Transcribed from 1922 MacMillan and Co. “Daisy Miller, Pandora, The
Patagonia and Other Tales” edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Proofed by David, Jeremy Kwock and Uzma G.
[Picture: Book cover]
PANDORA
by Henry James
I
IT has long been the custom of the North German Lloyd steamers, which
convey passengers from Bremen to New York, to anchor for several hours in
the pleasant port of Southampton, where their human cargo receives many
additions. An intelligent young German, Count Otto Vogelstein, hardly
knew a few years ago whether to condemn this custom or approve it. He
leaned over the bulwarks of the _Donau_ as the American passengers
crossed the plank—the travellers who embark at Southampton are mainly of
that nationality—and curiously, indifferently, vaguely, through the smoke
of his cigar, saw them absorbed in the huge capacity of the ship, where
he had the agreeable consciousness that his own nest was comfortably
made. To watch from such a point of vantage the struggles of those less
fortunate than ourselves—of the uninformed, the unprovided, the belated,
the bewildered—is an occupation not devoid of sweetness, and there was
nothing to mitigate the complacency with which our young friend gave
himself up to it; nothing, that is, save a natural benevolence which had
not yet been extinguished by the consciousness of official greatness.
For Count Vogelstein was official, as I think you would have seen from
the straightness of his back, the lustre of his light elegant spectacles,
and something discreet and diplomatic in the curve of his moustache,
which looked as if it might well contribute to the principal function, as
cynics say, of the lips—the active concealment of thought. He had been
appointed to the secretaryship of the German legation at Washington and
in these first days of the autumn was about to take possession of his
post. He was a model character for such a purpose—serious civil
ceremonious curious stiff, stuffed with knowledge and convinced that, as
lately rearranged, the German Empire places in the most striking light
the highest of all the possibilities of the greatest of all the peoples.
He was quite aware, however, of the claims to economic and other
consideration of the United States, and that this quarter of the globe
offered a vast field for study.
The process of inquiry had already begun for him, in spite of his having
as yet spoken to none of his fellow-passengers; the case being that
Vogelstein inquired not only with his tongue, but with his eyes—that is
with his spectacles—with his ears, with his nose, with his palate, with
all his senses and organs. He was a highly upright young man, whose only
fault was that his sense of comedy, or of the humour of things, had never
been specifically disengaged from his several other senses. He vaguely
felt that something should be done about this, and in a general manner
proposed to do it, for he was on his way to explore a society abounding
in comic aspects. This consciousness of a missing measure gave him a
certain mistrust of what might be said of him; and if circumspection is
the essence of diplomacy our young aspirant promised well. His mind
contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the
light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass. He was
impatient to report himself to his superior in Washington, and the loss
of time in an English port could only incommode him, inasmuch as the
study of English institutions was no part of his mission. On the other
hand the day was charming; the blue sea, in Southampton Water, pricked
all over with light, had no movement but that of its infinite shimmer.
Moreover he was by no means sure that he should be happy in the United
States, where doubtless he should find himself soon enough disembarked.
He knew that this was not an important question and that happiness was an
unscientific term, such as a man of his education should be ashamed to
use even in the silence of his thoughts. Lost none the less in the
inconsiderate crowd and feeling himself neither in his own country nor in
that to which he was in a manner accredited, he was reduced to his mere
personality; so that during the hour, to save his importance, he
cultivated such ground as lay in sight for a judgement of this delay to
which the German steamer was subjected in English waters. Mightn’t it be
proved, facts, figures and documents—or at least watch—in hand,
considerably greater than the occasion demanded?
Count Vogelstein was still young enough in diplomacy to think it
necessary to have opinions. He had a good many indeed which had been
formed without difficulty; they had been received ready-made from a line
of ancestors who knew what they liked. This was of course—and under
pressure, being candid, he would have admitted it—an unscientific way of
furnishing one’s mind. Our young man was a stiff conservative, a Junker
of Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary phase and expected to
find many arguments against it in the great Republic. In regard to these
things it was a pleasure to him to feel that, with his complete training,
he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the nature of evidence. The
ship was heavily laden with German emigrants, whose mission in the United
States differed considerably from Count Otto’s. They hung over the
bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned forward on their elbows for hours,
their shoulders kept on a level with their ears; the men in furred caps,
smoking long-bowled pipes, the women with babies hidden in remarkably
ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans and some were black, and all
looked greasy and matted with the sea-damp. They were destined to swell
still further the huge current of the Western democracy; and Count
Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that they wouldn’t improve its
quality. Their numbers, however, were striking, and I know not what he
thought of the nature of this particular evidence.
