The New York Stories of Henry James

by Henry James

  Mrs. Westgate’s discourse, delivered in a soft, sweet voice, flowed on like a miniature torrent and was interrupted by a hundred little smiles, glances and gestures, which might have figured the irregularities and obstructions of such a stream. Lord Lambeth listened to her with, it must be confessed, a rather ineffectual attention, although he indulged in a good many little murmurs and ejaculations of assent and deprecation. He had no great faculty for apprehending generalisations. There were some three or four indeed which, in the play of his own intelligence, he had originated, and which had seemed convenient at the moment; but at the present time he could hardly have been said to follow Mrs. Westgate as she darted gracefully about in the sea of speculation. Fortunately she asked for no especial rejoinder, for she looked about at the rest of the company as well, and smiled at Percy Beaumont, on the other side of her, as if he too must understand her and agree with her. He was rather more successful than his companion; for besides being, as we know, cleverer, his attention was not vaguely distracted by close vicinity to a remarkably interesting young girl, with dark hair and blue eyes. This was the case with Lord Lambeth, to whom it occurred after a while that the young girl with blue eyes and dark hair was the pretty sister of whom Mrs. Westgate had spoken. She presently turned to him with a remark which established her identity.

  “It’s a great pity you couldn’t have brought my brother-in-law with you. It’s a great shame he should be in New York in these days.”

  “Oh yes; it’s so very hot,” said Lord Lambeth.

  “It must be dreadful,” said the young girl.

  “I daresay he is very busy,” Lord Lambeth observed.

  “The gentlemen in America work too much,” the young girl went on.

  “Oh, do they? I daresay they like it,” said her interlocutor.

  “I don’t like it. One never sees them.”

  “Don’t you, really?” asked Lord Lambeth. “I shouldn’t have fancied that.”

  “Have you come to study American manners?” asked the young girl.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just came over for a lark. I haven’t got long.” Here there was a pause, and Lord Lambeth began again. “But Mr. Westgate will come down here, will not he?”

  “I certainly hope he will. He must help to entertain you and Mr. Beaumont.”

  Lord Lambeth looked at her a little with his handsome brown eyes. “Do you suppose he would have come down with us, if we had urged him?”

  Mr. Westgate’s sister-in-law was silent a moment, and then—“I daresay he would,” she answered.

  “Really!” said the young Englishman. “He was immensely civil to Beaumont and me,” he added.

  “He is a dear good fellow,” the young lady rejoined. “And he is a perfect husband. But all Americans are that,” she continued, smiling.

  “Really!” Lord Lambeth exclaimed again; and wondered whether all American ladies had such a passion for generalising as these two.

  III

  HE sat there a good while: there was a great deal of talk; it was all very friendly and lively and jolly. Every one present, sooner or later, said something to him, and seemed to make a particular point of addressing him by name. Two or three other persons came in, and there was a shifting of seats and changing of places; the gentlemen all entered into intimate conversation with the two Englishmen, made them urgent offers of hospitality and hoped they might frequently be of service to them. They were afraid Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont were not very comfortable at their hotel—that it was not, as one of them said, “so private as those dear little English inns of yours.” This last gentleman went on to say that unfortunately, as yet, perhaps, privacy was not quite so easily obtained in America as might be desired; still, he continued, you could generally get it by paying for it; in fact you could get everything in America nowadays by paying for it. American life was certainly growing a great deal more private; it was growing very much like England. Everything at Newport, for instance, was thoroughly private; Lord Lambeth would probably be struck with that. It was also represented to the strangers that it mattered very little whether their hotel was agreeable, as every one would want them to make visits; they would stay with other people, and, in any case, they would be a great deal at Mrs. Westgate’s. They would find that very charming; it was the pleasantest house in Newport. It was a pity Mr. Westgate was always away; he was a man of the highest ability—very acute, very acute. He worked like a horse and he left his wife—well, to do about as she liked. He liked her to enjoy herself, and she seemed to know how. She was extremely brilliant, and a splendid talker. Some people preferred her sister; but Miss Alden was very different; she was in a different style altogether. Some people even thought her prettier, and, certainly, she was not so sharp. She was more in the Boston style; she had lived a great deal in Boston and she was very highly educated. Boston girls, it was intimated, were more like English young ladies.

