The Europeans. Генри Джеймс
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