by Henry James
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.
“That’s very unkind of you, when I recall vividly that you had a pink dress.”
“Oh I remember that dress—your strawberry tarletan: you looked lovely in it!” Mrs. Mavis broke out. “You must get another just like it—on the other side.
”
“Yes, your daughter looked charming in it,” said Jasper Nettlepoint. Then he added to the girl: “Yet you mentioned my name to your mother.”
“It came back to me—seeing you here. I had no idea this was your home.”
“Well, I confess it isn’t, much. Oh there are some drinks!”—he approached the tray and its glasses.
“Indeed there are and quite delicious”—Mrs. Mavis largely wiped her mouth.
“Won’t you have another then?—a pink one, like your daughter’s gown.”
“With pleasure, sir. Oh do see them over,” Mrs. Mavis continued, accepting from the young man’s hand a third tumbler.
“My mother and that gentleman? Surely they can take care of themselves,” he freely pleaded.
“Then my daughter—she has a claim as an old friend.”
But his mother had by this time interposed. “Jasper, what does your telegram say?”
He paid her no heed: he stood there with his glass in his hand, looking from Mrs. Mavis to Miss Grace.
“Ah leave her to me, madam; I’m quite competent,” I said to Mrs. Mavis.
Then the young man gave me his attention. The next minute he asked of the girl: “Do you mean you’re going to Europe?”
“Yes, tomorrow. In the same ship as your mother.”
“That’s what we’ve come here for, to see all about it,” said Mrs. Mavis.