Great Short Novels of Henry James
“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 buttonhole; 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 Vevey. Mrs. Costello was fond of Vevey. 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.
An International Episode
An International Episode
BESSIE ALDEN, the heroine of An International Episode (1878), is noteworthy as the first of the James girls to turn down the proposal of an old-world aristocrat. She is a more cultivated and socially entrenched figure than Daisy Miller, though quite as ingenuous in her way. Daisy is a small-town, altogether average American girl who cannot even conceive of herself as the bride of a count or a marchesse, whereas Bessie seizes upon such a conception only to rise above it. In her character the primal sincerity of her forebears is combined with a Jamesian sensitivity to the “momentos and reverberations of greatness” in the life of ancient aristocracies; and there is scarcely anything more typical or touching in her treatment of her noble suitor than the solemn manner in which she lectures him on his alleged failure to live up to his social position. Her refusal of Lord Lambeth has as little of the accidental or gratuitous about it as Isabel Archer’s refusal of Lord Warburton in The Portrait of a Lady (1880). In both cases the American heroine’s capacity to say no to a “great personage” is to be taken as a leading motive in the drama of transatlantic relations.
On the biographical plane An International Episode can be said to reveal something of James’s social experience in London. Bessie Alden, for example, wholly rejects the assumptions of superiority which come to light as soon as her suitor’s family become aware of her existence. It is her idea that an American young lady of good standing in her own country is in every way the equal of the “best people” in Europe; and it is chiefly because of her insistence on this principal that she gives up Lord Lambeth. And in this connection it is interesting to cite the evidence of E. S. Nadal, a secretary at the American Embassy in London in the seventies, who relates in his memoirs that James often spoke to him about “the rudeness encountered from some of the London social leaders.” In his writings of that period Nadal could see signs that “his personal relations with English society were very much in his mind.”—“An American woman, Mrs. Westgate in An International Episode, says that an English woman had said to her, ‘In one’s own class,’ meaning the middle class and meaning also that the American woman belonged to that class. The American woman didn’t see what right the English woman had to talk to her in that manner. This was a transcript of an incident James related to me one night when we were walking about the London streets. Some lady of the English middle class, whom he had lately visited in the country, had said to him, ‘That is true of the aristocracy, but in one’s own class it is different,’ meaning, said James, ‘her class and mine.’ Rather than this, he said he preferred to be regarded as a foreigner.” *
Bessie Alden’s behavior was resented, of course, by British readers, just as Daisy Miller’s was resented by American readers. James, however, took it all in with gloating satisfaction, delighted by the contrast, with the “dramas upon dramas . . . and innumerable points of view,” thus disclosed. He felt that the reaction of the public justified his faith in the theme of the “international situation.” But conscious as he was of his expatriate status, he was disturbed to learn that some people professed to see a breach of manners in his story of “a Bostonian nymph who rejects an English duke”—as an irate London reviewer summed up Bessie Alden’s case. Hence even while the story was running serially in The Cornhill Magazine he wrote to his mother that he hoped she would not, like many of his friends in England, take it as an offence against his hosts. “It seems to me myself that I have been very delicate; but I shall keep off dangerous ground in future. It is an entirely new sensation for them (the people here) to be (at all
delicately) ironized or satirized, from the American point of view. . . .”
An International Episode should be read as a companion-piece to Daisy Miller. Both stories have a clarity of outline and a lightness and wit of phrasing which James sacrificed in later years for effects of a different sort; and both stories have a charm of time and place that is unforgettable. The Rome frequented by American travelers of the seventies has never been quite so done as in Daisy Miller. And the description of summertime New York and of Newport as seen through the eyes of Lord Lambeth and his friend Mr. Beaumont is nearly as captivating.
* Quoted by Van Wyck Brooks in The Pilgrimage of Henry James.
PART I
FOUR YEARS ago—in 1874—two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer, and, arriving in New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the fervid temperature of that city. Disembarking upon the wharf, they climbed into one of those huge high-hung coaches which convey passengers to the hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping, took their course through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is not, perhaps, the most favorable one; still, it is not without its picturesque and even brilliant side. Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travelers advanced—looking out on each side of them at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-colored, heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble facades glittering in the strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings, banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horsecars, and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The young men had exchanged few observations; but in crossing Union Square, in front of the monument to Washington—in the very shadow, indeed, projected by the image of the pater patriae—one of them remarked to the other, “It seems a rum-looking place.”
“Ah, very odd, very odd,” said the other, who was the clever man of the two.
“Pity it’s so beastly hot,” resumed the first speaker after a pause.
“You know we are in a low latitude,” said his friend.
