Collected Stories

‘Dear lady,’ I said, ‘I have no general ideas about him at all. He is just one of the phenomena I am going to observe. He seems to me a very fine young man. However,’ I added, ‘since you have mentioned last night I will admit that I thought he rather tantalised you. He played with your suspense.’

  ‘Why, he came at the last just to please me,’ said Mrs Nettlepoint.

  I was silent a moment. ‘Are you sure it was for your sake?’

  ‘Ah, perhaps it was for yours!’

  ‘When he went out on the balcony with that girl perhaps she asked him to come,’ I continued.

  ‘Perhaps she did. But why should he do everything she asks him?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but perhaps I shall know later. Not that he will tell me – for he will never tell me anything: he is not one of those who tell.’

  ‘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 continued, smiling.

  ‘You are cold-blooded – it’s uncanny!’ my companion exclaimed.

  ‘Ah, this is nothing yet! Wait a while – you’ll see. At sea in general I’m awful – I pass the limits. If I have outraged her in thought I will 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 suppose between them,’ said Mrs Nettlepoint.

  ‘Nothing 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 is not a person he could ever think of seriously.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I believe.’

  ‘You don’t observe – you imagine,’ Mrs Nettlepoint pursued. ‘How do you reconcile her laying a trap for Jasper with her going out to Liverpool on an errand of love?’

  ‘I don’t for an instant suppose she laid a trap; I believe she acted on the impulse of the moment. She is going out to Liverpool on an errand of marriage; that is 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 is 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 rejoined. ‘Decencies and violations – there is 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.

  ‘What is she doing?’

  ‘She is walking with your son.’

  Mrs Nettlepoint said nothing for a moment, then she broke out, inconsequently – ‘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 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 exclamation ‘Poor young thing!’

  ‘You think she is a good deal to be pitied, then?’

  ‘Well, her story sounds dreary – she told me a great 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 inquired.

  ‘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 a flirt. She gave me no answer, but went on to remark that it was odd and interesting to her 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 mixed up, so that on certain questions you couldn’t tell where you would find her. You would think she would 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 would be terribly wanting. Mrs Nettlepoint proceeded to observe (to such idle speculations does the vanity of a sea-voyage 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 is true that if you are very well brought up you are not ordinary,’ said Mrs Nettlepoint, smelling her strong salts. ‘You are a lady, at any rate. C’est toujours ça.’

  ‘And Miss Mavis isn’t one – is that what you mean?’

  ‘Well – you have 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 is 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 mother was concerned) had been eminently decent.

  ‘Yes, but she couldn’t bear it,’ said Mrs Nettlepoint.

  ‘Ah, if you know it I may confess that she has told me as much.’

  Mrs Nettlepoint 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 think she’s a flirt?’

  ‘Find out for yourself, since you pretend to study folks.’

  ‘Oh, your judgement would probably not at all determine mine. It’s in regard to yourself that I ask it.’

  ‘In regard to myself?’

  ‘To see the length of maternal immorality.’

  Mrs Nettlepoint continued to 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 will have no responsibility.’

  ‘Heavens, how you analyse! I haven’t in the least your passion for making up my mind.’

  ‘Then if you chance it you’ll be more immoral still.’

  ‘Your reasoning is strange,’ said the poor lady; ‘when it was you who tried to put it into my head yesterday that she had asked him to come.’

  ‘Yes, but in good faith.’

  ‘How do you mean in good faith?’

  ‘Why, as girls of that sort do. Their allowance and measure in such matters is much larger than that of young ladies who have been, as you say, very well brought up; and yet I am not sure that on the whole I don’t think them 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 goes on, 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.’

  ‘Well, if there is no harm from it what are you talking about and why am I immoral?’

  I hesitated, laughing. ‘I retract – you are sane and clear. I am sure she thinks there won’t be any harm,’ I added. ‘That’s the great point.’

&
nbsp; ‘The great point?’

  ‘I mean, to be settled.’

  ‘Mercy, we are not trying them! How can we settle it?’

  ‘I mean of course in our minds. There will be nothing more interesting for the next ten days for our minds to exercise themselves upon.’

  ‘They will get very tired of it,’ said Mrs Nettlepoint.

  ‘No, no, because the interest will increase and the plot will thicken. It can’t help it.’ She looked at me as if she thought me slightly Mephistophelean, and I went on – ‘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 will behave properly now about coming in to see me; I told her she ought to.’

  ‘I am glad of that,’ I said. ‘Keep her with you as much as possible.’

