And so, in desultory observation of the idiosyncrasies of the new society in which they found themselves, the young Englishmen proceeded to dine--going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and dishes, of which their attendant offered them a very long list. After dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighboring streets. The early dusk of waning summer was coming on, but the heat was still very great.
The pavements were hot even to the stout boot soles of the British travelers, and the trees along the curbstone emitted strange exotic odors.
The young men wandered through the adjoining square--that queer place without palings, and with marble walks arranged in black and white lozenges.
There were a great many benches, crowded with shabby-looking people, and the travelers remarked, very justly, that it was not much like Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly lighted windows.
At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horsecars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister hum of mosquitoes.
The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge transparent cage, flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a sort of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passersby promiscuously.
The young Englishmen went in with everyone else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor, with their legs stretched out, together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket office of a railway station, before a brilliantly illuminated counter of vast extent. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their hands, had a dejected, exhausted look;their garments were not very fresh, and they seemed to be rendering some mysterious tribute to a magnificent young man with a waxed mustache, and a shirtfront adorned with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped an absent glance over their multitudinous patience.
They were American citizens doing homage to a hotel clerk.
"I'm glad he didn't tell us to go there," said one of our Englishmen, alluding to their friend on the steamer, who had told them so many things.
They walked up the Fifth Avenue, where, for instance, he had told them that all the first families lived. But the first families were out of town, and our young travelers had only the satisfaction of seeing some of the second--or perhaps even the third--taking the evening air upon balconies and high flights of doorsteps, in the streets which radiate from the more ornamental thoroughfare.
They went a little way down one of these side streets, and they saw young ladies in white dresses--charming-looking persons--seated in graceful attitudes on the chocolate-colored steps.
In one or two places these young ladies were conversing across the street with other young ladies seated in similar postures and costumes in front of the opposite houses, and in the warm night air their colloquial tones sounded strange in the ears of the young Englishmen.
One of our friends, nevertheless--the younger one--intimated that he felt a disposition to interrupt a few of these soft familiarities;but his companion observed, pertinently enough, that he had better be careful. "We must not begin with making mistakes,"said his companion.
"But he told us, you know--he told us," urged the young man, alluding again to the friend on the steamer.
"Never mind what he told us!" answered his comrade, who, if he had greater talents, was also apparently more of a moralist.
By bedtime--in their impatience to taste of a terrestrial couch again our seafarers went to bed early--it was still insufferably hot, and the buzz of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an audible crepitation of the temperature. "We can't stand this, you know,"the young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed about all night more boisterously than they had tossed upon the Atlantic billows.
On the morrow, their first thought was that they would re-embark that day for England; and then it occured to them that they might find an asylum nearer at hand. The cave of Aeolus became their ideal of comfort, and they wondered where the Americans went when they wished to cool off.
They had not the least idea, and they determined to apply for information to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This was the name inscribed in a bold hand on the back of a letter carefully preserved in the pocketbook of our junior traveler.
Beneath the address, in the left-hand corner of the envelope, were the words, "Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont, Esq."The letter had been given to the two Englishmen by a good friend of theirs in London, who had been in America two years previously, and had singled out Mr. J. L. Westgate from the many friends he had left there as the consignee, as it were, of his compatriots.
"He is a capital fellow," the Englishman in London had said, "and he has got an awfully pretty wife. He's tremendously hospitable--he will do everything in the world for you; and as he knows everyone over there, it is quite needless I should give you any other introduction.
He will make you see everyone; trust to him for putting you into circulation.
He has got a tremendously pretty wife." It was natural that in the hour of tribulation Lord Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont should have bethought themselves of a gentleman whose attractions had been thus vividly depicted;all the more so that he lived in the Fifth Avenue, and that the Fifth Avenue, as they had ascertained the night before, was contiguous to their hotel.
"Ten to one he'll be out of town," said Percy Beaumont; "but we can at least find out where he has gone, and we can immediately start in pursuit.