I've got it, and several others, through without paying duty. I thought
you wouldn't mind, you're such a dear pet, and it's been _such_ an
accommodation. Not that I care about the money, but I do love to get
the best of those Fiends at the Custom House, and I _have_, for once.
You see, it was like this. When Louise went to the baggage room to get
out some things for you, I had them put in my trunks, afterwards, and
some of my dresses changed into yours, as your frocks had all been worn
and mine hadn't. I told Louise to put my things down at the bottom,
some in each of your trunks, and I was pretty sure the man wouldn't
touch them, as you're a British subject. I trusted to luck that you'd
be too 'cute to say anything and give me away, if you saw the dresses
while your trunks were being examined, but I just _hoped_ he wouldn't
dig down to them. I dared not tell you what was going on, as Sally said
I ought to, because if I had you might have refused, or else spoiled
everything by being self-conscious. If you'd been with me, the Fiends
might have caught on to our little game, they're so suspicious; but
where you were, they never suspected any connection between us. You're
just a _Dear_."
I had been a Dear in spite of myself, but there was no use in making a
fuss now the Dearness was all over, whatever I might have done if I'd
known beforehand that I was to be a cat's-paw. Perhaps, if I hadn't
been given the iced stuff with the strawberries, I might have been
crosser; but fortified by that, I lived up to my reputation as a Dear,
during the half hour of the unpacking.
When my frocks all hung in a row like Bluebeard's wives, in the cedar
wardrobe, and I was left alone with them at last, my first thought was
to plunge my imprisoned roses in water; my second, to do the same with
myself.
The hope of tea (which hadn't been fulfilled) and a bath had kept me
alive through those two hot hours on the dock; and now I could choose
between several kinds of bath, each one more luxurious than any I had
ever known. At home there's either the big bath, in the bathroom, or
there's a tub in your bedroom, so it doesn't take you long to make up
your mind which you will have. But here there were so many things I
could do, that I grew quite confused among them.
There was the big bath, so big that two of our big ones at Battlemead
could have gone into it; and instead of climbing ignominiously in, in
the ordinary way, you walked down several glittering white marble
steps. It was very alluring, but as the marble tank was so vast, I
feared I might have to spend all the rest of the afternoon in getting
it full of water. It seemed impertinent to make a convenience of such a
splendid, early Roman sort of receptacle for a mere five minutes'
splash; a bath of such magnificence ought, I felt, to be what Americans
call a "function"; a ceremony for which you would prepare with perfumed
ointments and ambergris, and protract for half a day, at least, not to
be wasteful. Then there was the vapour bath, which you took in a kind
of box, with a hole for your head to stick out; a porcelain sitz bath;
and a mysterious shower bath into which you secretively retired behind
canvas curtains, shaped like a sentry box.
I dared not try the vapour, for fear I should be steamed, like a
potato; the sitz seemed as inadequate as a thwarted ambition; and to
turn on the shower without knowing how much it could do, or how soon it
could be stopped, appeared a desperate adventure. After all, I thought,
it was less worrying with us. Here, whichever thing you chose, you
would probably wish you had had the other, whereas at home you did what
you could, and were perfectly satisfied.
I decided that I would toss up a coin; heads, the big marble tank;
tails, the shower. It came tails, and I had a dreadful qualm, but
_noblesse oblige_; one must be sporting. So I was; only the hot water
wouldn't come, and apparently there was ice in the cold, which wouldn't
stop coming, and it was very violent. I screamed once, and Mrs. Ess Kay
and Sally and Louise ran to the door, which was embarrassing; but
fortunately, I'd locked it, and they told me how to stop the iced
water. When it was all over, I felt like a marble statue for hours.
Dinner was at half past seven, which seemed odd in such a grand palace
of a house, because, of course, at home, for some extraordinary reason
unless you are in the middle classes, you never have an appetite before
eight, at the very earliest. If you're in France, or other countries on
the Continent, you can be hungry sooner, and evidently it is the same
in America. Perhaps, if I were scientific, I should be able to classify
these differences as natural phenomena.
I had dressed myself early, and was ready a little after seven, because
I thought it would be nice to sit in the fountain court; but just as I
was going down Louise knocked at the door.
"I have come to help Miladi, and to bring her these flowers," said she.
"They are with _mille compliments_ from Monsieur the Lieutenant Parker,
the brother of Madame."
