Mr Westgate gave one of his slow, keen looks again. ‘What’s your railroad?’ he asked.
‘The Tennessee Central.’
The American tilted back his chair a little, and poised it an instant. ‘Well, I’m sorry you want to attack one of our institutions,’ he said, smiling. ‘But I guess you had better enjoy yourself first!’
‘I’m certainly rather afraid I can’t work in this weather,’ the young barrister confessed.
‘Leave that to the natives,’ said Mr Westgate. ‘Leave the Tennessee Central to me, Mr Beaumont. Some day we’ll talk it over, and I guess I can make it square. But I didn’t know you Englishmen ever did any work, in the upper classes.’
‘Oh, we do a lot of work; don’t we, Lambeth?’ asked Percy Beaumont.
‘I must certainly be at home by the 19th of September,’ said the younger Englishman, irrelevantly, but gently.
‘For the shooting, eh? or is it the hunting – or the fishing?’ inquired his entertainer.
‘Oh, I must be in Scotland,’ said Lord Lambeth, blushing a little.
‘Well then,’ rejoined Mr Westgate, ‘you had better amuse yourself first, also. You must go down and see Mrs Westgate.’
‘We should be so happy – if you would kindly tell us the train,’ said Percy Beaumont.
‘It isn’t a train – it’s a boat.’
‘Oh, I see. And what is the name of – a – the – a – town?’
‘It isn’t a town,’ said Mr Westgate, laughing. ‘It’s a – well, what shall I call it? It’s a watering-place. In short, it’s Newport. You’ll see what it is. It’s cool; that’s the principal thing. You will greatly oblige me by going down there and putting yourself into the hands of Mrs Westgate. It isn’t perhaps for me to say it; but you couldn’t be in better hands. Also in those of her sister, who is staying with her. She is very fond of Englishmen. She thinks there is nothing like them.’
‘Mrs Westgate or – a – her sister?’ asked Percy Beaumont, modestly, yet in the tone of an inquiring traveller.
‘Oh, I mean my wife,’ said Mr Westgate. ‘I don’t suppose my sister-in-law knows much about them. She has always led a very quiet life; she has lived in Boston.’
Percy Beaumont listened with interest. ‘That, I believe,’ he said, ‘is the most – a – intellectual town?’
‘I believe it is very intellectual. I don’t go there much,’ responded his host.
‘I say, we ought to go there,’ said Lord Lambeth to his companion.
‘Oh, Lord Lambeth, wait till the great heat is over!’ Mr Westgate interposed. ‘Boston in this weather would be very trying; it’s not the temperature for intellectual exertion. At Boston, you know, you have to pass an examination at the city limits; and when you come away they give you a kind of degree.’
Lord Lambeth stared, blushing a little; and Percy Beaumont stared a little also – but only with his fine natural complexion; glancing aside after a moment to see that his companion was not looking too credulous, for he had heard a great deal about American humour. ‘I daresay it is very jolly,’ said the younger gentleman.
‘I daresay it is,’ said Mr Westgate. ‘Only I must impress upon you that at present – to-morrow morning, at an early hour – you will be expected at Newport. We have a house there; half the people in New York go there for the summer. I am not sure that at this very moment my wife can take you in; she has got a lot of people staying with her; I don’t know who they all are; only she may have no room. But you can begin with the hotel, and meanwhile you can live at my house. In that way – simply sleeping at the hotel – you will find it tolerable. For the rest, you must make yourself at home at my place. You mustn’t be shy, you know; if you are only here for a month that will be a great waste of time. Mrs Westgate won’t neglect you, and you had better not try to resist her. I know something about that. I expect you’ll find some pretty girls on the premises. I shall write to my wife by this afternoon’s mail, and to-morrow she and Miss Alden will look out for you. Just walk right in and make yourself comfortable. Your steamer leaves from this part of the city, and I will immediately send out and get you a cabin. Then, at half-past four o’clock, just call for me here, and I will go with you and put you on board. It’s a big boat; you might get lost. A few days hence, at the end of the week, I will come down to Newport and see how you are getting on.’
