Lady Betty Across the Water Part 9

In America, you build up your whole conversation out of it, and it's wonderful. I longed for a notebook while those two men were talking, to put everything down, and I felt, if people were often going to be as funny as that, I should need to go home soon to rest my features. I'm not sure whether Americans really think funnier things than English people do, but their funny ideas are startlingly unlike ours. Somehow they seem younger and more bubbling. When I go home, I shall probably have collected so much slang in my pores that I shall talk about putting on my "glad rags" when I'm going to dress for dinner; my life will be my "natural"; I shall call Stan's motor car the Blue a.s.sa.s.sin or the Homicide Wagon; I shall say my best frocks are "mighty conducive"; I shall get bored by poor Mr. Duckworth, our newest curate, and tell him he's "the limit"; I may even take to abbreviating my affirmatives and negatives by saying "Yep" and "Nope" when I'm in a hurry; but if I do fall into these ways, I tremble to think what may be the effect on Mother.

IV

ABOUT SHOPPING AND MEN

"Why, Betty, you never told me you were interviewed on the dock." These were the first words Mrs. Ess Kay said to me as I walked in to breakfast, a little late because of a wrestle I had had with a different and even more exciting kind of bath.

"I wasn't," said I, on the defensive; though I couldn't be perfectly sure what connection, if any, interviewing had with the Customs. "You told me not to declare anything, and I didn't."

Mr. Parker, looking as if he had been melted, poured into his clothes, and then cooled off with iced water, burst out laughing.

"You're a daisy, Lady Betty," said he.

"Is it invidious to be a daisy?" I asked.

"I guess I must look in the dictionary for 'invidious'; but a daisy's a flower that has budded in the green fields of England, where there aren't any newspaper reporters or other strange bugs."

"Potter!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay, "don't tease her; and when you've been in the green fields of England you'll say _insects_, not--er--what you _did_ say, if you don't want ladies to faint all around you on the floor." Then she turned to me. "He means you're very innocent, because you don't know what it is to be interviewed. But you must have _been_ it, all the same, for see here, in this dreadful _Flashlight_." And she handed me a newspaper, with one page folded over, and huge headings dotted about at the tops of paragraphs, like the lines of big print that oculists keep to make you try your eyesight. In the middle column I saw my name, but I couldn't believe it was really there, in an American paper. I began to think I wasn't awake yet, and that this must be part of the dream I was dreaming all yesterday.

"BONNY--BETTY--BULKELEY," I read out aloud. "A Duke's Daughter on the Dock. Call Her by Her Front Name, Please. What Lady Betty Thinks of Our Boys."

There was more, but when I had got so far, I simply gasped.

"How _dare_ they?"

"There isn't much they don't dare, except to go back without a 'story'," said Mr. Parker, laughing. But I didn't laugh. I was too angry.

"If my brother were here, he'd kill them," I said.

"Then he hasn't got a sense of humour," replied Mr. Parker; "I don't see how a Duke could have, and be a Duke nowadays; but I guess I wouldn't mind swopping my sense of humour for a dukedom, all the same.

See here, Lady Betty, you'll get to like our newspapers before you've been over here a month. They sort of grow on you. They're as interesting as novels, and almost as true to life."

"This isn't true to my life, anyway," I said, not knowing whether I wanted most to laugh or cry. "Oh, Sally, Sally _Woodburn_, will anybody believe I said such things as these?"

"Give the _Flashlight_ to me and let me look," she said. And when she'd taken the paper, she began to read the stuff that came under the big headings, out aloud, in her pretty, soft voice.

"Yesterday was a blazer, but though it was hot enough on the docks to roast a c.o.o.n, when the Big Willie steamed in, that beautiful young visitor to our sh.o.r.es, Lady Betty Bulkeley, managed to look like the Duke's daughter and Duke's sister she is, and so far as a mere man could tell, without the help of patent hair curlers, or other artificial aids to personal pulchritude.

"A daughter of the G.o.ds, divinely tall and most divinely fair, she sat on a throne of ducal luggage, looking queenly in an elegant white s.h.i.+rt waist, built mostly of holes and eminently suited to her style of beauty as well as the weather. She also had on a picture hat, which was superfluous as she would have been a picture without it, and below the waist she was tailor made."

"I think it's most insulting!" I broke in. "And I was made at home, all the way down."

But Sally went on: "I soon found [writes the representative of _The Flashlight_] that the sister of the Duke of Stanforth, one of Britain's eligibles, preferred to be addressed by her Front name of Lady Betty.

'I feel more at home,' said she, with a sweet voice, but a p.r.o.nounced English accent, 'when I am called Lady Betty. And I want to feel at home in America, because I expect to be some time with my friend, Mrs.

Stuyvesant-Knox, who will show me society over on this side. I have heard so much about Newport, don't you know? I fancy it will be too utterly deevy.'"

"What's deevy?" I demanded with scorn.

