I
Four years ago—in 1874—two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the
United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer and, arriving in New
York on the first day of August, were much struck with the high, the
torrid temperature. Disembarking upon the wharf they climbed into one of
the huge high-hung coaches that convey passengers to the hotels, and with
a great deal of bouncing and bumping they took their course through
Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is doubtless not the most
engaging, though nothing perhaps could well more solicit an alarmed
attention. Of quite other sense and sound from those of any typical
English street was the endless rude channel, rich in incongruities,
through which our two travellers advanced—looking out on either side at
the rough animation of the sidewalks, at the high-coloured heterogeneous
architecture, at the huge white marble façades that, bedizened with
gilded lettering, seemed to glare in the strong crude light, at the
multifarious awnings, banners and streamers, at the extraordinary number
of omnibuses, horse-cars and other democratic vehicles, at the vendors of
cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen,
the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the
general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The
young men had exchanged few observations, but in crossing Union Square,
in front of the monument to Washington—in the very shadow indeed
projected by the image of the _pater patriae_—one of them remarked to the
other: “Awfully rum place.”
“Ah, very odd, very odd,” said the other, who was the clever man of the
two.
“Pity it’s so beastly hot,” resumed the first speaker after a pause.
“You know we’re in a low latitude,” said the clever man.
“I daresay,” remarked his friend.
“I wonder,” said the second speaker presently, “if they can give one a
bath.”
“I daresay not,” the other returned.
“Oh I say!” cried his comrade.
This animated discussion dropped on their arrival at the hotel,
recommended to them by an American gentleman whose acquaintance they had
made—with whom, indeed, they had become very intimate—on the steamer and
who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and introduce them in a
friendly way to the proprietor. This plan, however, had been defeated by
their friend’s finding his “partner” in earnest attendance on the wharf,
with urgent claims on his immediate presence of mind. But the two
Englishmen, with nothing beyond their national prestige and personal
graces to recommend them, were very well received at the hotel, which had
an air of capacious hospitality. They found a bath not unattainable and
were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated
immersion with which their apartment was supplied. After bathing a good
deal—more indeed than they had ever done before on a single occasion—they
made their way to the dining-room of the hotel, which was a spacious
restaurant with a fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in
ornamental tubs and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on
land, after a sea-voyage, is in any connexion a delightful hour, and
there was much that ministered to ease in the general situation of our
young men. They were formed for good spirits and addicted and appointed
to hilarity; they were more observant than they appeared; they were, in
an inarticulate accidentally dissimulative fashion, capable of high
appreciation. This was perhaps especially the case with the elder, who
was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little
table which was a very different affair from the great clattering see-saw
in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the
restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide expanse studded
with other plants in tubs and rows of spreading trees—beyond which
appeared a large shady square without palings and with marble-paved
walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other façades of white marble
and of pale chocolate-coloured stone, squaring themselves against the
deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade and the heat,
was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable street-cars and a
constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of many pedestrians,
extremely frequent among whom were young women in Pompadour-looking
dresses. The place within was cool and vaguely lighted; with the plash
of water, the odour of flowers and the flitting of French waiters, as I
have said, on soundless carpets.
“It’s rather like Paris, you know,” said the younger of our two
travellers.
“It’s like Paris—only more so,” his companion returned.
“I suppose it’s the French waiters,” said the first speaker. “Why don’t
they have French waiters in London?”
“Ah, but fancy a French waiter at a London club!” said his friend.
The elder man stared as if he couldn’t fancy it. “In Paris I’m very apt
to dine at a place where there’s an English waiter. Don’t you know,
what’s-his-name’s, close to the thingumbob? They always set an English
waiter at me. I suppose they think I can’t speak French.”
“No more you can!” And this candid critic unfolded his napkin.
The other paid no heed whatever to his candour. “I say,” the latter
resumed in a moment, “I suppose we must learn to speak American. I
suppose we must take lessons.”
