by Henry James
“You express it perfectly,” said Mrs. Bonnycastle. “I couldn’t say it better myself.”
“But with her present, with her future, when they change like this young lady’s, I suppose everything else changes. How do you say it in America? She lets him slide.”
“We don’t say it at all!” Mrs. Bonnycastle cried. “She does nothing of the sort; for what do you take her? She sticks to him; that at least is what we EXPECT her to do,” she added with less assurance. “As I tell you, the type’s new and the case under consideration. We haven’t yet had time for complete study.”
“Oh of course I hope she sticks to him,” Vogelstein declared simply and with his German accent more audible, as it always was when he was slightly agitated.
For the rest of the trip he was rather restless. He wandered about the boat, talking little with the returning picnickers. Toward the last, as they drew near Washington and the white dome of the Capitol hung aloft before them, looking as simple as a suspended snowball, he found himself, on the deck, in proximity to Mrs. Steuben. He reproached himself with having rather neglected her during an entertainment for which he was indebted to her bounty, and he sought to repair his omission by a proper deference. But the only act of homage that occurred to him was to ask her as by chance whether Miss Day were, to her knowledge, engaged.
Mrs. Steuben turned her Southern eyes upon him with a look of almost romantic compassion. “To my knowledge? Why of course I’d know! I should think you’d know too. Didn’t you know she was engaged? Why she has been engaged since she was sixteen.”
Count Otto gazed at the dome of the Capitol. “To a gentleman from Utica?
“Yes, a native of her place. She’s expecting him soon.”
“I’m so very glad to hear it,” said Vogelstein, who decidedly, for his career, had promise. “And is she going to marry him?”
“Why what do people fall in love with each other FOR? I presume they’ll marry when she gets round to it. Ah if she had only been from the Sooth—!”
At this he broke quickly in: “But why have they never brought it off, as you say, in so many years?”
“Well, at first she was too young, and then she thought her family ought to see Europe—of course they could see it better WITH her— and they spent some time there. And then Mr. Bellamy had some business difficulties that made him feel as if he didn’t want to marry just then. But he has given up business and I presume feels more free. Of course it’s rather long, but all the while they’ve been engaged. It’s a true, true love,” said Mrs. Steuben, whose sound of the adjective was that of a feeble flute.
“Is his name Mr. Bellamy?” the Count asked with his haunting reminiscence. “D. F. Bellamy, so? And has he been in a store?”
“I don’t know what kind of business it was: it was some kind of business in Utica. I think he had a branch in New York. He’s one of the leading gentlemen of Utica and very highly educated. He’s a good deal older than Miss Day. He’s a very fine man—I presume a college man. He stands very high in Utica. I don’t know why you look as if you doubted it.”
Vogelstein assured Mrs. Steuben that he doubted nothing, and indeed what she told him was probably the more credible for seeming to him eminently strange. Bellamy had been the name of the gentleman who, a year and a half before, was to have met Pandora on the arrival of the German steamer; it was in Bellamy’s name that she had addressed herself with such effusion to Bellamy’s friend, the man in the straw hat who was about to fumble in her mother’s old clothes. This was a fact that seemed to Count Otto to finish the picture of her contradictions; it wanted at present no touch to be complete. Yet even as it hung there before him it continued to fascinate him, and he stared at it, detached from surrounding things and feeling a little as if he had been pitched out of an overturned vehicle, till the boat bumped against one of the outstanding piles of the wharf at which Mrs. Steuben’s party was to disembark. There was some delay in getting the steamer adjusted to the dock, during which the passengers watched the process over its side and extracted what entertainment they might from the appearance of the various persons collected to receive it. There were darkies and loafers and hackmen, and also vague individuals, the loosest and blankest he had ever seen anywhere, with tufts on their chins, toothpicks in their mouths, hands in their pockets, rumination in their jaws and diamond pins in their shirt-fronts, who looked as if they had sauntered over from Pennsylvania Avenue to while away half an hour, forsaking for that interval their various slanting postures in the porticoes of the hotels and the doorways of the saloons.
“Oh I’m so glad! How sweet of you to come down!” It was a voice close to Count Otto’s shoulder that spoke these words, and he had no need to turn to see from whom it proceeded. It had been in his ears the greater part of the day, though, as he now perceived, without the fullest richness of expression of which it was capable. Still less was he obliged to turn to discover to whom it was addressed, for the few simple words I have quoted had been flung across the narrowing interval of water, and a gentleman who had stepped to the edge of the dock without our young man’s observing him tossed back an immediate reply.
