by Henry James
“If she didn’t ask him, what you say is a great wrong to her,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint.
“Yes, if she didn’t. But you say that to protect Jasper—not to protect her,” I smiled.
“You ARE cold-blooded—it’s uncanny!” my friend exclaimed.
“Ah this is nothing yet! Wait a while—you’ll see. At sea in general I’m awful—I exceed the limits. If I’ve outraged her in thought I’ll jump overboard. There are ways of asking—a man doesn’t need to tell a woman that—without the crude words.”
“I don’t know what you imagine between them,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint.
“Well, nothing,” I allowed, “but what was visible on the surface. It transpired, as the newspapers say, that they were old friends.”
“He met her at some promiscuous party—I asked him about it afterwards. She’s not a person”—my hostess was confident—”whom he could ever think of seriously.”
“That’s exactly what I believe.”
“You don’t observe—you know—you imagine,” Mrs. Nettlepoint continued to argue. “How do you reconcile her laying a trap for Jasper with her going out to Liverpool on an errand of love?”
Oh I wasn’t to be caught that way! “I don’t for an instant suppose she laid a trap; I believe she acted on the impulse of the moment. She’s going out to Liverpool on an errand of marriage; that’s not necessarily the same thing as an errand of love, especially for one who happens to have had a personal impression of the gentleman she’s engaged to.”
“Well, there are certain decencies which in such a situation the most abandoned of her sex would still observe. You apparently judge her capable—on no evidence—of violating them.”
“Ah you don’t understand the shades of things,” I returned. “Decencies and violations, dear lady—there’s no need for such heavy artillery! I can perfectly imagine that without the least immodesty she should have said to Jasper on the balcony, in fact if not in words: ‘I’m in dreadful spirits, but if you come I shall feel better, and that will be pleasant for you too.’”
“And why is she in dreadful spirits?”
“She isn’t!” I replied, laughing.
My poor friend wondered. “What then is she doing?”
“She’s walking with your son.”
Mrs. Nettlepoint for a moment said nothing; then she treated me to another inconsequence. “Ah she’s horrid!”
“No, she’s charming!” I protested.
“You mean she’s ‘curious’?”
“Well, for me it’s the same thing!”
This led my friend of course to declare once more that I was cold- blooded. On the afternoon of the morrow we had another talk, and she told me that in the morning Miss Mavis had paid her a long visit. She knew nothing, poor creature, about anything, but her intentions were good and she was evidently in her own eyes conscientious and decorous. And Mrs. Nettlepoint concluded these remarks with the sigh “Unfortunate person!”
“You think she’s a good deal to be pitied then?”
“Well, her story sounds dreary—she told me a good deal of it. She fell to talking little by little and went from one thing to another. She’s in that situation when a girl MUST open herself—to some woman.”
“Hasn’t she got Jasper?” I asked.
“He isn’t a woman. You strike me as jealous of him,” my companion added.
“I daresay HE thinks so—or will before the end. Ah no—ah no!” And I asked Mrs. Nettlepoint if our young lady struck her as, very grossly, a flirt. She gave me no answer, but went on to remark that she found it odd and interesting to see the way a girl like Grace Mavis resembled the girls of the kind she herself knew better, the girls of “society,” at the same time that she differed from them; and the way the differences and resemblances were so mixed up that on certain questions you couldn’t tell where you’d find her. You’d think she’d feel as you did because you had found her feeling so, and then suddenly, in regard to some other matter—which was yet quite the same—she’d be utterly wanting. Mrs. Nettlepoint proceeded to observe—to such idle speculations does the vacancy of sea-hours give encouragement—that she wondered whether it were better to be an ordinary girl very well brought up or an extraordinary girl not brought up at all.
“Oh I go in for the extraordinary girl under all circumstances.”
It’s true that if you’re VERY well brought up you’re not, you can’t be, ordinary,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint, smelling her strong salts. “You’re a lady, at any rate.”
“And Miss Mavis is fifty miles out—is that what you mean?”
“Well—you’ve seen her mother.”
“Yes, but I think your contention would be that among such people the mother doesn’t count.”
“Precisely, and that’s bad.”
“I see what you mean. But isn’t it rather hard? If your mother doesn’t know anything it’s better you should be independent of her, and yet if you are that constitutes a bad note.” I added that Mrs. Mavis had appeared to count sufficiently two nights before. She had said and done everything she wanted, while the girl sat silent and respectful. Grace’s attitude, so far as her parent was concerned, had been eminently decent.
“Yes, but she ‘squirmed’ for her,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint.
“Ah if you know it I may confess she has told me as much.”