The two young Englishmen inaugurated the policy of not resisting Mrs Westgate by submitting, with great docility and thankfulness, to her husband. He was evidently a very good fellow, and he made an impression upon his visitors; his hospitality seemed to recommend itself, consciously – with a friendly wink, as it were – as if it hinted, judicially, that you could not possibly make a better bargain. Lord Lambeth and his cousin left their entertainer to his labours and returned to their hotel, where they spent three or four hours in their respective shower-baths. Percy Beaumont had suggested that they ought to see something of the town; but ‘Oh, damn the town!’ his noble kinsman had rejoined. They returned to Mr Westgate’s office in a carriage, with their luggage, very punctually; but it must be reluctantly recorded that, this time, he kept them waiting so long that they felt themselves missing the steamer and were deterred only by an amiable modesty from dispensing with his attendance and starting on a hasty scramble to the wharf. But when at last he appeared, and the carriage plunged into the purlieus of Broadway, they jolted and jostled to such good purpose that they reached the huge white vessel while the bell for departure was still ringing and the absorption of passengers still active. It was indeed, as Mr Westgate had said, a big boat, and his leadership in the innumerable and interminable corridors and cabins, with which he seemed perfectly acquainted, and of which any one and every one appeared to have the entrée, was very grateful to the slightly bewildered voyagers. He showed them their state-room – a spacious apartment, embellished with gaslamps, mirrors en pied and sculptured furniture – and then, long after they had been intimately convinced that the steamer was in motion and launched upon the unknown stream that they were about to navigate, he bade them a sociable farewell.
‘Well, good-bye, Lord Lambeth,’ he said. ‘Good-bye, Mr Percy Beaumont; I hope you’ll have a good time. Just let them do what they want with you. I’ll come down by-and-by and look after you.’
II
THE young Englishmen emerged from their cabin and amused themselves with wandering about the immense labyrinthine steamer, which struck them as an extraordinary mixture of a ship and an hotel. It was densely crowded with passengers, the larger number of whom appeared to be ladies and very young children; and in the big saloons, ornamented in white and gold, which followed each other in surprising succession, beneath the swinging gas-lights and among the small side-passages where the negro domestics of both sexes assembled with an air of philosophic leisure, every one was moving to and fro and exchanging loud and familiar observations. Eventually, at the instance of a discriminating black, our young men went and had some ‘supper’, in a wonderful place arranged like a theatre, where, in a gilded gallery upon which little boxes appeared to open, a large orchestra was playing operatic selections, and, below, people were handing about bills of fare, as if they had been programmes. All this was sufficiently curious; but the agreeable thing, later, was to sit out on one of the great white decks of the steamer, in the warm, breezy darkness, and, in the vague starlight, to make out the line of low, mysterious coast. The young Englishmen tried American cigars – those of Mr Westgate – and talked together as they usually talked, with many odd silences, lapses of logic and incongruities of transition; like people who have grown old together and learned to supply each other’s missing phrases; or, more especially, like people thoroughly conscious of a common point of view, so that a style of conversation superficially lacking in finish might suffice for a reference to a fund of associations in the light of which everything was all right.
‘We really seem to be going out to sea,’ Percy Beaumont observed. ‘Upon my word, we are
going back to England. He has shipped us off again. I call that “real mean”. ’
‘I suppose it’s all right,’ said Lord Lambeth. ‘I want to see those pretty girls at Newport. You know he told us the place was an island; and aren’t all islands in the sea?’
‘Well,’ resumed the elder traveller after a while, ‘if his house is as good as his cigars, we shall do very well.’
‘He seems a very good fellow,’ said Lord Lambeth, as if this idea had just occurred to him.
‘I say, we had better remain at the inn,’ rejoined his companion, presently. ‘I don’t think I like the way he spoke of his house. I don’t like stopping in the house with such a tremendous lot of women.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Lord Lambeth. And then they smoked awhile in silence. ‘Fancy his thinking we do no work in England!’ the young man resumed.
‘I daresay he didn’t really think so,’ said Percy Beaumont.
