The Patagonia

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THE PATAGONIA
by Henry James


CHAPTER I


The houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon
Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert. The
club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow
upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the
hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls. As "every one" was
out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure,
were profaning the tables. The heat was insufferable and I thought with
joy of the morrow, of the deck of the steamer, the freshening breeze, the
sense of getting out to sea. I was even glad of what I had learned in
the afternoon at the office of the company--that at the eleventh hour an
old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the
vessel in which I had taken my passage. America was roasting, England
might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of
the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or
twelve days of fresh air.

I strolled down the hill without meeting a creature, though I could see
through the palings of the Common that that recreative expanse was
peopled with dim forms. I remembered Mrs. Nettlepoint's house--she lived
in those days (they are not so distant, but there have been changes) on
the water-side, a little way beyond the spot at which the Public Garden
terminates; and I reflected that like myself she would be spending the
night in Boston if it were true that, as had been mentioned to me a few
days before at Mount Desert, she was to embark on the morrow for
Liverpool. I presently saw this appearance confirmed by a light above
her door and in two or three of her windows, and I determined to ask for
her, having nothing to do till bedtime. I had come out simply to pass an
hour, leaving my hotel to the blaze of its gas and the perspiration of
its porters; but it occurred to me that my old friend might very _well_
not know of the substitution of the _Patagonia_ for the _Scandinavia_, so
that I should be doing her a service to prepare her mind. Besides, I
could offer to help her, to look after her in the morning: lone women are
grateful for support in taking ship for far countries.

It came to me indeed as I stood on her door-step that as she had a son
she might not after all be so lone; yet I remembered at the same time
that Jasper Nettlepoint was not quite a young man to lean upon, having--as
I at least supposed--a life of his own and tastes and habits which had
long since diverted him from the maternal side. If he did happen just
now to be at home my solicitude would of course seem officious; for in
his many wanderings--I believed he had roamed all over the globe--he
would certainly have learned how to manage. None the less, in fine, I
was very glad to show Mrs. Nettlepoint I thought of her. With my long
absence I had lost sight of her; but I had liked her of old, she had been
a good friend to my sisters, and I had in regard to her that sense which
is pleasant to those who in general have gone astray or got detached, the
sense that she at least knew all about me. I could trust her at any time
to tell people I was respectable. Perhaps I was conscious of how little
I deserved this indulgence when it came over me that I hadn't been near
her for ages. The measure of that neglect was given by my vagueness of
mind about Jasper. However, I really belonged nowadays to a different
generation; I was more the mother's contemporary than the son's.

Mrs. Nettlepoint was at home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where
the wide windows opened to the water. The room was dusky--it was too hot
for lamps--and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the
little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights
of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing on the loved
ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren;
but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me,
pointing with her fan to the Back Bay: "I shall see nothing more charming
than that over there, you know!" She made me very welcome, but her son
had told her about the _Patagonia_, for which she was sorry, as this
would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature in any boat and
mainly confined to her cabin even in weather extravagantly termed fine--as
if any weather could be fine at sea.

"Ah then your son's going with you?" I asked.

"Here he comes, he'll tell you for himself much better than I can pretend
to." Jasper Nettlepoint at that moment joined us, dressed in white
flannel and carrying a large fan. "Well, my dear, have you decided?" his
mother continued with no scant irony. "He hasn't yet made up his mind,
and we sail at ten o'clock!"

"What does it matter when my things are put up?" the young man said.
"There's no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I'm
waiting for a telegram--that will settle it. I just walked up to the
club to see if it was come--they'll send it there because they suppose
this house unoccupied. Not yet, but I shall go back in twenty minutes."

"Mercy, how you rush about in this temperature!" the poor lady exclaimed
while I reflected that it was perhaps _his_ billiard-balls I had heard
ten minutes before. I was sure he was fond of billiards.

"Rush? not in the least. I take it uncommon easy."