The passengers who came on board at Southampton were not of the greasy
class; they were for the most part American families who had been
spending the summer, or a longer period, in Europe. They had a great
deal of luggage, innumerable bags and rugs and hampers and sea-chairs,
and were composed largely of ladies of various ages, a little pale with
anticipation, wrapped also in striped shawls, though in prettier ones
than the nursing mothers of the steerage, and crowned with very high hats
and feathers. They darted to and fro across the gangway, looking for
each other and for their scattered parcels; they separated and reunited,
they exclaimed and declared, they eyed with dismay the occupants of the
forward quarter, who seemed numerous enough to sink the vessel, and their
voices sounded faint and far as they rose to Vogelstein’s ear over the
latter’s great tarred sides. He noticed that in the new contingent there
were many young girls, and he remembered what a lady in Dresden had once
said to him—that America was the country of the Mädchen. He wondered
whether he should like that, and reflected that it would be an aspect to
study, like everything else. He had known in Dresden an American family
in which there were three daughters who used to skate with the officers,
and some of the ladies now coming on board struck him as of that same
habit, except that in the Dresden days feathers weren’t worn quite so
high.
At last the ship began to creak and slowly bridge, and the delay at
Southampton came to an end. The gangway was removed and the vessel
indulged in the awkward evolutions that were to detach her from the land.
Count Vogelstein had finished his cigar, and he spent a long time in
walking up and down the upper deck. The charming English coast passed
before him, and he felt this to be the last of the old world. The
American coast also might be pretty—he hardly knew what one would expect
of an American coast; but he was sure it would be different.
Differences, however, were notoriously half the charm of travel, and
perhaps even most when they couldn’t be expressed in figures, numbers,
diagrams or the other merely useful symbols. As yet indeed there were
very few among the objects presented to sight on the steamer. Most of
his fellow-passengers appeared of one and the same persuasion, and that
persuasion the least to be mistaken. They were Jews and commercial to a
man. And by this time they had lighted their cigars and put on all
manner of seafaring caps, some of them with big ear-lappets which somehow
had the effect of bringing out their peculiar facial type. At last the
new voyagers began to emerge from below and to look about them, vaguely,
with that suspicious expression of face always to be noted in the newly
embarked and which, as directed to the receding land, resembles that of a
person who begins to perceive himself the victim of a trick. Earth and
ocean, in such glances, are made the subject of a sweeping objection, and
many travellers, in the general plight, have an air at once duped and
superior, which seems to say that they could easily go ashore if they
would.
It still wanted two hours of dinner, and by the time Vogelstein’s long
legs had measured three or four miles on the deck he was ready to settle
himself in his sea-chair and draw from his pocket a Tauchnitz novel by an
American author whose pages, he had been assured, would help to prepare
him for some of the oddities. On the back of his chair his name was
painted in rather large letters, this being a precaution taken at the
recommendation of a friend who had told him that on the American steamers
the passengers—especially the ladies—thought nothing of pilfering one’s
little comforts. His friend had even hinted at the correct reproduction
of his coronet. This marked man of the world had added that the
Americans are greatly impressed by a coronet. I know not whether it was
scepticism or modesty, but Count Vogelstein had omitted every pictured
plea for his rank; there were others of which he might have made use.
The precious piece of furniture which on the Atlantic voyage is trusted
never to flinch among universal concussions was emblazoned simply with
his title and name. It happened, however, that the blazonry was huge;
the back of the chair was covered with enormous German characters. This
time there can be no doubt: it was modesty that caused the secretary of
legation, in placing himself, to turn this portion of his seat outward,
away from the eyes of his companions—to present it to the balustrade of
the deck. The ship was passing the Needles—the beautiful uttermost point
of the Isle of Wight. Certain tall white cones of rock rose out of the
purple sea; they flushed in the afternoon light and their vague rosiness
gave them a human expression in face of the cold expanse toward which the
prow was turned; they seemed to say farewell, to be the last note of a
peopled world. Vogelstein saw them very comfortably from his place and
after a while turned his eyes to the other quarter, where the elements of
air and water managed to make between them so comparatively poor an
opposition. Even his American novelist was more amusing than that, and
he prepared to return to this author. In the great curve which it
described, however, his glance was arrested by the figure of a young lady
who had just ascended to the deck and who paused at the mouth of the
companionway.
This was not in itself an extraordinary phenomenon; but what attracted
Vogelstein’s attention was the fact that the young person appeared to
have fixed her eyes on him. She was slim, brightly dressed, rather
pretty; Vogelstein remembered in a moment that he had noticed her among
the people on the wharf at Southampton. She was soon aware he had
observed her; whereupon she began to move along the deck with a step that
seemed to indicate a purpose of approaching him. Vogelstein had time to
wonder whether she could be one of the girls he had known at Dresden; but
he presently reflected that they would now be much older than that. It
was true they were apt to advance, like this one, straight upon their
victim. Yet the present specimen was no longer looking at him, and
though she passed near him it was now tolerably clear she had come above
but to take a general survey. She was a quick handsome competent girl,
and she simply wanted to see what one could think of the ship, of the
weather, of the appearance of England, from such a position as that;
possibly even of one’s fellow-passengers. She satisfied herself promptly
on these points, and then she looked about, while she walked, as if in
keen search of a missing object; so that Vogelstein finally arrived at a
conviction of her real motive. She passed near him again and this time
almost stopped, her eyes bent upon him attentively. He thought her
conduct remarkable even after he had gathered that it was not at his
face, with its yellow moustache, she was looking, but at the chair on
which he was seated. Then those words of his friend came back to him—the
speech about the tendency of the people, especially of the ladies, on the
American steamers to take to themselves one’s little belongings.