"But I have never met him," I said, gazing with wonder upon a group
(bunch is too mean a word) of mammoth pink roses, with thickly leaved
stems, longer than walking sticks. There were at least a dozen of these
splendid creatures, loosely held together by trails of pink satin
ribbon, wide enough for a sash. I had never dreamed of such roses. I
almost expected them to speak.
"Miladi and the Lieutenant will meet at dinner," explained Louise. "It
is an American custom that the Messieurs send always flowers to the
ladies. Madame, and Mademoiselle Woodburn have received bouquets also,
but these roses for Miladi are the most beautiful. Is it Miladi's wish
that I untie the ribbon, and take out one or two for her to carry?"
I was on the point of saying "yes," because the flowers were so lovely,
and because it would please Mrs. Ess Kay; but on second thoughts, I
said "no," thanking Louise, and asking her to put the creatures' feet
in water. Perhaps it would be as well, I reminded myself, to see this
brother of Mrs. Ess Kay's (of whose existence I'd never heard) before I
went about armed with his roses. I had already tucked the white bud,
which had come to me on the dock like a dove with an olive branch, into
the low neck of my frilly white muslin frock, and I gave it no rivals.
"Has Madame gone down?" I asked; for it occurred to me that it would be
awkward to find myself alone for nearly half an hour with a strange
man.
"I think Madame will be in the hall," said Louise, and satisfied, I
descended in a stately way suited to the house, into the fountain
court. Nobody was there, however, except a young man in evening dress,
who jumped up from a chair, and set down a small glass out of which he
had been drinking.
"Allow me to introduce myself," said he. "I know you must be Lady Betty
Bulkeley. My name is Potter Parker."
I couldn't help wondering whether his friends called him "Pot," for
short, and the thought made me smile more than I would have smiled at a
stranger if it hadn't popped into my head. This seemed to encourage
him, which I regretted; because you can see at once by his face that he
isn't the kind who needs encouragement. It is something like Mrs. Ess
Kay's face, only younger, with her square chin, and bold blue eyes as
pale as hers. The likeness is all the stronger because Mr. Parker wears
no moustache or beard, and his dark hair, which falls in two straight,
thick blocks over his forehead, is parted in the middle. You would
know, if you saw him riding a white bear at the North Pole, that he was
an American young man. Why, or how, I'm not experienced enough in
Americans to tell, but I'm beginning to think that all American men,
and all American women, have a dim sort of family likeness to each
other. With the girls, it's their chins and the way they do their hair;
but with the men it's more mysterious. They look less lazy and more
feverish than our men, yet at the same time more humorous; and their
clothes seem always to be new.
Mrs. Ess Kay's nose turns down, and her brother's turns up, which is
the principal difference in their features, and his makes him look very
impudent, though rather clever and amusing.
"My sister wrote me about your dimples, Lady Betty," said he, when I
smiled; and I screwed my mouth into prunes and prisms as quickly as I
could.
"I should have thought such things were hardly worth writing about,"
said I.
"My impression is that they're worth about a million dollars an eighth
of an inch," he replied, "and I bet they'd fetch that in a bear
market."
I began to wish that Mrs. Ess Kay or Sally would come, for I'm not used
to having persons who have just introduced themselves make remarks on
my dimples or other features.
"Don't be mad with me," he went on, "or I shall think I've estimated
them too low. On mature consideration, as we soldier chaps say at a
court-martial, I should be inclined to set them higher. If you'll just
show them again----"
"I think, if you don't mind," said I, "that I'd rather speak of the
weather."
"I'm afraid you're not used to Americans," said he.
"I've met several, crossing, but none of them talked to me about--such
things," I replied, rather primly.
"If they had, I should have challenged them," he retorted. "While
you're staying with my sister, I consider myself a sort of guardian of
yours, and part of my duty will be to keep off men--other men--with a
stick, you see."
"No, I don't see," said I. "Not that there will be the least necessity
for you to do anything of the sort."
"Oh, won't there? Well, you just wait till you get to Newport, and
you'll find out differently. I've applied for leave on purpose to help
Kath protect you, and I expect to put on a suit of chain armour under
my clothes. But first, you're coming to visit me, at West Point."
"I don't think I am," I said.
"Oh, but you are. It's a promise of Kath's. And shan't I be proud to
show you around? You shall see Flirtation Walk the first thing. It's
what the ladies admire the most, at the Point. Perhaps you've heard of
it?"
"No," said I. "And I never heard of West Point. Is it a suburb of New
York?"