"Ah I'm bound to say you do!" Mrs. Nettlepoint returned with
inconsequence. I guessed at a certain tension between the pair and a
want of consideration on the young man's part, arising perhaps from
selfishness. His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting to be at rest
as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or be obliged to
struggle alone. But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan
he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn't sit too
heavily. He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not
of those who worry about other people. Tall and strong, he had a
handsome face, with a round head and close-curling hair; the whites of
his eyes and the enamel of his teeth, under his brown moustache, gleamed
vaguely in the lights of the Back Bay. I made out that he was sunburnt,
as if he lived much in the open air, and that he looked intelligent but
also slightly brutal, though not in a morose way. His brutality, if he
had any, was bright and finished. I had to tell him who I was, but even
then I saw how little he placed me and that my explanations gave me in
his mind no great identity or at any rate no great importance. I foresaw
that he would in intercourse make me feel sometimes very young and
sometimes very old, caring himself but little which. He mentioned, as if
to show our companion that he might safely be left to his own devices,
that he had once started from London to Bombay at three quarters of an
hour's notice.

"Yes, and it must have been pleasant for the people you were with!"

"Oh the people I was with--!" he returned; and his tone appeared to
signify that such people would always have to come off as they could. He
asked if there were no cold drinks in the house, no lemonade, no iced
syrups; in such weather something of that sort ought always to be kept
going. When his mother remarked that surely at the club they _were_ kept
going he went on: "Oh yes, I had various things there; but you know I've
walked down the hill since. One should have something at either end. May
I ring and see?" He rang while Mrs. Nettlepoint observed that with the
people they had in the house, an establishment reduced naturally at such
a moment to its simplest expression--they were burning up candle-ends and
there were no luxuries--she wouldn't answer for the service. The matter
ended in her leaving the room in quest of cordials with the female
domestic who had arrived in response to the bell and in whom Jasper's
appeal aroused no visible intelligence.

She remained away some time and I talked with her son, who was sociable
but desultory and kept moving over the place, always with his fan, as if
he were properly impatient. Sometimes he seated himself an instant on
the window-sill, and then I made him out in fact thoroughly
good-looking--a fine brown clean young athlete. He failed to tell me on
what special contingency his decision depended; he only alluded
familiarly to an expected telegram, and I saw he was probably fond at no
time of the trouble of explanations. His mother's absence was a sign
that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to
spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some close storeroom,
among old preserve-pots, while the dull maid-servant held the candle
awry. I don't know whether this same vision was in his own eyes; at all
events it didn't prevent his saying suddenly, as he looked at his watch,
that I must excuse him--he should have to go back to the club. He would
return in half an hour--or in less. He walked away and I sat there
alone, conscious, on the dark dismantled simplified scene, in the deep
silence that rests on American towns during the hot season--there was now
and then a far cry or a plash in the water, and at intervals the tinkle
of the bells of the horse-cars on the long bridge, slow in the
suffocating night--of the strange influence, half-sweet, half-sad, that
abides in houses uninhabited or about to become so, in places muffled and
bereaved, where the unheeded sofas and patient belittered tables seem
(like the disconcerted dogs, to whom everything is alike sinister) to
recognise the eve of a journey.

After a while I heard the sound of voices, of steps, the rustle of
dresses, and I looked round, supposing these things to denote the return
of Mrs. Nettlepoint and her handmaiden with the refection prepared for
her son. What I saw however was two other female forms, visitors
apparently just admitted, and now ushered into the room. They were not
announced--the servant turned her back on them and rambled off to our
hostess. They advanced in a wavering tentative unintroduced way--partly,
I could see, because the place was dark and partly because their visit
was in its nature experimental, a flight of imagination or a stretch of
confidence. One of the ladies was stout and the other slim, and I made
sure in a moment that one was talkative and the other reserved. It was
further to be discerned that one was elderly and the other young, as well
as that the fact of their unlikeness didn't prevent their being mother
and daughter. Mrs. Nettlepoint reappeared in a very few minutes, but the
interval had sufficed to establish a communication--really copious for
the occasion--between the strangers and the unknown gentleman whom they
found in possession, hat and stick in hand. This was not my doing--for
what had I to go upon?--and still less was it the doing of the younger
and the more indifferent, or less courageous, lady. She spoke but
once--when her companion informed me that she was going out to Europe the
next day to be married. Then she protested "Oh mother!" in a tone that
struck me in the darkness as doubly odd, exciting my curiosity to see her
face.

