The Patagonia

“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 thought 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.

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 especially 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.

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.  These companions, in other words, would have been between us, Jasper marking the limit of the party in that quarter.  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 chaperon not being able to accompany her.”

“Her chaperon?” my fellow passenger echoed.

“Mrs. Nettlepoint—the lady under whose protection she happens to be.”

“Protection?” Mrs. Peck stared at me a moment, moving some valued morsel in her mouth; then she exclaimed familiarly “Pshaw!”  I was struck with this and was on the point of asking her what she meant by it when she continued: “Ain’t we going to see Mrs. Nettlepoint?”

“I’m afraid not.  She vows she won’t stir from her sofa.”

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Peck again.  “That’s quite a disappointment.”

“Do you know her then?”

“No, but I know all about her.”  Then my companion added: “You don’t mean to say she’s any real relation?”

“Do you mean to me?”

“No, to Grace Mavis.”

“None at all.  They’re very new friends, as I happen to know.  Then you’re acquainted with our young lady?”  I hadn’t noticed the passage of any recognition between them at luncheon.

“Is she your young lady too?” asked Mrs. Peck with high significance.

“Ah when people are in the same boat—literally—they belong a little to each other.”

“That’s so,” said Mrs. Peck.  “I don’t know Miss Mavis, but I know all about her—I live opposite to her on Merrimac Avenue.  I don’t know whether you know that part.”

“Oh yes—it’s very beautiful.”

The consequence of this remark was another “Pshaw!”  But Mrs. Peck went on: “When you’ve lived opposite to people like that for a long time you feel as if you had some rights in them—tit for tat!  But she didn’t take it up today; she didn’t speak to me.  She knows who I am as well as she knows her own mother.”

“You had better speak to her first—she’s constitutionally shy,” I remarked.

“Shy?  She’s constitutionally tough!  Why she’s thirty years old,” cried my neighbour.  “I suppose you know where she’s going.”

“Oh yes—we all take an interest in that.”

“That young man, I suppose, particularly.”  And then as I feigned a vagueness: “The handsome one who sits there.  Didn’t you tell me he’s Mrs. Nettlepoint’s son?”

“Oh yes—he acts as her deputy.  No doubt he does all he can to carry out her function.”

Mrs. Peck briefly brooded.  I had spoken jocosely, but she took it with a serious face.  “Well, she might let him eat his dinner in peace!” she presently put forth.

“Oh he’ll come back!” I said, glancing at his place.  The repast continued and when it was finished I screwed my chair round to leave the table.  Mrs. Peck performed the same movement and we quitted the saloon together.  Outside of it was the usual vestibule, with several seats, from which you could descend to the lower cabins or mount to the promenade-deck.  Mrs. Peck appeared to hesitate as to her course and then solved the problem by going neither way.  She dropped on one of the benches and looked up at me.

“I thought you said he’d come back.”

“Young Nettlepoint?  Yes, I see he didn’t.  Miss Mavis then has given him half her dinner.”

“It’s very kind of her!  She has been engaged half her life.”

“Yes, but that will soon be over.”

“So I suppose—as quick as ever we land.  Every one knows it on Merrimac Avenue,” Mrs. Peck pursued.  “Every one there takes a great interest in it.”

“Ah of course—a girl like that has many friends.”

But my informant discriminated.  “I mean even people who don’t know her.”

“I see,” I went on: “she’s so handsome that she attracts attention—people enter into her affairs.”

Mrs. Peck spoke as from the commanding centre of these.  “She used to be pretty, but I can’t say I think she’s anything remarkable today.  Anyhow, if she attracts attention she ought to be all the more careful what she does.  You had better tell her that.”

“Oh it’s none of my business!” I easily made out, leaving the terrible little woman and going above.  This profession, I grant, was not perfectly attuned to my real idea, or rather my real idea was not quite in harmony with my profession.  The very first thing I did on reaching the deck was to notice that Miss Mavis was pacing it on Jasper Nettlepoint’s arm and that whatever beauty she might have lost, according to Mrs. Peck’s insinuation, she still kept enough to make one’s eyes follow her.  She had put on a crimson hood, which was very becoming to her and which she wore for the rest of the voyage.  She walked very well, with long steps, and I remember that at this moment the sea had a gentle evening swell which made the great ship dip slowly, rhythmically, giving a movement that was graceful to graceful pedestrians and a more awkward one to the awkward.  It was the loveliest hour of a fine day, the clear early evening, with the glow of the sunset in the air and a purple colour on the deep.  It was always present to me that so the waters ploughed by the Homeric heroes must have looked.  I became conscious on this particular occasion moreover that Grace Mavis would for the rest of the voyage be the most visible thing in one’s range, the figure that would count most in the composition of groups.  She couldn’t help it, poor girl; nature had made her conspicuous—important, as the painters say.  She paid for it by the corresponding exposure, the danger that people would, as I had said to Mrs. Peck, enter into her affairs.

Jasper Nettlepoint went down at certain times to see his mother, and I watched for one of these occasions—on the third day out—and took advantage of it to go and sit by Miss Mavis.  She wore a light blue veil drawn tightly over her face, so that if the smile with which she greeted me rather lacked intensity I could account for it partly by that.

“Well, we’re getting on—we’re getting on,” I said cheerfully, looking at the friendly twinkling sea.

“Are we going very fast?”

“Not fast, but steadily.  Ohne Hast, ohne Rast—do you know German?”

“Well, I’ve studied it—some.”

“It will be useful to you over there when you travel.”

“Well yes, if we do.  But I don’t suppose we shall much.  Mr. Nettlepoint says we ought,” my young woman added in a moment.

“Ah of course he thinks so.  He has been all over the world.”

“Yes, he has described some of the places.  They must be wonderful.  I didn’t know I should like it so much.”

“But it isn’t ‘Europe’ yet!” I laughed.

Well, she didn’t care if it wasn’t.  “I mean going on this way.  I could go on for ever—for ever and ever.”

“Ah you know it’s not always like this,” I hastened to mention.

“Well, it’s better than Boston.”

“It isn’t so good as Paris,” I still more portentously noted.

“Oh I know all about Paris.  There’s no freshness in that.  I feel as if I had been there all the time.”

“You mean you’ve heard so much of it?”

“Oh yes, nothing else for ten years.”

I had come to talk with Miss Mavis because she was attractive, but I had been rather conscious of the absence of a good topic, not feeling at liberty to revert to Mr. Porterfield.  She hadn’t encouraged me, when I spoke to her as we were leaving Boston, to go on with the history of my acquaintance with this gentleman; and yet now, unexpectedly, she appeared to imply—it was doubtless one of the disparities mentioned by Mrs. Nettlepoint—that he might be glanced at without indelicacy.