II
There were not many passengers on the steamer; at this season the current of travel ran in the opposite direction. There was a puffy little white-haired, important man, who accosted him on the deck, the second day out, and asked whether it was his first visit abroad that he was returning from. He reflected for a moment, and answered yes; for though he had lived abroad half a lifetime, he had crossed the ocean only once before. He was too shy to enter upon an explanation, so he answered yes. Then the puffy man boasted of the immense numbers of voyages he had made. “Oh, I know Europe!” he declaimed, and told how his business—he described himself as “buyer” for a firm of printing-ink importers—took him to that continent two or three times a year. He had an inquiring mind, and a great facility for questioning people. “Excuse me, Mr. Aigrefield,” he said (he had learned our friend’s name from the passenger-list) “but what does that red button in your buttonhole mean? Some society you belong to?”
Aigrefield, concealing what he suffered, again sought refuge in an ambiguous yes; but he slunk away to his cabin, and put the “red button” in his box: it was absurd to wear the insignia of a French order outside of France.
Then, of course, the ship’s company was completed by a highly intelligent lady in eyeglasses, who lay in a deck-chair all day, and read Mr. Pater’s Mariys (the volume lasted her throughout the voyage); a statistical clergyman, returning from his vacation, a mine of practical misinformation; a couple of Frenchmen, travelling no one could guess why, since they seemed quite cast-down and in despair about it; a half-dozen Hebrews, travelling one couldn’t help knowing wherefore, since they discussed “voollens” and prices and shipments at the tops of their cheerful voices; and the inevitable young Western girl, travelling alone. For the first time in twenty years, almost, he had descended from the cloud he lived in, and was rubbing against the actualities of the earth.
The highly intelligent lady “knew who he was,” as she told him sweetly, and would speak of nothing but art, in her highly intelligent way. If he had had more humour, her perfervid enthusiasms, couched in an extremely rudimental studio-slang (she talked a vast deal of values and keys, of atmosphere and light, of things being badly modelled or a little “out”)—if he had had more humour, all this might have amused him; but he was, as we have said, somewhat too literally inclined; and the cant of it jarred upon him, and made him sick at heart. Her formula for opening up a topic, “Now, Mr. Aigrefield, tell me, what do you think of...” became an obsession, that would descend upon him in the dead of night, making him dread the morrow. All these people, he remarked, Mr. Aigrefielded him unpityingly. He wished the English language had, for the use of his compatriots (in England they seem to get on well enough without forever naming names) a mode of address similar to the French monsieur.
But the solitary young Western girl he liked. She had made her first appeal to his eye, through her form and colour; but when he came to know her a little he liked her for her spirit. She was tall, with a strong, supple figure, a face picturesque in the discreet irregularity of its features, a pair of limpid gray eyes, a fresh complexion, and an overhanging ornament of warm brown hair. She was much given to smiling, also,—a smile that played in lovely curves about lips, if anything, a thought too full, a semitone too scarlet,—whence he inferred that she had an amiable disposition, a light heart, and an easy conscience. Hearing her speak, he observed that her voice was of a depth, smoothness, and rotundity, that atoned in great measure for the occidental quality of her accent. At all events, he was drawn to her: they walked the deck a good deal together, and often had their chairs placed side by side. He philosophised her attraction for him by saying, “She is a force of nature, she is fresh and simple.” The “buyer” for the firm of printing-ink importers had struck him as fresh, indeed, but not as simple; the lady who read Mr. Pater, as simple but not fresh; the Hebrew gentlemen, even the unhappy Frenchmen, if you will, as natural forces: but the Western girl combined these several advantages in her single person, and so she became his favourite amongst his shipmates.
Her name was Lillian Goddard; she lived in Minneapolis, where, as she informed him, her father was a judge. She had been abroad nearly a year, had passed the winter in Rome, could speak a little Italian, a little French, and an immense deal of American. I have described her as young, and I hope it will not be considered an anachronism when I add that her age was twenty-six.
She was tremendously patriotic, and appeared shocked and grieved when she learned that he had remained continuously absent from his country for a score of years.
“Why, the more I saw of Europe, the more I loved dear old America,” she declared, in her deep voice.
She was just as homesick as she could be, she said, and couldn’t get back to Minneapolis fast enough. Did he know the West?—and again she appeared shocked at discovering the profundities of his ignorance concerning it. Oh, he must certainly see the West. No American could begin to appreciate his country till he had seen the West. The people out there were so alive, so go-ahead; and they took such an interest in all forms of culture too, in literature, music, painting, the drama. “Why, look at the big magazines,—they depend for their circulation on the West.” And then, the homes of the West! “Oh, if I lived in Europe, I should lose my faith in human nature. Western people are so warmhearted. I’m afraid you’re awfully unpatriotic, Mr. Aigrefield.”
He reminded her that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel; and anyhow, he pleaded, it was too much to expect of one small man that he should be patriotic for a continent. But she shook her head at his perversity, and guessed he’d be proud enough of his Continent if he had seen it, and insisted that he must come to Minneapolis, and look round.
He liked her amazingly. As their voyage grew older, he found himself taking a greater and greater pleasure in her propinquity; looking forward with something akin to eagerness to meeting her on deck, as he accomplished his morning toilet; and recalling fondly their commerce of the day, as he turned in at night. Besides, the charm of her strong, irregular beauty grew upon him, and he said to her, smiling, “When I come to Minneapolis you must let me try a portrait of you.”
“Ah, then you are really coming?” she demanded, striving to fix him in a pious resolution.
