The European: Chapter I [C20]

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# The European: Chapter I

CHAPTER I

A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen
from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of
enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the
mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual
refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened
by this frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate that the
blessed vernal season is already six weeks old, it will be admitted that
no depressing influence is absent from the scene. This fact was keenly
felt on a certain 12th of May, upwards of thirty years since, by a lady
who stood looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in the
ancient city of Boston. She had stood there for half an hour--stood
there, that is, at intervals; for from time to time she turned back
into the room and measured its length with a restless step. In the
chimney-place was a red-hot fire which emitted a small blue flame; and
in front of the fire, at a table, sat a young man who was busily plying
a pencil. He had a number of sheets of paper cut into small
equal squares, and he was apparently covering them with pictorial
designs--strange-looking figures. He worked rapidly and attentively,
sometimes threw back his head and held out his drawing at arm’s-length,
and kept up a soft, gay-sounding humming and whistling. The lady brushed
past him in her walk; her much-trimmed skirts were voluminous. She never
dropped her eyes upon his work; she only turned them, occasionally, as
she passed, to a mirror suspended above the toilet-table on the other
side of the room. Here she paused a moment, gave a pinch to her waist
with her two hands, or raised these members--they were very plump
and pretty--to the multifold braids of her hair, with a movement half
caressing, half corrective. An attentive observer might have fancied
that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her face forgot
its melancholy; but as soon as she neared the window again it began to
proclaim that she was a very ill-pleased woman. And indeed, in what
met her eyes there was little to be pleased with. The window-panes were
battered by the sleet; the head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed
to be holding themselves askance to keep it out of their faces. A tall
iron railing protected them from the street, and on the other side of
the railing an assemblage of Bostonians were trampling about in the
liquid snow. Many of them were looking up and down; they appeared to be
waiting for something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to
the place where they stood,--such a vehicle as the lady at the window,
in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had
never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colors,
and decorated apparently with jangling bells, attached to a species of
groove in the pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal
of rumbling, bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small
horses. When it reached a certain point the people in front of the
grave-yard, of whom much the greater number were women, carrying
satchels and parcels, projected themselves upon it in a compact body--a
movement suggesting the scramble for places in a life-boat at sea--and
were engulfed in its large interior. Then the life-boat--or the
life-car, as the lady at the window of the hotel vaguely designated
it--went bumping and jingling away upon its invisible wheels, with the
helmsman (the man at the wheel) guiding its course incongruously from
the prow. This phenomenon was repeated every three minutes, and the
supply of eagerly-moving women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles,
renewed itself in the most liberal manner. On the other side of the
grave-yard was a row of small red brick houses, showing a series of
homely, domestic-looking backs; at the end opposite the hotel a tall
wooden church-spire, painted white, rose high into the vagueness of
the snow-flakes. The lady at the window looked at it for some time; for
reasons of her own she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
She hated it, she despised it; it threw her into a state of irritation
that was quite out of proportion to any sensible motive. She had never
known herself to care so much about church-spires.

She was not pretty; but even when it expressed perplexed irritation her
face was most interesting and agreeable. Neither was she in her
first youth; yet, though slender, with a great deal of extremely
well-fashioned roundness of contour--a suggestion both of maturity and
flexibility--she carried her three and thirty years as a light-wristed
Hebe might have carried a brimming wine-cup. Her complexion was
fatigued, as the French say; her mouth was large, her lips too full, her
teeth uneven, her chin rather commonly modeled; she had a thick nose,
and when she smiled--she was constantly smiling--the lines beside it
rose too high, toward her eyes. But these eyes were charming: gray
in color, brilliant, quickly glancing, gently resting, full of
intelligence. Her forehead was very low--it was her only handsome
feature; and she had a great abundance of crisp dark hair, finely
frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some
Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large
collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed
to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once
been paid her, which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure
than anything she had ever heard. “A pretty woman?” someone had said.
“Why, her features are very bad.” “I don’t know about her features,” a
very discerning observer had answered; “but she carries her head like a
pretty woman.” You may imagine whether, after this, she carried her head
less becomingly.

She turned away from the window at last, pressing her hands to her eyes.
“It’s too horrible!” she exclaimed. “I shall go back--I shall go back!”
 And she flung herself into a chair before the fire.

“Wait a little, dear child,” said the young man softly, sketching away
at his little scraps of paper.

