‘Oh, I hate travelling!’ said the Countess of Pimlico, and transferred her attention to Mrs Westgate.
‘My son tells me you are going to Branches,’ the Duchess presently resumed.
‘Lord Lambeth has been so good as to ask us,’ said Mrs Westgate, who perceived that her visitor had now begun to look at her, and who had her customary happy consciousness of a distinguished appearance. The only mitigation of her felicity on this point was that, having inspected her visitor’s own costume, she said to herself, ‘She won’t know how well I am dressed!’
‘He has asked me to go, but I am not sure I shall be able,’ murmured the Duchess.
‘He had offered us the p— the prospect of meeting you,’ said Mrs Westgate.
‘I hate the country at this season,’ responded the Duchess.
Mrs Westgate gave a little shrug. ‘I think it is pleasanter than London.’
But the Duchess’s eyes were absent again; she was looking very fixedly at Bessie. In a moment she slowly rose, walked to a chair that stood empty at the young girl’s right hand, and silently seated herself. As she was a majestic, voluminous woman, this little transaction had, inevitably, an air of somewhat impressive intention. It diffused a certain awkwardness, which Lady Pimlico, as a sympathetic daughter, perhaps desired to rectify in turning to Mrs Westgate.
‘I daresay you go out a great deal,’ she observed.
‘No, very little. We are strangers, and we didn’t come here for society.’
‘I see,’ said Lady Pimlico. ‘It’s rather nice in town just now.’
‘It’s charming,’ said Mrs Westgate. ‘But we only go to see a few people – whom we like.’
‘Of course one can’t like every one,’ said Lady Pimlico.
‘It depends upon one’s society,’ Mrs Westgate rejoined.
The Duchess, meanwhile, had addressed herself to Bessie. ‘My son tells me the young ladies in America are so clever.’
‘I am glad they made so good an impression on him,’ said Bessie, smiling.
The Duchess was not smiling; her large fresh face was very tranquil. ‘He is very susceptible,’ she said. ‘He thinks every one clever, and sometimes they are.’
‘Sometimes,’ Bessie assented, smiling still.
The Duchess looked at her a little and then went on – ‘Lambeth is very susceptible, but he is very volatile, too.’
‘Volatile?’ asked Bessie.
‘He is very inconstant. It won’t do to depend on him.’
‘Ah!’ said Bessie; ‘I don’t recognise that description. We have depended on him greatly – my sister and I – and he has never disappointed us.’
‘He will disappoint you yet,’ said the Duchess.
Bessie gave a little laugh, as if she were amused at the Duchess’s persistency. ‘I suppose it will depend on what we expect of him.’
‘The less you expect the better,’ Lord Lambeth’s mother declared.
‘Well,’ said Bessie, ‘we expect nothing unreasonable.’
The Duchess, for a moment, was silent, though she appeared to have more to say. ‘Lambeth says he has seen so much of you,’ she presently began.
‘He has been to see us very often – he has been very kind,’ said Bessie Alden.
‘I daresay you are used to that. I am told there is a great deal of that in America.’
‘A great deal of kindness?’ the young girl inquired, smiling.
‘Is that what you call it? I know you have different expressions.’
‘We certainly don’t always understand each other,’ said Mrs Westgate, the termination of whose interview with Lady Pimlico allowed her to give her attention to their elder visitor.
‘I am speaking of the young men calling so much upon the young ladies,’ the Duchess explained.
‘But surely in England,’ said Mrs Westgate, ‘the young ladies don’t call upon the young men?’
‘Some of them do – almost!’ Lady Pimlico declared. ‘When the young men are a great parti.’
‘Bessie, you must make a note of that,’ said Mrs Westgate. ‘My sister,’ she added, ‘is a model traveller. She writes down all the curious facts she hears, in a little book she keeps for the purpose.’
The Duchess was a little flushed; she looked all about the room, while her daughter turned to Bessie. ‘My brother told us you were wonderfully clever,’ said Lady Pimlico.
‘He should have said my sister,’ Bessie answered – ‘when she says such things as that.’
‘Shall you be long at Branches?’ the Duchess asked, abruptly, of the young girl.
‘Lord Lambeth has asked us for three days,’ said Bessie.
‘I shall go,’ the Duchess declared, ‘and my daughter too.’
‘That will be charming!’ Bessie rejoined.
‘Delightful!’ murmured Mrs Westgate.
‘I shall expect to see a deal of you,’ the Duchess continued. ‘When I go to Branches I monopolise my son’s guests.’
‘They must be most happy,’ said Mrs Westgate, very graciously.
‘I want immensely to see it – to see the Castle,’ said Bessie to the Duchess. ‘I have never seen one – in England at least; and you know we have none in America.’
‘Ah! you are fond of castles?’ inquired her Grace.
‘Immensely!’ replied the young girl. ‘It has been the dream of my life to live in one.’
The Duchess looked at her a moment, as if she hardly knew how to take this assurance, which, from her Grace’s point of view, was either very artless or very audacious. ‘Well,’ she said, rising, ‘I will show you Branches myself.’ And upon this the two great ladies took their departure.
