The Europeans | Page 3

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THE EUROPEANS
by
HENRY JAMES

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