I.
FROM MISS AURORA CHURCH, AT SEA,
TO
MISS WHITESIDE, IN PARIS.
… MY dear child, the bromide of
sodium (if that’s what you call it) proved perfectly useless. I
don’t mean that it did me no good, but that I never had occasion to
take the bottle out of my bag. It might have done wonders for me if
I had needed it; but I didn’t, simply because I have been a wonder
myself. Will you believe that I have spent the whole voyage on
deck, in the most animated conversation and exercise? Twelve times
round the deck make a mile, I believe; and by this measurement I
have been walking twenty miles a day. And down to every meal, if
you please, where I have displayed the appetite of a fish-wife. Of
course the weather has been lovely; so there’s no great merit. The
wicked old Atlantic has been as blue as the sapphire in my only
ring (a rather good one), and as smooth as the slippery floor of
Madame Galopin’s dining- room. We have been for the last three
hours in sight of land, and we are soon to enter the Bay of New
York, which is said to be exquisitely beautiful. But of course you
recall it, though they say that everything changes so fast over
here. I find I don’t remember anything, for my recollections of our
voyage to Europe, so many years ago, are exceedingly dim; I only
have a painful impression that mamma shut me up for an hour every
day in the state-room, and made me learn by heart some religious
poem. I was only five years old, and I believe that as a child I
was extremely timid; on the other hand, mamma, as you know, was
dreadfully severe. She is severe to this day; only I have become
indifferent; I have been so pinched and pushed—morally speaking,
bien entendu. It is true, however, that there are children of five
on the vessel today who have
been extremely
conspicuous—ranging all over the ship, and always under one’s feet.
Of course they are little compatriots, which means that they are
little barbarians. I don’t mean that all our compatriots are
barbarous; they seem to improve, somehow, after their first
communion. I don’t know whether it’s that ceremony that improves
them, especially as so few of them go in for it; but the women are
certainly nicer than the little girls; I mean, of course, in
proportion, you know. You warned me not to generalise, and you see
I have already begun, before we have arrived. But I suppose there
is no harm in it so long as it is favourable. Isn’t it favourable
when I say that I have had the most lovely time? I have never had
so much liberty in my life, and I have been out alone, as you may
say, every day of the voyage. If it is a foretaste of what is to
come, I shall take to that very kindly. When I say that I have been
out alone, I mean that we have always been two. But we two were
alone, so to speak, and it was not like always having mamma, or
Madame Galopin, or some lady in the pension, or the temporary cook.
Mamma has been very poorly; she is so very well on land, it’s a
wonder to see her at all taken down.
She says, however, that it isn’t
the being at sea; it’s, on the contrary, approaching the land. She
is not in a hurry to arrive; she says that great disillusions await
us. I didn’t know that she had any illusions—she’s so stern, so
philosophic. She is very serious; she sits for hours in perfect
silence, with her eyes fixed on the horizon. I heard her say
yesterday to an English gentleman—a very odd Mr. Antrobus, the only
person with whom she converses—that she was afraid she shouldn’t
like her native land, and that she shouldn’t like not liking it.
But this is a mistake—she will like that immensely (I mean not
liking it). If it should prove at all agreeable, mamma will be
furious, for that will go against her system. You know all about
mamma’s system; I have explained that so often. It goes against her
system that we should come back at all; that was my system—I have
had at last to invent one! She consented to come only because she
saw that, having no dot, I should never marry in Europe; and I
pretended to be immensely pre- occupied with this idea, in order to
make her start. In reality cela m’est parfaitement égal. I am only
afraid I shall like it too much (I don’t mean marriage, of course,
but one’s native
land). Say what you will, it’s a
charming thing to go out alone, and I have given notice to mamma
that I mean to be always en course. When I tell her that, she looks
at me in the same silence; her eye dilates, and then she slowly
closes it.