The lady put out her foot; it was very small, and there was an immense
rosette on her slipper. She fixed her eyes for a while on this ornament,
and then she looked at the glowing bed of anthracite coal in the grate.
“Did you ever see anything so hideous as that fire?” she demanded. “Did
you ever see anything so--so _affreux_ as--as everything?” She spoke
English with perfect purity; but she brought out this French epithet
in a manner that indicated that she was accustomed to using French
epithets.

“I think the fire is very pretty,” said the young man, glancing at it
a moment. “Those little blue tongues, dancing on top of the crimson
embers, are extremely picturesque. They are like a fire in an
alchemist’s laboratory.”

“You are too good-natured, my dear,” his companion declared.

The young man held out one of his drawings, with his head on one side.
His tongue was gently moving along his under-lip. “Good-natured--yes.
Too good-natured--no.”

“You are irritating,” said the lady, looking at her slipper.

He began to retouch his sketch. “I think you mean simply that you are
irritated.”

“Ah, for that, yes!” said his companion, with a little bitter laugh.
“It’s the darkest day of my life--and you know what that means.”

“Wait till tomorrow,” rejoined the young man.

“Yes, we have made a great mistake. If there is any doubt about it
today, there certainly will be none tomorrow. _Ce sera clair, au
moins!_”

The young man was silent a few moments, driving his pencil. Then at
last, “There are no such things as mistakes,” he affirmed.

“Very true--for those who are not clever enough to perceive them. Not
to recognize one’s mistakes--that would be happiness in life,” the lady
went on, still looking at her pretty foot.

“My dearest sister,” said the young man, always intent upon his drawing,
“it’s the first time you have told me I am not clever.”

“Well, by your own theory I can’t call it a mistake,” answered his
sister, pertinently enough.

The young man gave a clear, fresh laugh. “You, at least, are clever
enough, dearest sister,” he said.

“I was not so when I proposed this.”

“Was it you who proposed it?” asked her brother.

She turned her head and gave him a little stare. “Do you desire the
credit of it?”

“If you like, I will take the blame,” he said, looking up with a smile.

“Yes,” she rejoined in a moment, “you make no difference in these
things. You have no sense of property.”

The young man gave his joyous laugh again. “If that means I have no
property, you are right!”

“Don’t joke about your poverty,” said his sister. “That is quite as
vulgar as to boast about it.”

“My poverty! I have just finished a drawing that will bring me fifty
francs!”

_“Voyons,”_ said the lady, putting out her hand.

He added a touch or two, and then gave her his sketch. She looked at it,
but she went on with her idea of a moment before. “If a woman were to
ask you to marry her you would say, ‘Certainly, my dear, with pleasure!’
And you would marry her and be ridiculously happy. Then at the end of
three months you would say to her, ‘You know that blissful day when I
begged you to be mine!’”

The young man had risen from the table, stretching his arms a little; he
walked to the window. “That is a description of a charming nature,” he
said.

“Oh, yes, you have a charming nature; I regard that as our capital. If
I had not been convinced of that I should never have taken the risk of
bringing you to this dreadful country.”

“This comical country, this delightful country!” exclaimed the young
man, and he broke into the most animated laughter.

“Is it those women scrambling into the omnibus?” asked his companion.
“What do you suppose is the attraction?”

“I suppose there is a very good-looking man inside,” said the young man.

“In each of them? They come along in hundreds, and the men in this
country don’t seem at all handsome. As for the women--I have never seen
so many at once since I left the convent.”

“The women are very pretty,” her brother declared, “and the whole affair
is very amusing. I must make a sketch of it.” And he came back to the
table quickly, and picked up his utensils--a small sketching-board,
a sheet of paper, and three or four crayons. He took his place at the
window with these things, and stood there glancing out, plying his
pencil with an air of easy skill. While he worked he wore a
brilliant smile. Brilliant is indeed the word at this moment for his
strongly-lighted face. He was eight and twenty years old; he had a
short, slight, well-made figure. Though he bore a noticeable resemblance
to his sister, he was a better favored person: fair-haired, clear-faced,
witty-looking, with a delicate finish of feature and an expression at
once urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an eyebrow finely
drawn and excessively arched--an eyebrow which, if ladies wrote sonnets
to those of their lovers, might have been made the subject of such a
piece of verse--and a light moustache that flourished upwards as if
blown that way by the breath of a constant smile. There was something
in his physiognomy at once benevolent and picturesque. But, as I have
hinted, it was not at all serious. The young man’s face was, in this
respect, singular; it was not at all serious, and yet it inspired the
liveliest confidence.