"Not much. It's our American Sandhurst. But you English people don't
know anything about this side. I guess, now, you think that Florida is
in South America?"
"I haven't thought about it yet," I replied.
"That's right. I don't ask anything better than to teach you the
geography of the United States. We'll begin with Flirtation Walk. But
see here, Lady Betty, that rose you've got on isn't a good sample of
what we can grow over here. Didn't that maid of my sister's take you
something a little better from me?"
"Something much bigger and grander," I said, feeling loyal to my poor
white bud. "I was meaning to thank you."
"Don't do that; the things aren't worth it. I only wanted to know
whether that French female had played me false or not. But here comes
my sister. I wish she'd taken longer to do up her back hair. Now, I'll
give you your wish, and talk about the weather. Mighty hot day, isn't
it? Won't you have a cocktail? I'd just finished mine when you came
down."
"Of course Betty will have a cocktail; we all do before dinner," said
Mrs. Ess Kay, sailing towards us in a trailing white film of lace.
But Betty didn't have one, though at this moment several little glasses
appeared on a tray. I was sure that Mother would not approve of
cocktails for me, as it sounds so fast for a young girl who isn't yet
out. When I excused myself, Mrs. Ess Kay laughed, and said, "Then what
about that sherry cobbler?"
While I was trying to think what she meant, Sally came into the hall,
and immediately after I was surprised by a kind of musical moaning
which began suddenly and kept on for a long time.
"That's the Japanese gong," said Mrs. Ess Kay, when I looked round to
see where the sound came from. "It's for dinner. Potter, give Betty
your arm."
I was glad she didn't use that nickname I'd been thinking of, for if
she had, I should certainly have laughed.
We began dinner by eating pinky-yellow melons cut in half and filled
with chopped ice. I thought at first that it must be a mistake, and
they ought to have come in at dessert, but everybody else ate theirs
without appearing disconcerted, so I did mine, and it was good. So were
all the other things that followed in a long procession, though they
were very strange and some of them I shouldn't have known how to eat if
Mr. Parker, whose place was next to mine, hadn't told me.
We had bouillon partly frozen, instead of soup; and then came the most
extraordinary little fried animals which quite startled me, they were
so like exaggerated brown spiders, done in egg and breadcrumbs. "Soft
shell crabs, dear child," said Mrs. Ess Kay, "and you eat every bit,
down to the tippiest end of his claw."
I should never have managed the green corn, which grows like lots of
pearls set close together in rows on a fat stick, if Mr. Parker hadn't
scraped all the pearls off for me, with a fork, and put butter and salt
on them. I liked him a little better after that, for he did the thing
with great skill. When I had got so far, nothing could surprise me, and
I didn't turn a hair when I found that I was expected to eat pears cut
up with salad oil. But they were alligator pears, and when you tasted
them, it appeared that they had nothing whatever to do with the fruit
kingdom. Best of all, I liked the watermelon which came at the end, cut
in little balls, looking like strawberry water ice, and soaked in
champagne. I hope that all the things to eat in America won't be so
nice, or I may grow stout before I go back; and Vic says it is better
for a girl to hang herself.
It was very trying, too, to find that I was keeping every course
waiting. I've never been accused of greediness at home, though I've
often been made to feel guilty of most other sins in the calendar, but
I did feel queer when I began to realise that everybody else had
finished what was on their plates, when I'd just about discovered what
the thing was. It made me so uncomfortable to see them all leaning back
waiting for me, after their plates had been whisked away, that I took
to bolting the rest of my food, and by the time we'd got rid of nine
courses in about half an hour I felt qualified to write the
autobiography of an anaconda.
As for the iced water, I had intended to refuse it at any cost, because
Vic and Mother both solemnly warned me that it made _all_ the
difference between a complexion and mere skin. But the minute I landed,
I began thinking hard about iced water, and I soon discovered that when
you are in America a comparatively small consideration like a
complexion would never keep you from drinking it. In fact, nothing
would. You feel as if you must drink iced water, pints of iced water,
in rapid succession, if not only your complexion, but your whole face
were to be swept away in the deluge. Once you have got the taste
nothing can quench it but iced water, more iced water, and still more
iced water!