‘What did they mean by it?’ asked Mrs Westgate, when they were gone.
‘They meant to be polite,’ said Bessie, ‘because we are going to meet them.’
‘It is too late to be polite,’ Mrs Westgate replied, almost grimly. ‘They meant to overawe us by their fine manners and their grandeur, and to make you lâcher prise.’
‘Lâcher prise? What strange things you say!’ murmured Bessie Alden.
‘They meant to snub us, so that we shouldn’t dare to go to Branches,’ Mrs Westgate continued.
‘On the contrary,’ said Bessie, ‘the Duchess offered to show me the place herself.’
‘Yes, you may depend upon it she won’t let you out of her sight. She will show you the place from morning till night.’
‘You have a theory for everything,’ said Bessie.
‘And you apparently have none for anything.’
‘I saw no attempt to “overawe” us,’ said the young girl. ‘Their manners were not fine.’
‘They were not even good!’ Mrs Westgate declared.
Bessie was silent awhile, but in a few moments she observed that she had a very good theory. ‘They came to look at me!’ she said, as if this had been a very ingenious hypothesis. Mrs Westgate did it justice; she greeted it with a smile and pronounced it most brilliant; while in reality she felt that the young girl’s scepticism, or her charity, or, as she had sometimes called it, appropriately, her idealism, was proof against irony. Bessie, however, remained meditative all the rest of that day and well on into the morrow.
On the morrow, before lunch, Mrs Westgate had occasion to go out for an hour, and left her sister writing a letter. When she came back she met Lord Lambeth at the door of the hotel, coming away. She thought he looked slightly embarrassed; he was certainly very grave. ‘I am sorry to have missed you. Won’t you come back?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said the young man, ‘I can’t. I have seen your sister. I can never come back.’ Then he looked at her a moment, and took her hand. ‘Good-bye, Mrs Westgate,’ he said. ‘You have been very kind to me.’ And with what she thought a strange, sad look in his handsome young face, he turned away.
She went in and she found Bessie still writing her letter; that is, Mrs Westgate perceived she was sitting at the table with the pen in her hand and not writing. ‘Lord Lambe
th has been here,’ said the elder lady at last.
Then Bessie got up and showed her a pale, serious face. She bent this face upon her sister for some time, confessing silently and, a little, pleading. ‘I told him,’ she said at last, ‘that we could not go to Branches.’
Mrs Westgate displayed just a spark of irritation. ‘He might have waited,’ she said with a smile, ‘till one had seen the Castle.’ Later, an hour afterwards, she said, ‘Dear Bessie, I wish you might have accepted him.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Bessie, gently.
‘He is a dear good fellow,’ said Mrs Westgate.
‘I couldn’t,’ Bessie repeated.
‘If it is only,’ her sister added, ‘because those women will think that they succeeded – that they paralysed us!’
Bessie Alden turned away; but presently she added, ‘They were interesting; I should have liked to see them again.’
‘So should I!’ cried Mrs Westgate, significantly.
‘And I should have liked to see the Castle,’ said Bessie. ‘But now we must leave England,’ she added.
Her sister looked at her. ‘You will not wait to go to the National Gallery?’
‘Not now.’
‘Nor to Canterbury Cathedral?’
Bessie reflected a moment. ‘We can stop there on our way to Paris,’ she said.
Lord Lambeth did not tell Percy Beaumont that the contingency he was not prepared at all to like had occurred; but Percy Beaumont, on hearing that the two ladies had left London, wondered with some intensity what had happened; wondered, that is, until the Duchess of Bayswater came, a little, to his assistance. The two ladies went to Paris, and Mrs Westgate beguiled the journey to that city by repeating several times, ‘That’s what I regret; they will think they petrified us.’ But Bessie Alden seemed to regret nothing.
