The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II

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The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II Page 18

by Bob Blaisdell


  “Every one thinks so—if you care to know,” said Winterbourne.

  “Of course I care to know!” Daisy exclaimed, seriously. “But I don’t believe it. They are only pretending to be shocked. They don’t really care a straw what I do. Besides, I don’t go round so much.”

  “I think you will find they do care. They will show it disagreeably.”

  Daisy looked at him a moment. “How disagreeably?”

  “Haven’t you noticed anything?” Winterbourne asked.

  “I have noticed you. But I noticed you were as stiff as an umbrella the first time I saw you.”

  “You will find I am not so stiff as several others,” said Winterbourne, smiling.

  “How shall I find it?”

  “By going to see the others.”

  “What will they do to me?”

  “They will give you the cold shoulder. Do you know what that means?”

  Daisy was looking at him intently; she began to color. “Do you mean as Mrs. Walker did the other night?”

  “Exactly!” said Winterbourne.

  She looked away at Giovanelli, who was decorating himself with his almond blossom. Then looking back at Winterbourne, “I shouldn’t think you would let people be so unkind!” she said.

  “How can I help it?” he asked.

  “I should think you would say something.”

  “I do say something;” and he paused a moment. “I say that your mother tells me that she believes you are engaged.”

  “Well, she does,” said Daisy, very simply.

  Winterbourne began to laugh. “And does Randolph believe it?” he asked.

  “I guess Randolph doesn’t believe anything,” said Daisy. Randolph’s scepticism excited Winterbourne to further hilarity, and he observed that Giovanelli was coming back to them. Daisy, observing it too, addressed herself again to her countryman. “Since you have mentioned it,” she said, “I am engaged.” . . . Winterbourne looked at her; he had stopped laughing. “You don’t believe!” she added.

  He was silent a moment; and then, “Yes, I believe it,” he said.

  “Oh no, you don’t!” she answered. “Well, then—I am not!”

  The young girl and her cicerone were on their way to the gate of the enclosure, so that Winterbourne, who had but lately entered, presently took leave of them. A week afterward he went to dine at a beautiful villa on the Cælian Hill, and, on arriving, dismissed his hired vehicle. The evening was charming, and he promised himself the satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past the vaguely-lighted monuments of the Forum. There was a waning moon in the sky, and her radiance was not brilliant, but she was veiled in a thin cloud-curtain which seemed to diffuse and equalize it. When, on his return from the villa (it was eleven o’clock), Winterbourne approached the dusky circle of the Colosseum, it recurred to him, as a lover of the picturesque, that the interior, in the pale moonshine, would be well worth a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches, near which, as he observed, an open carriage—one of the little Roman street-cabs—was stationed. Then he passed in, among the cavernous shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One-half of the gigantic circus was in deep shade, the other was sleeping in the luminous dusk. As he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous lines, out of “Manfred;” but before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma. Winterbourne walked to the middle of the arena, to take a more general glance, intending thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The great cross in the centre was covered with shadow; it was only as he drew near it that he made it out distinctly. Then he saw that two persons were stationed upon the low steps which formed its base. One of these was a woman, seated; her companion was standing in front of her.

  Presently the sound of the woman’s voice came to him distinctly in the warm night air. “Well, he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers may have looked at the Christian martyrs!” These were the words he heard, in the familiar accent of Miss Daisy Miller.

  “Let us hope he is not very hungry,” responded the ingenious Giovanelli. “He will have to take me first; you will serve for dessert!”

  Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror, and, it must be added, with a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of Daisy’s behavior, and the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect. He stood there, looking at her—looking at her companion, and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely, he himself must have been more brightly visible. He felt angry with himself that he had bothered so much about the right way of regarding Miss Daisy Miller. Then, as he was going to advance again, he checked himself; not from the fear that he was doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from cautious criticism. He turned away toward the entrance of the place, but, as he did so, he heard Daisy speak again.

  “Why, it was Mr. Winterbourne! He saw me, and he cuts me!”

  What a clever little reprobate she was, and how smartly she played at injured innocence! But he wouldn’t cut her. Winterbourne came forward again, and went toward the great cross. Daisy had got up; Giovanelli lifted his hat. Winterbourne had now begun to think simply of the craziness, from a sanitary point of view, of a delicate young girl lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria. What if she were a clever little reprobate? that was no reason for her dying of the perniciosa. “How long have you been here?” he asked, almost brutally.

  Daisy, lovely in the flattering moonlight, looked at him a moment. Then—“All the evening,” she answered, gently. . . . “I never saw anything so pretty.”

  “I am afraid,” said Winterbourne, “that you will not think Roman fever very pretty. This is the way people catch it. I wonder,” he added, turning to Giovanelli, “that you, a native Roman, should countenance such a terrible indiscretion.”

  “Ah,” said the handsome native, “for myself I am not afraid.”

  “Neither am I—for you! I am speaking for this young lady.”