After dinner, while we were having heavenly Turkish coffee in the
fountain court, who should come but Mr. Doremus. It seemed to me a
funny time to call, but apparently the others didn't think it out of
the way. He wanted us to go to some theatre on a roof, and I should
have loved it, especially when Mrs. Ess Kay said you didn't get smudges
on your nose as you would if you sat on a roof in London--a thing which
I never heard of anybody except cats doing. But she was tired, and I
suppose it would have been ladylike for me to be, only I was much too
excited. So Mr. Doremus stayed, and he and Mr. Parker talked more slang
in an hour than I think I ever heard in my whole life, though I have
always considered Stan talented in that way.
But Stan's slang, and Vic's, are quite different from American slang.
In America, you build up your whole conversation out of it, and it's
wonderful. I longed for a notebook while those two men were talking, to
put everything down, and I felt, if people were often going to be as
funny as that, I should need to go home soon to rest my features. I'm
not sure whether Americans really think funnier things than English
people do, but their funny ideas are startlingly unlike ours. Somehow
they seem younger and more bubbling. When I go home, I shall probably
have collected so much slang in my pores that I shall talk about
putting on my "glad rags" when I'm going to dress for dinner; my life
will be my "natural"; I shall call Stan's motor car the Blue Assassin
or the Homicide Wagon; I shall say my best frocks are "mighty
conducive"; I shall get bored by poor Mr. Duckworth, our newest curate,
and tell him he's "the limit"; I may even take to abbreviating my
affirmatives and negatives by saying "Yep" and "Nope" when I'm in a
hurry; but if I do fall into these ways, I tremble to think what may be
the effect on Mother.
IV
ABOUT SHOPPING AND MEN
"Why, Betty, you never told me you were interviewed on the dock." These
were the first words Mrs. Ess Kay said to me as I walked in to
breakfast, a little late because of a wrestle I had had with a
different and even more exciting kind of bath.
"I wasn't," said I, on the defensive; though I couldn't be perfectly
sure what connection, if any, interviewing had with the Customs. "You
told me not to declare anything, and I didn't."
Mr. Parker, looking as if he had been melted, poured into his clothes,
and then cooled off with iced water, burst out laughing.
"You're a daisy, Lady Betty," said he.
"Is it invidious to be a daisy?" I asked.
"I guess I must look in the dictionary for 'invidious'; but a daisy's a
flower that has budded in the green fields of England, where there
aren't any newspaper reporters or other strange bugs."
"Potter!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay, "don't tease her; and when you've
been in the green fields of England you'll say _insects_, not--er--what
you _did_ say, if you don't want ladies to faint all around you on the
floor." Then she turned to me. "He means you're very innocent, because
you don't know what it is to be interviewed. But you must have _been_
it, all the same, for see here, in this dreadful _Flashlight_." And she
handed me a newspaper, with one page folded over, and huge headings
dotted about at the tops of paragraphs, like the lines of big print
that oculists keep to make you try your eyesight. In the middle column
I saw my name, but I couldn't believe it was really there, in an
American paper. I began to think I wasn't awake yet, and that this must
be part of the dream I was dreaming all yesterday.
"BONNY--BETTY--BULKELEY," I read out aloud. "A Duke's Daughter on the
Dock. Call Her by Her Front Name, Please. What Lady Betty Thinks of Our
Boys."
There was more, but when I had got so far, I simply gasped.
"How _dare_ they?"
"There isn't much they don't dare, except to go back without a
'story'," said Mr. Parker, laughing. But I didn't laugh. I was too
angry.
"If my brother were here, he'd kill them," I said.
"Then he hasn't got a sense of humour," replied Mr. Parker; "I don't
see how a Duke could have, and be a Duke nowadays; but I guess I
wouldn't mind swopping my sense of humour for a dukedom, all the same.
See here, Lady Betty, you'll get to like our newspapers before you've
been over here a month. They sort of grow on you. They're as
interesting as novels, and almost as true to life."
"This isn't true to my life, anyway," I said, not knowing whether I
wanted most to laugh or cry. "Oh, Sally, Sally _Woodburn_, will anybody
believe I said such things as these?"
"Give the _Flashlight_ to me and let me look," she said. And when she'd
taken the paper, she began to read the stuff that came under the big
headings, out aloud, in her pretty, soft voice.
"Yesterday was a blazer, but though it was hot enough on the docks to
roast a coon, when the Big Willie steamed in, that beautiful young
visitor to our shores, Lady Betty Bulkeley, managed to look like the
Duke's daughter and Duke's sister she is, and so far as a mere man
could tell, without the help of patent hair curlers, or other
artificial aids to personal pulchritude.
