by Henry James
“Afraid of what?”
“Of your pitying him too much.”
Bessie Alden turned away impatiently; but at the end of a minute she turned back. “What if I should pity him too much?” she asked.
Mrs. Westgate hereupon turned away, but after a moment’s reflection she also faced her sister again. “It would come, after all, to the same thing,” she said.
Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, and the two ladies, attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance and were conveyed eastward, through some of the duskier portions of the metropolis, to the great turreted donjon which overlooks the London shipping. They all descended from their vehicle and entered the famous enclosure; and they secured the services of a venerable beefeater, who, though there were many other claimants for legendary information, made a fine exclusive party of them and marched them through courts and corridors, through armouries and prisons. He delivered his usual peripatetic discourse, and they stopped and stared, and peeped and stooped, according to the official admonitions. Bessie Alden asked the old man in the crimson doublet a great many questions; she thought it a most fascinating place. Lord Lambeth was in high good-humour; he was constantly laughing; he enjoyed what he would have called the lark. Willie Woodley kept looking at the ceilings and tapping the walls with the knuckle of a pearl-grey glove; and Mrs. Westgate, asking at frequent intervals to be allowed to sit down and wait till they came back, was as frequently informed that they would never come back. To a great many of Bessie’s questions—chiefly on collateral points of English history—the ancient warder was naturally unable to reply; whereupon she always appealed to Lord Lambeth. But his lordship was very ignorant. He declared that he knew nothing about that sort of thing, and he seemed greatly diverted at being treated as an authority.
“You can’t expect every one to know as much as you,” he said.
“I should expect you to know a great deal more,” declared Bessie Alden.
“Women always know more than men about names and dates, and that sort of thing,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “There was Lady Jane Grey we have just been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning of her age.”
“You have no right to be ignorant, at all events,” said Bessie.
“Why haven’t I as good a right as any one else?”
“Because you have lived in the midst of all these things.”
“What things do you mean? Axes and blocks and thumb-screws?”
“All these historical things. You belong to an historical family.”
“Bessie is really too historical,” said Mrs. Westgate, catching a word of this dialogue.
“Yes, you are too historical,” said Lord Lambeth, laughing, but thankful for a formula. “Upon my honour, you are too historical!”
He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous horse-chestnuts were in blossom, and Lord Lambeth, who quite entered into the spirit of the cockney excursionist, declared that it was a jolly old place. Bessie Alden was in ecstasies; she went about murmuring and exclaiming.
“It’s too lovely,” said the young girl, “it’s too enchanting; it’s too exactly what it ought to be!”
At Hampton Court the little flocks of visitors are not provided with an official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion upon the local antiquities. It happened in this manner that, in default of another informant, Bessie Alden, who on doubtful questions was able to suggest a great many alternatives, found herself again applying for intellectual assistance to Lord Lambeth. But he again assured her that he was utterly helpless in such matters—that his education had been sadly neglected.
“And I am sorry it makes you unhappy,” he added in a moment.
“You are very disappointing, Lord Lambeth,” she said.
“Ah, now, don’t say that!” he cried. “That’s the worst thing you could possibly say.”
“No,” she rejoined; “it is not so bad as to say that I had expected nothing of you.”
“I don’t know. Give me a notion of the sort of thing you expected.”
“Well,” said Bessie Alden, “that you would be more what I should like to be—what I should try to be—in your place.”
“Ah, my place!” exclaimed Lord Lambeth; “you are always talking about my place.”
The young girl looked at him; he thought she coloured a little; and for a moment she made no rejoinder.
“Does it strike you that I am always talking about your place?” she asked.
“I am sure you do it a great honour,” he said, fearing he had been uncivil.
“I have often thought about it,” she went on after a moment. “I have often thought about your being an hereditary legislator. An hereditary legislator ought to know a great many things.”
“Not if he doesn’t legislate.”
“But you will legislate; it’s absurd your saying you won’t. You are very much looked up to here—I am assured of that.”
“I don’t know that I ever noticed it.”
“It is because you are used to it, then. You ought to fill the place.”
“How do you mean, to fill it?” asked Lord Lambeth.
“You ought to be very clever and brilliant, and to know almost everything.”
Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. “Shall I tell you something?” he asked. “A young man in my position, as you call it—”
“I didn’t invent the term,” interposed Bessie Alden. “I have seen it in a great many books.”
“Hang it, you are always at your books! A fellow in my position, then, does very well, whatever he does. That’s about what I mean to say.”
“Well, if your own people are content with you,” said Bessie Alden, laughing, “it is not for me to complain. But I shall always think that, properly, you should have a great mind—a great character.”
“Ah, that’s very theoretic!” Lord Lambeth declared. “Depend upon it, that’s a Yankee prejudice.”
“Happy the country,” said Bessie Alden, “where even people’s prejudices are so elevated!”