“Be sure you put in plenty of snow,” said his sister. “_Bonté divine_,
what a climate!”

“I shall leave the sketch all white, and I shall put in the little
figures in black,” the young man answered, laughing. “And I shall call
it--what is that line in Keats?--Mid-May’s Eldest Child!”

“I don’t remember,” said the lady, “that mamma ever told me it was like
this.”

“Mamma never told you anything disagreeable. And it’s not like
this--every day. You will see that tomorrow we shall have a splendid
day.”

“_Qu’en savez-vous?_ Tomorrow I shall go away.”

“Where shall you go?”

“Anywhere away from here. Back to Silberstadt. I shall write to the
Reigning Prince.”

The young man turned a little and looked at her, with his crayon poised.
“My dear Eugenia,” he murmured, “were you so happy at sea?”

Eugenia got up; she still held in her hand the drawing her brother had
given her. It was a bold, expressive sketch of a group of miserable
people on the deck of a steamer, clinging together and clutching at each
other, while the vessel lurched downward, at a terrific angle, into
the hollow of a wave. It was extremely clever, and full of a sort of
tragi-comical power. Eugenia dropped her eyes upon it and made a sad
grimace. “How can you draw such odious scenes?” she asked. “I should
like to throw it into the fire!” And she tossed the paper away. Her
brother watched, quietly, to see where it went. It fluttered down to the
floor, where he let it lie. She came toward the window, pinching in
her waist. “Why don’t you reproach me--abuse me?” she asked. “I think
I should feel better then. Why don’t you tell me that you hate me for
bringing you here?”

“Because you would not believe it. I adore you, dear sister! I am
delighted to be here, and I am charmed with the prospect.”

“I don’t know what had taken possession of me. I had lost my head,”
 Eugenia went on.

The young man, on his side, went on plying his pencil. “It is evidently
a most curious and interesting country. Here we are, and I mean to enjoy
it.”

His companion turned away with an impatient step, but presently came
back. “High spirits are doubtless an excellent thing,” she said; “but
you give one too much of them, and I can’t see that they have done you
any good.”

The young man stared, with lifted eyebrows, smiling; he tapped his
handsome nose with his pencil. “They have made me happy!”

“That was the least they could do; they have made you nothing else. You
have gone through life thanking fortune for such very small favors that
she has never put herself to any trouble for you.”

“She must have put herself to a little, I think, to present me with so
admirable a sister.”

“Be serious, Felix. You forget that I am your elder.”

“With a sister, then, so elderly!” rejoined Felix, laughing. “I hoped we
had left seriousness in Europe.”

“I fancy you will find it here. Remember that you are nearly thirty
years old, and that you are nothing but an obscure Bohemian--a penniless
correspondent of an illustrated newspaper.”

“Obscure as much as you please, but not so much of a Bohemian as you
think. And not at all penniless! I have a hundred pounds in my pocket.
I have an engagement to make fifty sketches, and I mean to paint the
portraits of all our cousins, and of all _their_ cousins, at a hundred
dollars a head.”

“You are not ambitious,” said Eugenia.

“You are, dear Baroness,” the young man replied.

The Baroness was silent a moment, looking out at the sleet-darkened
grave-yard and the bumping horse-cars. “Yes, I am ambitious,” she said
at last. “And my ambition has brought me to this dreadful place!” She
glanced about her--the room had a certain vulgar nudity; the bed and the
window were curtainless--and she gave a little passionate sigh. “Poor
old ambition!” she exclaimed. Then she flung herself down upon a sofa
which stood near against the wall, and covered her face with her hands.

Her brother went on with his drawing, rapidly and skillfully; after some
moments he sat down beside her and showed her his sketch. “Now, don’t
you think that’s pretty good for an obscure Bohemian?” he asked. “I have
knocked off another fifty francs.”

Eugenia glanced at the little picture as he laid it on her lap. “Yes,
it is very clever,” she said. And in a moment she added, “Do you suppose
our cousins do that?”

“Do what?”

“Get into those things, and look like that.”

Felix meditated awhile. “I really can’t say. It will be interesting to
discover.”

“Oh, the rich people can’t!” said the Baroness.