  Lord Lambeth had presently a chance to test the truth of this proposition; for on the company rising in compliance with a suggestion from their hostess that they should walk down to the rocks and look at the sea, the young Englishman again found himself, as they strolled across the grass, in proximity to Mrs. Westgate’s sister. Though she was but a girl of twenty, she appeared to feel the obligation to exert an active hospitality; and this was perhaps the more to be noticed as she seemed by nature a reserved and retiring person, and had little of her sister’s fraternising quality. She was perhaps rather too thin, and she was a little pale; but as she moved slowly over the grass, with her arms hanging at her sides, looking gravely for a moment at the sea and then brightly, for all her gravity, at him, Lord Lambeth thought her at least as pretty as Mrs. Westgate, and reflected that if this was the Boston style the Boston style was very charming. He thought she looked very clever; he could imagine that she was highly educated; but at the same time she seemed gentle and graceful. For all her cleverness, however, he felt that she had to think a little what to say; she didn’t say the first thing that came into her head; he had come from a different part of the world and from a different society, and she was trying to adapt her conversation. The others were scattering themselves near the rocks; Mrs. Westgate had charge of Percy Beaumont.

  “Very jolly place, isn’t it?” said Lord Lambeth. “It’s a very jolly place to sit.”

  “Very charming,” said the young girl; “I often sit here; there are all kinds of cosy corners—as if they had been made on purpose.”

  “Ah! I suppose you have had some of them made,” said the young man.

  Miss Alden looked at him a moment. “Oh no, we have had nothing made. It’s pure nature.”

  “I should think you would have a few little benches—rustic seats and that sort of thing. It might be so jolly to sit here, you know,” Lord Lambeth went on.

  “I am afraid we haven’t so many of those things as you,” said the young girl, thoughtfully.

  “I daresay you go in for pure nature as you were saying. Nature, over here, must be so grand, you know.” And Lord Lambeth looked about him.

  The little coast-line hereabouts was very pretty, but it was not at all grand; and Miss Alden appeared to rise to a perception of this fact. “I am afraid it seems to you very rough,” she said. “It’s not like the coast scenery in Kingsley’s novels.”

  “Ah, the novels always overdo it, you know,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “You must not go by the novels.”

  They were wandering about a little on the rocks, and they stopped and looked down into a narrow chasm where the rising tide made a curious bellowing sound. It was loud enough to prevent their hearing each other, and they stood there for some moments in silence. The young girl looked at her companion, observing him attentively but covertly, as women, even when very young, know how to do. Lord Lambeth repaid observation; tall, straight and strong, he was handsome as certain young Englishmen, and certain young Englishmen almost alone, are handsome; with a perfect finish of feature and a look of intellectual repose and gentle good tem
per which seemed somehow to be consequent upon his well-cut nose and chin. And to speak of Lord Lambeth’s expression of intellectual repose is not simply a civil way of saying that he looked stupid. He was evidently not a young man of an irritable imagination; he was not, as he would himself have said, tremendously clever; but, though there was a kind of appealing dulness in his eye, he looked thoroughly reasonable and competent, and his appearance proclaimed that to be a nobleman, an athlete, and an excellent fellow, was a sufficiently brilliant combination of qualities. The young girl beside him, it may be attested without farther delay, thought him the handsomest young man she had ever seen; and Bessie Alden’s imagination, unlike that of her companion, was irritable. He, however, was also making up his mind that she was uncommonly pretty.

  “I daresay it’s very gay here—that you have lots of balls and parties,” he said; for, if he was not tremendously clever, he rather prided himself on having, with women, a sufficiency of conversation.

  “Oh yes, there is a great deal going on,” Bessie Alden replied. “There are not so many balls, but there are a good many other things. You will see for yourself; we live rather in the midst of it.”

  “It’s very kind of you to say that. But I thought you Americans were always dancing.”

  “I suppose we dance a good deal; but I have never seen much of it. We don’t do it much, at any rate, in summer. And I am sure,” said Bessie Alden, “that we don’t have so many balls as you have in England.”

  “Really!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth. “Ah, in England it all depends, you know.”

  “You will not think much of our gaieties,” said the young girl, looking at him with a little mixture of interrogation and decision which was peculiar to her. The interrogation seemed earnest and the decision seemed arch; but the mixture, at any rate, was charming. “Those things, with us, are much less splendid than in England.”

  “I fancy you don’t mean that,” said Lord Lambeth, laughing.

  “I assure you I mean everything I say,” the young girl declared. “Certainly, from what I have read about English society, it is very different.”

  “Ah, well, you know,” said her companion, “those things are often described by fellows who know nothing about them. You mustn’t mind what you read.”

  “Oh, I shall mind what I read!” Bessie Alden rejoined. “When I read Thackeray and George Eliot, how can I help minding them?”

  “Ah, well, Thackeray—and George Eliot,” said the young nobleman; “I haven’t read much of them.”

  “Don’t you suppose they know about society?” asked Bessie Alden.

  “Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever. But those fashionable novels,” said Lord Lambeth, “they are awful rot, you know.”

  His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then she looked down into the chasm where the water was tumbling about. “Do you mean Mrs. Gore, for instance?” she said presently, raising her eyes.

  “I am afraid I haven’t read that either,” was the young man’s rejoinder, laughing a little and blushing. “I am afraid you’ll think I am not very intellectual.”

