by Henry James
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 b
een 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.
“I see—you mean by letters,” I remarked.
“We won’t live in a good part. I know enough to know that,” she went on.
“Well, it isn’t as if there were any very bad ones,” I answered reassuringly.
“Why Mr. Nettlepoint says it’s regular mean.”
“And to what does he apply that expression?”
She eyed me a moment as if I were elegant at her expense, but she answered my question. “Up there in the Batignolles. I seem to make out it’s worse than Merrimac Avenue.”
“Worse—in what way?”
“Why, even less where the nice people live.”
“He oughtn’t to say that,” I returned. And I ventured to back it up. “Don’t you call Mr. Porterfield a nice person?”
“Oh it doesn’t make any difference.” She watched me again a moment through her veil, the texture of which gave her look a suffused prettiness. “Do you know him very little?” she asked.
“Mr. Porterfield?”
“No, Mr. Nettlepoint.”
“Ah very little. He’s very considerably my junior, you see.”
She had a fresh pause, as if almost again for my elegance; but she went on: “He’s younger than me too.” I don’t know what effect of the comic there could have been in it, but the turn was unexpected and it made me laugh. Neither do I know whether Miss Mavis took offence at my sensibility on this head, though I remember thinking at the moment with compunction that it had brought a flush to her cheek. At all events she got up, gathering her shawl and her books into her arm. “I’m going down—I’m tired.”
“Tired of me, I’m afraid.”
“No, not yet.”
“I’m like you,” I confessed. “I should like it to go on and on.”
She had begun to walk along the deck to the companionway and I went with her. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t, after all!”
I had taken her shawl from her to carry it, but at the top of the steps that led down to the cabins I had to give it back. “Your mother would be glad if she could know,” I observed as we parted.
But she was proof against my graces. “If she could know what?”
“How well you’re getting on.” I refused to be discouraged. “And that good Mrs. Allen.”
“Oh mother, mother! She made me come, she pushed me off.” And almost as if not to say more she went quickly below.
I paid Mrs. Nettlepoint a morning visit after luncheon and another in the evening, before she “turned in.” That same day, in the evening, she said to me suddenly: “Do you know what I’ve done? I’ve asked Jasper.”
“Asked him what?”
“Why, if SHE asked him, you understand.”
I wondered. “DO I understand?”
“If you don’t it’s because you ‘regular’ won’t, as she says. If that girl really asked him—on the balcony—to sail with us.”
“My dear lady, do you suppose that if she did he’d tell you?”
She had to recognise my acuteness. “That’s just what he says. But he says she didn’t.”
“And do you consider the statement valuable?” I asked, laughing out. “You had better ask your young friend herself.”
Mrs. Nettlepoint stared. “I couldn’t do that.”
On which I was the more amused that I had to explain I was only amused. “What does it signify now?”
“I thought you thought everything signified. You were so full,” she cried, “of signification!”
“Yes, but we’re further out now, and somehow in mid-ocean everything becomes absolute.”
“What else CAN he do with decency?” Mrs. Nettlepoint went on. “If, as my son, he were never to speak to her it would be very rude and you’d think that stranger still. Then YOU would do what he does, and where would be the difference?”
“How do you know what he does? I haven’t mentioned him for twenty- four hours.”
“Why, she told me herself. She came in this afternoon.”
“What an odd thing to tell you!” I commented.
“Not as she says it. She says he’s full of attention, perfectly devoted—looks after her all the time. She seems to want me to know it, so that I may approve him for it.”
“That’s charming; it shows her good conscience.”
“Yes, or her great cleverness.”
Something in the tone in which Mrs. Nettlepoint said this caused me to return in real surprise: “Why what do you suppose she has in her mind?”
“To get hold of him, to make him go so far he can’t retreat. To marry him perhaps.”
“To marry him? And what will she do with Mr. Porterfield?”
“She’ll ask me just to make it all right to him—or perhaps you.”
“Yes, as an old friend”—and for a moment I felt it awkwardly possible. But I put to her seriously: “DO you see Jasper caught like that?”
“Well, he’s only a boy—he’s younger at least than she.”
“Precisely; she regards him as a child. She remarked to me herself today, that is, that he’s so much younger.”
Mrs. Nettlepoint took this in. “Does she talk of it with you? That shows she has a plan, that she has thought it over!”
I’ve sufficiently expressed—for the interest of my anecdote—that I found an oddity in one of our young companions, but I was far from judging her capable of laying a trap for the other. Moreover my reading of Jasper wasn’t in the least that he was catchable—could be made to do a thing if he didn’t want to do it. Of course it wasn’t impossible that he might be inclined, that he might take it—or already have taken it—into his head to go further with his mother’s charge; but to believe this I should require still more proof than his always being with her. He wanted at most to “take up with her” for the voyage. “If you’ve questioned him perhaps you’ve tried to make him feel responsible,” I said to my fellow critic.
“A little, but it’s very difficult. Interference makes him perverse. One has to go gently. Besides, it’s too absurd—think of her age. If she can’t take care of herself!” cried Mrs. Nettlepoint.
“Yes, let us keep thinking of her age, though it’s not so prodigious. And if things get very bad you’ve one resource left,” I added.
She wondered. “To lock her up in her cabin?”
“No—to come out of yours.”
“Ah never, never! If it takes that to save her she must be lost. Besides, what good would it do? If I were to go above she could come below.”
“Yes, but you could keep Jasper with you.”
“COULD I?” Mrs. Nettlepoint demanded in the manner of a woman who knew her son.
In the saloon the next day, after dinner, over the red cloth of the tables, beneath the swinging lamps and the racks of tumblers, decanters and wine-glasses, we sat down to whist, Mrs. Peck, to oblige, taking a hand in the game. She played very badly and talked too much, and when the rubber was over assuaged her discomfiture (though not mine—we had been partners) with a Welsh rabbit and a tumbler of something hot. We had done with the cards, but while she waited for this refreshment she sat with her elbows on the table shuffling a pack.
“She hasn’t spoken to me yet—she won’t do it,” she remarked in a moment.
“Is it possible there’s any one on the ship who hasn’t spoken to you?”
“Not that girl—she knows too well!” Mrs. Peck looked round our little circle with a smile of intell
igence—she had familiar communicative eyes. Several of our company had assembled, according to the wont, the last thing in the evening, of those who are cheerful at sea, for the consumption of grilled sardines and devilled bones.
“What then does she know?”