"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair, she sat
on a throne of ducal luggage, looking queenly in an elegant white shirt
waist, built mostly of holes and eminently suited to her style of
beauty as well as the weather. She also had on a picture hat, which was
superfluous as she would have been a picture without it, and below the
waist she was tailor made."
"I think it's most insulting!" I broke in. "And I was made at home, all
the way down."
But Sally went on: "I soon found [writes the representative of _The
Flashlight_] that the sister of the Duke of Stanforth, one of Britain's
eligibles, preferred to be addressed by her Front name of Lady Betty.
'I feel more at home,' said she, with a sweet voice, but a pronounced
English accent, 'when I am called Lady Betty. And I want to feel at
home in America, because I expect to be some time with my friend, Mrs.
Stuyvesant-Knox, who will show me society over on this side. I have
heard so much about Newport, don't you know? I fancy it will be too
utterly deevy.'"
"What's deevy?" I demanded with scorn.
"Oh, that's supposed to be what smart Englishwomen say for divine."
"_I_ never heard it," I sneered, "much less said it. I'm sure Mother
would consider it quite profane."
"Well, do be quiet, child, and listen to what _The Flashlight_ says you
said." "'What opinion have you formed of our society women and clubmen,
on board the Willie?' was the next question.
"'I think your ladies are better dressed than ours, and the gentlemen
are just lovely. They don't sit around and wait while we girls amuse
them, they hustle to give us a good time, and they know how to do it. I
shouldn't wonder if I should hate to go home and associate with lords
after being a summer girl in Newport. I don't see now why American
girls go out of their own country to marry.'
"'I suppose we shall be seeing your brother, the Duke, over here before
long?'
"'His Grace may come to fetch me back,' replied her ladyship. 'He has
never been to America, but it is one of the desires of his life to
come, and your American beauties had better look out, for he is a gay
young bachelor, and I shouldn't be surprised if he took a fancy to
carry home a Duchess. Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox will entertain him also, and
maybe he will paint some of America red.'"
"That's all about you, I see," Sally finished up. "The rest is about
Cousin Katherine and me. It says we've come back with a touch of the
Piccadilly accent; and it criticises my nose, and the way Cousin
Katherine puts on her hat. It describes this house all wrong, and says
the Newport cottage 'knocks spots' out of Mrs. Van der Windt's cottage.
It also mentions Cousin Potter, and calls him 'one of our Army Dudes.'
But _we_ don't mind, and you mustn't. Everybody reads _The Flashlight_,
for the sake of the shocks, but nobody believes its flashes."
"Still, you must have said something to the man," remarked Mrs. Ess
Kay.
"I only said 'No, but--' or 'Yes, but--,'" I insisted. "Truly and truly
nothing else. And oh, there was a _Bat_, too, who tried to talk to me."
"Great Scott! the _Evening Bat_," chortled Mr. Parker. "Look out for
something rich to-night."
"Can't he be stopped?" I asked.
"Might as well try to stop Niagara--with a tin can; the less _you_
said, the more the _Bat_ will say. But it doesn't matter. Nobody'll
care. Reporters are paid by the yard for imagination; information's
gone out, though I do hear you use it still on your side."
I was just going to defend information (British) at the expense of
imagination (American), when I remembered that the "Army Dude"--which
sounds rather like something you might buy at the Stores--had sent me
up an enormous bouquet of violets as big as a breakfast plate, and that
I'd forgotten to thank him. I did so at once, but it seemed that I had
blundered.
"Violets?" he echoed. "Must have been some other fellow. I sent you
gardenias."
"Oh, then the cards got mixed," I said. "I thought the gardenias were
from Mr. Doremus. How kind of you both. I was so surprised to receive
such lovely flowers."
"Our American buds are surprised when they don't get them. They would
think it a cold day when they didn't have a slight morning haul of
flowers--must be out of season ones, or they're no use--new novels, or
candy. What do men over on your side of the water do to convince you
girls that they think you're as beautiful as you really are?"
I thought for a minute, and then I said that perhaps we weren't as hard
to convince as American girls. I don't know whether this was a proper
answer or not, but, anyway, Mr. Parker laughed, and then began to plan
what we should do for the day.
"Say, let's run her over to Coney Island," he said.
"Oh, my dear boy!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay. "Not for anything. The
Duchess would have a fi--I mean, she would be horrified."