"Oh, that's supposed to be what smart Englishwomen say for divine."

"_I_ never heard it," I sneered, "much less said it. I'm sure Mother would consider it quite profane."

"Well, do be quiet, child, and listen to what _The Flashlight_ says you said." "'What opinion have you formed of our society women and clubmen, on board the Willie?' was the next question.

"'I think your ladies are better dressed than ours, and the gentlemen are just lovely. They don't sit around and wait while we girls amuse them, they hustle to give us a good time, and they know how to do it. I shouldn't wonder if I should hate to go home and a.s.sociate with lords after being a summer girl in Newport. I don't see now why American girls go out of their own country to marry.'

"'I suppose we shall be seeing your brother, the Duke, over here before long?'

"'His Grace may come to fetch me back,' replied her ladys.h.i.+p. 'He has never been to America, but it is one of the desires of his life to come, and your American beauties had better look out, for he is a gay young bachelor, and I shouldn't be surprised if he took a fancy to carry home a d.u.c.h.ess. Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox will entertain him also, and maybe he will paint some of America red.'"

"That's all about you, I see," Sally finished up. "The rest is about Cousin Katherine and me. It says we've come back with a touch of the Piccadilly accent; and it criticises my nose, and the way Cousin Katherine puts on her hat. It describes this house all wrong, and says the Newport cottage 'knocks spots' out of Mrs. Van der Windt's cottage.

It also mentions Cousin Potter, and calls him 'one of our Army Dudes.'

But _we_ don't mind, and you mustn't. Everybody reads _The Flashlight_, for the sake of the shocks, but n.o.body believes its flashes."

"Still, you must have said something to the man," remarked Mrs. Ess Kay.

"I only said 'No, but--' or 'Yes, but--,'" I insisted. "Truly and truly nothing else. And oh, there was a _Bat_, too, who tried to talk to me."

"Great Scott! the _Evening Bat_," chortled Mr. Parker. "Look out for something rich to-night."

"Can't he be stopped?" I asked.

"Might as well try to stop Niagara--with a tin can; the less _you_ said, the more the _Bat_ will say. But it doesn't matter. n.o.body'll care. Reporters are paid by the yard for imagination; information's gone out, though I do hear you use it still on your side."

I was just going to defend information (British) at the expense of imagination (American), when I remembered that the "Army Dude"--which sounds rather like something you might buy at the Stores--had sent me up an enormous bouquet of violets as big as a breakfast plate, and that I'd forgotten to thank him. I did so at once, but it seemed that I had blundered.

"Violets?" he echoed. "Must have been some other fellow. I sent you gardenias."

"Oh, then the cards got mixed," I said. "I thought the gardenias were from Mr. Doremus. How kind of you both. I was so surprised to receive such lovely flowers."

"Our American buds are surprised when they don't get them. They would think it a cold day when they didn't have a slight morning haul of flowers--must be out of season ones, or they're no use--new novels, or candy. What do men over on your side of the water do to convince you girls that they think you're as beautiful as you really are?"

I thought for a minute, and then I said that perhaps we weren't as hard to convince as American girls. I don't know whether this was a proper answer or not, but, anyway, Mr. Parker laughed, and then began to plan what we should do for the day.

"Say, let's run her over to Coney Island," he said.

"Oh, my dear boy!" exclaimed Mrs. Ess Kay. "Not for anything. The d.u.c.h.ess would have a fi--I mean, she would be horrified."

But when I heard that Coney Island was like a kind of glorified Margate (which I've never been to, but only heard about) with switchbacks and all sorts of shows, I said that Mother would consider it a chapter in the liberal education of a respectable British tourist; and it was decided that we should dine there. Mrs. Ess Kay had to do a lot of things before she could go on to Newport, so we were to shop all the morning, lunch at Sherry's, rest in the afternoon, and spend the evening at Coney Island. Next day we were to go to West Point, where Mr. Parker is stationed and stay there all night for a cadet ball.

Just as we had got this programme settled, and were making up our minds to go out early, "while it was cool" (we should all have been lying about with wet handkerchiefs on our foreheads at home, and there would have been special prayers in church, if it had ever been what New Yorkers seem to think cool) the butler came in leading by a leash a perfect angel of a dog, a little French bull, with skin satiny as a ripe chestnut, and eyes like rosettes of brown velvet, with diamonds s.h.i.+ning through them. He had on a spikey silver collar, fringed on each edge with white horsehair, and he came trotting into the room with a high action of his paws, dainty and proud, like a horse that knows he's on show; and his tiny head was c.o.c.ked on one side as if he were asking us to please admire him and be his friends.

I supposed that the little fellow belonged to Mrs. Ess Kay, and that he was being brought in to bid his mistress good morning, but she said quite sharply, "What dog is that?"

"He's a parcel, ma'am," said the butler, "addressed to Lady Betty Bulkeley. He was left at the door by a messenger boy, and the label's on his collar."