It had taken the elder woman but a moment to come to that, and to various
other things, after I had explained that I myself was waiting for Mrs.
Nettlepoint, who would doubtless soon come back.

"Well, she won't know me--I guess she hasn't ever heard much about me,"
the good lady said; "but I've come from Mrs. Allen and I guess that will
make it all right. I presume you know Mrs. Allen?"

I was unacquainted with this influential personage, but I assented
vaguely to the proposition. Mrs. Allen's emissary was good-humoured and
familiar, but rather appealing than insistent (she remarked that if her
friend _had_ found time to come in the afternoon--she had so much to do,
being just up for the day, that she couldn't be sure--it would be all
right); and somehow even before she mentioned Merrimac Avenue (they had
come all the way from there) my imagination had associated her with that
indefinite social limbo known to the properly-constituted Boston mind as
the South End--a nebulous region which condenses here and there into a
pretty face, in which the daughters are an "improvement" on the mothers
and are sometimes acquainted with gentlemen more gloriously domiciled,
gentlemen whose wives and sisters are in turn not acquainted with them.

When at last Mrs. Nettlepoint came in, accompanied by candles and by a
tray laden with glasses of coloured fluid which emitted a cool tinkling,
I was in a position to officiate as master of the ceremonies, to
introduce Mrs. Mavis and Miss Grace Mavis, to represent that Mrs. Allen
had recommended them--nay, had urged them--just to come that way,
informally and without fear; Mrs. Allen who had been prevented only by
the pressure of occupations so characteristic of her (especially when up
from Mattapoisett for a few hours' desperate shopping) from herself
calling in the course of the day to explain who they were and what was
the favour they had to ask of her benevolent friend. Good-natured women
understand each other even when so divided as to sit residentially above
and below the salt, as who should say; by which token our hostess had
quickly mastered the main facts: Mrs. Allen's visit that morning in
Merrimac Avenue to talk of Mrs. Amber's great idea, the classes at the
public schools in vacation (she was interested with an equal charity to
that of Mrs. Mavis--even in such weather!--in those of the South End) for
games and exercises and music, to keep the poor unoccupied children out
of the streets; then the revelation that it had suddenly been settled
almost from one hour to the other that Grace should sail for Liverpool,
Mr. Porterfield at last being ready. He was taking a little holiday; his
mother was with him, they had come over from Paris to see some of the
celebrated old buildings in England, and he had telegraphed to say that
if Grace would start right off they would just finish it up and be
married. It often happened that when things had dragged on that way for
years they were all huddled up at the end. Of course in such a case she,
Mrs. Mavis, had had to fly round. Her daughter's passage was taken, but
it seemed too dreadful she should make her journey all alone, the first
time she had ever been at sea, without any companion or escort. _She_
couldn't go--Mr. Mavis was too sick: she hadn't even been able to get him
off to the seaside.

"Well, Mrs. Nettlepoint's going in that ship," Mrs. Allen had said; and
she had represented that nothing was simpler than to give her the girl in
charge. When Mrs. Mavis had replied that this was all very well but that
she didn't know the lady, Mrs. Allen had declared that that didn't make a
speck of difference, for Mrs. Nettlepoint was kind enough for anything.
It was easy enough to _know_ her, if that was all the trouble! All Mrs.
Mavis would have to do would be to go right up to her next morning, when
she took her daughter to the ship (she would see her there on the deck
with her party) and tell her fair and square what she wanted. Mrs.
Nettlepoint had daughters herself and would easily understand. Very
likely she'd even look after Grace a little on the other side, in such a
queer situation, going out alone to the gentleman she was engaged to:
she'd just help her, like a good Samaritan, to turn round before she was
married. Mr. Porterfield seemed to think they wouldn't wait long, once
she was there: they would have it right over at the American consul's.
Mrs. Allen had said it would perhaps be better still to go and see Mrs.
Nettlepoint beforehand, that day, to tell her what they wanted: then they
wouldn't seem to spring it on her just as she was leaving. She herself
(Mrs. Allen) would call and say a word for them if she could save ten
minutes before catching her train. If she hadn't come it was because she
hadn't saved her ten minutes but she had made them feel that they must
come all the same. Mrs. Mavis liked that better, because on the ship in
the morning there would be such a confusion. She didn't think her
daughter would be any trouble--conscientiously she didn't. It was just
to have some one to speak to her and not sally forth like a servant-girl
going to a situation.