‘Well, I guess they don’t know much about England over here!’ declared Lord Lambeth, humorously. And then there was another long pause. ‘He was devilish civil,’ observed the young nobleman.
‘Nothing, certainly, could have been more civil,’ rejoined his companion.
‘Littledale said his wife was great fun,’ said Lord Lambeth.
‘Whose wife – Littledale’s?’
‘This American’s – Mrs Westgate. What’s his name? J. L.’
Beaumont was silent a moment. ‘What was fun to Littledale,’ he said at last, rather sententiously, ‘may be death to us.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked his kinsman. ‘I am as good a man as Littledale.’
‘My dear boy, I hope you won’t begin to flirt,’ said Percy Beaumont.
‘I don’t care. I daresay I shan’t begin.’
‘With a married woman, if she’s bent upon it, it’s all very well,’ Beaumont expounded. ‘But our friend mentioned a young lady – a sister, a sister-in-law. For God’s sake, don’t get entangled with her.’
‘How do you mean, entangled?’
‘Depend upon it she will try to hook you.’
‘Oh, bother!’ said Lord Lambeth.
‘American girls are very clever,’ urged his companion.
‘So much the better,’ the young man declared.
‘I fancy they are always up to some game of that sort,’ Beaumont continued.
‘They can’t be worse than they are in England,’ said Lord Lambeth, judicially.
‘Ah, but in England,’ replied Beaumont, ‘you have got your natural protectors. You have got your mother and sisters.’
‘My mother and sisters –’ began the young nobleman, with a certain energy. But he stopped in time, puffing at his cigar.
‘Your mother spoke to me about it, with tears in her eyes,’ said Percy Beaumont. ‘She said she felt very nervous. I promised to keep you out of mischief.’
‘You had better take care of yourself,’ said the object of maternal and ducal solicitude.
‘Ah,’ rejoined the young barrister, ‘I haven’t the expectation of a hundred thousand a year – not to mention other attractions.’
‘Well,’ said Lord Lambeth, ‘don’t cry out before you’re hurt!’
It was certainly very much cooler at Newport, where our travellers found themselves assigned to a couple of diminutive bedrooms in a far-away angle of an immense hotel. They had gone ashore in the early summer twilight, and had very promptly put themselves to bed; thanks to which circumstance and to their having, during the previous hours, in their commodious cabin, slept the sleep of youth and health, they began to feel, towards eleven o’clock, very alert and inquisitive. They looked out of their windows across a row of small green fields, bordered with low stone dykes, of rude construction, and saw a deep blue ocean lying beneath a deep blue sky and flecked now and then with scintillating patches of foam. A strong, fresh breeze came in through the curtainless casements and prompted our young men to observe, generously, that it didn’t seem half a bad climate. They made other observations after they had emerged from their rooms in pursuit of breakfast – a meal of which they partook in a huge bare hall, where a hundred negroes, in white jackets, were shuffling about upon an uncarpeted floor; where the flies were superabundant and the tables and dishes covered over with a strange, voluminous integument of coarse blue gauze; and where several little boys and girls, who had risen late, were seated in fastidious solitude at the morning repast. These young persons had not the morning paper before them, but they were engaged in languid perusal of the bill of fare.
This latter document was a great puzzle to our friends, who, on reflecting that its bewildering categories had relation to breakfast alone, had an uneasy prevision of an encyclopaedic dinner-list. They found a great deal of entertainment at the hotel, an enormous wooden structure, for the erection of which it seemed to them that the virgin forests of the West must have been terribly deflowered. It was perforated from end to end with immense bare corridors, through which a strong draught was blowing – bearing along wonderful figures of ladies in white morning-dresses and clouds of Valenciennes lace, who seemed to float down the long vistas with expanded furbelows, like angels spreading their wings. In front was a gigantic verandah, upon which an army might have encamped – a vast wooden terrace, with a roof as lofty as the nave of a cathedral. Here our young Englishmen enjoyed, as they supposed, a glimpse of American society, which was distributed over the measureless expanse in a variety of sedentary attitudes, and appeared to consist largely of pretty young girls, dressed as if for a fête champêtre, swaying to and fro in rocking-chairs, fanning themselves with large straw fans, and enjoying an enviable exemption from social cares. Lord Lambeth had a theory, which it might be interesting to trace to its origin, that it would be not only agreeable, but easily possible, to enter into relations with one of these young ladies; and his companion found occasion to check the young nobleman’s colloquial impulses.