“I daresay,” remarked the other.
“I wonder,” said the second speaker presently, “if they can give one a bath?”
“I daresay not,” rejoined the other.
“Oh, I say!” cried his comrade.
This animated discussion was checked by their arrival at the hotel, which had been recommended to them by an American gentleman whose acquaintance they made—with whom, indeed, they became very intimate—on the steamer, and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and introduce them, in a friendly way, to the proprietor. This plan, however, had been defeated by their friend’s finding that his “partner” was awaiting him on the wharf and that his commercial associate desired him instantly to come and give his attention to certain telegrams received from St. Louis. But the two Englishmen, with nothing but their national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They found that a bath was not unattainable, and were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal—more, indeed, than they had ever done before on a single occasion—they made their way into the dining room of the hotel, which was a spacious restaurant, with a fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs, and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea voyage, is, under any circumstances, a delightful occasion, and there was something particularly agreeable in the circumstances in which our young Englishmen found themselves. They were extremely good natured young men; they were more observant than they appeared; in a sort of inarticulate, accidentally dissimulative fashion, they were highly appreciative. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the elder, who was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little table, which was a very different affair from the great clattering seesaw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide pavement, where there were other plants in tubs, and rows of spreading trees, and beyond which there was a large shady square, without any palings, and with marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other facades of white marble and of pale chocolate-colored stone, squaring themselves against the deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade and the heat, there was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable streetcars, and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of many pedestrians, a large proportion of whom were young women in Pompadour-looking dresses. Within, the place was cool and vaguely lighted, with the plash of water, the odor of flowers, and the flitting of French waiters, as I have said, upon soundless carpets.
“It’s rather like Paris, you know,” said the younger of our two travelers.
“It’s like Paris—only more so,” his companion rejoined.
“I suppose it’s the French waiters,” said the first speaker. “Why don’t they have French waiters in London?”
“Fancy a French waiter at a club,” said his friend.
The young Englishman started a little, as if he could not fancy it. “In Paris I’m very apt to dine at a place where there’s an English waiter. Don’t you know what’s-his-name’s, close to the thingumbob? They always set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can’t speak French.”
“Well, you can’t.” And the elder of the young Englishmen unfolded his napkin.
His companion took no notice whatever of this declaration. “I say,” he resumed in a moment, “I suppose we must learn to speak American. I suppose we must take lessons.”
“I can’t understand them,” said the clever man.
“What the deuce is he saying?” asked his comrade, appealing from the French waiter.
“He is recommending some soft-shell crabs,” said the clever man.
And so, in desultory observation of the idiosyncrasies of the new society in which they found themselves, the young Englishmen proceeded to dine—going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and dishes, of which their attendant offered them a very long list. After dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighboring streets. The early dusk of waning summer was coming on, but the heat was still very great. The pavements were hot even to the stout boot soles of the British travelers, and the trees along the curbstone emitted strange exotic odors. The young men wandered through the adjoining square—that queer place without palings, and with marble walks arranged in black and white lozenges. There were a great many benches, crowded with shabby-looking people, and the travelers remarked, very justly, that it was not much like Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly lighted windows. At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horsecars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister hum of mosquitoes. The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge transparent cage, flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a sort of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passersby promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with everyone else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor, with their legs stretched out, together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket office of a railway station, before a brilliantly illuminated counter of vast extent. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their hands, had a dejected, exhausted look; their garments were not very fresh, and they seemed to be rendering some mysterious tribute to a magnificent young man with a waxed mustache, and a shirtfront adorned with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped an absent glance over their multitudinous
patience. They were American citizens doing homage to a hotel clerk.
“I’m glad he didn’t tell us to go there,” said one of our Englishmen, alluding to their friend on the steamer, who had told them so many things. They walked up the Fifth Avenue, where, for instance, he had told them that all the first families lived. But the first families were out of town, and our young travelers had only the satisfaction of seeing some of the second—or perhaps even the third—taking the evening air upon balconies and high flights of doorsteps, in the streets which radiate from the more ornamental thoroughfare. They went a little way down one of these side streets, and they saw young ladies in white dresses—charming-looking persons—seated in graceful attitudes on the chocolate-colored steps. In one or two places these young ladies were conversing across the street with other young ladies seated in similar postures and costumes in front of the opposite houses, and in the warm night air their colloquial tones sounded strange in the ears of the young Englishmen. One of our friends, nevertheless—the younger one—intimated that he felt a disposition to interrupt a few of these soft familiarities; but his companion observed, pertinently enough, that he had better be careful. “We must not begin with making mistakes,” said his companion.