  “Reading Mrs. Gore is no proof of intellect. But I like reading everything about English life—even poor books. I am so curious about it.”

  “Aren’t ladies always curious?” asked the young man, jestingly.

  But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously. “I don’t think so—I don’t think we are enough so—that we care about many things. So it’s all the more of a compliment,” she added, “that I should want to know so much about England.”

  The logic here seemed a little close; but Lord Lambeth, conscious of a compliment, found his natural modesty just at hand. “I am sure you know a great deal more than I do.”

  “I really think I know a great deal—for a person who has never been there.”

  “Have you really never been there?” cried Lord Lambeth. “Fancy!”

  “Never—except in imagination,” said the young girl.

  “Fancy!” repeated her companion. “But I daresay you’ll go soon, won’t you?”

  “It’s the dream of my life!” declared Bessie Alden, smiling.

  “But your sister seems to know a tremendous lot about London,” Lord Lambeth went on.

  The young girl was silent a moment. “My sister and I are two very different persons,” she presently said. “She has been a great deal in Europe. She has been in England several times. She has known a great many English people.”

  “But you must have known some, too,” said Lord Lambeth.

  “I don’t think that I have ever spoken to one before. You are the first Englishman that—to my knowledge—I have ever talked with.”

  Bessie Alden made this statement with a certain gravity, as it seemed to Lord Lambeth, an impressiveness. Attempts at impressiveness always made him feel awkward, and he now began to laugh and swing his stick. “Ah, you would have been sure to know!” he said. And then he added, after an instant—“I’m sorry I am not a better specimen.”

  The young girl looked away; but she smiled, laying aside her impressiveness. “You must remember that you are only a beginning,” she said. Then she retraced her steps, leading the way back to the lawn, where they saw Mrs. Westgate come towards them with Percy Beaumont still at her side. “Perhaps I shall go to England next year,” Miss Alden continued; “I want to, immensely. My sister is going to Europe, and she has asked me to go with her. If we go, I shall make her stay as long as possible in London.”

  “Ah, you must come in July,” said Lord Lambeth. “That’s the time when there is most going on.”

  “I don’t think I can wait till July,” the young girl rejoined. “By the first of May I shall be very impatient.” They had gone farther, and Mrs. Westgate and her companion were near them. “Kitty,” said Miss Alden, “I have given out that we are going to London next May. So please to conduct yourself accordingly.”

  Percy Beaumont wore a somewhat animated—even a slightly irritated—air. He was by no means so handsome a man as his cousin, although in his cousin’s absence he might have passed for a striking specimen of the tall, muscular, fair-bearded, clear-eyed Englishman. Just now Beaumont’s clear eyes, which were small and of a pale grey colour, had a rather troubled light, and, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke, he rested them upon his kinsman. Mrs. Westgate meanwhile, with her superfluously pretty gaze, looked at every one alike.

  “You had better wait till the time comes,” she said to her sister. “Perhaps next May you won’t care so much about London. Mr. Beaumont and I,” she went on smiling at her companion, “have had a tremendous discussion. We don’t agree about anything. It’s perfectly delightful.”

  “Oh, I say, Percy!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth.

  “I disagree,” said Beaumont, stroking down his black hair, “even to the point of not thinking it delightful.”

  “Oh, I say!” cried Lord Lambeth again.

  “I don’t see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,” said Percy Beaumont.

  “Well, I do!” Mrs. Westgate declared; and she turned to her sister. “You know you have to go to town. The phaeton is there. You had better take Lord Lambeth.”

  At this point Percy Beaumont certainly looked straight at his kinsman; he tried to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth would not look at him; his own eyes were better occupied. “I shall be very happy,” cried Bessie Alden. “I am only going to some shops. But I will drive you about and show you the place.”

  “An American woman who respects herself,” said Mrs. Westgate, turning to Beaumont with her bright expository air, “must buy something every day of her life. If she cannot do it herself, she must send out some member of her family for the purpose. So Bessie goes forth to fulfil my mission.”

  The young girl had walked away, with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they passed towards the house. “She fulfils her own mission,�
�� he presently said; “that of being a very attractive young lady.”

  “I don’t know that I should say very attractive,” Mrs. Westgate rejoined. “She is not so much that as she is charming when you really know her. She is very shy.”

  “Oh indeed?” said Percy Beaumont.

  “Extremely shy,” Mrs. Westgate repeated. “But she is a dear good girl; she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that isn’t at all her line; she doesn’t know the alphabet of that sort of thing. She is very simple—very serious. She has lived a great deal in Boston, with another sister of mine—the eldest of us—who married a Bostonian. She is very cultivated, not at all like me—I am not in the least cultivated. She has studied immensely and read everything; she is what they call in Boston ‘thoughtful.’”

  “A rum sort of girl for Lambeth to get hold of!” his lordship’s kinsman privately reflected.