  Giovanelli lifted his well-shaped eyebrows and showed his brilliant teeth. But he took Winterbourne’s rebuke with docility. “I told the Signorina it was a grave indiscretion; but when was the Signorina ever prudent?”

  “I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be!” the Signorina declared. “I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight; I shouldn’t have wanted to go home without that; and we have had the most beautiful time, haven’t we, Mr. Giovanelli? If there has been any danger, Eugenio can give me some pills. He has got some splendid pills.”

  “I should advise you,” said Winterbourne, “to drive home as fast as possible and take one!”

  “What you say is very wise,” Giovanelli rejoined. “I will go and make sure the carriage is at hand.” And he went forward rapidly.

  Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her; she seemed not in the least embarrassed. Winterbourne said nothing; Daisy chattered about the beauty of the place. “Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight!” she exclaimed. “That’s one good thing.” Then, noticing Winterbourne’s silence, she asked him why he didn’t speak. He made no answer; he only began to laugh. They passed under one of the dark archways; Giovanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped a moment, looking at the young American. “Did you believe I was engaged, the other day?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believed the other day,” said Winterbourne, still laughing.

  “Well, what do you believe now?”

  “I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!”

/>   He felt the young girl’s pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick gloom of the archway; she was apparently going to answer. But Giovanelli hurried her forward. “Quick! quick!” he said; “if we get in by midnight we are quite safe.”

  Daisy took her seat in the carriage, and the fortunate Italian placed himself beside her. “Don’t forget Eugenio’s pills!” said Winterbourne, as he lifted his hat.

  “I don’t care,” said Daisy in a little strange tone, “whether I have Roman fever or not!” Upon this the cab-driver cracked his whip, and they rolled away over the desultory patches of the antique pavement.

  Winterbourne, to do him justice, as it were, mentioned to no one that he had encountered Miss Miller, at midnight, in the Colosseum with a gentleman; but nevertheless, a couple of days later, the fact of her having been there under these circumstances was known to every member of the little American circle, and commented accordingly. Winterbourne reflected that they had of course known it at the hotel, and that, after Daisy’s return, there had been an exchange of remarks between the porter and the cabdriver. But the young man was conscious, at the same moment, that it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the little American flirt should be “talked about” by low-minded menials. These people, a day or two later, had serious information to give: the little American flirt was alarmingly ill. Winterbourne, when the rumor came to him, immediately went to the hotel for more news. He found that two or three charitable friends had preceded him, and that they were being entertained in Mrs. Miller’s salon by Randolph.

  “It’s going round at night,” said Randolph—“that’s what made her sick. She’s always going round at night. I shouldn’t think she’d want to, it’s so plaguy dark. You can’t see anything here at night, except when there’s a moon. In America there’s always a moon!” Mrs. Miller was invisible; she was now, at least, giving her daughter the advantage of her society. It was evident that Daisy was dangerously ill.

  Winterbourne went often to ask for news of her, and once he saw Mrs. Miller, who, though deeply alarmed, was, rather to his surprise, perfectly composed, and, as it appeared, a most efficient and judicious nurse. She talked a good deal about Dr. Davis, but Winterbourne paid her the compliment of saying to himself that she was not, after all, such a monstrous goose. “Daisy spoke of you the other day,” she said to him. “Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying, but that time I think she did. She gave me a message, she told me to tell you. She told me to tell you that she never was engaged to that handsome Italian. I am sure I am very glad; Mr. Giovanelli hasn’t been near us since she was taken ill. I thought he was so much of a gentleman; but I don’t call that very polite! A lady told me that he was afraid I was angry with him for taking Daisy round at night. Well, so I am; but I suppose he knows I’m a lady. I would scorn to scold him. Anyway, she says she’s not engaged. I don’t know why she wanted you to know; but she said to me three times, ‘Mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne.’ And then she told me to ask if you remembered the time you went to that castle in Switzerland. But I said I wouldn’t give any such messages as that. Only, if she is not engaged, I’m sure I’m glad to know it.”

  But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little. A week after this the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of the fever. Daisy’s grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring-flowers. Winterbourne stood there beside it, with a number of other mourners; a number larger than the scandal excited by the young lady’s career would have led you to expect. Near him stood Giovanelli, who came nearer still before Winterbourne turned away. Giovanelli was very pale: on this occasion he had no flower in his button-hole; he seemed to wish to say something. At last he said, “She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable;” and then he added in a moment, “and she was the most innocent.”

  Winterbourne looked at him, and presently repeated his words, “And the most innocent?”

  “The most innocent!”

  Winterbourne felt sore and angry. “Why the devil,” he asked, “did you take her to that fatal place?”

  Mr. Giovanelli’s urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked on the ground a moment, and then he said, “For myself I had no fear; and she wanted to go.”

  “That was no reason!” Winterbourne declared.

  The subtle Roman again dropped his eyes. “If she had lived, I should have got nothing. She would never have married me, I am sure.”