“Well, after all,” observed Lord Lambeth, “I don’t know that I am such a fool as you are trying to make me out.”
“I said nothing so rude as that; but I must repeat that you are disappointing.”
“My dear Miss Alden,” exclaimed the young man, “I am the best fellow in the world!”
“Ah, if it were not for that!” said Bessie Alden, with a smile.
Mrs. Westgate had a good many more friends in London than she pretended, and before long she had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their hospitality was extreme, so that, one thing leading to another, she began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw something of what she found it a great satisfaction to call to herself English society. She went to balls and danced, she went to dinners and talked, she went to concerts and listened (at concerts Bessie always listened), she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain celebrated persons—authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen—of whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder, and who now, as a part of the habitual furniture of London drawing-rooms, struck her as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable—revealing also, sometimes, on contact, qualities not to have been predicted of bodies sidereal. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation, had a good many personal disappointments; but, on the other hand, she had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she communicated the emotions of either class to a dear friend, of her own sex, in Boston, with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her reflections, indeed, she attempted to impart to Lord Lambeth, who came almost every day to Jones’s Hotel, and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India;
and of several others of Mrs. Westgate’s ex-pensioners—gentlemen who, as she said, had made, in New York, a club-house of her drawing-room—no tidings were to be obtained; but Lord Lambeth was certainly attentive enough to make up for the accidental absences, the short memories, all the other irregularities, of every one else. He drove them in the Park, he took them to visit private collections of pictures, and having a house of his own, invited them to dinner. Mrs. Westgate, following the fashion of many of her compatriots, caused herself and her sister to be presented at the English Court by her diplomatic representative—for it was in this manner that she alluded to the American Minister to England, inquiring what on earth he was put there for, if not to make the proper arrangements for one’s going to a Drawing Room.
Lord Lambeth declared that he hated Drawing Rooms, but he participated in the ceremony on the day on which the two ladies at Jones’s Hotel repaired to Buckingham Palace in a remarkable coach which his lordship had sent to fetch them. He had on a gorgeous uniform, and Bessie Alden was particularly struck with his appearance—especially when on her asking him, rather foolishly as she felt, if he were a loyal subject, he replied that he was a loyal subject to her. This declaration was emphasised by his dancing with her at a royal ball to which the two ladies afterwards went, and was not impaired by the fact that she thought he danced very ill. He seemed to her wonderfully kind; she asked herself, with growing vivacity, why he should be so kind. It was his disposition—that seemed the natural answer. She had told her sister that she liked him very much, and now that she liked him more she wondered why. She liked him for his disposition; to this question as well that seemed the natural answer. When once the impressions of London life began to crowd thickly upon her she completely forgot her sister’s warning about the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great pain at the moment; but there was no particular reason why she should remember it; it corresponded too little with any sensible reality; and it was disagreeable to Bessie to remember disagreeable things. So she was not haunted with the sense of a vulgar imputation. She was not in love with Lord Lambeth—she assured herself of that. It will immediately be observed that when such assurances become necessary the state of a young lady’s affections is already ambiguous; and indeed Bessie Alden made no attempt to dissimulate—to herself, of course—a certain tenderness that she felt for the young nobleman. She said to herself that she liked the type to which he belonged—the simple, candid, manly, healthy English temperament. She spoke to herself of him as women speak of young men they like—alluded to his bravery (which she had never in the least seen tested), to his honesty and gentlemanliness; and was not silent upon the subject of his good looks. She was perfectly conscious, moreover, that she liked to think of his more adventitious merits—that her imagination was excited and gratified by the sight of a handsome young man endowed with such large opportunities—opportunities she hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things—for setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness, for encouraging the arts. She had a kind of ideal of conduct for a young man who should find himself in this magnificent position, and she tried to adapt it to Lord Lambeth’s deportment, as you might attempt to fit a silhouette in cut paper upon a shadow projected upon a wall. But Bessie Alden’s silhouette refused to coincide with his lordship’s image; and this want of harmony sometimes vexed her more than she thought reasonable. When he was absent it was of course less striking—then he seemed to her a sufficiently graceful combination of high responsibilities and amiable qualities. But when he sat there within sight, laughing and talking with his customary good humour and simplicity, she measured it more accurately, and she felt acutely that if Lord Lambeth’s position was heroic, there was but little of the hero in the young man himself. Then her imagination wandered away from him—very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at such moments he seemed distinctly dull. I am afraid that while Bessie’s imagination was thus invidiously roaming, she cannot have been herself a very lively companion; but it may well have been that these occasional fits of indifference seemed to Lord Lambeth a part of the young girl’s personal charm. It had been a part of this charm from the first that he felt that she judged him and measured him more freely and irresponsibly—more at her ease and her leisure, as it were—than several young ladies with whom he had been on the whole about as intimate. To feel this, and yet to feel that she also liked him, was very agreeable to Lord Lambeth. He fancied he had compassed that gratification so desirable to young men of title and fortune—being liked for himself. It is true that a cynical counsellor might have whispered to him, “Liked for yourself? Yes; but not so very much!” He had, at any rate, the constant hope of being liked more.