“I can’t make them out, you know,” said the clever man.
“What the deuce is _he_ saying?” asked his comrade, appealing from the
French waiter.
“He’s recommending some soft-shell crabs,” said the clever man.
And so, in a desultory view of the mysteries of the new world bristling
about them, the young Englishmen proceeded to dine—going in largely, as
the phrase is, for cooling draughts and dishes, as to which their
attendant submitted to them a hundred alternatives. After dinner they
went out and slowly walked about the neighbouring streets. The early
dusk of waning summer was at hand, but the heat still very great. The
pavements were hot even to the stout boot-soles of the British
travellers, and the trees along the kerb-stone emitted strange exotic
odours. The young men wandered through the adjoining square—that queer
place without palings and with marble walks arranged in black and white
lozenges. There were a great many benches crowded with shabby-looking
people, and the visitors remarked very justly that it wasn’t much like
Grosvenor Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into the
hot darkness an immense array of open and brightly-lighted windows. At
the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horse-cars,
and all round it, in the upper dusk, a sinister hum of mosquitoes. The
ground-floor of the hotel, figuring a huge transparent cage, flung a wide
glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a public adjunct,
absorbing and emitting the passers-by promiscuously. The young
Englishmen went in with every one else, from curiosity, and saw a couple
of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor,
their legs variously stretched out, together with several dozen more
standing in a queue, as at the ticket-office of a railway station, before
a vast marble altar of sacrifice, a thing shaped like the counter of a
huge shop. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their
hands, had a dejected exhausted look; their garments were not fresh, as
if telling of some rush, or some fight, for life, and they seemed to
render mystic tribute to a magnificent young man with a waxed moustache
and a shirt front adorned with diamond buttons, who every now and then
dropped a cold glance over their multitudinous patience. They were
American citizens doing homage to an hotel-clerk.
“I’m glad he didn’t tell us to go there,” said one of our Englishmen,
alluding to their friend on the steamer, who had told them so many
things. They walked up the Fifth Avenue, where he had, for instance,
told them all the first families lived. But the first families were out
of town, and our friends had but the satisfaction of seeing some of the
second—or perhaps even the third—taking the evening air on balconies and
high flights of doorsteps in streets at right angles to the main straight
channel. They went a little way down one of these side-streets and there
saw young ladies in white dresses—charming-looking persons—seated in
graceful attitudes on the chocolate-coloured steps. In one or two places
these young ladies were conversing across the street with other young
ladies seated in similar postures and costumes in front of the opposite
houses, and in the warm night air their colloquial tones sounded
strangely in the ears of the young Englishmen. One of the latter,
nevertheless—the younger—betrayed a disposition to intercept some stray
item of this interchange and see what it would lead to; but his companion
observed pertinently enough that he had better be careful. They mustn’t
begin by making mistakes.
“But he told us, you know—he told us,” urged the young man, alluding
again to the friend on the steamer.
“Never mind what he told us!” answered his elder, who, if he had more
years and a more developed wit, was also apparently more of a moralist.
By bedtime—in their impatience to taste of a terrestrial couch again our
seafarers went to bed early—it was still insufferably hot, and the buzz
of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an audible
crepitation of the temperature. “We can’t stand this, you know,” the
young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed about all night more
boisterously than they had been tossed by Atlantic billows. On the
morrow their first thought was that they would re-embark that day for
England, but it then occurred to them they might find an asylum nearer at
hand. The cave of Æolus became their ideal of comfort, and they wondered
where the Americans went when wishing to cool off. They hadn’t the least
idea, and resolved to apply for information to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This
was the name—inscribed in a bold hand on the back of a letter carefully
preserved in the pocket-book of our younger gentleman. Beneath the
address, in the left-hand corner of the envelope, were the words
“Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont Esq.” The letter had been
given to the two Englishmen by a good friend of theirs in London, who had
been in America two years previously and had singled out Mr. J. L.