  ‘I don’t follow you much,’ Mrs Nettlepoint replied, ‘but so far as I do I don’t think your remarks are in very good taste.’

  ‘I’m too excited, I lose my head, cold-blooded as you think me. Doesn’t she like Mr Porterfield?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the worst of it.’

  ‘The worst of it?’

  ‘He’s so good – there’s no fault to be found with him. Otherwise she would 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 childish muddles which parents in America might prevent so much more than they do. The thing is to insist on one’s daughter’s waiting, on the engagement’s being long; and then after you have got that started to take it on every occasion as little seriously as possible – to make it die out. You can easily tire it out. However, Mr Porterfield has taken it 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 absolutely no money.’

  ‘He ought to have got some, in seven years.’

  ‘So I think she thinks. There are some sorts of poverty that are contemptible. But he has a little more now. That’s why he won’t wait any longer. His mother has come out, she has something – a little – and she is able to help him. She will 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 asked, cynically.

  ‘I haven’t the least idea. But it doesn’t sound very inspiring. He has not been to America since he first went out.’

  ‘That’s an odd way of adoring her.’

  ‘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. ‘And did she say 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 is very little money at home. She has tried to make money; she has written little things and painted little things, but her talent is apparently not in that direction. Her father has had a long illness and has lost his place – he was in receipt of a salary in connection 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.’

  ‘That only makes it the more honourable. She will go through with it, whatever it costs, rather than disappoint him after he has waited so long. It is true,’ I continued, ‘that when a woman acts from a sense of honour—’

  ‘Well, when she does?’ said Mrs Nettlepoint, for I hesitated perceptibly.

  ‘It is so extravagant a course that some one has to pay for it.’

  ‘You are 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 is in perfect good-humour.’

  ‘Well, we must try and keep her so,’ I said. ‘You must take care that Jasper neglects nothing.’

  I know not what reflections 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 is 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 upon us.’

  ‘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 exclaimed.

  ‘Ah, wait a few days!’ I replied, getting up to leave her.

  III

  THE Patagonia was slow, but she was spacious and comfortable, and there was a kind of motherly decency in her long, nursing rock and her rustling, old-fashioned gait. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We were not numerous enough to squeeze each other and yet we were not too few to entertain – with that familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great bare field of the ocean, beneath 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 heart-beats, 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 satisfaction the Patagonia was not a racer. One had never thought of the sea as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there is no place so safe from the land. When it does not give you trouble it takes it 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 is produced, becomes in itself a kind of bliss, and the clean stage of the deck shows you 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 go to sleep. I, at any rate, dozed a great deal, lying on my rug with a French novel, and when I opened my eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint passing with his mother’s protégée on his arm. Somehow at these moments, between sleeping and waking, I had an inconsequent sense that they were a part of the French novel. 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 step was required in their interest, but as we were not in Europe yet the business could not be said to have begun. The four little Pecks, in the enjoyment of untrammelled leisure, 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 especially to be trusted to run between the legs of the stewards when these
attendants arrived with bowls of soup for the languid ladies. Their mother was too busy recounting to her fellow-passengers how many years Miss Mavis had been engaged. In the blank of a marine existence things that are nobody’s business very soon become everybody’s, and this was just one of those facts that are propagated with a mysterious and ridiculous rapidity. The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of things, of air and space and progress, but it is also very safe, for there is 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 grow at last so insipid that, in comparison, revelations as to the personal history of one’s companions have a taste even when one cares little about the people.

  Jasper Nettlepoint sat on my left hand when he was not upstairs seeing that Miss Mavis had her repast comfortably on deck. His mother’s place would have been next mine had she shown herself, and then that of the young lady under her care. The two ladies, in other words, would have been between us, Jasper marking the limit of the party on that side. Miss Mavis was present at luncheon the first day, but dinner passed without her coming in, and when it was half over Jasper remarked that he would go up and look after her.

  ‘Isn’t that young lady coming – the one who was here to lunch?’ Mrs Peck asked of me as he left the saloon.

  ‘Apparently not. My friend tells me she doesn’t like the saloon.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say she’s sick, do you?’

  ‘Oh no, not in this weather. But she likes to be above.’

  ‘And is that gentleman gone up to her?’

  ‘Yes, she’s under his mother’s care.’

  ‘And is his mother up there, too?’ asked Mrs Peck, whose processes were homely and direct.

  ‘No, she remains in her cabin. People have different tastes. Perhaps that’s one reason why Miss Mavis doesn’t come to table,’ I added – ‘her chaperone not being able to accompany her.’