"I see, I'm to act as a sort of bridesmaid and to give her away," Mrs.
Nettlepoint obligingly said. Kind enough in fact for anything, she
showed on this occasion that it was easy enough to know her. There is
notoriously nothing less desirable than an imposed aggravation of effort
at sea, but she accepted without betrayed dismay the burden of the young
lady's dependence and allowed her, as Mrs. Mavis said, to hook herself
on. She evidently had the habit of patience, and her reception of her
visitors' story reminded me afresh--I was reminded of it whenever I
returned to my native land--that my dear compatriots are the people in
the world who most freely take mutual accommodation for granted. They
have always had to help themselves, and have rather magnanimously failed
to learn just where helping others is distinguishable from that. In no
country are there fewer forms and more reciprocities.

It was doubtless not singular that the ladies from Merrimac Avenue
shouldn't feel they were importunate: what was striking was that Mrs.
Nettlepoint didn't appear to suspect it. However, she would in any case
have thought it inhuman to show this--though I could see that under the
surface she was amused at everything the more expressive of the pilgrims
from the South End took for granted. I scarce know whether the attitude
of the younger visitor added or not to the merit of her good nature. Mr.
Porterfield's intended took no part in the demonstration, scarcely spoke,
sat looking at the Back Bay and the lights on the long bridge. She
declined the lemonade and the other mixtures which, at Mrs. Nettlepoint's
request, I offered her, while her mother partook freely of everything and
I reflected--for I as freely drained a glass or two in which the ice
tinkled--that Mr. Jasper had better hurry back if he wished to enjoy
these luxuries.

Was the effect of the young woman's reserve meanwhile ungracious, or was
it only natural that in her particular situation she shouldn't have a
flow of compliment at her command? I noticed that Mrs. Nettlepoint
looked at her often, and certainly though she was undemonstrative Miss
Mavis was interesting. The candlelight enabled me to see that though not
in the very first flower of her youth she was still fresh and handsome.
Her eyes and hair were dark, her face was pale, and she held up her head
as if, with its thick braids and everything else involved in it, it were
an appurtenance she wasn't ashamed of. If her mother was excellent and
common she was not common--not at least flagrantly so--and perhaps also
not excellent. At all events she wouldn't be, in appearance at least, a
dreary appendage; which in the case of a person "hooking on" was always
something gained. Was it because something of a romantic or pathetic
interest usually attaches to a good creature who has been the victim of a
"long engagement" that this young lady made an impression on me from the
first--favoured as I had been so quickly with this glimpse of her
history? I could charge her certainly with no positive appeal; she only
held her tongue and smiled, and her smile corrected whatever suggestion
might have forced itself upon me that the spirit within her was dead--the
spirit of that promise of which she found herself doomed to carry out the
letter.