Especially the ladies, he might well say; for here was one who apparently
wished to pull from under him the very chair he was sitting on. He was
afraid she would ask him for it, so he pretended to read, systematically
avoiding her eye. He was conscious she hovered near him, and was
moreover curious to see what she would do. It seemed to him strange that
such a nice-looking girl—for her appearance was really charming—should
endeavour by arts so flagrant to work upon the quiet dignity of a
secretary of legation. At last it stood out that she was trying to look
round a corner, as it were—trying to see what was written on the back of
his chair. “She wants to find out my name; she wants to see who I am!”
This reflexion passed through his mind and caused him to raise his eyes.
They rested on her own—which for an appreciable moment she didn’t
withdraw. The latter were brilliant and expressive, and surmounted a
delicate aquiline nose, which, though pretty, was perhaps just a trifle
too hawk-like. It was the oddest coincidence in the world; the story
Vogelstein had taken up treated of a flighty forward little American girl
who plants herself in front of a young man in the garden of an hotel.
Wasn’t the conduct of this young lady a testimony to the truthfulness of
the tale, and wasn’t Vogelstein himself in the position of the young man
in the garden? That young man—though with more, in such connexions in
general, to go upon—ended by addressing himself to his aggressor, as she
might be called, and after a very short hesitation Vogelstein followed
his example. “If she wants to know who I am she’s welcome,” he said to
himself; and he got out of the chair, seized it by the back and, turning
it round, exhibited the superscription to the girl. She coloured
slightly, but smiled and read his name, while Vogelstein raised his hat.
“I’m much obliged to you. That’s all right,” she remarked as if the
discovery had made her very happy.
It affected him indeed as all right that he should be Count Otto
Vogelstein; this appeared even rather a flippant mode of disposing of the
fact. By way of rejoinder he asked her if she desired of him the
surrender of his seat.
“I’m much obliged to you; of course not. I thought you had one of our
chairs, and I didn’t like to ask you. It looks exactly like one of ours;
not so much now as when you sit in it. Please sit down again. I don’t
want to trouble you. We’ve lost one of ours, and I’ve been looking for
it everywhere. They look so much alike; you can’t tell till you see the
back. Of course I see there will be no mistake about yours,” the young
lady went on with a smile of which the serenity matched her other
abundance. “But we’ve got such a small name—you can scarcely see it,”
she added with the same friendly intention. “Our name’s just Day—you
mightn’t think it _was_ a name, might you? if we didn’t make the most of
it. If you see that on anything, I’d be so obliged if you’d tell me. It
isn’t for myself, it’s for my mother; she’s so dependent on her chair,
and that one I’m looking for pulls out so beautifully. Now that you sit
down again and hide the lower part it does look just like ours. Well, it
must be somewhere. You must excuse me; I wouldn’t disturb you.”
This was a long and even confidential speech for a young woman,
presumably unmarried, to make to a perfect stranger; but Miss Day
acquitted herself of it with perfect simplicity and self-possession. She
held up her head and stepped away, and Vogelstein could see that the foot
she pressed upon the clean smooth deck was slender and shapely. He
watched her disappear through the trap by which she had ascended, and he
felt more than ever like the young man in his American tale. The girl in
the present case was older and not so pretty, as he could easily judge,
for the image of her smiling eyes and speaking lips still hovered before
him. He went back to his book with the feeling that it would give him
some information about her. This was rather illogical, but it indicated
a certain amount of curiosity on the part of Count Vogelstein. The girl
in the book had a mother, it appeared, and so had this young lady; the
former had also a brother, and he now remembered that he had noticed a
young man on the wharf—a young man in a high hat and a white overcoat—who
seemed united to Miss Day by this natural tie. And there was some one
else too, as he gradually recollected, an older man, also in a high hat,
but in a black overcoat—in black altogether—who completed the group and
who was presumably the head of the family. These reflexions would
indicate that Count Vogelstein read his volume of Tauchnitz rather
interruptedly. Moreover they represented but the loosest economy of
consciousness; for wasn’t he to be afloat in an oblong box for ten days
with such people, and could it be doubted he should see at least enough
of them?
It may as well be written without delay that he saw a great deal of them.