Westgate from the many friends he had left there as the consignee, as it
were, of his compatriots. “He’s really very decent,” the Englishman in
London had said, “and he has an awfully pretty wife. He’s tremendously
hospitable—he’ll do everything in the world for you, and as he knows
every one over there it’s quite needless I should give you any other
introduction. He’ll make you see every one—trust him for the right
kick-off. He has a tremendously pretty wife.” It was natural that in
the hour of tribulation Lord Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont should have
bethought themselves of so possible a benefactor; all the more so that he
lived in the Fifth Avenue and that the Fifth Avenue, as they had
ascertained the night before, was contiguous to their hotel. “Ten to one
he’ll be out of town,” said Percy Beaumont; “but we can at least find out
where he has gone and can at once give chase. He can’t possibly have
gone to a hotter place, you know.”
“Oh there’s only one hotter place,” said Lord Lambeth, “and I hope he
hasn’t gone there.”
They strolled along the shady side of the street to the number indicated
by the precious letter. The house presented an imposing
chocolate-coloured expanse, relieved by facings and window-cornices of
florid sculpture and by a couple of dusty rose-trees which clambered over
the balconies and the portico. This last-mentioned feature was
approached by a monumental flight of steps.
“Rather better than a dirty London thing,” said Lord Lambeth, looking
down from this altitude after they had rung the bell.
“It depends upon what London thing you mean,” replied his companion.
“You’ve a tremendous chance to get wet between the house-door and your
carriage.”
“Well,” said Lord Lambeth, glancing at the blaze of the sky, “I ‘guess’
it doesn’t rain so much here!”
The door was opened by a long negro in a white jacket, who grinned
familiarly when Lord Lambeth asked for Mr. Westgate. “He ain’t at home,
sir; he’s down town at his office.”
“Oh at his office?” said the visitors. “And when will he be at home?”
“Well, when he goes out dis way in de mo’ning he ain’t liable to come
home all day.”
This was discouraging; but the address of Mr. Westgate’s office was
freely imparted by the intelligent black and was taken down by Percy
Beaumont in his pocket-book. The comrades then returned, languidly
enough, to their hotel and sent for a hackney-coach; and in this
commodious vehicle they rolled comfortably down town. They measured the
whole length of Broadway again and found it a path of fire; and then,
deflecting to the left, were deposited by their conductor before a fresh
light ornamental structure, ten stories high, in a street crowded with
keen-faced light-limbed young men who were running about very nimbly and
stopping each other eagerly at corners and in doorways. Passing under
portals that were as the course of a twofold torrent, they were
introduced by one of the keen-faced young men—he was a charming fellow in
wonderful cream-coloured garments and a hat with a blue ribbon, who had
evidently recognised them as aliens and helpless—to a very snug hydraulic
elevator, in which they took their place with many other persons and
which, shooting upward in its vertical socket, presently projected them
into the seventh heaven, as it were, of the edifice. Here, after brief
delay, they found themselves face to face with the friend of their friend
in London. His office was composed of several conjoined rooms, and they
waited very silently in one of these after they had sent in their letter
and their cards. The letter was not one it would take Mr. Westgate very
long to read, but he came out to speak to them more instantly than they
could have expected; he had evidently jumped up from work. He was a tall
lean personage and was dressed all in fresh white linen; he had a thin
sharp familiar face, a face suggesting one of the ingenious modern
objects with alternative uses, good as a blade or as a hammer, good for
the deeps and for the shallows. His forehead was high but expressive,
his eyes sharp but amused, and a large brown moustache, which concealed
his mouth, made his chin, beneath it, look small. Relaxed though he was
at this moment Lord Lambeth judged him on the spot tremendously clever.
“How do you do, Lord Lambeth, how do you do, sir?”—he held the open
letter in his hand. “I’m very glad to meet you—I hope you’re very well.
