she had whispered with a flicker of the old encouraging smile that had comforted every hurt and bruise they
had ever had, ‘Don’t cry … little darlings, don’t cry. …’


But on that first birthday after her death they had got more and more solemn as time passed, and breakfast was cleared away,
and there were no sounds, prick up their ears as they might, of subdued preparations in the next room, no stealthy going up
and down stairs to fetch the presents, and at last no hope at all of the final glorious flinging open of the door and the vision inside of two cakes all glittering with candles, each on a table covered with flowers
and all the things one has most wanted.


Their aunt didn’t know. How should she? England was a great and beloved country, but it didn’t have proper birthdays.

‘Every country has one drawback,’ Anna-Rose explained to Anna-Felicitas when the morning was finally over, in case she should
by any chance be thinking badly of the dear country that had produced their mother as well as Shakespeare, ‘and not knowing
about birthdays is England’s.’


‘There’s Uncle Arthur,’ said Anna-Felicitas, whose honest mind groped continually after accuracy.

‘Yes,’ Anna-Rose admitted after a pause. ‘Yes. There’s Uncle Arthur.’

UNCLE ARTHUR was the husband of Aunt Alice. He didn’t like foreigners, and said so. He never had liked them, and had always said so. It
wasn’t the war at all, it was the foreigners. But as the war went on, and these German nieces of his wife became more and
more, as he told her, a blighted nuisance, so did he become more and more pointed, and said he didn’t mind French foreigners,
nor Russian foreigners; and a few weeks later, that it wasn’t Italian foreigners either that he minded; and still later, that
nor was it foreigners indigenous to the soil of countries called neutral. These things he said aloud at meals in a general
way. To his wife when alone he said much more.


Anna-Rose, who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to soften his heart by offering to read aloud to him in the evenings
when he came home weary from his daily avocations, which were golf. Her own suggestion instantly projected a touching picture
on her impressionable imagination of youth, grateful for a roof over its head, in return alleviating the tedium of crabbed
age by introducing its uncle, who from his remarks was evidently unacquainted with them, to the best productions of the great masters of English literature.


But Uncle Arthur merely stared at her with a lack-lustre eye when she proposed it, from his wide-legged position on the hearthrug,
where he was moving money about in trouser-pockets of the best material. And later on she discovered that he had always supposed
the Faery Queen, and Adonais, and In Memoriam, names he had heard at intervals during his life, for he was fifty and such things do sometimes get mentioned, were well-known
racehorses.


Uncle Arthur, like Onkel Col, was a very good man, and though he said things about foreigners he did stick to these unfortunate
alien nieces longer than one would have supposed possible if one had overheard what he said to Aunt Alice in the seclusion
of their bed. His ordered existence, shaken enough by the war, Heaven knew, was shaken in its innermost parts, in its very
marrow, by the arrival of the two Germans. Other people round about had Belgians in their homes, and groaned; but who but
he, the most immensely British of anybody, had Germans? And he couldn’t groan, because they were, besides being motherless
creatures, his own wife’s flesh and blood. Not openly at least could he groan; but he could and did do it in bed. Why on earth
that silly mother of theirs couldn’t have stayed quietly on her Pomeranian sand-heap where she belonged, instead of coming
gallivanting over to England, and then when she had got there not even decently staying alive and seeing to her children herself, he at
frequent intervals told Aunt Alice in bed that he would like to know.


Aunt Alice, who after twenty years of life with Uncle Arthur was both silent and sleek (for he fed her well), sighed and said
nothing. She herself was quietly going through very much on behalf of her nieces. Jessup didn’t like handing dishes to Germans.
The tradespeople twitted the cook with having to cook for them, and were facetious about sausages and asked how one made sauerkraut.
Her acquaintances told her they were very sorry for her, and said they supposed she knew what she was doing and that it was
all right about spies, but really one heard such strange things, one never could possibly tell even with children; and regularly
the local policeman bicycled over to see if the aliens, who were registered at the county-town police-station, were still
safe. And then they looked so very German, Aunt Alice felt. There was no mistaking them. And every time they opened their
mouths there were all those r’s rolling about. She hardly liked callers to find her nieces in her drawing-room at tea-time,
they were so difficult to explain; yet they were too old to shut up in a nursery.


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


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


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