What corrected it less, I must add, was an odd recollection which
gathered vividness as I listened to it--a mental association evoked by
the name of Mr. Porterfield. Surely I had a personal impression, over-
smeared and confused, of the gentleman who was waiting at Liverpool, or
who presently would be, for Mrs. Nettlepoint's protegee. I had met him,
known him, some time, somewhere, somehow, on the other side. Wasn't he
studying something, very hard, somewhere--probably in Paris--ten years
before, and didn't he make extraordinarily neat drawings, linear and
architectural? Didn't he go to a table d'hote, at two francs
twenty-five, in the Rue Bonaparte, which I then frequented, and didn't he
wear spectacles and a Scotch plaid arranged in a manner which seemed to
say "I've trustworthy information that that's the way they do it in the
Highlands"? Wasn't he exemplary to positive irritation, and very poor,
poor to positive oppression, so that I supposed he had no overcoat and
his tartan would be what he slept under at night? Wasn't he working very
hard still, and wouldn't he be, in the natural course, not yet satisfied
that he had found his feet or knew enough to launch out? He would be a
man of long preparations--Miss Mavis's white face seemed to speak to one
of that. It struck me that if I had been in love with her I shouldn't
have needed to lay such a train for the closer approach. Architecture
was his line and he was a pupil of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. This
reminiscence grew so much more vivid with me that at the end of ten
minutes I had an odd sense of knowing--by implication--a good deal about
the young lady.

Even after it was settled that Mrs. Nettlepoint would do everything
possible for her the other visitor sat sipping our iced liquid and
telling how "low" Mr. Mavis had been. At this period the girl's silence
struck me as still more conscious, partly perhaps because she deprecated
her mother's free flow--she was enough of an "improvement" to measure
that--and partly because she was too distressed by the idea of leaving
her infirm, her perhaps dying father. It wasn't indistinguishable that
they were poor and that she would take out a very small purse for her
trousseau. For Mr. Porterfield to make up the sum his own case would
have had moreover greatly to change. If he had enriched himself by the
successful practice of his profession I had encountered no edifice he had
reared--his reputation hadn't come to my ears.

Mrs. Nettlepoint notified her new friends that she was a very inactive
person at sea: she was prepared to suffer to the full with Miss Mavis,
but not prepared to pace the deck with her, to struggle with her, to
accompany her to meals. To this the girl replied that she would trouble
her little, she was sure: she was convinced she should prove a wretched
sailor and spend the voyage on her back. Her mother scoffed at this
picture, prophesying perfect weather and a lovely time, and I interposed
to the effect that if I might be trusted, as a tame bachelor fairly sea-
seasoned, I should be delighted to give the new member of our party an
arm or any other countenance whenever she should require it. Both the
ladies thanked me for this--taking my professions with no sort of
abatement--and the elder one declared that we were evidently going to be
such a sociable group that it was too bad to have to stay at home. She
asked Mrs. Nettlepoint if there were any one else in our party, and when
our hostess mentioned her son--there was a chance of his embarking but
(wasn't it absurd?) he hadn't decided yet--she returned with
extraordinary candour: "Oh dear, I do hope he'll go: that would be so
lovely for Grace."

Somehow the words made me think of poor Mr. Porterfield's tartan,
especially as Jasper Nettlepoint strolled in again at that moment. His
mother at once challenged him: it was ten o'clock; had he by chance made
up his great mind? Apparently he failed to hear her, being in the first
place surprised at the strange ladies and then struck with the fact that
one of them wasn't strange. The young man, after a slight hesitation,
greeted Miss Mavis with a handshake and a "Oh good-evening, how do you
do?" He didn't utter her name--which I could see he must have forgotten;
but she immediately pronounced his, availing herself of the American
girl's discretion to "present" him to her mother.

"Well, you might have told me you knew him all this time!" that lady
jovially cried. Then she had an equal confidence for Mrs. Nettlepoint.
"It would have saved me a worry--an acquaintance already begun."

"Ah my son's acquaintances!" our hostess murmured.

"Yes, and my daughter's too!" Mrs. Mavis gaily echoed. "Mrs. Allen
didn't tell us _you_ were going," she continued to the young man.

"She'd have been clever if she had been able to!" Mrs. Nettlepoint
sighed.

"Dear mother, I have my telegram," Jasper remarked, looking at Grace
Mavis.

"I know you very little," the girl said, returning his observation.

"I've danced with you at some ball--for some sufferers by something or
other."

"I think it was an inundation or a big fire," she a little languidly
smiled. "But it was a long time ago--and I haven't seen you since."

"I've been in far countries--to my loss. I should have said it was a big
fire."

"It was at the Horticultural Hall. I didn't remember your name," said
Grace Mavis.