“I got here by the three o’clock train. They told me in K Street where you were, and I thought I’d come down and meet you.”
“Charming attention!” said Pandora Day with the laugh that seemed always to invite the whole of any company to partake in it; though for some moments after this she and her interlocutor appeared to continue the conversation only with their eyes. Meanwhile Vogelstein’s also were not idle. He looked at her visitor from head to foot, and he was aware that she was quite unconscious of his own proximity. The gentleman before him was tall, good-looking, well- dressed; evidently he would stand well not only at Utica, but, judging from the way he had planted himself on the dock, in any position that circumstances might compel him to take up. He was about forty years old; he had a black moustache and he seemed to look at the world over some counter-like expanse on which he invited it all warily and pleasantly to put down first its idea of the terms of a transaction. He waved a gloved hand at Pandora as if, when she exclaimed “Gracious, ain’t they long!” to urge her to be patient. She was patient several seconds and then asked him if he had any news. He looked at her briefly, in silence, smiling, after which he drew from his pocket a large letter with an official-looking seal and shook it jocosely above his head. This was discreetly, covertly done. No one but our young man appeared aware of how much was taking place—and poor Count Otto mainly felt it in the air. The boat was touching the wharf and the space between the pair inconsiderable.
“Department of State?” Pandora very prettily and soundlessly mouthed across at him.
“That’s what they call it.”
“Well, what country?”
“What’s your opinion of the Dutch?” the gentleman asked for answer.
“Oh gracious!” cried Pandora.
“Well, are you going to wait for the return trip?” said the gentleman.
Our silent sufferer turned away, and presently Mrs. Steuben and her companion disembarked together. When this lady entered a carriage with Miss Day the gentleman who had spoken to the girl followed them; the others scattered, and Vogelstein, declining with thanks a “lift” from Mrs. Bonnycastle, walked home alone and in some intensity of meditation. Two days later he saw in a newspaper an announcement that the President had offered the post of Minister to Holland to Mr. D. F. Bellamy of Utica; and in the course of a month he heard from Mrs. Steuben that Pandora, a thousand other duties performed, had finally “got round” to the altar of her own nuptials. He communicated this news to Mrs. Bonnycastle, who had not heard it but who, shrieking at the queer face he showed her, met it with the remark that there was now ground for a new induction as to the self- made girl.
A Passionate Pilgrim
I
Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I determined to spend the interval of six weeks in England, to which country my mind’s
eye only had as yet been introduced. I had formed in Italy and France a resolute preference for old inns, considering that what they sometimes cost the ungratified body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London, therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much to the east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay, I descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of the genius of “attendance” in the person of the solitary waiter. No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt I had cut a golden-ripe crop of English “impressions.” The coffee-room of the Red Lion, like so many other places and things I was destined to see in the motherland, seemed to have been waiting for long years, with just that sturdy sufferance of time written on its visage, for me to come and extract the romantic essence of it.
The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile failed to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so deeply buried in the soil of our early culture that, without some great upheaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when and where and how it begins. It makes an American’s enjoyment of England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home—at Saragossa Illinois—in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of mahogany, something higher than a man’s stature, furnished on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a narrow table—a table expected under stress to accommodate no less than four pairs of active British elbows. High pressure indeed had passed away from the Red Lion for ever. It now knew only that of memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling of mahogany, so dark with time and so polished with unremitted friction that by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out the dim reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated by the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age— the Derby favourite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpet—as old as the mahogany almost, as the Bank of England, as the Queen—into which the waiter had in his lonely revolutions trodden so many massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing beer that the glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognised it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type would be altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the mahogany partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that must have expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy screen refused even to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency.