“Are you very sure they are rich?” asked Felix, lightly.

His sister slowly turned in her place, looking at him. “Heavenly
powers!” she murmured. “You have a way of bringing out things!”

“It will certainly be much pleasanter if they are rich,” Felix declared.

“Do you suppose if I had not known they were rich I would ever have
come?”

The young man met his sister’s somewhat peremptory eye with his bright,
contented glance. “Yes, it certainly will be pleasanter,” he repeated.

“That is all I expect of them,” said the Baroness. “I don’t count upon
their being clever or friendly--at first--or elegant or interesting. But
I assure you I insist upon their being rich.”

Felix leaned his head upon the back of the sofa and looked awhile at the
oblong patch of sky to which the window served as frame. The snow was
ceasing; it seemed to him that the sky had begun to brighten. “I count
upon their being rich,” he said at last, “and powerful, and clever, and
friendly, and elegant, and interesting, and generally delightful! _Tu
vas voir_.” And he bent forward and kissed his sister. “Look there!” he
went on. “As a portent, even while I speak, the sky is turning the color
of gold; the day is going to be splendid.”

And indeed, within five minutes the weather had changed. The sun broke
out through the snow-clouds and jumped into the Baroness’s room. “_Bonté
divine_,” exclaimed this lady, “what a climate!”

“We will go out and see the world,” said Felix.

And after a while they went out. The air had grown warm as well as
brilliant; the sunshine had dried the pavements. They walked about the
streets at hazard, looking at the people and the houses, the shops and
the vehicles, the blazing blue sky and the muddy crossings, the hurrying
men and the slow-strolling maidens, the fresh red bricks and the bright
green trees, the extraordinary mixture of smartness and shabbiness.
From one hour to another the day had grown vernal; even in the bustling
streets there was an odor of earth and blossom. Felix was immensely
entertained. He had called it a comical country, and he went about
laughing at everything he saw. You would have said that American
civilization expressed itself to his sense in a tissue of capital jokes.
The jokes were certainly excellent, and the young man’s merriment was
joyous and genial. He possessed what is called the pictorial sense;
and this first glimpse of democratic manners stirred the same sort of
attention that he would have given to the movements of a lively
young person with a bright complexion. Such attention would have been
demonstrative and complimentary; and in the present case Felix might
have passed for an undispirited young exile revisiting the haunts of
his childhood. He kept looking at the violent blue of the sky, at the
scintillating air, at the scattered and multiplied patches of color.

“_Comme c’est bariolé_, eh?” he said to his sister in that foreign
tongue which they both appeared to feel a mysterious prompting
occasionally to use.

“Yes, it is _bariolé_ indeed,” the Baroness answered. “I don’t like the
coloring; it hurts my eyes.”

“It shows how extremes meet,” the young man rejoined. “Instead of coming
to the West we seem to have gone to the East. The way the sky touches
the house-tops is just like Cairo; and the red and blue sign-boards
patched over the face of everything remind one of Mahometan
decorations.”

“The young women are not Mahometan,” said his companion. “They can’t be
said to hide their faces. I never saw anything so bold.”

“Thank Heaven they don’t hide their faces!” cried Felix. “Their faces
are uncommonly pretty.”

“Yes, their faces are often very pretty,” said the Baroness, who was
a very clever woman. She was too clever a woman not to be capable of
a great deal of just and fine observation. She clung more closely than
usual to her brother’s arm; she was not exhilarated, as he was; she said
very little, but she noted a great many things and made her reflections.
She was a little excited; she felt that she had indeed come to a strange
country, to make her fortune. Superficially, she was conscious of a good
deal of irritation and displeasure; the Baroness was a very delicate
and fastidious person. Of old, more than once, she had gone, for
entertainment’s sake and in brilliant company, to a fair in a provincial
town. It seemed to her now that she was at an enormous fair--that the
entertainment and the _désagréments_ were very much the same. She found
herself alternately smiling and shrinking; the show was very curious,
but it was probable, from moment to moment, that one would be jostled.
The Baroness had never seen so many people walking about before; she
had never been so mixed up with people she did not know. But little by
little she felt that this fair was a more serious undertaking. She went
with her brother into a large public garden, which seemed very pretty,
but where she was surprised at seeing no carriages. The afternoon was
drawing to a close; the coarse, vivid grass and the slender tree-boles
were gilded by the level sunbeams--gilded as with gold that was fresh
from the mine. It was the hour at which ladies should come out for an
airing and roll past a hedge of pedestrians, holding their parasols
askance. Here, however, Eugenia observed no indications of this custom,
the absence of which was more anomalous as there was a charming avenue
of remarkably graceful, arching elms in the most convenient contiguity
to a large, cheerful street, in which, evidently, among the more
prosperous members of the _bourgeoisie_, a great deal of pedestrianism
went forward. Our friends passed out into this well lighted promenade,
and Felix noticed a great many more pretty girls and called his sister’s
attention to them. This latter measure, however, was superfluous; for
the Baroness had inspected, narrowly, these charming young ladies.

