The Patagonia by Henry James


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Page 1

Mrs. Nettlepoint was at home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where
the wide windows opened to the water. The room was dusky--it was too hot
for lamps--and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the
little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights
of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing on the loved
ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren;
but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me,
pointing with her fan to the Back Bay: "I shall see nothing more charming
than that over there, you know!" She made me very welcome, but her son
had told her about the _Patagonia_, for which she was sorry, as this
would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature in any boat and
mainly confined to her cabin even in weather extravagantly termed fine--as
if any weather could be fine at sea.

"Ah then your son's going with you?" I asked.

"Here he comes, he'll tell you for himself much better than I can pretend
to." Jasper Nettlepoint at that moment joined us, dressed in white
flannel and carrying a large fan. "Well, my dear, have you decided?" his
mother continued with no scant irony. "He hasn't yet made up his mind,
and we sail at ten o'clock!"

"What does it matter when my things are put up?" the young man said.
"There's no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I'm
waiting for a telegram--that will settle it. I just walked up to the
club to see if it was come--they'll send it there because they suppose
this house unoccupied. Not yet, but I shall go back in twenty minutes."

"Mercy, how you rush about in this temperature!" the poor lady exclaimed
while I reflected that it was perhaps _his_ billiard-balls I had heard
ten minutes before. I was sure he was fond of billiards.

"Rush? not in the least. I take it uncommon easy."

"Ah I'm bound to say you do!" Mrs. Nettlepoint returned with
inconsequence. I guessed at a certain tension between the pair and a
want of consideration on the young man's part, arising perhaps from
selfishness. His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting to be at rest
as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or be obliged to
struggle alone. But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan
he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn't sit too
heavily. He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not
of those who worry about other people. Tall and strong, he had a
handsome face, with a round head and close-curling hair; the whites of
his eyes and the enamel of his teeth, under his brown moustache, gleamed
vaguely in the lights of the Back Bay. I made out that he was sunburnt,
as if he lived much in the open air, and that he looked intelligent but
also slightly brutal, though not in a morose way. His brutality, if he
had any, was bright and finished. I had to tell him who I was, but even
then I saw how little he placed me and that my explanations gave me in
his mind no great identity or at any rate no great importance. I foresaw
that he would in intercourse make me feel sometimes very young and
sometimes very old, caring himself but little which. He mentioned, as if
to show our companion that he might safely be left to his own devices,
that he had once started from London to Bombay at three quarters of an
hour's notice.

"Yes, and it must have been pleasant for the people you were with!"

"Oh the people I was with--!" he returned; and his tone appeared to
signify that such people would always have to come off as they could. He
asked if there were no cold drinks in the house, no lemonade, no iced
syrups; in such weather something of that sort ought always to be kept
going. When his mother remarked that surely at the club they _were_ kept
going he went on: "Oh yes, I had various things there; but you know I've
walked down the hill since. One should have something at either end. May
I ring and see?" He rang while Mrs. Nettlepoint observed that with the
people they had in the house, an establishment reduced naturally at such
a moment to its simplest expression--they were burning up candle-ends and
there were no luxuries--she wouldn't answer for the service. The matter
ended in her leaving the room in quest of cordials with the female
domestic who had arrived in response to the bell and in whom Jasper's
appeal aroused no visible intelligence.

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.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Tue 19th Mar 2024, 2:57