Christopher and Columbus | Page 2

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