An International Episode. Генри Джеймс
and, below, people were handing about bills of fare, as if they had been programs. 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 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 traveler 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 a while 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 travelers found themselves assigned to a couple of diminutive bedrooms in a faraway 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, toward eleven o’clock, very alert and inquisitive. They looked out of their windows across a row of small green fields, bordered with low stone walls 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, generally, 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 encyclopedic 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 veranda, 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 fete champetre, 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 (as he had done a couple of days before) 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 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 veranda 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