“I feel an intimate conviction that our cousins are like that,” said
Felix.

The Baroness hoped so, but this is not what she said. “They are very
pretty,” she said, “but they are mere little girls. Where are the
women--the women of thirty?”

“Of thirty-three, do you mean?” her brother was going to ask; for he
understood often both what she said and what she did not say. But he
only exclaimed upon the beauty of the sunset, while the Baroness, who
had come to seek her fortune, reflected that it would certainly be well
for her if the persons against whom she might need to measure herself
should all be mere little girls. The sunset was superb; they stopped
to look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous
mixture of colors. The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was
perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood there
she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of various
nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a distinguished,
strikingly-dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming upon the
beauties of nature on a Boston street corner in the French tongue,
could not be an object of indifference. Eugenia’s spirits rose. She
surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gaiety. If she had come to
seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to
find. There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western
sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the
passers of a certain natural facility in things.

“You will not go back to Silberstadt, eh?” asked Felix.

“Not tomorrow,” said the Baroness.

“Nor write to the Reigning Prince?”

“I shall write to him that they evidently know nothing about him over
here.”

“He will not believe you,” said the young man. “I advise you to let him
alone.”

Felix himself continued to be in high good humor. Brought up among
ancient customs and in picturesque cities, he yet found plenty of local
color in the little Puritan metropolis. That evening, after dinner, he
told his sister that he should go forth early on the morrow to look up
their cousins.

“You are very impatient,” said Eugenia.

“What can be more natural,” he asked, “after seeing all those pretty
girls today? If one’s cousins are of that pattern, the sooner one knows
them the better.”

“Perhaps they are not,” said Eugenia. “We ought to have brought some
letters--to some other people.”

“The other people would not be our kinsfolk.”

“Possibly they would be none the worse for that,” the Baroness replied.

Her brother looked at her with his eyebrows lifted. “That was not what
you said when you first proposed to me that we should come out here and
fraternize with our relatives. You said that it was the prompting of
natural affection; and when I suggested some reasons against it you
declared that the _voix du sang_ should go before everything.”

“You remember all that?” asked the Baroness.

“Vividly! I was greatly moved by it.”

She was walking up and down the room, as she had done in the morning;
she stopped in her walk and looked at her brother. She apparently was
going to say something, but she checked herself and resumed her walk.
Then, in a few moments, she said something different, which had the
effect of an explanation of the suppression of her earlier thought. “You
will never be anything but a child, dear brother.”

“One would suppose that you, madam,” answered Felix, laughing, “were a
thousand years old.”

“I am--sometimes,” said the Baroness.

“I will go, then, and announce to our cousins the arrival of a
personage so extraordinary. They will immediately come and pay you their
respects.”

Eugenia paced the length of the room again, and then she stopped before
her brother, laying her hand upon his arm. “They are not to come and see
me,” she said. “You are not to allow that. That is not the way I shall
meet them first.” And in answer to his interrogative glance she went on.
“You will go and examine, and report. You will come back and tell me
who they are and what they are; their number, gender, their respective
ages--all about them. Be sure you observe everything; be ready to
describe to me the locality, the accessories--how shall I say
it?--the _mise en scène_. Then, at my own time, at my own hour, under
circumstances of my own choosing, I will go to them. I will present
myself--I will appear before them!” said the Baroness, this time
phrasing her idea with a certain frankness.

“And what message am I to take to them?” asked Felix, who had a lively
faith in the justness of his sister’s arrangements.

She looked at him a moment--at his expression of agreeable veracity;
and, with that justness that he admired, she replied, “Say what you
please. Tell my story in the way that seems to you most--natural.” And
she bent her forehead for him to kiss.
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