‘You had better take care,’ said Percy Beaumont, ‘or you will have an offended father or brother pulling out a bowie-knife.’
‘I assure you it is all right,’ Lord Lambeth replied. ‘You know the Americans come to these big hotels to make acquaintances.’
‘I know nothing about it, and neither do you,’ said his kinsman, who, like a clever man, had begun to perceive that the observation of American society demanded a readjustment of one’s standard.
‘Hang it, then, let’s find out!’ cried Lord Lambeth with some impatience. ‘You know, I don’t want to miss anything.’
‘We will find out,’ said Percy Beaumont, very reasonably. ‘We will go and see Mrs Westgate and make all the proper inquiries.’
And so the two inquiring Englishmen, who had this lady’s address inscribed in her husband’s hand upon a card, descended from the verandah of the big hotel and took their way, according to direction, along a large straight road, past a series of fresh-looking villas, embosomed in shrubs and flowers and enclosed in an ingenious variety of wooden palings. The morning was brilliant and cool, the villas were smart and snug, and the walk of the young travellers was very entertaining. Everything looked as if it had received a coat of fresh paint the day before – the red roofs, the green shutters, the clean, bright browns and buffs of the house-fronts. The flower-beds on the little lawns seemed to sparkle in the radiant air, and the gravel in the short carriage-sweeps to flash and twinkle. Along the road came a hundred little basket-phaetons, in which, almost always, a couple of ladies were sitting – ladies in white dresses and long white gloves, holding the reins and looking at the two Englishmen, whose nationality was not elusive, through thick blue veils, tied tightly about their faces as if to guard their complexions. At last the young men came within sight of the sea again, and then, having interrogated a gardener over the paling of a villa, they turned into an open gate. Here they found themselves face to face with the ocean and with a very picturesque structure, resembling a magnified chalet, which was perched upon a green embankment just above it
. The house had a verandah of extraordinary width all around it, and a great many doors and windows standing open to the verandah. These various apertures had, in common, such an accessible, hospitable air, such a breezy flutter, within, of light curtains, such expansive thresholds and reassuring interiors, that our friends hardly knew which was the regular entrance, and, after hesitating a moment, presented themselves at one of the windows. The room within was dark, but in a moment a graceful figure vaguely shaped itself in the rich-looking gloom, and a lady came to meet them. Then they saw that she had been seated at a table, writing, and that she had heard them and had got up. She stepped out into the light; she wore a frank, charming smile, with which she held out her hand to Percy Beaumont.
‘Oh, you must be Lord Lambeth and Mr Beaumont,’ she said. ‘I have heard from my husband that you would come. I am extremely glad to see you.’ And she shook hands with each of her visitors. Her visitors were a little shy, but they had very good manners; they responded with smiles and exclamations, and they apologised for not knowing the front door. The lady rejoined, with vivacity, that when she wanted to see people very much she did not insist upon those distinctions, and that Mr Westgate had written to her of his English friends in terms that made her really anxious. ‘He said you were so terribly prostrated,’ said Mrs Westgate.
‘Oh, you mean by the heat?’ replied Percy Beaumont. ‘We were rather knocked up, but we feel wonderfully better. We had such a jolly – a – voyage down here. It’s so very good of you to mind.’
‘Yes, it’s so very kind of you,’ murmured Lord Lambeth.
Mrs Westgate stood smiling; she was extremely pretty. ‘Well, I did mind,’ she said; ‘and I thought of sending for you this morning, to the Ocean House. I am very glad you are better, and I am charmed you have arrived. You must come round to the other side of the piazza.’ And she led the way, with a light, smooth step, looking back at the young men and smiling.