THE _Patagonia_ was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a
motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned
gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper
petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with
the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We weren’t numerous enough
quite to elbow each other and yet weren’t too few to support—with that
familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great
bare field of the ocean and under the great bright glass of the sky. I
had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at
all; but now I had a revelation of how in a midsummer mood it could
please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably
quiet—save for the great regular swell of its heartbeats, the pulse of
its life; and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of
floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was a positive
godsend the _Patagonia_ was no racer. One had never thought of the sea
as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there’s no
place so safe from the land. When it doesn’t confer trouble it takes
trouble away—takes away letters and telegrams and newspapers and visits
and duties and efforts, all the complications, all the superfluities and
superstitions that we have stuffed into our terrene life. The simple
absence of the post, when the particular conditions enable you to enjoy
the great fact by which it’s produced, becomes in itself a positive
bliss, and the clean boards of the deck turn to the stage of a play that
amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the movement and interaction,
in the strong sea-light, of figures that end by representing
something—something moreover of which the interest is never, even in its
keenness, too great to suffer you to slumber. I at any rate dozed to
excess, stretched on my rug with a French novel, and when I opened my
eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint pass with the young woman
confided to his mother’s care on his arm. Somehow at these moments,
between sleeping and waking, I inconsequently felt that my French novel
had set them in motion. Perhaps this was because I had fallen into the
trick, at the start, of regarding Grace Mavis almost as a married woman,
which, as every one knows, is the necessary status of the heroine of such
a work. Every revolution of our engine at any rate would contribute to
the effect of making her one.
In the saloon, at meals, my neighbour on the right was a certain little
Mrs. Peck, a very short and very round person whose head was enveloped in
a “cloud” (a cloud of dirty white wool) and who promptly let me know that
she was going to Europe for the education of her children. I had already
perceived—an hour after we left the dock—that some energetic measure was
required in their interest, but as we were not in Europe yet the
redemption of the four little Pecks was stayed. Enjoying untrammelled
leisure they swarmed about the ship as if they had been pirates boarding
her, and their mother was as powerless to check their licence as if she
had been gagged and stowed away in the hold. They were especially to be
trusted to dive between the legs of the stewards when these attendants
arrived with bowls of soup for the languid ladies. Their mother was too
busy counting over to her fellow-passengers all the years Miss Mavis had
been engaged. In the blank of our common detachment things that were
nobody’s business very soon became everybody’s, and this was just one of
those facts that are propagated with mysterious and ridiculous speed.
The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of
things, of air and space and progress, but it’s also very safe, for
there’s no compression, no sounding-board, to make speakers responsible.
And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in the
air, the mind is flat and everything recurs—the bells, the meals, the
stewards’ faces, the romp of children, the walk, the clothes, the very
shoes and buttons of passengers taking their exercise. These things
finally grow at once so circumstantial and so arid that, in comparison,
lights on the personal history of one’s companions become a substitute
for the friendly flicker of the lost fireside.
Jasper Nettlepoint sat on my left hand when he was not upstairs seeing
that Miss Mavis had her repast comfortably on deck. His mother’s place
would have been next mine had she shown herself, and then that of the
young lady under her care. These companions, in other words, would have
been between us, Jasper marking the limit of the party in that quarter.
Miss Mavis was present at luncheon the first day, but dinner passed
without her coming in, and when it was half over Jasper remarked that he
would go up and look after her.
“Isn’t that young lady coming—the one who was here to lunch?” Mrs. Peck
asked of me as he left the saloon.
“Apparently not. My friend tells me she doesn’t like the saloon.”
“You don’t mean to say she’s sick, do you?”
“Oh no, not in this weather. But she likes to be above.”
“And is that gentleman gone up to her?”
“Yes, she’s under his mother’s care.”
“And is his mother up there, too?” asked Mrs. Peck, whose processes were
homely and direct.
“No, she remains in her cabin. People have different tastes. Perhaps
that’s one reason why Miss Mavis doesn’t come to table,” I added—“her
chaperon not being able to accompany her.”
“Her chaperon?” my fellow passenger echoed.
“Mrs. Nettlepoint—the lady under whose protection she happens to be.”
“Protection?” Mrs. Peck stared at me a moment, moving some valued morsel
in her mouth; then she exclaimed familiarly “Pshaw!” I was struck with
this and was on the point of asking her what she meant by it when she
continued: “Ain’t we going to see Mrs. Nettlepoint?”
“I’m afraid not. She vows she won’t stir from her sofa.”
“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Peck again. “That’s quite a disappointment.”
“Do you know her then?”
“No, but I know all about her.” Then my companion added: “You don’t mean
to say she’s any real relation?”
“Do you mean to me?”
“No, to Grace Mavis.”
“None at all. They’re very new friends, as I happen to know. Then
you’re acquainted with our young lady?” I hadn’t noticed the passage of
any recognition between them at luncheon.
“Is she your young lady too?” asked Mrs. Peck with high significance.
“Ah when people are in the same boat—literally—they belong a little to
each other.”
“That’s so,” said Mrs. Peck. “I don’t know Miss Mavis, but I know all
about her—I live opposite to her on Merrimac Avenue. I don’t know
whether you know that part.”
“Oh yes—it’s very beautiful.”