It may seem, perhaps, a trifle singular—but it is nevertheless true—that Bessie Alden, when he struck her as dull, devoted some time, on grounds of conscience, to trying to like him more. I say on grounds of conscience, because she felt that he had been extremely “nice” to her sister, and because she reflected that it was no more than fair that she should think as well of him as he thought of her. This effort was possibly sometimes not so successful as it might have been, for the result of it was occasionally a vague irritation, which expressed itself in hostile criticism of several British institutions. Bessie Alden went to some entertainments at which she met Lord Lambeth; but she went to others at which his lordship was neither actually nor potentially present; and it was chiefly on these latter occasions that she encountered those literary and artistic celebrities of whom mention has been made. After a while she reduced the matter to a principle. If Lord Lambeth should appear anywhere, it was a symbol that there would be no poets and philosophers; and in consequence—for it was almost a strict consequence—she used to enumerate to the young man these objects of her admiration.
“You seem to be awfully fond of that sort of people,” said Lord Lambeth one day, as if the idea had just occurred to him.
“They are the people in England I am most curious to see,” Bessie Alden replied.
“I suppose that’s because you have read so much,” said Lord Lambeth, gallantly.
“I have not read so much. It is because we think so much of them at home.”
“Oh, I see!” observed the young nobleman. “In Boston.”
“Not only in Boston; everywhere,” said Bessie. “We hold them in great honour; they go to the best dinner-parties.”
“I dare say you are right. I can’t say I know many of them.”
“It’s a pity you don’t,” Bessie Alden declared. “It would do you good.”
“I dare say it would,” said Lord Lambeth, very humbly. “But I must say I don’t like the looks of some of them.”
“Neither do I—of some of them. But there are all kinds, and many of them are charming.”
“I have talked with two or three of them,” the young man went on, “and I thought they had a kind of fawning manner.”
“Why should they fawn?” Bessie Alden demanded.
“I’m sure I don’t know. Why, indeed?”
“Perhaps you only thought so,” said Bessie.
“Well, of course,” rejoined her companion, “that’s a kind of thing that can’t be proved.”
“In America they don’t fawn,” said Bessie.
“Ah! well, then, they must be better company.”
Bessie was silent a moment. “That is one of the things I don’t like about England,” she said; “your keeping the distinguished people apart.”
“How do you mean, apart?”
“Why, letting them come only to certain places. You never see them.”
Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. “What people do you mean?”
“The eminent people—the authors and artists—the clever people.”
“Oh, there are other eminent people besides those!” said Lord Lambeth.
“Well, you certainly keep them apart,” repeated the young girl.
“And there are other clever people,” a
dded Lord Lambeth, simply.
Bessie Alden looked at him, and she gave a light laugh. “Not many,” she said.
On another occasion—just after a dinner-party—she told him that there was something else in England she did not like.
“Oh, I say!” he cried; “haven’t you abused us enough?”
“I have never abused you at all,” said Bessie; “but I don’t like your precedence.”
“It isn’t my precedence!” Lord Lambeth declared, laughing.
“Yes, it is yours—just exactly yours; and I think it’s odious,” said Bessie.
“I never saw such a young lady for discussing things! Has some one had the impudence to go before you?” asked his lordship.
“It is not the going before me that I object to,” said Bessie; “it is their thinking that they have a right to do it—a right that I should recognise.”
“I never saw such a young lady as you are for not ‘recognising.’ I have no doubt the thing is beastly, but it saves a lot of trouble.”
“It makes a lot of trouble. It’s horrid!” said Bessie.
“But how would you have the first people go?” asked Lord Lambeth. “They can’t go last.”
“Whom do you mean by the first people?”
“Ah, if you mean to question first principles!” said Lord Lambeth.
“If those are your first principles, no wonder some of your arrangements are horrid,” observed Bessie Alden, with a very pretty ferocity. “I am a young girl, so of course I go last; but imagine what Kitty must feel on being informed that she is not at liberty to budge until certain other ladies have passed out!”
“Oh, I say, she is not ‘informed’!” cried Lord Lambeth. “No one would do such a thing as that.”
“She is made to feel it,” the young girl insisted—“as if they were afraid she would make a rush for the door. No, you have a lovely country,” said Bessie Alden, “but your precedence is horrid.”
“I certainly shouldn’t think your sister would like it,” rejoined Lord Lambeth, with even exaggerated gravity. But Bessie Alden could induce him to enter no formal protest against this repulsive custom, which he seemed to think an extreme convenience.