My friend stared. “Told YOU? There’s one of the things they do!”
“Well, it was only a word. Won’t you let me know whether you do think her a flirt?”
“Try her yourself—that’s better than asking another woman; especially as you pretend to study folk.”
“Oh your judgement wouldn’t probably at all determine mine. It’s as bearing on YOU I ask it.” Which, however, demanded explanation, so that I was duly frank; confessing myself curious as to how far maternal immorality would go.
It made her at first but repeat my words. “Maternal immorality?”
“You desire your son to have every possible distraction on his voyage, and if you can make up your mind in the sense I refer to that will make it all right. He’ll have no responsibility.”
“Heavens, how you analyse!” she cried. “I haven’t in the least your passion for making up my mind.”
“Then if you chance it,” I returned, “you’ll be more immoral still.”
“Your reasoning’s strange,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint; “when it was you who tried to put into my head yesterday that she had asked him to come.”
“Yes, but in good faith.”
“What do you mean, in such a case, by that?”
“Why, as girls of that sort do. Their allowance and measure in such matters,” I expounded, “is much larger than that of young persons who have been, as you say, VERY well brought up; and yet I’m not sure that on the whole I don’t think them thereby the more innocent. Miss Mavis is engaged, and she’s to be married next week, but it’s an old old story, and there’s no more romance in it than if she were going to be photographed. So her usual life proceeds, and her usual life consists—and that of ces demoiselles in general—in having plenty of gentlemen’s society. Having it I mean without having any harm from it.”
Mrs. Nettlepoint had given me due attention. “Well, if there’s no harm from it what are you talking about and why am I immoral?”
I hesitated, laughing. “I retract—you’re sane and clear. I’m sure she thinks there won’t be any harm,” I added. “That’s the great point.”
“The great point?”
“To be settled, I mean.”
“Mercy, we’re not trying them!” cried my friend. “How can WE settle it?”
“I mean of course in our minds. There will be nothing more interesting these next ten days for our minds to exercise themselves upon.”
“Then they’ll get terribly tired of it,” said Mrs. Nettlepoint.
“No, no—because the interest will increase and the plot will thicken. It simply can’t NOT,” I insisted. She looked at me as if she th
ought me more than Mephistophelean, and I went back to something she had lately mentioned. “So she told you everything in her life was dreary?”
“Not everything, but most things. And she didn’t tell me so much as I guessed it. She’ll tell me more the next time. She’ll behave properly now about coming in to see me; I told her she ought to.”
“I’m glad of that,” I said. “Keep her with you as much as possible.”
“I don’t follow you closely,” Mrs. Nettlepoint replied, “but so far as I do I don’t think your remarks in the best taste.”
“Well, I’m too excited, I lose my head in these sports,” I had to recognise—”cold-blooded as you think me. Doesn’t she like Mr. Porterfield?”
“Yes, that’s the worst of it.”
I kept making her stare. “The worst of it?”
“He’s so good—there’s no fault to be found with him. Otherwise she’d have thrown it all up. It has dragged on since she was eighteen: she became engaged to him before he went abroad to study. It was one of those very young and perfectly needless blunders that parents in America might make so much less possible than they do. The thing is to insist on one’s daughter waiting, on the engagement’s being long; and then, after you’ve got that started, to take it on every occasion as little seriously as possible—to make it die out. You can easily tire it to death,” Mrs. Nettlepoint competently stated. “However,” she concluded, “Mr. Porterfield has taken this one seriously for some years. He has done his part to keep it alive. She says he adores her.”
“His part? Surely his part would have been to marry her by this time.”
“He has really no money.” My friend was even more confidently able to report it than I had been.
“He ought to have got some, in seven years,” I audibly reflected.
“So I think she thinks. There are some sorts of helplessness that are contemptible. However, a small difference has taken place. That’s why he won’t wait any longer. His mother has come out, she has something—a little—and she’s able to assist him. She’ll live with them and bear some of the expenses, and after her death the son will have what there is.”
“How old is she?” I cynically asked.
“I haven’t the least idea. But it doesn’t, on his part, sound very heroic—or very inspiring for our friend here. He hasn’t been to America since he first went out.”
“That’s an odd way of adoring her,” I observed.
“I made that objection mentally, but I didn’t express it to her. She met it indeed a little by telling me that he had had other chances to marry.”
“That surprises me,” I remarked. “But did she say,” I asked, “that SHE had had?”
