Pandora

Henry James

Pandora

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.