THE PENSION BEAUREPAS
I
I WAS not rich – on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary career, and a friend of mine had said to me, ‘If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other such place to pick up material.’ I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: ‘I have a passionate desire to know human nature, and have a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people cannot conceal their real characters.’ I was an admirer of La Chartreuse de Parme, and it appeared to me that one could not do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’s Père Goriot, – the ‘pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres’, kept by Madam Vauquer, née De Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas. This institution was one of the most esteemed in Geneva, and, standing in a little garden of its own, not far from the lake, had a very homely, comfortable, sociable aspect. The regular entrance was, as one might say, at the back, which looked upon the street, or rather upon a little place, adorned like every place in Geneva, great or small, with a fountain. This fact was not prepossessing, for on crossing the threshold you found yourself more or less in the kitchen, encompassed with culinary odours. This, however, was no great matter, for at the Pension Beaurepas there was no attempt at gentility or at concealment of the domestic machinery. The latter was of a very simple sort. Madame Beaurepas was an excellent little old woman – she was very far advanced in life, and had been keeping a pension for forty years – whose only faults were that she was slightly deaf, that she was fond of a surreptitious pinch of snuff, and that, at the age of seventy-three, she wore flowers in her cap. There was a tradition in the house that she was not so deaf as she pretended; that she feigned this infirmity in order to possess herself of the secrets of her lodgers. But I never subscribed to this theory; I am convinced that Madame Beaurepas had outlived the period of indiscreet curiosity. She was a philosopher, on a matter-of-fact basis; she had been having lodgers for forty years, and all that she asked of them was that they should pay their bills, make use of the door-mat, and fold their napkins. She cared very little for their secrets. ‘J’en ai vus de toutes les couleurs,’ she said to me. She had quite ceased to care for individuals; she cared only for types, for categories. Her large observation had made her acquainted with a great number, and her mind was a complete collection of ‘heads’. She flattered herself that she knew at a glance where to pigeon-hole a new-comer, and if she made any mistakes her deportment never betrayed them. I think that, as regards individuals, she had neither likes nor dislikes; but she was capable of expressing esteem or contempt for a species. She had her own ways, I suppose, of manifesting her approval, but her manner of indicating the reverse was simple and unvarying. ‘Je trouve que c’est déplacé!’ – this exhausted her view of the matter. If one of her inmates had put arsenic into the pot-au-feu, I believe Madame Beaurepas would have contented herself with remarking that the proceeding was out of place. The line of misconduct to which she most objected was an undue assumption of gentility; she had no patience with boarders who gave themselves airs. ‘When people come chez moi, it is not to cut a figure in the world; I have never had that illusion,’ I remember hearing her say; ‘and when you pay seven francs a day, tout compris, it comprises everything but the right to look down upon the others. But there are people who, the less they pay, the more they take themselves au sérieux. My most difficult boarders have always been those who have had the little rooms.’
Madame Beaurepas had a niece, a young woman of some forty odd years; and the two ladies, with the assistance of a couple of thick-waisted, red-armed peasant women, kept the house going. If on your exits and entrances you peeped into the kitchen, it made very little difference; for Célestine, the cook, had no pretension to be an invisible functionary or to deal in occult methods. She was always at your service, with a grateful grin: she blacked your boots; she trudged off to fetch a cab; she would have carried your baggage, if you had allowed her, on her broad little back. She was always tramping in and out, between her kitchen and the fountain in the place, where it often seemed to me that a large part of the preparation for our dinner went forward – the wringing out of towels and table-cloths, the washing of potatoes and cabbages, the scouring of saucepans and cleansing of water-bottles. You enjoyed, from the doorstep, a perpetual back view of Célestine and of her large, loose, woollen ankles, as she craned, from the waist, over into the fountain and dabbled in her various utensils. This sounds as if life went on in a very make-shift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas – as if the tone of the establishment were sordid. But such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. This is an excellent principle – when you have the reality. We had the reality at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft, short beds, equipped with fluffy duvets; of admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Célestine in person, as we lay recumbent on these downy couches; of copious, wholesome, succulent dinners, conformable to the best provincial traditions. For myself, I thought the Pension Beaurepas picturesque, and this, with me, at that time was a great word. I was young and ingenuous; I had just come from America. I wished to perfect myself in the French tongue, and I innocently believed that it flourished by Lake Leman. I used to go to lectures at the Academy, and come home with a violent appetite. I always enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge (there was only one, just there, in those days) which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and up the dark, steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced this way, toward the lake and the old town; and this was the pleasantest approach to the house. There was a high wall, with a double gate in the middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts; the big rusty grille contained some old-fashioned iron-work. The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and
untended; but it contained a little thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety little table of the same complexion, and three orange-trees, in tubs, which were deposited as effectively as possible in front of the windows of the salon.
II
As commonly happens in boarding-houses, the rustle of petticoats was, at the Pension Beaurepas, the most familiar form of the human tread. There was the usual allotment of economical widows and old maids, and to maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old Frenchman and a young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman came from Lausanne. He was a native of that estimable town, but he had once spent six months in Paris, he had tasted of the tree of knowledge; he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he pronounced inadequate. Lausanne, as he said, ‘manquait d’agréments’. When obliged, for reasons which he never specified, to bring his residence in Paris to a close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had broken his fall at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was, after all, more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans with whom one could talk about the French metropolis. M. Pigeonneau was a little lean man, with a large, narrow nose, who sat a great deal in the garden, reading with the aid of a large magnifying glass a volume from the cabinet de lecture.
One day, a fortnight after my arrival at the Pension Beaurepas, I came back rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half an hour of the midday breakfast. I went into the salon with the design of possessing myself of the day’s Galignani before one of the little English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower – a privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the attractions of the establishment. In the salon I found a new-comer, a tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel-parlours of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the present moment in a hotel-parlour; his hat was on his head, or, rather, half off it – pushed back from his forehead, and rather suspended than poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered, one of which he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was holding out at arm’s-length. It was that honourable but extremely diminutive sheet, the Journal de Genève, a newspaper of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for my Galignani, the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eye-glass, a somewhat solemn stare. Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on the object of my search, he silently offered me the Journal de Genève.