“No, and that’s one of the things I thought nice in her; for she must have had. She didn’t try to make out that he had spoiled her life. She has three other sisters and there’s very little money at home. She has tried to make money; she has written little things and painted little things—and dreadful little things they must have been; too bad to think of. Her father has had a long illness and has lost his place—he was in receipt of a salary in connexion with some waterworks—and one of her sisters has lately become a widow, with children and without means. And so as in fact she never has married any one else, whatever opportunities she may have encountered, she appears to have just made up her mind to go out to Mr. Porterfield as the least of her evils. But it isn’t very amusing.”
“Well,” I judged after all, “that only makes her doing it the more honourable. She’ll go through with it, whatever it costs, rather than disappoint him after he has waited so long. It’s true,” I continued, “that when a woman acts from a sense of honour—!”
“Well, when she does?” said Mrs. Nettlepoint, for I hung back perceptibly.
“It’s often so extravagant and unnatural a proceeding as to entail heavy costs on some one.”
“You’re very impertinent. We all have to pay for each other all the while and for each other’s virtues as well as vices.”
“That’s precisely why I shall be sorry for Mr. Porterfield when she steps off the ship with her little bill. I mean with her teeth clenched.”
“Her teeth are not in the least clenched. She’s quite at her ease now”—Mrs. Nettlepoint could answer for that.
“Well, we must try and keep her so,” I said.
“You must take care that Jasper neglects nothing.” I scarce know what reflexions this innocent pleasantry of mine provoked on the good lady’s part; the upshot of them at all events was to make her say: “Well, I never asked her to come; I’m very glad of that. It’s all their own doing.”
“‘Their’ own—you mean Jasper’s and hers?”
“No indeed. I mean her mother’s and Mrs. Allen’s; the girl’s too of course. They put themselves on us by main force.”
“Oh yes, I can testify to that. Therefore I’m glad too. We should have missed it, I think.”
“How seriously you take it!” Mrs. Nettlepoint amusedly cried.
“Ah wait a few days!”—and I got up to leave her.
CHAPTER III
The Patagonia was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old- fashioned gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We weren’t numerous enough quite to elbow each other and yet weren’t too few to support—with that familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great bare field of the ocean and under the great bright glass of the sky. I had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at all; but now I had a revelation of how in a midsummer mood it could please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably quiet—save for the great regular swell of its heartbeats, the pulse of its life; and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was a positive godsend the Patagonia was no racer. One had never thought of the sea as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there’s no place so safe from the land. When it doesn’t confer trouble it takes trouble away—takes away letters and telegrams and newspapers and visits and duties and efforts, all the complications, all the superfluities and superstitions that we have stuffed into our terrene life. The simple absence of the post, when the particular conditions enable you to enjoy the great fact by which it’s produced, becomes in itself a positive bliss, and the clean boards of the deck turn to the stage of a play that amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the movement and interaction, in the strong sea-light, of figures that end by representing something—something moreover of which the interest is never, even in its keenness, too great to suffer you to slumber. I at any rate dozed to excess, stretched on my rug with a French novel, and when I opened my eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint pass with the young woman confided to his mother’s care on his arm. Somehow at these moments, between sleeping and waking, I inconsequently felt that my French novel had set them in motion. Perhaps this was because I had fallen into the trick, at the start, of regarding Grace Mavis almost as a married woman, which, as every one knows, is the necessary status of the heroine of such a work. Every revolution of our engine at any rate would contribute to the effect of making her one.
In the saloon, at meals, my neighbour on the right was a certain little Mrs. Peck, a very short and very round person whose head was enveloped in a “cloud” (a cloud of dirty white wool) and who promptly let me know that she was going to Europe for the education of her children. I had already perceived—an hour after we left the dock— that some energetic measure was required in their interest, but as we were not in Europe yet the redemption of the four little Pecks was stayed. Enjoying untrammelled leisure they swarmed about the ship as if they had been pirates boarding her, and their mother was as powerless to check their licence as if she had been gagged and stowed away in the hold. They were especiall
y to be trusted to dive between the legs of the stewards when these attendants arrived with bowls of soup for the languid ladies. Their mother was too busy counting over to her fellow-passengers all the years Miss Mavis had been engaged. In the blank of our common detachment things that were nobody’s business very soon became everybody’s, and this was just one of those facts that are propagated with mysterious and ridiculous speed. The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of things, of air and space and progress, but it’s also very safe, for there’s no compression, no sounding-board, to make speakers responsible. And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in the air, the mind is flat and everything recurs—the bells, the meals, the stewards’ faces, the romp of children, the walk, the clothes, the very shoes and buttons of passengers taking their exercise. These things finally grow at once so circumstantial and so arid that, in comparison, lights on the personal history of one’s companions become a substitute for the friendly flicker of the lost fireside.