I have sketched in some detail the conditions in which he made the
acquaintance of Miss Day, because the event had a certain importance for
this fair square Teuton; but I must pass briefly over the incidents that
immediately followed it. He wondered what it was open to him, after such
an introduction, to do in relation to her, and he determined he would
push through his American tale and discover what the hero did. But he
satisfied himself in a very short time that Miss Day had nothing in
common with the heroine of that work save certain signs of habitat and
climate—and save, further, the fact that the male sex wasn’t terrible to
her. The local stamp sharply, as he gathered, impressed upon her he
estimated indeed rather in a borrowed than in a natural light, for if she
was native to a small town in the interior of the American continent one
of their fellow-passengers, a lady from New York with whom he had a good
deal of conversation, pronounced her “atrociously” provincial. How the
lady arrived at this certitude didn’t appear, for Vogelstein observed
that she held no communication with the girl. It was true she gave it
the support of her laying down that certain Americans could tell
immediately who other Americans were, leaving him to judge whether or no
she herself belonged to the critical or only to the criticised half of
the nation. Mrs. Dangerfield was a handsome confidential insinuating
woman, with whom Vogelstein felt his talk take a very wide range indeed.
She convinced him rather effectually that even in a great democracy there
are human differences, and that American life was full of social
distinctions, of delicate shades, which foreigners often lack the
intelligence to perceive. Did he suppose every one knew every one else
in the biggest country in the world, and that one wasn’t as free to
choose one’s company there as in the most monarchical and most exclusive
societies? She laughed such delusions to scorn as Vogelstein tucked her
beautiful furred coverlet—they reclined together a great deal in their
elongated chairs—well over her feet. How free an American lady was to
choose her company she abundantly proved by not knowing any one on the
steamer but Count Otto.
He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had not at all her grand
air. They were fat plain serious people who sat side by side on the deck
for hours and looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white face,
large cheeks and small eyes: her forehead was surrounded with a multitude
of little tight black curls; her lips moved as if she had always a
lozenge in her mouth. She wore entwined about her head an article which
Mrs. Dangerfield spoke of as a “nuby,” a knitted pink scarf concealing
her hair, encircling her neck and having among its convolutions a hole
for her perfectly expressionless face. Her hands were folded on her
stomach, and in her still, swathed figure her little bead-like eyes,
which occasionally changed their direction, alone represented life. Her
husband had a stiff grey beard on his chin and a bare spacious upper lip,
to which constant shaving had imparted a hard glaze. His eyebrows were
thick and his nostrils wide, and when he was uncovered, in the saloon, it
was visible that his grizzled hair was dense and perpendicular. He might
have looked rather grim and truculent hadn’t it been for the mild
familiar accommodating gaze with which his large light-coloured
pupils—the leisurely eyes of a silent man—appeared to consider
surrounding objects. He was evidently more friendly than fierce, but he
was more diffident than friendly. He liked to have you in sight, but
wouldn’t have pretended to understand you much or to classify you, and
would have been sorry it should put you under an obligation. He and his
wife spoke sometimes, but seldom talked, and there was something vague
and patient in them, as if they had become victims of a wrought spell.
The spell however was of no sinister cast; it was the fascination of
prosperity, the confidence of security, which sometimes makes people
arrogant, but which had had such a different effect on this simple
satisfied pair, in whom further development of every kind appeared to
have been happily arrested.
Mrs. Dangerfield made it known to Count Otto that every morning after
breakfast, the hour at which he wrote his journal in his cabin, the old
couple were guided upstairs and installed in their customary corner by
Pandora. This she had learned to be the name of their elder daughter,
and she was immensely amused by her discovery. “Pandora”—that was in the
highest degree typical; it placed them in the social scale if other
evidence had been wanting; you could tell that a girl was from the
interior, the mysterious interior about which Vogelstein’s imagination
was now quite excited, when she had such a name as that. This young lady
managed the whole family, even a little the small beflounced sister, who,
with bold pretty innocent eyes, a torrent of fair silky hair, a crimson
fez, such as is worn by male Turks, very much askew on top of it, and a
way of galloping and straddling about the ship in any company she could
pick up—she had long thin legs, very short skirts and stockings of every
tint—was going home, in elegant French clothes, to resume an interrupted
education. Pandora overlooked and directed her relatives; Vogelstein
could see this for himself, could see she was very active and decided,
that she had in a high degree the sentiment of responsibility, settling
on the spot most of the questions that could come up for a family from
the interior.
The voyage was remarkably fine, and day after day it was possible to sit
there under the salt sky and feel one’s self rounding the great curves of
the globe. The long deck made a white spot in the sharp black circle of
the ocean and in the intense sea-light, while the shadow of the
smoke-streamers trembled on the familiar floor, the shoes of
fellow-passengers, distinctive now, and in some cases irritating, passed
and repassed, accompanied, in the air so tremendously “open,” that
rendered all voices weak and most remarks rather flat, by fragments of
opinion on the run of the ship. Vogelstein by this time had finished his
little American story and now definitely judged that Pandora Day was not
at all like the heroine. She was of quite another type; much more
serious and strenuous, and not at all keen, as he had supposed, about
making the acquaintance of gentlemen. Her speaking to him that first
afternoon had been, he was bound to believe, an incident without
importance for herself; in spite of her having followed it up the next
day by the remark, thrown at him as she passed, with a smile that was
almost fraternal: “It’s all right, sir! I’ve found that old chair.”
After this she hadn’t spoken to him again and had scarcely looked at him.