You had better come in here—I think it’s cooler”; and he led the way into
another room, where there were law-books and papers and where windows
opened wide under striped awnings. Just opposite one of the windows, on
a line with his eyes, Lord Lambeth observed the weather-vane of a
church-steeple. The uproar of the street sounded infinitely far below,
and his lordship felt high indeed in the air. “I say it’s cooler,”
pursued their host, “but everything’s relative. How do you stand the
heat?”
“I can’t say we like it,” said Lord Lambeth; “but Beaumont likes it
better than I.”
“Well, I guess it will break,” Mr. Westgate cheerfully declared; “there’s
never anything bad over here but it does break. It was very hot when
Captain Littledale was here; he did nothing but drink sherry-cobblers.
He expresses some doubt in his letter whether I shall remember him—as if
I don’t remember once mixing six sherry-cobblers for him in about fifteen
minutes. I hope you left him well. I’d be glad to mix him some more.”
“Oh yes, he’s all right—and without _them_,” said Lord Lambeth.
“I’m always very glad to see your countrymen,” Mr. Westgate pursued. “I
thought it would be time some of you should be coming along. A friend of
mine was saying to me only a day or two ago, ‘It’s time for the
water-melons and the Englishmen.’”
“The Englishmen and the water-melons just now are about the same thing,”
Percy Beaumont observed with a wipe of his dripping forehead.
“Ah well, we’ll put you on ice as we do the melons. You must go down to
Newport.”
“We’ll go anywhere!” said Lord Lambeth.
“Yes, you want to go to Newport; that’s what you want to do.” Mr.
Westgate was very positive. “But let’s see—when did you get here?”
“Only yesterday,” said Percy Beaumont.
“Ah yes, by the _Russia_. Where are you staying?”
“At the Hanover, I think they call it.”
“Pretty comfortable?” inquired Mr. Westgate.
“It seems a capital place, but I can’t say we like the gnats,” said Lord
Lambeth.
Mr. Westgate stared and laughed. “Oh no, of course you don’t like the
gnats. We shall expect you to like a good many things over here, but we
shan’t insist on your liking the gnats; though certainly you’ll admit
that, as gnats, they’re big things, eh? But you oughtn’t to remain in
the city.”
“So we think,” said Lord Lambeth. “If you’d kindly suggest something—”
“Suggest something, my dear sir?”—and Mr. Westgate looked him over with
narrowed eyelids. “Open your mouth and shut your eyes! Leave it to me
and I’ll fix you all right. It’s a matter of national pride with me that
all Englishmen should have a good time, and as I’ve been through a good
deal with them I’ve learned to minister to their wants. I find they
generally want the true thing. So just please consider yourselves my
property; and if any one should try to appropriate you please say, ‘Hands
off—too late for the market.’ But let’s see,” continued the American
with his face of toil, his voice of leisure and his general intention,
apparently, of everything; “let’s see: are you going to make something of
a stay, Lord Lambeth?”
“Oh dear no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was to make this
little visit, so I just came with him, at an hour’s notice, for the
lark.”
“Is it your first time over here?”
“Oh dear yes.”
“I was obliged to come on some business,” Percy Beaumont explained, “and
I brought Lambeth along for company.”
“And _you_ have been here before, sir?”
“Never, never!”
“I thought from your referring to business—” Mr. Westgate threw off.
“Oh you see I’m just acting for some English shareholders by way of legal
advice. Some of my friends—well, if the truth must be told,” Mr.
Beaumont laughed—“have a grievance against one of your confounded
railways, and they’ve asked me to come and judge, if possible, on the
spot, what they can hope.”
Mr. Westgate’s amused eyes grew almost tender. “What’s your railroad?”
he asked.
“The Tennessee Central.”
The American tilted back his chair and poised it an instant. “Well, I’m
sorry you want to attack one of our institutions. But I guess you had
better enjoy yourself _first_!”
“I’m certainly rather afraid I can’t work in this weather,” the young
emissary confessed.