While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a person whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be a fellow lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like myself, to have submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on the other side of my partition had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to the fire, exposed his back to it and, after consulting his watch, looked directly out of the window and indirectly at me. He was a man of something less than middle age and more than middle stature, though indeed you would have called him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for his emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his head, was dark short and fine. His eye was of a pale turbid grey, unsuited, perhaps, to his dark hair and well-drawn brows, but not altogether out of harmony with his colourless bilious complexion. His nose was aquiline and delicate; beneath it his moustache languished much rather than bristled. His mouth and chin were negative, or at the most provisional; not vulgar, doubtless, but ineffectually refined. A cold fatal gentlemanly weakness was expressed indeed in his attenuated person. His eye was restless and deprecating; his whole physiognomy, his manner of shifting his weight from foot to foot, the spiritless droop of his head, told of exhausted intentions, of a will relaxed. His dress was neat and “toned down”—he might have been in mourning. I made up my mind on three points: he was a bachelor, he was out of health, he was not indigenous to the soil. The waiter approached him, and they conversed in accents barely audible. I heard the words “claret,” “sherry” with a tentative inflexion, and finally “beer” with its last letter changed to “ah.” Perhaps he was a Russian in reduced circumstances; he reminded me slightly of certain sceptical cosmopolite Russians whom I had met on the Continent. While in my extravagant way I followed this train—for you see I was interested—there appeared a short brisk man with reddish- brown hair, with a vulgar nose, a sharp blue eye and a red beard confined to his lower jaw and chin. My putative Russian, still in possession of the rug, let his mild gaze stray over the dingy ornaments of the room. The other drew near, and his umbrella dealt a playful poke at the concave melancholy waistcoat. “A penny ha’penny for your thoughts!”
My friend, as I call him, uttered an exclamation, stared, then laid his two hands on the other’s shoulders. The latter looked round at me keenly, compassing me in a momentary glance. I read in its own vague light that this was a transatlantic eyebeam; and with such confidence that I hardly needed to see its owner, as he prepared, with his companion, to seat himself at the table adjoining my own, take from his overcoat-pocket three New York newspapers and lay them beside his plate. As my neighbours proceeded to dine I felt the crumbs of their conversation scattered pretty freely abroad. I could hear almost all they said, without straining to catch it, over the top of the partition that divided us. Occasionally their voices dropped to recovery of discretion, but the mystery pieced itself together as if on purpose to entertain me. Their speech was pitched in the key that may in English air be called alien in spite of a few coincidences. The voices were American, however, with a difference; and I had no hesitation in assigning the softer and clearer sound to the pale thin gentleman, whom I decidedly preferred to his comrade. The latter began to question him about his voyage.
“Horrible, horrible! I was deadly sick from the hour we left New York.”
“Well, you do look considerably reduced,” said the second-comer.
“Reduced! I’ve been on the verge of the grave. I haven’t slept six hours for three weeks.” This was said with great gravity.
“Well, I’ve made the voyage for the last time.”
“The plague you have! You mean to locate here permanently?”
“Oh it won’t be so very permanent!”
There was a pause; after which: “You’re the same merry old boy, Searle. Going to give up the ghost to-morrow, eh?”
“I almost wish I were.”
“You’re not so sweet on England then? I’ve heard people say at home that you dress and talk and act like an Englishman. But I know these people here and I know you. You’re not one of this crowd, Clement Searle, not you. You’ll go under here, sir; you’ll go under as sure as my name’s Simmons.”
Following this I heard a sudden clatter as of the drop of a knife and fork. “Well, you’re a delicate sort of creature, if it IS your ugly name! I’ve been wandering about all day in this accursed city, ready to cry with homesickness and heartsickness and every possible sort of sickness, and thinking, in the absence of anything better, of meeting you here this evening and of your uttering some sound of cheer and comfort and giving me some glimmer of hope. Go under? Ain’t I under now? I can’t do more than get under the ground!”
Mr. Simmons’s superior brightness appeared to flicker a moment in this gust of despair, but the next it was burning steady again. “DON’T ‘cry,’ Searle,” I heard him say. “Remember the waiter. I’ve grown Englishman enough for that. Fo
r heaven’s sake don’t let’s have any nerves. Nerves won’t do anything for you here. It’s best to come to the point. Tell me in three words what you expect of me.”
I heard another movement, as if poor Searle had collapsed in his chair. “Upon my word, sir, you’re quite inconceivable. You never got my letter?”
“Yes, I got your letter. I was never sorrier to get anything in my life.”
At this declaration Mr. Searle rattled out an oath, which it was well perhaps that I but partially heard. “Abijah Simmons,” he then cried, “what demon of perversity possesses you? Are you going to betray me here in a foreign land, to turn out a false friend, a heartless rogue?”
“Go on, sir,” said sturdy Simmons. “Pour it all out. I’ll wait till you’ve done. Your beer’s lovely,” he observed independently to the waiter. “I’ll have some more.”
“For God’s sake explain yourself!” his companion appealed.
There was a pause, at the end of which I heard Mr. Simmons set down his empty tankard with emphasis. “You poor morbid mooning man,” he resumed, “I don’t want to say anything to make you feel sore. I regularly pity you. But you must allow that you’ve acted more like a confirmed crank than a member of our best society— in which every one’s so sensible.”