She read a great deal, and almost always French books, in fresh yellow
paper; not the lighter forms of that literature, but a volume of
Sainte-Beuve, of Renan or at the most, in the way of dissipation, of
Alfred de Musset. She took frequent exercise and almost always walked
alone, apparently not having made many friends on the ship and being
without the resource of her parents, who, as has been related, never
budged out of the cosy corner in which she planted them for the day.
Her brother was always in the smoking-room, where Vogelstein observed
him, in very tight clothes, his neck encircled with a collar like a
palisade. He had a sharp little face, which was not disagreeable; he
smoked enormous cigars and began his drinking early in the day: but his
appearance gave no sign of these excesses. As regards euchre and poker
and the other distractions of the place he was guilty of none. He
evidently understood such games in perfection, for he used to watch the
players, and even at moments impartially advise them; but Vogelstein
never saw the cards in his hand. He was referred to as regards disputed
points, and his opinion carried the day. He took little part in the
conversation, usually much relaxed, that prevailed in the smoking-room,
but from time to time he made, in his soft flat youthful voice, a remark
which every one paused to listen to and which was greeted with roars of
laughter. Vogelstein, well as he knew English, could rarely catch the
joke; but he could see at least that these must be choice specimens of
that American humour admired and practised by a whole continent and yet
to be rendered accessible to a trained diplomatist, clearly, but by some
special and incalculable revelation. The young man, in his way, was very
remarkable, for, as Vogelstein heard some one say once after the laughter
had subsided, he was only nineteen. If his sister didn’t resemble the
dreadful little girl in the tale already mentioned, there was for
Vogelstein at least an analogy between young Mr. Day and a certain small
brother—a candy-loving Madison, Hamilton or Jefferson—who was, in the
Tauchnitz volume, attributed to that unfortunate maid. This was what the
little Madison would have grown up to at nineteen, and the improvement
was greater than might have been expected.
The days were long, but the voyage was short, and it had almost come to
an end before Count Otto yielded to an attraction peculiar in its nature
and finally irresistible, and, in spite of Mrs. Dangerfield’s emphatic
warning, sought occasion for a little continuous talk with Miss Pandora.
To mention that this impulse took effect without mentioning sundry other
of his current impressions with which it had nothing to do is perhaps to
violate proportion and give a false idea; but to pass it by would be
still more unjust. The Germans, as we know, are a transcendental people,
and there was at last an irresistible appeal for Vogelstein in this quick
bright silent girl who could smile and turn vocal in an instant, who
imparted a rare originality to the filial character, and whose profile
was delicate as she bent it over a volume which she cut as she read, or
presented it in musing attitudes, at the side of the ship, to the horizon
they had left behind. But he felt it to be a pity, as regards a possible
acquaintance with her, that her parents should be heavy little burghers,
that her brother should not correspond to his conception of a young man
of the upper class, and that her sister should be a Daisy Miller _en
herbe_. Repeatedly admonished by Mrs. Dangerfield, the young diplomatist
was doubly careful as to the relations he might form at the beginning of
his sojourn in the United States. That lady reminded him, and he had
himself made the observation in other capitals, that the first year, and
even the second, is the time for prudence. One was ignorant of
proportions and values; one was exposed to mistakes and thankful for
attention, and one might give one’s self away to people who would
afterwards be as a millstone round one’s neck: Mrs. Dangerfield struck
and sustained that note, which resounded in the young man’s imagination.
She assured him that if he didn’t “look out” he would be committing
himself to some American girl with an impossible family. In America,
when one committed one’s self, there was nothing to do but march to the
altar, and what should he say for instance to finding himself a near
relation of Mr. and Mrs. P. W. Day?—since such were the initials
inscribed on the back of the two chairs of that couple. Count Otto felt
the peril, for he could immediately think of a dozen men he knew who had
married American girls. There appeared now to be a constant danger of
marrying the American girl; it was something one had to reckon with, like
the railway, the telegraph, the discovery of dynamite, the Chassepôt
rifle, the Socialistic spirit: it was one of the complications of modern
life.
It would doubtless be too much to say that he feared being carried away
by a passion for a young woman who was not strikingly beautiful and with
whom he had talked, in all, but ten minutes. But, as we recognise, he
went so far as to wish that the human belongings of a person whose high
spirit appeared to have no taint either of fastness, as they said in
England, or of subversive opinion, and whose mouth had charming lines,
should not be a little more distinguished. There was an effect of
drollery in her behaviour to these subjects of her zeal, whom she seemed
to regard as a care, but not as an interest; it was as if they had been
entrusted to her honour and she had engaged to convey them safe to a
certain point; she was detached and inadvertent, and then suddenly
remembered, repented and came back to tuck them into their blankets, to
alter the position of her mother’s umbrella, to tell them something about
the run of the ship. These little offices were usually performed deftly,
rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their daughter drew near
them Mr. and Mrs. Day closed their eyes after the fashion of a pair of
household dogs who expect to be scratched.
