Christopher and Columbus
By the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1919. 12mo, 435 pp. Illus. $1.60.
IN a quiet and unpretending way, this sentimental farce-comedy rounds out a rather notable achievement in cosmopolitanism; for it exhibits as shrewd an appreciation of American middle-class life as the same author revealed of English and German middle-class life in her earlier books. Unlike them, it could not conceivably be reread by anyone; but, like them, it is sure to be read through with chuckles by the reader who picks it up. Its humor, in spite of extreme timeliness, is at the expense of odds and ends of life which will remain funny — the spy hysteria of war-time, the California hotel colony of gossiping Easterners, the whimsies of advertising, and the faddishness which some of us carried even into our war-benevolences. A good sample of the author’s edged felicity is one of the ladies of the hotel colony who ‘ was knitting socks for the Allied armies in France the next winter, but it being warm just then in California they were cotton socks because wool made her hands too hot.’
Christopher and Columbus are Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas, the seventeen-year-old twin daughters of a Junker father and an English mother. On the outbreak of the war their widowed mother takes them to England; she dies soon afterward, leaving them to an aunt; the aunt’s husband has them bundled off to friends in America; the friends with one consent divorce or die or otherwise become unavailable; and the twins descend bag and baggage upon a benevolent companion of their voyage, Mr. Edward Twist, the famed inventor of Twist’s Non-Trickler Teapot. The entrance of America into the war renders the twins enemy aliens once more — a situation out of which they are assisted, after the right number of farcical vicissitudes, by Mr. Twist and a young English officer on sick leave.
One might trace certain tricks of the author to their genesis in Dickens. But why hunt butterflies with a blunderbuss? The sole business of the reader of this book is to chuckle at and with the twins — after which, if he be afflicted with highbrow friends, there is nothing to stop his pretending that he never heard of it. W. F.