The consequence of this remark was another “Pshaw!” But Mrs. Peck went
on: “When you’ve lived opposite to people like that for a long time you
feel as if you had some rights in them—tit for tat! But she didn’t take
it up today; she didn’t speak to me. She knows who I am as well as she
knows her own mother.”
“You had better speak to her first—she’s constitutionally shy,” I
remarked.
“Shy? She’s constitutionally tough! Why she’s thirty years old,” cried
my neighbour. “I suppose you know where she’s going.”
“Oh yes—we all take an interest in that.”
“That young man, I suppose, particularly.” And then as I feigned a
vagueness: “The handsome one who sits _there_. Didn’t you tell me he’s
Mrs. Nettlepoint’s son?”
“Oh yes—he acts as her deputy. No doubt he does all he can to carry out
her function.”
Mrs. Peck briefly brooded. I had spoken jocosely, but she took it with a
serious face. “Well, she might let him eat his dinner in peace!” she
presently put forth.
“Oh he’ll come back!” I said, glancing at his place. The repast
continued and when it was finished I screwed my chair round to leave the
table. Mrs. Peck performed the same movement and we quitted the saloon
together. Outside of it was the usual vestibule, with several seats,
from which you could descend to the lower cabins or mount to the
promenade-deck. Mrs. Peck appeared to hesitate as to her course and then
solved the problem by going neither way. She dropped on one of the
benches and looked up at me.
“I thought you said he’d come back.”
“Young Nettlepoint? Yes, I see he didn’t. Miss Mavis then has given him
half her dinner.”
“It’s very kind of her! She has been engaged half her life.”
“Yes, but that will soon be over.”
“So I suppose—as quick as ever we land. Every one knows it on Merrimac
Avenue,” Mrs. Peck pursued. “Every one there takes a great interest in
it.”
“Ah of course—a girl like that has many friends.”
But my informant discriminated. “I mean even people who don’t know her.”
“I see,” I went on: “she’s so handsome that she attracts attention—people
enter into her affairs.”
Mrs. Peck spoke as from the commanding centre of these. “She _used_ to
be pretty, but I can’t say I think she’s anything remarkable today.
Anyhow, if she attracts attention she ought to be all the more careful
what she does. You had better tell her that.”
“Oh it’s none of my business!” I easily made out, leaving the terrible
little woman and going above. This profession, I grant, was not
perfectly attuned to my real idea, or rather my real idea was not quite
in harmony with my profession. The very first thing I did on reaching
the deck was to notice that Miss Mavis was pacing it on Jasper
Nettlepoint’s arm and that whatever beauty she might have lost, according
to Mrs. Peck’s insinuation, she still kept enough to make one’s eyes
follow her. She had put on a crimson hood, which was very becoming to
her and which she wore for the rest of the voyage. She walked very well,
with long steps, and I remember that at this moment the sea had a gentle
evening swell which made the great ship dip slowly, rhythmically, giving
a movement that was graceful to graceful pedestrians and a more awkward
one to the awkward. It was the loveliest hour of a fine day, the clear
early evening, with the glow of the sunset in the air and a purple colour
on the deep. It was always present to me that so the waters ploughed by
the Homeric heroes must have looked. I became conscious on this
particular occasion moreover that Grace Mavis would for the rest of the
voyage be the most visible thing in one’s range, the figure that would
count most in the composition of groups. She couldn’t help it, poor
girl; nature had made her conspicuous—important, as the painters say.
She paid for it by the corresponding exposure, the danger that people
would, as I had said to Mrs. Peck, enter into her affairs.
Jasper Nettlepoint went down at certain times to see his mother, and I
watched for one of these occasions—on the third day out—and took
advantage of it to go and sit by Miss Mavis. She wore a light blue veil
drawn tightly over her face, so that if the smile with which she greeted
me rather lacked intensity I could account for it partly by that.
“Well, we’re getting on—we’re getting on,” I said cheerfully, looking at
the friendly twinkling sea.
“Are we going very fast?”
“Not fast, but steadily. _Ohne Hast_, _ohne Rast_—do you know German?”
“Well, I’ve studied it—some.”
“It will be useful to you over there when you travel.”
“Well yes, if we do. But I don’t suppose we shall much. Mr. Nettlepoint
says we ought,” my young woman added in a moment.
“Ah of course _he_ thinks so. He has been all over the world.”
“Yes, he has described some of the places. They must be wonderful. I
didn’t know I should like it so much.”
“But it isn’t ‘Europe’ yet!” I laughed.
Well, she didn’t care if it wasn’t. “I mean going on this way. I could
go on for ever—for ever and ever.”
“Ah you know it’s not always like this,” I hastened to mention.
“Well, it’s better than Boston.”
“It isn’t so good as Paris,” I still more portentously noted.
“Oh I know all about Paris. There’s no freshness in that. I feel as if
I had been there all the time.”
“You mean you’ve heard so much of it?”
“Oh yes, nothing else for ten years.”
I had come to talk with Miss Mavis because she was attractive, but I had
been rather conscious of the absence of a good topic, not feeling at
liberty to revert to Mr. Porterfield. She hadn’t encouraged me, when I
spoke to her as we were leaving Boston, to go on with the history of my
acquaintance with this gentleman; and yet now, unexpectedly, she appeared
to imply—it was doubtless one of the disparities mentioned by Mrs.
Nettlepoint—that he might be glanced at without indelicacy.
“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.”