One morning she brought up the Captain of the ship to present to them;
she appeared to have a private and independent acquaintance with this
officer, and the introduction to her parents had the air of a sudden
happy thought. It wasn’t so much an introduction as an exhibition, as if
she were saying to him: “This is what they look like; see how comfortable
I make them. Aren’t they rather queer and rather dear little people?
But they leave me perfectly free. Oh I can assure you of that. Besides,
you must see it for yourself.” Mr. and Mrs. Day looked up at the high
functionary who thus unbent to them with very little change of
countenance; then looked at each other in the same way. He saluted, he
inclined himself a moment; but Pandora shook her head, she seemed to be
answering for them; she made little gestures as if in explanation to the
good Captain of some of their peculiarities, as for instance that he
needn’t expect them to speak. They closed their eyes at last; she
appeared to have a kind of mesmeric influence on them, and Miss Day
walked away with the important friend, who treated her with evident
consideration, bowing very low, for all his importance, when the two
presently after separated. Vogelstein could see she was capable of
making an impression; and the moral of our little matter is that in spite
of Mrs. Dangerfield, in spite of the resolutions of his prudence, in
spite of the limits of such acquaintance as he had momentarily made with
her, in spite of Mr. and Mrs. Day and the young man in the smoking-room,
she had fixed his attention.
It was in the course of the evening after the scene with the Captain that
he joined her, awkwardly, abruptly, irresistibly, on the deck, where she
was pacing to and fro alone, the hour being auspiciously mild and the
stars remarkably fine. There were scattered talkers and smokers and
couples, unrecognisable, that moved quickly through the gloom. The
vessel dipped with long regular pulsations; vague and spectral under the
low stars, its swaying pinnacles spotted here and there with lights, it
seemed to rush through the darkness faster than by day. Count Otto had
come up to walk, and as the girl brushed past him he distinguished
Pandora’s face—with Mrs. Dangerfield he always spoke of her as
Pandora—under the veil worn to protect it from the sea-damp. He stopped,
turned, hurried after her, threw away his cigar—then asked her if she
would do him the honour to accept his arm. She declined his arm but
accepted his company, and he allowed her to enjoy it for an hour. They
had a great deal of talk, and he was to remember afterwards some of the
things she had said. There was now a certainty of the ship’s getting
into dock the next morning but one, and this prospect afforded an obvious
topic. Some of Miss Day’s expressions struck him as singular, but of
course, as he was aware, his knowledge of English was not nice enough to
give him a perfect measure.
“I’m not in a hurry to arrive; I’m very happy here,” she said. “I’m
afraid I shall have such a time putting my people through.”
“Putting them through?”
“Through the Custom-House. We’ve made so many purchases. Well, I’ve
written to a friend to come down, and perhaps he can help us. He’s very
well acquainted with the head. Once I’m chalked I don’t care. I feel
like a kind of blackboard by this time anyway. We found them awful in
Germany.”
Count Otto wondered if the friend she had written to were her lover and
if they had plighted their troth, especially when she alluded to him
again as “that gentleman who’s coming down.” He asked her about her
travels, her impressions, whether she had been long in Europe and what
she liked best, and she put it to him that they had gone abroad, she and
her family, for a little fresh experience. Though he found her very
intelligent he suspected she gave this as a reason because he was a
German and she had heard the Germans were rich in culture. He wondered
what form of culture Mr. and Mrs. Day had brought back from Italy, Greece
and Palestine—they had travelled for two years and been
everywhere—especially when their daughter said: “I wanted father and
mother to see the best things. I kept them three hours on the Acropolis.
I guess they won’t forget that!” Perhaps it was of Phidias and Pericles
they were thinking, Vogelstein reflected, as they sat ruminating in their
rugs. Pandora remarked also that she wanted to show her little sister
everything while she was comparatively unformed (“comparatively!” he
mutely gasped); remarkable sights made so much more impression when the
mind was fresh: she had read something of that sort somewhere in Goethe.
She had wanted to come herself when she was her sister’s age; but her
father was in business then and they couldn’t leave Utica. The young man
thought of the little sister frisking over the Parthenon and the Mount of
Olives and sharing for two years, the years of the school-room, this
extraordinary pilgrimage of her parents; he wondered whether Goethe’s
dictum had been justified in this case. He asked Pandora if Utica were
the seat of her family, if it were an important or typical place, if it
would be an interesting city for him, as a stranger, to see. His
companion replied frankly that this was a big question, but added that
all the same she would ask him to “come and visit us at our home” if it
weren’t that they should probably soon leave it.
“Ah, you’re going to live elsewhere?” Vogelstein asked, as if that fact
too would be typical.
“Well, I’m working for New York. I flatter myself I’ve loosened them
while we’ve been away,” the girl went on. “They won’t find in Utica the
same charm; that was my idea. I want a big place, and of course Utica—!”
She broke off as before a complex statement.
“I suppose Utica is inferior—?” Vogelstein seemed to see his way to
suggest.