He laughed vaguely, and she protested, “Oh, shame, Mr. Aigrefield, now you are wriggling out!”
He felt that she was sweet and sound and honest: direct, vigorous, bracing: he wondered if indeed she might not owe these qualities, in some part, to her native Western soil; and he admitted that the West was beginning to take a place in his affections. Heretofore, it had been a mere geographical abstraction for him, and one he would have shrunk from realising through experience. He imagined the colouring would be hard, the action violent, the atmosphere raw and rough.
“Well, whether I really come or not, I am sure I should really like to,” he said now.
“That’s such an innocent desire,” she cried, with a touch of mockery. “I don’t think it would be selfish to indulge it.”
“And if I do come, you will sit for me?”
“Oh, I’d do anything in such a cause—to make a patriot of you!”
At the outset of his journey, his impatience to reach the end of it was so great, the progress of the steamer had seemed exasperatingly slow. But as they began to near New York, a vague dread of what might await him there, a vague recoil from the potential and the unknown, made him almost wish that the throbbing of the engines were not so rapid. A cloud of dismal possibilities haunted his imagination, filling it with a strange chill and ache. He had never paused before to think of the many things that had had time to happen in twenty years; and now they assailed his mind in a mass, and appalled it. Even the preliminary business of discovering her whereabouts, for instance, might prove difficult enough; and then——-? In matters of this sort, at any rate, it is the next step which costs. In twenty years what ties and affections she might have formed, that would make him a necessary stranger to her life, and leave no room for him in her heart. He was jealous of a supposititious lover (he had lived in France too long to remember that in America lovers are not the fashion), of supposititious children, supposititious interests and occupations: jealous and afraid. And of course it was always to be reckoned with as in the bounds of the conceivable, that she might be disconsolate for the loss of Mr. Merrow: though this, for some reason, seemed the least likely of the contingencies he had to face. Mr. Merrow, he knew, had been a cotton-broker; he had always fancied him as a big, rather florid person, with a husky voice: capable perhaps of inspiring a mild fondness, but not of a character to take hold upon the deeper emotional strands of Pauline’s nature.
His nervousness increased inordinately after the pilot came aboard. He marched rapidly backwards and forwards on the deck, scarcely conscious of what he was saying to Miss Goddard, who kept pace with him. She laughed presently—her deep contralto laughter; and then he inquired very seriously whether he had said anything absurd.
“Don’t you know what you said?” she exclaimed.
“I—I don’t just remember. I was thinking of something else,” he confessed, knitting his brows.
“Well, that’s not very complimentary to me, now, is it? Still, if you can say such things without knowing it, I suppose I must forgive you. I asked you what you thought was the best short definition of life, and you said a chance to make mistakes.”
“I never could have said anything so good if I had had my wits about me,” he explained.
Countless old memories and associations were surging up within him now; and as he leaned over the rail and gazed into the murky waters of the New York Bay, the European chapters of his life became a mere parenthesis, and the text joined itself to the word at which it had been interrupted when he was four and twenty. Sorry patriot though he might be, he was still made of flesh and blood; and he could not approach the land of his childhood, his youth, his love and loss, without some stirrings of the heartstrings besides those that were evoked by the prospect of meeting her. His other old companions would no doubt be dead or scattered; or they would have forgotten him as he, indeed, till yesterday had forgotten them. Anyhow, he would not attempt to look them up. He knew that he should feel an alien among his own people; he would not heighten the dreariness of that situation by ferreting out former intimates to find himself unrecognized, or by inquiring about them to be told that they were dead. He hadn’t very clearly formulated his positive intentions, but they probably lay in his sub-consciousness, brief and to the point, if somewhat short-sighted and unpractical: he would do his wooing as speedily as might be, and bear his bride triumphantly over-sea, to his home in Paris.
He bade Miss Goddard good-bye on the dock, whilst his trunks were being rifled by the Custom House inspector.
“Now, mind, you are to come to Minneapolis,” she insisted, as her hand lay in his, returning its pressure; and he could perceive a shade of earnestness behind the smile that lighted up her eyes.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” he answered, fervently, moved all at once by a feeling he would have had some difficulty in naming. “I may surprise you by turning up there one of these days.”
Then her hand was withdrawn, and she disappeared in a hackney-carriage. He went back to the task of getting his luggage examined, with a sense of having been abandoned by his last friend.
“What fortitude it must require to live here,” was the reflection that made him shake his head, as he drove over the rough paving-stones, through the dirty, ignoble streets, to his hotel. It struck him as more depressing still, when he emerged from the sordid tangle of the lower town into the smug rectangularity of the upper. He was sure that Pauline would be glad enough to exchange it all for the airy perspectives, the cleanliness, the gay colours, the variety of Paris. Of course he would have to give up his bachelor chambers overlooking the Luxembourg. He would rent, or buy, or even build, a proper house for her, in the quarter of the Etoile, or near the Parc Monceau.
He turned over the pages of the Directory that the hotel-clerk condescendingly pointed out to him, and found that Mr. Morrow’s address had been twenty-something in a street that had no name, but only a number and a point of the compass to serve for one; and that seemed to him in thorough keeping with the unimaginative, business-like character of the deceased cotton-broker. Pauline, in her widowhood, would very likely have moved away. It was too late to make a call to-day, being nearly dinner-time (he had forgotten that in New York it is not forbidden to call after dinner), but he would write her a little note, informing her of his arrival, and proposing to come to-morrow in the forenoon. On the corner of the envelope he would put “Please forward,” to anticipate the event of her having moved. Then he could leave it to destiny and the post-office authorities to do the rest.