“Leave that to the natives,” said Mr. Westgate. “Leave the Tennessee
Central to me, Mr. Beaumont. I guess I can tell you more about it than
most any one. 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?” Percy Beaumont appealed.
“I must certainly be back early for _my_ engagements,” said his companion
irrelevantly but gently.
“For the shooting, eh? or is it the yachting or the hunting or the
fishing?” inquired his entertainer.
“Oh I must be in Scotland,”—and Lord Lambeth just amiably blushed.
“Well, then,” Mr. Westgate returned, “you had better amuse yourself first
also. You must go right down and see Mrs. Westgate.”
“We should be so happy—if you’d kindly tell us the train,” said Percy
Beaumont.
“You don’t take any train. You take a boat.”
“Oh I see. And what is the name of—a—the—a—town?”
“It’s a regular old city—don’t you let them hear you call it a village or
a hamlet or anything of that kind. They’d half-kill you. Only it’s a
city of pleasure—of lawns and gardens and verandahs and views and, above
all, of good Samaritans,” Mr. Westgate developed. “But you’ll see what
Newport is. It’s cool. That’s the principal thing. You’ll greatly
oblige me by going down there and putting yourself in the hands of Mrs.
Westgate. It isn’t perhaps for me to say it, but you couldn’t be in
better ones. Also in those of her sister, who’s staying with her. She’s
half-crazy about Englishmen. She thinks there’s nothing like them.”
“Mrs. Westgate or—a—her sister?” asked Percy Beaumont modestly, yet in
the tone of a collector of characteristic facts.
“Oh I mean my wife,” said Mr. Westgate. “I don’t suppose my
sister-in-law knows much about them yet. You’ll show her anyhow. She
has always led a very quiet life. She has lived in Boston.”
Percy Beaumont listened with interest. “That, I believe, is the most
intellectual centre.”
“Well, yes—Boston knows it’s central and feels it’s intellectual. I
don’t go there much—I stay round here,” Mr. Westgate more loosely
pursued.
“I say, you know, _we_ ought to go there,” Lord Lambeth broke out to his
companion.
“Oh Lord Lambeth, wait till the great heat’s 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 flushed himself, in his charming way, with wonder, though
his friend glanced to make sure he wasn’t looking too credulous—they had
heard so much about American practices. He decided in time, at any rate,
to take a safe middle course. “I daresay it’s very jolly.”
“I daresay it is,” Mr. Westgate returned. “Only I must impress on you
that at present—to-morrow morning at an early hour—you’ll be expected at
Newport. We have a house there—many of our most prominent citizens and
society leaders go there for the summer. I’m not sure that at this very
moment my wife can take you in—she has 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’ll find it tolerable. For the rest
you must make yourself at home at my place. You mustn’t be shy, you
know; if you’re only here for a month that will be a great waste of time.
Mrs. Westgate won’t neglect you, and you had better not undertake to
resist her. I know something about that. I guess 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 get into touch. Your steamer leaves from this
part of the city, and I’ll send right out and get you a cabin. Then at
half-past four o’clock just call for me here, and I’ll 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 don’t know but I’ll come down myself and
see how you are.”
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 clear thinker, and he made an impression on
his visitors; his hospitality seemed to recommend itself consciously—with
a friendly wink, as might be, hinting judicially that you couldn’t 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 so kept them waiting that they felt themselves
miss their previous escape and were deterred only by an amiable modesty
from dispensing with his attendance and starting on a hasty scramble to
embark. 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 luxurious retreat embellished with
gas-lamps, mirrors _en pied_ and florid furniture—and then, long after
they had been intimately convinced that the steamer was in motion and
launched upon the unknown stream they were about to navigate, he bade
them a sociable farewell.
“Well, good-bye, Lord Lambeth,” he said. “Goodbye, Mr. Percy Beaumont.
I hope you’ll have a good time. Just let them do what they want with
you. Take it as it’s meant. Renounce your own personality. I’ll come
down by and by and enjoy what’s left of you.”