“Well no, I guess I can’t have you call Utica inferior. It isn’t
supreme—that’s what’s the matter with it, and I hate anything middling,”
said Pandora Day. She gave a light dry laugh, tossing back her head a
little as she made this declaration. And looking at her askance in the
dusk, as she trod the deck that vaguely swayed, he recognised something
in her air and port that matched such a pronouncement.
“What’s her social position?” he inquired of Mrs. Dangerfield the next
day. “I can’t make it out at all—it’s so contradictory. She strikes me
as having much cultivation and much spirit. Her appearance, too, is very
neat. Yet her parents are complete little burghers. That’s easily
seen.”
“Oh, social position,” and Mrs. Dangerfield nodded two or three times
portentously. “What big expressions you use! Do you think everybody in
the world has a social position? That’s reserved for an infinitely small
majority of mankind. You can’t have a social position at Utica any more
than you can have an opera-box. Pandora hasn’t got one; where, if you
please, should she have got it? Poor girl, it isn’t fair of you to make
her the subject of such questions as that.”
“Well,” said Vogelstein, “if she’s of the lower class it seems to me
very—very—” And he paused a moment, as he often paused in speaking
English, looking for his word.
“Very what, dear Count?”
“Very significant, very representative.”
“Oh dear, she isn’t of the lower class,” Mrs. Dangerfield returned with
an irritated sense of wasted wisdom. She liked to explain her country,
but that somehow always required two persons.
“What is she then?”
“Well, I’m bound to admit that since I was at home last she’s a novelty.
A girl like that with such people—it _is_ a new type.”
“I like novelties”—and Count Otto smiled with an air of considerable
resolution. He couldn’t however be satisfied with a demonstration that
only begged the question; and when they disembarked in New York he felt,
even amid the confusion of the wharf and the heaps of disembowelled
baggage, a certain acuteness of regret at the idea that Pandora and her
family were about to vanish into the unknown. He had a consolation
however: it was apparent that for some reason or other—illness or absence
from town—the gentleman to whom she had written had not, as she said,
come down. Vogelstein was glad—he couldn’t have told you why—that this
sympathetic person had failed her; even though without him Pandora had to
engage single-handed with the United States Custom-House. Our young
man’s first impression of the Western world was received on the
landing-place of the German steamers at Jersey City—a huge wooden shed
covering a wooden wharf which resounded under the feet, an expanse
palisaded with rough-hewn piles that leaned this way and that, and
bestrewn with masses of heterogeneous luggage. At one end; toward the
town, was a row of tall painted palings, behind which he could
distinguish a press of hackney-coachmen, who brandished their whips and
awaited their victims, while their voices rose, incessant, with a sharp
strange sound, a challenge at once fierce and familiar. The whole place,
behind the fence, appeared to bristle and resound. Out there was
America, Count Otto said to himself, and he looked toward it with a sense
that he should have to muster resolution. On the wharf people were
rushing about amid their trunks, pulling their things together, trying to
unite their scattered parcels. They were heated and angry, or else quite
bewildered and discouraged. The few that had succeeded in collecting
their battered boxes had an air of flushed indifference to the efforts of
their neighbours, not even looking at people with whom they had been
fondly intimate on the steamer. A detachment of the officers of the
Customs was in attendance, and energetic passengers were engaged in
attempts to drag them toward their luggage or to drag heavy pieces toward
them. These functionaries were good-natured and taciturn, except when
occasionally they remarked to a passenger whose open trunk stared up at
them, eloquent, imploring, that they were afraid the voyage had been
“rather glassy.” They had a friendly leisurely speculative way of
discharging their duty, and if they perceived a victim’s name written on
the portmanteau they addressed him by it in a tone of old acquaintance.
Vogelstein found however that if they were familiar they weren’t
indiscreet. He had heard that in America all public functionaries were
the same, that there wasn’t a different _tenue_, as they said in France,
for different positions, and he wondered whether at Washington the
President and ministers, whom he expected to see—to _have_ to see—a good
deal of, would be like that.
He was diverted from these speculations by the sight of Mr. and Mrs. Day
seated side by side upon a trunk and encompassed apparently by the
accumulations of their tour. Their faces expressed more consciousness of
surrounding objects than he had hitherto recognised, and there was an air
of placid expansion in the mysterious couple which suggested that this
consciousness was agreeable. Mr. and Mrs. Day were, as they would have
said, real glad to get back. At a little distance, on the edge of the
dock, our observer remarked their son, who had found a place where,
between the sides of two big ships, he could see the ferry-boats pass;
the large pyramidal low-laden ferry-boats of American waters. He stood
there, patient and considering, with his small neat foot on a coil of
rope, his back to everything that had been disembarked, his neck
elongated in its polished cylinder, while the fragrance of his big cigar
mingled with the odour of the rotting piles, and his little sister,
beside him, hugged a huge post and tried to see how far she could crane
over the water without falling in. Vogelstein’s servant was off in
search of an examiner; Count Otto himself had got his things together and
was waiting to be released, fully expecting that for a person of his
importance the ceremony would be brief.