  “She would never have married you?”

  “For a moment I hoped so. But no. I am sure.”

  Winterbourne listened to him: he stood staring at the raw protuberance among the April daisies. When he turned away again, Mr. Giovanelli, with his light, slow step, had retired.

  Winterbourne almost immediately left Rome; but the following summer he again met his aunt, Mrs. Costello, at Vevay. Mrs. Costello was fond of Vevay. In the interval Winterbourne had often thought of Daisy Miller and her mystifying manners. One day he spoke of her to his aunt—said it was on his conscience that he had done her injustice.

  “I am sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. Costello. “How did your injustice affect her?”

  “She sent me a message before her death which I didn’t understand at the time; but I have understood it since. She would have appreciated one’s esteem.”

  “Is that a modest way,” asked Mrs. Costello, “of saying that she would have reciprocated one’s affection?”

  Winterbourne offered no answer to this question; but he presently said, “You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts.”

  Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report that he is “studying” hard—an intimation that he is much interested in a very clever foreign lady.

  SOURCE: Henry James, Jr. Daisy Miller: A Study. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878.

  * * *

  1. The first part was titled “Les Trois Couronnes” [The Three Crowns] in the original 1878 Cornhill Magazine publication.

  2. The second part was titled “Rome” in the original 1878 Cornhill Magazine publication.

  3. qui se passe ses fantaisies: French for “who indulges herself.”

  ULYSSES S. GRANT

  As the great general and former president Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) neared the end of his life, Grant’s friend Mark Twain encouraged him to finish writing his memoirs. No president ever wrote memoirs so well or as straightforwardly. This chapter describes his life immediately after his military service in the Mexican War in 1854 and leads up to “the coming crisis,” the Civil War, where Grant, to the surprise of many, eventually led the Union Army to its victory over the armies of the seceded states that made up the Confederacy.

  Chapter 16 from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885)

  MY FAMILY, ALL this while, was at the East. It consisted now of a wife and two children [Frederick Dent and Ulysses, Jr.]. I saw no chance of supporting them on the Pacific coast out of my pay as an army officer. I concluded, therefore, to resign, and in March applied for a leave of absence until the end of the July following, tendering my resignation to take effect at the end of that time. I left the Pacific coast very much attached to it, and with the full expectation of making it my future home. That expectation and that hope remained uppermost in my mind until the Lieutenant-Generalcy bill was introduced into Congress in the winter of 1863–4. The passage of that bill, and my promotion, blasted my last hope of ever becoming a citizen of the further West.

  In the late summer of 1854 I rejoined my family, to find in it a son whom I had never seen, born while I was on the Isthmus of Panama. I was now to commence, at the age of thirty-two, a new struggle for our support. My wife had a farm near St. Louis, to which we went, but I had no means to stock it. A house had to be built also. I worked very hard, n
ever losing a day because of bad weather, and accomplished the object in a moderate way. If nothing else could be done I would load a cord of wood on a wagon and take it to the city for sale. I managed to keep along very well until 1858, when I was attacked by fever and ague. I had suffered very severely and for a long time from this disease, while a boy in Ohio. It lasted now over a year, and, while it did not keep me in the house, it did interfere greatly with the amount of work I was able to perform. In the fall of 1858 I sold out my stock, crops and farming utensils at auction, and gave up farming.

  In the winter I established a partnership with Harry Boggs, a cousin of Mrs. Grant, in the real estate agency business. I spent that winter at St. Louis myself, but did not take my family into town until the spring. Our business might have become prosperous if I had been able to wait for it to grow. As it was, there was no more than one person could attend to, and not enough to support two families. While a citizen of Saint Louis and engaged in the real estate agency business, I was a candidate for the office of county engineer, an office of respectability and emolument which would have been very acceptable to me at that time. The incumbent was appointed by the county court, which consisted of five members. My opponent had the advantage of birth over me (he was a citizen by adoption) and carried off the prize. I now withdrew from the co-partnership with Boggs, and, in May, 1860, removed to Galena, Illinois, and took a clerkship in my father’s store.

  While a citizen of Missouri, my first opportunity for casting a vote at a Presidential election occurred. I had been in the army from before attaining my majority and had thought but little about politics, although I was a Whig by education and a great admirer of Mr. Clay. But the Whig party had ceased to exist before I had an opportunity of exercising the privilege of casting a ballot; the Know-Nothing party had taken its place, but was on the wane; and the Republican party was in a chaotic state and had not yet received a name. It had no existence in the Slave States except at points on the borders next to Free States. In St. Louis City and County, what afterwards became the Republican party was known as the Free-Soil Democracy, led by the Honorable Frank P. Blair. Most of my neighbors had known me as an officer of the army with Whig proclivities. They had been on the same side, and, on the death of their party, many had become Know-Nothings, or members of the American party. There was a lodge near my new home, and I was invited to join it. I accepted the invitation; was initiated; attended a meeting just one week later, and never went to another afterwards.

 

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