Before it began he said a word to young Mr. Day, raising his hat at the
same time to the little girl, whom he had not yet greeted and who dodged
his salute by swinging herself boldly outward to the dangerous side of
the pier. She was indeed still unformed, but was evidently as light as a
feather.
“I see you’re kept waiting like me. It’s very tiresome,” Count Otto
said.
The young American answered without looking behind him. “As soon as
we’re started we’ll go all right. My sister has written to a gentleman
to come down.”
“I’ve looked for Miss Day to bid her good-bye,” Vogelstein went on; “but
I don’t see her.”
“I guess she has gone to meet that gentleman; he’s a great friend of
hers.”
“I guess he’s her lover!” the little girl broke out. “She was always
writing to him in Europe.”
Her brother puffed his cigar in silence a moment. “That was only for
this. I’ll tell on you, sis,” he presently added.
But the younger Miss Day gave no heed to his menace; she addressed
herself only, though with all freedom, to Vogelstein. “This is New York;
I like it better than Utica.”
He had no time to reply, for his servant had arrived with one of the
dispensers of fortune; but as he turned away he wondered, in the light of
the child’s preference, about the towns of the interior. He was
naturally exempt from the common doom. The officer who took him in hand,
and who had a large straw hat and a diamond breastpin, was quite a man of
the world, and in reply to the Count’s formal declarations only said,
“Well, I guess it’s all right; I guess I’ll just pass you,” distributing
chalk-marks as if they had been so many love-pats. The servant had done
some superfluous unlocking and unbuckling, and while he closed the pieces
the officer stood there wiping his forehead and conversing with
Vogelstein. “First visit to our country, sir?—quite alone—no ladies? Of
course the ladies are what we’re most after.” It was in this manner he
expressed himself, while the young diplomatist wondered what he was
waiting for and whether he ought to slip something into his palm. But
this representative of order left our friend only a moment in suspense;
he presently turned away with the remark quite paternally uttered, that
he hoped the Count would make quite a stay; upon which the young man saw
how wrong he should have been to offer a tip. It was simply the American
manner, which had a finish of its own after all. Vogelstein’s servant
had secured a porter with a truck, and he was about to leave the place
when he saw Pandora Day dart out of the crowd and address herself with
much eagerness to the functionary who had just liberated him. She had an
open letter in her hand which she gave him to read and over which he cast
his eyes, thoughtfully stroking his beard. Then she led him away to
where her parents sat on their luggage. Count Otto sent off his servant
with the porter and followed Pandora, to whom he really wished to address
a word of farewell. The last thing they had said to each other on the
ship was that they should meet again on shore. It seemed improbable
however that the meeting would occur anywhere but just here on the dock;
inasmuch as Pandora was decidedly not in society, where Vogelstein would
be of course, and as, if Utica—he had her sharp little sister’s word for
it—was worse than what was about him there, he’d be hanged if he’d go to
Utica. He overtook Pandora quickly; she was in the act of introducing
the representative of order to her parents, quite in the same manner in
which she had introduced the Captain of the ship. Mr. and Mrs. Day got
up and shook hands with him and they evidently all prepared to have a
little talk. “I should like to introduce you to my brother and sister,”
he heard the girl say, and he saw her look about for these appendages.
He caught her eye as she did so, and advanced with his hand outstretched,
reflecting the while that evidently the Americans, whom he had always
heard described as silent and practical, rejoiced to extravagance in the
social graces. They dawdled and chattered like so many Neapolitans.
“Good-bye, Count Vogelstein,” said Pandora, who was a little flushed with
her various exertions but didn’t look the worse for it. “I hope you’ll
have a splendid time and appreciate our country.”
“I hope you’ll get through all right,” Vogelstein answered, smiling and
feeling himself already more idiomatic.
“That gentleman’s sick that I wrote to,” she rejoined; “isn’t it too bad?
But he sent me down a letter to a friend of his—one of the examiners—and
I guess we won’t have any trouble. Mr. Lansing, let me make you
acquainted with Count Vogelstein,” she went on, presenting to her
fellow-passenger the wearer of the straw hat and the breastpin, who shook
hands with the young German as if he had never seen him before.
Vogelstein’s heart rose for an instant to his throat; he thanked his
stars he hadn’t offered a tip to the friend of a gentleman who had often
been mentioned to him and who had also been described by a member of
Pandora’s family as Pandora’s lover.
“It’s a case of ladies this time,” Mr. Lansing remarked to him with a
smile which seemed to confess surreptitiously, and as if neither party
could be eager, to recognition.
“Well, Mr. Bellamy says you’ll do anything for _him_,” Pandora said,
smiling very sweetly at Mr. Lansing. “We haven’t got much; we’ve been
gone only two years.”
Mr. Lansing scratched his head a little behind, with a movement that sent
his straw hat forward in the direction of his nose. “I don’t know as I’d
do anything for him that I wouldn’t do for you,” he responded with an
equal geniality. “I guess you’d better open that one”—and he gave a
little affectionate kick to one of the trunks.